All these special interest groups

Jaclyn Glenn has another video. In this one she’s replying to someone else’s video which is replying to her video berating people who said Elliot Rodger’s adventure in murder was motivated by misogyny. (Video to video to video. It’s so cumbersome. Why can’t they just type it all, as humans were meant to do?) She starts off with a sarcastic apology for saying Rodger’s adventure was caused solely by mental illness, then drops the sarcasm to say that’s not at all what she said. Huh. She certainly did say it was definitely not misogyny, it was mental illness. She said that with great emphasis and certitude. The bit where she says “there were also other factors” didn’t take up nearly as much time or get as much emphasis. She explains that.

I never said that mental illness was solely to blame, I said several times that there were other things that played a role, and the point of the video was simply to let people know that mental illness played a role, that it wasn’t just misogyny, because I was sick and tired of seeing all these special interest groups jumping in on a tragedy and trying to capitalize on it and trying to use it to further their specific agendas.

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Truth and journalism

Wow.

I’ve thought Chris Hedges is a terrible writer and human being ever since I read his terrible book I Don’t Believe in Atheists which came out in 2008. I found it to be both sloppy and vulgarly abusive; both lazily written and dishonest about the people he was abusing.

Well color me prophetic then, in light of a long piece in The New Republic reporting several instances of fairly shameless plagiarism. And then for good measure there’s Hedges’s belligerence when the plagiarism is pointed out to him, and then there’s also the circling of the wagons by his friends and colleagues, who swear up and down that he’s just a great guy so please shut up and go away. Yeah that sounds familiar.

Christopher Ketcham writes that Hedges submitted a long piece to Harper’s in 2010 about poverty in Camden, New Jersey.

The trouble began when Ross passed the piece along to the fact-checker assigned to the story. As Ross and the fact-checker began working through the material, they discovered that sections of Hedges’s draft appeared to have been lifted directly from the work of a PhiladelphiaInquirer reporter named Matt Katz, who in 2009 had published a four-part series on social and political dysfunction in Camden.

Given Hedges’s institutional pedigree, this discovery shocked the editors at Harper’s. Hedges had been a star foreign correspondent at the Times,where he reported from war zones and was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for covering global terrorism. In 2002, he had received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is a fellow at the Nation Institute. He has taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. He writes a weekly column published in two widely read progressive websites, TruthOut andTruthdig. He is the author of twelve books, including the best-sellingAmerican Fascists. Since leaving the Times in 2005, he has evolved into a polemicist of the American left. For his fierce denunciations of the corporate state, his attacks on the political elite, and his enthusiasm for grassroots revolt, he has secured a place as a firebrand revered among progressive readers.

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Uttar Pradesh’s trees bear strange fruit

There’s another one, and there was one more yesterday.

A teenager has been found hanging from a tree in a village in northern India, the fourth woman to die in such a way in recent weeks in Uttar Pradesh state.

The family of the 19-year-old say she was raped. A post mortem is under way.

It comes just one day after a woman’s body was found hanging from a tree in a remote village elsewhere in the state.

The gang rape and murder of two girls found in similar circumstances last month sparked outrage. Correspondents say more cases are now being reported.

Such attacks have long taken place in Uttar Pradesh, reports the BBC’s Geeta Pandey in Delhi, but recent outrage over sexual violence has meant that every case is being reported to police and getting media coverage.

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Make lemonade

Reading the tweets at #womenaretoohardtoanimate is very funny.

Why it’s almost worth being the despised superfluous tiresome hard to draw alien sex, just to be able to read such hilarious tweets!

One of Soraya’s –

because, really, in our idealized worlds, isn’t it just better if they don’t exist? They’re SO COMPLICATED.

A few others –

i can never get the hundred flailing tendrils right

with all the crying, menstruating, and nagging. How can we draw it ALL?!

cos you have to start from scratch, unlike with male forms that spring whole from the designers cloven forehead.

and it’s not historically accurate b/c everyone knows during the french rev. women and POC weren’t invented yet

Having to redo all that animation

Why aren’t there any female characters in this new video game? Well because it would be too much trouble, that’s why. It would take too long. It would be too difficult.

So says Ubisoft about the new Assassin’s Creed.

The next game in the Assassin’s Creed series will not allow you to play as a female character because it would have “doubled the work” for the game’s developer Ubisoft. Speaking to VideoGamer, Ubisoft technical director James Therien said female assassins were on the company’s feature list until “not too long ago,” but were cut as a matter of “focus and production.”

“A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation,” Therien said, defending the exclusion by saying it was “not a question of philosophy or choice.” Ubisoft’s Bruno St. Andre estimated that a female assassin would’ve necessitated more than 8,000 new animations recreated on a new skeletal structure, but said that playable female characters were “dear to the production team.”

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What the story actually shows

Oh, Andrew Brown. Wrong in the very first sentence.

He’s writing about the Tuam babies.

Why is it that we are more shocked by what happens to dead babies than to live ones?

We’re not.

There, that’s done; no need to write the rest of that piece.

But of course he did write it.

The story that almost 800 dead babies were buried in a disused sewage tank outside Tuamin rural Ireland turns out to be problematic. It is certain that 796 babies did die under the care of nuns in a home for unmarried mothers there between 1925 and 1961 and that is in itself a shocking statistic. But what gave the story wings was the claim that their bodies had been dumped in a septic tank…

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Human rights>theocratic oppression

When I flagged up the #TwitterTheocracy campaign yesterday I forgot to link to the petition, and I forgot to sign it myself. Sign the petition!

It’s authored by Ex Muslims of North America.

Twitter has agreed to use its ‘Country Withheld Tool’ to block “blasphemous” tweets in Pakistan. Blasphemy laws are used in Pakistan and elsewhere to suppress dissent and persecute minorities who face state and vigilante violence at the mere accusation of blasphemy. Twitter is  being complicit in suppressing free speech, and in aiding Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

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We urge Twitter and all other international companies and organizations to uphold human rights-based standards of conduct, particularly when it comes to freedom of expression.

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Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, states:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

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Tell Twitter that human rights trump theocratic oppression, and that you will not tolerate censorship of dissenters who are trying to speak up against theocratic and oppressive regimes.

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Sign this petition and join us on June 10 by tweeting using hashtag #TwitterTheocracy. Use the freedom of speech you still have to defend the same human right for everyone. For more info, visit the campaign against #TwitterTheocracy page.

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Remember to spread the word among your own social networks!

More signatures!

Do you believe in sharing the good news?

Behold the ignorant and fanatical Congressional Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, grilling the Rev Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, on whether or not he believes what Jesus said right here on this one page.

“Do you believe in sharing the good news that will keep people from going to Hell, consistent with Christian beliefs?” the Texas Republican wondered.

Lynn, however, disagreed with the congressman’s “construction of what Hell is like or why one gets there.”

“So, you do not believe somebody would go to Hell if they do not believe Jesus is the way, the truth, the life?” Gohmert pressed.

The pastor argued that people would not got to Hell for believing a “set of ideas.”

“No, not a set of ideas. Either you believe as a Christian that Jesus is the way, the truth, or life or you don’t,” Gohmert shot back. “And there’s nothing wrong in our country with that — there’s no crime, there’s no shame.”

“Congressman, what I believe is not necessarily what I think ought to justify the creation of public policy for everybody,” Lynn explained. “For the 2,000 different religions that exist in this country, the 25 million non-believers. I’ve never been offended, I’ve never been ashamed to share my belief. When I spoke recently at an American Atheists conference, it was clear from the very beginning, the first sentence that I was a Christian minister.”

“So, the Christian belief as you see it is whatever you choose to think about Christ, whether or not you believe those words he said that nobody basically ‘goes to heaven except through me,’” Gohmert concluded, ignoring the point about separation of church and state.

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