How appropriate, how timely, how right in every way – Jesus and Mo the Book is now available in Danish.
Jesus
andog MoJesus og Mo på dansk
De bedste striber udkommer på dansk fredag den 20. februar. [Read more…]
Good god. Chelsea fans (fans of the football club of that name) are caught on video on the Paris Métro pushing a black man off the train and chanting “we are racist and that’s the way we like it.”
The jaw drops. The eyes bug out. What are they thinking? What is wrong with them? What is it about being a Chelsea fan that requires or enables this? Football is hardly a lily-white sport, happily, so…what??
Police are looking at the video in hopes of identifying the perps. [Read more…]
Here’s a piece of good news for a change – Malawi has said no to child marriage.
Malawi has passed a law banning child marriage, raising the minimum age to 18 in a country where half of girls end up as child brides.
Women rights campaigners hailed the move as “a great day for Malawian girls” and said the law would help boost development in one of the world’s poorest countries. [Read more…]
But David Futrelle didn’t mess around with just one stupid meme. David Futrelle got together a whole bunch of stupid memes to admire.
Ian Ironwood, as he calls himself, is the proprietor of the blog The Red Pill Room. He’s also a big fan of retro art. Alas, he has attempted to combine these two interests, producing a series of baffling “memes” in which he pastes little manosophere lessons on top of artwork borrowed from postwar American magazines and paperbacks.
Lucky me, I just saw a meme on Facebook, with an approving comment.
How lucky for people who hate feminism that ISIS and Boko Haram exist.
Lars Vilks has indeed gone into hiding now, which is tragic. I’m relieved, though, that he says it’s probably temporary.
Lars Vilks, the controversial cartoonist who escaped unhurt from the café hosting the debate, told Channel 4 News he is now in hiding.
“I am at a secret place, totally unknown. I can’t give you countries or one place. I can only just say that I will remain here until we have a more clear picture of how things are looking and hopefully I will go back into a bit more normal routines within a few days or a week or so.”
The BBC is still at it. This must be a deliberate policy, not mere laziness or habit.
It’s at it in a story on what the Danish domestic intelligence agency knew about El-Hussein. Prison officials told them he was at risk of being radicalized. I would guess they are told that about a lot of people, and can’t closely monitor all of them.
Danish intelligence chief Jens Madsen acknowledged that El-Hussein had been “on the radar” of his services.
Mr Madsen said investigators were working on the theory that he could have been inspired by the shootings in Paris last month.
Lars Vilks told AFP news agency that police “did not step up security on Saturday. It was the same as we had previously”, confirming that he had since gone into hiding.
The cartoonist stoked controversy in 2007 by drawing pictures of the Prophet Muhammad dressed as a dog and has been under police protection since 2010.
There they are, at it again – firmly blaming Lars Vilks for drawing a cartoon that in just about any other context would be simply a cartoon, like any other. There they are again, dishonestly and damagingly saying that Lars Vilks “stoked controversy” when he simply drew a cartoon.
They really really really need to stop doing that.
The BBC reports that a police chief in al-Baghdadi, Iraq reports that IS torched 45 people there.
Jihadist militants from Islamic State (IS) have burned to death 45 people in the western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, the local police chief says.
Exactly who these people were and why they were killed is not clear, but Col Qasim al-Obeidi said he believed some were members of the security forces. [Read more…]
What it’s like to be a child and a mother.
Many of the babies are born with complications, far from the nearest hospital, and the mortality rate for mother and infant is sky-high.
Nor does the future look rosy. The daughters of these child brides are born into a cycle of systemic abuse, violence and poverty. [Read more…]
My friend Sadaf Ali has a post about the fact that far too many activist atheists talk over ex-Muslims and liberal Muslims instead of listening to them and/or helping them get a turn at the mic.
I was recently quote in Allie Conti’s article for VICE on this issue:
But Sadaf Ali, a Muslim turned atheist activist, says that many New Atheists are just grown-up version of the bullies who called her a “terrorist” as a kid.
“I’ve had to debate people often who make gross generalizations of Muslims and Muslim cultures,” she told me. “People hide their bigotry behind their promotion of atheism, and I think it’s disturbing.” She has a pretty easy solution to changing the movement’s alleged-racism rap: Giving people besides Dawkins and Harris a prominent platform.
That would help. It would help with a lot of things.
It’s a familiar problem with how the media operate, which is that once X gets called as an expert then X becomes that expert you always call when you want an expert. It’s a stupid & lazy shortcut which seems to be damn near impossible to overcome. [Read more…]