Oh dear god here we go again.
Sinn Fein is refusing to say if it will hand over to gardai the minutes of a star chamber-style inquiry into 100 cases of suspected sex abuse involving members of the Provisional movement, held in Dublin eight years ago.
The secret investigation flies in the face of repeated denials by Sinn Fein leadership of their knowledge of a culture of sexual abuse within the Republican movement.
Again Josh, Official SpokesGay writes a Facebook post that I have to put here.
Had a long conversation with one of my best friends last week. We talked a lot about how different life, sex, love, politics look as we enter middle-age as compared to how it looked to us in the late 80s when we were just coming out.
About the double-edged sword of cultural ghettoization. How the closure of a famed gay bar provokes sadness and outcries about how those young baby fags don’t understand what they’ve lost. And they don’t, but not necessarily for the Very Important Reasons we middle-aged are thinking of. [Read more…]
The New Republic ran a piece by Ken Silverstein about salary inflation at DC think tanks in February 2013.
Jim DeMint had recently left the Senate to become president of the Heritage Foundation, going from $174,000 a year to $1.2 million or more.
Once upon a time, the only way for a pol to cash in like that was to leave elected office in order to become a lobbyist—a nice living, but one that carries with it a stigma that would likely kill any future ambitions for high office. By contrast, a gig at Heritage, the main voice of the conservative movement, could be a good launching pad for a potential 2016 presidential bid. Candidate DeMint could run as a man of ideas, not another pol out shilling for his donors.
You know how I keep expressing astonishment at the way C H Sommers has gone from being an academic to being a shameless hack. It occurred to me to wonder if it’s just a simple matter of being better paid as a hack. Having wondered that, I decided to see if I could compare her salary as an academic to her salary as a hack for the American Enterprise Institute.
The bulk of her teaching career was at Clark University; she was an Associate Professor when she left to be a scholar at AEI. Clark reports the salary for associate profs to be $107,580. [Read more…]
Here’s a good thing. I saw it via Leo Igwe on Facebook: he posted a picture of himself with a young girl who was fundraising for it at the Foundation Beyond Belief conference last July. The good thing is the Kasese Humanist Primary School in Uganda.
The more humanist schools the better, I say.
Sandy Garossino, a former prosecutor, explains at the Huffington Post Canada how Jian Ghomeshi threw a wrench into his own defense by writing and publishing that Facebook post.
Normally in sexual assault trials, the accused doesn’t have to do anything and all the hassle falls on the complainant. The defense strategy is usually to batter the complainant’s credibility to death while the accused just looks on.
The Jian Ghomeshi trial will be very different. [Read more…]
This will give you nightmares.
David Futrelle at We Hunted the Mammoth collected some “fan art” devoted to Christina Hoff Sommers by her adoring admirers who call her (god I hate this, it’s so fucking twee) “Based Mom.”
GamerGaters sure do love their Based Mom! Christina Hoff Sommers, as you may or may not know, is a libertarian think-tanker who’s been grinding away at feminism for two decades, while still, rather perversely, claiming to be feminist.
I’ve been re-watching Lone Star.
We talked about it last month, and this past week I’ve been re-watching it. There are a lot of threads in it, that weave together throughout the movie, so there’s a lot to keep track of. There are some things I don’t think I caught before. [Read more…]
