It’s funny how feminism gets it in the neck from both directions, isn’t it. On the one hand there are people who say “feminists are silent about stonings and forced marriage and FGM!” To which I murmur replies to the effect that not all feminists are silent about that. On the other hand there are people who claim that “Mean Girls Cis White Feminism” is silent about the marginalization of women who wear the hijab. To which I murmur replies to the effect that I don’t want to see anyone marginalized or bullied, but at the same time I reserve the right to say I think the hijab is a bad, regressive, sexist custom, and why I think that.

I’ve noticed that the position between those two poles is not always a popular one.

 

Taslima wonders if anyone is listening.

It’s hard to miss her in Calcutta these days. She beams at passers-by from king-size hoardings at several busy junctions, anxiously marking her “return” to Bengal after six years.

But Taslima Nasreen is not returning to the city. Not in person, certainly — thanks to embargoes on her travelling and living in India. And not on television either, which had been promoting her as the writer of a mega serial that was to have been aired from December 19.

Despite the grand announcements, the show has been stalled. And Nasreen is furious. “Hating Taslima is an essential part of politics in the subcontinent. I feel pity for those who need to violate a writer’s rights to get votes,” she tweeted. “Whatever I write is hated by ignorant anti-women, anti-human rights bigots. Because they are afraid of the truth and the power of the pen,” said another tweet.

Of course she’s furious. Who wouldn’t be?!

She walks into the drawing room-cum-study of her apartment located in an upmarket area of Delhi, where she has been living since 2008, full of misgivings. Just days before the serial was called off, she’d heard that the Calcutta police had met the producers of the serial.

“Some bigoted individuals asked for a ban and the state acquiesced — I don’t think this will happen even in Saudi Arabia,” she says. “But fundamentalists are anti-women and anti-freedom of expression, and for political reasons the government might side with them. But why are the people in Bengal silent,” she asks. [Read more…]

It’s ten past four, nearly sunset. Leonard Tremiel informed me the other day that the earliest sunset is actually two weeks before the solstice, and the latest sunrise two weeks after it. He recommended Earth and Sky’s explanation.

It seems paradoxical. At middle latitudes in the U.S. – and throughout the Northern Hemisphere – the earliest sunsets of the year come about two weeks before the solstice and the shortest day of the year.

Why isn’t the earliest sunset on the year’s shortest day? It’s because of the discrepancy between the clock and the sun. A clock ticks off exactly 24 hours from one noon to the next. But an actual day – as measured by the spin of the Earth, from what is called one “solar noon” to the next – rarely equals 24 hours exactly. [Read more…]

Why do the wizards of tv keep throwing various iterations of Home Alone at us? What’s that about? How did it become one of those “holiday classics” we always hear about? It’s horrible. The Home Alone movies are awful and everybody should stop watching them.

Instead watch Alastair Sim as Scrooge. You might want to skip the parts where he’s offscreen (Tiny Tim, you know), but when he’s on screen it’s a gem.

Update: see comments, especially Tony Sidaway’s @ 10, for context that makes sense of this.

An item from the Independent more than two years ago. It’s more than a little unnverving.

A man who used a social networking website to post sectarian comments about Catholics and Celtic supporters has been jailed for eight months.

What?

Stephen Birrell, 28, from Glasgow, was also handed a five-year football banning order at Glasgow Sheriff Court for writing the comments on a Facebook page titled Neil Lennon Should Be Banned. [Read more…]

For any future gifting needs you may have, Ezra Resnick suggests a Magic Dogma Ball for those on your gifting list who like easy answers.

Ask any question, no matter how complex, and the Magic Dogma Ball™ will give you the definitive answer (according to your selected tradition). No thinking required!

The Magic Dogma Ball™ answers questions about ethics, politics, metaphysics, fashion, sex, and more. Possible answers include:

• It is certain
• Without a doubt
• It is forbidden
• Don’t even think about it

Gifting made easy.

 

Spain: women protesting new anti-abortion law: police get rough.

A commenter pointed out a storify in a comment and I took a look at it. What I saw made me curious about the person behind it so I looked at her Twitter and that led me to her blog. Her most recent post there is titled So, What’s It Like Being a White Muslim, Anyway? The title is symptomatic of the post itself.

It’s a stupid title, because Islam is not officially unwhite, and because it represents a category mistake. It’s getting to be a boring trope to point out that Islam is not a race, but all the same, it’s not, even though it’s true that Muslims are often treated as a despised racial group. Islam is not a race and “White” is not a religion.

Ok but one gets what she means. Islam is not in fact a race but Muslims are mostly de facto non-white; a Muslim who is white is usually a convert or possibly a child of converts; there are social and political issues one can talk about. Yes. But one can talk about them well, or one can talk about them badly. This blogger, who calls herself Ms Muslamic and The Hijabinist, does not talk about them well. [Read more…]

All your bases are belong to us.

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that gay marriages can continue in Utah, denying a request from the state to halt same-sex weddings that have been occurring at a rapid rate since last week.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ rejection of Utah’s request for an emergency stay marks yet another legal setback for the state. The same federal judge who ruled that Utah’s same-sex marriage ban violates gay and lesbian couples’ rights previously denied the state’s request to halt the marriages. [Read more…]

Originally a comment on In their efforts to discredit advocates of women’s international human rights.

In the 80s & 90s, one faced the same sort of thing in Japan, with what was called ‘nihon-jin-ron’, the ‘theory of the Japanese’, a thoroughly and cynically racist and chauvinistic outpouring which depended in part on taking certain questionable and often racist assertions about Japan made over a century or so by some Westerners and throwing them back in the face of the West: ‘we Japanese’ understand one another not through logic, like coldly rational Westerners, but through intuitive feeling, through ‘hara’ (guts); our arts are so extraordinarily sensitive that Westerners cannot possibly appreciate them; even though Westerners may parrot the Japanese language, they can never truly speak or understand it. [Read more…]