In news that surprised no one, a woman charged that inmates at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre are sexually harassed by guards.
A former detainee at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre has alleged that women held there have been subjected to unwanted sexual advances and abuse by security guards and other officials. [Read more…]
The Independent gets a woman who wears the niqab to explain to the benighted rest of us why she’s so right and right-on and good for doing so.
The common impression that many people have about those that wear the niqab is that we are oppressed, uneducated, passive, kept behind closed doors and not integrated within British society.
So you know what’s coming next. She’s none of those things; she’s the opposite of all of them. Therefore the niqab is great. [Read more…]
And now for a visit to the WorshipFamily crowd. This time it’s a site called Fix the Family, whose subject and theme and purpose and enthusiasm seems to be loathing of feminism. But don’t be confused! This is not the slime pitter, Twitter harasser, Thunderfoot, call them all cunts brand of feminism-loathing. It’s the other kind. The family values kind.
It offers reasons not to send your daughter to college. (I guess daughters aren’t allowed to read it, and neither are people who don’t have daughters.)
Probably the most controversial and rejected position we have at Fix the Family is that parents should not send their daughters to college. It is even more vehemently opposed than the submission of wives to their husbands. Both of these positions we have are a threat to the trophies of the feminist agenda, so the rejection we receive is always emotionally charged and ends up insulting, since once explained logically, the opposition runs out of substance and is only left to hurl insults and presume and misconstrue this practical wisdom into some chauvinistic evil. [Read more…]
Bjarte Foshaug that is.
The Onion reports on a guy who’s just too intelligent for the women he dates.
MILWAUKEE—Describing his mind as both “a blessing and a curse,” local man Benjamin Walker, 27, told reporters Thursday that his intellect was probably just too intimidating for most women to engage with romantically.
“I’m a very, very smart guy, and I guess most women are pretty scared off by that, you know?” said Walker, confirming that women often seem extremely uncomfortable and agitated around him, most likely because of how cultured and well-read he is. [Read more…]
Abhishek Phadnis considers the silence of secularists in the face of the left-Islamist alliance.
Radical Islam mines a rich seam of support in the British radical Left, nowhere more so than in our universities. In light of the Birmingham reversal, it may be instructive to take stock of the role of this unholy alliance in other recent events in British academia (of which I present a small selection) and what this implies for those of us who seek to keep this space secular. [Read more…]
This is exciting. A few weeks ago I got an email from a producer at National Public Radio’s The Story; she wanted to be put in touch with Leo Igwe. And so –
Result:
When Leo Igwe was a child living in Nigeria, he saw his father beaten after being accused of witchcraft. Accusations of witch craft run rampant in many parts of western Africa, and Igwe has made it his life’s work to bring attention to the problem. Many of those accused of witchcraft find refuge in “Witch Camps,” which offer safety after an accused individual has been ousted from a community. Igwe has visited camps in Nigeria and northern Ghana and tells host Dick Gordon what life is like inside them.
This is great, because it will inevitably get Leo more support for his work.
Dang but some people like to over-react to mostly-imaginary entities like “Atheism Plus” or “FTBullies”.
Like “the Denver Atheist” (there’s only the one?) for instance, in a post reasonably titled Atheism Plus Is A Fascist Movement Within The Atheist Community. Here’s how the one atheist in Denver arrives at that conclusion.
Let’s define our terms up front, shall we? Here’s the definition of the word “fascism”:
Fascism: any movement, ideology, or attitude that favors dictatorial government, centralized control of private enterprise, repression of all opposition, and extreme nationalism
Here’s how I’m relating it to Atheism Plus:
Atheism Plus: a movement, ideology, and attitude that favors dictatorial organization, centralized control of atheism, repression of all opposition, and extreme loyalty to the movement, ideology, and attitude. [Read more…]
I had an interesting Twitter conversation with Dave Silverman yesterday, which continued with other people later. It was about the recurring subject of having an all-inclusive political movement on the one hand, and standing by certain values or commitments on the other hand.
Dave obviously has to lean heavily toward the former, because that’s his job. The atheism comes first, by a long way, and everything else comes second. But does everything else come nowhere? I don’t think so. I think there are limits. I don’t think Dave would welcome the KKK or the American Nazi Party as allies, for instance. [Read more…]
Karen Armstrong tells her much-recycled story again. Once she tried to be a nun, then she got fed up with it and tried to be an academic and was all skeptical and shit. Then she sat down to read quietly and she discovered religion was right about everything after all.
I suddenly found that I was learning a great deal from other religious traditions. From Judaism, I learned to never stop asking questions — about anything! — and never to imagine that I had come to the end of what I could know and say about God.
But you don’t need Judaism to learn to never stop asking questions about anything. And then, why should you think there is a god in the first place, to never imagine you’d come to the end of what you could know and say about? How can you “know” anything about a presumed god? [Read more…]