Things it’s good to hear are now lying in the dirt…
A leaflet listing the regulations for women under Islamist rule now lies in dirt here at the tribunal in Timbuktu. Rule No. 1: The veil should cover the entire body. Rule No. 4: The veil cannot be colored. And Rule No. 8: The woman should not perfume herself after putting on the all-enveloping fabric.
Any of those rules or other rules broken? 95 lashes. [Read more…]
Daniel Kahneman explains that there is such a thing as the affect heuristic,
where judgments and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning.
The example he had just given was the chief investment officer of a large financial firm, who told Kahneman he had just invested tens of millions of dollars in the stock of Ford Motor Company. Why? He’d gone to an automobile show and been impressed by Ford cars. “Wo, good cars!” Yes but that’s not the relevant question. The relevant question is whether the stock is currently underpriced. [Read more…]
Coming up this week at the Tate Modern:
a major performance-art event conceived and curated by US artist Suzanne Lacy. Silver Action will see 400 women aged 60 and over – who have taken part in some of the last century’s major political protests, from the 1968 Ford sewing machinists’ strike to Greenham Common – converge on the gallery’s subterranean performance space, the Tanks, for a live, unscripted performance about ageing and activism.
Why? Well one reason is…
One evening a couple of years ago, 82-year-old Barbara Robson was crammed in a rush-hour London tube train. Politely, she asked a young man near her, smart in his suit and tie, if he might move along a little. “He turned to me,” she says, “and told me that, as an old woman, I was a total waste of space. [Read more…]
What a waste. What a horrible waste.
Less than two weeks ago, Hadiya Pendleton was leading her classmates in the King College Prep School Marching Band down Pennsylvania Avenue on the afternoon of President Obama’s second inauguration. It would be an opportunity of a lifetime for any 15 year old, but for Pendleton, it was her last. On Tuesday, she was gunned down in a park a few blocks from school on the South Side of Chicago, less than a mile from the first family’s home.
It’s always a horrible waste and it happens way too much. As I said at the time, the children at Newtown are no more (or less) of a waste because there was a larger than usual number of them for a single event. There are way too many Hadiya Pendletons in Chicago.
And there’s the school bus driver in Alabama who did his best to prevent a guy with a gun from causing harm to the children on the bus and was shot and killed.
Charles Albert Poland Jr., was driving a school bus for the Dale County Board of Education on Tuesday afternoon, a job he had done full-time since 2009.
At about 3:40 p.m. a gun-wielding man boarded the bus carrying 22 students near Destiny Church on Highway 231.
The suspect, identified to NBC News by a source close to the investigation as area resident Jimmy Lee Dykes, tried to take children off the bus — but the 66-year-old Poland was determined to not let that happen.
For his heroism, the driver was shot and killed.
Horrible.
Salman Rushdie’s in India and he talked to the BBC there. I transcribed most of it.
The bigger question India needs to ask itself is about gender relations, is about how men think about women, and actually to an extent how women think about women because again there’s a lot of oppression inside families by matriarchs of daughters-in-law.
And many women bring up these boys, you know? And don’t teach them proper ways to behave.
Rajini Vaidyanathan: What appals you the most about the way women are treated here?
Well just the brutality of it, the easy brutality of it, and the fact that mostly people get away with it.
It’s nothing to do with what clothes they wear, with whether they go out in the evening – it’s to do with the way men behave towards them.
He cited the disppointing reaction from politicians, gurus, the police.
Unless these attitudes change – and I think young people have to demand that they change –
Vaidyanathan: What would your recommendation be?
Well first you’ve got to start talking about it the right way. You’ve got to stop criminalizing women in this situation and shift the focus to how men think about women.
You’ve got to start changing the terms of the conversation.
He’s talking about culture, ideas, discourse – what confused people label “radical” feminism. It’s not radical. It’s core feminism.
BBC World does a thing where it reads a proverb as a little filler item. Yesterday’s proverb – which is currently visible on its Africa page – is a charmer.
Today’s African Proverb
“He who never saw his mother while she was young thinks his father wasted the dowry”
A Maragoli proverb from Western Kenya sent by H Essendi, Southampton, UK
Good choice. Well done, BBC.
Lee Moore is hoping for a cease fire.
I think a cease fire could be possible, since I haven’t been firing except when attacked. That makes it easy to agree to a cease fire. Do I want to write about Reap Paden and Atheist Asshole all the time? Fuck no. Of course not. If they would leave me the hell alone I would be delighted to forget all about them.
But Lee wants more than just a cease fire.
I am going to do something about it. In order to facilitate this I am calling for representatives from both camps in these blog wars to sit down with me in what may be the first of many live and public google hangouts to discuss grievances and come back to the world of civil discussion and cooperation. [Read more…]
More harassment. More complications. More failure to disclose. More clumsy attempts at setups. More provocation followed by noisy media blitz to express outrage at the response to the provocation.
The A-news people, who do that podcast I was invited to do, posted a podcast on Monday, the day I was invited.
Lee Moore, the guy who invited me, never mentioned the podcast, not when he invited me and not yesterday when I told him about the tweet from the impersonation account (one of them) and Paden’s blog post. He never said a word about it. He should have, since half of it is about me (and my incomparable awfulness). [Read more…]