Star Wars is racist because Darth Vader is 'a black guy', MSNBC's Melissa Harris Perry suggests
33 Questions We Desperately Want Answered After Star Wars: The Force Awakens
If it were so good there wouldn't be so many questions. If a normal movie does this we'd call it sloppy
25 Unanswered Star Wars: The Force Awakens Questions
Hello Marvel Cinematic Universe and its huge variety of spinoofs you all need to know about to understand it
5-Year Jail Time For Anyone Who Celebrates Christmas In Brunei
May the police force be with you: Chewbacca arrested at Ukraine polls - "A man dressed as Star Wars character Chewbacca was detained and fined for disobeying police during local polls in Ukraine. The Wookiee warrior — an activist from a marginal political party — was apprehended by police in the south-western city of Odessa after refusing to present his ID as he posed alongside children near a polling station, a local court said. Video footage from the arrest showed a growling Chewbacca resisting four officers, who were forced to pin him down on the bonnet of a van to handcuff him... Chewbacca, who had reportedly driven a candidate dressed as Darth Vader to the polling station, later told local media he could not pay the fine because his "intergalactic bank" did not have a branch on Earth. The local electoral commission registered 48 candidates from the Darth Vader Block political party, including 44 individuals with the last name Vader, a local news site reported. Another candidate — posing as Sheev Palpatine, the Emperor of the Galactic Empire — was elected to the Odessa city council. Star Wars characters such as Chewbacca, the Jedi Master Yoda and Princess Amidala had tried their luck in last year's parliamentary poll in full costume, all without success. Many of these offbeat candidates represent the tiny Pirate Party of Ukraine — one of more than 40 groups that have sprung up worldwide in defence of internet freedoms and limits on copyright laws. Last week, a Soviet-era statue of Lenin was transformed into one of Darth Vader in the city, an homage to the oddly prominent figure in local politics."
Chewbacca in court over lack of ID while driving Darth Vader to Ukraine election - "A statement posted on the official Instagram account of the Ukrainian police read: “Nothing unusual here, just Chewbacca detained for being without documents while driving Darth Vader to the elections in Odessa. The Sith Lord has already claimed this was illegal as Chewbacca is his pet and general servant and thus does not require documents.”
Virgins? What virgins? - "Modern apologists of Islam try to downplay the evident materialism and sexual implications of such descriptions, but, as the Encyclopaedia of Islam says, even orthodox Muslim theologians such as al Ghazali (died 1111 CE) and Al-Ash'ari (died 935 CE) have "admitted sensual pleasures into paradise". The sensual pleasures are graphically elaborated by Al-Suyuti (died 1505 ), Koranic commentator and polymath. He wrote: "Each time we sleep with a houri we find her virgin. Besides, the penis of the Elected never softens. The erection is eternal; the sensation that you feel each time you make love is utterly delicious and out of this world and were you to experience it in this world you would faint. Each chosen one [ie Muslim] will marry seventy [sic] houris, besides the women he married on earth, and all will have appetising vaginas." One of the reasons Nietzsche hated Christianity was that it "made something unclean out of sexuality", whereas Islam, many would argue, was sex-positive. One cannot imagine any of the Church fathers writing ecstatically of heavenly sex as al-Suyuti did, with the possible exception of St Augustine before his conversion. But surely to call Islam sex-positive is to insult all Muslim women, for sex is seen entirely from the male point of view; women's sexuality is admitted but seen as something to be feared, repressed, and a work of the devil.
Citation for Christianity being sex negative/unfriendly
Singapore has the world’s worst taxi drivers - "in Singapore they ask because they have no idea how to get to the destination. If I hear one more time, “I’m new, I don’t know the way” when getting in a cab I will scream. My response is twofold 1) you’re not new to Singapore you have lived here all your life and 2) it’s your bloody job to know the way! If someone came to me in my marketing job and said I would like some marketing advice please and I then turned around and said well what do you think because I haven’t got a clue, what would happen? The client would walk out and not pay me. In a Singapore taxi this happens 75% of every one of my journeys... What happens at 4pm? Why does “change shift” give taxi drivers the right to not pick people up? Why do they drop by taxi ranks and say that they are going to their home and that if anyone else happens to live next door to them they will take them but if not they won’t! By the time they have driven around for hours looking for this perfect passenger who lives next door they could have taken several people home and earnt some money!... When is the one time you can never get a taxi in Singapore despite their being 26,000 of them, more than any other country per capita? When it rains... Why do the big posh black SMRT limos that Singaporeans won’t get into (because it costs a couple of dollars more, they would rather wait in the queue, even though it is the same cost as texting for one…) not take card? Why do the red and black/yellow ones do the same? Which modern country these days only takes cash when all the marketing from people like Nets, MasterCard, Visa, EZ link is cashless? Why do some cabs have displayed that they will take card/they are cashless only to turn around and say only cash? This usually happens only on a Thursday or Friday…when they don’t get their money to after the weekend unless it’s a cash payment… Why are there 25,000 of the 26,000 Singaporean taxis always at Changi Airport? This is why you can never get a cab when you really want one... In Australia and New York they allow non Australians and non Americans to take the roles and the service and knowledge of the city is better than Singaporeans of Singapore. In fact I would wager that if you took an Indian who had just got off a plane and never been to Singapore and gave him a cab he would do a better job than a Singaporean taxi driver in driving you to your destination…"
Notre Dame tutor accused of pressuring students — including athletes — into having sex with her daughter - "In the lawsuit against the school, the unnamed student argues “the tutor orchestrated ‘sexually and racially motivated’ trysts with her daughter by including condoms, transportation and hotel rooms for academic favors,” Nicole Hensley and Reuven Blau of the Daily News report. “She was exploiting African-American males”"
Matt Stone & Trey Parker Are Not Your Political Allies (No Matter What You Believe) - "Both men were adamant that the show has no political affiliation. "I would never want the show to be a Democrat show or Republican show, because for us the show's more important than that. It isn't for everybody else in the world, but it is for us. We don't want you to come to it thinking, 'These guys are going to bash liberals,'" Matt explained. "I look at it like this," Trey added. "I have a cat, I love my cat and it's like someone coming in and saying, 'Hey, is that cat a Republican or a Democrat?' He's my fucking cat, leave him alone"... "everyone sees their own thing in it. So a lot of our shows where even we think we've taken a very deliberate stand, liberals say, 'That's awesome, you took on the conservatives' same show and conservatives say 'That's awesome, you took on liberals.'" They have certainly mocked conservative groups and people on their show, but they tend to skewer liberals more often. Why? "Ripping on Republicans is not that fun for us only because everyone else does it""
Trey Parker and Matt Stone - Americans of the Year 2011 Parker and Stone - "Parker and Stone abhor having their politics labeled, even by themselves. They're better at defining themselves in the negative. A few years ago, Stone said, "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals"... But the truth is that Parker and Stone, the creators of the decade's most extreme mass entertainment, are shockingly ... temperate. They say it themselves: "There is a middle ground, and most of us actually live in this middle ground.""
Addendum: "What we're sick of — and it's getting even worse — is you either like Michael Moore or you wanna fuckin' go overseas and shoot Iraqis... We find just as many things to rip on the left as we do on the right. People on the far left and the far right are the same exact person to us."
Baghdad travel guide - Wikitravel - "The easiest way to stay safe in Baghdad is not to go there in the first place"
What is the greatest global threat to Muslims? - "Who is responsible for the greatest numbers of deaths against Muslims today? Who commits the worst atrocities against Muslims? It is not the West that claims the highest headcount nor is it Israel. The sad truth is that today Muslims kill the most Muslims around the world... We like to proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace. And for most of us it is. But we have to acknowledge that there are those Muslims for whom Islam is not a religion of peace. Whether extremist Salafist Jihadists, or Shiite Revolutionary Guards, there are those in our religion that speak of Islam with a gun in their hands. And as long as they have the power to do so, they will claim to speak on our behalf as well. We need to take responsibility for these facts. And we need to recognize that while we allow young boys and men who should know better kill Muslims on behalf of Islam all around the Muslim world, we are failing to uphold the Islam of peace. When we let our religion be hijacked by the violent minority, we are failing in our religious duty. There is only one uprising we need. We need the silent majority who does not care whether their neighbors are Sunni, or Shiite, or Sufi, or Ahmadi, or Ismaili, or Christian or Jewish, or whatever else, but who care that they are good people, we need this majority to stop being silent."
If the world's hypocritical for caring more for Paris than Beirut, it is a mirror of Muslims' attitudes to Muslim violence
Emma Watson Sofia Vergara Bizarre Mask Gif Mystery Solved - "You may have seen an intensely bizarre Gif image making the rounds that shows Emma Watson talking and then eventually peeling away her face (and chest) to reveal herself to be Sofia Vergara in disguise"
Fat Studies: Colleges' Hot New Course? - "Jacqueline Johnson knows what it's like to be shunned because of her weight. In the early 2000s fat activism was edging into existence, and Johnson, a weight studies scholar, was deemed too skinny to take part... critics worry that such classes emphasize bleeding-heart politics over intellectual rigor... the presence of feel-good politics in college classrooms concerns some scholars, who worry about promoting acceptance and tolerance at the expense of hard academics. Anna Kirkland, an associate professor of Women's Studies and Political Science at the University of Michigan, is a supporter of Fat Studies, but fears it may lead to social proselytizing rather than serious study. "I'm not interested in areas of study whose main justification is that they're going to advance the situation of some social group," she says. "I mean, that's fine if that's part of the reason. But the main reason should be intellectual interest and energy cohering around a single topic area." In an article published last year on CampusReform.org, Abigail Alger, a manager at the Leadership Institute in Washington D.C., wrote that the subject is "part of a dangerous dumbing down of liberal education in which the pursuit of knowledge is replaced by frantic social programming and promotion of state programs." The discipline, Alger argued, doesn't encourage open debate, but instead "begins with the end in mind," and brands as a bigot anyone who disagrees... most fat activists still don't consider college to be a "weight-safe" environment"
Do they learn about the health effects of being overweight in fat studies?
Is "bleeding-heart politics over intellectual rigor" unique to fat studies?
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Transgender father Stefonknee Wolscht who left family to be a six-year-old girl 'uses child's play to escape adult life'
Transgender father Stefonknee Wolscht who left family to be a six-year-old girl 'uses child's play to escape adult life'
"A transgender father who left her family to be a six-year-old girl says that she cannot be an adult and "uses child’s play to escape adult life".
The uncut version of an interview by Daily Xtra with Stefonknee Wolscht explains how she makes life a game and how living as a six-year-old girl enabled her to escape from depression and suicidal thoughts.
“It’s called play therapy, no medication, no suicide thoughts and I just get to play,” she says.
She said that even in jail, where she spent nine days in solitary confinement (but does not explain what for), she played.
She made the cell a kingdom and sang songs there and would not be an adult, so she said they could not hurt her, saying, “If I’m six-years-old, I don’t have to think about adult stuff.”
Ms Wolscht still does adult things like drink coffee and drive a car, but does these things as a little kid.
As she was never allowed to be a little girl, she feels she is “filling that tank full of little girl experiences” and loves the fact that she has access to "really pretty clothes" and doesn’t have to act her age.
“By not acting my age, I don’t have to deal with the reality of my past, because it hurt” she says.
She goes on to explain that she has a “whole bunch of friends who want to play, so they still do their job during the day, but when they’re stressed out, there’s nothing wrong with us pulling out a puzzle, or colouring in a colouring book, or watching cartoons.”
She says that some people turn to drugs, some people turn to different kind of fetishes, medication or therapy.
But for Ms Wolscht, she prefers to “just let it go and stop thinking about big people’s stuff.”
When asked what she hopes this will achieve, Ms Wolscht replies, “Well, eventually I will grow up.”
Ms Wolscht was married to a woman for 23 years and has seven children. She began her transition six years ago.
Her wife gave her an ultimatum: to either stop being trans or leave. But Ms Wolscht said she "did not know how to stop being trans".
“It would be like telling me to stop being 6ft 2 or leave”, she said in the published interview.
She now lives with an adopted family, who she says are “totally comfortable with me being a little girl.”"
Is Age Dysphoria the new Gender Dysphoria?
"A transgender father who left her family to be a six-year-old girl says that she cannot be an adult and "uses child’s play to escape adult life".
The uncut version of an interview by Daily Xtra with Stefonknee Wolscht explains how she makes life a game and how living as a six-year-old girl enabled her to escape from depression and suicidal thoughts.
“It’s called play therapy, no medication, no suicide thoughts and I just get to play,” she says.
She said that even in jail, where she spent nine days in solitary confinement (but does not explain what for), she played.
She made the cell a kingdom and sang songs there and would not be an adult, so she said they could not hurt her, saying, “If I’m six-years-old, I don’t have to think about adult stuff.”
Ms Wolscht still does adult things like drink coffee and drive a car, but does these things as a little kid.
As she was never allowed to be a little girl, she feels she is “filling that tank full of little girl experiences” and loves the fact that she has access to "really pretty clothes" and doesn’t have to act her age.
“By not acting my age, I don’t have to deal with the reality of my past, because it hurt” she says.
She goes on to explain that she has a “whole bunch of friends who want to play, so they still do their job during the day, but when they’re stressed out, there’s nothing wrong with us pulling out a puzzle, or colouring in a colouring book, or watching cartoons.”
She says that some people turn to drugs, some people turn to different kind of fetishes, medication or therapy.
But for Ms Wolscht, she prefers to “just let it go and stop thinking about big people’s stuff.”
When asked what she hopes this will achieve, Ms Wolscht replies, “Well, eventually I will grow up.”
Ms Wolscht was married to a woman for 23 years and has seven children. She began her transition six years ago.
Her wife gave her an ultimatum: to either stop being trans or leave. But Ms Wolscht said she "did not know how to stop being trans".
“It would be like telling me to stop being 6ft 2 or leave”, she said in the published interview.
She now lives with an adopted family, who she says are “totally comfortable with me being a little girl.”"
Is Age Dysphoria the new Gender Dysphoria?
Monday, December 21, 2015
Links - 21st December 2015
Saudi millionaire cleared of rape after claiming he fell and accidentally penetrated teenager
What we learn from this story: most people don't read/understand articles, especially those with provocative headlines. The contention is that she says he raped her with his penis, and he says he fell and his hand penetrated her vagina. He's cleared of rape - presumably because they didn't have sex. But the trial is still ongoing. Also for all the people alleging that money buys justice or that the judge has a Swiss bank account - this was a jury trial zzz
Star Wars porn sees 500% sales growth in two weeks
Who Has Abortions? - "Who has abortions? For most of human history, the answer was obvious: women have abortions. Girls have abortions. Not any more. People have abortions. Patients have abortions. Men have abortions. “We must acknowledge and come to terms with the implicit cissexism in assuming that only women have abortions,” wrote feminist activist Lauren Rankin in July 2013 in truthout.com. She went on to criticize as exclusionary slogans like “the War on Women” and “Stand with Texas Women”... removing “women” from the language of abortion is a mistake. We can, and should, support trans men and other gender-non-conforming people. But we can do that without rendering invisible half of humanity and 99.999 percent of those who get pregnant... “Most of the pressure [to shift language] comes from young people,” said one abortion-fund head I interviewed, whose fund, like many, has “Women” in its name. “The role of people in our generation is to give money and get out of the way.” (Like many of the people I interviewed for this column, she asked to remain anonymous)... it feels as if abortion language is becoming a bit like French, where one man in a group of no matter how many women means “elles” becomes “ils”... every year over 2,000 men get breast cancer and over 400 die, and no one is calling for “women” to be cut out of breast-cancer language so that men will feel more comfortable seeking treatment... The real damage of abolishing “women” in abortion contexts, though, is to our political analysis. What happens to Dr. Tiller’s motto, “Trust Women”? There was a whole feminist philosophy expressed in those two words... When the actress and feminist advocate Martha Plimpton organized an abortion-fund benefit lightheartedly named “Night of a Thousand Vaginas,” some activists were outraged, because some trans men don’t like that word (“birth canal” or “front hole” are favored alternatives to the V-word). Trans men should refer to their genitalia however they like, but it’s hard not to feel that there’s something seriously awry when women, who only got to call their genitals by the proper term in public a decade or so ago, are supposed to stop naming them in order to avoid offense. Most people who support dropping “women”-specific language are feminists (although maybe they won’t call themselves that for long, given that “feminism” itself comes from the Latin for “woman”). They point to their use of words like “misogyny” and “patriarchy” as evidence that they understand female oppression by men is central to their analysis. But a feminism that can’t say “women”—or “vagina” or “sisterhood” or even the cutesy “ladyparts”— is cutting the ground from under itself... In an era where politics is all about identity, as a tool for organizing and claiming public space, are women about to lose theirs? Because after all we’re all just people now"
How long does it take for a movement to implode?
Does Talking About ‘Women’ Exclude Transgender People From the Fight for Abortion Rights? - "women know that “women’s clinic,” “women’s health,” and so on are code for “abortion.” That’s how they find services. That’s why many abortion funds have “women” not just in their messaging but in their name... “women” reminds us that the denial of reproductive rights to women is political: It’s about the control of women’s sexuality by church, state, and (yes) men, individually and collectively, in order to confine them to lesser, subordinate roles. The use of the word “women” is a call for solidarity and mutual compassion among women—something we could use a lot more of. It also humanizes the abortion patient to the public. A recent Vox survey found that 28 percent of respondents agreed that “abortion should be legal in almost all cases.” But 37 percent agreed that “women should have a legal right to safe and accessible abortion in almost all cases.” That’s a 9 percent jump gained simply by including the word “women.” Most people understand that “Black Lives Matter” does not exclude Latinos or other victims of police brutality who are targeted because of race. Why is “Trust Women” or “Stand With Texas Women” or “women’s rights” exclusionary?"
The Dispute Between Radical Feminism and Transgenderism - "radical feminists now find themselves in a position that few would have imagined when the conflict began: shunned as reactionaries on the wrong side of a sexual-rights issue. It is, to them, a baffling political inversion... Abusive posts proliferated on Twitter and, especially, Tumblr. One read, “/kill/terfs 2K14.” Another suggested, “how about ‘slowly and horrendously murder terfs in saw-like torture machines and contraptions’ 2K14.” A young blogger holding a knife posted a selfie with the caption “Fetch me a terf.” Such threats have become so common that radical-feminist Web sites have taken to cataloguing them. “It’s aggrieved entitlement,” Lierre Keith told me. “They are so angry that we will not see them as women”... a person born with male privilege can no more shed it through surgery than a white person can claim an African-American identity simply by darkening his or her skin... Heath Atom Russell gave the closing talk. A stocky woman, with curly turquoise hair and a bluish stubble shadow on her cheeks, she wore a T-shirt that read “I Survived Testosterone Poisoning.” At twenty-five, she is a “detransitioner,” a person who once identified as transgender but no longer does. (Expert estimates of the number of transitioners who abandon their new gender range from fewer than one per cent to as many as five per cent.) Russell, a lesbian who grew up in a conservative Baptist family in Southern California, began transitioning to male as a student at Humboldt State University, and was embraced by gender-rights groups on campus. She started taking hormones and changed her name. Then, in her senior year, she discovered “Unpacking Queer Politics” (2003), by Sheila Jeffreys, which critiques female-to-male transsexualism as capitulation to misogyny... Jeffreys calls detransitioners like Russell “survivors,” and cites them as evidence that transgenderism isn’t immutable and thus doesn’t warrant radical medical intervention. (She considers gender-reassignment surgery a form of mutilation.) “The phenomenon of regret undermines the idea that there exists a particular kind of person who is genuinely and essentially transgender and can be identified accurately by psychiatrists,” she writes. “It is radically destabilising to the transgender project.” She cites as further evidence the case of Bradley Cooper, who, in 2011, at the age of seventeen, became Britain’s youngest gender-reassignment patient, then publicly regretted his transition the next year and returned to living as a boy"
Jon Ronson: When online shaming spirals out of control | TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript | TED.com - "this was a unique moment when the beautiful naivety of Twitter was hitting the increasingly horrific reality... "Jonah Lehrer has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame." That one must have been written by the best psychiatrist ever, to know that about such a tiny figure behind a lectern. And, "Jonah Lehrer is just a frigging sociopath." That last word is a very human thing to do, to dehumanize the people we hurt. It's because we want to destroy people but not feel bad about it. Imagine if this was an actual court, and the accused was in the dark, begging for another chance, and the jury was yelling out, "Bored! Sociopath!"... Power shifts fast. We were getting Jonah because he was perceived to have misused his privilege, but Jonah was on the floor then, and we were still kicking, and congratulating ourselves for punching up. And it began to feel weird and empty when there wasn't a powerful person who had misused their privilege that we could get. A day without a shaming began to feel like a day picking fingernails and treading water... another woman on Twitter that night, a New Statesman writer Helen Lewis, she reviewed my book on public shaming and wrote that she Tweeted that night, "I'm not sure that her joke was intended to be racist," and she said straightaway she got a fury of Tweets saying, "Well, you're just a privileged bitch, too." And so to her shame, she wrote, she shut up and watched as Justine's life got torn apart... Google made somewhere between 120,000 dollars and 468,000 dollars from Justine's annihilation, whereas those of us doing the actual shaming -- we got nothing. We were like unpaid shaming interns for Google... We were all so excited about destroying Justine, and our shaming brains are so simple-minded, that we couldn't also handle destroying somebody who was inappropriately destroying Justine... Twitter is basically a mutual approval machine. We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, and we approve each other, and that's a really good feeling. And if somebody gets in the way, we screen them out. And do you know what that's the opposite of? It's the opposite of democracy. We wanted to show that we cared about people dying of AIDS in Africa. Our desire to be seen to be compassionate is what led us to commit this profoundly un-compassionate act... the phrase "misuse of privilege" is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It's becoming a devalued term, and it's making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions... back on the early days of Twitter, when people would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." These days, the hunt is on for people's shameful secrets. You can lead a good, ethical life, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all, become a clue to your secret inner evil. Maybe there's two types of people in the world: those people who favor humans over ideology, and those people who favor ideology over humans. I favor humans over ideology, but right now, the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas where everybody's either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain, even though we know that's not true about our fellow humans. What's true is that we are clever and stupid; what's true is that we're grey areas. The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but we're now creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless... for 30 years I've been writing stories about abuses of power, and when I say the powerful people over there in the military, or in the pharmaceutical industry, everybody applauds me. As soon as I say, "We are the powerful people abusing our power now," I get people saying, "Well you must be a racist too.
BG: So the other night -- yesterday -- we were at dinner, and there were two discussions going on. On one side you were talking with people around the table -- and that was a nice, constructive discussion. On the other, every time you turned to your phone, there is this deluge of insults."
I Once Had A Feminist Tell Me - ""I once had a feminist tell me that it was rude to disagree/rebuke a "bathing in male tears" post."
"I had another feminist tell me I was stupid and rude for implying that not all white people are bad and telling them I have black friends."
"Using feminism’s past achievements to imply that the movement’s above reproach is like if I were to use the Roman alphabet, bound books, the modern Gregorian calendar (which is based on the Julian calendar) and the concept of government welfare programs to excuse the tyranny and wartime atrocities of the Roman Empire."
"I once had a feminist tell me that feminism doesn't hurt men, but then the same feminist went on to make fun of men in very demeaning ways."
"I once had a feminist tell me that not enough stories (books, movies, etc.) had female protagonists. I told her about the books I was writing, starring female cops and graffiti artists and the like. Her reply was that since I'm not female, I'm not allowed to write female characters."
"I once had a feminist tell me that the reason why men don’t have more birth control options is because the pharmaceutical industry was controlled by men."
"I once had a feminist tell me that I was a "naive idiot" because I told her that calling people names, silencing, and cussing didn't strengthen her argument."
"I’ve more than once had a feminist belittle me in class for not being on board with feminism, and constantly says things like “What about the sisterhood?” and “I’ll make you a feminist one day.” This feminist is my sociology lecturer at college."
"I once had a feminist tell me that I was a pathetic whiny man because I said we needed more abuse recovery centers for men. (I am a cisgender female)"
Naturally, this is (supposedly) "not representative"
If the Everyday Sexism project shows that women face sexism every day does this show that feminists are crazy?
The 5 Most Depraved Sex Scenes Implied by 'Harry Potter'
What we learn from this story: most people don't read/understand articles, especially those with provocative headlines. The contention is that she says he raped her with his penis, and he says he fell and his hand penetrated her vagina. He's cleared of rape - presumably because they didn't have sex. But the trial is still ongoing. Also for all the people alleging that money buys justice or that the judge has a Swiss bank account - this was a jury trial zzz
Star Wars porn sees 500% sales growth in two weeks
Who Has Abortions? - "Who has abortions? For most of human history, the answer was obvious: women have abortions. Girls have abortions. Not any more. People have abortions. Patients have abortions. Men have abortions. “We must acknowledge and come to terms with the implicit cissexism in assuming that only women have abortions,” wrote feminist activist Lauren Rankin in July 2013 in truthout.com. She went on to criticize as exclusionary slogans like “the War on Women” and “Stand with Texas Women”... removing “women” from the language of abortion is a mistake. We can, and should, support trans men and other gender-non-conforming people. But we can do that without rendering invisible half of humanity and 99.999 percent of those who get pregnant... “Most of the pressure [to shift language] comes from young people,” said one abortion-fund head I interviewed, whose fund, like many, has “Women” in its name. “The role of people in our generation is to give money and get out of the way.” (Like many of the people I interviewed for this column, she asked to remain anonymous)... it feels as if abortion language is becoming a bit like French, where one man in a group of no matter how many women means “elles” becomes “ils”... every year over 2,000 men get breast cancer and over 400 die, and no one is calling for “women” to be cut out of breast-cancer language so that men will feel more comfortable seeking treatment... The real damage of abolishing “women” in abortion contexts, though, is to our political analysis. What happens to Dr. Tiller’s motto, “Trust Women”? There was a whole feminist philosophy expressed in those two words... When the actress and feminist advocate Martha Plimpton organized an abortion-fund benefit lightheartedly named “Night of a Thousand Vaginas,” some activists were outraged, because some trans men don’t like that word (“birth canal” or “front hole” are favored alternatives to the V-word). Trans men should refer to their genitalia however they like, but it’s hard not to feel that there’s something seriously awry when women, who only got to call their genitals by the proper term in public a decade or so ago, are supposed to stop naming them in order to avoid offense. Most people who support dropping “women”-specific language are feminists (although maybe they won’t call themselves that for long, given that “feminism” itself comes from the Latin for “woman”). They point to their use of words like “misogyny” and “patriarchy” as evidence that they understand female oppression by men is central to their analysis. But a feminism that can’t say “women”—or “vagina” or “sisterhood” or even the cutesy “ladyparts”— is cutting the ground from under itself... In an era where politics is all about identity, as a tool for organizing and claiming public space, are women about to lose theirs? Because after all we’re all just people now"
How long does it take for a movement to implode?
Does Talking About ‘Women’ Exclude Transgender People From the Fight for Abortion Rights? - "women know that “women’s clinic,” “women’s health,” and so on are code for “abortion.” That’s how they find services. That’s why many abortion funds have “women” not just in their messaging but in their name... “women” reminds us that the denial of reproductive rights to women is political: It’s about the control of women’s sexuality by church, state, and (yes) men, individually and collectively, in order to confine them to lesser, subordinate roles. The use of the word “women” is a call for solidarity and mutual compassion among women—something we could use a lot more of. It also humanizes the abortion patient to the public. A recent Vox survey found that 28 percent of respondents agreed that “abortion should be legal in almost all cases.” But 37 percent agreed that “women should have a legal right to safe and accessible abortion in almost all cases.” That’s a 9 percent jump gained simply by including the word “women.” Most people understand that “Black Lives Matter” does not exclude Latinos or other victims of police brutality who are targeted because of race. Why is “Trust Women” or “Stand With Texas Women” or “women’s rights” exclusionary?"
The Dispute Between Radical Feminism and Transgenderism - "radical feminists now find themselves in a position that few would have imagined when the conflict began: shunned as reactionaries on the wrong side of a sexual-rights issue. It is, to them, a baffling political inversion... Abusive posts proliferated on Twitter and, especially, Tumblr. One read, “/kill/terfs 2K14.” Another suggested, “how about ‘slowly and horrendously murder terfs in saw-like torture machines and contraptions’ 2K14.” A young blogger holding a knife posted a selfie with the caption “Fetch me a terf.” Such threats have become so common that radical-feminist Web sites have taken to cataloguing them. “It’s aggrieved entitlement,” Lierre Keith told me. “They are so angry that we will not see them as women”... a person born with male privilege can no more shed it through surgery than a white person can claim an African-American identity simply by darkening his or her skin... Heath Atom Russell gave the closing talk. A stocky woman, with curly turquoise hair and a bluish stubble shadow on her cheeks, she wore a T-shirt that read “I Survived Testosterone Poisoning.” At twenty-five, she is a “detransitioner,” a person who once identified as transgender but no longer does. (Expert estimates of the number of transitioners who abandon their new gender range from fewer than one per cent to as many as five per cent.) Russell, a lesbian who grew up in a conservative Baptist family in Southern California, began transitioning to male as a student at Humboldt State University, and was embraced by gender-rights groups on campus. She started taking hormones and changed her name. Then, in her senior year, she discovered “Unpacking Queer Politics” (2003), by Sheila Jeffreys, which critiques female-to-male transsexualism as capitulation to misogyny... Jeffreys calls detransitioners like Russell “survivors,” and cites them as evidence that transgenderism isn’t immutable and thus doesn’t warrant radical medical intervention. (She considers gender-reassignment surgery a form of mutilation.) “The phenomenon of regret undermines the idea that there exists a particular kind of person who is genuinely and essentially transgender and can be identified accurately by psychiatrists,” she writes. “It is radically destabilising to the transgender project.” She cites as further evidence the case of Bradley Cooper, who, in 2011, at the age of seventeen, became Britain’s youngest gender-reassignment patient, then publicly regretted his transition the next year and returned to living as a boy"
Jon Ronson: When online shaming spirals out of control | TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript | TED.com - "this was a unique moment when the beautiful naivety of Twitter was hitting the increasingly horrific reality... "Jonah Lehrer has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame." That one must have been written by the best psychiatrist ever, to know that about such a tiny figure behind a lectern. And, "Jonah Lehrer is just a frigging sociopath." That last word is a very human thing to do, to dehumanize the people we hurt. It's because we want to destroy people but not feel bad about it. Imagine if this was an actual court, and the accused was in the dark, begging for another chance, and the jury was yelling out, "Bored! Sociopath!"... Power shifts fast. We were getting Jonah because he was perceived to have misused his privilege, but Jonah was on the floor then, and we were still kicking, and congratulating ourselves for punching up. And it began to feel weird and empty when there wasn't a powerful person who had misused their privilege that we could get. A day without a shaming began to feel like a day picking fingernails and treading water... another woman on Twitter that night, a New Statesman writer Helen Lewis, she reviewed my book on public shaming and wrote that she Tweeted that night, "I'm not sure that her joke was intended to be racist," and she said straightaway she got a fury of Tweets saying, "Well, you're just a privileged bitch, too." And so to her shame, she wrote, she shut up and watched as Justine's life got torn apart... Google made somewhere between 120,000 dollars and 468,000 dollars from Justine's annihilation, whereas those of us doing the actual shaming -- we got nothing. We were like unpaid shaming interns for Google... We were all so excited about destroying Justine, and our shaming brains are so simple-minded, that we couldn't also handle destroying somebody who was inappropriately destroying Justine... Twitter is basically a mutual approval machine. We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, and we approve each other, and that's a really good feeling. And if somebody gets in the way, we screen them out. And do you know what that's the opposite of? It's the opposite of democracy. We wanted to show that we cared about people dying of AIDS in Africa. Our desire to be seen to be compassionate is what led us to commit this profoundly un-compassionate act... the phrase "misuse of privilege" is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It's becoming a devalued term, and it's making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions... back on the early days of Twitter, when people would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." These days, the hunt is on for people's shameful secrets. You can lead a good, ethical life, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all, become a clue to your secret inner evil. Maybe there's two types of people in the world: those people who favor humans over ideology, and those people who favor ideology over humans. I favor humans over ideology, but right now, the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas where everybody's either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain, even though we know that's not true about our fellow humans. What's true is that we are clever and stupid; what's true is that we're grey areas. The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but we're now creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless... for 30 years I've been writing stories about abuses of power, and when I say the powerful people over there in the military, or in the pharmaceutical industry, everybody applauds me. As soon as I say, "We are the powerful people abusing our power now," I get people saying, "Well you must be a racist too.
BG: So the other night -- yesterday -- we were at dinner, and there were two discussions going on. On one side you were talking with people around the table -- and that was a nice, constructive discussion. On the other, every time you turned to your phone, there is this deluge of insults."
I Once Had A Feminist Tell Me - ""I once had a feminist tell me that it was rude to disagree/rebuke a "bathing in male tears" post."
"I had another feminist tell me I was stupid and rude for implying that not all white people are bad and telling them I have black friends."
"Using feminism’s past achievements to imply that the movement’s above reproach is like if I were to use the Roman alphabet, bound books, the modern Gregorian calendar (which is based on the Julian calendar) and the concept of government welfare programs to excuse the tyranny and wartime atrocities of the Roman Empire."
"I once had a feminist tell me that feminism doesn't hurt men, but then the same feminist went on to make fun of men in very demeaning ways."
"I once had a feminist tell me that not enough stories (books, movies, etc.) had female protagonists. I told her about the books I was writing, starring female cops and graffiti artists and the like. Her reply was that since I'm not female, I'm not allowed to write female characters."
"I once had a feminist tell me that the reason why men don’t have more birth control options is because the pharmaceutical industry was controlled by men."
"I once had a feminist tell me that I was a "naive idiot" because I told her that calling people names, silencing, and cussing didn't strengthen her argument."
"I’ve more than once had a feminist belittle me in class for not being on board with feminism, and constantly says things like “What about the sisterhood?” and “I’ll make you a feminist one day.” This feminist is my sociology lecturer at college."
"I once had a feminist tell me that I was a pathetic whiny man because I said we needed more abuse recovery centers for men. (I am a cisgender female)"
Naturally, this is (supposedly) "not representative"
If the Everyday Sexism project shows that women face sexism every day does this show that feminists are crazy?
The 5 Most Depraved Sex Scenes Implied by 'Harry Potter'
The First Illuminati Recruitment Message I've Ever Seen
Amusing post I saw on Facebook:
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Addendum:
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paid) to your dream tourist destination. 5.One year Golf Membership package 6.A V.I.P treatment in all Airports in the World 7.A total Lifestyle change 8.Access to Bohemian Grove 9.Monthly payment of $5,000,000Usd into your bank account every month as a member 10.One Month booked Appointment with Top 5 world Leaders and Top 5 Celebrities in the World. If you are interested of joining us in the great brotherhood illuminati666 contact email:illuminatistar6666@gmail.com, illuminatistar6666@yahoo.com
Addendum:
Amusing spam comment I got for this:
"mr johncifer
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[ILLUMINATI] OF THE WHOLE WORLD WIDE
.
ARE YOU A BUSINESS MAN, POLITICIAN , musical, student and you
want to be rich, powerful and be famous in life. You can achieve your dreams being a
member of the Illuminati.With this all your dreams and heart desire can be fully
accomplish. it’s well-known fact that we Freemasonry/ ILLUMINATI consist of Multi
Millionaires, Billionaires who have major influence regarding most global affairs,
including the planning of a New World Order. Many world leaders, Presidents, Prime
Ministers, royalty and senior executives of major Fortune 5,000 companies are
members of Freemasonry. Now, for the FIRST TIME IN HISTORY, we are opening our d oors to the masses. JOINING THE ILLUMINATI BRINGS YOU INTO THE LIMELIGHT OF THE WORLD IN WHICH YOU LIVE IN TODAY. YOUR
FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES ARE BROUGHT TO AN END. WE SUPPORT YOU BOTH FINANCIALLY AND MATERIALLY TO ENSURE YOU LIVE A COMFORTABLE LIFE. IT DOES NOT MATTER WHICH PART OF THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN.
contact us as soon as possible famousilluminatimoney666@gmail.com or call +2349037326964 if you are really interested so that you can become a great man or woman in life and become a multi billionaires.
If you wish to be a member of this great brothersh ood of kingdom of riches this is
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