Links - 22nd October 2011

"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that." - G. H. Hardy

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Obedient Wives Club publishes explicit sex book - "Titillatingly-titled “Seks Islam, perangi Yahudi untk kembalikan seks Islam kepada dunia [Islamic sex, fighting Jews to return Islamic sex to the world]”, the explicit book aims to guide Muslim brides on how to pleasure their husbands in bed. In its foreword, the pro-polygamy OWC said its studies showed women only gave their husbands 10 per cent of what the men desired of their wives’ bodies."
There is actually a word for sex in Malay: "persetubuhan"

Godchecker.com - Your Guide To The Gods

Deconstructing SlutWalk: San Francisco, August 6, 2011 - "SlutWalks simmer with a jittery yet unnerving erotic tension. Look at me, I'm sexy and gorgeous! is inextricably meshed with If you even DARE to glance in my direction, I will disembowel you. For those marinated in academic feminism, this posture makes total sense; everyone else cringes nervously and expects someone to jump out and say "Ha ha! You've been punked!"... if anybody dares to disagree with you or even raise a minor quibble, you can shoot back, "What? Are you FOR rape? Do you think we SHOULD blame victims? You're part of the problem!" As a result of this stance, your cause becomes above reproach, immune from criticism. THEN... (did you really think the strategy stopped there? Tsk tsk tsk) once you've assumed this mantle of moral perfection, you can start heaping all sorts of ancillary ultimatums and issues onto your list of demands, and no one is allowed to resist or complain, lest you once again neutralize them with "Blaming the victim again, are we? Pig!"... SlutWalk is a set of mutually contradictory statements and attitudes that all cancel each other out and make no logical sense...
Contradiction #1: I'm a slut / Don't call me a slut!
Contradiction #2: Look at me / Don't you dare look at me!
Contradiction #3: Looksism is unfair and patriarchal / See how gorgeous we are?
Contradiction #4: Let's stop rape / Cops are the enemy
Contradiction #5: Casual consensual sex is fun / Men are evil
Contradiction #6: Sexual exploitation of women is bad / Let's glorify prostitution
Possibly the most misguided message of the day: Amidst all the "Keep your hands of me!" signage, this participant wore a "Hug Me" t-shirt. If any man had taken her up on the offer, would he have been beaten to a pulp by the crowd? "Hug Me"'s only competition for "worst t-shirt" came from this SlutWalker who thought it wise to wear her "Itty Bitty Titty Committee" shirt to the march"
This is the best SlutWalk analysis/commentary so far
Addendum: "not a slut", "incoherent", "incoherence"

EU bans pre-ticked website boxes to aid consumers - ""Pre-ticked" boxes on shopping websites will be banned in European Union states under newly approved legislation... Traders will not be allowed to make a profit from the charge levied on customers for using a credit card; those with telephone hotlines will only be allowed to charge customers basic call rates."

Spider-Woman scales castle wall: Ma Jei climbs 70ft to dodge £2.50 admission fee

The Digital Humanities as Composite | Digital Humanities Specialist - "While working on a vector rendition of the Farnese Atlas, a sculpture
now residing in Naples that was carved in the 2nd century as a copy of a Greek sculpture possibly dating back to the 2nd century BCE, I realized that the piece wouldn’t come off as well as I would like if it was based on a single static image of the sculpture (one such image, a photograph taken by Gabriel Seah and released CCSA3 on Wikipedia, served as the primary reference)"

Willingness to lie manipulated with magnets

Angry Birds! - "As I got ready to sling the bird into the pigs building in the fourth level of the game, I began to think “Either am crazy, or this game is political”. The birds started to remind me of Angry Muslim “birds” who would strap bombs and risk their lives to destroy the Jewish ”pigs” who had stolen their eggs… I mean land. Instead of sling-shots the “birds” used airplanes that they hijacked. The largest Jewish (Pig) population is in the USA, so they aimed their sling-shot in that direction. Birds who are angry, and determined. Coincidence? I don’t think so. A man said to the Prophet (SAW): “Counsel me”. The prophet said: “Do not become angry”… لا تغضب And he repeated several times: “Do not become angry”."
This sort of analysis says more about the analyser than the analysed

Good sex? Science serves up the secret - ""One paper suggested that one in 400 pairs of fraternal twins born to white married women in the United States may actually have different fathers"... There's a reason for women to prefer dark men: They're less like to have sperm damage from UV light."

Newspaper thief drives off in lorry, shopkeeper clings onto bonnet - "It was a scene straight out of the movies. A lorry swerving from left to right trying to dislodge a man clinging for dear life on the bonnet."

If It's Hip, It's Here: Soup For Sluts & Other Rad Ramen Noodles

Antiperspirants and Breast Cancer Risk - "For a while now, an email rumor has suggested that underarm antiperspirants cause breast cancer... All of these claims are largely untrue."

Orthodox church appears to be exempt from austerity measures - ""The Greek church is a national church," Karamouzis says, "which means there is a political connection between the church and the state, for the state awarded it these privileges. Its spiritual role is closely linked to its political function, muddying the distinction between its congregation and Greek citizens, a source of confusion which politicians use in their quest for votes""

Deepak Chopra reviews Richard Dawkins - "Shorter Deepak: “Richard Dawkins didn’t endorse my quantum bullshit, therefore The Magic of Reality sucks!” Deepak Chopra actually sounds quite upset — his review of the book reads more like the indignant squawk of a charlatan furious that the presence of a skeptic might cut into his take. It’s largely an exercise in name-dropping and the profession of bleary, vacuous misinterpretations of science on his part, which he then turns around and uses to accuse Dawkins of error because he doesn’t share his inoculation of the ideas with pseudoscience"

My new favorite word: cephalophoric - "This translates, from Greek, as “head carrier” and refers specifically to saints who, after beheading, carried around their own heads... a French scholar found 134 examples in French hagiography alone"

WEST: Shariah goes to Harvard - "What do Pakistan’s Swat Valley and Harvard University have in common? Their leading Islamic authorities uphold the Shariah (Islamic law) tradition of punishing those who leave Islam with death... No one from the public-affairs office I contacted would answer questions or return phone calls... maybe more disturbing than either Mr. Abdul-Basser’s Shariah position or Harvard’s stonewalling is the silence of the media. With the exception of the Harvard Crimson, no news outlets have covered the story. Compare this silence to the uninterrupted media pillory that Lawrence H. Summers endured back in 2005. For suggesting that differences between men and women, not discrimination, accounted for a dearth of women in the sciences, Mr. Summers was ultimately driven from the Harvard presidency. Today, for seeing “great wisdom” in the Shariah tradition of capital punishment for apostasy, Mr. Abdul-Basser not only doesn’t rate a news squib, but he also continues to minister to Harvard’s flock"
More Islamophobia!

Map your Twitter Followers

Fit to fat and back again - "A personal trainer in the US has spent six months pigging out and eating junk food - to help him better understand fat clients. Drew Manning says he was fed up of hearing people tell him he didn't know what it was like to be fat and suffer cravings"

Sola Ratione: William L. Craig debates the undebatable - "Most people who see themselves as engaging in a serious and honest intellectual inquiry wouldn't even dream of resorting to such a devious tactic — much less suspect their colleagues of doing so. What would be the point? You might win the debate, as Craig apparently did — but then what?... I don't think even Krauss could have foreseen just how pointless and disheartening it would be to try and engage with someone like William Lane Craig"

Sexy Gisele ad not too sexist for TV - "Brazil's National Advertising Council has denied a request to ban a television ad featuring lingerie-clad supermodel Gisele Bundchen after a government agency called it sexist. "The stereotypes in this ad campaign are common in society, easily identifiable and do not denigrate women"... Some men had called for the ad to be put down because it took them for "idiots""
Interestingly the Council said nothing about denigrating men

Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig | Richard Dawkins - "Most churchmen these days wisely disown the horrific genocides ordered by the God of the Old Testament. Anyone who criticises the divine bloodlust is loudly accused of unfairly ignoring the historical context, and of naive literalism towards what was never more than metaphor or myth... listen to Craig. He begins by arguing that the Canaanites were debauched and sinful and therefore deserved to be slaughtered... 'I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli [sic] soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli [sic] soldiers is disturbing... If the Canaanite tribes, seeing the armies of Israel, had simply chosen to flee, no one would have been killed at all. There was no command to pursue and hunt down the Canaanite peoples. It is therefore completely misleading to characterise God's command to Israel as a command to commit genocide. Rather it was first and foremost a command to drive the tribes out of the land and to occupy it. Only those who remained behind were to be utterly exterminated. No one had to die in this whole affair' So, apparently it was the Canaanites' own fault for not running away. Right. Would you shake hands with a man who could write stuff like that? Would you share a platform with him? I wouldn't, and I won't"
Since one Christian definition of "freedom" is warped ("freedom" means being free to do God's will), it's no surprise that terms like "genocide" and "good" get redefined in doublespeak too