Muslims who keep beard without moustache are fundamentalists: UP Shia Waqf Board chief - ""Keeping beard is Sunnat. However, keeping beard without moustache is against Sunnat as the person looks fearful. Muslims with beard and no moustache are fundamentalists," Razvi said. "Such people can be seen promoting terrorism across the world."He also spoke about fatwas being issued to govern individuals' personal life. "We have some Muslims who issue fatwa by interfering in the personal life of others. They forget that Islam has nothing to do with this," he said.The Shia Waqf Board chief said that any person or institution issuing such diktats should be "booked as traitors". "Nobody has the right to go against the Constitution and make their own laws," he said."
COVID-19 is reminding everyone that PCs aren't going anywhere - "PCs may not be the new thing, and they may not be sexy, but right now, PCs sure are useful.You can see this, a little, in the big PC companies’ financial results. Intel has reported a 23 percent increase in overall revenue, with “PC-centric revenue” growing by 14 percent. “Consumers and businesses are relying on PCs for working and learning at home”... most people’s devices are already good enough that this enforced time indoors may make them reconsider their purchases -- especially if the economic shock of COVID-19 causes many to cut down on their spending as job losses hit. IDC says that the expected “global economic downturn” is likely to stop plenty of people from buying a new device.The technology industry does seem to get this, recognizing that people buying $1,500 phones is no longer a done deal. That’s why Apple is pushing the new iPhone SE, Google’s focus is on the much cheaper (and much leaked) Pixel 4A and Samsung’s drive is on its wide variety of “good enough” non-flagship A series phones"
Iranian Navy Hits Own Warship With Missile In Fatal Accident - "The Iranian Navy has confirmed that 19 people died when one of its warships was hit by a missile during a training exercise. Fifteen more are reported to have been injured... This is not the first accident involving this class of ship. Her sister-ship Damavand was sunk in a navigation error on January 10 2018.Iran regularly exercises its forces to attack ships in the Straits of Hormuz as well as the Persian Gulf and Sea of Oman."
Why Some LGBT+ People Feel Uneasy At The Sight Of NHS Rainbow Flags - "in the U.K. a wave of rainbows is on display in windows up and down the country. Like the weekly “Clap for Carers” they are a symbol of people's solidarity with NHS and key workers.But this act is leaving some in the LGBT+ community feeling uneasy about whether they are losing their symbol, accusing some online shops of erasure and ignorance as they sell LGBT+ pride banners rebranded as “Thank You NHS” flags... "What I find frustrating are the people who know it's an LGBT flag but are taking the stance 'well it’s a symbol for the NHS now, we repurpose things all the time.'"Those are the people who are actively trying to steal our flag, in my opinion. And those people are definitely frustrating."... as Coward points out in a recent #MuseumFromHome video about the history of the flag, “no-one owns the rainbow.”He does warn “it is worth remembering it has different meanings for different people.”Indeed, the peace flag, which has seven stripes, was used as a symbol of anti-war movements"
So much for minority rights not affecting other people, or rights not being like cake
Of course Christians who claimed the rainbow was a Christian symbol stolen by the gays get called homophobic bigots
S'poreans who took their businesses to North Korea interviewed by Vice News - "The first Singaporean featured was Patrick Soh, who opened a Western hamburger chain called Samtaesong (Three Big Stars) in Pyongyang. In Singapore, this fast food chain is better known as Waffletown and Soh owns the Asian franchise of this little-known American fast-food chain.The Singaporean outlet is located at Balmoral Plaza on Bukit Timah Road. By April 2009, the first outlet was set up in North Korea. Since then, four more dine-in outlets and 20 takeaway units have been established in Pyongyang"
10 Facts About Waffletown, The First Fast-Food Restaurant in N.Korea Opened By S'poreans - "After opening its first outlet in 2719 East College Avenue in Avondale Estates, Georgia, Waffletown USA now has 2,100 outlets in 25 states in the United States."
Bolu Babalola on Twitter - Julie Bindel: "Does anyone else think the ‘Karen’ slur is woman hating and based on class prejudice?"
"petition to change karen to "julie". definition : a woman who erases black women & woc and manipulates misogyny to evade accountability in regards to whiteness and the many forms in which it commits aggression"
The magic of intersectionality! Victim olympics means endless tearing down of other people
The Worst of Twitter - Posts - "nikkie tutorials was just forced to come out as trans due to blackmail... cis people are literally weaponizing our transitions against us in 2020 and y'all still have the audacity to scroll past our gofundme's??"
"We can all raise each other up WITHOUT putting each other down. I support your overall message but not the way it’s been said"
"tone police me harder it makes my cunt wet"
"just a thought: perhaps u should not be rude as absolute fuck to the people u are BEGGING for money from *clown* *clown* *clown*"
"who's begging? im just acknowledging ur societal obligation to give me money :)"
The Worst of Twitter - Posts - "There’s a certain level of intellect required to enjoy certain things. You can’t breakdown Beethoven’s symphonic algorithm to someone that ONLY listens to trap and expect them to catch the vibe. Same with movies and shows.. everything isn’t meant to be enjoyed by all."
"Hi! Musicologist here. Praising Beethoven and denouncing trap is super gross and reinscribes white supremacist power structures! It's not "intellect" but rather "commitment to elite white art" that is required to make this claim! Thanks have a good day"
Does this count as whitesplaining and silencing minorities?
Johanna Katrin Fridriksdottir On Viking Women | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘We have the famous burial, from Birka of a woman who has been described as a warrior recently, which got a lot of media attention’...
‘If we try to just boil it down, there's that famous Birka grave that you mentioned where a woman or a skeleton that has been analyzed. And the DNA says that this is a biological woman. And then this person is buried with all kinds of weapons and tools that are gendered as both male and warrior. And then the location of the grave is also, you know, close to the kind of garrison embidika [sp?]. And so the kind of classic interpretation of the grave before the DNA was analyzed was that this was a high status warrior. But what, what turns out is interesting, that the bones don't actually have any sort of, you know, wounds and they're not like dents in the way that suggests that the person might have trained a lot. So it kind of prompts a lot of questions about, you know, what is the warrior? Any grave with with lots of weapons, does that just equal a warrior or does the skeleton kind of need to have signs of having fought because we also find graves where little boys have been buried, you know, in the whole kit for a warrior and like they obviously wouldn't have been using it at the time of death, but they, that was maybe the role that was intended for them. And then kind of thinking about the realities of being a warrior. You know, you're in this kind of masculine war band and then there's maybe a woman. I mean, there’s, when you don't have any contraception for example, in a modern way I mean, is that realistic to think that you would have been able to, to exist in this sort of space and have this sort of lifestyle if you're a woman. So, so in these, so in the sagas you have these examples of these women, for example, in Hathawaga’s [s[?] saga, she is an only child and she decides that she wants to be a Viking. And so she goes and becomes a Viking and asks her mother to outfit her as you would a son. And then what's really interesting is that the saga narrator switches the pronouns from she to he. And this character adopts a male name, Hermanwish [sp?]. And so you sort of wonder whether this is some kind of way for the narrator to talk about a person who we would describe as trans. And you sort of wonder whether this grave for example, the bidco grave, whether that might have been if it was a warrior indeed. Whether that would have been someone who would have identified as a woman or identified as a man. And so there's just so many complicated aspects to this story. And I think what's maybe interesting from my point of view, you know, having a general interest in in the Viking Age is that, for example, I found the sales so interesting and like, why, why is there so much focus on one grave? I don't know what you would say. But, is, you know, is that some kind of the intense focus on one grave? Like, doesn't that just say that we are so interested in whether women can do all the same things that men can do and does it also maybe prompt questions about you know, why do we think that warriors are so amazing and violence is something that is powerful and to be maybe not admired but sort of understood as as having agency and there's just so many different images of these women, viking women having agency in all kinds of ways. Political and economic and taking land and traveling and so on. And so why, why are we focusing so much on warriors when, you know, if if it was a reality, it probably was a very small section of society. And why isn't it cool to be you know, an entrepreneur who makes sails and makes lots of money that way and gain status. So, yeah, I think there's a lot of things to kind of think about when we think about shieldmaidens but certainly, in the sagas, I mean shieldmaidens only exist in these kind of more fantastical spaces. And when you get into the more realistic sagas, you know, there's not not really a shieldmaiden among the Viking armies’"
Hadley Freeman On A 20th-Century Family History | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘I spoke to people from the Holocaust educational trust afterwards. And they said how much it's changed in Poland, just in the past five years. If you went five years ago, you would get a fairly straightforward narrative of what happened. You go now, and the focus is really on Polish suffering. And probably the most amazing bit is when you leave Auschwitz, there is a gift shop in the carpark with all this I heart Poland stuff. And I wrote about it in the newspaper after I went in, you know, 2018 or whenever it was, and I got these angry tweets from Auschwitz on Twitter about it saying it's not our gift shop it, it's the local municipality. And I thought, oh my god, there's something quite funny about being told off by Auschwitz Twitter. It's like, it's this in itself is a Jewish joke, as though the gift shop wasn’t a Jewish joke, being shouted at by Auschwitz on Twitter. But the fact that it's the local municipality’s gift shop just makes it even worse. I mean, this is the local government saying, you know what makes you want to buy an I heart Poland mug? Going to Auschwitz. So it's it's very strange how that narrative works. And there's a really interesting contrast with France. You know, France is really coming to terms with its culpability after having denied it for so long. But then under President Chirac in the 90s, it started to admit how bad it was basically, and how much it collaborated. And now there are sort of monuments around the various concentration camps that were in France, whereas in Poland, there's a real aversion to admitting its culpability... He was arrested one night at a nightclub after he made a bit of a scene, the orchestra in the nightclub started playing German music. And in a scene straight out of Casablanca, Alex stood up and said, you should play the Marseillaise. And the Germans came and arrested him, put them on the train... He was then rescued by railway workers who were communists who hid him in a pile of manure when the Nazis came looking for him because they knew the Nazis were too vain about their uniforms to go to manure...
We think of Vichy as just basically analogous to the Nazis. And some of them were, definitely. But actually there were a lot of people in Vichy, who are just real old school, French Catholics. And yes, they didn't like the Jews. But it’s because they wanted to protect the sanctity of French culture. So it wasn't that they wanted France to be German, like on no level. So if there were Jews around who had fought for France as Alex had done, they were happy to protect them. And I think that's a really interesting dynamic in the Vichy Nazi Alliance. And it worked against a lot of these old Vichy people in the end"
BBC Radio Ulster - Everyday Ethics, World Population - "‘Well, there's no doubt that the population growth rates can exacerbate a number of different problems including the environmental crisis. At the same time, though, they are highly convenient to people who don't want to address other aspects of crisis. And I believe they've been greatly over emphasized by certain people, particularly by post reproductive wealthy people, for a couple of reasons. First off, they are about the only issue for which most post reproductive wealthy people cannot be blamed when it comes to environmental crises. Secondly, there's almost nothing substantial that we can do about it. And so they present no moral challenge to us. We can carry on flying, carry on driving our big cars, carry on eating rare fish, carry on tucking into steak while saying: oh, nothing to do with me, guv. The problem’s caused by those people over there, generally much poorer people in other countries. And so we absolve ourselves of moral challenge by pointing to an issue we can't actually do anything about.’"
Too bad he goes on about riding a bicycle and not eating meat, ignoring the fact that if someone never exists, his carbon footprint is 0
