All The Witch Hunts…

It’s seems that whole clumps of bitter techbros are fleeing to the MGTOW life (that’s Men Going Their Own Way, if you didn’t know), and advocating a life of male separatism. Just a thought, but if you avoid women at all costs, it might not be a surprise that your viewpoints are more suited to a cave than a nice high tech office somewhere. Naturally, this is an evil witch hunt, with the intent to subjugate men (and make them do what? Scrub out the toilet?) and other nefarious things. As always, the irony of men screeching “witch hunt!” escapes them entirely.

One of those who said there had been a change is James Altizer, an engineer at the chip maker Nvidia. Mr. Altizer, 52, said he had realized a few years ago that feminists in Silicon Valley had formed a cabal whose goal was to subjugate men. At the time, he said, he was one of the few with that view.
Continue reading the main story

Now Mr. Altizer said he was less alone. “There’s quite a few people going through that in Silicon Valley right now,” he said. “It’s exploding. It’s mostly young men, younger than me.”

Mr. Altizer said that a gathering he hosts in person and online to discuss men’s issues had grown by a few dozen members this year to more than 200, that the private Facebook pages he frequents on men’s rights were gaining new members and that a radical subculture calling for total male separatism was emerging.

“It’s a witch hunt,” he said in a phone interview, contending men are being fired by “dangerous” human resources departments. “I’m sitting in a soundproof booth right now because I’m afraid someone will hear me. When you’re discussing gender issues, it’s almost religious, the response. It’s almost zealotry.”

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Altizer, when you decide to pontificate about how women should not be in a workplace, and they should be quiet about slaps on the ass, if they don’t want to deal, they should stay home and do what they were ‘made’ for and all that, it will elicit a response. Women have been responding to misogynistic attitudes for thousands of years now. If we, from time to time, snap or yell, well, I’m sure you’ll understand the frustration of having one generation after another having to repeat themselves.

I do love the touch of the soundproof booth, though. For unknown reasons, the NYT has decided to give these sad separatists a full work up, because life is so gosh darn hard for men, especially those of the white variety. I’ll wish them fun in their cones of silence, and continue to pay attention to those men who have happily figured out that yes, women are human beings too.

Full story here.

The Christian Extremists Behind Roy Moore.

Right Wing Watch has a comprehensive rundown of all those backing Roy Moore. In case you don’t remember Moore, here are two posts from last year, when Moore made a mess of his career at the time: one, two. Now that Moore is running for a senate seat, the religious reich is fervently backing him.

…Some better-known Religious Right groups, including the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council, have recently gone all-in for Moore. He has also been getting serious financial support in the form of outside spending from groups like Ken Cuccinelli’s Senate Conservatives Fund and from Alabama activist Stan Pate, who has been funding ads attacking Strange.

And Moore has also quietly been getting support from some of his most extreme allies, who see him as a chance to give their Christian nationalists views the biggest megaphone yet:

Michael Peroutka is a local Republican politician in Maryland who has used wealth from a set of debt-collection businesses to bankroll Christian nationalist causes across the country, most notably by funding the career of Moore. Peroutka has funded Moore’s Christian nationalist ventures and political campaigns for decades; he gave Moore’s Senate campaign $2,500 in June and his wife Natalie gave the same amount in early August, each nearly maxing out on their individual contribution limit for the initial Republican primary.

Peroutka is a former member of the neo-Confederate League of the South—he quit when the association started to cause him trouble in his campaign for office. As recently as 2012, he was on video leading a League of the South gathering in a round of “Dixie,” which he calls the “national anthem”; in a 2004 speech to the group, he said he was “still angry” that Maryland didn’t join the Confederacy and said that his daughter had the nickname “Beth Booth,” as in “John Wilkes Booth.”

Peroutka, who runs a group called the Institute on the Constitution, advocates an extreme form of Christian nationalism, saying for instance that the Maryland legislature had ceased to be a legitimate governing body when it violated “God’s law” by passing a marriage equality bill. Last year, he presented on his theocratic view of the law to Operation Save America, an extreme anti-choice group that is trying to get government officials to defy laws on abortion rights and ultimately charge women who have abortions with homicide. (OSA has its own relationship with Moore, which we discuss below.) Along with his longtime support for Moore, Peroutka has helped to fund the campaigns of Tom Parker, Moore’s protégé on the Alabama Supreme Court, who has been trying to establish a legal framework for extreme anti-choice “personhood” laws.

Rusty Thomas, the head of the extreme anti-choice group Operation Save America, contributedjust over $200 to Moore’s campaign in three separate contributions in July and August. Although Thomas’ financial contribution is relatively small, he has been a stalwart ally to Moore throughout his tribulations on the Alabama Supreme Court.

In the summer of 2015, as Moore attempted to fight the Supreme Court’s landmark marriage equality decision, he accepted an award from OSA at the group’s gathering in Montgomery, telling them that “America is under attack” as it moves away from God and adding, “I’m sorry but this country was not founded on Muhammad. It was not founded on Buddha. It was not founded on secular humanism. It was founded on God.”

Moore responded to criticism of his association with OSA by saying: “You know, some told me ‘you know they’re a radical group.’ I said yeah. They are radical for God.”

Like Peroutka, Thomas and OSA promote the theocratic worldview that laws that they perceive to be ungodly are null and void. OSA’s main text for this belief is a book called “The Doctrine of Lesser Magistrates” by OSA activist Matt Trewhella, one of the anti-choice radicals who signed a statement in the 1990s declaring the murder of abortion providers to be justifiable homicide; in presenting the award to Moore in 2015, Thomas prayed that God would use him to “set an example for lesser magistrates throughout the United States of America that it’s time to say no to the federal beast!”

That’s just a little bit. There’s video, many links, and background on these supporters, including Anita and Mat Staver, Steve Hotze, Ken Eldred, and Eugene Delgaudio at RWW. I think a bit of fear is setting into the religious reich at this point, about how long they may have their stooge in office. Their efforts are seriously ramping up when it comes to getting as many religious reich fanatics as possible into government positions.

Sunday Facepalm.

Oh Kevin Swanson, the religious extremist’s extremist. He’s at it again, pouring down Jehovah’s wrath in the form of hurricanes, natch. Mr. Swanson has a solution to Hurricane Irma eating Florida, though!

Kevin Swanson declared on his radio program today that the Supreme Court should immediately reverse its Roe v. Wade and Obergefell decisions before God unleashes his judgment on America in the form of Hurricane Irma.

Swanson, who just last week said that Hurricane Harvey was the judgment of God on Houston, said that these “God-ordained disasters” are a warning to this nation to repent for its myriad of sins.

Now, Swanson said this on the 7th this month, and I have to say, it would be a fun experiment, if you could get the Supreme Court to say, okay, the law is suspended until such and such a date, and see if it would magically wither Irma. We all know it wouldn’t have the slightest effect, and the religious reich would claim that Jehovah got all sniffy ’cause it wasn’t a permanent reversal. Of course, it doesn’t take much to make Jehovah all sniffy and pissy.

“God is in control of what is going on,” he said, “and whether or not Irma is going to do $200 billion worth of damage in Miami … is all in the hands of God. Those winds are going to blow where they are going to blow, but they’re going to blow in the direction that God ordains them to go. Friends, God is in complete control and utter control of what is going on with these hurricanes.”

Well, the wind is gonna go where it goes, but Jehovah is in control, you betcha! So, that’s why Mar-a-Lago and other overblown McMansions of conservative assholes are right in the path, and that’s why we’re all getting taxed for the federal coverage of Pres. Pinchpork’s palace. So, one could go with the assumption that Jehovah isn’t upset about gay people, but conservative assholes. Unfortunately, Jehovah’s aim has always been notoriously bad, so a lot of good people are gonna get screwed over here, but Jehovah has never been one to care about ‘collateral damage’.

“The wrath of God against this nation is intense,” Swanson continued. “I wish that American leaders would sit up and pay attention … The Supreme Court of the United States needs to reverse Roe v. Wade and Obergefell now, this afternoon, before Irma does her damage. It would be a good thing if the Supreme Court of the United States understood that God is in control of these things and God is a personality and God is offended by the sins of this nation.”

Oooh, Jehovah is a personality. A psychopathic one. Yeah, I’m not shaking in my boots over your non-existent psychopath, Mr. Swanson. Climate change, on the other hand, there’s reason to be scared shitless.

Via RWW.

No Miss Piggies! Unattractive!

Let’s take a look at Mr. No Unattractive Fatties:

Via Twitter.

We should all know that looks aren’t all that, and most people aren’t obscenely rich and have the option to completely remold their faces and figures, and to attempt to offput aging through various methods, some very questionable, like that of vampire wannabe Thiel. Apparently, President Pinchpork seems to think he’s devastatingly attractive as he is. Whether or not a person is intellectually engaging, has a sense a humour, is kind, and so on, those things matter. Looks? Not so much. Not that eye candy isn’t nice, what’s not to enjoy? There are plenty of people who make a living being eye candy, for everyone’s enjoyment. If that’s not your job though, then looks should not have jack shit to do with anything, while your actual abilities to do your job competently, that should matter.

RANCHO PALOS VERDES (CBSLA.com) — Trump’s exclusive Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles perched in picturesque Rancho Palos Verdes is now at the center of bias accusations. In legal documents first published by the LA Times, former staffers here unleashed a slew of ugly allegations against Trump in a lawsuit that has since been settled.

Among the accusations: Trump fat shamed employees at the golf club’s restaurant and demanded they be given the boot because of their weight.

A former catering director said this about the billionaire real estate mogul:

“I had witnessed Donald Trump tell managers many times while he was visiting the club that restaurant hostesses were not ‘pretty enough’ and that they should be fired and be replaced with more attractive women.’

Another staffer also said she was told to fire someone because they were too heavy:

“Mr. Stellio told me that I should do this because Mr. Trump doesn’t like fat people and that he would not like seeing (her) when he was on the premises.”

Staffers also reported fearing Trump’s wrath, so they replaced middle-aged hostesses at the restaurant with younger, more attractive women when Trump was visiting.

I wonder, given President Pinchpork’s hatred of fat, what the hell he sees when he looks in the mirror.

Trump’s organization called the claims totally bogus in the following statement:

“The allegations in the lawsuit were meritless. We do not engage in discrimination of any kind. The statements made by a group of former disgruntled employees are far from an accurate portrayal of what it is like to work at Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles.”

Let’s go back to the recent past for a moment:

Alicia Machado, who won the Miss Universe pageant in 1996, was photographed in May of this year in Los Angeles. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times.

Alicia Machado, who won the Miss Universe pageant in 1996, was photographed in May of this year in Los Angeles. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times.

This is the woman Trump called “Miss Piggy” “Miss Housekeeping” and “Miss Eating Machine”.  Wanting women to be walking skeletons is in no way reasonable, especially when those making such demands tend to be more than a bit well padded. It’s not as though President Pinchpork is demanding all the men who work for him be model level attractive and to be of sufficient thinness. So as far as the statement goes, I’ll issue an unequivocal bullshit. Pinchpork is a walking, talking horror show when it comes to womens’ bodies and clothing choices, and it’s not as though girls don’t have enough shit hurled at them from day one on that level. Men don’t need this sort of crap either, nor do they need anyone encouraging them to be judgmental assholes of shallowness. All my hopes to those suing.

Full story here.

Fetuses for Ba’al!

The stele of Baal with Thunderbolt found in the ruins of Ugarit.

Mark “can’t be too lurid” Taylor, self-styled prophet, is at it again. How does this man manage to do anything like eat? He never shuts up. This time, it’s Baal (Ba’al). Well, Ba’al and people who believe in bodily autonomy and reproductive choice. On to the lurid idiocy!

After repeating his prophecy that God is going to supernaturally remove five Supreme Court justices so that President Trump can replace them and overturn Roe v. Wade, Taylor warned viewers not to be fooled by those who claim they support a woman’s right to choose.

“People have to realize the strongman over America is Baal,” he said. “Baal is a very violent entity, he is the second in Satan’s triune, he is the second in command, he is the counterfeit Christ. It feeds off the blood of the innocent, which is the aborted babies. This is why Baal is the strongman, because the aborted babies are the food source that is empowering Baal.”

Sigh. What a fucktonne of nonsense. In the first place, Ba’al is a placeholder, much like god, in this case, meaning Lord. The actual god was Hadad, a storm and weather god. Things changed over the years, and Ba’al became the name rather than the epithet. Ba’al is mentioned in the bible, more than once, as a rival god to young Yahweh/Jehovah. Ba’al’s worshipers got right up Jehovah’s nose, and he called for them all to be slaughtered, more than once. Ba’al never had anything to do with Lucifer, or his triune, whatever that might comprise. Lucifer wasn’t the convenient fall guy of Ba’al. Different gods, Mr. Taylor. Try reading something, like, oh, the bible. Now, Ba’al is a fertility god, with a particular enmity toward snakes, so I think if he was going to feast on blood, it would most likely be snakes or the local river god. Ba’al was also the patron of sailors and sea going merchants. Not such a bad god. He certainly didn’t hate his worshipers and everyone else like Jehovah. Oh yes, Ba’al’s conflict with Yammu is now generally regarded as the prototype of the vision recorded in the 7th chapter of the Biblical Book of Daniel. Yet another god the bible writers happily thieved.

I’m pretty sure that medical waste incinerators are not made in the form of Ba’al, with all medical personnel and people who are pro-choice suddenly Ba’al worshipers.

Taylor said that “if you’re listening to these politicians and they’re telling you, ‘Oh, we’re pro-choice, it’s all about a woman’s right to choose, it’s all about women’s health,’ you’re being duped, you’re being lied to.”

“They don’t care anything about you,” he said. “All they want from you, as a woman, is to be a breeder for that food source, for you to abort that baby to feed their god called Baal. They don’t care anything about your right to choose, they don’t care anything about your health, all they want is that baby aborted as a sacrifice because every time you abort a baby, it’s a sacrifice to their god called Baal.”

Oh. Apparently, Mr. Taylor does think we’re all worshipers of Ba’al. Well, there are worse gods, to be sure. Topping the list would be that psychopathic monster Mr. Taylor worships, who has a most serious problem with women, along with his followers. Terminating a pregnancy is about not breeding, Mr. Taylor. You want women to be forced to breed and birth, with nary a thought for any woman’s health or welfare, and we all know you couldn’t give a shit about the children, either.

Via RWW.

The Book Women.

A group of “book women” on horseback in Hindman, Kentucky, 1940. Kentucky Library and Archives.

They were known as the “book women.” They would saddle up, usually at dawn, to pick their way along snowy hillsides and through muddy creeks with a simple goal: to deliver reading material to Kentucky’s isolated mountain communities.

The Pack Horse Library initiative was part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), created to help lift America out of the Great Depression, during which, by 1933, unemployment had risen to 40 percent in Appalachia. Roving horseback libraries weren’t entirely new to Kentucky, but this initiative was an opportunity to boost both employment and literacy at the same time.

“Sometimes the short way across is the hard way for the horse and rider but schedules have to be maintained if readers are not to be disappointed. Then, too, after highways are left, there is little choice of roads,” c. 1940. Kentucky Libraries and Archives.

Another fascinating article at Atlas Obscura, with absolutely splendid photos! Click on over and see.

The Violet Sister.

Louise Michel pictured at home in her later years, around the time she is presumed to have penned the piece translated below — Source.

A husky voice barked: “Entrez!”

Through a long, dim hallway, I followed the voice, until I reached a spare, curtained room. One empty chair stood near the entrance. Another, across the darkened space, was occupied by a slender, shadowed figure with erect posture, white hair long and flowing as in the fashion of the 1840s, in an elegant black suit, immaculate linens, a neckcloth of Persian design. A bright gaze set into a finely featured face pierced the gloom.

“Sit”, the figure commanded. As if under the influence of a powerful magnetizer, I sat without pause.

My host spoke sharply, gruffly. “Welcome, Mademoiselle. You have come to meet me, no? You wish to learn of my ideas, my thoughts. But should you not first know to whom you speak?” I nodded.

The figure straightened. “You wrote to Octave Obdurant. This is the name with which the person before you entered the Ecole Polytechnique. It is the name on my entrance papers to the Ecole de Ponts et Chaussées. It is the name with which I signed my first articles in geometry, my first statistical tables, as well as Free the Earth, which you were kind enough to notice.”

The voice was clear and occasionally guttural; there was a warmth beneath its unyielding syllables.

“But as you have certainly realized, this is not my true name.”

I felt my mind begin to spin. I was unsure of where I was, what I was doing here, in these isolated rooms. I stammered out:

“Excuse me, Monsieur. What, then, is your name?”

“I was baptized Tranchot.” Despite the pause which followed, the name meant nothing to me until it was repeated, with its prenames before it.

“Marie Violette Tranchot.”

I was moved by an emotion of shock and recognition at once. Some part of me had already realized that I was not in the presence of a great man, but rather a great woman — no wizened brother of the struggle, but a sister. Instantly, I felt myself uncannily at home, safe at last in a place I’d never been — truly at home, perhaps, for the first time in my life. This hero, epitome of the courage and intelligence the world saw as masculine, was a woman like myself.

Fascinating reading, from Louise Michel, in Le Libertaire, iii, 1895. She writes about the Scoundrel Laws, and the paucity of an overly-praised history, and her meeting with Octave Obdurant.

You can read the whole thing at The Public Domain. Highly recommended.

The Prophetic Order of the United States.

Right Wing Watch has an in-depth breakdown of the Religious Reich which now has a great deal of control over uStates government. It’s in sections:

  1. Introduction
  2. Who Are These People?
  3. Trump and the Prophets: Made For The Era of Social Media?
  4. Overlapping Networks
  5. God’s Own Party?
  6. POTUS Trump and the Prophetic Order of the United States

I’m just going to have a few bits here…

Brody and Lamb’s book, “The Faith of Donald J. Trump: A Spiritual Biography” is scheduled for publication in January 2018, but it won’t be the first. It will face competition from “God and Trump” by Stephen Strang, who heads the Pentecostal media empire Charisma. During the campaign, Strang gave a media megaphone to Trump-boosting prophets like Wallnau. Strang’s book, which promises to explore “what is God doing, now not only in Donald Trump’s life, but also in the life of the nation,” is scheduled for release in November.

Meanwhile, POTUS Shield leaders continue to personally assure Trump that God Himself put Trump in power, something Amedia told attendees at the March POTUS Shield gathering that Trump understands:

I said to the man’s own face, ‘If you didn’t see God got you elected, with all the mistakes you made, and how you should have lost this election 50 times, then you will never see God.’ And he said, ‘I know it was God.’

[…]

For many Religious Right leaders, support for Trump is transactional: Trump promised them the Supreme Court, attacks on legal abortion and Planned Parenthood, and legal changes to make conservative Christians more politically powerful. But POTUS Shield members believe that something even greater than the Supreme Court is at stake: the future of the church and the reign of God on earth. They give Trump assurance that he’s on a divine path, and they give their followers a sense of playing an important role on the world stage, warring with the devil to take political and culture power away from liberals and secularists and establish the kingdom of God in the United States and around the world.

If you’re inclined to laugh, or shrug, don’t. Instead, think. This is terror. This is terrorism. This is a regime of sweeping oppression waiting in the wings, trying to take the main stage. This has been at work for many a year now, and this is the one and only chance they have, and they know it. I see in my own referrers here, how many people search for things like “Trump tackles elite satanic pedophiles” and the “prophecies” of this, that, and the other self-styled prophets. The Religious Reich has the perfect puppet, and Donny does not dare dismiss them, or spurn their desires, they are about the only thing keeping his arse firmly in the white house.

If there should be a face to atheism, to humanism, to the benefits of a secular society, it should be centered here, in direct and open opposition to these people who, in their pettiness and need to subjugate others, are climbing to ultimate power.

You can read the whole thing at Right Wing Watch, recommended.

The Pinnacle of the Human Experience.

Dave Daubenmire has a recent column up, where he tries for “hey, look, I’m a reasonable guy” instead of his usual rant at the top of his voice idiocy. There’s still plenty of idiocy, interspersed in between attempts to establish his credibility as a feminist, but only a proper one, y’know. I’m going to skip all that, and the bit where he finds it necessary to try and illustrate empathy by how he treats his aging dog. This is important, because while Dave has never been a dog, he can feel for one. Just like Dave has never been a woman (something he takes great pains to emphasise), he can certainly feel for them. By golly, Dave is even married to a woman! And it is pointed out, more than once, that his wife is a genuine, born that way woman. Now, with all that out of the way…

[Read more…]

Collocation and Pejoration.

‘I am a gentil womman and no wenche’: from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, c1386. Photograph: Alamy.

Linguists call it collocation: the likelihood of two words occurring together. If I say “pop”, your mental rolodex will begin whirring away, coming up with candidates for what might follow. “Music”, “song” or “star”, are highly likely. “Sensation” or “diva” a little less so. “Snorkel” very unlikely indeed.

What do you think of when I say the word “rabid”? One option, according to the dictionary publisher Oxford Dictionaries, is “feminist”. The publisher has been criticised for a sexist bias in its illustrations of how certain words are used. “Nagging” is followed by “wife”. “Grating” and “shrill” appear in sentences describing women’s voices, not men’s.

[…]

Perhaps “rabid” is collocated with “feminist” more often than with those other words (if the data the OUP uses includes online discussions, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case). Sexist assumptions find their way into speech and writing for the simple reason that society is still sexist.

Language, as the medium through which we conduct almost all relationships, public and private, bears the precise imprint of our cultural attitudes. The history of language, then, is like a fossil record of how those attitudes have evolved, or how stubbornly they have stayed the same.

When it comes to women, the message is a depressing one. The denigration of half of the population has embedded itself in the language in ways you may not even be aware of. Often this takes the form of “pejoration”: when the meaning of the word “gets worse” over time. Linguists have long observed that words referring to women undergo this process more often than those referring to men. Here are eight examples:

Those examples are Mistress, Hussy, Madam, Governess, Spinster, Courtesan, Wench, and Tart. I’ll just include Hussy here:

Hussy.

This once neutral term meant the female head of a household. Hussy is a contraction of 13th-century husewif – a word cognate with modern “housewife”. From the 17th century onwards, however, it began to mean “a disreputable woman of improper behaviour”. That’s now its only meaning.

My whole lifetime, hussy has carried a negative meaning only. I had no idea it actually meant head of a household, much like my surprise over the primary definition of paraphernalia.  Click on over for the full article and to see the rest of the words, and how they have changed over the years! (I got to this article from another interesting one, on how American is taking over English all over the world. I get teased a lot for using English spelling rather than American, but that was how I was taught, and I’ll keep using it.)

Sunday Facepalm.

In the coming days, 100 US Senators will be delivered an important package. But this delivery won’t be a simple note from one of their constituents. Within days, every single US Senator will be delivered Baby Hope, a twelve-week old baby, with a personal message from her to defund Planned Parenthood and redirect tax payer dollars to community health centers.

[…]

Here is the letter to every US Senator from Baby Hope:

Dear Senator,
My name is Baby Hope. I’m only 12 weeks old, but I want to live. Sadly, there is a high likelihood I will be killed by Planned Parenthood before I ever get a chance to be born. Even worse, Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider that kills 900 preborn babies like me each day, would get paid by American taxpayers to kill me.

However, you can stop Planned Parenthood from killing me and many others. Here’s how: Vote for a health care bill that will not subsidize abortion and will redirect abortion giant Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding to community health centers.

For my sake and hundreds like me, I beg you to refuse to fund abortion and Planned Parenthood in the health care bill.

Please protect me.

Sincerely,

Baby Hope

Dear anti-autonomy asshole christians,

It would be ever so nice if you all would get one tiny fact into your malnourished, underused brains: no federal or taxpayer monies go towards terminations. Please repeat that to yourselves as many times as necessary for it to penetrate those pea brains. Federal monies go to womens’ health, as in breast exams and other cancer prevention, among other things.

As for Baby Hope, please shove her where the sun don’t shine. What women do in regard to their own bodies is none of your business, and trying to remove one of the only sources of healthcare for women is not helping them. Nor are your “community health centers” or your “women’s clinics”. Your personal hatred of women is your business, of course, however, your thirst to see it translated into an increasing amount of women dead, along with a higher number of children born into dire circumstance needs to stop. Learn to mind your own damn business, and try something different, like looking after children who are bereft of care. There are plenty of them. There are also many children in this country who go without adequate food every day. That situation could use more attention. Women do not need you fucking assholes constantly attempting to control every aspect of their lives. You could always turn to advocating for comprehensive sexual education, accessible, affordable birth control, and more education for girls. Those are all proven methods in reducing abortions.

As always, since you find women being allowed full human rights and control over their own bodies so terribly distressing, I give you my constant suggestion: leave it up to that piece of shit god of yours. You’re the ones who think he’s so great and mighty and all that. Seems to me you must be pretty damn sure there’s no such god at all, else you’d be happy to put it all in his hands, no?

Via ChristianNewsWire.

Bråvalla Canceled, No Men To Take Its Place.

The camping site of the Bråvalla festival. Photograph: Tt News Agency/Reuters.

A Swedish Music Festival is taking to heart the Michelle Obama mantra of “when they go low, we go high” with a gendered twist. A few days have passed since the organizers of Sweden’s four-day Bravalla festival announced their cancellation of next year’s event after news broke that four rapes and 23 reports of sexual assault happened at this year’s iteration of the fest. “Certain men … apparently cannot behave,” said organizers in a report. “It’s a shame.”

[…]

Rather than go without a music festival next year, Swedish radio host Emma Knyckare tweeted that she wanted to see “a really cool festival where only non-men are welcome” that would go “until ALL men have learned how to behave.” Now, she’s making that dream a reality. She has since written on Instagram that a “man-free” festival will take place next summer. “In the coming days I’ll bring together a solid group of talented organisers and project leaders to form the festival organisers,” she told BBC. “Then you’ll hear from everyone again when it’s time to move forward.”

The “man free” festival idea follows the Womyn’s Musical Festival that was regularly held in Michigan for nearly four decades. That festival was a haven for lesbians and queer women, but ultimately shuttered after protests against its trans-exclusive policy. The Swedish festival hasn’t announced specifics in regards to how transgender communities will integrate into the man ban, but we’d expect them to be a bit more flexible.

Well, here’s hoping that transphobia doesn’t dominate the man-free festival, and I hope it’s a success.

The Guardian has the story on Bråvalla, Out has the story on the replacement.