I saw this horror via Tehmina Kazi on Facebook. A faceless “Deeni doll” is now on the shelves.
A new faceless doll, produced in accordance with Islamic law, has been launched in Britain.
The ‘Deeni Doll’, which is adorned with a traditional hijab headdress, has no nose, mouth, or eyes, in order to comply with Islamic rulings regarding the depictions of facial features.
A doll with no face – it’s hard to imagine anything more creepy. The picture is certainly a nightmare.
Zachary Goldfarb at the Washington Post reports on how the insiders told Warren to act like an insider. She had dinner with Larry Summers back in 2009, when she was the chair of that panel panel investigating the government’s response to the financial trainwreck.
Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. … He teed it up this way: I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule. They don’t criticize other insiders. [Read more…]
Another poke in the eye for those wicked people who can’t manage to bend the knee to a god.
Thousands of couples planning non-religious humanist weddings could have their hopes dashed after a row between the Tories and Liberal Democrats saw Number 10 veto proposals to give such marriages legal status.
The Lib Dems want people who are agnostic, atheist or simply do not want a religious ceremony to be able to have a secular wedding, outside of a register office. Couples could tailor their own ceremonies, and select venues that are not licensed for civil weddings.
Right now at a cafe in Sydney.
The story says the people in the window are staff. Not even privileged rich coffee-sippers, but young people who staff the cafe.*
Picture: Courtesy of Channel 7. Source: Supplied [Read more…]
God Dick Cheney is an embarrassment. He was on tv this morning saying how fabulous torture is and how he regrets nothing.
The former vice president showed little remorse for the dozens of prisoners who were found to have been wrongfully detained, for the man who died in the program, or for people like Khaled El-Masri — a German citizen who was shipped off to Afghanistan and sodomized in a case of mistaken identity.
“I’d do it again in a minute,” said Cheney. [Read more…]
Here’s an interesting issue.
From the context where I found it, I gather it’s one of those right-wing moral panics about creeping PC run amok creepingly amidst us, but setting that aside, it’s still an interesting issue. The issue is something like: can an exam question about a very fraught current event or series of events be so emotionally loaded that it either shouldn’t be on the exam or should have a trigger warning?
Eugene Volokh writes it up for the Washington Post.
Several readers have asked me about the controversy at UCLA Law School related to this exam question in a First Amendment Law class: [Read more…]
I’ve been remembering the tinctures – the tiny little tinctures that Prince Charles used to sell for £10 the 50 ml bottle. He doesn’t sell them any more because the regulators told him to stop pretending they had medicinal value.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld a complaint over the online advertising, for a range of organic products, including Duchy Herbals Echina-Relief Tincture and Duchy Herbals Hyperi-Lift Tincture saying the product had no “scientifically proven benefits for treating colds and low moods”. [Read more…]
In the CBC’s Fifth Estate show on Jian Ghomeshi, there was discussion of the fact that he once told a producer at a meeting who had just yawned that he would like to hate-fuck her to wake her up. (No doubt it stuck in my mind because the US is too puritanical to allow the word “fuck” on broadcast tv.) A few days later the producer wrote about her history with Ghomeshi at the Guardian. It’s an ugly story. Familiar, and ugly.
I used to work as a radio producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. A few months into my job in 2007, I let out a big yawn at a staff meeting and my host told me “I want to hate fuck you, to wake you up.” I was 27 years old. I made sure never to yawn in front of him again.
There was groping. There was leering while shirt-unbuttoning. There was gaslighting, there were psychological games that undermined her. [Read more…]
Mukhtar Mai is strong and active these days, which is good to learn. If you’ve been reading B&W for a long time you may remember a lot of posts about her gang rape, ordered by the village elders as punishment for something her younger brother was alleged to have done (he hadn’t).
KARACHI: Mukhtar Mai put up a smiling face throughout the evening – a smile that symbolised courage, defiance and resilience, even when others spoke about how difficult life is for rape survivors.
On Thursday, she was called to address a seminar, titled ‘Rape and Sexual Violence: Legal Reforms,’ organised by War Against Rape (WAR) to celebrate 25 years of its existence.
You couldn’t make it up. Update: you could make it up, and someone did. I bit! /end of update.
You know how Alanah Pearce has been getting harassment, and how she’s been reporting some of the harassers to their mothers?
Now some of the reported ones are suing her for doing that. For some reason the judge has apparently failed to throw the case out. [Read more…]
