Maajid Nawaz points out a comrade in Pakistan. Newsweek Pakistan calls him an unlikely icon.
Mohammad Jibran Nasir, a 27-year-old serial do-gooder from Karachi, has become the inadvertent leader of Pakistan’s post-Peshawar anti-extremist discourse.
Hours after the Dec. 16 attack, Nasir joined a 200-strong vigil for the Peshawar slain in Islamabad. [Read more…]
A young mother was shot and killed by her 2-year-old son today in an Idaho Walmart, police said.
Lt. Stu Miller of the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office said that the boy was sitting in the shopping cart when pulled the handgun from his mom’s purse and pulled the trigger. The victim, whose name hasn’t been released, was 29 years old.
Walmart of course sells guns among other things. One-stop shopping – you can buy a gun there and get shot with it in one easy trip.
So, I’ve learned something. I’d never head of “vocal fry” until I read that Slate piece, so I had to look it up. Apparently it’s big among the Kardashians. (I wonder if it’s also big among Rachel Zoe [who – gasp – dresses Kardashians omg!!] too. She’s like a walking textbook of bizarre vocal affectations – I bet she does vocal fry all the time.)
I’d never heard of it, but I recognized it when I watched this. Oh that; right.
There’s a heated discussion of vaccinations on a Facebook thread of mine, on which Pedram made such informative comments in response to a claim that whooping cough was coming back because of “over use of vaccination” that I requested and got permission to quote them here. The rest is Pedram.
No, high vaccination rates in the population means that a pathogen cannot replicate as quickly–many fewer hosts will be available. Vaccination is just a way of inducing a regular adaptive immune response (the adaptive immune cells are exposed to antigens that mark the dead or inactivated pathogen used in the vaccine, without the danger of an infection). If this is done extensively enough, the pathogen can quickly be suppressed or even (mostly) eradicated. Preventing new infections is a very fast way of stopping a disease in a population. [Read more…]
Hmm. Is it sexist – or even misogynist – to advise women to talk with authority? Marybeth Seitz-Brown at Slate is more or less arguing that, and I don’t think I agree.
Last week, I gave an interview on NPR, and while most of the reactions were overwhelmingly positive, I also received several messages suggesting I change my voice so that people will take me seriously. Why? Well, I uptalk. But I’m not ashamed of it, and no one else should be either. [Read more…]
My new Freethinker column is posted. It’s stuff I’ve been saying here, but it’s chafing my mind rather, so I wanted to say it there too. It’s about police fascism in the US, and the way our mephitic heritage of genocide and slavery (notice how both are rooted in racism? funny coincidence, isn’t it?) has produced a stratified society which means police work can be a tough job. It’s a vicious circle, and to break out of that vicious circle we’d need to do things that are not part of the Church of the Free Market, so we don’t do them. We’d rather spend billions on locking people up than on ways out of the trap.
The one comment is from a UKanian talking about a one and only visit to the US.
Racism, in the affluent area I was living in, was blatant in the comments made. And I had the distressing experience of watching a Mexican, picked up in some queue, working furiously in hot sun in the garden while we enjoyed drinks. I caused surprise and resentment at deciding to take him a drink. My hosts wife said, “They are not like us. They don’t expect to have to be given a drink.” The worker seemed scared of me. I discovered he was an illegal immigrant. At the end of the day money was handed to the man who had brought him; not to the worker.
Alas, I recognize the picture.
So, working backward, let’s consider what Scott Aronson said.
First we need what Amy said, because he was responding to it.
As for the “shy and nerdy” bit…you know, some of the gropiest, most misogynistic guys I’ve met have been of the shy and nerdy persuasion. I can only speculate on why that’s so, but no, I would certainly not equate shy/nerdy with harmless. [Read more…]
How opportune: right after I post the latest, I see this:
Laurie Penny has some thoughts on nerd entitlement. She has them in response to an impassioned comment by Scott Aronson on his own blog about what it’s like to be a nerdy anxious teenage boy and why that makes it impossible for him to recognize any “privilege” attributed to him by feminists. Here’s some of what Penny has to say:
Women generally don’t get to think of men as less than human, not because we’re inherently better people, not because our magical feminine energy makes us more empathetic, but because patriarchy doesn’t let us. We’re really not allowed to just not consider men’s feelings, or to suppose for an instant that a man’s main or only relevance to us might be his prospects as a sexual partner. That’s just not the way this culture expects us to think about men. Men get to be whole people at all times. Women get to be objects, or symbols, or alluring aliens whose responses you have to game to “get” what you want. [Read more…]
Whooping cough may be evolving to resist vaccinations. That would be bad.
Analysis of strains from 2012 shows the parts of the pertussis bacterium that the vaccine primes the immune system to recognise are changing.
It may have “serious consequences” in future outbreaks, UK researchers state in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
But experts stressed the vaccine remains highly effective in protecting the most vulnerable young babies. [Read more…]