No unaccompanied women allowed

Petty tyranny in Saudi Arabia. I could also label it everyday misogyny in Saudi Arabia, or minor oppression in Saudi Arabia.

Restaurants in Saudi Arabia have been asked to remove signs which forbid entry to single women, it appears.

The request comes from the kingdom’s National Society For Human Rights, which says the signs on the doors of eateries are “illegal”, the Arabic-language Al-Hayat newspaper reports. A restaurant owner says he put up the signs because of “numerous incidents” of flirting. “We’ll only remove these signs when we make sure such incidents never happen again on our premises,” he told the paper.

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Sommers says feminism=creationism

Sommers is still being a hack.

Christina H. Sommers @CHSommers ·  8 hours ago
Dear liberals, When you side with today’s 3rd wave intersectional feminism, you are siding with the intellectual equivalent of creationism.

Don’t forget, she used to be an academic. There are standards in academia. Academics aren’t supposed to say flagrantly untrue things like that.

And she retweeted this piece of shit –

brat

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Guest post: Meta³ lesson on the history of slavery

Originally a comment by jesse on Guest post: A meta-history lesson on states’ rights.

One of the things about Brazil (and Jamaica for that matter) was that by the time Brazil abolished slavery slaves just weren’t that important to the economy any more, which was smaller than that of the US (in fact it was smaller than that of the American South, I think) in any case. In Jamaica, the slave system was much less entrenched and on it way out by the time they were emancipated in the 1830s (this had less to do with principled British planters and more to do with changes in the sugar market). In Brazil, ironically enough, mismanagement of the local economy by dependence on slave labor and lack of investment in roads and such meant that the whole economy was relatively unconnected to the rest of the world compared to the US. So the market forces that made slavery such a good deal weren’t there as much. Add in the British pressure on the slave trade, and by the 1880s you didn’t have a viable institution anymore unless they did what we did here in the US. In Brazil that wasn’t an option. [Read more…]

To question America’s credentials as a human rights champion

The BBC reports on the global media response to the Ferguson protests and their cause.

There has been enormous headline reaction in the world’s media to the Ferguson protests, and many commentators have taken the opportunity to question America’s credentials as a human rights champion.

European papers highlight inequalities in American society, and a South African commentator sees echoes of his country’s own grim racial history.

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No polio vaccination for you and you and you

News from Baluchistan Province – yet again men with guns have murdered polio workers in a region where polio is endemic.

Pakistan is one of three countries in the world, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, where polio remains endemic. But even as Nigeria has managed to halt any rise in new cases, the virus has spread at alarming rates in Pakistan, with 260 new cases reported so far this year, compared with 64 at the same point in 2013, according to Global Polio Eradication Initiative statistics.

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