The double standards of prudish Slutwalkers | Abigail Ross-Jackson. On Saturday, 4,000 women (and some men) took to the streets of London in response to a Toronto police officer’s comment that women should ‘avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised’. The Slutwalk phenomenon has gained momentum around the world, with marches materialising in numerous countries. Yet this movement is underpinned by a deep contradiction: Slutwalkers invite the world to focus on what they are wearing, yet they simultaneously call for a world in which whatever women wear – no matter how provocative it is – it should never provoke a response.
Of course there is absolutely no justification for rape. Whether a woman is wearing jeans and a t-shirt or a corset and a miniskirt, her clothing should never be seen as an invitation to sexual assault. But to suggest that clothing is not an invitation to anything is bizarre. I wouldn’t want to live in a world defined by Slutwalkers, one in which women can wear whatever they want but men are not allowed to react. The Blog : Drugs and the Meaning of Life. (Photo by JB Banks) (Note 6/4/2014: I have revised this 2011 essay and added an audio version. —SH) Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. Drugs are another means toward this end.
One of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting and for what purpose and which are not. However, we should not be too quick to feel nostalgia for the counterculture of the 1960s. Drug abuse and addiction are real problems, of course, the remedy for which is education and medical treatment, not incarceration. I discuss issues of drug policy in some detail in my first book, The End of Faith, and my thinking on the subject has not changed. I have two daughters who will one day take drugs.
This is not to say that everyone should take psychedelics. (Pokhara, Nepal) Recommended Reading: Where Have All the Girls Gone? - By Mara Hvistendahl. How did more than 160 million women go missing from Asia? The simple answer is sex selection -- typically, an ultrasound scan followed by an abortion if the fetus turns out to be female -- but beyond that, the reasons for a gap half the size of the U.S. population are not widely understood. And when I started researching a book on the topic, I didn't understand them myself. I thought I would focus on how gender discrimination has persisted as countries develop. The reasons couples gave for wanting boys varies: Sons stayed in the family and took care of their parents in old age, or they performed ancestor and funeral rites important in some cultures.
Or it was that daughters were a burden, made expensive by skyrocketing dowries. But that didn't account for why sex selection was spreading across cultural and religious lines. Once found only in East and South Asia, imbalanced sex ratios at birth have recently reached countries as varied as Vietnam, Albania, and Azerbaijan. The U.S. How I Became the Subject of a Conspiracy Theory - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics. The paranoid style in American politics is alive and well, as I learned after writing about the new Sarah Palin movie Before I say something provocative about Sarah Palin, Andrew Breitbart, the mainstream media, and the culture wars, or revisit the short piece I wrote about "The Undefeated," I insist on airing a complaint. In four months as an associate editor at The Atlantic, I've argued the case that President Obama took us to war illegally in Libya, excoriated him for persecuting whistleblowers, insisted that he betrayed a central promise of his candidacy, and strenuously objected to his claim that he is empowered to assassinate American citizens without due process.
I've profiled Gary Johnson, formulated 11 questions all presidential candidates should be asked to test their civil liberties bonifides, urged the tea party movement to embrace Mitch Daniels, warned against the inexperience of Michele Bachmann, and even curated nearly 100 fantastic pieces of journalism! Why? His response? Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a fact - On Faith. “I believe Governor Romney is a good man. Loves his family, cares about his faith. But I also believe that when he said behind closed doors that 47 percent of the country considered themselves victims who refuse personal responsibility, think about who he was talking about.” During the second presidential debate, President Obama on Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment at a fundraiser earlier this year. Read more in the Faith 2012 Quote Archives. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney listens as President Obama answers a question during the second presidential debate in Hempstead, N.Y. on Oct. 16, 2012.
About Georgetown/ On Faith. 'Torrent of abuse' hindering ME research. Image copyright Other Scientists working on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), or ME, say they are being subjected to a campaign of vicious abuse and intimidation that is hampering research into the causes of the condition. The harassment has included death threats, vilification on internet websites, and a series of official complaints alleging both personal and professional misconduct to universities, ethical oversight committees and the General Medical Council (GMC).
"It's direct intimidation in the sense of letters, emails, occasional phone calls and threats," says Professor Simon Wessely, of King's College London, who has received a series of death threats and threatening phone calls, and now has his mail routinely scanned for suspect devices. "But more often indirect intimidation through my employer or the GMC. All of it intended to denigrate and try and make you into a leper. " "That's profoundly misguided. ON THE RIGHT TO SATIRISE, PROVOKE, AND BE DOWNRIGHT OFFENSIVE. The offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were this morning firebombed, just as it was about to publish its latest edition, a spoof issue ‘guest edited by Muhammed’, in response to the Islamist Ennahda party’s victory in the Tunisian elections. Caustic and vulgar (think of a cross between Private Eye and Viz), Charlie Hebdo prides itself on being an equal opportunities offender, as happy to draw the ire of Christians and Jews (and, indeed communists) as of Muslims.
The French press has, so far, been almost unanimously in support of the magazine. But already there have been rumblings elsewhere that Charlie Hebdo went too far, that this was the wrong time and the wrong issue upon whichto be so provocative. I am republishing here my original response to the Danish cartoons controversy. This essay was first published in Prospect almost six years ago. ‘I believe in free speech. Free speech is good, runs the argument, but it has to be less free in a plural society. Charlie Hebdo attack: No more excuses.
By James Kirchick / 4 November, 2011 The smoke had barely cleared from the firebombed office of Charlie Hebdo magazine – attacked for publishing cartoons of Mohammed – when TIME magazine’s Bruce Crumley chose to criticise the satirists before the terrorist. James Kirchick denounces a too-familiar tendancy There exists an unspoken rule in the Republic of Letters — that land where novelists, poets, mere ink-stained wretches like myself, think tank scholars who churn out dry policy reports…really anyone who writes for a living, reside: No one should be physically harmed, let alone threatened, for something that they publish. Don’t get me wrong. I love literary feuds, even the bristling, (if well placed and rare), ad hominem attack. Writers in the West rarely have to confront violence, certainly not from the state. On Tuesday morning, the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were firebombed after it named the Prophet Muhammed its “editor-in-chief” for an upcoming issue.
News Desk: Taking It Off for Putin. Stop Forcing Journalists to Conceal Their Views from the Public - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics. Brooklyn-based journalist Caitlin Curran was fired from her part-time gig at WNYC, the innovative public radio station, because her boss found out that she attended an Occupy Wall Street protest. She's written about her termination at Gawker, where she wondered whether experiences like hers will "dissuade people who have jobs they want to keep from expressing their opinions. " It's a disturbing possibility, but reading her story, I couldn't help but focus on a disturbing fact. As regular readers know, Curran and her boyfriend, neither of whom I know, made a sign that displayed an excerpted phrase from an article I wrote. While Curran held it aloft in Times Square, someone snapped a photograph; soon afterward the image went viral. Presuming the accuracy of this account, her boss is wrong. To borrow a phrase, every editor who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that propagating the myth of "objective journalism" is indefensible.
What's the price of lobster? 352 lives - Americas - World. Like most of the indigenous men on this part of the Mosquito Coast, he made his living diving for lobsters destined for American and European restaurants. And like many of those buried around him, Carlos was killed suddenly – and horribly – by the bends. It is impossible to say what proportion of men from the Mosquito Coast are killed or left paralysed diving for lobster for the international market: there has never been a census of this region, so no one knows how many live here. Accessible only by sea or air, it is a land of wiry mangroves, indigo lagoons and thick jungle, home to an ethnic group called the Miskitos.
At least 4,200 Miskito men are thought to be living with permanent disabilities due to diving accidents – half the estimated number of lobster divers. The shores of the Mosquito Coast are so inundated with paralysed men that some places look more like colonies for war veterans than fishing villages. Alexis Valderramos has come to pay his respects to Carlos. Famous Last Words - Media Transparency, Kate Fitzgerald and the Irish Times. I wanted to do a piece on media transparency for some time, but I never imagined that the death of someone I love very much could be the catalyst for this, nor did I foresee quite how disappointed I would be with publications I had previously thought were illustrious; publications I thought valued integrity and accuracy over all else.
It turns out I was sorely mistaken. In August just gone, my beautiful and dear friend Kate took her own life; she was 25. The night before she died, she took the time to compose this poignant and erudite plea for better understanding of mental health. It was sent to my national paper of record, the Irish Times. By the time this appeared in print, Kate was already dead. In an ideal world, Tom and Sally's sincere wish that Kate's wish for a better understanding of mental health would have been fulfilled.
But that was not the end of the story - Kate's former employers, also couldn't fail to notice the story. Let me digress for a moment; I'm a scientist. Adam Curtis Blog: THE BABY AND THE BAATH WATER. People person. Melinda Gates, arguably the wealthiest woman in the world, talks about behaviour change and the crucial role of luck Melinda Gates sits, calm and engaged, making direct eye contact – not the piercing variety favoured by most executives in the technology world she hails from, but an interested, almost intimate, kind. In her sixth-floor office at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates describes a work life fighting poverty in the developing world, balanced with a home life as a down-to-earth billionaire in Seattle.
She wears a distinctive mustard-yellow jacket and a faint dusting of gold eye shadow to match, only because she spoke in front of 100 academics earlier in the morning. Normally, she wears no make-up. Gates is arguably the wealthiest woman in the world. Gates talks about her wealth almost as though it is a cross she must bear. ‘Meeting women who have lost a child hits you at a human scale’ Gates was raised in a middle-class Catholic family in Texas.
Jennifer Egan, novelist. The shot that nearly killed me: War photographers – a special report | Media. Adam Ferguson, Afghanistan, 2009 I was one of the first on the scene. The Afghan security forces normally shut down a suicide bombing like this pretty quickly. I was able to get to the epicentre of the explosion. It was carnage, there were bodies, flames were coming out of the buildings. I remember feeling very scared because there was still popping and hissing and small explosions, and the building was collapsing. This woman was escorted out of the building and round this devastated street corner. As a photographer, you feel helpless. When I won a World Press award for this photograph, I felt sad. Alvaro Ybarra Zavala, Congo, November 2008 The situation was very tense – people were drunk and aggressive. When I got to the hotel, I showed the other photographers.
I really hate this shot. Lynsey Addario, Libya, March 2011 I had been in Libya for just over two weeks, shooting the insurgency. The first three days were very violent – I was punched in the face several times, groped nonstop. How Western human rights activists have twisted the truth about Tiananmen Square. A pro-democracy demonstrator evades plain-clothed police on the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre (Photo: AP) The liberal blogosphere got its undies in a bunch yesterday in response to some old comments of George Galloway’s on the Tiananmen Square massacre. Galloway had allegedly said: “It is a remarkable thing, that something we’ve been told for 20 years was a massacre, that not a single photograph of a single dead person has been adduced.” Yet many of those attacking Galloway have been complicit in a far more insidious and successful whitewashing of what occurred in Beijing in June 1989.
Their promotion of the mainstream Amnesty/Human Rights Watch narrative – namely that students and intellectuals were massacred in Beijing’s main square – has nurtured a profound lack of understanding across the West about what really happened in China 22 years ago. Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door | Politics. Then, one day in December 2003, at a sleazy motor inn on the Berlin Turnpike—an 11.2-mile time-warp stretch of asphalt, lined on either side with at least 37 other no-tell motels—Paris remitted Forbes $1,200, and the girls, court documents show, were his. Buying girls like livestock is not unusual. Cheryl, a gems girl, at about 14 was sold by one pimp, “Love,” to another pimp, “Junior,” for $600. The New York City Police detective Wayne Taylor—convicted in July 2008 for the attempted kidnapping of a 13-year-old—purchased his thrall for $500 from a Brooklyn “pimp partner.” In fact, the price for an adolescent female slave is far lower than it was in the mid–19th century, when, adjusted to today’s dollar, the going rate was roughly $40,000, the price of a car.
Convicted sex trafficker Dennis Paris (a.k.a. “Rahmyti”) conferring with defense attorney Jeremiah Donovan at the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Dennis Paris “I’m already crying. World Press Photo Of The Year 2010. You Think Hollywood Is Rough? Welcome to the Chaos, Excitement and Danger of Nollywood.
The Chilling Story of Genius in a Land of Chronic Unemployment. How gossip took over the news. How my book became part of the “satanic sex stabbing” Why cockfighting persists. Child Brides. A Q&A with a 'Daily News' Crime Reporter. Fukushima Earthquake Moved Seafloor Half a Football Field. Porn Performer: Why I'm Against Government Mandated Condom Use in Porn. Germany's Outdated, Wrongheaded Ban on Nazi Books Like 'Mein Kampf' - Heather Horn - International. Tobacco haters, kick your filthy habit | Nathalie Rothschild. The latest BS about the Big C | Rob Lyons. The End of Cheap Coffee: Why the Diner Staple Is About to Become a Luxury - Lifestyle. Mason Lse Lecture Jan 2012. Who Was That Masked Man? - By Nate Anderson. Rob Lyons: The Truth About Jamie Oliver's 'Pink Slime' With Vaccines, Bill Gates Changes The World Again.