Archive for the 'Feminism' Category

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Watch this and weep.

Then ruddy rage!

The young girl is 15 years old.

The ’so called’ policeman is a ’so called’ sheriff’s deputy.

So, now you’ve seen the film, read this whole sorry story ~ and much more of the same sort of shocking shit.

Home of the brave? Land of the free?

Oh, yeah. Sure

And we’re a pair of Protestant Popes.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

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(image source)

From the Washington Post:

Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor’s house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.

There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. “I do this in the name of Allah!” she intoned.

As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan’s genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan’s mother smiled with pride.

“This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember,” said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of Baghdad. “We don’t know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it.”

Kurdistan is the only known part of Iraq –and one of the few places in the world–where female circumcision is widespread. More than 60 percent of women in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq have been circumcised, according to a study conducted this year. In at least one Kurdish territory, 95 percent of women have undergone the practice, which human rights groups call female genital mutilation.

The practice, and the Kurdish parliament’s refusal to outlaw it, highlight the plight of women in a region with a reputation for having a more progressive society than the rest of Iraq. Advocates for women point to the increasing frequency of honor killings against women and female self-immolations in Kurdistan this year as further evidence that women in the area still face significant obstacles, despite efforts to raise public awareness of circumcision and violence against women.

The fight against female genital mutilation is one of the few feminist causes that conservative Americans embrace. They love to point to Somali communities and claim that the fact that FGM is practiced in these communities proves that Islam is a barbaric religion (link link), but something tells me that they’re just going to ignore the fact that it’s been legal in Kurdish Iraq since Bush’s invasion.

(via digby, who also points out that things have gotten a lot worse for women all over Iraq since the invasion)

Hillary plays hardball

The first sign of friction in the Obama camp as Mrs Clinton demands - and gets - a purge of her critics before accepting Secretary of State role

By Leonard Doyle in Washington - Sunday, 23 November 2008

Hillary Clinton insisted on direct access to the President

Before Hillary Clinton has been formally offered the job as Secretary of State, a purge of Barack Obama’s top foreign policy team has begun.

The advisers who helped trash the former First Lady’s foreign policy credentials on the campaign trail are being brutally shunted aside, as the price of her accepting the job of being the public face of America to the world.

In negotiations with Mr Obama this week before agreeing to take the job, she demanded and received assurances that she alone should appoint staff to the State Department.

She also got assurances that she will have direct access to the President and will not have to go through his foreign policy advisers on the National Security Council, which is where many of her critics in the Obama team are expected to end up.

Aha!

Hath hell no fury, Hillary?

Read the rest this rather revealing report right here.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

WOW!!!!!

What a woman — from Wales.

Is this a “great” granny or what?

And to think they thought the comic strip Wonder Woman was something special.

Well, Rosie’s the real thing.

Welcome home for world runner, 61

Have crutches, will travel: Rosie Swale Pope was determined to carry on A grandmother is due to arrive home after an epic round-the-world run she began almost five years ago.

Rosie Swale Pope, 61, will finish her journey on crutches after injuring her leg on the final part of her journey of more than 20,000 miles (32,000 km).

Read the rest of this super-duper Rosie report.

If this lovely little lady isn’t the absolute epitome of old Brit true grit, then we don’t damned well know who, or what, the hell is.

Head straight across here, and read some of the super stuff on our intrepid Rosie’s own special website.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

“‘This regulation is not about contraception. It’s about abortion,’ said Mike Leavitt, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

But Mr. Leavitt acknowledged that some medical providers may want to ‘press the definition’ and make the case that some forms of contraception are tantamount to abortion.

Karen Brauer, president of Pharmacists for Life, said she expects members of her group will do exactly that. ‘It would be pretty excellent,’ she said, if states lost federal funding over laws requiring pharmacists to fill birth-control prescriptions.”

(Emphasis mine.)

Sixteen states currently require hospitals to provide rape victims with information about emergency contraception, but Pharmacists For Life wants to put a stop to that. Normal people see nothing wrong with protecting rape victims from unwanted pregnancy, but Karen Brauer feels we ought to be more worried about protecting rapists’ sperm, and the Bush administration agrees.

(Cross-posted at Trailer Park Feminist.)

Nothing has set back the cause of humane treatment of animals further than the antics of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Associating animal welfare with sadistic pornography and trivialization of the Holocaust just makes the issue seem stupid and juvenile.

Meanwhile, the Humane Society does wonderful work on behalf of animals, including advocacy, sheltering, spaying, and neutering. And now there’s another reason to support the Humane Society: they’ve helped set up a series of safe haven programs, which allow victims of domestic abuse to take their pets with them when they flee to a shelter. Maybe the idiots at PETA will do something like this in the future, but only if the abused women agree to pose naked with their pets.

I think it’s time someone set up PENTA, or PEople for Normal Treatment of Animals. I think there’s a lot of people who are against cruelty and gratuitously killing animals, but who are willing to accept that in human societies, people have more rights than other animals.

Amandagon has more information on the connection between animal abuse and domestic abuse.

Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation. Put those three factors together - loads of children, broken homes, absent mothers - and what you have, surely, is a recipe for misery and social chaos. But no. Iceland, the block of sub-Arctic lava to which these statistics apply, tops the latest table of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index rankings, meaning that as a society and as an economy - in terms of wealth, health and education - they are champions of the world. To which one might respond: Yes, but - what with the dark winters and the far from tropical summers - are Icelanders happy? Actually, in so far as one can reliably measure such things, they are. According to a seemingly serious academic study reported in the Guardian in 2006, Icelanders are the happiest people on earth. (The study was lent some credibility by the finding that the Russians were the most unhappy.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations to Danica Patrick on winning her first IndyCar race — the Indy Japan 300 — and becoming the first woman to win a major auto race!

Patrick passed two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Helio Castroneves three laps from the finish to take the lead as the front-runners pitted.Patrick, Castroneves and Ed Carpenter had pitted five laps after the front-runners, including Scott Dixon, who dominated the second half of the race.

“It’s a long time coming,” Patrick said on ESPN’s television broadcast. “Finally!”

After Dixon and others pitted, Moyer told Patrick that Castroneves was the only driver that could deny her, and she did the rest. Having saved a considerable amount of fuel in the final segment, she stood on the gas and blew past the Brazilian on the 198th lap.

“I knew he was the one to beat,” Patrick said. “I was not going to make the mistake of not (going for it).”

Too bad Bob Margolis felt the need to shit all over her victory in his column: (Via.) Read the rest of this entry »

Several times recently we’ve sensed some subtle suggestions that there might be some sort of sexism being practised by our ourselves - politically speaking, that is.

Especially, concerning our personal preference of candidate for the immensely important position of official Democratic nominee, for the soon upcoming US presidential election.

So we’re grasping this special historic opportunity to show that we’re certainly no sexists. No way, Jose.

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Viva Espana!

Sock it to ‘em good style, Senoras.

Show the real, MCPs and sexists the way.

All the way … home.