All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Feminists Are Not Your Mommies | Dame Magazine

It’s time for the internet—well, the entire culture, really, but let’s start small—to grow the fuck up about women. Tim Colwill, editor-in-chief of gaming website games.on.net, recently offered an example of what this might look like, with a post called “Announcement: Readers who feel threatened by equality no longer welcome.”

“If you really think feminism, or women, are destroying games,” he writes, “or that LGBT people and LGBT relationships have no place in games, or that games in any way belong to you or are ‘under attack’ from political correctness or ‘social justice warriors’: please leave this website. I don’t want your clicks, I don’t want your hits, I don’t want your traffic. Leave now and please don’t come back.”

This is the first step: Serious people refusing to engage with anyone who argues on the level of a whiny child, and editors refusing to prioritize the page views that come with such arguments. As Colwill put it, for these excessively vocal, woman-hating brats, “Literally the worst possible thing that can happen here is equality. That’s the worst outcome, that’s the nightmare scenario.” If they were actually children, we’d be obliged to fret over their moral development and continue providing lessons in sharing and caring. But the “14-year-old in a basement” stereotype notwithstanding, the enemies of equality are not actually kids, and pro-woman writers sure as hell aren’t their mommies. The grown-up internet needs to unequivocally shun these clowns, so the rest of us are free to have some new conversations.

via Feminists Are Not Your Mommies | Dame Magazine.

Ebola outbreak: call to send in military to west Africa to help curb epidemic | Society | The Guardian

Military teams should be sent to west Africa immediately if there is to be any hope of controlling the Ebola epidemic, doctors on the frontline told the United Nations on Tuesday, painting a stark picture of health workers dying, patients left without care and infectious bodies lying in the streets.

The international president of Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), Dr Joanne Liu, told member states that although alarm bells had been ringing for six months, the response had been too little, too late and no amount of vaccinations and new drugs would be able to prevent the escalating disaster.

via Ebola outbreak: call to send in military to west Africa to help curb epidemic | Society | The Guardian.

Everyday harassment! The Israeli Army closes central vegetable market near Nablus

The Israeli Occupation Forces closed the central vegetable market this morning in Baita, a village south of  Nablus. They also prevented vegetable containers from entering and leaving the market under the pretext of  stone throwing at Israeli settlers’ cars in Hwara street .

The Head of Baita Municipality, Uthman Dweekat, said that  the Israeli Army raided the  village, closed the central vegetable market and prevented the vegetable containers’ access to the market. He also added that the market provides a number of West Bank cities with vegetables and fruit, not only the nearby towns and villages.

In related context, eyewitnesses reported that the  Israeli army set up a checkpoint by the main entrance of the  village and checked the passengers’ IDs.

via The Israeli Army closes central vegetable market near Nablus.

Just plain meanness! Israeli demolition of dairy factory in Hebron

Israeli bulldozers are reported to have inflicted considerable damage in demolishing a dairy farm and factory owned by Hebron’s Islamic Charitable Society in al-Rama neighbourhood in the north of the city. Eyewitnesses report that Israeli soldiers accompanied two bulldozers and two excavators at the site.

The Chair of the Islamic Charitable Society’s Board of Directors, Hatim al-Bakri, estimated the cost of the damages in the region of “2 million US dollars”. The “services the Charitable Society offers to orphans in the Hebron district will be badly affected”, he added. The factory employs around 52 members of staff.

This is not the first time the factory has been targeted. Israeli forces confiscated the factory’s contents in early July, during Ramadan, after the Israeli Council for Planning alleged that the plant was built without a license.

via Israeli demolition of dairy factory in Hebron.

The Systematic Dismantling of Paradise: A Preliminary Checklist

Petchary's Blog

I get emotional about certain things. One of them is the destruction of the few relatively untouched areas of our planet, in the name of unsustainable “development.” Despite the recent warnings that the damage we human beings have already done is beyond repair, in terms of climate change, some among us relentlessly move onwards in pursuit of profit and perhaps economic domination. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in a leaked draft report, noted a few days ago: “Without additional mitigation, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally.”  But hey, they are probably exaggerating, say our “investors,” sweeping all before them. Let’s build another coal plant.

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Here’s a little list I started – beginning with what is closest to our home, and one would hope, dearest to our hearts…

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