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Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is, strictly speaking, not really any of my business. It’s been a few years since any artist I particularly like performed there, and I have an allergy to alternative spellings of “women.” This said, as a feminist, I do feel it’s my right to criticize gender essentialism and transphobia and take […]

Mounties use tasers to sexually assault an aboriginal child. And get away with it.
Predictably, the article doesn’t call it sexual assault. But what does this sound like to you?

The girl, who was 16 at the time of the incident, said she was held down by four officers, one for each limb, while a taser was […]

We have a contender.
Meet Dmitri. He’s a pick-up artist, which in itself gives him about 50 million douchebag points. He met a woman named Olga, who talked to him for a few minutes, gave him her card, and said, “Call me.”
So he did. She wasn’t home, and he left the second-douchiest phone message in […]

Folks, the internet has been won.
Background: Something Awful commentators react to recently-released footage of then 16-year-old Omar Khadr being cruelly interrogated by Canadian officials at Guantanamo. Their reactions range from sympathetic to death threats—these soft children of privilege who never leave the comfort of their parents’ basement, let alone face unending hell in an illegal […]

JOSÉ ROSENDO DE JESÚS from the State of Guerrero works as a union organizer in New York.
He Sends 700 a month.
Check out this amazing photo-essay by Dulce Pinzón:
After September 11, the notion of the “hero” began to rear its head in the public consciousness more and more frequently. The notion served a necessity in a […]

Whatever side one falls on in the gun control debate, most people agree that handguns should not be in schools. It’s just a bad mix—volatile, trapped kids and deadly firearms. Any sane person ought to feel a bit uncomfortable at the thought of guns in a high school.
Unfortunately, sane people aren’t in charge in my […]

The AP is in the running for best headline of the year:
Everything seemingly is spinning out of control
WASHINGTON (AP) — Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end […]

What Americans do half-heartedly, the Russians will attempt with gusto.
Russian lawmakers are weird.
Parliamentary hearings were held yesterday at which the “Concept for a State Policy in the Area of Spiritual and Moral Education of the Children of the Russian Federation and Protection of Their Morals” was discussed.
Really weird:
The draft law “On Children’s Toys” would ban […]

Just completely gross.
Short version: Sarasota Planned Parenthood and Habitat for Humanity team up with a plan that will help Planned Parenthood with some zoning issues and help Habitat get some almost-free land. For their altruism, they’re repaid with the nastiest of the nasty anti-choice contingent:
“We could have put up any building we wanted,” said […]

I wonder at what point a country accumulates enough of the markers—surveillance, botched elections, out-of-control law enforcement, and so on—that citizens and government alike can just shrug their shoulders and say, “Yep, we’re living in a police state. Can someone please liberate us now?”
The U.S. is pretty well there, I think. Check out this story […]