Ophelia Benson's Blog

Time to launch .

I tested it on Facebook the other day to see if I’d done it right and people started pledging right then but this is the actual launch.

I’m going back to , with NO ADS and no fatuous people announcing that I’m a transphobe because I have my own ideas about gender. I earned a little income blogging at Freethought Blogs and I need to replace that. Think of me as like a public radio station but without voices and without the “you owe us, please call no...

People are so nice.

is not the person I was hoping to hear was leaving. I can certainly understand why, though.

Update: adding a poignant public post from a network colleague:

[Personal problems blah blah]I know there’s some shit going down on our blog network that I need to address, and I will once I’ve found enough spoons. I know a lot of my readers are hurting right now. Please let me know if there’s anything in particular you need me to do to help you....

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Zip down to page 5, and read note 2.

²As noted within AmnestyInternational’spolicy on sex work, the organization is opposed tocriminalization of all activities related to the purchase and sale of sex. Sexual desire and activity are afundamental human need. To criminalize those who are unable or unwilling to fulfill that need throughmore traditionally recognized means and thus purchase sex, may amount to a violation of the right toprivacy and undermine...

Today in my Inbox an email from one of my heroes – John Lewis. It is, of course, a public mailing, so I’ll share it right here.

Every year, I head back to the birthplace of a new America — Selma, Alabama — where a determined struggle for voting rights transformed our democracy 50 years ago.

On March 7, 1965, Hosea Williams and I led a band of silent witnesses, 600 nonviolent crusaders, intending to march 50 miles to Montgomery — Alabama’s capital — to demonstrate the need for voting rights in...

that the UAE has tightened up its laws by making it illegal to “offend” God.

Wouldn’t you think if there’s anyone who can rise above being “offended” it would be God? I mean – ants can say harsh things about me all they want to; it won’t offend me. Why? Because they’re ants. Their concerns are not my concerns, and vice versa. Our concerns are too different in nature to be subject to emotions like being “offended.” Ants are going to think I’m way too big and ugly and misshapen,...

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The California Fish and Game Commission voted 3-2 Wednesday to ban bobcat trapping everywhere in California. The vote, which took place at the Commission’s regular meeting in Fortuna, caps a controversy that started when a Joshua Tree resident found traps illegally placed on his land less than a mile from the National Park.

Concern over the threat to bobcats in Joshua Tree and elsewhere in the state prompted the California Legislature to pass AB1213, the Bobcat Protecti...

Originally by John Horstman on .

I was just reminded of (looking at some of the theoretical underpinnings/implications of the rise of use of “triggering” as a silencing tactic, among other subjects) by Jack Halberstam, a radical queer anti-capitalist anarchist who . I’m a product of the 90s scene and theoretical perspective Jack describes in that first link, and indeed influenced by...

No. No no no no no.

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I have to reply to some of the garbage that’s being spewed on from yesterday. I’m going to do it here because – oh well the reason’s obvious.

It’s all people who have been examining everything they can see of my Facebook activity going back months – which is creepy and disgusting all by itself. Even if I’m a raving Republican, that’s creepy and disgusting. Since I’m not, it’s all the more so. (If I were a Republican lobbyist or politician or influential think-tanker, ok, fa...

:

However, there would be no harm, she thought, in asking if the game was over. `Please, would you tell me — ‘ she began, looking timidly at the Red Queen.

`Speak when you’re spoken to!’ The Queen sharply interrupted her.

`But if everybody obeyed that rule,’ said Alice, who was always ready for a little argument, `and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for you to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything,...