Quotulatiousness

December 7, 2015

Vikings lose at home to Seahawks, 38-7 in blowout

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:19

Fortunately for me, I was unavoidably busy on Sunday afternoon and missed what sounds like the worst game Minnesota has played in the last two years. If there were any bandwagon fans left after the loss to Green Bay, they’re probably all gone now. The bad news started long before kickoff, as nose tackle Linval Joseph was listed on the injury report all week and then downgraded on Friday, so he and starting strong safety Andrew Sendejo were both out. Middle linebacker Anthony Barr and free safety Harrison Smith both started the game, but were standing on the sideline not long after the game started. Without Barr, Joseph, and Smith, the Vikings defence was a hollow shell, and Seattle took full advantage of the weakness. Usually, after a game I didn’t get to watch, I’ll read through the hundreds of Twitter posts in my Vikings list. Today, after looking at a couple of dozen of the most recent ones, I decided that I should just give the rest of them a miss:

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Saudi women can now vote, but are still far from having equal rights with men

Filed under: Liberty, Middle East — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ian Geldard linked to this article at The Week. It was posted in August, but the situation is still pretty much identical:

Women in Saudi Arabia are registering to vote for the first time in history, more than four years after King Abdullah granted equal voting rights.

They will be allowed to vote in municipal elections due to take place in December and can also stand as candidates.

“[Voting is] a dream for us,” Jamal Al-Saadi, the first woman to register in Medina told the Saudi Gazette. “[It] will enable Saudi women to have a say in the process of decision-making.”

Human rights campaigners have welcomed the move, but warn there is still a long way to go in the fight for gender equality in the conservative Muslim nation.

Saudi Arabia has an abysmal human rights record, particularly with regards to protecting women. Although in recent years the rights of women have been incrementally extended, their actions are still severely restricted.

“This long overdue move is welcome but it’s only a tiny fraction of what needs to be addressed over gender inequality in Saudi Arabia,” Amnesty International’s Karen Middleton told The Independent.

“Let’s not forget that Saudi Arabian women won’t actually be able to drive themselves to the voting booths as they’re still completely banned from driving,” she says.

Rescuing Yazidi captives from ISIS

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Hannah James reports on Montreal’s “Jewish Schindler”:

From his office at The Prancing Horse — a high-end car and motorcycle dealership in Montreal — Steve Maman is scrolling through picture after picture of Yazidi women and girls he’s helped liberate. They were held as slaves in northern Iraq by fighters with the Islamic State group.

“You relive the emotions,” Maman explains as he looks through his files of dozens of women and children. “It’s anger. Right now I’m getting angry. That’s all it is. It builds anger. You get angry.”

In August 2014, IS militants raided villages in the Sinjar District of northern Iraq. It’s an area occupied by many Yazidis – a religious minority practicing an ancient religion, pre-dating Islam.

IS considers the Yazidis heretics, and set out to purge the villages of men, and to kidnap thousands of women and children to sell as sexual and domestic slaves.

Not long after the invasion of Sinjar, an IS video surfaced, showing a group of men laughing and joking about buying and selling Yazidi girls.

“Can you prove to her you’re a man?” one of the men asks another.

Maman, a car dealer specializing in luxury vintage automobiles, saw the news coverage of the massacres across Sinjar, and says he felt he had to take action. He calls his mission not a “choice” but “divine providence.” He says he’s inspired by his religious beliefs, and also by Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who rescued 1,200 Jews during the holocaust.

If not amnesty, then what?

Filed under: Americas, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer cuts to the chase on the whole amnesty “debate” in US politics:

Mickey Kaus wonders why the GOP elite is still “clinging to amnesty” for illegal immigrants. I have the same thought every time I hear someone rail against “amensty”: What the f*ck else are we going to do? Put 12 million people in jail for violating immigration laws? Are we really talking about deporting 12 million people? Do you have any idea how ugly this will be? I don’t want to commit a Godwin’s Law violation, but rousting people — whole families — out of their homes at gunpoint and loading them up on trucks and trains to be shipped en mass somewhere else — does this sound like any other 20th century event to you? If you wanted to find some other precedent for this that was not the German shipping of Jews to Poland, what would even be close?

Looked at another way, the disastrous government and civil war in Syria has created, by UN estimates, 4 million refugees. At a stroke, do Republicans really want to create 12 million refugees?

QotD: The problem of Belgium

Filed under: Europe, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Judging by emerging reports, it almost looks as though the big new international-relations problem highlighted by the latest massacre might end up being the failure of the Belgian state. Some of the perpetrators seem to have fled toward the terrorist-riddled Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, which has sprouted a long sequence of killers involved with everything from the 2004 Madrid attacks to the failed August Amsterdam-Paris train attack that was stopped by American passengers. The Belgian authorities are contrite about the helplessness of their police and security apparatus in a zone that is a giant magnet for Europe’s Muslim creeps and ne’er-do-wells.

This raises further existential questions, and it is not as though they are new, about an ethnically divided country fabricated by 19th-century great powers mostly for geopolitical purposes. Foreign-policy amateurs are fond of saying, with some justice, that most of the world’s problems come from borders badly drawn by Europeans in out-of-the-way places. Belgium’s worsening habit of exhaling spores of Muslim terror on to its neighbours may actually put it on that list, unless its problem is solved pretty quickly.

Colby Cosh, “After Paris, are we sure the map that needs changing is in the Middle East?”, National Post, 2015-11-17.

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