The UK's new cuts in welfare will imprison women who say they got pregnant due to rape if they did not make a police report.

Women often don't make police reports about rape, because they rightly fear that they'd have to go through with a trial in which they are effectively the accused.

A British MP is being punished by his party for doing something “inappropriate”.

That should never happen.

“Inappropriate” means “not fitting for the circumstances, and causing annoyance.”

That is a vague and weak criticism.

Nobody should be reviled, let alone punished, for having “done something inappropriate”, because that is too vague.

I don't know what that MP is accused of doing.

So I won't say it was not a really bad thing to do.

Perhaps it was.

Or perhaps it wasn't.

“Inappropriate” fails to tell us.

What I do say is that anyone who is criticized has the right to a clear statement of the criticism.

Deir ez-Zor has been taken from PISSI, leaving it with very little territory.

Thugs in Virginia arrested a reporter for covering a candidate for governor, supposedly because he said “fuck”.

They were violent about it, too.

Today's global capitalism produces ever more addictive goods that get society ever more screwed up.

I like this quote: “The logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own mad dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people.”