Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Saudis behead woman for witchcraft

By BJ Bjornson

Not much nice you can say about this kind of crazy behaviour.


A Saudi woman has been executed for practising "witchcraft and sorcery", the country's interior ministry says.


She is the second person to be executed for such crimes by Saudi Arabia this year. Her actual crimes, such as they are, were to convince people to give her money based on claims that she could cure their illnesses. I�m definitely not in favour of quackery, but it is not magic, and does not condone having a person�s head chopped off as punishment.

Unsurprisingly, the harshness of the sentencing comes from those who believe in the supernatural themselves.


Amnesty says that Saudi Arabia does not actually define sorcery as a capital offence. However, some of its conservative clerics have urged the strongest possible punishments against fortune-tellers and faith healers as a threat to Islam.


I can only hope that the clerics� fear is that once the people understand how foolish and idiotic those other superstitions are, they might start casting their critical eyes towards the superstition the clerics base their authority on and note it makes claims just as outrageous, which would be quite threatening to the clerics indeed.



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