The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Yes, Kamala Harris Slept with a  Powerful Man for Political  Advancement But her female privilege means we’re not supposed to talk about it Janice Fiamengo Note: this is a revised version of an earlier  Substack essay . A recent  Time  article, “ Fact-Checking False Claims about Kamala Harris ” [never trust a “fact-checker”] tries to throw cold water on the allegation that  Harris got her start by having an affair with a married man, California politician Willie Brown . Oh well, declares the  Time  article in response, Willie Brown wasn’t  really  married because he and his wife were estranged at the time. And far from being a secret affair, Brown has freely admitted that he “dated” Harris. What kind of sexist prude, the article implies, has a problem with a woman’s freely-chosen sexual conduct, and what does it have to do with her fitness for public office? The alleged fact-checker leaves out salient context to suggest that anyone put off by Harris’s actions in her climb up the slip

  Panic In Zanzibar: Nocturnal Sodomy & Demon-Bats The Legend of the Popobawa, the 1995 event and Swahili spirit-sex STONE AGE HERBALIST “In the first half of 1995 an extraordinary collective panic swept across the Zanzibar archipelago. It started on the island of Pemba and later spread from there to Unguja and Zanzibar town. Men, women and children described being assaulted by a shape-shifting spirit, Popobawa, and on the larger island reports were rife that adults of both sexes had been sodomised by this malevolent entity. In order to avert its nocturnal attacks many people resorted to spending the night huddled together in anxious groups outside of their homes. On both islands the panic produced incidents of collective violence, when strangers suspected of being manifestations of Popobawa were attacked, beaten, and in some cases killed by the angry mob. Government efforts to calm things down were largely ineffectual, not least because most Pembans and supporters of the oppositio