Oath Keepers guy charged with sedition.

Stewart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was arrested on Thursday and charged with seditious conspiracy for organizing a wide-ranging plot to storm the Capitol last Jan. 6 and disrupt the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory, federal law enforcement officials said.

I think that might be a fairly serious crime.

The arrest of Mr. Rhodes was a major step forward in the sprawling investigation of the Capitol attack and the case marked the first time that prosecutors had filed charges of sedition.

…

The Oath Keepers, along with the Proud Boys, have emerged as the most prominent far-right extremists to have taken part in the assault on the Capitol. Prosecutors have collected reams of evidence against them, including encrypted cellphone chats and recordings of online meetings. They have charged its members not only with forcing their way into the building in a military-style “stack,” but also with stationing an armed “quick reaction force” at a hotel in Virginia to be ready to rush into Washington if needed.

In other words they can’t plausibly claim to have been just protesting, just telling Congress how they felt, just demonstrating their loyalty to the coward Trump. My guess is that a lot of people who were there can plausibly claim that, and that it’s true of some of them, but it’s always appeared that some were organized and not messing around.

Their cover story is that they were there to provide security for people like Roger Stone.

But at least four Oath Keepers who were at the Capitol that day and are cooperating with the government have sworn in court papers that the group intended to breach the building with the goal of obstructing the final certification of the Electoral College vote.

…

Mr. Rhodes has been a fixture on the far right almost from the day in 2009 that he announced the creation of the Oath Keepers at a rally in Lexington, Mass., the site of a famous Revolutionary War battle.

At the event, Mr. Rhodes laid out an antigovernment platform for the current and former law enforcement and military personnel who joined his group, saying that his plan was for members to disobey certain illegal orders from officials and instead to uphold their oath to the Constitution.

During the years that President Barack Obama was in office, the Oath Keepers repeatedly inserted themselves into prominent public conflicts, often playing the role of heavily armed vigilantes. In 2014, for instance, they turned up at a cattle ranch in Nevada after its owner, Cliven Bundy, engaged in an armed standoff with federal land management officials.

Of course they did. What cause could be more glorious than helping individuals steal public lands?

But after Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Rhodes and the Oath Keepers pivoted away from their antigovernment views and appeared to embrace the new spirit of nationalism and suspicions of a deep-state conspiracy that had taken root in Washington. Like other far-right groups such as the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers also opposed — often physically — the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis.

See this is where mention of BLM and George Floyd is relevant. When calling JK Rowling names, not so much.

I find I have to go back to the dreadful Quisling LSE blog post by Ilaria Michelis, because there are just too many irritations and outrages to ignore.

The impact of their rhetoric and political action has been and will continue to be devastating for trans people, from the halting of reforms to the Gender Recognition Act despite public support, to ever more intense levels of transphobic violence taking place online and offline.

What is online violence? Besides an oxymoron? And note the very selective catastrophizing. Oh oh oh trans people; women, meh.

I explore the function of so-called ‘gender critical’ feminism as a reactionary response to anti-racist and decolonial campaigns…

And by “explore” she means “make up.”

In July 2020, JK Rowling infamously decided to take a very public stance on the issue of trans rights and women’s safety through a series of tweets and an essay.

“Infamously.” JK Rowling dared to say something, in public of all things, and another [white!!] woman calls that infamous and hints that it’s brazen or rude or privileged to be so public about it.

As Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests spread around the world in response to George Floyd’s murder, and as Edward Colston’s statue was toppled to highlight Britain’s lack of accountability towards its colonial past, the novelist’s choice to use her substantial platform to reignite the debate on trans rights appeared highly insensitive and a product of her current class and race privilege

What utter bullshit. Censorious, creepy, witch-hunty bullshit. It is not the case that people stopped talking about other things as BLM protests spread, nor was it expected or demanded that they should.

Alyosxa Tudor asks “How bored and annoyed must JK Rowling be that she thinks the perfect moment in which she can reheat her […] comments is the height of Black Lives Matter?” (emphasis mine).

Emphasis hers; emphasis stupid. People are always talking about more than one thing. Feminists are allowed to talk about feminist issues even at “the height of” BLM. Michelis is of course carefully ignoring the fact that many gender critical feminists are Black.

One of the core arguments of so-called ‘gender critical’ ideology is that trans women cannot be fully ‘accepted’ as women because their experience of womanhood is not identical to that of cis women…

Ah ah stop right there. It’s not that it’s “not identical,” it’s that it’s the opposite. It’s that male people can’t have “their experience of womanhood” because their experience is necessarily, by definition, experience of manhood.

… and trans women can therefore not fully comprehend or empathise with the supposedly universal subordination of women. This argument rests on the fiction of a single female experience, a fiction which has routinely silenced and side-lined women who experience racism, colonial domination and other forms of oppression that cannot be singularly attributed to their gender.

No no no no. Not the same thing at all. A dishonest manipulative piece of rhetoric.

Depictions of trans women as deceitful monsters seeking to violate the purity of innocent young women and their ‘safe spaces’ recall all too clearly the starkly racist representations of Black men during the Jim Crow era.

All too clearly? More like a window plastered in mud.

Media and public attention towards BLM and global struggles against racism and coloniality have increasingly challenged white women, including white feminists, to consider their own participation and complicity in systems of white supremacy and imperialism. Concepts like “white fragility” and “white women’s tears”[5] have become mainstream…

Indeed they have, and guess why. Guess whose interests that diversion promotes.

Perhaps JK Rowling was indeed quite annoyed because BLM and other anti-racist movements had decisively shoved the conversation away from the narrative of white women as the ultimate victim towards the long overdue recognition that Black, Brown and other racialised and minoritised groups, and amongst them Black trans women, suffer incredible levels of daily violence which many white women can barely imagine.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps Ilaria Michelis is aligned with the Eating People’s Faces Party…or perhaps not, but let’s just throw it out there for credulous people to embrace. That’s the approach of the whole piece.

But he identifies as royal; surely that’s all that’s required?

The Queen has removed a range of military affiliations and royal patronages held by Prince Andrew, Buckingham Palace has said. The move comes after a US judge gave the green light for her second son to face a sexual assault civil lawsuit.

Buckingham Palace said in a statement on Thursday: “With the Queen’s approval and agreement, the Duke of York’s military affiliations and royal patronages have been returned to the Queen. The Duke of York will continue not to undertake any public duties and is defending this case as a private citizen.”

The dramatic move comes hours after more than 150 military veterans wrote to the Queen to ask her to strip Andrew of his honorary military roles amid what they described as their “upset and anger”. The palace had said earlier on Thursday that it had no comment on their open letter.

It’s almost as if the whole system is archaic and impossible to justify. Why does he have a whole string of honorary military roles in the first place?

The veterans add in their letter, which was partly coordinated by the campaign group Republic: “Officers of the British armed forces must adhere to the very highest standards of probity, honesty and honourable conduct.

“These are standards which Prince Andrew has fallen well short of. It is hard not to see, when senior officers are reportedly describing him as ‘toxic’, that he has brought the services he is associated with into disrepute.

“We are therefore asking that you take immediate steps to strip Prince Andrew of all his military ranks and titles and, if necessary, that he be dishonourably discharged.”

Now that would be interesting.

She thought of it, therefore it’s true. Boy does that make fact-checking easy!

She couldn’t unsee “the connection” she made up in her own febrile brain. Well hey, I can play that game too. She posted this article at the height of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, so I can’t un-see the connection. It’s right there, staring me in the face!

Shall we take a look? It’s every bit as stupid and insinuating and jargon-ridden as you’d expect.

Re-centring white victimhood in the age of Black Lives Matter: a ‘gender critical’ project?

Self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ feminists have grown increasingly loud within the UK political space over recent years.

Sneering in the very first words. How dare we proclaim ourselves gender-critical feminists? What a nerve! We’re supposed to call ourselves evil transphobic cunts, obviously. And we’re “increasingly loud”…says a woman who probably also considers herself a feminist.

The impact of their rhetoric and political action has been and will continue to be devastating for trans people, from the halting of reforms to the Gender Recognition Act despite public support, to ever more intense levels of transphobic violence taking place online and offline.

In short we’re killing trans people with our rude self-proclaimed insistence on talking.

I explore the function of so-called ‘gender critical’ feminism as a reactionary response to anti-racist and decolonial campaigns which aims to both reclaim the centrality of white women as the ultimate victim in public debates, and to divert attention from calls to recognise and address the role of feminist movements in upholding systems of white supremacy and imperialism worldwide.

Blah blah blah. It’s all in the playbook.

“White” feminism on trial again.

Open Democracy adds its lashes to the dead horse.

“When the trans community is discussed in the British media, there is a particular word that crops up again and again,” said Niamh Simpson, a trans illustrator and community organiser from Oxford. “That word is ‘debate’.”

A trans illustrator? So he identifies as an illustrator but actually can’t draw a recognizable stick figure?

“Trans people cannot simply exist. We must justify our existence in the public arena – in a format that is inherently dehumanising because it assumes that a fundamental aspect of our personhood is up for discussion.”

Ha no. “Trans people can’t simply exist” because they have to be always telling us about themselves. Trans people are the last people who want to “simply exist” and get on with their lives in peace – they want the rest of us to devote all our attention to them.

Simpson was one of more than a dozen speakers who addressed a crowd of trans people and allies outside the BBC’s London headquarters on Saturday (8 January), protesting against the broadcaster’s “agenda of hate and discrimination”.

What about the trans agenda of hate and discrimination? The activist wing of trans people is not exactly cuddly or eager to persuade.

2021 was the deadliest year on record for trans people: at least 375 trans, non-binary or gender nonconforming people were murdered worldwide, most of them trans women or transfeminine people of colour. At least 125 of these murders took place in Brazil…

…among trans women who worked in the sex trade. 375 worldwide is not a huge number.

There are several more paragraphs of the same stale flat reheated sludge. It’s almost as if they have nothing to say beyond “oh poor us, pay more attention to us, ignore those bleeding women over there, oh poor us.”

People may eventually get bored with it.

Loathsome man.

He’s a Republican representative from Ohio.

Linda Blade on the Lia Thomas question:

The recent editorial in Swimming World Magazine defending the right of Lia Thomas (LT) to swim as a woman deserves a response.

Allow me to begin this critique with applause for author Lucas Draper (LD). As a female athlete who self-identifies as a man, LD has chosen the ethical pathway in competing in a much more difficult field with male swimmers rather than to be competing unfairly against fellow females while doping.

Unfortunately, in the manner typical of proponents of gender ideology, LD’s editorial comments deploy escalating levels of emotional gaslighting.

Facts and arguments don’t make their case, so emotional bludgeoning is all they have. Unfortunately it works.

Fourthly, there is an appeal to victimhood while victimizing others: “Lia Thomas experiences far more scrutiny over her physical form than I will ever have to deal with” and putting the focus on LT is “mean.” Also, Lia “does not deserve to be at the center of this issue.” Yes, of course LT is scrutinized! Because being biologically male in a female competition is not fair. Scrutiny by officials and the public is part of sports. It is not being “mean.” LT chooses to be in the spotlight.

He also chooses to compete against women half his size.

Contrary to what was presented to the NCAA back in 2011, all research to date indicates that medical intervention is completely inadequate in transforming a male body into the female design – anatomically or physiologically – as discussed in this review of the literature by Hilton and Lundberg.

Given the overwhelming scientific evidence now available showing that males will always maintain a physical advantage over females in sports involving strength, speed, power and reaction time, the NCAA must undertake a re-assessment of its policy ASAP!

No matter how much emotional blackmail is sent their way.

Things are not going all that well for Boris Johnson. Now that everyone has been discussing that “work party” for days he has admitted it was a booboo and “apologized” – if it can really be called apologizing when it doesn’t happen until it has been discussed into the ground and out the other side.

The prime minister says he went into the garden of Downing Street on 20 May 2020 to thank staff before going back into his office 25 minutes later.

He says in hindsight he should have sent everyone back inside.

“In hindsight” meaning “now that everybody is screaming at him and won’t shut up.”

He says he should have recognised that even if it could be seen as technically inside the guidance there would be millions who would not see it that way.

The PM ends his statement by offering his “heartfelt apologies” to the House and to those who were not able to see loved ones at the time.

Yes very heartfelt which is why it took him days and days to admit.

It doesn’t get much more absurd than this.

Who is Brian Piddick? Profile: Lib Dem Spokesperson on Home Affairs in House of Lords. Ran for Mayor of London 2008 & 2012.

He’s a politician. That’s what he does. Politicians engage with lots of people; that’s what they do. It’s the nature of the work: engaging with lots of people. Yet here he is complaining because lots of people are talking to him.

Maybe he identifies as a recluse?

Originally a comment by Artymorty on THIS is the culture war.

Latsot, you’ve really nailed it here. It’s all about narratives now. People want a tidy story to explain things, not the complicated, underivative truth. A tidy and familiar and comforting story. This is dangerous because sometimes the truth doesn’t have a precedent to model itself on; we can’t just rely on pattern recognition and narrative familiarity to figure out what’s real and true versus what’s illusory and untrue.

It’s pattern recognition and narrative familiarity that has led everyone to treat gender identity ideology like it’s just as simple as Gay Rights 2.0. It’s also what’s behind the cringeworthy line “my truth” that I hear all the time among certain people. What they’re saying is, I’ve made sense of something complex by making it comfortable and familiar and digestible to me, and that’s what truth means to me: comfort and safety.

It’s probably also behind the fact that the entertainment industry only wants to reboot and repackage old familiar “media properties” these days: they treat entertainment consumers (a creepy way to describe what are otherwise known as people) like they don’t have the energy to invest in entirely new stories — new ideas — anymore.

If we take it a step back and speculate about why this is happening now, I guess the primary culprit has to be information overload due to social media and the internet? We have access to everything and everyone all the time now, and social media algorithms have eroded our attention spans to the point that it feels too exhausting to sort the truth out, so we just seek comfort instead. It’s quite depressing.

More and more I feel like civilization can’t survive the Internet age unless we start formally teaching everyone how to manage our lives in the digital age. Maybe the Three Rs of elementary school should become four: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Reason(able thinking in the digital age).

Hottest on record:

Last year was New Zealand’s hottest year on record, according to the country’s National Institute of Water and Aeronautic Research (NIWA), and seven of the past nine years are among New Zealand’s warmest ever. The country’s steadily rising temperature brings increased risk of major floods, bushfires and storms.

And – surprise! – that’s not going to change.

The increases won’t end anytime soon without significant action on climate change, said Victoria University of Wellington’s Dr Nathanael Melia. “Every year we spin the roulette wheel of weather variability; however, like a casino, we have rigged the game, and the hothouse always wins in the end.”

…

In July 2021 heavy rain engorged the West Coast’s Buller River, accelerating its flow to 10 times its normal rate – the highest recorded in a New Zealand river since 1926. The resulting flood devastated the town of Westport. Many residents had to be evacuated after hundreds of houses were inundated, causing an estimated NZ$132m in damage. Development West Coast’s chief executive, Heath Milne, expects the rebuild to take up to two years.

Meanwhile in the Pacific Northwest a fire destroyed a British Columbia town. Tomorrow is today. Next year is tomorrow.

They what?

Washington state now appears to allow minors to undergo life-changing gender reassignment surgery without parental consent.

Under a new law, health insurers must cover “gender-affirming” care, including surgical treatments that were previously denied coverage. Democrats rejected a proposal to apply the new law to patients over 18 years old.

So young Billy age 13 can get his penis lopped off and present his parents with a fait accompli? Seems a bit rash.

Up until this law, gender reassignment surgery and other procedures like facial reconstruction or laser hair removal were considered cosmetic by health insurance companies. Due to its classification as cosmetic, health insurers did not usually cover the procedures, even when doctors medically recommended them.

If only it were just “cosmetic.”

The source self-identifies as “conservative talk radio” but…sometimes the other team has its head up its ass.

Tennis coach Judy Murray is not convinced that trans women should compete against women.

[Murray] told Radio Times magazine: “It could be really off-putting to female athletes to feel you could train for years to get to whatever level and then be knocked out or beaten by someone born with a physical strength advantage.”

To say the least. I would use words stronger than “off-putting,” myself.

“I don’t know enough about it and it’s incredibly complex but it’s important there’s a lot of research into creating a fair solution. Where there are clear physical advantages, (for) governing bodies involved in creating the rules about the point at which there is too much of a disadvantage, it’s really important they get that right.”

I don’t think it’s all that complex. I think it’s just obvious that men shouldn’t do it, at all, ever, no matter how intensely they feel “like women.” They have the male bodies. They shouldn’t use them in that way.

That reply is garnering a lot of laughter. Not a tennis coach’s area of expertise? Really?

Well, let’s think about it.

Is it controversial to say that white people and black people have distinct but overlapping experiences of oppression, or is that standard intersectional anti-racism?

I suppose one answer is that it’s not exactly controversial to say that, because hardly anyone does say it, so there’s no fuel for controversy. But if white people did say that? A lot, and noisily, and with menaces and insults? Yes I think we can surmise that would be controversial.

Sorry we missed your call, we were busy playing Pokémon.

Two Los Angeles police officers were fired for chasing Pokémon rather than fleeing robbers, court documents show.

So the robbers caught them?

No no don’t be silly, the BBC means they were chasing Pokémon rather than chasing fleeing robbers.

The pair were parked nearby when a radio call came in for officers to respond to a shop robbery.

But a review of their in-car camera footage showed they had been playing Pokémon Go and chose to pursue a nearby Snorlax – a relatively rare catch – instead of providing back-up.

Air Traffic Control to pilot: I wish I could deal with your questions but I can’t right now, there’s a Snorlax down the block.

Eric Trump, Constitutional scholar.

Eric Trump has called New York Attorney General Letitia James the “most unethical prosecutor in the history of the United States” while saying her office’s investigation[s] into his father’s business practices are unconstitutional.

No, hon. He’s not president any more. He’s just a shameless crook, and the law can touch him.

Donald Trump’s son made the remarks on Monday during an appearance on Sean Hannity‘s Fox News show more than a week after it was revealed James had subpoenaed two of the former president’s adult children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, as part of the inquiry.

Chronologically adult. Intellectually, morally, psychologically, not so much.

James’ office is looking into allegations Donald Trump fraudulently inflated the value of assets to get better loans from banks and undervalued them to reduce his tax bills. James began the investigation after Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress in 2019.

It’s her job.

“You have Letitia James out there, probably the most unethical prosecutor in the history of the United States, who literally said on video ‘I’m going to go into office every single day and I’m going to sue Trump and then I’m going to go home,'” Eric Trump said.

We’re all really fascinated to hear what Eric Trump thinks is unethical.

“She ran on the campaign promise of suing my father because she didn’t believe in his political party, because she didn’t like us, because the people of Washington, D.C. told her to do that. It violates the Constitution, it’s unethical, it’s wrong.”

That might be a little more credible if Trump were in fact not a crook, but since this is the real world and not a fantasy, it’s not.

In December 2021, Donald Trump sued James while arguing that the inquiry violates his constitutional rights.

“The investigations commenced by James are in no way connected to legitimate law enforcement goals, but rather, are merely a thinly-veiled effort to publicly malign Trump and his associates,” the lawsuit filed in New York court reads.

“Her mission is guided solely by political animus and a desire to harass, intimidate, and retaliate against a private citizen who she views as a political opponent. James has deprived, and will continue to deprive, Plaintiffs of their rights under federal law, state law and common law by virtue of her callous acts.”

Goodness. That doesn’t sound like lawyer-speak, it sounds like Trump-speak. I guess he doesn’t let his lawyers re-write his rage blurts. “Callous” is a nice touch – what, she’s supposed to have sympathy for the pack of filthy rich crooks?

I don’t even recognize this world.

Who are these people they’re talking about? Nobody I know.

Originally a comment by latsot on “Mass formation psychosis”.

Ah that word narrative – be very cautious around anyone telling you something is a “narrative” when it bears no resemblance to a story. It’s a favorite of bullshitters.

That’s partly because to many, many people ‘narrative’ is the same thing as ‘evidence’. I mean this in the most literal sense; I come across many people, especially on social media, who seem to sincerely believe that being able to tell a story about something – even if that story doesn’t really seem to explain the facts – is the same as providing huge great chunks of evidence of something being true.

In fact, they feel it gives them license to dismiss evidence, because to them, that evidence belongs to a different story so just isn’t valid. They’re happy to cite ‘evidence’ when it appears superficially to support their story but they’re unable or unwilling to distinguish between what is evidence and what is not.

So they get to tell their lovely story and cite any willy-nilly thing as evidence because the story is always so meandering and vague. And they also get to dismiss our evidence because they believe it belongs in another, nastier story they want nothing to do with.

Meanwhile, we are explaining what our evidence says and why it says what it says (and doesn’t say) and it’s being entirely ignored.

This is the culture war.

We’ve only spelled out our goals eleventy billion times.

Policy goals – not allowing trans ideology to erode women’s rights and women’s prizes, set-asides, honors and the like. I think we’ve been very clear and very forthcoming about it. Where’s he been?

The replies are uniformly nuts.

“the genocidal” – yes sure, plus we’re vampires and that thing from Alien.

More brazen by the day.

Glinner tells us which women missed out because a man won Best Actress.