A couple of thoughts related to the police murder of George Floyd and the protests in response:

Both women are former prosecutors.

Originally a comment by Seth on As a fact not as a statement.

This is the real Doublespeak, of course; not a statement meant to instill contradictory beliefs in the speaker’s mind and thus induce a fugue of passive acceptance of Big Brother, but rather an obvious smokescreen meant to gaslight anyone who takes the plain reading seriously. I foresaw this excuse immediately when I glanced at your previous post. The interpretation being in this case that Trump is a very poor and disorganized speaker who obviously meant that when looting (or really any kind of civil disobedience) occurs, violence often follows (by and upon the looters/disobeyers themselves, obviously), and the government should step in to prevent the looters/disobeyers from harming one another. Of course, even this interpretation is fascist and implicitly racist, not to mention supremely insulting to Trump besides, but it’s rather different from an explicit threat to unleash the violence of the state on peaceful protesters, and this interpretive gap is precisely large enough to drive trollish outrage which Trump’s people will now take.

The cycle is quite simple, and doubtless obvious to you, but it bears spelling out explicitly: Say something horrendous but which could, when interpreted very generously, be taken not-quite-as-offensively; dare anyone to take offence; scream to high heaven how you’re being persecuted and misconstrued when offence is indeed taken; claim persecution and victimhood; feel smugly superior; repeat.

They will do this every time. And every time you do not give them the benefit of every doubt, every time you do not extend them the most generous interpretation imaginable, they will insist it’s because you’re an insipid knave who has had it out for them from the start and they shouldn’t have to listen to the likes of you.

Ah now comes the backtrack.

Time stamp is 11:20. He was scheduled to do a press conference starting at 11.

What does “It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement” mean? Was he trying to say he was describing what happens as opposed to making a threat? Poor confused wannabe fascist.

Anyway – do we believe his afterthought?

No.

Maybe casual libel isn’t such a good idea after all.

Also in the Post’s live updates:

Hours after Twitter said a tweet by President Trump violated its rules for glorifying violence, the White House posted his same comments about the unrest in Minneapolis on its official account Friday morning.

“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen,” the White House tweet said, quoting Trump’s words referring to the man who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck. “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

The White House did that, so it’s no longer the personal murderous outburst of Donald Trump, it’s an official murderous outburst from the Trump administration. The executive branch of our government is telling us it will murder us on sight for crimes against property.

Reichstag fire.

More on that arrest of the CNN reporter and crew as they were reporting:

CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez and his camera crew were arrested on air early Friday as they reported on the protests.

A Minnesota State Police officer said the journalists were arrested because they were told to move and didn’t, according to CNN. Jimenez is seen and heard on camera before his arrest identifying himself and his crew as reporters and saying, “We’re getting out of your way” and “put us back where you want us. Just let us know.”

…

The arrest, which happened during CNN’s “New Day,” shocked hosts Alysin Camerota and John Berman. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Berman said.

…

CNN political reporter Abby Phillip noted that her other colleague on the scene, who is white, was not arrested.

“He just reported that police approached him, asked him who he was with, he said CNN,” Phillip said via Twitter. “And they say “ok, you’re good.” This is minutes after Omar, who is black and Latino, was arrested nearby.”

Totally not connected, I’m sure. (His name is calculated to piss Trump off, isn’t it. Omar Jiminez – hoo boy. Might as well be named Barack Obama.)

Do we really have to soften Trump’s homicidal fascist screams of rage even now, when he’s literally saying he’s going to have people shot in the street?

Washington Post headline:

CNN crew arrested as fires rage in Minneapolis; Trump calls protesters ‘THUGS,’ suggests looting will lead to ‘shooting’

He didn’t “suggest”! He flat-out said it! His words: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” How is that in any way a “suggestion”? It’s a flat unqualified announcement. He announced his intention to have people murdered for property crimes.

President Trump called the protesters “THUGS,” while suggesting military intervention and warning in a tweet that there could be additional violence if the chaos continued. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” the president wrote. Trump’s tweet was later flagged by Twitter for “glorifying violence.”

Again – he didn’t “warn” and he didn’t “suggest.” He said. He didn’t say “if,” he said “when.”

A CNN crew was arrested early Friday while reporting on the protests in Minnesota. CNN said in a statement that the three journalists were arrested “for doing their jobs, despite identifying themselves.” Correspondent Omar Jimenez was released from custody and back on the air a short time later.

For now.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) condemned Trump for tweets that he said have contributed to the “angry cycle” of violence in Minneapolis. “Calling people thugs and calling on people to get shot stems from the same sort of attitude that resulted in the death of George Floyd,” Ellison said on “CBS This Morning.”

And they weren’t “suggestions.”

And there’s this.

Very Reichstag fire today.

But last night Trump finally did push it hard enough that Twitter semi-removed one of his tweets. They’ve veiled it behind the message

This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible. Learn more

and there’s a view button next to it.

What does it say? Oh nothing much, just that he wants “the Military” to shoot people who are “looting” in Minneapolis.

….These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!

Yes he really cares passionately about the memory of George Floyd.

Nah, he just wants to order “the Military” to shoot black people.

He preceded the “shooting starts” tweet with another hello this is literal fascism one:

Another day another horror show.

Wisdom:

Such a good idea to politicize wearing masks during a lethal pandemic.

Trump reading from the words written down on the paper in front of him.

He sounds both congested and slobbery, as if he had both snot and spit surging out of control in his nose and mouth and throat. It’s gross.

He is barely able to read. He has to guide himself down the page with his hands. He ad libs while looking at the camera, telegraphing the fact that he’s ad libbing, which looks pretty dopy given how fiercely he has to stare at the script in order to read it. He thought “shadow” and “ban” were two of the things Twitter is doing to stifle his freespeech.

He spells the “fact” in “fact check” for us, because he was so congested and slobbery when he read it.

He considers it “censorship” to fact check.

The Associated Press/The Guardian does a crap job of reporting on the Title IX ruling.

A subhead:

Ruling calls policy a violation of civil rights of ‘female athletes’

What’s with the scare quotes? Have we decided female athletes don’t exist now? Are they all an illusion? Are they a product of lies and public relations?

Connecticut’s policy allowing transgender girls to compete as girls in high school sports violates the civil rights of athletes who have always identified as female, the US Education Department has determined in a decision that could force the state to change course to keep federal funding and influence others to do the same.

It’s interesting how the boys who claim to be girls are called transgender girls, no scare quotes, while girls are called “athletes who have always identified as female.” How insulting is that? And how fantasy-privileging, and reality-scorning? Let’s get this straight. It’s the boys who are claiming to be something they are not, and it’s the girls who are what they are as well as what they say they are. Furthermore, it’s the boys who have a large physical advantage over the girls, not the other way around. It’s also journalistically bizarre that everyone simply assumes that the boys really do “identify as” girls as opposed to pretending to for a few years in order to win races and maybe athletic scholarships.

A letter from the department’s civil rights office, a copy of which was obtained Thursday by the Associated Press, came in response to a complaint filed last year by several cisgender female track athletes who argued that two transgender female runners had an unfair physical advantage.

Again. They’re not “cisgender female track athletes,” they’re just female track athletes. They don’t need an extra label to denote that they’re not lying or pretending or fantasizing about being female, and it’s insulting to slap that label on them.

“All that today’s finding represents is yet another attack from the Trump administration on transgender students,” said Chase Strangio, who leads transgender justice initiatives for the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT and HIV Project.

It’s not an attack. Not letting boys who say they are girls compete on the girls’ team is not attacking those boys – they can compete on the boys’ team. The attack is from the other direction: letting boys who say they “identify as” girls compete against girls attacks the right of girls to fair competition. It would be nice if all these putative progressives gave a damn about that.

“Trans students belong in our schools, including on sports teams, and we aren’t backing down from this fight,” Strangio said.

Nobody is trying to keep trans students out of schools or off sports teams.

It still amazes me how suddenly and swiftly women’s rights stopped mattering.

Trump has duly staged his tantrum disguised as an “executive order.”

President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order aimed at limiting the broad legal protections enjoyed by social media companies, just two days after Trump tore into Twitter for fact-checking two of the president’s tweets.

…

Legal observers described the action as “political theater,” arguing that the order does not change existing federal law and will have no bearing on federal courts.

The president’s latest confrontation with Twitter was set off after the tech company placed fact-checking warnings on two of his tweets that claimed, without evidence, that casting ballots by mail allows for voter fraud.

See? There’s that “without evidence” signal again, which is the ass-covering way of saying he lied.

Trump lashed out at Twitter, comparing the fact-checking labels to censorship and accusing social media giant of stifling conservative voices, though the president did not provide any examples to back up that claim.

That’s another one of those “he lied” euphemisms. Fact-checking of course is not censorship, it’s fact-checking. Trump visibly makes shit up constantly; he does it while we watch him.

Legal experts greeted the order with heavy skepticism, saying, [in the absence of] a new law passed by Congress, the order would not be legally binding.

“It flies in the face of 25 years of judicial precedent, that has been federal precedent in almost every circuit court,” said Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University School of Law in New York. “It’s not the role of the president to interpret federal law.”

And in his case, how could he if he wanted to? He doesn’t know anything about anything, so how could he interpret federal law?

This just in –

A Connecticut policy that allows transgender athletes to compete in girls sports violates the civil rights of female athletes, the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has ruled.

The ruling, which was obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, comes in response to a complaint filed last year by several female track athletes, who argued that two transgender runners who were identified as male at birth had an unfair physical advantage.

The office said in a 45-page letter that it may seek to withhold federal funding over the policy, which allows transgender athletes to participate as the gender with which they identify. It said the policy is a violation of Title IX, the federal civil rights law that guarantees equal education opportunities for women, including in athletics.

As it obviously does. It’s just verbal magic to pretend it doesn’t – the verbal magic of calling boys “trans girls” so that they can compete against girls and thus be almost guaranteed to win.

It has “denied female student-athletes athletic benefits and opportunities, including advancing to the finals in events, higher level competitions, awards, medals, recognition, and the possibility of greater visibility to colleges and other benefits,” according to the letter, which is dated May 15.

The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which oversees scholastic sports in the state, has said its policy is designed to comply with the state’s law barring schools from discriminating against transgender students. A call seeking comment was left Thursday with CIAC.

Trans students shouldn’t, obviously, be bullied or persecuted, but that doesn’t mean they have to be endorsed as the sex they claim they are but physically speaking are not. Feelings in the head like “identifying as” something can’t really be subjects of anti-discrimination law, because they’re too nebulous and unfalsifiable and personal.

The dispute, which is already the subject of a federal lawsuit, centers on two transgender sprinters, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, who have frequently outperformed their competitors, winning a combined 15 girls state indoor or outdoor championship races since 2017, according to the lawsuit.

Which is a combined 15 wins that have been stolen from girls.

Oh good, an academic article on “Philosophical Problems With the Gender-Critical Feminist Argument Against Trans Inclusion.” At least it won’t be stuffed full of shouty accusations and libels.

But…

The proposed reforms aim to replace the current medicalized process of gender recognition with one based on self-identification and self-declaration. The most prominent voice opposing the reforms was raised under the banner of gender-critical feminism. Academics from various disciplines, including philosophy and law, have lent their voices to the gender-critical project. In general, gender-critical feminism advocates reserving women’s spaces for cis women.

That’s in the first paragraph, and already I’m de-motivated to keep going, because already we’re in a world of assumptions that I refuse to assume, that I in fact reject entirely. Gender-critical feminism advocates reserving women’s spaces for women, which is the whole point of “women’s spaces” in the first place. I refuse to be called a “cis woman,” I refuse to call women “cis women,” I don’t agree that “trans women” are just another set of women, like French women and Kenyan women, tall women and short women, poor women and rich women. The academic philosopher who wrote this piece takes the opposite view so he will be wording everything in that taking it for granted way…so what’s the point in reading more?

Others have been more willing to take the trouble than I am.

Does the Trump administration really want to go on the record saying social media outlets can’t fact-check Trump’s lies?

Apparently it does, yes, however fatuous that may be.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he stands by the company’s decision to fact-check two tweets by President Donald Trump, even as it has attracted intense criticism by Trump and his allies.

News outlets do that already. They add “without evidence” to their reporting on Trump’s lies. That’s not nearly as forthright and clear as I would like, but it’s not nothing.

The statement comes as the White House is preparing an executive order that would target social media companies for alleged bias in their content moderation strategies.

Brazen, isn’t it. The reason there is a need for fact-checking on things Trump says is because he lies so floridly and often and shamelessly, and a president’s doing that is very bad for the country and the world in a host of ways, but because he is the president he gets to claim that pointing out his lies is “bias.” But there is no one on The Other Team who lies as floridly and often and shamelessly as Trump; it’s not bias, it’s just the reality of who is the King Kong of Liars here. But they get to call it bias…which is simply grotesque.

In a series of Tweets late Wednesday, Dorsey addressed the firestorm created by the company’s decision to label Trump’s tweets with a fact-check for the first time. Twitter on Tuesday  added a link under two of Trump’s tweets about mail-in ballots that said, “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” When clicked, the links directed users to a page that said, in part, “Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to ‘a Rigged Election.’ However, fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.”

We mere civilians may not use Twitter to mess with elections…but Trump, who is in a position to do far more damage to US elections than anyone else on the planet, may. But he gets a fact-check. And he wants to make that illegal. No fact checking allowed!

Dorsey’s statement came shortly after the White House said Trump would sign an executive order about social media companies on Thursday. According to a draft of the order obtained by CNBC, Trump would direct the Federal Communications Commission to propose and clarify regulations of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It would also encourage the Federal Trade Commission to take action against companies engaging in “deceptive” acts of communication. The working draft of the order cites Twitter by name.

…

Trump railed against Twitter for its initial decision to label his tweets, saying the company was “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

And Trump think only Trump gets to do that.

Pliny comments:

Padma Lakshmi is on it:

Damn right.

Let’s read that op ed from October 2017:

Over this past summer, I met with virtually every homeowner who lives directly along Lake Calhoun, plus another couple hundred neighbors who live within a few blocks. Why? To listen to what they had to say about the renaming of Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska. The results were surprising.

About 20 percent of the people I met told me that they feel that the name Calhoun is problematic and that they’d like to see a “more inclusive” name.

Surprisingly, they feel that there is nothing inclusive about the name “Bde Maka Ska.” They are upset that American Indian activists seem to have hijacked the discussion and that public officials have not made a bigger effort (and process) to enroll the entire community in a discussion about what alternative names are “more inclusive” than Lake Calhoun.

These people raised a good question: What exactly have the Dakota Indians done that is a positive contribution to all Minnesotans? What is the heroism or accomplishment that we are recognizing in order to justify renaming the lake to Bde Maka Ska? Unfortunately, nobody had any answers.

Is that the criterion for place names? They have to be named after people who have made a positive contribution to everyone in the state where the to-be-named place is? Well then what contribution did the number 7 make to the people of Washington state? I live on one of several 7th Avenues in Seattle and I would like to know. There are of course also questions about the other numbers, which run up into the 200s if you follow them out into the burbs.

Fortunately, I also met eight people who specifically supported the name Bde Maka Ska. This was an interesting group. With the exception of one person, they were angry at the “white establishment” and felt that we Minnesotans need to atone for history’s wrongdoings. Ironically, none of them was able to provide specifics of what exactly we needed to atone for, other than “Calhoun was racist and we stole all of this land from the Indians.”

He does sound like a charmer, doesn’t he.

In Morocco, on the other hand, The Authorities can tell everyone what they can say.

Police have opened a preliminary investigation into the criminal acts attributed to the Moroccan actor, Rafik Boubker, after placing him in custody this evening. The procedure follows the decision of the public prosecutor of Casablanca’s Court of First Instance. 

The General Directorate for National Security (DGSN) said in a statement that it had “monitored digital content published on social media, in which the suspect appears in an abnormal condition, insulting the Islamic religion and violating the reverence for acts of worship.”

The DGSN added that it has received several complaints from citizens on the matter which prompted them to open a judicial investigation. Security services aim to uncover the full circumstances of the criminal act and identify those involved in recording and sharing the video.

Why not just let the all-powerful god deal with it?

Boubker appeared in a live video on Instagram on Monday insulting the Islamic religion, violating reverence for acts of worship, and offending imams. “We are at the mosque since bars are closed because of the lockdown. The bar of the mosque,” said Boubker in the video. He then mockingly told people “to make their ablution with wine and perform prayers with whiskey.”

Aaand who gives a fuck? Really. It sounds so very trivial.