So Trump doesn’t know where Kansas City is. I’m sure lots of people don’t, and the name does suggest that it’s in Kansas, but still, a president should know things like that. It’s not a random small town, it’s an important city in the Midwest or West or Plains States or whatever you want to call it – in the Heartland, if you like. It has a lot of cultural chops. Presidents should have a decent knowledge of US geography.

But does it really matter? Yes.

But here’s why Trump doesn’t get a pass. Because he and his administration have made a HUGE point of picking out the slip-ups of past politicians and questioning people over their supposed lack of knowledge of geography.

He talked about Obama’s flubs, he talked about Hillary Clinton’s purported imminent collapse, he talks about Biden’s flubs.

At a campaign rally in November 2019, Trump said this of Biden:

“They have him all freaked out because he makes a mistake every time he speaks. I can just see these handlers because they’re handlers like they use on horses. ‘Alright, get him off now, he’s been up there long enough!’ So they’re screaming, ‘Get off! Get off! Sleepy Joe, get off the stage! Please! Please, Joe, you’re doing fine. Joe, you’re doing fine. You’re doing fine.'”

And at a campaign rally in Milwaukee just last month, Trump again mocked Biden for forgetting which state he was speaking in; “When you do that, you can’t really recover,” Trump concluded.

And then…

Trump’s own Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly challenged an NPR reporter to find Ukraine on a blank map after she asked him some questions regarding the President’s interactions with the country.

And she found it at once, so since then he’s been lying about it. (I wasn’t there. I didn’t see her find it. But come on – she has advanced degrees in international relations. It’s not like trying to locate a particular city on a blank map, or even one of the Baltic countries. She says she pointed it out at once and I believe her.)

The reason stuff like Trump’s Kansas flub can’t be totally ignored is because if the shoe [were] on the other foot — and it has been! — we know that Trump not only doesn’t ignore it, but seeks to make the flub some sort of sign of either declining mental ability or a lack of intelligence.

When he’s always the stupidest person in the room.

Morning Star reports on the WPUK meeting on Saturday:

Woman’s Place UK (WPUK) know better than most how challenging it can be, simply being able to gather together to discuss women’s rights. Many of their meetings have suffered intimidation, threats of violence, even a bomb scare.

A group of around 30 protesters did make a brief appearance as delegates arrived, claiming that the organisers were trans-exclusionary.

How dare women gather to talk about women’s rights.

In the packed hall, Pragna Patel, co-founder of Southall Black Sisters, helped kick-start the day, telling the crowd: “What a hopeful moment in history we have reached as feminists — and I know you’re thinking ‘what is she talking about’?”

Her optimism sprang, she went on, “from the fact that, all over the world, women are leading an unmistakably secular resistance against tyranny, misogyny and oppression. There is a new kind of feminism stirring in the air … women are on the rise, demanding a new kind of feminist citizenship, based not on identity but political values.

“It is exciting because it feels different … waves of ordinary, marginalised and poor women are rising up to demand economic equality and justice, and to prevent their leaders from ripping up well-crafted constitutions born out of long and painful struggles for freedom.”

On the minus side, said Patel, “we haven’t yet found a way of getting rid of the cul-de-sac of identity politics [which] muzzles voices of dissent from within. If we are not careful, we will find ourselves sliding towards regressive politics, that reinvigorates patriarchy and inequality whilst appearing to be progressive.”

This is especially true, true x a million, when the “identity” in question is based on nothing but a feeling, and is deployed to appropriate the materially real identity of marginalized people, i.e. women.

Joanna Cherry, QC and SNP MP for Edinburgh South West, praised “the bravery of people at UCL in holding this conference — though it is ludicrous that it requires bravery.”

…

She expressed “sadness about the way in which the LGBT+ movement has become fragmented over a resistance to talking about the true meaning of equal rights.

“I really believe that women’s rights are human rights, and I strongly believe in equal rights for everyone, and of course that includes trans people. But it has never before been part of the movement for equal rights that one group’s trumps another’s.”

Naturally enough, since a movement for equal rights that claims one group’s rights trump another’s is not a movement for equal rights. Not treating Xs as inferiors does not take away anyone’s rights; there is no such right as the right to treat Xs as inferiors. It all hinges on how one defines rights.

Maya Forstater, who lost her job at a think tank after tweeting about the difference between sex and gender identity, said: “My mother’s generation found the words to talk about the unfairness between the way that men and women are treated in society.

But our daughters are being told that it is unkind and exclusionary to even state the material reality that women are female, that being a woman is not a feeling, that being a woman is not a costume; it is not something you can identify out of, or identify into.”

…

Journalist and campaigner Julie Bindel addressed particularly younger women at the event, “for whom things are hellish right now, but also full of possibilities.

…

This was not a revival per se, she said: “We have always had a women’s movement. But we’ve seen that, in the past couple of decades, young women who would describe themselves as feminists got dragged into the neoliberal politics of the individual, where they dismiss any necessity of collectivism, where they would not have it that focusing on ridiculous, meaningless identities would get them absolutely nowhere.

Identity politics, without the politics, is what we’ve got now.”

Read the whole thing.

Yes but also a bit of no.

I suppose it’s probably true that he thinks “the base will love this” with every insult, but I also think he does it because he likes it, and that that’s who he is. He’s a profoundly nasty man, one who lashes out in rage at anybody who annoys him, no matter how close or loyal. Nastiness aka cruelty is at the core of his being, and one of his favorite activities.

It does appeal to the base, though, and how depressing is that? A hefty fraction of the population is thrilled and amused and energized by deliberate hostile cruelty and bullying from a gilded real estate fraud who frauded his way into the presidency.

At any rate – I certainly agree with Walter Shaub that the ethics part is far from secondary. Trump is an actively bad human being, and that can’t possibly be secondary.

It’s all about the coastal elites. Never mind soaring inequality, never mind low wages and de-unionization and crumbling schools, none of that matters, the real issue is coastal elites who don’t paint names on their barns. Well not names exactly; one name. But let’s pretend we mean names in general.

Would Nick Zerwas have said the same about, say, a grandchild of sharecroppers who painted OBAMA on the roof of a barn?

Why yes, this is what we’ve been saying all along.

I love having “transitioned to female” but oh gee I do miss the benefits of male privilege in business/career matters. My technology clients pay attention to me when I use my dudely real name and gosh darn it I miss that.

It’s so unfair that I have to think about this!

/sarcasm

Image via Lady Mondegreen

More video of men preventing women from talking.

At the Seattle Public Library last night:

Men shouting so that women can’t speak. New boss same as the old boss.

“Happy Brexit Day”

Aka we hate you and think we now have licence to persecute and shame you.

BBC Norfolk:

“Happy Brexit Day” notices telling residents “we do not tolerate” people speaking languages other than English have been posted at a block of flats.

Who’s we, one wonders. Whatever damn fool wrote that notice is not the “we” of everyone living in that block of flats.

A resident of Winchester Tower in Norwich first spotted them at 06:00 GMT on Friday, as first reported in the Eastern Daily Press.

The man, who does not want to be named, has reported the signs – which he said were on every floor – to the police.

Full text:

As we finally have our great country back we feel there is one rule that needs to be made clear to Winchester Tower residents.

We do not tolerate people speaking other languages than English in the flats.

We are now our own country again and the Queens English is the spoken tongue here.

If you do want to speak whatever is the mother tongue of the country you came from then we suggest you return to that place and return your flat to the council so they can let British people live here and we can return to what was normality before you infected this once great island.

Its a simple choice obey the rule of the majority or leave.

You won’t have long till our government will implement rules that will put British first. So, best evolve or leave.

God save the Queen, her government and all true patriots.

I think “we can return to what was normality before you infected this once great island” is a particularly striking detail.

Originally a comment by Papito on “Morality” sounds better than “submit or else.”

I was idly contemplating these themes this morning as I walked down to the greengrocer for limes. I passed by the house of one of my daughter’s friends, whose parents had pulled her out of her very progressive school for a more traditional school that didn’t impress me very much, with the goal of later attending a school my son found utterly dehumanizing. I like the girl, and her parents as well, but why they would make such a choice didn’t really compute for me until I remembered that they are practicing Catholics (as opposed to cultural Catholics or recovering Catholics, no offense intended please). The doctrine of Catholicism (and most other varieties of Christianity) differs very much from the ethos of humanism in that it’s a zero-sum game. The roles of people, and the possible outcomes of people, have already been determined. What is a sin, and how one may be forgiven for it, is already written. In a sense, the only free will people have is to either comply or not comply with the rules laid down by God. For humanists, or secularists, the game is open-ended: we create the world, and what the world may become is yet undetermined. We have the freedom to determine who we will become and what that will mean. Education is, for the progressive, about the student creating herself, and possibly becoming something entirely new. For the traditional, it is about the student being trained to comply with a limited set of rules and roles. Freedom means something entirely different in the two cases.

To bring this back to Barr, we can understand how this man can violate every ethical guideline for his professional behavior, and yet believe that he is the one standing for morality, if we consider that he is constitutionally unable to understand human freedom. For a man like him, any deviation from his set of assumed strictures on human behavior must be considered sinful. There can be nothing new that is not of the devil. He seeks the ultimate end of Republicanism in an imperial presidency so that sinful people will not be allowed to determine their future collectively, but will instead be forced to return to the past. Domination and punishment are good for the souls of children and countries alike.

CNN is harsher than the Post.

The Department of Justice revealed in a court filing late Friday that it has two dozen emails related to the President Donald Trump’s involvement in the withholding of millions in security assistance to Ukraine — a disclosure that came just hours after the Senate voted against subpoenaing additional documents and witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial, paving the way for his acquittal.

The filing, released near midnight Friday, marks the first official acknowledgment from the Trump administration that emails about the President’s thinking related to the aid exist, and that he was directly involved in asking about and deciding on the aid as early as June. The administration is still blocking those emails from the public and has successfully kept them from Congress.

The first official acknowledgement, and it comes after the vote to cover it all up. The 49 to 51 vote, with all but two Republicans voting to hide the criminal self-serving traitorous actions of the lying self-serving criminal Donald Trump. The Republicans have decided to be the party of selfish greedy criminals, which seems a tad cynical.

Oh is that so.

Hours after the Senate voted against seeking new evidence in the impeachment case against President Trump, the administration acknowledged in a midnight court filing Friday the existence of two dozen emails that reveal the president’s thinking about withholding military aid to Ukraine.

Was there a “neener neener” attached?

The Department of Justice filed a response to a lawsuit seeking access to unredacted copies of those communications. Heather Walsh, a lawyer for the Office of Management and Budget, wrote to the court that 24 of those emails were protected under “presidential privilege.”

“Specifically, the documents in this category are emails that reflect communications by either the President, the Vice President, or the President’s immediate advisors regarding Presidential decision-making about the scope, duration, and purpose of the hold on military assistance to Ukraine,” Walsh wrote.

Yes, but in the case of this president, that doesn’t mean normal decision-making and discussion of same. That’s the problem. In the case of this president it’s about abuse of power, extortion, treating an ally like an enemy and an enemy like an ally, and similar batshit-crazy criminal goings-on. We can’t just fall back in awe and reverence because it’s Communications By The President.

Heavily blacked out versions of the emails were released in two batches in December in response to a lawsuit filed by the Center for Public Integrity. The filing Friday asked the court to deny the organization’s request for unredacted copies.

“Please continue to hide this material, because Mister Trump doesn’t want to be exposed as a criminal and a traitor.”

More from #WomensLib2020:

That’s Pragna in that photo on the right.

There was a Women’s Party UK event today at University College London aka UCL.

There were also people protesting the event – not godbothering fanatics who think their god ordained that women should be subordinate and submissive, but genderbothering fanatics who think women should shut up and let men who say they are women do all the talking.

It seems only yesterday that women were allowed to meet and talk and organize around women’s rights and women’s concerns without others on the left protesting this suspicious activity.

Sweet summer child there on the right – no, trans lib is not women’s lib. It’s really not. Trans lib is women’s silencing.

Originally a comment by iknklast on “Militant secularists” again.

What values exactly, is there some secularist tome I can refer to

Barr probably knows, but assumes his audience doesn’t, or that they agree with him, that the only value they are really concerned about is the value of freedom to make up your own mind about god. The freedom to send your children to school without being converted to a believe they find unacceptable.

Barr believes that what secularists want is like what Christians want – to send their children to school to have their beliefs reinforced, and to convert all the other little kids to their beliefs. Some secularists probably want this, but on the whole, we want our kids taught to think, how to read, how to write and do math, and in general become educated, not brainwashed.

There is a lot of projection in this. The Evangelical Christians want unencumbered access to other people’s kids. They assume that is what the secularists want. They are afraid someone is coming for their kids because they are ‘coming for’ other people’s kids.

In short, the only value at stake here is belief in the god that Barr believes in. That is for so many Christians the true morality. Believing in God, worshiping God, submitting to God, becoming a “servant” to God. And making everyone else do the same.

But if they use the words “moral” and “values”, it sounds better than “submit or else”. They never actually have to specify those morals because everyone else will fill in what they think morality is. And they can see that morality in Trump because he is willing to force everyone to submit. That’s the only moral they really care about; all the rest are window dressing designed for control. Control people’s sex and diet, and you have them in your control. Mostly.

I hate quoting National Review…

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said earlier this week that she would only nominate a Secretary of Education who was pre-screened by a “young transgender person” in order to ensure that her pick would be “committed to creating a welcoming environment, a safe environment, and a full educational curriculum for everyone.”

Wellllll…except for women of course. But that’s ok, women are such a tiny minority compared to transgender persons.

Speaking Sunday at a townhall in Iowa, Warren responded to a question about how to address a lack of LGBTQ history and sexual education in public schools.

That’s a bad question in the first place. L and G are not the same as T, and most of their issues are different, and some of their rights are in tensions. Some of us think lesbians get to decide for themselves who their sex/romance partners will be, but some transgender persons think lesbians must have sex/romance with men who identify as lesbians. That’s a conflict.

“It starts with a Secretary of Education who has a lot to do with where we spend our money, with what gets advanced in our public schools, with what the standards are,” she replied.

The Massachusetts Democrat went on to explain that any candidate for the position first had to be a former public-school teacher, and then had to go through an interview conducted by a young transgender person Warren had met on the campaign trail who was worried about the lack of a “welcoming community” in public schools.

No. We don’t want to put schoolchildren in charge of Cabinet hiring, not even a small fraction of Cabinet Hiring. We’ve seen more than enough of that kind of thing from Don the Disgusting and we don’t want new instances of it.

Warren has released several plans highlighting her agenda to promote transgender talking points. A recent plan detailing how to restore “Integrity and Competence to Government after Trump” included a commitment to have at least half of Warren’s Cabinet be filled by “women and non-binary people.”

Again – no. “Non-binary people” can just mean men who call themselves non-binary so they can get that job in Warren’s Cabinet. No, a man who calls himself non-binary is not the same kind of thing as a woman, and hiring one doesn’t up the stats on hiring women. No.

In October, Warren released her criminal justice reform platform, which included an end to the “Trump Administration’s dangerous policy” of jailing prisoners based on their biological sex…

What’s genuinely dangerous is jailing men who say they are women alongside actual women.

No to all of this.

Of course he has.

US President Donald Trump has lifted restrictions on the deployment of anti-personnel landmines by American forces.

Trump never met a form of violence (against other people of course) he didn’t like. So landmines linger on for decades after the war or insurgency or invasion is over, killing and maiming generations of children, farmers, and other people rash enough to walk in places where there are unexploded mines buried out of sight, so what? It won’t be Donald Trump they blow up so who cares?

The decision reverses a 2014 Obama administration ban on the use of such weapons, which applied everywhere in the world except for in the defence of South Korea.

Of course it does, because Obama is smarter and better than Trump, and Trump can’t be doing with that.

Thousands of people are injured and killed by landmines every year.

…

The US is not a signatory to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which restricts the development or use of anti-personnel land mines.

There are a lot of treaties and international agreements we’re not a signatory to. We’re a rogue nation, and we’re going downhill fast.

“The Department of Defense has determined that restrictions imposed on American forces by the Obama administration’s policy could place them at a severe disadvantage during a conflict against our adversaries,” a White House statement said, adding: “The president is unwilling to accept this risk to our troops.”

But he’s perfectly willing to accept the risk to the people who will be killed or injured by landmines long after the “conflict against our adversaries” is over.

Rachel Stohl, an arms control expert at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, called the decision “inexplicable”.

“I have no idea if it’s posturing or a reality that the US is claiming back the right to use landmines,” she told the BBC. “It’s inexplicable given all we know about these deadly weapons and the amount of money the United States has spent demining around the world,” she added.

Ms Stohl said the decision put lives at risk and was another example of the Trump administration “defining its own rules and ignoring global standards of behaviour”.

It is explicable though. The explanation is that Trump hates Obama and loves violence that’s not directed at him.

This is a very bad and stupid piece of writing.

Earlier this month, the Seattle Public Library decided that it will allow a group of trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” (TERFs) to hold an event centered on rejecting the rights and identities of transgender people.

The first sentence, and already so bad. It wasn’t earlier this month, for a start, but more to the point, the library did not decide it will allow a group of trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” to hold an event centered on rejecting the rights and identities of transgender people. The library accepted a booking from a feminist group to discuss and defend the rights of women in the context of ever-broader demands from men who identify as women.

Following widespread objections and calls from the trans community to cancel the event, the library has responded with by-now predictable talking points about the value of, and need to protect, intellectual freedom, a response that self-professed defenders of free speech have praised.

Notice how casually the author takes it for granted that “the trans community” should be able to shut down a feminist event on demand. Notice the clumsy sarcasm about the value of intellectual freedom and the contempt for its defenders.

This conversation isn’t new — we’ve been having some version of it for years.

Not all that many years though. This fad for people to Identify As the sex they’re not and then bully everyone in sight on the strength of their new Idenninny has not been around all that long.

For TERFs, leaning on dogmatic conceptualizations of free speech has been a convenient way to push bigoted, pseudoscientific claims about gender. TERF ideology most basically characterizes trans women as men-pretending-to-be-women, allegedly to “invade” women-only spaces, assault women or otherwise exercise misogyny. These arguments rely on cherry-picked biology and function as dog whistles to stoke prejudice and trans panic. And, unsurprisingly, mainstream TERFs and free speech dogmatists are apparently all hanging out together.

The shocking thing? This person, Sam Sumpter, is a graduate student in philosophy.

Bet you haven’t seen anything this wack before!

I don’t think it’s wrong, sinful, for a girl baby to have a sleeper on.

BUT.

Of course there’s a but.

It’s not sinful if she’s just, like, a month.

But hey once she knows those things are PANTS –

That’s whOle other kettle of fish, my friend. Whole other.

Men wrap each leg. Women DO NOT. Are we clear? This is a rule straight from God, so don’t be getting it wrong, or you know what will happen.