Trump notices that times have changed

Sep 1st, 2019 10:15 am | By

Trump and priorities is a hot topic today, because on the one hand a mass shooting in Odessa, Texas plus a hurricane getting stronger as it approaches, and on the other hand a woman who said something critical about him. The underlying thought is that a normal person in Trump’s job would focus on the first hand rather than the second.

Kyle Griffin:

It seems noteworthy that the president was tweeting about Debra Messing and The Apprentice this morning, hours after a mass shooting in West Texas and while a hurricane that’s threatening parts of the south was continuing to strengthen.

Donald Trump:

I have not forgotten that when it was announced that I was going to do The Apprentice, and when it then became a big hit, helping NBC’s failed lineup greatly, @DebraMessing came up to me at an Upfront & profusely thanked me, even calling me “Sir.” How times have changed!

Well no shit times have changed, “sir.” Then you were just a loudmouth on tv; now you’re the president of the US.

There’s an interesting thing about this change in the times that Trump doesn’t seem to have noticed: the expectations are different. Very different, and in more than one area. Not much is expected of blowhards on tv except that they blow hard in a way that many millions of people want to watch. I’m not a fan of blowhards, myself, even if I share their politics, and I don’t really get the taste, but lots of people love them. But being president is a different kind of job and position, and it requires a different set of skills. Trump has none of the skills required for that job; not one. He can’t even look the part for the cameras, let alone actually perform it.

So, yeah, no shit people who tolerated him when he was just a corrupt racist vulgar tv shouter are not willing to tolerate him now that he’s in a position to destroy everything. What an idiotic Gotcha it is to rage that someone who flattered him when he was a mere joke is critical of him now that he’s Godzilla.

Plus the whole priorities issue. Mass shootings, growing hurricanes, and all Donny Two-Scoops cares about is his own precious bloated self.

What a spectacle.



He thinks all lives matter and he’s just asking questions

Aug 31st, 2019 5:33 pm | By

So now I’m curious about Bret Stephens and especially about his excitingly original take on climate change, so I’ve hit the googles to learn more. David Roberts at Vox reported in May 2017 that Stephens had been hired away from the Wall Street Journal. Oh that kind of “diversity.”

Though the paper defends the hire in the name of opinion diversity, Stephens is a very familiar sort of establishment conservative — a cosmopolitan, well-educated, reflexively pro-Israel war hawk (who once wrote a column on “the disease of the Arab mind”) who thinks anti-racists are the real racists but moderates on select issues to demonstrate his independence.

Guys like that are a dime a dozen, I promise you.

Stephens is the kind of conservative writer who has feasted on easy shots at liberals for so long that he has let himself get lazy. Read his interview with Vox’s Jeff Stein, who actually pushed him a little. He says things like this:

I think Black Lives Matter has some really thuggish elements in it. Look — at the risk of being incredibly politically incorrect, but I guess that’s my job — I think that all lives matter. Not least black lives.

Oh, wow, nobody had ever said that before.  Mega diversity!

And when he discusses climate change, Stephens uses incorrect facts and terrible arguments. At a time when we desperately need a conversation about climate change more sophisticated than “is it a problem?” he makes the debate dumber.

Since the outcry that met his hiring, Stephens has tried to soften his take on climate. He told Huffington Post that he is a “climate agnostic.”

“Is the earth warming?” he asked. “That’s what the weight of scientific evidence indicates. Is it at least partially, and probably largely, a result of man-made carbon emissions? Again, that seems to be the case. Am I ‘anti-science’? Hell, no.”

As Joe Romm of Climate Progress has demonstrated, this is utterly disingenuous. Stephens called climate change a “mass hysteria phenomenon” for which “much of the science has … been discredited.” He said that people who accept climate change science are motivated in part by the “totalitarian impulse” and they worship “a religion without God.” He said “global warming is dead, nailed into its coffin one devastating disclosure, defection and re-evaluation at a time.”

What the hell kind of religion is accepting climate change science? Does he think we like what’s happening?

In a column calling climate change one of liberalism’s “imaginary enemies,” he said this:

Here’s a climate prediction for the year 2115: Liberals will still be organizing campaigns against yet another mooted social or environmental crisis. Temperatures will be about the same.

As Romm notes, the idea that temperature will be the same in 100 years is utterly ludicrous, the scientific equivalent of claiming the earth is flat.

Roberts goes through a list of annoying, familiar ploys Stephens uses.

6) Just asking questions. Why so rude?

Stephens is playing a bit part in a very, very old strategy. It goes like this:

  • Q: “We’re just asking questions.”
  • A: [questions answered]
  • Q: “We’re just asking questions.”
  • A: “Yeah, we answered those. Here’s a link.”
  • Q: “We’re just asking questions.”
  • A: “We answered the questions. A bunch of times. Please acknowledge our answers.”
  • Q: “We’re just asking questions.”
  • A: “Okay, we went back over our answers, double-checked and peer-reviewed them, compiled them in a series of reports with easy-to-read summaries, all of which we have broken down into digestible bits via various blog posts and visual aids.”
  • Q: “We’re just asking questions.”
  • A: “It’s beginning to seem like you don’t really care about this issue and are just jerking us around.”
  • Q: “Hey, we’re just asking questions! Galileo asked questions, didn’t he? Why are you being so intolerant and rude?”

Let’s start at the beginning over and over again, every single day, ignoring what everyone has been doing and just taking step one, then step one, then step one, until suddenly the glacier breaks loose and sweeps us all away.

In all these examples, a similar theme emerges: Stephens just doesn’t seem to have thought much about climate change. He’s enacting the rote conservative ritual of groping around for some reason, any reason, to a) justify inaction and b) blame liberals, in the process saying false things and making terrible arguments.

He sounds kind of…bedbuggy, doesn’t he.



The media requests were thinning

Aug 31st, 2019 4:58 pm | By

David Karpf points out how much worse it would all have been if he were not a white guy.

The controversy began earlier this week after reports of a bedbug infestation at the Times. Karpf, an activist and former Sierra Club board member who says he has been particularly disappointed with Stephens’s takes on climate change, made a joke about the conservative writer, whose columns have prompted some dismayed readers to cancel subscriptions.

“The bedbugs are a metaphor,” Karpf tweeted Monday. “The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”

“He tends to write pretty lightweight, poorly researched columns about things that I know something about,” Karpf explained later. “So I’ve always seen him as this person that everyone complains about but we just can’t get rid of. He’s a bedbug.

The tweet seemed destined for obscurity. (Karpf did not tag Stephens’s now-defunct Twitter handle.) But then Stephens emailed Karpf and copied George Washington University’s provost. He invited the professor to come to his home, meet his family and call him a bedbug in person in an act that “would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your [Karpf’s] part.”

“I’m often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people — people they’ve never met — on Twitter,” Stephens wrote. “I think you’ve set a new standard.”

Stephens’s response went viral as critics called it an overreaction. Karpf and others pointed to far more demeaning insults frequently aimed at other writers, especially women and people of color.

But he’s Bret Stephens, so that’s completely different…isn’t it?

Former Trump White House spokesman Sean Spicer, no stranger to online ridicule, laughed at Stephens’s indignation with conservative talk show host Sean Hannity, saying, “I think if that’s the worst thing that he’s been called, my goodness, take a look at my Twitter feed any day.”

“These guys can’t take a punch,” he said.

Some have defended Stephens. Letters published Saturday in the Los Angeles Times were critical of “name-calling” by Karpf, who detailed his takeaways from the spat with Stephens in the Times earlier this week.

Karpf wrote in that piece that he thinks he has received “remarkably little online abuse” stemming from the exchange with Stephens because he is a white man.

“If Stephens had directed his message to one of my female colleagues,” he wrote, “they would have faced much more online vitriol. … Many women with a public platform receive a death threat with their daily morning coffee.”

That reality, Karpf told The Post, has made Stephens’s decision to amplify his bedbug tweet all the more baffling. By the end of this week, the professor’s Twitter feed was returning to normal. The media requests were thinning. The smart thing for Stephens to do, he said, would have been to let the dust-up die — a lesson he discussed earlier this week with students of his class on political communications.

“It should have ended there,” Karpf said. “And then he decided he wanted to dunk on himself again.”

I expect what he thought he was doing was explaining to the waiting world how he was right and Karpf was wrong and everybody who thought he overreacted was wrong and look out it’s the left-wing Nazis. The problem is that that’s all bullshit, so it didn’t work out for him.



The Times ought to hire a factchecker to shadow Brett Stephens

Aug 31st, 2019 3:55 pm | By

Vivian Ho at The Guardian on Bret Stephens’s Revenge Column:

On Friday, Stephens used his weekly column to issue a warning about the modern dangers of hateful comments disseminated through mass communications, drawing a line from Hitler’s radio addresses to the power of social media today.

In the ultimate subtweet move, Stephens didn’t even reference what had happened on Twitter – rather, the column casually dropped a quote about bedbugs in relation to the burning of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto.

Nothing to do with David Karpf at all! Pure coincidence!

David Klion doesn’t buy the coincidence theory:

My jaw is on the floor

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David Karpf, the author of the tweet that started the saga, told the Guardian he was “surprised and disappointed” that Stephens escalated what should have been “a silly argument”. “Bret Stephens does not appear to have the humility to admit that he was having a bad night, overreacted and was wrong,” Karpf said.

“Stephens states in his op-ed that eliminationist rhetoric is particularly prominent from the left. That isn’t the least bit true, and the Times ought to hire a factchecker to challenge him on these assertions,” Karpf continued. “He also says that the most reviled people in American politics are the moderate Republicans … again, this is embarrassingly self-centered and obviously untrue.”

Other than that it’s great stuff.

Meanwhile, internet sleuths were quick to tactfully decompose Stephens’ argument.

Following the link that Stephens left in his column suggests that he searched “Jews as bedbugs” on Google books to find the quote in question – “The bedbugs are on fire. The Germans are doing a great job”.

Despite Stephens’ obvious arduous researching endeavor, the quote may not actually be in reference to Jews. “Professor Jerzy Tomaszewski” – a historian who taught at the University of Warsaw – “believes that ‘the bedbugs are burning’ should be taken literally: there was an infestation of bedbugs in Warsaw at the time which was generally believed to have originated in the ghetto,” the book reads.

And all this, let’s remember, is a columnist in The New York Times – not the Tulsa World or the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. The NYT has a pretty large and respectable reach. This is a columnist in the NYT going after an academic who made a mildly insulting joke about him on Twitter. This is a columnist in the NYT pretending a Jewish academic making a mild joke is comparable to Göbbels ranting about the Jews.

It’s a bit Gatling gun—>gnat.

Am I allowed to say “gnat”?



Especially promiscuous?

Aug 31st, 2019 11:31 am | By

It seems like only yesterday that Bret Stephens was getting his ass handed to him for pitching a public fit about David Karpf’s joke that the real bedbugs at the New York Times are dud columnists like Bret Stephens, but in fact it was four whole days ago. Apparently the ass-handing rolled off him in a way the bedbug joke didn’t, because he decided to devote his column in the Times to pitching the same fit all over again, but with extra added Google searching.

He tries to pretend it’s prompted by WWII’s 80th birthday this weekend, but nobody is buying it. He huffs about the parallels between then and now, and then he zeroes in on his real point.

All that, plus three crucial factors: new forms of mass communication, the rhetoric of dehumanization and the politics of absolute good versus absolute evil.

It was radio then, it’s Twitter now. It was kulaks and Jews then…

Today, the rhetoric of infestation is back. In the U.S., Trump uses it to describe Latin American migrants. In Europe, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, chairman of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party, warned in 2015 that migrants carried “all sorts of parasites and protozoa,” which, “while not dangerous in the organisms of these people, could be dangerous here.”

True. I’ve pointed it out myself many times.

But he goes on.

More of this talk will surely follow, and not just from the right. The American left has become especially promiscuous when it comes to speaking pejoratively about entire categories of disfavored people.

Eh? The left does more of it than the right? Bad people on both sides but more on the left?

Yes. It’s because they want to exterminate the moderates.

None of this would be possible without the third factor: the conviction that an opponent embodies an irredeemable evil, and that his destruction is therefore an act of indubitable good. That spirit of certitude that dominated the politics of the 1930s is not so distant from us today. The unpopular political figures of our day are the people who seem to convey less than 100 percent true belief: the moderate conservative, the skeptical liberal, the centrist wobbler.

Like that guy wot called Bret Stephens a bedbug, geddit? People like that are like Göbbels!

David Karpf is not amused.

Okay, look, I have two things to say right now. (1) this just stopped being funny. The New York Times is the paper of record. The entire internet knows who Bret Stephens just subtweeted with his column. He should know better. He doesn’t. That’s not okay anymore.

(2) I’m attending the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association right now. I have an actual job that doesn’t leave me with endless time to pursue pointless online vendettas. So I’m going to try to take the night off from this. I’ll have more to say tomorrow.

I’ll say this: beware the demon of self-importance. It is the Foul Fiend! Beware beware and avoid. Do not become so convinced of your own sky-concealing importance that you perceive a mild joke by an academic as the equivalent of Göbbels raging about cockroaches. Especially not after having it pointed out to you and especially not in the New York Times.

(It reminds me a little of Michael Shermer’s intense over-reaction to a brief mention of a stupid sexist thing he said in a column I wrote for Free Inquiry several years ago. He did say the thing I quoted him saying and it was stupid and sexist, but Shermer screamed the house down. It was bizarre. He demanded space to scream in the next Free Inquiry, and got it, but then I got space to reply, and of the two of us I think I was the more…erm…restrained.)



Indefinitely postponed

Aug 31st, 2019 9:47 am | By

Meanwhile though that talk McKinnon was scheduled to give has been cancelled (or, tactfully, “rescheduled”) because no one was interested. It has already been scrubbed from the How To Academy and Eventbrite pages.

A tweet:

P.S. I’ve seen an e-mail saying that ticket numbers for McKinnon’s talk were “embarrassingly low” and that How To: Academy has actually received more objections to McKinnon’s talk than tickets sold. On that basis, it has been CANCELLED.

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Further elucidation:

To pre-empt McKinnon’s lies that TRANSPHOBES were SOLELY responsible for cancelling his talk, I attach an e-mail from.the director of How To: Academy which explains that ticket sales were so low it was EMBARRASSING TO RUN THE EVENT.

Image

I wonder if the talk on Fairness in Sport failed to resonate with his audience because it’s hard to think of anyone less qualified to talk about fairness in sport than a man who calls himself a woman and competes in women’s races.



No, as a matter of fact, it’s not

Aug 31st, 2019 9:10 am | By

McKinnon is working on motivation. Athletes need motivation.

‘Is this what a world champion would do?’ is a question I use often to get through the hardest workouts. I’m putting together a killer garage gym for my lifting needs. I’m designing up a personal motivational poster. Thoughts?

Image

I have a thought. My thought is that R. McKinnon is not a genuine world champion, but instead is a man who stole a world championship from a woman by competing against her. My further thought is that the exhibitionistic bragging about this feat is quite astonishingly repellent. Even if you buy the fairy tale that men can “become” women by saying the magic words and doing some hormone-fiddling, it still doesn’t follow that they are justified in then using their physical advantage to trounce women in athletic competitions.

Shorter: R. McKinnon is not a genuine world champion and looks like a sleazy fuck claiming he is.



It might be legal, but it is grossly irresponsible

Aug 30th, 2019 5:33 pm | By

CNN says much the same thing.

Eric Brewer, a former NSC official who focused on Iranian and North Korean nuclear issues in both the Trump and Obama administrations, suggested that he is among those who believe the imagery was a product of the intelligence community.

“In a normal world, we would assume the IC approved the public release of this image,” Brewer tweeted. “Yes, the President has the magic wand of declassification authority, but that is rarely (ever?) exercised without consultations with the IC to understand the risks and benefits of doing so. To do otherwise might be legal, but it is grossly irresponsible.”

What I say. Legal authority, maybe, but absolute right, hell no.

It’s a really terrible thing to say to us. It amounts to saying he doesn’t give a shit if it’s reckless or not, if it harms us or not – all he cares about is his personal power. He can’t get his head out of his own fucking vanity for one second, ever, no matter what.



Sir, please drop dead now, sir

Aug 30th, 2019 5:12 pm | By

Trump, adult and responsible as always, says HE CAN IF HE WANTS TO.

Maybe, but that’s not the issue, so let’s try to pay attention.

Kaitlan Collins of CNN:

Asked if the image of the accident at the Iranian space facility was classified, Trump only says, “I just wish Iran well. They had a big problem & we had a photo and I released it, which I have the absolute right to do.” From where? “You’ll have to figure that one out yourself.”

He keeps saying that, and it’s not true.

He may have the legal authority to do this particular thing, I don’t know, but “the absolute right” is a much bigger claim, and he doesn’t have that. He wants to think he does, but that’s because he has a tiny cheap empty mind, and he understands nothing that matters. Anyone with a proper understanding of life and human relations wouldn’t dream of making a hideous claim like that. It could be the case that he broke no explicit rule in doing it, but it could still be a reckless dangerous thing to do. He has no right, let alone an absolute one, to do reckless dangerous things just because he feels like showing off.

I hope he dies in the night.



Trump says his is bigger

Aug 30th, 2019 4:40 pm | By

Somewhat breathtaking – Trump appears to have tweeted classified intelligence again.

President Trump has tweeted what experts say is almost certainly an image from a classified satellite or drone, showing the aftermath of an accident at an Iranian space facility.

Along with text that someone wrote for him, because he’s not literate enough to have written it himself.

It says:

The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One.

View image on Twitter

NPR goes on:

NPR broke the news of the launch failure on Thursday, using images from commercial satellites that flew over Iran’s Imam Khomeini Space Center. Those images showed smoke billowing from the pad. Iran has since acknowledged an accident occurred at the site.

Some of the highest-resolution imagery available commercially comes from the company Maxar, whose WorldView-2 satellite sports 46-centimeter resolution.

But the image shown in the president’s tweet appears to be of far better quality, says Ankit Panda, an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, who specializes in analyzing satellite imagery. “The resolution is amazingly high,” says Panda. “I would think it’s probably below well below 20 centimeters, which is much higher than anything I’ve ever seen.”

And some genius puts it on Twitter. What are they doing up in there?

The DNI office referred questions to the White House; the White House said it was too busy tweeting secret intel to answer any damn fool questions.

Panda notes that a small redaction in the upper left-hand corner suggests the intelligence community had cleared the image for release by the president.

But both he and Hanham question whether releasing it was a good idea. “You really risk giving away the way you know things,” Hanham says. “That allows people to adapt and hide how they carry out illicit activity.”

“These are closely held national secrets,” Panda adds. “We don’t even share a lot of this kind of imagery with our closest allies.” In tweeting it out to the world, Trump is letting Iran know exactly what the U.S. is capable of. He’s also letting others know as well, Panda says. “The Russians and the Chinese, you’re letting them know that these are the kind of things that the United States has the capability of seeing,” he says.

Secrets shmecrets, right? Let’s spill all our beans and then make hummus!



Guards throw the food on the floor

Aug 30th, 2019 3:38 pm | By

Trump continues the Torture Children program:

Migrant girls being held by the Trump administration are being given only very limited access to items as basic as sanitary pads and tampons, according to a lawsuit that claims to put fresh light on the “appalling” conditions being endured by youngsters.

Earlier this year, it was revealed children being held in facilities in Texas operated by immigration authorities, were being detained in circumstances United Nations (UN) human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said appalled her. Children were denied access to showers, adequate food or bedding, allegedly in breach of a 20-year ruling.

Now, in a lawsuit filed by 19 states, further details have been provided by some of those children, who told investigators they were held in rooms too small to sit down in, were repeatedly woken through the night by “roll calls”, and were made to fight for food that guards threw on the floor.

It appears they are trying to rival the SS in 1942.

One young woman told lawyers from Washington state, that menstruating youngsters were permitted only one tampon, or sanitary pad, a day. After that, at least one girl “had no choice but to continue to wear her soiled underwear” and clothes.

Well all menstruating girls would have no choice but to bleed through everything, because the first two or three days just are like that. One tampon or pad for the whole day won’t do the job.

Bob Ferguson, Washington’s attorney general, is among those behind the lawsuit filed in California. He claimed the immigration policies of Donald Trump were “reminiscent of shameful chapters in American history — the internment of Japanese Americans, and the forced separation of Native American families”.

The lawsuit includes testimony by Alma Poletti, an investigator in Mr Ferguson’s civil rights division, who said one young woman who was having her period was only permitted to take a shower after 10 days.

“She recalls there was another girl at the facility who was also on her period. They were each given one sanitary pad per day. Although the guards knew they had their periods, they were not offered showers or a change of clothes, even when the other girl visibly bled through her pants,” said Ms Poletti. “This girl had no choice but to continue to wear her soiled underwear and [trousers].”

And continue bleeding, so that her underpants and trousers got ever more bloody sticky wet uncomfortable and shaming.

So that’s the US in 2019. Might as well be Germany 1938.



But his tough management style and bellicose worldview

Aug 30th, 2019 3:00 pm | By

Even John Bolton can’t keep Trump’s love.

Bolton, who has long advocated an expansive military presence around the world, has become a staunch internal foe of an emerging peace deal aimed at ending America’s longest war, the officials said.

His opposition to the diplomatic effort in Afghanistan has irritated President Trump, these officials said, and led aides to leave the National Security Council out of sensitive discussions about the agreement.

At the zenith of his influence, Bolton enabled the president to act on his most aggressive instincts and outmaneuvered other Cabinet officials with less experience in the interagency process. But his tough management style and bellicose worldview have frayed relations with some colleagues.

You’d think it would endear him to Trump, though, but nah.

Bolton’s isolation on Afghanistan became particularly apparent this month when the president’s top officials descended on Trump’s New Jersey golf resort to discuss the peace deal that would be presented to Afghan and Taliban officials in Kabul and Doha, U.S. officials said. In addition to the president, the Aug. 16 meeting included Secretary of Defense Mark Mark T. Esper chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., [Vice-] President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Khalilzad. Bolton was not originally invited out of concern that his team would oppose the agenda and leak the details later, several officials said.

So that’s totally normal. All administrations omit their national security chiefs when discussing national security issues because they fear leaks. Kidding; not normal at all.

Amid the tensions, Bolton has sought to amplify the diplomatic nature of the national security adviser job, withtrips this week to Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus. Despite his differences with Trump, he has found a way to achieve some of his lifelong goals, defunding various United Nations organizations and ripping up international treaties he views as a constraint on American power, such as the Reagan-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Cool cool. Even though the two assholes can’t get along because they’re such assholes, they’re still managing to break everything.

Bolton’s pugnacious views on military force are matched with a fiery temperament. Earlier this year, he got into a confrontation with White House Staff Secretary Derek Lyons in the West Wing, according to people familiar with the incident. The president had signed off on a statement concerning the International Criminal Court, and Bolton didn’t want to give Pompeo or other senior White House officials a chance to look at it or make comments, the people said. With Pompeo out of Washington on a trip at the time, the disagreement over the statement’s release escalated.

One person familiar said Bolton was merely trying to execute the president’s orders. Others said he taunted Lyons, asking him, “Did you have fun today?”

“You better watch out, buddy,” Bolton added, the people said.

He has a “fiery temperament” aka he’s a raging bully, just like his boss.



Another nosegay for his crush

Aug 30th, 2019 12:25 pm | By

Trump is doing his best to plant a big wet one on Putin’s bum.

President Donald Trump is seriously considering a plan to block $250 million in military assistance to Ukraine, a move that would further ingratiate him with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and has directed senior officials to review the aid package.

To be fair he also wanted to slash foreign aid in general and was stymied in that effort.

If Trump ultimately decides to block the aid package, a possibility first reported by Politico, it would likely prompt a bipartisan uproar from members of Congress who believe US military support is essential to countering Russia’s military involvement in Ukraine.

Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, voiced his strong opposition to that idea in a tweet Thursday: “This is unacceptable. It was wrong when Obama failed to stand up to Putin in Ukraine, and it’s wrong now.”

Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez released a statement accusing the administration of circumventing Congress and “undermining a key policy priority that has broad and deep bipartisan support.”

Nobody knows what Trump is going to do, which is unsurprising given that he doesn’t know himself.

A US Department of State official told CNN on Thursday that the policy on Ukraine has not changed, adding the US remains committed to a robust partnership between the two countries.

The State Department – ha – as if Trump ever paid any attention to them. They might as well be the Parks Department of a small Wyoming town.

But Trump’s public deference to Putin and Russia has alarmed US allies and lawmakers. The issue has only been amplified by Trump’s recent comments at the G7 summit, in which he seemingly downplayed Russia’s military incursion in Ukraine and suggested that Russia be reinstated into the group of leading global economies.

He just wants a friend. Everybody should have a friend.



What a mess we create when we conflate sex and gender

Aug 30th, 2019 11:36 am | By

Girls’ schools will probably go the way of the coral reefs.

Girls schools would have to admit transgender pupils under proposals being considered by the equalities watchdog.

The confidential Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) draft guidance, leaked to The Telegraph, reveals that schools could be set to consider admissions of trans students to single-sex schools on a “case-by-case approach”.

There were supposed to be guidelines by 2018 but the process has bogged down. Quel surprise.

The Telegraph however has a draft and is sharing from that.

It says that: “A refusal to admit a trans pupil to a single-sex school which is the same as the trans pupil’s sex recorded at birth would be direct sex discrimination. Admitting such a pupil will not affect the school’s single-sex status.

“A pupil who has transitioned, or wants to, must be allowed to continue to attend the school; to remove them would amount to direct gender reassignment discrimination.”

So you put sex discrimination and gender reassignment discrimination together and you get…girls lose?

The document also says: “An admission policy of only admitting pupils in accordance with their sex recorded at birth would particularly disadvantage trans pupils, and would be indirectly discriminatory against trans pupils, unless it could be demonstrated to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.”

Would it though? That seems to be true only if you buy the full ideological package, and if you assume that children have infallible knowledge about their “gender identity” and how it can be opposed to their sex. If instead you simply say that girls don’t have to conform to gender conventions to attend your school, then you can continue admitting girls who are girls without discriminating against “trans pupils.”

On the controversial area of sex categories in sports, the leaked EHRC document encourages schools to “consider ways of enabling all pupils to participate in sports, including competitive events that align with their gender identity.”

Meaning, girls’ schools have to admit boys and let them compete against the girls?

The leaked document has prompted controversy among the feminist academic and women’s rights campaigners, with critics claiming that it will have controversial implications for single-sex schools and “shows what a mess we create when we conflate sex and gender”.

Meanwhile trans rights and childrens charities say it is paramount that transgender children can “ live their life freely” and that all schools take steps to create “inclusive environments” for vulnerable students.

Well children are not generally able to “live their lives freely” in every sense, because they’re children. I chafed against this endlessly as a child, because I wanted to wander off by myself and there were limits on how far I was allowed to go. This idea of “living their lives freely” as the sex they are not is a very adult one and a very disruptive one. Let them pretend and fantasize freely, by all means, but put every fantasy into literal practice, no. We don’t give children real guns or real swords or real cars; we let them pretend.

Kathleen Stock, professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, said that educational guidance should not be based on a “usually transitory feeling”.

She said: “We have to remember that literally the only criterion of telling who is a trans child and who isn’t is that they say so. It’s based on a feeling.

“Moreover it’s a feeling that we know most will grow out of. Assuming that there are good reasons to retain single sex provision in certain schools, it’s incomprehensible that these reasons should be overidden in favour of a usually transitory feeling.”

Mermaids, on the other hand, talked the usual bullshit.



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Aug 30th, 2019 10:59 am | By

A thing I saw.

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H/t Josh



The most ingenious tactic of misogynistic MRAs

Aug 30th, 2019 10:20 am | By

Julie Bindel on the Blame Women trick:

Men blaming women for ‘getting themselves raped/murdered/beaten’ is certainly nothing new. But women being blamed for male violence towards other vulnerable groups, such as trans-women of colour, is the latest pernicious tactic by misogynists. Feminists are blamed for the murder of trans-women, including those killed by intimate male partners.

Apparently, we whip up hatred and fury that leads men to decide to kill trans women. Doubtless these violent male murderers will have been sitting reading me, Janice Turner, Janice Raymond, and watching Magdalen Berns videos before deciding to take a gun, knife, fists or whatever and brutally kill a trans-woman. Not being satisfied with having total permission, indeed praise, for screaming TERF, bigot, fascist, homophobic, evil witch at us feminists, the woke blokes who get regular pats on the dick for putting bitches in our place, the dudes now put the blame on others for fatal male violence. Despite the fact that we are the ones at risk from violence by trans-extremists.

It is the most ingenious tactic of misogynistic men’s rights activists I have ever seen in 40 years of feminism. But we see you, boys, and I swear to god we will have you.

Image result for we see you



Bleaching the coral

Aug 30th, 2019 9:56 am | By

The health of The Great Barrier Reef isn’t just bad, it’s very bad. That’s official.

The Great Barrier Reef’s outlook has been officially downgraded from poor to very poor due to climate change.

Rising sea temperatures thanks to human-driven global warming remain the biggest threat to the reef, a five-year Australian government report says.

They mean from bad to very bad. For some reason officials think we can’t deal with the word “bad” but we’ll be ok if they change it to “poor,” but “bad” is what they mean. In short the GBR is doomed, which is very bad (not poor) news.

Rising sea temperatures caused “mass bleaching events” in 2016 and 2017 that wiped out coral and destroyed habitats for other sea life. While some habitats remain in a good state, the condition of the site as a whole is worsening.

“Threats to the reef are multiple, cumulative and increasing,” the report says. “The window of opportunity to improve the Reef’s long-term future is now.”

Scientists say the number of new corals plummeted by 89% on the reef thanks to recent bleaching events, which affected a 1,500km stretch.

Why does it matter if we kill off the coral reefs? Because they support so much marine life:

Coral reefs are the most diverse of all marine ecosystems. They teem with life, with perhaps one-quarter of all ocean species depending on reefs for food and shelter. This is a remarkable statistic when you consider that reefs cover just a tiny fraction (less than one percent) of the earth’s surface and less than two percent of the ocean bottom. Because they are so diverse, coral reefs are often called the rainforests of the sea.

It’s the biodiversity:

Biodiversity is the variety of living species that can be found in a particular place—region, ecosystem, planet, etc. Coral reefs are believed by many to have the highest biodiversity of any ecosystem on the planet—even more than a tropical rainforest. Occupying less than one percent of the ocean floor, coral reefs are home to more than twenty-five percent of marine life.

Why is that important? A highly biodiverse ecosystem, one with many different species, is often more resilient to changing conditions and can better withstand significant disturbances.

In addition, ecosystem services—benefits that humans receive from natural environments—are often greater in highly diverse places. Coral reefs, thanks to their diversity, provide millions of people with food, medicine, protection from storms, and revenue from fishing and tourism. An estimated six million fishermen in 99 reef countries and territories worldwide—over a quarter of the world’s small-scale fishermen—harvest from coral reefs.

And those estimated six million fishers feed six million x whatever people. Thirty million? Sixty? Six hundred?



It’s her fault

Aug 30th, 2019 9:16 am | By

Peter Tatchell’s decision to blame feminists for the fact that a man murdered a trans woman continues to annoy everyone who sees it.

What he said:

Tracy Single is 15th trans woman of colour murdered in US this year. The tiny minority of feminists who demonise trans women as a threat to non-trans women contribute to the toxicl atmosphere that fuels prejudice, discrimination & violence

Janice Turner:

A man killed Tracy. It is overwhelmingly men who commit murder and violence against trans people. As they kill far, far greater numbers of women. Yet somehow feminists are the cause of male violence. Why not challenge men, Peter Tatchell? Your misogyny is disgraceful.

Sarah Ditum:

Tracy Single was killed by a man. Not a feminist who accepts sex is real, a man. I’m not sure why Peter is so attached to blaming women for male violence, but it gives the strong impression that he cares more about attacking women than protecting victims.

Holly Lawford-Smith:

was she murdered by a feminist, @PeterTatchell? you absolute muppet.

Julie Bindel

our misogyny is off the scale. MEN kill, rape & abuse trans women, NOT feminists. Neither do we ‘provoke’ such violence. We campaign AGAINST it. One woman is killed every 3 days by ex or current MALE partners for example. To blame us for the actions of violent men is outrageous.

Hadley Freeman:

Are you seriously blaming feminists for male violence, Peter?

It’s not helping him that a man was arrested on suspicion of murdering Tracy Single.



Dead animals nailed to the door

Aug 29th, 2019 5:05 pm | By

Meghan Murphy has more on the activism vandalism against VRR:

On Tuesday, Vancouver Rape Relief & Woman’s Shelter (VRRWS) tweeted images of vandalism left on their storefront — a space used for meetings, events, and support groups. ‘Kill TERFs,’ ‘Fuck TERFs,’ ‘TERFs go home, you are not welcome,’ ‘Transwomen are women,’ and ‘Trans Power’ had been scrawled across the windows and door in black marker. ‘TERF,’ for the blissfully ignorant, is an acronym that stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist.’ This is, of course, a misnomer. Radical feminists are not interested in ‘excluding’ trans-identified people from anything. What they are interested in is protecting certain spaces designated for women and girls.

Not because trans people are trans, but because male people are not female.

VRRWS has been targeted not only with vandalism, but with dead animals nailed to their door and stuffed through their mail slot, on account of their women-only policy. They operate a transition house for women and their children, which aims to protect abused women and help them to heal from horrific violence and sexual assault. To most, it makes sense that a space for extremely vulnerable women escaping male violence would exclude men. For trans activists, it makes sense to disembowel a skunk and string it up by its neck — noose-like — to hang it on the door where victims of rape and domestic abuse will find it and read it as (yet another) violent threat.

I didn’t know about that one.

It’s hard to take sides on this one, but local would-be politician, Morgane Oger, managed to, tweeting:

‘Regrettably but predictably, VRR choosing to ignore Canada’s civil rights laws causes blow-back. I empathize VRR feel threatened by the predictable response to their conduct. As I have previously offered, I am ready to help VRR get out of their mess if they wish to.’

In other words, those bitches deserved it.

Many progressives like Oger have accused the women involved in Vancouver Rape Relief and their supporters of being ‘hateful’. Oger also led a (successful) campaign to end a $30,000 City grant the organization had been receiving for education purposes, claiming their practice of serving women alone and hiring only female counselors discriminated against men. Well, to be specific, men who announce they are women. During a City hearing to determine the continuation of this grant, Oger accused VRRWS of ‘having a history of discrimination against transgender women on the basis of their gender identity or gender expression.’ This is untrue, as services and spaces that are women-only don’t care about a person’s gender identity or gender expression.

Many women don’t do a particularly orthodox gender expression ourselves, after all.

Any person who would go so far as to intimidate and threaten women who stand up for other women in this particularly disturbing way is on the wrong side of politics, never mind history. It is beyond unacceptable that the left is not only remaining silent on these kinds of attacks, but is continuing to fuel them, by claiming it is feminists who are guilty of ‘hate’ and ‘violence,’ not their comrades-in-arms.

Looking at you Peter Tatchell.



Tell Mike to start packing

Aug 29th, 2019 4:19 pm | By

Yesterday Trump was raging at Puerto Rico because Hurricane Dorian was headed towards it. Why did he think that was Puerto Rico’s fault? You’d have to ask him. But now the hurricane’s path has shifted, and Don has changed his tune.

Hurricane Dorian is poised to hit Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club, so the president has canceled his trip to Poland. Bloomberg reported, “President Donald Trump has canceled a trip to Poland this weekend because Hurricane Dorian is poised to strike Florida, according to two people familiar with the matter.”

Trump is sending Pence instead.

Trump was all set to take off for Poland when he thought that the hurricane was going to hit Puerto Rico, but he suddenly changed his plans when the storm modeling showed his private Mar-a-Lago club potentially taking a direct hit from what is projected to become a Category 4 storm.

Puerto Rico? Bunch of whiners who brought it on themselves. Mar-a-Lago? CLEAR MY CALENDAR.

Great to know he’s laser-focused on our needs.

David Leavitt:

Trump: Climate change is a hoax.

Earth 🌍: Here’s a Category 4 hurricane with 130+ mph winds aimed right at Mar-a-Lago, with my compliments.

View image on Twitter

It’s almost as if he cares about no one and nothing but himself.