[Trump speaks off the record.]

Nov 28th, 2018 12:19 pm | By

In their talk with Trump yesterday Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker asked him about the Mueller-Manafort breakup.

DAWSEY: People around you have told me you’re upset about the way he’s been treated. Are you planning to do anything to help him?

TRUMP: Let me go off the record because I don’t want to get in the middle of the whole thing.

[Trump speaks off the record.]

DAWSEY: Is there any version of that you’re willing to give us on the record in answer to that question?

TRUMP: I’d rather not. At some point, I’ll talk on the record about it. But I’d rather not.

[Trump speaks off the record.]

So it’s not likely that was an uncomplicated “no,” then. He’s said “no” many times on the record, so if he felt the need to say it off the record, it probably wan’t just another “no.” So what was it?

DAWSEY: Mr. President, your national security team is going to the Hill tomorrow to brief senators on Saudi Arabia and Jamal Khashoggi. I’ve heard from Senator [Lindsey O.] Graham, who I know you were with yesterday, and others, that they want stronger punishment on Saudi Arabia, tougher sanctions. Do you want them to impose that, or do you think that would be deleterious to our — ?

TRUMP: I’m going to listen to what they say. They’re all friends of mine, and I get along with them great. I’m going to certainly listen to what they have to say, Josh. In the end, though, they’re spending massive amounts of billions of dollars. If you look at Iran and what they do, and you look at many other countries — I don’t have to embarrass other countries by saying it — if you look at what they do, it’s a rough part of the world. It’s a dangerous, rough part of the world. But they’ve been a great ally. Without them, Israel would be in a lot more trouble. We need to have a counterbalance to Iran. I know him. I know him well, the crown prince. And, by the way, never did business with them, never intend to do business with them. I couldn’t care less. This is a very important job that I’m doing right now. The last thing I care about is doing business with people. I only do business for us. Somebody said, well, maybe they’re an investor in one of his jobs. The answer is no.

Like hell it is.

But I just feel that it’s very, very important to maintain that relationship. It’s very important to have Saudi Arabia as an ally, if we’re going to stay in that part of the world. Now, are we going to stay in that part of the world? One reason to is Israel. Oil is becoming less and less of a reason because we’re producing more oil now than we’ve ever produced. So, you know, all of a sudden it gets to a point where you don’t have to stay there.

RUCKER: And why have you taken his denials for ordering the killing of our colleague, Jamal Khashoggi —

TRUMP: I haven’t taken anything.

RUCKER: — over the evidence that the intelligence community has gathered?

TRUMP: Phil, I haven’t done that. If you look at my statement, it’s maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. But he denies it. And people around him deny it.

Sometimes people deny things for reasons other than truth-telling. Sometimes.

RUCKER: Sir, you just said, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but are you getting the best advice and the best information from the intelligence community and on the climate issue from your experts in the government, because you’re doubting what they’re saying?

TRUMP: Phil, I’m getting advice. I’m the president of this country. I have to do what’s the best for our country. We have a very important ally in Saudi Arabia. We have an ally that has tremendous oil reserves, which are — frankly, they can make prices go up and down, and I want to keep them down. We have an ally that’s investing billions and billions of dollars in our country. They could very easily invest $110 billion, $450 billion overall over a period of time, fairly short period of time. $110 billion in military. Russia and China would love to have those orders, and they’ll get them if we don’t. They’ll have no choice, but they’ll get them if we don’t.

He seems to have completely missed what Rucker was asking, which was about the relationship between his constant dismissal of what experts in his own government tell him and his ability to get good information. If he refuses to pay attention to his own experts, how can he get the best advice and the best information? He doesn’t address that question at all.

So I take everything into consideration, and again, he totally denies it, and he denied it to me on three different occasions, on three different calls, and a lot of other people deny it, too. Did he do it? As I said, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but in the meantime Saudi Arabia’s spending billions and billions of dollars in the United States, and I want them to spend it here. I don’t want them to spend it in China and Russia.

One, he denies it so it’s not true, and two, never mind whether it’s true because money.

Also, about that it’s not true – he seems to think he gets to add up all the denials and get a higher not-true number. “He denied it to me on three different occasions, on three different calls, and a lot of other people deny it, too,” so it’s not true times 3 plus a lot. That makes it very very big number not true. You can’t argue with that.

But if you insist on arguing with it anyway, then money. End of argument.



Inflamed tensions

Nov 27th, 2018 9:05 pm | By

Grotesque.

A lawyer for Paul Manafort, the president’s onetime campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Mr. Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.

Boom.

The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.

Whatever it was a bid for, it’s dirty dirty dirty.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, acknowledged the arrangement on Tuesday and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed.

WELL NO SHIT, SHERLOCK, THAT’S THE POINT. That’s what makes it dirty dirty dirty.

Such information could help shape a legal defense strategy, and it also appeared to give Mr. Trump and his legal advisers ammunition in their public relations campaign against Mr. Mueller’s office.

But a public relations campaign should be wholly beside the point. It’s not a vote whether or not Trump is a crook, it’s a factual question.

While Mr. Downing’s discussions with the president’s team violated no laws, they helped contribute to a deteriorating relationship between lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors, who accused Mr. Manafort of holding out on them despite his pledge to assist them in any matter they deemed relevant, according to the people. That conflict spilled into public view on Monday when the prosecutors took the rare step of declaring that Mr. Manafort had breached his plea agreement by lying to them about a variety of subjects.

Awwww; I hope they can be friends again some time down the road.

In his own recent Twitter attacks on the special counsel, the president seemed to imply that he had inside information about the prosecutors’ lines of inquiry and frustrations. “Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie,” Mr. Trump wrote on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, he tweeted: “The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want.”

I wish a prosecutor twenty feet tall would just tear the roof off the White House right now and pluck Trump out and smash his head on Pennsylvania Avenue.



Trump reports he has a very high level of intelligence

Nov 27th, 2018 5:17 pm | By

The Post had a conversation with Trump today; it went as well as you’d expect.

In a wide-ranging and sometimes discordant 20-minute interview with The Washington Post, Trump complained at length about Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. “Jay” Powell, whom he nominated earlier this year. When asked about declines on Wall Street and GM’s announcement that it was laying off 15 percent of its workforce, Trump responded by criticizing higher interest rates and other Fed policies, though he insisted that he is not worried about a recession.

“I’m doing deals, and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed,” Trump said. “They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

Classic. One, he thinks he has great instincts (wrong), and two, he thinks he knows more than anyone else (so very wrong).

He added: “So far, I’m not even a little bit happy with my selection of Jay. Not even a little bit. And I’m not blaming anybody, but I’m just telling you I think that the Fed is way off-base with what they’re doing.”

Classic. He tells us how bad Jay is, then he says he’s not blaming anybody.

Trump also dismissed the federal government’s landmark report released last week finding that damages from global warming are intensifying around the country. The president said that “I don’t see” climate change as man-made and that he does not believe the scientific consensus.

“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Trump said. “You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean.”

Image result for head desk

The president added of climate change, “As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it.”

Says the imbecile who knows nothing at all about it except that he doesn’t like it. “Very high levels of intelligence” in a pig’s eye.

Trump again questioned the CIA’s assessment that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a contributor to The Post, and said he has considered Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s repeated denials in his decision to maintain a close alliance with the oil-rich desert kingdom.

“Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t,” Trump said. “But he denies it. And people around him deny it. And the CIA did not say affirmatively he did it, either, by the way. I’m not saying that they’re saying he didn’t do it, but they didn’t say it affirmatively.”

He’s just repeating the same twenty stupid words he said about it last week. With all his high levels of intelligence, he doesn’t have enough nous to avoid constantly repeating the same stale formulas over and over and OVER again. That is not a sign of someone with an adept mind. Plus he’s so fucking thick that he thinks the normal explanation of what we can know and what we can’t equals “but they didn’t say it affirmatively.”

The CIA has assessed that Mohammed ordered Khashoggi’s killing and has shared its findings with lawmakers and the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. Intelligence assessments are rarely, if ever, ironclad…

What I’m saying! They’re not going to send him a note saying “We know for positive he did it, Sir!” That’s not what they do. Trump thinks every opinion he has is the certain truth, and people with functioning brains know they never know the certain truth.



The view across Elysium Planitia

Nov 27th, 2018 4:42 pm | By

InSight is sending photos home.

The InSight lander's first picture from Mars

Looks a bit like Texas.

This is the view across Elysium Planitia, the vast lava plain near the equator of Mars, where Nasa’s InSight lander touched down after a hair-raising descent on Monday. The probe snapped the image of the desolate landscape as the dust thrown up by its arrival was still settling around it.

Over the coming days, InSight will take more photos of the landing site and send them back to Earth, where scientists will use them to decide where the probe should place its instruments.

Isn’t it strange that as a species we’re clever enough to do this, yet we still elect a Donald Trump president? Or we go on a hajj and get trampled to death or we stone girls to death for rejecting an arranged marriage or we let priests molest children for decade after decade.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan



Developments

Nov 27th, 2018 12:16 pm | By

DTrump is having a tough day. Not as tough as those teargassed asylum-seekers had, but tough. Not one but two shoes hit the floor with a crash.

The first development came when special counsel Robert S. Mueller III asked a federal court to begin sentencing proceedings for Manafort, sentencing that was on hold while Manafort cooperated with Mueller’s team. According to the filing: “After signing the plea agreement, Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement.”

That could be bad for Trump as well as for Manafort.

First, it’s unlikely that Mueller would be withdrawing Manafort’s plea agreement unless he had specific evidence demonstrating that Manafort lied. He’s going to lay that evidence out for the court as the judge considers what sentence to give Manafort, in what amounts to another indictment.

Second, Trump’s lawyers and Manafort’s lawyers have a joint defense agreement that allows them to share information. And third, Trump recently completed a set of written answers to Mueller’s questions.

Marcy Wheeler explains what all that might mean:

Mueller’s team appears to have no doubt that Manafort was lying to them. That means they didn’t really need his testimony, at all. It also means they had no need to keep secrets — they could keep giving Manafort the impression that he was pulling a fast one over the prosecutors, all while reporting misleading information to Trump that he could use to fill out his open book test. Which increases the likelihood that Trump just submitted sworn answers to those questions full of lies.

Interesting. The two are very close together in time. Innnteresting.

That’s a lot of ifs, which is why we’re going to have to wait until Mueller lays all his cards on the table to see the true magnitude of this development. Which brings us to the second of the day’s potentially enormous stories, from the Guardian:

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.

Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.

It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.

It may all just be coincidence.

Or not.



Human rights are not “Western”

Nov 27th, 2018 11:41 am | By

Maryam posted a Manifesto on Women and Secularism:

International Conference on Sharia, Segregation and Secularism
25 November 2018, London

Today, far-Right movements, including religious fundamentalisms, are seizing power and on the rise in both democratic and authoritarian states. Even in more secularised societies, religious organisations have gained power because they have been considered valuable allies – to provide services as the state shrinks, to oppose radical social justice movements, as part of counter-terror strategies and post conflict ‘stabilisation,’ and as part of the privatisation of law. From development banks to Western aid and human rights organisations, fundamentalists, particularly Islamists, have been promoted in the name of minority and religious rights. The growth of community based ‘Sharia’ and other parallel legal systems is part of this process of acquiescence and promotion by western states and international institutions as much as by fundamentalist regimes and movements.

When far-Right movements, including religious fundamentalists, take power or gain social acceptance, women are the first targets. They erase women from the public space, treat them as second-class citizens and consider them extensions of family and religious and national honour, not individuals with universal human rights.

On the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we recall that the peoples of the world came together in the hope of ending war, colonialism and fascism and ensuring human rights for all regardless of sex, race, citizenship or other status.

These struggles insisted on our common humanity and equality – not difference or superiority. Yet, we are concerned that many of the struggles that constituted universal rights have been erased from history and labelled ‘western’ by regressive identity politics. Those who see human rights and secular values as ‘western’ simply negate the history of local African, Middle Eastern and Asian struggles for secularism and do not recall that secular values were clearly understood to be the only framework which could build multi-ethnic, multi-religious, plural societies based on the emancipation of women and minorities.

Today, we acknowledge that we owe our rights to liberation and civil rights struggles across the globe, which created the foundation of modern human rights, including the right to women’s equality, freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, i.e. freedom of and from religion. We confirm our opposition to the fascist far-Right as we oppose all religious fundamentalisms. One feeds into the other. They are complementary and indispensable to each other. One can never excuse the other. We affirm the centrality of the universality of rights and the principle of secularism – the complete separation of religion from the state – to ensure that religion cannot influence the state and public policy and impose itself on private lives.

‘One Law for All’ stands for the struggle for universalism, secularism and against religious oppression.

More.



It’s a very minor form of tear gas

Nov 27th, 2018 11:22 am | By

Trump is fine with teargassing children (and of course adults).



Easy for him to say

Nov 27th, 2018 10:40 am | By

Peter Tatchell does keep getting this wrong.

First of all the priority. Trans rights first, women’s rights the also-ran. What the hell. First of all that’s one of the core reasons for this whole conflict: this relentless insistence that trans rights are far more important and urgent than boring old women’s rights. Second, why? Why put trans rights first? Women are half of everyone; trans people are a tiny fraction of everyone. What is it with this constant shrugging weary eye-rolling indifference to women’s rights from people who fancy themselves progressives?

Then there’s calling us “non-trans women.” Fuck right off with that. We’re women. That’s it. We’re not “cis” and we’re no more non-trans than we are non-reptile, non-plaster, non-chocolate, non-asteroid.

And most of all there’s his assuming the conclusion and announcing that “rational, evidence-based ideas” will get us there. There’s his assuming as fact that “trans women are not a threat to non-trans women” and that all there is to do is “show” that.

It’s probably true that most trans women are not a threat to women, but Peter Tatchell can’t possibly know that no trans women can ever be a threat of any kind to women. He can’t know that and we can’t know that and governments can’t know that, so systematically removing all arrangements intended to make women safe from voyeuristic or violent men is not automatically a brilliant plan.

That’s speaking generally, but speaking particularly, there’s also the fact that plenty of trans women are visibly and vocally and publicly a threat to women right now as we watch. Plenty of trans women are working hard to silence women who talk back in the way I’m talking back right here. They got a scalp a couple of days ago when they had Meghan Murphy permanently banned from Twitter. So yes, Peter, some trans women and their “allies” are a threat to women right here and right now.



Smile

Nov 26th, 2018 5:35 pm | By

Mars from a mere 4,700 miles away.



He thought they wouldn’t know

Nov 26th, 2018 5:01 pm | By

Oopsie. You know how Manafort agreed to a plea deal in exchange for getting some charges dismissed? Well he went and lied to the prosecutors after signing the deal, which means they’re filing those charges again.

Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, repeatedly lied to federal investigators in breach of a plea agreement he signed two months ago, the special counsel’s office said in a court filing late on Monday.

Prosecutors working for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, said Mr. Manafort’s “crimes and lies” about “a variety of subject matters relieve them of all promises they made to him in the plea agreement. But under the terms of the agreement, Mr. Manafort cannot withdraw his guilty plea.

Manafort’s lawyers said oh no he didn’t.

[A]fter at least a dozen sessions with him, federal prosecutors have not only decided Mr. Manafort does not deserve leniency, but also could seek to refile other charges that they had agreed to dismiss as part of the plea deal.

So much for making a deal.



Dedication

Nov 26th, 2018 1:43 pm | By

Trump has had a busy day not believing things he hasn’t read.

President Donald Trump on Monday dismissed a study produced by his own administration, involving 13 federal agencies and more than 300 leading climate scientists, warning of the potentially catastrophic impact of climate change.

Why, you ask?

“I don’t believe it,” Trump told reporters on Monday, adding that he had read “some” of the report.

The cover, maybe?

Anyway. There is more than one kind of not believing. There’s the kind that involves knowledge of the thing to be believed or not believed, and then there’s the other kind. You can count on Trump to practice always the other kind.

If you missed the study’s release, well, that was the point. It was originally slated to be made public next month but was suddenly released on the day after Thanksgiving, aka Black Friday, when the country shops, eats, hangs with family and pays a total of zero attention to what’s going on in politics. Outside of Christmas and the actual day of Thanksgiving, there’s no better day to drop bad news that you don’t want people to see.

Trump’s willingness to ignore the conclusions of experts because it doesn’t jibe with what he wants the truth to be isn’t isolated to just the climate. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the unanimous conclusion of the country’s intelligence community that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help him and hurt Hillary Clinton. And of late, he has chosen to ignore the CIA’s conclusion that Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.

He makes it easy for himself to ignore the conclusions of experts by not finding out anything about them.



Guest post: Instruments of social control

Nov 26th, 2018 12:42 pm | By

Originally a comment by Freemage on There are wheels that have been squeaking for a lot longer.

Religion is an instrument of societal control, but the New Atheist dream that a world without religion would immediately cast off the old chains has been largely and soundly debunked, primarily by the actions and rhetoric of the New Atheists, themselves. Undermining religious conservatives, in particular, does deal with one stumbling block, but it helps to remember there are progressive religionists, too (Quakers, for instance, tend to be a decade or two on the right side of historical changes), who can be counted upon as allies in fights against oppression, at least so long as their atheist counterparts don’t kick things off with, “You’re dumb. Help us.”

I do wonder how much of the extreme trans-woman rhetoric (and yes, it does seem to largely be confined to the transwoman side, with the standard caveats about humans being capable of anything accounting for the handful of transmen extremists) represents the larger body of transwomen, particularly among those who actually seek GRS. I’ve known a small number of transwomen over the years (possibly more, as the ones I KNOW were trans were the ones who transitioned after I’d met them, and I’ve seen enough of them post-transition to realize that I’m not particularly good at telling the difference on sight), and literally none of them have ever spouted off the sorts of nonsense and hateful rhetoric Ophelia regularly quotes here. Instead, they were generally inclined to keep to themselves and were way too busy navigating the assorted difficulties of life to deal with this sort of thing.

The bit that blows my mind is the extreme trans alliance with the ‘non-binary’ movement. The latter absolutely SHOULD be a feminist-adjacent cause, but got co-opted by the trans extremists somehow, even though they always seem to have opposing agendas, to my understanding. To feminist ideology, there’s little difference between ‘non-binary’ and ‘breathing’–a truly ‘binary man’ would be more like a Chuck Norris meme come to life; I’m not even sure I could imagine a genuinely ‘binary woman’, since the definition of femininity is almost always rigged to make sure that no human being could fit all the requirements (because that makes it easier to point out how any given woman is a ‘failure’ to meet the contradictory requirements). Sure, there’s a bit of special snowflake-ism to calling yourself non-binary, but that seems like it could be a window to getting the person to realize that this is the natural human condition, and that the gender roles they’re rejecting shouldn’t be forced on anyone.



The utterly sensible argument

Nov 26th, 2018 11:07 am | By

The logic of it.

By the same token, men have always been present everywhere. And? Does it follow that women have nothing to fear from men? Hardly. It’s not a vanishingly rare occurrence for men to use their superior size and strength to get violent with women. Even if you think it’s uncomplicatedly true that trans women are women, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that some men will pretend to be trans women in order to assault women. It doesn’t even rule out the possibility that some men could consider themselves trans women while not actually being trans women. (What? What does that mean? Isn’t saying it the same as being it? Well that’s the issue, isn’t it. What, exactly, is the difference between saying it and being it? If it really is just a matter of saying, why can’t people just say it for the moment and then unsay it 30 seconds later? How do we know they mean it? How do we know they’re not just having a laugh? How do we know they’re not being sarcastic? How do we know it’s not a ploy? How do we know anything? When trans is both a profound and intense inner [lived] experience and a simple matter of self-declaration, what is it at all?)

Sally Hines might as well have said men have always been married to women therefore women have nothing to fear from marriage to men. Most women don’t, of course, but some do, and the men who are going to turn violent don’t come with labels saying so.



Yesterday in London

Nov 26th, 2018 10:25 am | By

Deutsche Welle reports on the One Law For All conference this past weekend:

Should Shariah, the Islamic religious law, be blamed for the injustices faced by Muslim women and children or its rigid implementation? Can Shariah be adapted to the needs of secularism? Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and their political use that resulted in Asia Bibi’s death sentence prompted the discussion at a conference on Shariah, segregation and secularism in London on November 25.

The conference also featured Saif ul Mulook, Bibi’s lawyer, who fled Pakistan to the Netherlands soon after the court overturned his client’s death sentence, which had kept her in prison for nearly a decade.

Mulook praised the Pakistani constitution for its “secular credentials” and cited its Article 25 that guarantees equality to all citizens. He also spoke about his childhood when Christians and Muslims lived peacefully together in Pakistan.

“Small groups of mullahs (Islamic clerics) gained prominence after General Zia-ul-Haq [a military dictator who ruled Pakistan in the 1980s] and the US intervened in Afghanistan, a peaceful country at the time,” Mulook told the audience, as he was given a standing ovation by the attendees for his long struggle to get justice for Bibi.

The conference participants urged the British government to grant asylum to Bibi on humanitarian grounds. They also urged authorities to abolish all laws that are against the spirit of freedom of conscience and expression.

The participants of the international conference, organized by Maryam Namazie, marked the 10th anniversary of the One Law for All Campaign, which campaigns for equality irrespective of background, beliefs and religions. They demanded “one law for all’ in opposition to those in Europe who are calling for more autonomy for the arbitration of religious courts and religious judges, especially over matters related to family law, inheritance, divorce, child custody and domestic violence.

In her speech, Yasmin Rehman, a women’s rights campaigner, criticized British authorities for the “mess” they have created by categorizing minority communities “between good and bad migrants.”

Rehman alleged that the British government tends to support any organization that speaks against Muslim radicalization without analyzing its credentials.

The rights activist argued that authorities pander to the demands of right-wing Muslim organizations, giving them legitimacy by allowing Shariah courts to have authority in divorce cases, adding that these measures are tantamount to creating parallel legal systems in the country.

Conference organizers shared Rehman’s views, saying that often the victims of parallel legal regimes in the UK are the most vulnerable people, such as women, children and minority communities.

“We must acknowledge equal rights for all and stop dividing people into communities. We must all abide by human rights laws that are man-made and are subject to change, of course,” said Fariborz Pooya.

But the UK government doesn’t agree.

In February, a report submitted to the British parliament recommended regulation of Shariah courts in the country. It was, however, rejected by the government.

Gita Sahgal, director of the Center for Secular Space organization, accused the British government of legitimizing a parallel legal system in the UK by allowing a dual divorce procedure — one civil and one religious — for British Muslims.

Sahgal explained that the interpretation of Shariah laws is different in Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries. In Muslim-minority countries, Muslim organizations campaign for “cultural conservatism” and a more rigid form of Shariah law. Shariah, she said, has undergone a reformation over a period of time, depending on the political views of the Muslims organizing themselves in different societies or as different communities.

The thing about religious law is that it’s religious, which means it can’t be discussed and analyzed and criticized in purely secular terms, that is to say, in purely this-world terms. There’s always the sacred/fictional element, which takes it out of human hands.



This way to the gas, kids

Nov 26th, 2018 9:25 am | By

A day that will live in infamy.

A little girl from Honduras stares into the camera, her young features contorted in anguish. She’s barefoot, dusty, and clad only in a diaper and T-shirt. And she’s just had to run from clouds of choking tear gas fired across the border by U.S. agents.

A second photograph, which also circulated widely and rapidly on social media, shows an equally anguished woman frantically trying to drag the same child and a second toddler away from the gas as it spreads.

Tear gas – shot at people who were seeking asylum from violence in their home countries. Yes, I understand that no country can simply invite in all people who are fleeing violence in their home countries because that would be billions of people, but there’s plenty of space between that extreme and gassing people seeking asylum.

The Post continues:

The three were part of a much larger group, perhaps 70 or 80 men, women and children, pictured in a wider-angle photo fleeing the tear gas. Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon shot the images, which provoked outrage and seemed at odds with President Trump’s portrayal of the caravan migrants as “criminals” and “gang members.”

Trump officials said that authorities had to respond with force after hundreds of migrants rushed the border near Tijuana on Sunday, some of them throwing “projectiles” at Customs and Border Protection personnel.

No, actually, they didn’t “have to.” Trump told them to, because he’s a murderous racist. It’s pretty much as crude and simple as it looks.



Guest post: There are wheels that have been squeaking for a lot longer

Nov 25th, 2018 4:25 pm | By

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Questions are rarely settled without debate.

Is it just me, or have certain tennets of trans ideology met with more rapid acceptance than one might expect? I know I’m noticing the effects of my own aging on my perception of time (incipient curmudgeonly relativistic time dilation), but things seem to have moved very quickly. The squeaky wheel may get the grease, but there are wheels that have been squeaking for a lot longer (say WOMEN, for example) that have not gotten their timely share of “lubrication.” To further mix metaphors, the extreme trans activists come across as queue jumping dogs in the manger, preventing women from retaining (or gaining in the first place) rights they’ve been demanding for ever.

I’m surprised at the number of governmental and business bodies that have accepted/swallowed/caved in to trans ideologies demands without much in the way of question or debate. I can’t imagine it’s strictly out of the goodness of their hearts, or wanting to appear to do the right thing, because many of these same governments and businesses have been glacially slow or downright shitty at that sort of empathic response in the past. I’m not sure that all these institutions could learn to be so responsive to pressure and demands that quickly by simply learning from past mistakes. I can see some elements on the Left vying to be the mostest, bestest and wokest tof rans allies, but not so much government and business. What’s behind this slight, unexpected, change of gears in the workings of power? Are trans rights a way of undercutting feminism that these non-Left institutions have latched onto, just like New Atheism used women’s rights as a cudgel against Islam (and to a lesser degree Christianity) but quickly forgot about them domestically and within its own organizations once their rhetorical value had been spent against foreign, brown theists? Just curious…



Children were screaming and coughing

Nov 25th, 2018 3:55 pm | By

The AP reports:

12:15 p.m.

Central American migrants, mostly men, appear to be trying to breach the border crossing between Tijuana and California.

U.S. Border Patrol helicopters flew low overhead, while U.S. agents held vigil on foot beyond the wire fence. The Border Patrol office in San Diego said via Twitter that pedestrian crossings have been suspended at the San Ysidro port of entry at both the East and West facilities.

Trump meanwhile was running his mouth. Of course he was.

The AP 15 minutes later:

Migrants approaching the U.S. border from Mexico have been enveloped with tear gas after a few tried to breach the fence separating the two countries.

U.S. agents shot the gas, according to an Associated Press reporter on the scene. Children were screaming and coughing in the mayhem.

On the U.S. side of the fence, shoppers streamed in and out of an outlet mall.

And Trump played a round of golf.



State of play

Nov 25th, 2018 12:45 pm | By

The Guardian says Mueller has been amazingly speedy.

Anne Milgram, a law professor at New York University and a former prosecutor and attorney general of New Jersey, said Mueller and his 17 lawyers had done “a terrific job”.

“Months have gone by – people think it’s a long time – it is not in criminal justice,” she said. “He has moved incredibly quickly, got a lot of cooperation agreements, charges, done an extraordinary job of running down Russian hacking of the election.”

Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor for the northern district of California, said: “Complex charges against nearly three dozen people [and] organizations in less than two years is unheard of. Federal investigations may go on for three or four years before charges are brought against a few defendants. Also despite nearly daily false attacks from the president and his allies, the entire team has just kept its head down and done their work.”

The Guardian also says Trump is cornered.

Trump is approaching the midway point in his presidency and, some argue, a point of no return. The recent midterm elections left him wounded, House Democrats are said to be aiming a “subpoena cannon” at every aspect of his life and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation appears to be nearing its endgame.

“There’s no doubt we’re entering new territory and Donald Trump is in big trouble,” said Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “The election results, no matter what he says, were devastating to him. The coalition he put together is clearly strained and he seems incapable of creating consensus.”

Ya think?

the president has been acting like a man cornered. The catalogue is too long to list in full but here are some of the lowlights:

  • Trump fired Jeff Sessions and hired Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general, in what many see as a threat to the special counsel.
  • He tried to ban a CNN correspondent from the White House but lost in court.
  • He skipped a visit to a military cemetery in France.
  • He criticised the admiral who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
  • He floated bizarre theories for the wildfires in California, twice referred to the destroyed city of Paradise as “Pleasure” and revelled in ignorance of climate change.
  • He referred to the Democrat Adam Schiff as “Adam Schitt”.
  • He issued a bewildering statement (633 words with eight exclamation marks) questioning the CIA’s reported conclusion that Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
  • His daughter Ivanka was caught using a personal email account for government business.
  • He scolded the ninth circuit court of appeals, earning a rare rebuke from the chief justice of the supreme court.
  • It was reported that he wanted the justice department to prosecute Hillary Clinton and former FBI director James Comey.
  • He authorised troops on the US-Mexico border to use “lethal force”, despite concerns their presence is a political stunt.

None of it’s new but it’s nice to have a handy list.

Trump’s inability to stay silent suggests he has learned nothing from his election drubbing. Other presidents have suffered similar fates in the midterms, only to bounce back and win re-election. But they have done so by making changes and showing humility; when Trump was asked by Fox News to rank himself in the pantheon of great presidents, he awarded himself an A+; when he was asked by a reporter what he was grateful for on Thanksgiving, he talked about himself.

Well, he’s an extreme narcissist. Narcissists don’t do self-correction, let alone humility or apology.

Rick Tyler, a political analyst and Republican consultant, said: “Donald Trump seems like he’s worried about two things. First, he’s clearly worried about the Mueller report. If it was purely a question of ego and whether Russia helped him get elected, this is an overreaction. There’s something else going on.

“Second, if you analyse Saudi Arabia and the Khashoggi incident, what Trump says makes no sense. Saudi Arabia is not going to cancel contracts and only has a negligible impact on the cost of oil and gas. Yet Trump promoted the awful cover story. He’s hiding something. There’s something there. He’s not protecting the crown prince; he’s protecting himself.”

Third, there’s that lawsuit against the Trump Foundation.



Questions are rarely settled without debate

Nov 25th, 2018 11:55 am | By

Kenan Malik points out that discussion is more productive than silencing:

On perhaps no issue has the question of what can or cannot be debated been more sharply contested than that of transgenderism. How should society, and the law, look upon people who were born male but see themselves as female? Trying to answer that question has led to bitter confrontations between trans activists, determined to secure full rights for trans people, and “gender critical” feminists worried that the notion of what it is to be a woman is being transformed to the detriment of women’s rights.

The thing is, those two items don’t have to be in tension, and they shouldn’t be. Gender critical feminists don’t want to deny trans people full rights. It hasn’t generally been considered a “right” to be able to impose one’s own personal “identity” on the rest of the world. That still isn’t considered a “right” except when it comes to a gender that differs from a sex. It’s a new and peculiar “right,” this right to be validated as the gender that doesn’t match your sex. It’s becoming apparent as time goes on that such a right does in fact conflict with women’s struggle to obtain equal rights with men. If affirmative action for women (hire more women, invite more women to speak, give awards to women) starts applying to men who identify as women…that’s a tension.

Woman’s Place is a feminist group dedicated to defending the idea of women-only spaces. Its meetings have been disrupted by protesters and banned by local councils as “providing a platform for hate speech”. When another feminist group, Liverpool ReSisters, put up stickers proclaiming “Women don’t have penises” on Anthony Gormley statues on Crosby beach, they were investigated by the police for possible hate crimes and condemned by the city’s mayor, Joe Anderson, for their “hateful” actions.

The Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy recently tweeted “men aren’t women” and asked: “What is the difference between a man and a trans woman?” Twitter shut down her account for “violating our rules against hateful conduct” and forced her to delete her tweets.

The issue is not whether Stock or Murphy or the ReSisters are right in their views. I agree with some of their arguments, disagree with others. The issue, rather, is whether it is valid for them to raise the issues they do or whether the very act of doing so constitutes “hatred”.

There are, obviously, ways of talking about trans people (and any category of people) that do constitute hatred, but it doesn’t follow and it isn’t the case that all discussion of what we mean by “gender” and whether or not anyone’s identity can be treated as binding on everyone else constitutes hatred.

To suggest that the kinds of questions posed by Stock or Murphy should not be asked is to suggest, contra Joubert, that it is better to settle questions than debate them. The trouble is, questions are rarely settled without debate. Stock and Murphy raise certain issues not because they are bigots but because of the realities facing women in society. Whatever one thinks of their arguments, these realities will not disappear simply by labelling critical feminists “hatemongers”.

Is there a formula that debate plus time equals settled? There isn’t literally but there can be in practice, to some extent. There can be ratchets in what is still debatable and what isn’t, although strong enough pressure (in the form of Trumps and Bannons and the like) can break even the ratchets – but the ratchets don’t drop into place overnight. I would like it if it were not seen as debatable whether or not women get to work at Google, but we’re not there yet. It’s way too early in the process for any dogma on “gender identity” to be settled.



Solidarity, bro

Nov 25th, 2018 6:22 am | By

This is a strange one.

Impressive biceps for women.