Pertinent.

Saudi Arabia is issuing threats.

Saudi Arabia has said it will retaliate against any sanctions imposed over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, as the Riyadh stock market had its biggest fall in years.

…

The French, German and UK foreign secretaries ratcheted up the pressure by releasing a joint statement calling on the Saudi government to give a complete and detailed account of Khashoggi’s disappearance, adding that those found to be responsible must be held to account.

Riyadh vowed to hit back against any action. “The kingdom affirms its total rejection of any threats and attempts to undermine it, whether through economic sanctions, political pressure or repeating false accusations,” it said.

The kingdom affirms its right to murder anyone it wants to.

Saudi Arabia’s vast oil reserves, said to be about 260bn barrels, give it enormous clout in the global economy. It has significant power to drive up prices, which would hurt every major developed economy.

It has that, and that’s all it has. If it weren’t for the oil it would be a pariah state.

In the firmest joint language to appear from Europe since the crisis broke, the European foreign ministers said “light must be shed on Khashoggi’s disappearance”.

They said they shared the “grave concerns” expressed by the UN secretary general, António Guterres, and “are treating this incident with the utmost seriousness. There needs to be a credible investigation to establish the truth about what happened, and – if relevant – to identify those bearing responsibility for the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi and ensure that they are held to account.”

The statement added: “We encourage joint Saudi-Turkish efforts in that regard, and expect the Saudi government to provide a complete and detailed response. We have conveyed this message directly to the Saudi authorities.”

It would be nice if the US were part of that statement, but of course it’s not. Donnie Two-scoops likes the Saudi dictators; they’re his kind of guys.

Rachel Anne Williams wrote a post on this question of believing what people say about themselves, in addition to that tweet.

Williams’s Twitter/Medium bio:

Author & writer, ex-academic philosopher, Science Nerd. Read more at www.transphilosopher.com Forthcoming book Transgressive with @JKPBooks

I can’t find where Williams was an academic philosopher, and given the quality of argument in this post I have to say I don’t believe it.

What does it mean to say trans people are who we say we are? It means that if a trans woman says she is a woman, then you should believe she is a woman (and likewise for trans-masculine and non-binary identities).

Trans exclusionary radical feminists (henceforth radfems) respond by saying “Why should I believe what you say you are? Ok, then! I am seven feet tall and 400 lbs. Clearly, that doesn’t actually make me seven feet tall. Just because you say you’re something, doesn’t mean you are that thing.”

We need to therefore modify the definition.

It means that if a trans woman authentically says she is a woman, then you should believe she is a woman.

Ohhhhhh; that explains everything.

Kidding. It’s absolutely ludicrous. It’s like thinking if you say “really” five times then what you say is true. It’s like thinking emphasis=verification.

The radfem is not being authentic, see, she doesn’t mean it. Well no shit, Sherlock, because the radfem is using a reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate how idiotic your claim is. The inauthenticity is the whole point. (See also: sarcasm.)

Ex-academic philosopher who doesn’t know a reductio when she sees one? I think not.

She doesn’t live that truth. It’s not part of her core identity. She hasn’t spent years struggling with her desire to be seven feet tall.

But what if she has spent seven years struggling with her desire to be a genius poet? Does that mean she is a genius poet? No, it means she really really (plus 3) wants to be one. Most people have unfulfilled desires. They’re authentic all right, but that doesn’t mean we are or do or have the thing we desire to be or do or have. Desire doesn’t become the desired goal over time alone.

But we must ask about other identities we might take on, such as different animal species. It seems possible to me that someone could authentically identify as a non-human species. But clearly that wouldn’t actually make them non-human. That’s immutable.

The question then is whether gender/sex is immutable in the same way.

No, it isn’t, because sex and gender are not the same.

In regards to the person who identifies as a non-human species, we have to consider why we find it implausible that if you say you’re a dragon you actually are a dragon.

The answer is that specieshood is simply not the type of metaphysical category that is subjective in that way. I contend that gender is different.

But the issue is sex. Is sex subjective? Or is it a brute physical fact like being a dragon (or not)? If it’s not a brute physical fact, how do animals keep up all this reproducing all over the place?

But gender is also very much objective insofar as you can’t just will yourself into being trans. You either are trans or you’re not. (I’ve actually written an essay that talks about choosing to be trans but it’s a complex topic and not relevant here so we can bracket it).

But gender is objective in the same way. If you’re a cis male, you can’t just will yourself to be a woman.

“Ahh!”, says the TERF, “That’s what we’ve been saying — men cannot be women!”

But that’s not what I said. I said “cis male”. Trans women are by definition not cis males. They are trans women. And furthermore, they are women. Trans women. Or trans women. Or transwomen. We all have different individual emphasis in our identities. We don’t all identify as women in the same way or experience femininity the same way.

Ah yes, that’s the magic. Add “cis” and it all works. A cis male cannot just decide to be a woman, but a trans man can. No wait, that’s not right. A trans woman can, and furthermore she is a woman. But if a cis male can’t decide to, why doesn’t it work to say a trans man can? Because a trans man started out as a woman. No, that’s not right, because a trans man is a woman. Can we say “a cis male cannot just decide to be a woman, but a not-cis man can”? But not-cis is trans, we’re always told – cis is not-trans and trans is not-cis. Are we confused enough yet?

This is also something that differs from culture to culture. There are also many non-binary femmes and in reality the trans-feminine spectrum is just that: a multidimensional spectrum.

It’s a multidimensional spectrum plus a trans woman is a woman.

So what does it mean to be authentic? Because that’s what distinguishes the transphobic identities like “attack helicopter” from trans identities.

I would say that authenticity is about being true to your deepest vision for how you want your life to go. Your ultimate desire for how you want to live your life. It’s about not letting society dictate the terms of your life or your identity. It’s about being true to yourself. Of being actually fucking honest with yourself and not being afraid of accepting yourself for who you are.

Great. So if your ultimate desire for how you want to live your life is as a neurosurgeon at a top hospital, society cannot dictate the terms of your life or your identity.

Another Rachel steps up to defend Rachel MacKinnon.

I support @rachelvmckinnon as a trans athlete. She just set a world record in cycling and TERFs are giving her shit about it. But I know Rachel. I've seen how hard she's worked for this. How dedicated she's been. Hitting the gym. Practicing. Working with coaches. She deserved it.

— Rachel Anne Williams (@transphilosophr) October 13, 2018

But the issue isn’t working hard and dedication and hitting the gym and practicing and working with coaches. The issue is doing all that with a huge physical advantage over all your competitors – the issue is doing it while competing against women while having a male body, and quite a large-framed male body at that. MacKinnon doesn’t “deserve” a world record in women’s cycling because MacKinnon has a male body. Also: the fact that MacKinnon hit the gym does not mean that the women competing did not, so it’s pretty much beside the point. MacKinnon trained; yes; presumably they all trained, but only MacKinnon had the large male body.

Anyway, I read a few other tweets by transphilosophr (not for the first time) and found other peculiar “philosophy.” In particular:

On Medium some TERF responded to one of my articles calling me a "transgender extremist" for having the gall to suggest we should trust trans people about who we say we are. Yup. So extreme. Listening to people's authentic stories and believing them. So radical.

— Rachel Anne Williams (@transphilosophr) October 12, 2018

I keep coming back to this. It’s probably tedious that I keep coming back to it, but it still amazes me that so many people treat that claim as not just reasonable but downright binding, if you want to avoid being labeled a “TERF.” It’s doubly or triply amazing in someone who Identifies As a philosopher. No, there is no broad rule that we should trust people about who they say they are. On the contrary. If it were that simple there would be no such thing as civil service exams or medical degrees or exams in engineering or security clearances or CVs or passports…you get the idea.

In practice, we mostly do trust people in the sense of believing what they tell us about themselves as long as there’s nothing in particular at stake. But when there is something at stake? Then we may want more than simple belief or trust.

Also, we mostly do trust people in the sense of believing what they tell us about themselves as long as there’s nothing in particular at stake and what they tell us about themselves isn’t magical or supernatural. If people tell us they’re aliens from another galaxy, we don’t necessarily believe what they tell us about themselves, and if we do we’re credulous chumps. The things trans people tell us about themselves vary wildly, which is another reason we can’t undertake to believe all of it no matter what, but is also why we can’t even know what it is we’re agreeing to believe. Rachel Anne Williams might tell us one thing about herself while Rachel MacKinnon might tell us something quite different (and in tension with what Rachel Anne Williams told us). Calling both “authentic stories” is not a magic way to make them cohere.

This is simply childish. Of course we can’t just believe whatever people tell us about themselves sight unseen just like that. There is no such rule, so Williams’s implication that there is is kind of extreme, especially coming from someone who tells us she’s a philosopher.

Nicholas Kristof on Trump on Saudi Arabia and MBS and Khashoggi:

Turkey claims to have audiotape of Saudi interrogators torturing Jamal and killing him in the Saudi Consulate. None of this is confirmed, and we still don’t know exactly what happened; we all pray that Jamal will still reappear. But increasingly it seems that the crown prince, better known as M.B.S., orchestrated the torture, assassination and dismemberment of an American-based journalist using diplomatic premises in a NATO country.

That is monstrous, and it’s compounded by the tepid response from Washington. President Trump is already rejecting the idea of responding to such a murder by cutting off weapons sales. Trump sounds as if he believes that the consequence of such an assassination should be a hiccup and then business as usual.

Frankly, it’s a disgrace that Trump administration officials and American business tycoons enabled and applauded M.B.S. as he imprisoned business executives, kidnapped Lebanon’s prime minister, rashly created a crisis with Qatar, and went to war in Yemen to create what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis there. Some eight million Yemenis on the edge of starvation there don’t share this bizarre view that M.B.S. is a magnificent reformer.

And did anyone consult the thousands of foreign domestic workers in Saudi Arabia? I doubt that MBS is a big reformer to them.

In the end, M.B.S. played Kushner, Trump and his other American acolytes for suckers. The White House boasted about $110 billion in arms sales, but nothing close to that came through. Saudi Arabia backed away from Trump’s Middle East peace deal. Financiers salivated over an initial public offering for Aramco, the state-owned oil company, but that keeps getting delayed.

But hey, he said women could drive.

But he also imprisoned the women’s rights activists who had been campaigning for the right to drive. Saudi Arabia even orchestrated the detention abroad of a women’s rights activist, Loujain al-Hathloul, and her return in handcuffs. She turned 29 in a Saudi jail cell in July, and her marriage has ended. She, and not the prince who imprisons her, is the heroic reformer.

Just last month in London, unidentified Saudi men, one wearing an earpiece, attacked a Saudi dissident named Ghanem al-Dosari, who has mocked M.B.S. as “the tubby teddy bear.” As they punched Dosari, they cursed him for criticizing the Saudi royal family.

“M.B.S.’s message to Saudis is clear: I will shut you up no matter where you are and no matter what laws I have to break to do it,” Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch told me.

Yes but he and his entourage spend so much lovely money in Trump’s hotels – how can we possibly criticize them?

Why are we so cozy with Saudi Arabia, again?

Each year, Saudi Arabia employs, through consultants or otherwise, a host of retired American generals, diplomats, intelligence experts and others. Until now, they could assure themselves this was a win-win: lucrative for them, to be sure, but also enhancing mutual understanding with an important U.S. ally.

Now, as more and more evidence implicates Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in the reported murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Saudi diplomatic property in Istanbul, the equation has changed.

Not really. Saudi Arabia is a theocratic hell-hole that abuses women and girls, foreigners, atheists, dissenters – most people it can reach, in fact. The murder of Khashoggi is just more of the same.

Fred Hiatt imagines a retired military man explaining to his daughter why he takes a paycheck from the Saudis.

“You see,” he says, “we need Saudi Arabia’s help to stand up to the really bad actor in the region — Iran.”

“Oh,” she says, hoping this answer will be more satisfying. “What makes Iran so bad?”

“Well, they don’t let their people express themselves freely, or practice the religion of their choice, or even dress the way they want,” the colonel replies.

We know what the next lines are before we read them. So Saudi Arabia does? Er, no.

Even if we still needed Saudi Arabia’s oil, which we do not; even if Saudi Arabia [were] a strong and principled ally in the region, which it is not; even if it helped push the Palestinians toward peace, or kept its promises in Yemen, or bought the weapons that Trump thinks it is going to buy. . . . No matter what Saudi Arabia offered, could its supposed friendship be worth shrugging off the ensnaring and killing of a critic whose only offense was to tell the truth?

Is that the country we want to be?

No, but I thought that long before the murder of Khashoggi.

Talk about shameless…

I broke the 200m WORLD RECORD this morning. It was my first indoor 200m and I have to admit that my 11.92 was significantly slower than I was doing outdoors in the summer. I still need… https://t.co/B2AVmn6aDq

— Dr. Rachel McKinnon (@rachelvmckinnon) October 12, 2018

More shameless voter suppression, this time in North Dakota.

The high court decided 6 to 2 Tuesday to leave in place a state law that requires residents to provide an ID displaying a residential address rather than a P.O. box number to vote. Republican lawmakers who pushed for the measure say the rule is designed to combat voter fraud.

But tribal officials and Democrats say it appears aimed at making it harder for thousands of Native Americans to vote, particularly those who live on reservations without conventional street names. The law specifically bans the use of P.O. boxes as an alternative form of address, rendering many tribal ID cards invalid.

But tribal officials have a plan.

Native American activists have responded with plans to create addresses on the spot for those who need them on Election Day.

Tribal officials will stand outside polling stations on Nov. 6 with laptops and access to rural addressing software and a shared database of voter names. North Dakota is the only state that does not require voter registration, meaning eligible voters can generally show up at the polls and cast a ballot so long as they have proper identification.

No doubt Brett Kavanaugh will go there and tear up all those ballots personally.

Back in March there were news stories about Jared Kushner sharing intelligence with the Saudi dictators.

Jared Kushner discussed classified information from the president’s daily briefing with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who bragged that he had Kushner “in his pocket,” The Intercept reported on Wednesday, citing an unnamed source.

Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser,had access to the briefing, a highly sensitive intelligence update meant to be seen by only the president and his top advisers, before being stripped of his top-secret security clearance last month.

And, if this is accurate, he blabbed about it. To Saudi assistant-dictator Mohammed bin Salman, who apparently had Jamal Khashoggi killed last week.

When Salman became the heir to the throne in June, the daily briefing began to focus on shifting political allegiances in Saudi Arabia and named several Saudi royals opposing the crown prince, the Intercept report said.

Kushner then made a surprise trip to Riyadh in October, reportedly staying up until 4 a.m. with Salman to discuss strategy.

Several sources told The Intercept that after the meeting, Salman told close confidants that Kushner had spilled the names of the Saudi royals “disloyal” to the prince — something Kushner’s camp denies strongly.

Salman told the United Arab Emirates crown prince about the meeting with Kushner, bragging that he had Kushner “in his pocket,” The Intercept reported, citing “a source who talks frequently to confidants of the Saudi and Emirati rulers.”

Maybe it’s just gossip, maybe it’s true. There’s no way to know because Trump and his mob don’t adhere to the rules on transparency.

Jane Clare Jones explains to us about deconstruction and social construction and identity and trans doctrine.

The notion of identity, and what we mean by identity, is key to this whole story. And the infinite irony of the way mangled-post-structuralism is currently washing around in the background of this debate is that if I had to sum up the core of deconstruction in one line, I’d say ‘it’s the critique of identity.’ That is, deconstruction properly interpreted is actually a really useful tool for explaining what’s so wrong with trans rights claims that ‘I AM WHAT I SAY I AM,’ and ‘I am the determinant of my identity,’ and, equally, the idea that identity is ‘a simple case of individual rights.’ Because the core deconstructive insight, as I’ve laid out before, is not that nothing means anything, or that things are just what we randomly decide they are, or that everything is simply ‘discursively constituted.’ The key deconstructive insight is that the being of things – that is, their ‘identity’ – is not just something which exists only and exclusively inside those things. It is, rather, something that exists between one thing and other things. That is, the key deconstructive insight is that identity is, in fact, a relation.

Which of course is why there is any conflict at all. For the activist types it’s not just about being a woman, it’s about getting on Twitter and telling everyone else you’re a woman. With menaces.

That identity necessarily involves relation all becomes painfully, politically obvious in how this whole thing is playing out in practice. Someone can claim that trans people have an absolute right to determine their identity, but were that actually a simple ontological truth, then we wouldn’t be in an endless, fraught spiral about pronouns and misgendering and the world’s recalcitrant refusal to offer up the correct ‘validation.’ Being what you are is not merely a matter of a feeling, or of a ‘feeling of some fundamental essence.’ It’s a matter of being recognised by other human beings as the thing that you think you are.[2] It’s a matter of social relations. And this is why we’re in this whole fucking nightmare mess. Because we have a political movement claiming, on the one hand, that this is just a matter of identity, and it doesn’t affect anyone else, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just a nasty evil bigot, while, at the same time, because identity is all about social relations, they’re throwing a ton of their political weight into trying to control people’s speech, and behaviours, to enforce the validation of those identities.

I think one reason this gets on my nerves more than it does some people’s nerves is that I was such a little egomaniac as a kid. All kids are to some extent, because of theory of mind, but I think I was toward the worse end of the spectrum, maybe because I was such an awkward dork in school. I’ve been leaning hard in the other direction ever since I realized how bad and stupid egomania is, so a political movement that revolves entirely around Muh Identuhtee and what the entire world has to do to “validate” it makes my skin crawl, and seems to be to be the antithesis of progressive. This post of Jane’s puts it in less emotive terms along with clarifying it beautifully.

Originally a comment by latsot on The AI did not like women.

The interesting part (well. at least to people like me) is this:

It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter.

Nobody told it to take notice of the word “women’s”, it worked that out all by itself. This is one of the deeper problems of machine learning: the software can generate unexpected concepts and make decisions based on them and there’s often no way to know this is happening. Sometimes these concepts can perform well in a task, but then start to do badly when input data gradually changes. Sometimes they can bias future learning even more than it is already biassed.

There are lots and lots (and lots) of problems with algorithms running everything. Having no way to tell why particular decisions have been made is one of them. Trying to fix a bad process by training with the data that it produced is another (in the other room I mentioned the AI system lots of police forces use to predict crime. SPOILER: it picks black neighborhoods) is another.

But by far the biggest problem is the widespread assumption that if the programmers try hard enough, the algorithm can do everything. Which, to be fair, is an assumption everyone I have ever worked for has shared and is not only an AI issue. The UK’s porn filters and the proposed EU copyright filters are examples of systems that can not possibly work. Youtube’s copyright filter has proven this over and over again but nobody seems to take any notice.

I’ve drifted off-topic but my point is that this story is entirely unsurprising to anyone who works in the field (and, I assume, many who don’t). It’s going to happen more and more. We’re increasingly at the mercy of black box algorithms trained by skewed data with – for all anyone knows – capricious or malevolent intent. It’s as dystopian as hell.

The Post reports that Turkey says there is video of the torture and murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

The recordings show that a Saudi security team detained Khashoggi in the consulate after he walked in Oct. 2 to obtain an official document before his upcoming wedding, then killed him and dismembered his body, the officials said.

The audio recording in particular provides some of the most persuasive and gruesome evidence that the Saudi team is responsible for Khashoggi’s death, the officials said.

Turkey doesn’t want to share the recordings because they’re not supposed to be spying on other people’s consulates.

Mohammed has billed himself as a reformer and moderating force in Saudi Arabia, and he has become a key strategic partner in particular to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser.

Kushner has tried to promote Mohammed to skeptical national security officials, who have long viewed him as an impetuous and ruthless leader who has an overly simplistic view of the complex challenges the United States faces in the Middle East.

Now there’s a throbbing example of why we don’t want Trump’s ignorant stupid relatives holding powerful jobs in government: we don’t want Jared fucking Kushner trying to promote the thug MSB to skeptical national security officials, because what does Jared fucking Kushner know about it?

So nice, everyone wants Ivanka Trump to be the new United Nations Ambassador. She would be incredible, but I can already hear the chants of Nepotism! We have great people that want the job.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 12, 2018

Special meaning of “everyone” – everyone he talks to, everyone on Fox, everyone in his administration.

Actually, in reality, probably not even all of them. Trump’s abysmal theory of mind is quite capable of translating one person who nervously said (when asked) that it would be okay into everyone actively wanting it.

Because why would anyone actually want Ivanka Trump as UN ambassador? She’s a fashion marketer with no obvious intelligence and very obviously no expertise or knowledge. You might as well want any random person you pass on the street to be UN ambassador.

Princess Ivanka is neither intelligent nor informed, plus she’s deeply tainted by most of what we know about her – by her father, her acceptance of a job in a presidential administration that she is in no way qualified for, her acquiescence in her father’s disgusting policies and actions, her marriage to the corrupt Jared Kushner, and no doubt more. It’s not just that she’s not good enough, it’s also that she’s much too bad.

And then there’s Trump’s breezy disdain for the law against nepotism. Yes, people would say making Princess Ivanka the US ambassador to the UN would be called nepotism, because it would be nepotism. Nepotism is bad and we don’t want it and there are laws against it. Trump thinks he gets to flout and laugh at laws that should constrain him, and that makes him a dictator.

About that citizenship question on the census…

Wilbur Ross spoke with Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, before including on the 2020 census a question about people’s citizenship, the Justice Department said in a court document that appears to contradict what the commerce secretary told Congress.

The disclosure came in a lawsuit by more than a dozen states, cities and advocacy groups seeking to block the U.S. from asking the question, claiming it’s discriminatory and designed to reduce the accuracy of the count by cutting participation.

In other words, Ross “appears to” have lied to Congress. That’s a no-no.

Ross has denied speaking to Bannon, a vocal opponent of immigration, telling a congressional committee in March that he was “not aware” of any discussions with the president or anyone else in the White House about the citizenship question.

Remember when Steve Bannon was just one of the trolls? Those were the days.

John Kelly really doesn’t like women.

Remember the lies he told about Representative Frederica Wilson? It was just a year ago.

Kelly claimed Wilson had boasted of securing “$20 million” in federal funding to build a new FBI field office in Miami during the dedication ceremony for the building in 2015. He also called the congresswoman an empty barrel, saying her remarks focused more on her own actions than the heroism of the two FBI agents for whom the new building had been named.

But a Sun Sentinel video of the building dedication ceremony confirmed that she had not taken credit for the building’s funding.

Asked Monday if he felt like he needed to apologize for his comments about Wilson, Kelly said, “Oh, no. No. Never. Well, I’ll apologize if I need to. But for something like that, absolutely not. I stand by my comments.”

Apologize for telling disparaging lies about her? Absolutely not. A white military man in a powerful job apologize to a black woman for telling disparaging lies about her? Oh hell no.

And he doesn’t like Elizabeth Warren, either. She has the gall to talk to him as to an equal, to dispute him, to rebuke actions by the administration he’s part of. How dare she.

White House chief of staff John Kelly called Sen. Elizabeth Warren an “impolite arrogant woman” in a private email he exchanged last year with his top aide following a telephone conversation with the Massachusetts Democrat about the Trump administration’s travel ban.

“Absolutely most insulting conversation I have ever had with anyone,” Kelly, then serving as the secretary of homeland security, wrote to Kevin Carroll, who was then his senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security, in an email from Feb. 8, 2017. “What an impolite arrogant woman. She immediately began insulting our people accusing them of not following the court order, insulting and abusive behavior towards those covered by the pause, blah blah blah.”

Not that it’s a pattern or anything.