Back at the beginning of the week…

I am sorry and sickened to report that I just resigned from @RNS where I have been a national correspondent for the last 5 years and a freelancer for maybe a half dozen more. It has been the highlight of my career, my dream job and my dream team. Good luck and god bless to all.

— Kimberly Winston (@kjwinston11) April 24, 2018

Kimberly covered the non-religious beat at RNS and we talked several times. There was a lot of shock-horror at this (including from me); now it is explained: Columbia Journalism Review reports:

EARLY IN THE MORNING on Monday, April 23, members and followers of the “God beat” awoke to upsetting news. “I am no longer at @RNS, and that’s about all I can say,” tweeted Jerome Socolovsky, until then the editor in chief of Religion News Service. “It was an honor to lead such a dazzling news team.”

His departure—later revealed to be a firing—seemed to come out of nowhere. But current and former staff members say it has, in fact, been a long time coming: the culmination of months of tension between Socolovsky and RNS Publisher Tom Gallagher, whom many believe has taken control over the newsroom.

“Jerome has seen the slow erosion of his duties as editor in chief at RNS since Mr. Gallagher was hired,” says Kimberly Winston, a contract reporter who covered atheism, secularism, and humanism for RNS. She resigned on Monday in protest. “I feel like journalism is a calling, and they crossed a line,” Winston tells CJR. “If you cross a line, it’s more than personal. It’s my calling. I just felt that I had to go.”

RNS was founded in 1934.

In 2011, it was bought by the Religion News Foundation, a non-profit educational and charitable arm of Religion News Association, a 501(c)6 trade association. All of the organizations—the service, the foundation, and the association—are based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism…

“The country’s awash in religious media but there’s nothing else like RNS,” says Laurie Goodstein, a national religion correspondent for The New York Times. “It’s the AP of religion news, it’s a daily report covering news about all religious faiths without promoting any religion in particular.”

Notice that covering news is a very different thing from promoting anything.

Publisher Tom Gallagher, who is also president and CEO of the Religion News Foundation, was hired in 2016. Gallagher, an attorney and former Goldman Sachs vice president, was a columnist at the National Catholic Reporter from 2007 to 2016. Before that, he worked as an administrator for Mother Teresa’s religious order, Missionaries of Charity, where he helped create a New York State not-for-profit organization, the Mother Teresa of Calcutta Center. He also assisted the cause of her canonization by “investigating a potential miracle attributable to Mother Teresa,” according to his LinkedIn profile.

Well. Just off the top of my head, that seems like a worrying background for the publisher at a news organization. It’s very much in the promotional field as opposed to the reporting one.

Staffers were worried about his lack of experience, but Winston says they hoped his business experience would be useful to the org.

Socolovsky says he wasn’t given a reason for his firing until nearly a week later, when he met with board members and they said the decision was based on his disagreements with Gallagher. “Tom and I had serious differences over the editorial vision for RNS,” Socolovsky tells CJR. “He challenged the accuracy of a fact in a recent story we published and I stood by the reporter who wrote it.”

Possibly this fact:

In April, Gallagher sent a note to all staff members about an RNS story covering a protest at a talk given by Reverend James Martin. In it, he said he had been contacted by the Archdiocese of Chicago, which disputed the number of protesters reported in the piece. Staff members said they felt uncomfortable with what they viewed as the publisher interjecting in the editorial process on behalf of a religious organization.

Gallagher tells CJR that when he emailed Socolovsky and Markoe about the story, Socolovsky responded that the reporter was on vacation, that he trusted her, and that “she did a good job.”

“It’s terribly alarming that any editor would have such a cavalier response to a disputed fact in his staff’s reporting, without any effort to review,” Gallagher says. “Accuracy is our most cherished value. This is Journalism 101. If the top editor is dismissive of requests for corrections or clarifications, then RNS might as well shut down.”

Hmm. Another way of looking at it would be that if the publisher lets the Archdiocese tell the editor and reporters what to say, then RNS might as well shut down. It’s not as if the Catholic church has no history of trying to shape news coverage in its favor, or indeed of stonewalling and lying. The Catholic church is not a disinterested party.

On several occasions, staff members expressed concern over the possible perception that Gallagher favors Catholic-leaning coverage, something they worry could impact the publication’s reputation as nonsectarian.

What I said. He did PR work for “Mother Teresa.”

The publication’s history as a secular, independent, and nonsectarian source of religion news is exactly what staff members worry about losing. Religion reporters outside of RNS hold the same fears.

“That’s why RNS is so vital and so delicate,” says Goodstein, the New York Times religion reporter. “Because to do what they do requires immense journalistic experience and judgment. To cover religion news without fear or favor, impartially. My fear now is that that could be at risk.”

“For this to happen to RNS is a big deal to a number of people beyond our official subscribers, because we’re kind of the last ones standing that serve medium and small publications,” says Winston. “If our editorial independence goes down, that’s a big loss.”

Yes it is.

Zoe Williams has some thoughts on “incels”:

Some of the fault, in their eyes, is with attractive men who have sex with too many women – “We need to do something about the polygamy problem,” said the Incelcast, an astonishing three-hour podcast about the Toronto attack – but, of course, the main problem is women themselves, who become foes as people, but also as a political entity. There is a lot of discussion about how best to punish them, with mass rape fantasies and threads on how to follow women without getting arrested, just for the thrill of having them notice you. Feminism is held responsible for a dude who can’t get laid, and birth control is said to have caused “women to date only Chads. It causes all sorts of negative social ramifications”.

It’s always women’s fault, one way or another. Women are Mommy, who got it wrong at some point for sure, if only because she did most of the work. Women are Cunt-havers, who unfairly deny access to the Ego while sluttishly granting it to OtherPeople. Women are Bitches, who piss us off one way or another. Women are hags, who dare to exist without being sexually appealing. Women are whores, who need no introduction. Women are TERFs, who are legitimate targets of every kind of violence.

They borrow a lot of language from the equality/civil rights agenda – society “treats single men like trash, and it has to stop. The people in power, women, can change this, but they refuse to. They have blood on their hands,” read one post the morning after the Toronto attack. Basically, their virginity is a discrimination or apartheid issue, and only a state-distributed girlfriend programme, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice. Yet at the same time, they hate victims, snowflakes, liberals, those who campaign for any actual equality.

Well the state-distributed girlfriend programme is what makes that not a contradiction: no genuine anti-discrimination or anti-apartheid movement would promote a program of state-distributed human beings, because the word for that is “slavery.” People are not things to be distributed; it’s a pretty simple concept. Women are human beings, not sexual opportunities for men.

The US health care “system” is chaotic but there’s one thing we can say: it’s the worst of its kind.

The U.S. health care system has been subject to heated debate over the past decade, but one thing that has remained consistent is the level of performance, which has been ranked as the worst among industrialized nations for the fifth time, according to the 2014 Commonwealth Fund survey 2014. The U.K. ranked best with Switzerland following a close second.

Isn’t that impressive? Go us.

The Commonwealth Fund report compares the U.S. with 10 other nations: France, Australia, Germany, Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the U.K. were all judged to be superior based on various factors. These include quality of care, access to doctors and equity throughout the country.

Although the U.S. has the most expensive health care system in the world, the nation ranks lowest in terms of “efficiency, equity and outcomes,” according to the report. One of the most piercing revelations is that the high rate of expenditure for insurance is not commensurate to the satisfaction of patients or quality of service. High out-of-pocket costs and gaps in coverage “undermine efforts in the U.S. to improve care coordination,” the report summarized.

Gee, who could have foreseen that.

It turns out Bill Cosby isn’t nice Cliff Huxtable after all.

The 80-year-old actor, a fixture in American family entertainment for decades, erupted in response to a suggestion by the Montgomery County district attorney, Kevin R. Steele, that his bail should be revoked because he was a potential flight risk and owned a plane.

“He doesn’t have a plane, you asshole!” Mr. Cosby shouted. It was all the more startling coming from a man once beloved as the mild Dr. Cliff Huxtable on his hit NBC sitcom, the Jell-O pudding pitchman and the whimsical creator of the character Fat Albert.

In other news, sitcoms are not reality.

Who?

Bill Cosby. Finally.

A jury found Bill Cosby guilty Thursday of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home near here 14 years ago, capping the downfall of one of the world’s best-known entertainers, and offering a measure of satisfaction to the dozens of women who for years have accused him of similar assaults against them.

Finally.

On the second day of its deliberations at the Montgomery County Courthouse in this town northwest of Philadelphia, the jury returned to convict Mr. Cosby of three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, at the time a Temple University employee he had mentored.

The three counts — penetration with lack of consent, penetration while unconscious, and penetration after administering an intoxicant — are felonies, each punishable by up to 10 years in state prison, though the sentences could be served concurrently.

It was the second time a jury had considered Mr. Cosby’s fate. His first trial last summer ended with a deadlocked jury after six days of deliberations.

I had thought that was going to be the end of it. The bad, unfair, depressing end of it.

The case was the first high-profile trial of the #MeToo era. Candidates were required during jury selection to provide assurances that the accusations against scores of other famous men would not affect their judgment of Mr. Cosby. Mr. Cosby’s lawyers referred to the changed atmosphere in American society, warning it and the introduction of accounts from multiple other accusers risked denying Mr. Cosby a fair trial by distracting jurors’ attention. “Mob rule is not due process,” Kathleen Bliss, one of Mr. Cosby’s lawyers told the jury.

Then she spent much of her closing argument urging the jury to discount the accounts of the five supporting witnesses. One was a failed starlet who slept around, she suggested, another a publicity seeker. “Questioning an accuser is not shaming a victim,” she told the jury.

The remarks inflamed Ms. Feden, the prosecutor, who called the attacks on the women the same sort of filthy and shameful criticism that kept some victims of sexual assault from ever coming forward.

He’s a player, she’s a whore. That hasn’t changed yet.

A couple more exhibits at the San Francisco public library’s Degenderettes installation:

Note the barbed wire wrapped around the bottom one. Those bats are not for hitting baseballs, they’re for hitting women.

An axe and a “femme sledgehammer.”

As far as I know these are still there, still on display. In a public library.

Mick Mulvaney may have made things hot for himself by publicly saying he requires payment before he will meet with lobbyists.

Ethics experts say Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director and interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, should be investigated for potentially violating federal bribery laws after he admitted that, as a congressman, he only gave meetings to lobbyists who donated to his campaign.

Speaking before 1,300 financial industry executives at the American Bankers Association conference in Washington on Tuesday, Mulvaney encouraged the officials to use their money to influence policymaking.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” said Mulvaney, a former lawmaker from South Carolina, according to The New York Times. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Norm Eisen, a former top ethics official under President Barack Obama, told Business Insider that Mulvaney “better hope that he never went beyond selling access.”

So it’s officially permissible to sell access? Why?

Eisen said the White House official should be investigated for possibly engaging in a quid pro quo, in which individuals or groups donated to his campaign in exchange for specific actions he took in his capacity as a lawmaker.

That’s the same distinction Bill Clinton made, that I’ve always found so repellent – “money shouldn’t buy you legislation but it should buy you access.”

As a congressman, Mulvaney received $63,000 in campaign contributions from payday lenders, and since taking over at the CFPB he has loosened regulations on the payday lending industry, which has been accused of engaging in predatory practices.

At the expense of poor people, who are the only people who need payday loans.

Ethics and legal experts point out that the legal threshold prosecutors must reach in order to convict a public official of bribery is high.

The evidentiary bar was raised after the Supreme Court’s June 2016 decision in McDonnell v. United States, in which it unanimously overturned a former Virginia governor’s public-corruption conviction, reigning in what Chief Justice John Roberts called the government’s “boundless interpretation” of federal bribery laws.

Oh, so that’s why it’s permissible to sell access.

Prosecutors now must now prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an official took specific actions in exchange for a bribe, illustrating an obvious quid pro quo.

“The evidence stinks to high heaven, but it’s very hard to prove,” Painter said of Mulvaney’s case, adding that Mulvaney’s admission makes him “morally unfit for public office.”

Prosecution is one thing, and workplace rules are another. Mulvaney should be fired.

Many argue that regardless of whether Mulvaney engaged in any illegal conduct, his Tuesday admission is a fireable offense, and excusing it perpetuates a culture of impunity in Washington.

“It is the perfect picture of all that is wrong with DC — and that will remain wrong with DC, even after this administration is gone,” Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard professor and former Democratic presidential candidate, told Business Insider in a statement.

Damn right.

Hm, maybe beautiful friendship not so beautiful after all.

[O]n the last day of his state visit on Wednesday, Macron showed he will not be trifled with. He used a speech to a joint session of Congress to engage in a full-scale takedown of Trumpism, wrapped in a love letter to the United States and a call on Americans to live up to the values embedded in our own history.

Macron, speaking forcefully in English, held nothing back. He warned against “the illusion of nationalism” and politicians who “play with fear and anger.”

No president we’ve had in living memory (I can’t swear to anything about Jackson) has played with fear and anger more enthusiastically than Donald Trump. Macron warned against Trump.

Macron predicted that, despite Trump’s abandonment of the Paris climate accord, the United States would one day rejoin it. Turning Trump’s signature campaign theme on its author, the French president issued his patented call to “make our planet great again.” For good measure, he pointedly asked climate change deniers to confront the consequences if they proved to be wrong. “Let us face it,” Macron said, “there is no Planet B.”

…

If Trump underscored his permissive attitudes toward autocracy by referring on Tuesday to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as “very open” and “very honorable,” Macron spoke of the obligation to stand up for democracy and against authoritarian threats across the globe. And he reminded his American listeners that the chief architect of the multilateral institutions defending democratic ideals was — the United States of America.

“The United States is the one who invented this multilateralism,” Macron said. “You are the one now who has to help to preserve and reinvent it.”

If Trump understands that, he won’t like it.

Again and again, the French leader took on the policies Trump has pursued over the past 15 months. “Massive deregulation,” which is what Trump has been up to, is a bad idea, Macron said. The founder of a new down-the-middle French political party may well be a centrist, but he held nothing back in assailing “the abuses of globalized capitalism” and “financial speculation.” He also urged joint U.S.-European regulation to protect the users of social media.

And he put all he said in the context of a thoroughly Gallic nod to rationality. “Without reason, without truth,” he said, “there is no real democracy.”

There’s only an orange man shouting in rage.

The French are not as in love with Macron as Donnie is. They’re definitely not in love with the beautiful friendship between the pair of them.

[D]isdain for Trump is not a fringe phenomenon in France, where opinion polls consistently show that the U.S. president is deeply unpopular — much more so than Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and China’s Xi Jinping. The general sense is that Macron is playing with fire, even if he can establish himself, and France, as Trump’s leading interlocutor in a Europe that has largely remained at arm’s length.

Some in France have also started using the evidence of the increasingly tactile relationship between Macron and Trump to point out what they consider to be uncomfortable similarities between the two presidents, especially on immigration.

They hates it, both of them.

Macron’s immigration policy had already alienated some of his supporters in recent months.

In January, the French magazine L’Obs, formerly known as Le Nouvel Observateur, which was favorable to his candidacy throughout his presidential run, placed him on the cover behind a barbed-wire fence: “Welcome to the Country of Human Rights,” the headline said.

Macron’s perceived similarity with Trump on the issue has only fanned the flames of outrage.

In a bilateral news conference on Tuesday, Trump underscored these apparent points of intersection, in remarks about “uncontrolled migration.”

He could always go back to Scotland…

In other misogyny news…the San Francisco public library is hosting an exhibit that includes an “I punch TERFs” Tshirt.

Just in case the original poster blocks me, I am posting the image here. But this is 2018 a display in a public library in San Francisco. pic.twitter.com/AU24mItuRm

— Sarah Stuart (@sarahstuartxx) April 25, 2018

Another view:

Die cis scum. Again, a lovely message to send to the users of your library, @SFPublicLibrary pic.twitter.com/gOMbTaY0CK

— PERF (@schmendergender) April 25, 2018

I found the page for the exhibit on the library’s website. Sometime in the last few hours it has added a note:

Note: This exhibit contains strong language, blood and mentions of transmisogyny and police violence. Due to concerns raised by library patrons, we have altered the exhibit to remove a piece of artwork that could be interpreted to promote violence, which is incompatible with our exhibitions policy.

Yeah, “die cis scum” and “I punch TERFs” could indeed be interpreted to promote violence. It’s not a very labored interpretation, if you ask me.

Glosswitch points out what ought to be obvious: that men don’t have a “right” to access to women’s bodies.

Maybe, rather than just raging at "incels", we should question the idea that any man has a right to violent porn, paid-for sex and women's bodies in general. This entitlement doesn't come from nowhere. Even Amnesty have suggested men have a "right to sex".

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) April 25, 2018

Maybe, rather than just raging at “incels”, we should question the idea that any man has a right to violent porn, paid-for sex and women’s bodies in general. This entitlement doesn’t come from nowhere. Even Amnesty have suggested men have a “right to sex”.

I think they ended up walking that back. I found this Q&A where they explicitly reject the obvious implication:

7. Does Amnesty International believe that paying for sex work is a human right?

No. Our policy is not about the rights of buyers of sex. It is entirely focussed on protecting sex workers, who face a range of human rights violations linked to criminalization.

Nor does Amnesty believe that buying sex is a human right (but we do believe that sex workers have human rights!).

To be clear: sex must be agreed between people at all times. No one person can demand it as their right.

I think they wouldn’t have had to say that “to be clear” bit if they hadn’t previously babbled about a “human right to intimacy” while defending their decrim policy.

Think Progress has more on the “incel” uprising and Facebook:

Alek Minassian, 25, was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder during a brief court appearance on Tuesday. Minassian had previously posted a status on Facebook praising Elliot Rodger, the socially-awkward mass shooter who killed six people in Santa Barbara in 2014 before turning the gun on himself.

“Wishing to speak to Sgt. 4chan please…. The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” Minassian wrote on Facebook Monday, at around 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time — around the same time the attack begun. “We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

Facebook later confirmed that the post was authentic.

Facebook says the post from Alek Minassian referencing the "Incel Rebellion” and Elliot Rodger is real, and was posted publicly on his profile before Facebook shut it down.

— matthew braga (@mattbraga) April 24, 2018

If he’d simply shot up a women’s college it would have been no big deal, but the trouble with these scattershot drive down the sidewalk things is that you risk mowing down real people, i.e. men, along with the sluts.

It’s possible that the Toronto sidewalk-murderer is one of those guys who thinks he’s entitled to sex and thus that women are required to say yes to his demands for sex.

Shortly before a rented van ploughed into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 and wounding 14 others, a short and cryptic message was posted on the Facebook account of Alek Minassian, the man accused of carrying out the attack.

The post referred to another mass killer – Elliot Rodger, who shot dead six people and wounded 13 others in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 – and said that the “incel rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and the Stacys”.

What’s “the incel rebellion”? You know, it’s where men who think women owe them sex are going to unite and fight and just take it.

As in other reactionary subcultures that reject consensus liberal beliefs, those who take on the incel creed are said to have taken “the red pill” – referring to the scene in the science fiction movie The Matrix where the protagonist chooses to leave his illusions behind.

Frequently such ideas lead to a generalized bitterness towards women. Indeed, the big incel hubs are often viciously misogynistic and regularly feature calls for rape or other violence.

It couldn’t be anything else. If a man believes a woman – any woman – has no right to refuse to have sex with him, he is by definition calling for rape, and that of course is misogynistic.

Some with this mindset take it upon themselves to commit horrendous violence. In videos and a manifesto, the Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger justified his own mass homicide in 2014 by presenting it as revenge for his own romantic rejections, and the fact that at 22, he was still a virgin.

It’s such a bizarre belief, this idea that because you have a burning desire to stick your penis in someone, therefore that someone is obliged to let you stick her penis in her, quite regardless of her thoughts on the subject. Bizarre yet utterly pervasive.

Behind the layers of irony and disavowal, then, some incels have constructed a kind of violent, insurrectionary rhetoric from romantic failure and the belief that they are owed sex.

If only they could just put all the women under some kind of house arrest so that every man would be able to stick his penis in at least one of them whenever he wanted to.

Ah how touching – they’re celebrating “Confederate Memorial Day” in selected Southern states.

State government offices are closed today in Mississippi and Alabama for Confederate Memorial Day.

Georgia on the other hand renamed it “State Holiday” in 2015 after the slaughter in Charleston.

In some parts of the South, the debate has prompted a counter-effort to honor Southern heritage and preserve symbols of the Confederacy.

A Georgia lawmaker tried to revive Confederate Memorial Day in name in 2017. The proposal, which did not gain traction, made no direct reference to slavery or the Civil War. But it sought to recognize the “four-year struggle for states’ rights, individual freedom and local government control.”

“Southern heritage”=slavery. That’s it. There is no grand other Thing that was wholly separate from slavery that is “Southern heritage.” The South had some people who got very rich growing cotton, and not much else. It was an impoverished backwater with bad schools and worse universities. The “heritage” thing is a heritage of dominance and exploitation. Walk away.

The Great Piece of Turf never comes amiss.

Albrecht Dürer, The Great Piece of Turf, 1503 pic.twitter.com/xlDqxjTp7V

— Rabih Alameddine (@rabihalameddine) April 24, 2018

The Beeb a few days ago:

Campaigners have lost a High Court challenge to the government’s two-child limit on some benefits.

Lawyers representing three families had argued that the policy was incompatible with human rights law.

But a judge has ruled that limiting tax credits and universal credit to a family’s first two children is lawful.

Kate Smurthwaite draws the inevitable conclusion:

I don’t see why the public purse should be paying for Kate Middleton’s third child unless it was the result of rape. Right?

Truth innit!