Julian Baggini has a droll review of a new book by Jordan Peterson on the 12 eternal truths or something.

It’s not difficult to see why Peterson’s rules sold in the online marketplace, where attention spans are short and repackaged clichés pass for original insights. In headline form, most of his rules are simply timeless good sense. “Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)”; “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” The problem is that when Peterson fleshes them out, they carry more flab than meat.

Actually I would say the problem comes before that, the problem is with his “rules” themselves. They’re too self-conscious, too composed, too pseudo-Chesterfieldish. Writing like that brings me out in a rash. He’s not some guy in the smoking room of a club in St James Square in 1875, he’s an internet-famous academic in 2018. He should relax and get over himself…or else go back to being a real academic who writes academic prose. Attempted aphoristic Wisdom is just embarrassing, though I have no doubt his fans will think it’s genius. They think Peter Boghossian is a genius after all.

Although he advocates a balance between the two, most of the time he argues that we need more order. In practice, this means a conservative return to tradition and what is “natural”. Dominance hierarchies, for example, are said to be “older than trees”, a “near-eternal aspect of the environment”. But since when has “natural” meant “good”, or “is” meant “ought”? If we cannot move beyond dominance hierarchies, then his apparently empowering advice to stand tall has the chilling corollary that others will have to stoop.

…

Peterson, who has become one of the most prominent critics of anything that can be labelled as “political correctness”, is especially conservative on gender and family roles. “Female lobsters . . . identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him,” he writes. Generalising from the crustacean to the human he adds, “This is brilliant strategy, in my estimation.”

Ah so that’s why there are jokes about Peterson and lobsters. I’ve seen them around but not known why they were a thing. He fancies himself the top lobster.

Peterson has a knack for penning sentences that sound like deep wisdom at first glance but vanish into puffs of pseudo-profundity if you give them more than a second’s thought. Consider these: “Our eyes are always pointing at things we are interested in approaching, or investigating, or looking at, or having”; “In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise.”

My point exactly, except for the part about sounding like deep wisdom at first glance; to me even at first glance they sound like someone trying to sound like deep wisdom.

What about when artists have histories of abusing women? Should we care? Should museums care?

When the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery was preparing the wall text in 2014 to accompany an image of the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., the museum decided to note that Mr. Mayweather had been “charged with domestic violence on several occasions,” receiving “punishments ranging from community service to jail time.”

Such context is common for controversial subjects in art. But far less so for artists themselves — centuries of men like Picasso or Schiele who were known for mistreating women, but whose works hang in prominent museums without any asterisks.

Now, museums around the world are wrestling with the implications of a decision, by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, to indefinitely postpone a Chuck Close exhibition because of allegations of sexual harassment involving potential portrait models that have engulfed the prominent artist in controversy. Mr. Close has called the allegations “lies” and said he is “being crucified.”

It’s a quandary. If the allegations are false, the postponement is unfair to Close. If they’re true…then what? Should we decide it’s just about what’s on the canvas?

It is a provocative moment for the art world, as the public debate about separating creative output from personal conduct moves from popular culture into the realm of major visual artists from different eras and the institutions that have long collected and exhibited their pieces.

“We’re very used to having to defend people in the collection, but it’s always been for the sitter” rather than the artist, said Kim Sajet, director of the Portrait Gallery, which has a large body of Mr. Close’s work. “Now we have to think to ourselves, ‘Do we need to do that about Chuck Close?’”

It partly depends on what the allegations are, I think. If we’re looking at paintings of people who were abused by the artist, I want to know that. (Balthus’s young neighbor in Paris for instance: we wondered what he did to her.)

“How much are we going to do a litmus test on every artist in terms of how they behave?” said Jock Reynolds, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, which collects Mr. Close’s work. “Pablo Picasso was one of the worst offenders of the 20th century in terms of his history with women. Are we going to take his work out of the galleries? At some point you have to ask yourself, is the art going to stand alone as something that needs to be seen?”

But one is tempted to think that’s easy for him to say.

Whatever museums ultimately decide to do about Mr. Close, some say they can no longer afford to simply present art without addressing the issues that surround the artist — that institutions must play a more active role in educating the public about the human beings behind the work.

“The typical ‘we don’t judge, we don’t endorse, we just put it up for people to experience and decide’ falls very flat in this political and cultural moment,” said James Rondeau, the president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, which has Close works in its collection.

Maybe so, but then again this political and cultural moment could have it all wrong – it could be a moment of moral panic and overreaction.

Anything for sport, right? Anything to win.

The Larry Nassar scandal is the biggest sexual abuse scandal in sports history. Nassar’s victims, who include some of the most famous female athletes around today, including Simone Biles and McKayla Maroney, outnumber the alleged victims of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby combined. The abuse was global: he abused girls in London at the 2012 Olympics; at the Károlyi Ranch, USA Gymnastics’ training centre in Texas; at gymnastics meets in Rotterdam.

Over the course of the week-long sentence hearing, more than 150 women made impact statements in which they described lives crushed by trauma and shame. Shy little girls who briefly found self-confidence through sport became deeply self-loathing teenagers and adults because the man who was supposed to help them do the sport they loved instead molested them, over and over again.

The most obvious word this case sparks is “how”: how could this have ever been allowed to happen? How could USA Gymnastics have required hundreds of girls under its care to submit to mandatory treatment from a man who would give them “pelvic exams” in their hotel or dorm beds at night, wholly unsupervised? And how could the complaints about him have been dismissed for so long, as detailed by the gold medallist Aly Raisman in her unforgettably blistering testimony? “It’s easy to put out statements talking about how athlete care is the highest priority. But [USA Gymnastics] has been saying that for years, and all the while, this nightmare was happening,” Raisman said in court.

Because winning was all. Gold medals were all. The teenagers doing the winning didn’t matter.

“There is no other sport in which this could have happened but gymnastics,” says Joan Ryan, whose 1995 book, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, about the physical and psychological toll gymnastics takes on girls and young women, is still regarded as one of the seminal books about the sport. “These girls are groomed from an incredibly young age to deny their own experience. Your knee hurts? You’re being lazy. You’re hungry? No, you’re fat and greedy. They are trained to doubt their own feelings, and that’s why this could happen to over 150 of them.”

Ryan’s excellent book is also about figure skaters – the other athletes who are dressed and made up like dolls to do their sport.

Ryan wrote about the notoriously brutal regime at the Károlyi Ranch, run by Béla and Márta Károlyi and where Nassar worked, detailing how girls were so deprived of food and water they would beg their male teammates to smuggle them snacks. Yet as long as the Károlyis brought in medals the media loved them.

Anything to win, baby.

I did not know this.

As Director, Robert Mueller began the practice of sending every new agent class @FBI to the Holocaust Museum to understand what happens when police become complicit in authoritarian regimes. https://t.co/NyC1aAtYLW

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) January 28, 2018

Wow. So I looked for more. CNN in July 2014:

The FBI is well aware about the threat to your civil liberties — especially in an age of unwarranted, mass surveillance of our emails and video calls.

It’s why all FBI academy trainees learn about the rise of Nazi Germany and the transformation of law enforcement into a tool of oppression.

“We send every one of our agents to the Holocaust Museum before they’re agents to know and understand what happens when an agency goes rogue,” ex-FBI director Robert Mueller explained recently.

Agents take a private, guided tour of the museum. Then there’s a specialized class that highlights how everyday law enforcement played a key role in Germany’s descent into authoritarianism. It wasn’t only elite military units, like the infamous Schutzstaffel, or SS.

The presentation includes the slide below, which shows how German police accompanied Nazi bureaucrats as they compiled information about minorities who would later be hunted down and killed. That information was tabulated as punch cards by some of the earliest computers.

Very professional, very technologically sophisticated.

A portion of the class at the museum is led by the program’s creator, David Friedman, the Anti-Defamation League’s director of law enforcement initiatives. He asks the agents point blank: What makes you different? Pointing at the U.S. Constitution isn’t enough.

“Look, it’s an amazing document. But sometimes there’s a separation between the principles expressed and how law enforcement conducts itself at the street level,” Friedman said.

Then he brings up dark moments in American history. Japanese-Americans were sent to World War II internment camps. Civil Rights protestors were beaten by cops. And the FBI’s own covert surveillance program, COINTELPRO, targeted athletes, journalists, politicians and grassroots movements for being “subversive.”

Exactly, which is why many of us have very mixed feelings about the FBI’s role in the effort to keep Donald Trump from destroying everything. It’s good to know they’re thinking about it and including it in their training.

From the FBI archive 2010:

Every year, the FBI Training Academy graduates about 1,000 new special agents following 20 weeks of intense preparation. In countless tactical and analytical scenarios, the trainees learn how to respond appropriately under the most trying conditions.

But there is also a rigorous moral and ethical component to the training. In a poignant culmination of 21 hours spent defining the line between right and wrong, all new agents are escorted through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. to see in horrific detail what can happen when law enforcement loses sight of what is right. The program—called Law Enforcement and Society: Lessons of the Holocaust—is a joint partnership between the Anti-Defamation League and the museum.

“It makes our people think about morality, ethics, and how to maintain those during turbulent times,” said Special Agent Douglas B. Merel, who teaches the Academy’s ethical leadership course for new agents that includes the museum program. “It shows how important it is for law enforcement to maintain their core values.”

In one visit on a recent Friday morning, about 50 agents-to-be filed into the museum. Over the next four hours they toured the exhibits—led in some cases by Holocaust survivors—and discussed what separates them from the law enforcement officers in Germany who were systematically co-opted by the Nazis.

In a museum conference room, Elise Jarvis, associate director of Law Enforcement Outreach for the Anti-Defamation League, whose mission is in part to secure justice and fair treatment for all citizens, is purposefully blunt in her line of questions. “So the question I’m putting out there is: What makes you different?” Jarvis asked the class. “What, at the end of the day, is going to keep you all anchored? What keeps you from sliding down that slippery slope? What keeps you from abusing your power?”

As answers bubble up—the Constitution, personal morals, compassion, laws—instructors challenge the students to support and defend their positions.

“It’s really our hope that the law enforcement officers who come to the museum see this program, see this history, and really reflect on their professional core values and their role in society today,” said Marcus A. Appelbaum, who coordinates the museum’s community and leadership programs.

The law enforcement program was developed in 1999 after D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Charles Ramsey toured the museum and recognized the value of teaching trainees about law enforcement’s integral role in the Nazis’ rise to power. In 2000, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh incorporated the tour into the Bureau’s new agent training. In 2005, Director Robert S. Mueller said the training has never been more relevant. “At a time when law enforcement must be aggressive in stopping terror, these classes provide powerful lessons on why we must always protect civil rights and uphold the rule of law,” he said.

So it was Freeh rather than Mueller who started it, but either way it’s good to know.

In the latest news causing SurpriseOMeters to break all around the world, Trump shyly confides that he’s not a feminist. My god who could have seen that coming?!

In an interview airing Sunday, Trump unapologetically told British journalist Piers Morgan that he is not a feminist.

Morgan, a former “Celebrity Apprentice” winner, tweeted: “BREAKING NEWS: President Trump has declared he is NOT a feminist.”

Morgan continued: “He tells me: ‘No, I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist. I mean, I think that would be, maybe, going too far. I’m for women, I’m for men, I’m for everyone.’ “

He’s such a kidder. He’s for himself. He’s a Donald First guy.

He’s also, of course, stupid and uninformed. Being a feminist ≠ being against men or being Not For men. Feminism doesn’t translate as “for women to the exclusion of everyone else.” But it’s silly even to bother pointing that out, because Morgan was trolling and Trump trolled back. Nobody on earth has ever thought Trump was a feminist.

Morgan’s announcement was a bit tongue in cheek, as the president’s words weren’t breaking news to anyone who has paid attention. Trump has repeatedly criticized the Women’s March and other initiatives protesting and critiquing his presidency on the basis that his policies and worldview harm women.

Trolling, in other words. It’s not a joke, it’s not “tongue in cheek” – it’s that the president of the US has noisy, vocal, explicit hostile contempt for women along with a history of assaulting them. That’s not actually funny.

God hates people, it seems.

The Taliban drove an ambulance packed with explosives into a crowded Kabul street on Saturday, setting off an enormous blast that killed at least 95 people and injured 158 others, adding to the grim toll of what has been one of the most violent stretches of the long war, Afghan officials said.

The attack came days after a 15-hour siege by the militants at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul that left 22 dead, including 14 foreigners.

Killed for what? A fascist theocracy.

The large casualty toll was another reminder of how badly Afghanistan is bleeding. Over the past year, about 10,000 of the country’s security forces have been killed and more than 16,000 others wounded, according to a senior Afghan government official. The Taliban losses are believed to be about the same.

United Nations’ data suggests an average of about 10 civilians were killed every day over the first nine months of 2017.

Religion doesn’t seem to be very good for people.

“Today’s attack is nothing short of an atrocity, and those who have organized and enabled it must be brought to justice and held to account,” Tadamichi Yamamoto, the leader of the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan, said in a statement.

“I am particularly disturbed by credible reports that the attackers used a vehicle painted to look like an ambulance, including bearing the distinctive medical emblem, in clear violation of international humanitarian law,” Mr. Yamamoto added.

A filthy move for obvious reasons: you don’t want ambulances to be seen as suspicious.

Chris Sloggett at the National Secular Society on the stupid attacks on Sara Khan.

Today the BBC’s headline about her appointment is: ‘Controversy over new counter-extremism tsar Sara Khan’.

Many of those who claim to speak for Muslims do not like Khan because she promotes a positive message. She encourages a degree of integration into British society. She says Muslims should obey the same laws as everyone else and cooperate with the British state. She has called for honesty among Muslims about hateful ideologies and intolerant practices which are specific to, or particularly prominent among, those who share their religion.

Her organisation Inspire encourages girls and women from Muslim backgrounds to be aspirational. It has done important work countering the narrative of grievance and resentment peddled by so many. And Khan wrote a book, The Battle for British Islam, in which she tackled many of those peddlers, as well as their counterparts on the white far right, head-on.

Is this really work that we should explicitly describe as ‘controversial’? Anyone interested in the future of British society should support the general thrust of what Khan has tried to do.

It’s typical BBC though, to point a censorious finger at people considered “controversial” by reactionary religious men. They’ve been doing it for years.

That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be reasonable analysis and criticism of her work. But if such a thing exists it has been drowned out today amid a hurricane of apologism. Advocacy groups such as 5PillarsUK, the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee have berated Khan. Politicians such as Sayeeda Warsi, Naz Shah and Diane Abbott have cravenly jumped on the bandwagon.

And meanwhile press reports have danced to the Islamists’ tune. The BBC’s initial report on Khan’s appointment was particularly egregious. It described what had happened, included one sentence from Khan in reported speech, and then handed over the stage to a succession of Islamist apologists.

Was the Guardian any better?

The Guardian initially ran a reasonable, descriptive piece. Its headline declared Khan a “leading Muslim campaigner”. Then it decided to change it.

‘Choice of new UK anti-extremism chief criticised as “alarming”‘ was its new headline. ‘Sara Khan is seen as mouthpiece for the Home Office, says former Tory chair Sayeeda Warsi’ was the new standfirst. “The government has been criticised for appointing a divisive counter-extremism campaigner”, read the first line of the article.

Khan was “seen as being supportive of the government’s controversial Prevent programme” (ah yes, the Prevent victim-mongers getting their chance to say their piece without reply again). Warsi, Shah and Harun Khan of the Muslim Council of Britain were quoted before any description of Khan’s work and before anyone mounted a substantial defence of her.

Or the Independent maybe?

The Independent‘s headline read: ‘Government’s appointment of new anti-extremism chief branded “alarming” amid widespread criticism’. The first paragraph said the decision had been “widely criticised and described as ‘deeply disturbing’ by leading figures in the British Muslim community”. Soon we were being told that “Ms Khan has been a strong advocate for the government’s controversial Prevent policy, which has been described as ‘demonising’ Muslims.” (Of course it has also “been described” as many other things). Once again Shah, Warsi and Harun Khan were given the chance to spout their nonsense before the only defence came from Sara Khan herself and the Government.

It’s bizarre. They wouldn’t give this kind of sympathy to white nationalist groups protesting the hire of a BME woman charged with countering racist extremism. They seem to think Islamists are somehow the opposite of white nationalist groups, but they’re not. The two differ only on race; in every other way they match each other in reactionary repression and bullying.