Shawn Vestal points out that it’s really not a matter of not knowing sexual harassment is not ok.

As a man, on behalf of men, speaking with the full power and authority of the patriarchy at my back, let me just say: We don’t need sexual harassment training.

None of us needs a seminar to learn not to swap a job offer for sex. None of us is just one bullet point shy of understanding he shouldn’t lock the door and start masturbating in front of a woman. No man requires a PowerPoint to get that he shouldn’t ask a subordinate to watch him take a shower or text [her] a nude picture of himself.

Knowing they shouldn’t is part of why they do it. They’re “transgressive,” they’re bad boys, they’re wicked, they’re not pussywhipped, they’re beasts.

It’s not about what men don’t know.

It’s about what men have known too well: That we can get away with it. That it will be excused, hidden, justified and rationalized, and no one will be called to account. This is as true for the unwanted advance as it is for forced physical assault, and the fact that this is changing has nothing whatsoever to do with training.

They can get away with it, and they’ll be seen as lovable scamps, or they think they will. They know it’s not ok but they don’t take the not ok part seriously – they think women are prudes or cock-teases or interlopers or bores, and that it’s fun to make them jump and back away and look nervous.

So much of the sexual harassment tsunami that’s been unleashed shows very well what this is about: Men knowing exactly where the line is drawn and relishing the authority to step over – and other men sustaining that authority by looking the other way. Recall the illustrative example of the moment: the Access Hollywood tape. A serial groper brags about getting away with it, while another man chuckles along.

Billy Bush didn’t exactly chuckle along. It’s interesting what he did – he let out a startled blurt of laughter, that sounded both shocked and impressed. He now realizes what that sounded like to his daughter, because she told him. It would be nice if men could grasp the point even without a daughter to make it clear to them.

I don’t mean to dismiss all training. Organizations must be better about letting people know how to report misbehavior, clearly emphasizing what is not acceptable, making victims feel safe coming forward, and outlining the consequences for breaking the rules. And to the degree that it’s vital for victims to know their employers will protect them – rather than their harassers – such training is important.

But the rush to train arises from organizational butt-covering more than anything else. It is a way to inoculate against liability, to fly a flag of seeming to take the problem seriously, to stand at a podium and perform the appropriate attitudes.

Meanwhile, let’s remember that sexual harassment training has been commonplace for years and years. Workplaces have been marching employees through numbing, sometimes comically ineffective sexual harassment training even as the culture of sexual harassment thrived.

They forgot to start with misogyny.

It’s as though men need a sexual harassment GPS system rather than a simple human conscience, and it’s just more of the same old shedding of responsibility. As is the idea that we must fix the problem through training.

Men don’t need to be taught to be better. I don’t mean there isn’t a lot of learning to be done, but it’s never been the case that the problem was a lack of knowledge.

We have known better, all along, especially those of us who were laughers, not gropers. We have known better and allowed ourselves to go along, to get along, to go to sleep, to be worse than we knew we should be. To snigger and laugh. To hold our tongues. To dismiss and forget. It should have been obvious that this was odious and unjust, that it was widespread and unacceptable.

It wasn’t training that we lacked.

Well said.

A horror out of Karachi: a pair of teenage neighbors tried to run away together from their poor neighborhood of Ali Brohi Goth, and were murdered by their male relatives. First the 15-year-old girl, Bakhtaja, was tied down and electrocuted, and the next day it was 18-year-old Ghani’s turn.

His father finished dinner, then returned. With the help of an uncle, he strapped his son to a rope bed, tying one arm and one leg to the frame with uncovered electrical wires.

Bakhtaja had endured 10 minutes of searing electrical jolts before she died. The boy took longer, and eventually the uncle stepped in and strangled him. The couple were buried in the dead of night.

You’d think parental love would be a lot stronger than whatever brew of religion and custom and fear of the neighbors inspired that family holocaust, but there it is. Two fathers tortured their children to death for unlicensed sex.

“There are pockets in Karachi where tribal culture is being followed but we had no idea it was to this extent,” said Mahnaz Rahman, resident director of Auraf Foundation, a women’s rights group. Outside a secularised middle class, some communities are becoming more entrenched in their conservative values, she said.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has reported an average of 650 “honour” killings annually over the past decade. But since most go unreported, the real number is likely to be much higher.

…

Ghani had tried several times to get permission to marry her, but was rebuffed. Eventually, the pair fled, with cash and jewellery she had stashed away.

They had made it to Hyderabad, three hours west, when Bakhtaja’s father called and said the families had agreed to the marriage and would let them return safely. It was a trick.

The fathers had, in fact, come to a settlement. Muhammad Afzal, Ghani’s father, had pledged to give Hikmat Khan, Bakhtaja’s father, two of his own daughters, a cow, and PKR 500,000 (£3,538) for the wedding. They meant to keep the agreement a secret.

But an older relative, Sirtaj Khan, got wind of the deal and exposed it to the community, insisting that the couple be put to death. Instead of braving the supposed public embarrassment, the fathers agreed with Khan to make an example of their children.

I wonder what the lives of those two daughters, the ones who weren’t “given” to Hikmat Khan after all, will be like.

Bakhtaja and Ghani are buried 10 metres apart in the local cemetery, their graves dug between shrubs and covered with red cloth still not faded by the sun and dust. Ataullah, a gravedigger, said the bodies were charred from burns when they were lowered into the ground.

Female relatives of the couple, who were not available for interviews, were “removed” from their houses when punishments were meted out, neighbours said. After the murder, Bakhtaja’s mother told human rights defenders: “I forgive him,” meaning her husband.

“The women are vulnerable and scared. They want their men back,” said Rahman, of Aurat Foundation. The arrest of the culprits left the women without financial support. Yet they don’t seem to condone the actions of their husbands.

I guess that answers my question.

Updating to add: disregard the whole “the minute they” part, because I overlooked the date. This is actually about how they did both at the same time…which is even more ridiculous but also less sneaky. My source was an excoriating Twitter thread by Ben Wikler.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand the minute they get their slash taxes on the rich bill signed, they say they’re going to slash Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Of course they do. Inch by inch they get closer to their goal: heavy taxation on the poor and zero taxation on the rich.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Wednesday that congressional Republicans will aim next year to reduce spending on both federal health care and anti-poverty programs, citing the need to reduce America’s deficit.

Citing the need to reduce America’s deficit when he just finished straining every nerve to increase the deficit. Week one: cut taxes on corporations almost in half; week two: cut benefits for the bottom 90% to pay for week one.

Ryan said that he believes he has begun convincing President Trump in their private conversations about the need to rein in Medicare, the federal health program that primarily insures the elderly. As a candidate, Trump vowed not to cut spending on Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.

Everything must flow to the billionaires, while the people on the bottom must be left to starve and freeze. It’s what god intended.

Ryan’s remarks add to the growing signs that top Republicans aim to cut government spending next year. Republicans are close to passing a tax bill nonpartisan analysts say would increase the deficit by at least $1 trillion over a decade. Trump recently called on Congress to move to cut welfare spending after the tax bill, and Senate Republicans have cited the need to reduce the national deficit while growing the economy.

Republicans have cited the need to reduce the national deficit while pushing through a tax bill that balloons the national deficit. Makes sense.

Tell me more about the forgotten white working class who voted for Trump.

A couple in Virginia were shot to death three days before Xmas by a teenage boy they’d told their daughter to stop seeing on account of he was a racist.

The teenager shot Scott Fricker, 48, and his wife, Buckley Kuhn-Fricker, 43, around 5 a.m. Friday before shooting himself, the police said.

The couple, who lived in Reston, Va., about 20 miles west of Washington, were pronounced dead at the scene. The teenager survived and was hospitalized in “life-threatening condition,” according to a statement from the Fairfax County Police Department.

…

Family members recently tried to persuade Ms. Kuhn-Fricker’s 16-year-old daughter to stop seeing the teenager because they worried he was sharing white supremacist ideas with her, Janet Kuhn, Ms. Kuhn-Fricker’s mother, told The Washington Post.

…

Ms. Kuhn-Fricker was a lawyer who owned a business offering care and assistance to older adults. Mr. Fricker was a senior research psychologist for the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Never mind the war on Christmas, what about the war on people who have a conscience?

This crap again.

Police have arrested a blogger [at] Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport on Monday evening on charge of defaming Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) in a blog post.

According to the officer-in-charge of Barguna’s Amtali police station, the blogger Asaduzzaman Nur, more commonly known as Asad Nur, has been on the run after a case was filed against him on January 11 this year under ICT act. The case was filed for a blog post which allegedly carried defamatory language against the prophet.

You can’t “defame” dead people. Defamation applies to alive people only, people who can be harmed in their real, contemporary lives. The law doesn’t protect the reputations of dead people. They don’t mean “defamatory,” they mean “obnoxious to our religious beliefs.”

OC Shahid Ullah also said police sources confirmed that Asad, an Amtali denizen and son of one Tofazzal Hossain, fled to India as soon as he learned about the case. Limon Fakir, a known associate of Asad, had also been arrested in this connection.

“We [Amtali police] notified the immigration police about Asad’s status at the time,” the OC said.

An immigration police official, wishing anonymity, said Asad Nur has been detained after his passport number raised red flag in the immigration system at the airport.

They could have just let him flee to India, but oh no, they had to grab him and punish him for not sharing their religious views.

Via Tasneem Khalil

Barry Duke at The Freethinker reports that the BBC recently appointed James Purnell Radio and Education Director at the BBC, and then word got out that he’s…hold onto your hats…A Natheist.

He was talking to Nick Robinson on Radio 4’s Today about the BBC’s plan to set up a new unit for improving religious coverage, and Robinson asked him if he’s a godbotherer. (Not his exact words.) Purnell said he wasn’t.

I’m not. I’m an atheist but I think the issues around belief are incredibly important to how we live.

Robinson asked him:

Is that not a problem though? You are head of the BBC’s religious programming, you got the job because the BBC decided to abolish the post of head of religious programming as a separate post usually held by a Christian, recently held by a Muslim.

No, it’s not a problem. Why is it not a problem? Because it’s possible to do a job of that kind without being a follower or a devotee or a submitter or any other kind of obedient partisan of the subject in question. Why is it possible? Because people at that level should be able to understand subjects without having a personal emotional stake in them.

This is especially true of religion. Religion demands a knuckling under, a credulity, of its adherents that work against good intellectual practice. Religion is rather like Trump repeatedly badgering Comey to give him loyalty, which would have meant not doing his job properly.

The interview came as the BBC pledged to “raise our game” by increasing portrayal of all religions in mainstream shows. According to this report, it plans to increase prime-time coverage of non-Christian festivals including Rosh Hashanah and Passover as well as Eid and Diwali.

The corporation said the move was to address concerns that it does not reflect British society.

The plan includes proposals to inject more religious themes into mainstream TV and radio, with viewers seeing  protagonists of popular dramas grappling with dilemmas caused by their faiths.

Well that sounds horrible.

Also Happy Return of the Light.

Nearly a week ago the president of Wilfred Laurier University issued a statement.

It’s a gratifying thing to read.

When the issue first broke, I erred on the side of caution. As a person, and as the president of Laurier, I am sensitive to the viewpoints and concerns of our students, staff and faculty. As an employer, I am cognisant that the four people who were in that meeting room are employees and one is also a student. All four are entitled to due process. I did not want to rush to judgement; rather, I wanted to ensure we were able to objectively assess the facts and make sound decisions flowing from that assessment.

We hired an external fact-finder with expertise in human resources issues. I have received the report and we are taking decisive action to ensure these events will not be repeated. The report, along with what we already knew, has led me to the following conclusions and actions.

There were numerous errors in judgement made in the handling of the meeting with Ms. Lindsay Shepherd, the TA of the tutorial in question. In fact, the meeting never should have happened at all. No formal complaint, nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy, was registered about the screening of the video. This was confirmed in the fact-finding report.

The errors in judgement were compounded by misapplication of existing university policies and procedures. Basic guidelines and best practices on how to appropriately execute the roles and responsibilities of staff and faculty were ignored or not understood.

Procedures in how to apply university policies and under what circumstances were not followed. The training of key individuals to meet the expectations of the university in addressing an issue such as this was not sufficient and must be improved.

There was also institutional failure that allowed this to happen. And when there is institutional failure, responsibility ultimately starts and ends with me.

Going forward, we will implement improved training and new procedures and engage in a very specific administrative review to strengthen and enhance confidence in what students and employees can expect at Laurier.

Specifically:

There was no wrongdoing on the part of Ms. Shepherd in showing the clip from TVO in her tutorial. Showing a TVO clip for the purposes of an academic discussion is a reasonable classroom teaching tool. Any instructional material needs to be grounded in the appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context for the relevance of the learning outcomes of the course. The ensuing discussion also needs to be handled properly. We have no reason to believe this discussion was not handled well in the tutorial in question.

I have apologized to Ms. Shepherd publicly, as has Dr. Rambukkana, her supervising professor. The university has conveyed to her today the results of the fact-finding report, to make sure she understands it is clear that she was involved in no wrongdoing. The university is taking concrete steps to make changes to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

It has been made clear to those who were involved in the meeting with Ms. Shepherd that their conduct does not meet the high standards I set for staff and faculty.

Boom. Lindsay Shepherd did nothing wrong. The three people who bullied her, however, did.

A not very festive item I was unaware of: a friend mentioned the deregulation of neurotoxins “resulting in an entire generation of cognitively impaired humans” and I asked what he meant and he replied with Children of Color Hit Hardest as Environmental Enforcement Tumbles Under Trump. Ah yes. I knew that – I knew that poison and pollution in general is much more likely to be perpetrated on poor people than on rich people and more on people of color than white people – but I didn’t know about this particular example. It’s not cheerful.

Public health researchers have found elevated levels of manganese, a heavy metal that can cause neurological disorders and other health problems, in the toenails of children living in Chicago’s Southeast Side neighborhood. Environmentalists are nearly certain they know why.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been working with two industrial facilities that handle large amounts of manganese on the Southeast Side to reduce dangerous dust drifting into nearby residential areas, but enforcement has lagged since the Trump administration took over the agency, according to Debbie Chizewer, an attorney with the Environmental Advocacy Center at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law.

“As far as we know, [the] EPA has taken no further action to contain these emissions,” Chizewer told Truthout in an interview.

I’d like to know more. I’d like to know if Trump’s people told the EPA to stop, for instance.

This is not just a problem in Chicago. Across the country, the number of enforcement actions issued by the EPA has markedly declined since Trump took office and placed Scott Pruitt at the head of the agency, according to a recent investigation by the New York Times.

Trump and Pruitt have launched a sweeping rollback of Obama-era environmental protections and argue that regulators should work [more closely] with polluting industry to find environmental solutions that won’t hamper business.

Trump and Trump’s children don’t live in places where neurotoxins blow into the windows.

After months of pushback and wrangling with [Chicago] community groups and regulators, the operator of one terminal, S.H. Bell Co., agreed to place air pollution monitors at its facility. Within months, the monitors affirmed what residents and advocates had feared since at least 2014: Dust containing manganese was drifting from the facility at levels that exceed federal health standards.

A recent study conducted near a hazardous waste incinerator and another S.H. Bell industrial terminal in East Liverpool, Ohio, found a significant link between elevated manganese levels in the area and lower IQ scores in children.

EPA employees protest Trump’s appointments, and are subject to surveillance as a result.

Employees may be keeping a low profile, but the union representing EPA workers in the Chicago office has criticized the agency for failing to protect Southeast Chicago from pollution since Trump took office. The American Federation of Government Employees Local 704 posted this tweet on Wednesday:

It has been over four months since Trump’s #EPA cited SH Bell for violating health standards, and #EPA has not addressed Manganese Levels on SE side of #Chicago. https://t.co/P3XLvUOoGu

— AFGE Local 704 (@704afge) December 21, 2017

The union is also slamming Cathy Stepp, the Trump administration’s new pick to run the Region 5 office in Chicago. Stepp, a Republican businesswoman-turned-politician, formerly served as head of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR), where she came under fire for decreasing enforcement, shrinking the agency’s scientific research bureau and scrubbing information from the state website linking human activity to climate change, according to reports.

John O’Grady, president of the EPA’s national employee union, said Stepp appears to be “another non-scientist who doesn’t acknowledge that climate change is real.”

“Putting Ms. Stepp in charge of the largest Regional Office in the US EPA is akin to asking the fox to guard the hen house,” O’Grady said in a statement. “If her record at WDNR is any indication, Ms. Stepp will successfully cut funding for enforcement, along with fines for violations. In fact, US EPA Region 5’s enforcement efforts can be expected to plummet.”

Not very festive at all.

In the Telegraph:

Academics say they have been forced to leave the country to pursue their research interests as British universities are accused of blocking studies over fears of backlash on social media.

The Twitter armies are marching, marching.

The academics have decided to speak out as James Caspian, one of the country’s leading gender specialists, revealed that he is planning to take Bath Spa University to judicial review over its decision to turn down his research into transgenderism.

Well but you see there’s no need to research transgenderism, because we already know all there is to know: that gender is how people “identify” and that sex is wholly beside the point.

Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans, a fellow of King’s College London who has previously sat on research awarding bodies, claimed that some universities were becoming “authoritarian”.

Universities project themselves as places of open debate, while at the same time they are very worried about being seen to fall foul of the consensus, she added.

“They are increasingly managerial and bureaucratic. They are now prioritising the risk of reputational damage over their duty to uphold freedom of inquiry.”

Dr Brunskell-Evans said she has encountered resistance when researching the dangers associated with prostitution, adding that many universities had “shut down” any critical analysis of the subject which might offend advocates in favour of legalisation.

Good lord. So universities are afraid of being called SWERFs as well as TERFs. That seems pretty pathetic.

Whilst working at the University of Leicester, she claimed that a critical analysis she published of Vanity Fair magazine’s visual representation of the transgendering of Bruce to Caitlyn Jenner had been pulled after complaints were made.

It was later republished after the university’s lawyers were consulted. The University of Leicester was unavailable for comment.

I suppose she pointed out that Jenner was glamorized on the cover of Vanity Fair in a way that no woman of the same age would be in a million years? And that making it all about being on a magazine cover in a bathing suit is a slightly trivializing view of what it means to be a woman?

Bath Spa University caused controversy earlier this year, when it emerged that it had declined Mr Caspian’s research proposal to examine why growing numbers of transgender people were reversing their transition surgery.

After accepting his proposal in 2015, the university later U-turned when Mr Caspian asked to look for participants on online forums, informing him that his research could provoke “unnecessary offence” and “attacks on social media”.

But why? Why would such research cause offence and attacks?

Presumably because it has become Absolute Dogma that trans people just are the other sex and thus Absolute Blasphemy to do research that implies it might not be that simple. But that’s a ludicrous claim to make Absolute Dogma.

What would be a less ludicrous claim to make Absolute Dogma? That no one should be abused or disadvantaged for what they are. That’s a morality-claim and a rights-claim as well as (or rather than) a truth-claim. It’s a rule for participation, you could say, and it needs to be an order as opposed to a suggestion, but rules of that kind should be few and simple. Research into detransitioning should have nothing to do with that sort of rule.

In a letter sent this week to the universities minister Jo Johnson, Mr Caspian writes that the “suppression of research on spurious grounds” is a growing problem in Britain.

“I have already heard of academics leaving the UK for countries where they felt they would be more welcomed to carry out their research,” the letter continues.

“I believe that it should be made clear that any infringement of our academic freedom should not be allowed. I would ask you to consider the ramifications should academics continue to be censored in this way.”

Last night, Mr Johnson said that academic freedom was the “foundation of higher education”, adding that he expected universities to “protect and promote it”.

Under the new Higher Education and Research Act, he said that universities would be expected to champion “the freedom to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions”.