The other day Fresh Air did a conversation with a reporter about the health insurance battle; one item jumped out at me:

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who’s off this week. We’re talking with Sarah Kliff about the Senate health care bill. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had hoped to get it to a vote before the July 4 recess but has postponed action because he can’t get enough support for it to pass. Sarah Kliff is senior policy correspondent for Vox and co-host of its podcast “The Weeds.”

When we left off, Kliff had explained that the Congressional Budget Office found the bill would leave millions more uninsured and would increase health care costs for many Americans, especially older people. You’ve been covering this issue in Washington for a long time. You must talk to Republican staff and senators. What do they say when these questions are raised about whether people are going to end up paying a lot more and getting poorer coverage?

KLIFF: Yeah, that’s been one of the, you know, interesting and different things from covering the last health care debate, which I did. You know, back then in 2009 and 2010 when I talked to Democrats about their health care bill and asked them, you know, what’s the point of all of this, they would say, we want to increase coverage and reduce costs. It would be some variation on that line. You know, when I and my colleagues at Vox talked to Republican senators over the past few weeks and ask, you know, what’s the goal of this whole thing? We’ve heard back from multiple Republican senators. The goal is to get 51 votes. The goal is really less about policy and more about passing something.

Fucking hell.

That’s not surprising, I suppose, but it’s profoundly depressing, and horrifying. Democrats want to expand coverage; Republicans want to win. The issue is life and death, and Republicans’ goal is to win.

Peter Beinart on the two flavors of sexism:

On Thursday, Donald Trump tweeted that MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when she visited Mar-a-Lago last December. On Tuesday, in the Oval Office, he interrupted a phone call with the Irish prime minister to call over a female Irish journalist, Caitriona Perry, while referring to her “nice smile” and “this beautiful Irish press.”

The incidents are two sides of the same coin.

Or to put it more clearly, they’re the same thing in different moods. The sexist insult and the sexist compliment are both expressions of patronage, of ownership, of altitude. The complimentary version can in fact be worse, because if not obediently and gratefully received it can leap instantly into verbal and even physical aggression. I happened to see a guy doing exactly this just yesterday: he asked a woman what she’d done to alter her appearance, she responded uncertainly, and he instantly went into fake-jocular exclamations about how “It’s impossible to give you women compliments!!” hardeharhar. He laughed his ass off, she fake-laughed a little because who knew where he would go next. I thought about all the things I’d like to say to him but wasn’t going to.

Two decades ago, a pair of social psychologists, Susan Fiske and Peter Glick, distinguished between what they called “hostile” and “benevolent” sexism. Hostile sexism manifests itself in derogatory or threatening comments about a woman’s appearance, capacities, or behavior. Benevolent sexism, by contrast, manifests itself in praise or chivalry that nonetheless reaffirms a woman’s subordinate status. Telling your female coworker that she’s ugly is an expression of hostile sexism. Telling your female coworker that she’s pretty is an expression of benevolent sexism. Sexually assaulting a female colleague is an expression of hostile sexism. Suggesting that a female colleague needs help carrying her bags is an expression of benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism may be more antagonistic and aggressive but benevolent sexism also conveys the message that women should be valued for their appearance, and that they are not equal to men.

And benevolent sexism can be unbelievably patronizing – as when a man whose arms are fully occupied carrying a heavy load of something won’t let a woman hold a door open for him. (I’ve had that experience.)

The more a woman conforms to traditional gender norms, the more likely she is to experience benevolent sexism. The more she threatens them, the more likely she is to experience hostile sexism.

Heads he wins, tails she loses.

Viscerally, Trump likely understands what the research shows: that focusing people’s attention on a woman’s appearance makes them value her abilities less. For a 2009 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Nathan Heflick and Jamie Goldenberg asked one group of college students to write about Sarah Palin’s appearance and another to write about her “human essence.” Then both groups were asked a series of questions about her. The students who had written about her appearance rated her as less competent. In a different study, participants told to focus on Michelle Obama’s looks deemed her less competent, too.

This of course is why his “compliments” to Perry were more pseudo-benevolent than genuinely so – she was working, so his irrelevant eruptions about her smile were fundamentally insulting, as if she were there to be eye candy as opposed to doing her job.

The good news is that it motivates us to fight back. The bad news is that it grinds us down.

What Trump may not grasp is the different effects benevolent and hostile sexism have on the women who experience them. Jennifer Bosson, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida, told me that, “benevolent sexism reminds women of male protection and of the benefits of being pretty. It can leave women immobilized.” Hostile sexism, by contrast, “pisses women off. They get motivated to fight back.” As Becker and Wright put it, “benevolent sexism undermines, whereas hostile sexism promotes social change.”

Hostile sexism seems to motivate women even when they merely observe it happening to others. A 2010 study by Stephenie Chaudoir and Diane Quinn of the University of Connecticut found that merely hearing a man speak in demeaning sexual terms to another woman made female college students “feel greater anger and motivation to take direct action toward men.”

There’s some evidence that Trump’s hostile sexism, as evidenced most infamously in the Access Hollywood tape released last October, has had exactly that result. A post-election study found that people who were more angered by Trump’s comments about women were more likely to take political action to oppose him. This January’s women’s march in Washington was the largest in American history.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that while women often initially react to hostile sexism with outrage and a desire to reassert their dignity, the effects of persistent hostile sexism can be debilitating. A 1993 study by the University of Illinois’s Louise Fitzgerald found that women who suffer ongoing sexual harassment or disparagement “experience lower morale and job satisfaction and increased absenteeism, anger, anxiety, depression, and physical illness symptoms.”

That’s the paradox for anyone who gives a shit about anything, really. You’re motivated, but you’re also subject to disappointment and frustration.

[Editing to add – “altitude” isn’t a typo – it’s a rather cryptic way of saying “higher position on the social ladder.”]

Here is an interesting concept –

Twitter is also a regular reminder of what has long been Americans’ least-favorite quality in Trump: his temperament. A Quinnipiac University poll this month found that just 29 percent of Americans describe Trump as “levelheaded.” Even one-third of Republicans said the president is not a prudent man.

Our “least favorite quality”? What, because he has other, better ones? His temperament is everything. It’s not as if you can put his temperament to one side in order to give due credit to other things about him; his temperament suffuses everything he does and says. It’s a very “Aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” idea that Trump is separable from his temperament. It’s the fact that he’s a mean vengeful narcissistic reckless pig that causes us to detest him. Other than that, he’s not so bad.

Sigh. Not this crap again.

Read this & gasp. So…we should abandon Dr. King's dream & return to judging people by the color of their skin instead of their character? pic.twitter.com/IniWeMAdST

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) June 28, 2017

It’s Cardinal Pell’s turn.

Victoria Police has confirmed Cardinal Pell has been charged on summons over multiple allegations and is due to face Melbourne Magistrates Court on July 18 for a filing hearing.

A statement from the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney said Cardinal Pell had been informed of Victoria Police’s “decision and action”.

He denies all the allegations and says he’ll defend himself vigorously.

Cardinal Pell is the third most senior Catholic at the Vatican, where he is responsible for the church’s finances.

He is likely to step aside from his Vatican post while he fights the charges.

Victoria’s Deputy Police Commissioner, Shane Patton, confirmed in a brief press conference on Thursday morning that Cardinal Pell had been issued with multiple charges relating to historical sexual abuse allegations.

The charges were served on Cardinal Pell’s legal representatives in Melbourne on Thursday, Mr Patton said.

“There are multiple complainants relating to those charges,” he said.

Mr Patton said there had been a lot of speculation about the process that has been involved in the investigation of Cardinal Pell.

“The process and procedures that are being followed in the charging of Cardinal Pell have been the same that have been applied in a whole range of historical sex offences, whenever we investigate them,” he said.

“Cardinal Pell has been treated the same as anyone else in this investigation.”

So that’s interesting.

I wrote about “community”speak in The Freethinker.

The day after the terror attack near Finsbury Park Mosque, the BBC interviewed Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the ironically named Islamic Human Rights Commission.

The IHRC is in fact not so much a human rights organization as a public relations firm with one client: a reactionary theocratic version of Islam. In 2015 it distinguished itself by giving Charlie Hebdo an award for “Islamophobia” two months after 12 members of its staff were murdered by the Kouachi brothers, who shouted the obligatory “Allahu akbar” afterwards.

Why does the BBC consult organizations like that? Why doesn’t it talk to the not loathsome organizations instead? Why doesn’t it talk to women instead of men? Why doesn’t it talk to liberals instead of reactionaries?

Pro Publica provides a large bale of information on why Facebook does the strange things it does.

In the wake of a terrorist attack in London earlier this month, a U.S. congressman wrote a Facebook post in which he called for the slaughter of “radicalized” Muslims. “Hunt them, identify them, and kill them,” declared U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican. “Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.”

Higgins’ plea for violent revenge went untouched by Facebook workers who scour the social network deleting offensive speech.

But a May posting on Facebook by Boston poet and Black Lives Matter activist Didi Delgado drew a different response.

“All white people are racist. Start from this reference point, or you’ve already failed,” Delgado wrote. The post was removed and her Facebook account was disabled for seven days.

A trove of internal documents reviewed by ProPublica sheds new light on the secret guidelines that Facebook’s censors use to distinguish between hate speech and legitimate political expression. The documents reveal the rationale behind seemingly inconsistent decisions. For instance, Higgins’ incitement to violence passed muster because it targeted a specific sub-group of Muslims — those that are “radicalized” — while Delgado’s post was deleted for attacking whites in general.

Over the past decade, the company has developed hundreds of rules, drawing elaborate distinctions between what should and shouldn’t be allowed, in an effort to make the site a safe place for its nearly 2 billion users.

…

While Facebook was credited during the 2010-2011 “Arab Spring” with facilitating uprisings against authoritarian regimes, the documents suggest that, at least in some instances, the company’s hate-speech rules tend to favor elites and governments over grassroots activists and racial minorities. In so doing, they serve the business interests of the global company, which relies on national governments not to block its service to their citizens.

Who ya gonna suck up to? Established power, or rebels?

The question answers itself, doesn’t it.

One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company’s global hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers, black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate speech? The correct answer: white men.

The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected. (The exact rules are in the slide show below.)

Of course this further rests on the absurdity that all members of the “protected categories” get the protection – so whites as well as non-whites, men as well as women, locals as well as immigrants, gentiles as well as Jews, straights as well as gays.

Unlike American law, which permits preferences such as affirmative action for racial minorities and women for the sake of diversity or redressing discrimination, Facebook’s algorithm is designed to defend all races and genders equally.

“Sadly,” the rules are “incorporating this color-blindness idea which is not in the spirit of why we have equal protection,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor and expert on information privacy at the University of Maryland. This approach, she added, will “protect the people who least need it and take it away from those who really need it.”

Thanks, Facebook. That’s working out beautifully.

There’s a lot more. It’s both interesting and frustrating.

H/t Sackbut

Ben Schreckinger at Politico takes a look at the Southern Poverty Law Center and its expanded…agenda.

Since 1971, the SPLC has fought racial discrimination in the South and established itself as the nation’s most prominent hate-group watchdog, most notably winning legal fights that put some of the last nails in the coffin of the Ku Klux Klan. It has also built itself into a civil rights behemoth with a glossy headquarters and a nine-figure endowment, inviting charges that it oversells the threats posed by Klansmen and neo-Nazis to keep donations flowing in from wealthy liberals.

Trump has been a kind of gift to them, P argues, renewing their Relevance Ticket and inspiring new donors.

The rise of Trump is a moment made for Dees, the SPLC’s 80-year-old founder, who is more than a little Trumpian himself. Smooth, publicity-savvy and detail-averse, Dees is a marketing genius whose greatest success may be selling his own persona as a crusader—a skill on display across the street from the SPLC’s office, where a black granite memorial to the casualties of the civil rights movement proclaims it was built by the Morris Dees Legacy Fund. Inside the memorial’s gift shop, visitors will find on the wall a framed photo of Dees staring off into the distance, looking equal parts pensive and saintly. On a shelf next to SPLC-branded water bottles and mugs, the same image of Dees reappears in another frame; it’s also printed on nearby postcards, which are available for purchase.

Touches such as these have led some journalists to nickname Dees, with irony, “the Mother Teresa of Montgomery.” And as Dees navigates the era of Trump, there are new questions arising around a charge that has dogged the group for years: that the SPLC is overplaying its hand, becoming more of a partisan progressive hit operation than a civil rights watchdog. Critics say the group abuses its position as an arbiter of hatred by labeling legitimate players “hate groups” and “extremists” to keep the attention of its liberal donors and grind a political ax. Which means that just as the SPLC is about to embark on its biggest fight in decades, taking on rising racism and prejudice across the country, its authority to police the boundaries of American political discourse is facing its greatest challenge yet.

Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t even restrict itself to policing US political discourse, where at least it can be assumed to know something of what it discusses. Maajid Nawaz is part of UK political discourse, not US.

In October, the SPLC faced explosive blowback when it included British Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz on a list of “anti-Muslim extremists.” The targeting of Nawaz—a former Islamist turned anti-extremism campaigner who is considered a human rights leader by many in the mainstream—even sparked critical coverage in the Atlantic, creating the unusual spectacle of a publication founded by abolitionists going after a group founded to fight the KKK.

Well, it was a destructive, reckless, factually wrong, outrageous thing for the SPLC to do. Maajid is in no possible sense an “anti-Muslim extremist.”

Is tough immigration control really a form of hate, or just part of the political conversation? Does rejecting a religion make you an extremist? At a time when the line between “hate group” and mainstream politics is getting thinner and the need for productive civil discourse is growing more serious, fanning liberal fears, while a great opportunity for the SPLC, might be a problem for the nation.

That second question appears to be a reference to Maajid, but Maajid hasn’t even rejected the religion – he’s very much still a Muslim. This is part of the damage the SPLC has done: people assume they must have had some reason to include him.

The SPLC’s hate group and extremist labels are effective. Groups slapped with them have lost funding, been targeted by activists and generally been banished from mainstream legitimacy. This makes SPLC the de facto cop in this realm of American politics, with all the friction that kind of policing engenders.

Yes, American, which is, to repeat, another reason they shouldn’t have pinned the lie on Maajid Nawaz.

The SPLC’s leaders say they are aware of the various critiques lodged against them but have no plans to change their approach. Heidi Beirich, the head of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, says the group’s criteria are clear and transparent, pointing to the definition published on its website of hate groups as ones that “have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”

Which doesn’t apply to Maajid, as many people (including me) pointed out to her when she sent us a form letter saying that.

Trish Bendix at Slate also writes about Facebook’s tendency to recoil at the word “dyke,” though as an aside in a longer piece on dyke marches under threat.

[M]uch like the larger community has done with “queer,” lesbians have been working to reclaim the word for their own use and identification for decades.

“Lesbians have long been the object of vicious ‘name-calling’ designed to intimidate us into silence and invisibility,” wrote J.R. Roberts in the 1979 essay “In America They Call Us Dykes.” “In the Lesbian/feminist 1970s, we broke the silence on this tabooed word, reclaiming it for ourselves, assigning it to positive, political values.”

Since then, dyke has been a political identity for many young lesbians, its meaning expanding to, as Roberts detailed, “a strong independent lesbian who can take care of herself.” The word was used for a feminist lesbian magazine (DYKE: A Quarterly), Alison Bechdel’s famous long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For[,] and perhaps most famously, the all-women’s motorcycle crew Dykes on Bikes. And when the political activist group Lesbian Avengers decided to pull thousands of women together as part of the LGBT March on Washington in 1993, they did it under the name the Dyke March. Its success spawned siblings in several other cities, many of which are annual parts of Pride celebrations taking place this month.

…

Yet even within cities that hold dyke marches every year, some women find it hard to locate any positivity or power in the word’s meaning. And this, along with a lack of organizational support (some of which stems from queer women’s [in?]ability to volunteer free time and labor) and external logistical pressures, has placed the institution of the dyke march under threat.

Facebook is banning people – women mostly – for causing the word “dyke” to appear, while words like “cunt” and “whore” are of course sacrosanct. Perhaps you think Facebook is doing that only when “dyke” is being used as a pejorative? Ha no.

Lesbians are getting banned from Facebook in droves for posts that include the word “dyke.”

On Friday, in the days leading up to the annual Pride marches that take place in many North American cities, reports that lesbians were being banned from Facebook began to surface.

See the post for screenshots.

So, while the rash of bans over the weekend appeared to be targeted and connected to Pride, it’s not a new phenomenon. At Slate, Trish Bendix reported that Facebook removed a popular New York-based group called “Dyke Bar Takeover,” claiming the use of dyke in their name constituted “hate speech.” Even the term “lesbian” itself is not permitted on Facebook, as part of a username. Lisa A. Mallett and Liz Waterhouse report that posts arguing that lesbians are female have been removed by Facebook, as well.

Not allowed, huh? When the fact that lesbians are female is basic to the definition? Does Facebook disallow saying apples are fruit, spiders are arachnids, daffodils are flowers, cars are machines, cats are felines? I’m assuming a big no, here. So why would they remove a post saying lesbians are female?

The great irony in all of this is that Facebook refuses to take action against groups and individuals who post and share pornography or who engage in hate speech against feminists. I have personally reported dozens upon dozens of threats and hate speech directed at myself, other women, and posted on the Feminist Current Facebook page. The posts reported have included words like “cunt,” “whore,” and “bitch.” Many have paired the anti-feminist slur, “TERF,” with death threats. Not a single one of these incidents has ever qualified for any form of action, according to Facebook. Not once has Facebook removed the post in question or banned the user.

Meghan posts a few examples:

There are more. Facebook wrote back and said that’s very sad for you but we don’t care.

I am not alone in this. Many women report having experienced abuse or threats that Facebook has ignored, and having reported content including revenge porn, child exploitation, and other forms of sexual violence that did not go against the company’s “community standards.”

When asked about this lack of action on misogyny and male violence on their platform, Facebook will often claim dealing with the amount of flagged content is too challenging to get it right — employees must make decisions so quickly that errors are common. The company has also told users that reporting posts is the only way to deal with abusive content, that “every single report of abuse is read and acted upon by a human being,” and that Facebook does not scan for and remove content. Yet they managed to ban dozens of female users within a matter of days — most of whom are not public figures, do not necessarily have enormous followings, who clearly aren’t being reported through nefarious means, but are in fact being sought out by the company itself.

It’s beyond infuriating.