Fly the friendly skies of United.

Sometimes United doesn't realize they've overbooked until the flight has already taken off. pic.twitter.com/voFoBcQV59

— Diane N. Sevenay (@Diane_7A) April 10, 2017

@united "Fly the Friendly Skies" #united pic.twitter.com/ENxSZPiLEK

— Dark Night (@pzambrana) April 10, 2017

Wow now is not the time United pic.twitter.com/VzCoL30xZA

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) April 10, 2017

united's list of special in-flight deals makes a lot more sense now pic.twitter.com/UvkRVFppKz

— Bob Vulfov (@bobvulfov) April 10, 2017

https://twitter.com/metsFanscotty/status/851515669061545984

Here’s a thing you can do. George Szirtes writes:

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT – please sign if you support it.

“Dear Mr Tajani,

I see my fellow Booker Prize winner, the translator Ottilie Mulzet has already written to you about the disgraceful law intended to close the Central European University in Budapest. The law, intended for this one specific purpose, is the latest of steps taken by Viktor Orbán to close out democratic institutions in the country, including press, media and NGOs. Please note I do not say opposition institutions since the CEU is in no way a political opponent of the government. It is simply an independent university.

This evening the president of the country, János Áder, has signed the law and for the second night students are out there, protesting. They are the last bastion against the establishment of a prospective authoritarian one-party state.

It will be a serious blot on the EU’s conscience to permit this act of the Orbán government to pass without response. It reduces Europe. It weakens it. It takes it one step further to the edge of disintegration.

We can watch and hear the students on YouTube as I write this. We implore you to address this matter with the seriousness due to it.

George Szirtes FRSL,FEA

From the ACLU:

Just a week after the Republican Party’s Affordable Care Act repeal bill was dramatically pulled from the House floor, the Senate advanced legislation that will have serious consequences for the reproductive health and family planning abilities of millions across the country. It’s now awaiting President Trump’s signature — and we have his vice president to thank.

On March 30, the Senate passed H.J. Res 43, but only because, without sufficient support, Vice President Mike Pence cast the tiebreaking vote – a constitutional authority he holds as president of the Senate. He voted in favor, with a smile and a wave.

Here’s why that’s so disturbing: H.J. Res 43 would eliminate a regulation that enables Title X family planning grants to go to the most qualified health care providers. The regulation prohibits states from preventing providers from receiving federal funds for reasons that are unrelated to their ability to provide healthcare services. In other words, if a healthcare provider delivers high-quality care, it’s eligible to receive Title X money.

Why is this critical?

Title X providers offer vital services — such as birth control, cancer screenings, and testing for sexually transmitted infections — to 4 million people, regardless of economic status. It’s a publically funded safety net for those who can’t simply go elsewhere. And it works because the network is diverse and includes reproductive health providers, which are often the most qualified and best-equipped to provide this care.

Ahhh yes, but what else are they? Besides the most qualified and best-equipped to provide this care? Likely to provide abortions, of course. Uh oh uh oh. Must prevent, must terminate.

By law, no Title X funds can be used to provide abortion services. But, in more than a dozen states, politicians have moved to block healthcare providers who also provide abortion, like Planned Parenthood and others, from receiving Title X funds.

Because abortion cooties.

But no; really it’s because let’s punish abortion and the women who need abortion. Let’s use our power to do our best to force all pregnant women to stay pregnant whether they want to or not…except of course in the case of poor women who need pre-natal care. They can just die or miscarry, but those sluts who want to stop being pregnant – they have to be forced to stay pregnant.

By law, no Title X funds can be used to provide abortion services. But, in more than a dozen states, politicians have moved to block healthcare providers who also provide abortion, like Planned Parenthood and others, from receiving Title X funds. That’s discrimination, and the courts agree. Excluding qualified providers does nothing to help public health. It actually hurts access to needed care.

The Obama administration recognized this, and in December of last year, the Department of Health and Human Services issued its regulation to protect against this discrimination. But the Congressional Review Act gives Congress the authority to simply undo regulations passed late in the previous administration. It used to be an extremely rare move. That’s no longer the case.

Prior to 2017, it had been used to overturn a rule just once. But with Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, the process has become far more common: As of April 3, the president has signed 11 resolutions to overturn Obama-era regulations, with more headed to his desk. That’s how we ended up overturning Title X family planning protections by a margin so narrow — there was bipartisan opposition in the Senate — that the vice president had to step in.

It was a striking moment. Pence ascended the Senate dais, grabbed the gavel, and calmly, proudly, gleefully even, voted in favor of a resolution that will interfere with health care for millions of low-income women and insert ideology into reproductive health care.

Of course he did. There’s just nothing more gratifying than punishing those sluts who want to stop being pregnant.

The CEO of United Airlines says it’s all rather upsetting. To them.

Videos of a United Airlines passenger being forcibly dragged from his seat on a Sunday overbooked flight at O’Hare International Airport have been viewed more than 1 million times, and the airline’s CEO on Monday called the incident “an upsetting event to all of us here at United.”

Well that’s sad and everything but what about that doctor they beat up? What about his patients in Louisville who had appointments to see him today?

Another passenger on the flight, Audra Bridges, told the Louisville Courier-Journal that United asked for a volunteer at the gate to take a later flight, offering $400 and a hotel stay. Bridges, of Louisville, told the Courier-Journal that passengers were then allowed to board the flight.

Once the flight was boarded, passengers were told four people needed to give up their seats for stand-by United employees that needed to be in Louisville for a Monday flight and the plane wouldn’t depart until they had volunteers, Bridges said. United increased the offer to $800, but no one volunteered.

So they should have kept going.

Instead they said the computer would select four people to throw off. A couple left reluctantly, but the passenger who said he’s a doctor said he’s a doctor and refused. (So far it’s only his word that he’s a doctor.) Security came along to talk to him, and he still refused. So United called the cops, who got violent with him.

“After our team looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily and law enforcement was asked to come to the gate,” United spokesman Charlie Hobart said in the statement. “We apologize for the overbook situation.”

But not for the calling the cops situation or the beating a guy up situation or the dragging a guy bleeding up the aisle of the plane situation.

Travel industry analyst Henry Harteveldt questioned why United didn’t simply offer a larger sum.

“Everybody has their price. If they had allowed the agent to offer a higher incentive, we may never have heard about this,” said Harteveldt, founder of Atmosphere Research Group.

Hobart said United tries to come up with a reasonable compensation offer, but “there comes a point where you’re not going to get volunteers.”

At that point, United’s contract of carriage says the airline can select passengers to bump to a later flight, based on a priority system that can take into account how much passengers paid, how often they fly, whether missing that flight could affect a connecting flight and how early they checked in. People with disabilities and unaccompanied minors are generally last to be bumped.

Usually, passengers — however angry — comply with the airline’s orders. But even if it’s an unusual situation, it raises questions about what rights passengers have when being removed from a flight against their will, Harteveldt said.

Yes, yes it does.

I know it’s very first world problem and all, but the high-handedness and casual violence of it grabbed my attention.

Seriously?

Videos showing a man being violently removed from a United Airlines flight have provoked a public outcry on social media.

The footage taken from inside the airliner shows a man being violently pulled out of his seat and dragged down the aisle as passengers prepared to take off from Chicago to Louisville on Sunday evening.

Well there must be a reason. It may be a bad or mistaken reason but there must be a reason – they think he harassed the person next to him, or someone thought he was A Terrorist, or something.

But no.

The airline in question – United – has acknowledged that the man’s only apparent crime was that the flight was overbooked and he refused to leave voluntarily.

Erm…that’s not a crime.

And, in fact, isn’t it a crime to refuse to deliver a paid-for service and then assault the paid-up customer? That sounds criminalish to me.

Jayse D Anspach, who posted the footage, tweeted: “#United overbooked and wanted four of us to volunteer to give up our seats for personnel that needed to be at work the next day.”

“No one volunteered, so United decided to choose for us. They chose an Asian doctor and his wife.”

“The doctor needed to work at the hospital the next day, so he refused to volunteer,” Mr Anspach added.

“Ten minutes later, the doctor runs back into the plane with a bloody face, clings to a post in the back, chanting, “I need to go home.”

What???

Another passenger Audra D. Bridges, who posted a video of the incident on Facebook, that has been viewed over 400,000 times, wrote: “Please share this video. We are on this flight. United airlines overbooked the flight.”

“They randomly selected people to kick off so their standby crew could have a seat.

“This man is a doctor and has to be at the hospital in the morning,” she added.

“He did not want to get off. We are all shaky and so disgusted.”

The Washington Post has more details, which only make it sound even worse:

United Airlines says a man wouldn’t give up his spot on an overbooked flight Sunday.

So, according to witnesses and videos of the incident, he was pulled screaming from his seat by security, knocked against an arm rest and dragged down the aisle and back to the terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

United refused to answer questions about the incident, which horrified other passengers on the Louisville-bound flight. An airline spokesman only apologized for the overbooked flight, and said police were called after a passenger “refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily.”

But why do they get to call police on passengers who “refuse to leave the aircraft voluntarily” when it’s the airline that’s at fault? Surely what they should be doing in that situation is offering bribes until they get the necessary number of volunteers? Genuine volunteers, not “volunteers” dragged screaming from their seats.

Tyler Bridges recalled trouble starting almost as soon as he and his wife boarded.

An airline supervisor walked onto the plane and brusquely announced: “We have United employees that need to fly to Louisville tonight. … This flight’s not leaving until four people get off.”

“That rubbed some people the wrong way,” Bridges said.

I should think it would. What happened to that whole “thank you for flying with us today” thing? Not to mention that the respectable way to try to get people to do you a favor you need because you fucked up is to ask them very nicely – not to start with a threat. “Hey, I made a mistake, so we’re not going anywhere until you fix it for me.” <— No.

Then there’s the video, which I just watched. It’s unbelievable. It’s horrifying.

What is wrong with us? Is this some kind of Trumpvirus spreading to everywhere?

In another video, the man runs back onto the plane, his clothes still mussed from his forcible ejection, frantically repeating: “I have to go home. I have to go home.”

“He was kind of dazed and confused,” Bridges said. He recalled a group of high school students leaving the plane in disgust at that point, their adult escort explaining to other passengers: “They don’t need to see this anymore.”

The airline eventually cleared everyone from the plane, Bridges said, and did not let them back on until the man was removed a second time — in a stretcher.

This whole “human beings” thing has been a mistake.

Speaking of systemic obstacles thrown in the path of women in STEM – Google does its part.

Google has discriminated against its female employees, according to the US Department of Labor (DoL), which said it had evidence of “systemic compensation disparities”.

As part of an ongoing DoL investigation, the government has collected information that suggests the internet search giant is violating federal employment laws with its salaries for women, agency officials said.

“We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce,” Janette Wipper, a DoL regional director, testified in court in San Francisco on Friday.

Stay in STEM, girls – and if they pay you less than they pay the boys, just stay later and arrive earlier.

Reached for comment Friday afternoon, Janet Herold, regional solicitor for the DoL, said: “The investigation is not complete, but at this point the department has received compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters.”

Herold added: “The government’s analysis at this point indicates that discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry.”

Google denies it.

Google is a federal contractor, which means it is required to allow the DoL to inspect and copy records and information about its its compliance with equal opportunity laws. Last year, the department’s office of federal contract compliance programs requested job and salary history for Google employees, along with names and contact information, as part of the compliance review.

Google, however, repeatedly refused to hand over the data, which was a violation of its contractual obligations with the federal government, according to the DoL’s lawsuit. After the suit was originally filed, a company spokesperson claimed that Google had provided “hundreds of thousands of records” to the government and that the requests outlined in the complaint were “overbroad”, revealed confidential information, or violated employees’ privacy.

I’m surprised Trump hasn’t told the DoL to drop the case.

Google is not the first tech company to face legal action from the labor department over employment practices. In September, the DoL filed a lawsuitagainst Palantir, the Palo Alto data analytics company, alleging it systematically discriminated against Asian job applicants in its hiring process. Palantir has argued that the DoL’s analysis was flawed and the company has denied the accusations.

In January, the department sued Oracle, another large tech company, claiming it paid white men more than others, leading to pay discrimination against women and black and Asian employees. Oracle claimed the case was “politically motivated” and said its employment decisions were based on merit and experience.

In recent months, there has been uncertainty about the future of these kinds of aggressive DoL enforcement efforts under Donald Trump. The president has rolled back Obama-era protections for female workers, and some DoL staffers have raised concerns that the new administration will not embrace the agency’s core mission of supporting workers’ rights. An Oracle executive also joined Trump’s transition team, and the president’s close adviser Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir.

Any bets on how long it will take the Trump gang to shut that whole thing down?

Robert Reich – Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, don’t forget – said this:

When I visited Google several weeks ago, several women took me aside to mention how badly they were treated in terms of pay and promotions.

Shame on Google. It ought to be a model of equal opportunity for women rather than a model of gender bias. (By the way, I hope Trump’s new pick for Labor doesn’t stop this lawsuit.)

Robert Reich on Facebook:

Update for Trump voters.

1. He said he wouldn’t bomb Syria. You bought it. Then he bombed Syria.

2. He said he’d build a wall along the border with Mexico. You bought it. Now his secretary of homeland security says “It’s unlikely that we will build a wall.”

3. He said he’d clean the Washington swamp. You bought it. Then he brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses.

4. He said he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “wonderful.” You bought it. Then he didn’t.

5. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. Then he created the most chaotic, dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, in which no one is in charge.

6. He said he’d release his tax returns, eventually. You bought it. He hasn’t, and says he never will.

7. He said he’d divest himself from his financial empire, to avoid any conflicts of interest. You bought it. He remains heavily involved in his businesses, makes money off of foreign dignitaries staying at his Washington hotel, gets China to give the Trump brand trademark and copyright rights, manipulates the stock market on a daily basis, and has more conflicts of interest than can even be counted.

8. He said Clinton was in the pockets of Goldman Sachs, and would do whatever they said. You bought it. Then he put half a dozen Goldman Sachs executives in positions of power in his administration.

9. He said he’d surround himself with all the best and smartest people. You bought it. Then he put Betsy DeVos, opponent of public education, in charge of education; Jeff Sessions, opponent of the Voting Rights Act, in charge of voting rights; Ben Carson, opponent of the Fair Housing Act, in charge of fair housing; Scott Pruitt, climate change denier, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Russian quisling Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.

10. He said he’d faithfully execute the law. You bought it.
Then he said his predecessor, Barack Obama, spied on him, without any evidence of Obama ever doing so, in order to divert attention from the FBI’s investigation into collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives to win the election.

11. He said he knew more about strategy and terrorism than the Generals did. You bought it. Then he promptly gave the green light to a disastrous raid in Yemen- even though all his Generals said it would be a terrible idea. This raid resulted in the deaths of a Navy SEAL, an 8-year old American girl, and numerous civilians. The actual target of the raid escaped, and no useful intel was gained.

12. He called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief” and accused him of playing more rounds of golf than Tiger Woods. He promised to never be the kind of president who took cushy vacations on the taxpayer’s dime, not when there was so much important work to be done. You bought it. He has by now spent more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama did in the first 3 years of his presidency.

13. He called CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times “fake news” and said they were his enemy. You bought it. Now he gets his information from Fox News, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, and InfoWars.

More to come.

Well that’s a thing I didn’t know was happening.

What is “lunch shaming?” It happens when a child can’t pay a school lunch bill.

In Alabama, a child short on funds was stamped on the arm with “I Need Lunch Money.” In some schools, children are forced to clean cafeteria tables in front of their peers to pay the debt. Other schools require cafeteria workers to take a child’s hot food and throw it in the trash if he doesn’t have the money to pay for it.

New Mexico has passed a bill outlawing that kind of bullying.

In some cases, cafeteria workers have been ordered to throw away the hot lunches of children who owed money, giving them alternatives like sandwiches, milk and fruit.

“People on both sides of the aisle were genuinely horrified that schools were allowed to throw out children’s food or make them work to pay off debt,” said Jennifer Ramo, executive director of New Mexico Appleseed, an anti-poverty group that spearheaded the law. “It sounds like some scene from ‘Little Orphan Annie,’ but it happens every day.”

Well let’s face it, the US fosters a culture that treats poor people as Losers and worse. Of course sadism is the result, and of course the sadism can be directed at children.

Lunch shaming can take a toll on the adults enlisted to carry it out as well as on children. A Pittsburgh-area cafeteria worker made national news when she quit her job rather than deny hot lunches to students.

Some school employees reach into their own pockets to pay for meals. Sharon Schaefer, a former chef at a high school in Omaha, said one cashier asked to be removed from her position because of the school’s “no money, no meal” policy. “She had been secretly paying for students’ meals,” Ms. Schaefer said, “and couldn’t afford to keep it up.”

So that’s heart-breaking.

I saw people yesterday saying this was going to happen. I thought they were exaggerating the level of predictability. BBC headline: Egypt’s Coptic churches hit by deadly blasts on Palm Sunday.

In Alexandria, an explosion outside St Mark’s Coptic church killed 13 people. Pope Tawadros II, head of the Coptic Church, had been attending Mass inside and was unhurt, state media reported.

An earlier blast at St George’s Coptic church in Tanta killed 29 people.

So-called Islamic State (IS) says it is behind the explosions. The group has recently targeted Copts in Egypt.

Four police officers, including one policewoman, were among those killed in Alexandria, the interior ministry said. The suicide bomber blew himself up after they stopped him from entering the church.

It’s like the 16th century, but with better weapons.

The first explosion in Tanta, 94km (58 miles) north of Cairo, took place near the altar.

Security forces later dismantled two explosive devices at the Sidi Abdel Rahim Mosque, also in Tanta, the state-run Al-Ahram news website reports.

The explosions injured at least 71 people in Tanta and 35 others in Alexandria, the health ministry said.

The blasts appear to have been timed for maximum impact, as people gathered to mark Palm Sunday. It is one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar, marking the triumphal entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem.

Egyptian security forces had been put on alert in anticipation of attacks.

That concludes this chapter of Today in Religious Violence.

Is it a crime against childhood to teach children to read critically? Kathryn Heyman thinks not.

This week, the Victorian Education Department released their Respectful Relationships program for state primary schools. In spite of the shock headlines reporting fairytales being ‘banned’, the program simply helps teach children how to deconstruct those stories. In other words, it teaches them how to read. As Victorian premier Daniel Andrews said, with admirable restraint, “We are very much in favour of kids reading stories and then sitting down and talking about them. It is called learning.”

If you don’t look at stories (of all kinds) with a critical eye you can’t think about how they’re shaping you. It’s quite a good idea to think about how various bits of culture are shaping us, in case we don’t want to be shaped in that way.

Critics of the Respectful Relationships program seem to want it both ways. On one hand, fairy stories are sacred, innate to human life and, like the Bible, have been handed to us by divine forces – but have no real impact on the listener or the reader. Harmless, innocent, fun. On the other, if we change them, or merely critique them, terrible things will happen. Boys will grow breasts, girls will wield swords, society will fall apart.

Servants will talk about what chumps the people upstairs are.

In one interview, Australian Catholic University academic Kevin Donnelly said, “It’s a concerted campaign across kindergarten to year 12 to indoctrinate children with a gender and sexuality program that is biased and ideological.” Which seems to suggest the stories in which men lock women up for failing to be meek, or stories in which women are loved when they are pretty and silent (ideally asleep) – that these stories are not concerted campaigns to indoctrinate children with an ideological position.

Well I would say they’re not necessarily concerted campaigns. They can easily be just based on everyone’s unquestioned assumptions.

In fact, the Respectful Relationships program aims to have children look at traditional fairytales and take on a “fairytale detective” role, asking what the messages are, and what might happen, for instance, if “the girl had the sword and the boy had to wait for her to rescue him”. It does not – as far as I can tell – advocate locking boys up in towers or making them wait to be rescued. It simply suggest interrogating the text. As the Premier said, “That’s called learning.”

But it questions the unquestioned assumptions that wrote the girl as imprisoned and the boy as her rescuer, and that makes people who share the unquestioned assumptions feel very uneasy.

When children hear stories, they are making sense of the world, and casting themselves in the various roles. That’s one of the reasons girls grow up wanting to be princesses, if they’re not careful.

That plus all the princess merchandise in the toy shops and all the pink frilly stuff in the clothes shops.

Question all the things!

Another “prominent male philosopher suddenly found to have long history of sexual harassment accusations” story, where “suddenly found to have”=”has long been known to have but we tried to keep it quiet for a few decades.” The long history this time belongs to John Searle.

Documents obtained by BuzzFeed News show that Joanna Ong, 24, who filed suit against Searle and the University of California Regents last month, was not the first woman to report the 84-year-old professor to the university. Ong’s suit alleges that she was fired from her job as Searle’s research assistant after rejecting his advances.

In 2014, an undergraduate student said Searle told her she couldn’t be his research assistant because she was married and thus wouldn’t be as dedicated to the job.

In 2013, a foreign exchange student said Searle lunged at her and tried to kiss her in his office.

In 2004, a graduate student was so shocked by Searle’s behavior at a dinner event for prospective students that she wrote to the chair of the philosophy department condemning Searle’s “highly inappropriate” actions, which included Searle trying to play footsie with her under the table.

Searle denies Ong’s claims, and questions her motives. There’s a surprise. The university says the usual thing too. Looking into it, mutter mutter.

Some of Searle’s inappropriate behavior was an open secret among the philosophy students and faculty at the flagship University of California campus, which has been grappling with professor–student sexual misconduct scandals since 2015. His rotating stable of young, female assistants were known around campus as “Searle’s Girls.” Before Ong filed her lawsuit, which also alleges Searle watched porn in front of her and made sexist comments, philosophy graduate students struggled with how to address concerns about their department’s star philosopher. Those who did report him said their claims seemed to go nowhere.

If you’re a star philosopher, they let you do it.

Philosophy has a pervasive gender gap, and female philosophers have long said sexual harassment is one major factor that makes it difficult for women to succeed in the field. That’s why Kristina Gehrman wrote a letter to the then-chair of Berkeley’s philosophy department after what she called a “degrading” experience with Searle in 2004.

“I am concerned with the need to raise awareness among the faculty about gender-related issues in general within our community, and with the need to develop some concrete department level practices to prevent and/or respond to specific experiences like mine in the future,” Gehrman wrote in the letter, which was signed by eight other female philosophy graduate students.

Gehrman, then a graduate student in her twenties, met Searle at a department dinner for prospective students, she wrote in the letter, which was obtained by BuzzFeed News. Searle never asked her name, instead calling her “his girl,” she wrote. He invited her skiing in Tahoe and said he had taken an undergraduate female research assistant there before. He rubbed her foot with his under the table, she wrote, and when it was time for dessert, Searle insisted Gehrman share his plate.

He was being friendly.

Gehrman sent her letter, she met with administrators, they told her Searle would get training, and…that was the end of the matter. She transferred to UCLA – she thought about quitting philosophy altogether. Remember that gender gap in philosophy? There it is.

One grad student reported he invited her to his office and then pounced on her. Another reported he refused to hire her as a research assistant because she was married.

“I just worry that you won’t be as dedicated to the job,” she said Searle told her, even though she had received an A- in his class.

Well it is of course true that when women get married a portion of their brain dies.

A graduate student who passed on V.’s complaint about Searle to the philosophy department in 2014 said she never heard from the OPHD until this week, when the department emailed to say it heard she “might have information regarding potential behavior that may be in violation of university policy.”

“At the time, I assumed OPHD was handling the situation,” the graduate student said. “Now that I know about similar complaints, it’s clear that they should have done more.”

Jackson Kernion, a graduate student in the philosophy department, said he understood the faculty was limited in scope and had incomplete information about Searle’s behavior. Still, he said, he felt “there could have been a more vigorous response, given the serious concerns raised by grad students” at both formal and informal meetings.

“A number of Berkeley students had their first contact with academic philosophy by taking one of Searle’s classes,” Kernion said. “It shouldn’t come as a surprise that women and minorities sitting in his classes came away with the impression that they were less than fully welcomed in the field.”

It’s always worth re-reading Sally Haslanger’s paper.

Originally a comment by Helene on Rhetoric and imagery which is pure and simple Jew hatred.

I hold no brief for the Israeli government, especially not Netanyahu and his rightwing coalition. In particular, I loathe the meddling by ultra-orthodox rabbis and the haredi community in many civil matters (e.g. marriage, divorce). But there is little doubt that Israel is by far the most liberal (full women’s rights, gays rights — gays serve openly in the military and the only gay pride parade that I’ve seen bigger than Tel Aviv’s is the one in Berlin — press freedom, general civil rights, etc.) and democratic country in the Middle East, with a better record on many of these issues than many European countries.

The “apartheid” epithet is nonsense. If you mean it to apply to Israeli Arabs, you’re utterly wrong. Their main disadvantage is that they are exempt from military conscription and therefore do not enjoy the special government benefits extended to ex-servicemen/women. Nevertheless, some Arabs (mainly Christian Arabs), many Bedouin – and most Druze – (altogether Muslims constitute about 20% of the Israeli population) do volunteer for military or public service and then do qualify for the government benefits. In all other respects, Arabs are full citizens. All religions are fully acknowledged. The Islamic WAPF controls the Muslim religious sites and various Christian denominations control their churches and religious sites. Arabic is an official language and Arab schools have their own curriculum in Arabic. Arabs are elected to the Knesset, head scientific, medical, educational, artistic and political institutions: ambassadorships, government agencies, even seats on the Israeli supreme court.

If you mean to apply the “apartheid” epithet to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, you’d be closer to the mark. Israel controls the borders militarily but civil and domestic matters, including police, are under Palestinian Authority or (in Gaza) de facto Hamas control. Many of the Jewish “settlers” in the West Bank enclaves are vile bible-thumpers but, as the various Israeli peace proposals over the years (in particular the one brokered by Clinton in 2000 and the even more generous one made in 2008 by Olmert) showed, many of these settlements would have been closed and with border adjustments the Palestinians would have received 95- 97% of their territory, plus compensation, upon ratification. But Abbas, and even Arafat before him (about whom Clinton said: “I regret that in 2000 Arafat missed the opportunity to bring that nation into being and pray for the day when the dreams of the Palestinian people for a state and a better life will be realized in a just and lasting peace”), perhaps remembering what happened to Sadat, who was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood when he signed the first Egyptian peace treaty with Israel, declined to ratify any sort of real peace with Israel. After Israel fully withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it didn’t take long for Hamas to throw Fatah members off rooftops and begin sending rockets into Israel.

If you mean “apartheid” in a strictly racial sense, there are about 125,000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel, not to mention smaller groups from other African countries and, being brown myself, I could not help noticing many more dark faces in Tel Aviv than in Ramallah … or, for that matter, Beirut.

If you mean to apply the “apartheid” epithet to the separation wall/fence that Israel built along some sections of the border with the West Bank, it is undeniably repugnant, but (from the Israeli point of view) it helped put a stop to the attacks and bombings that claimed the lives of over a thousand Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada.

I gave two lectures in Birzeit University (my mother’s family is from Lebanon so I have a bit of Arabic) and I attended a conference at the Technion in Haifa… just to indicate to you that I have a bit of firsthand experience in the region.

By comparison, Lebanon, which comes closest to Israel in being multi-ethnic and multi-religious, used to have a precarious political balance between various religious and ethnic groups (Maronites, Orthodox, Sunni, Shia, Druze, &c), but it is now utterly under the sway of Hezbollah, next to ISIS the worst bunch of theocratic tyrants in the entire region (along with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, they are the ones supporting Assad’s murderous campaign against his own people). Though most left years ago, my mother still has some relatives in Lebanon, but they are Sunni (Iran and Hezbollah are Shia, Assad is Alawaite, generally subsumed under Shia, but the majority of Syrians are Sunni, including the Kurds in the north) and they see the writing on the wall. Half a million Syrians have died in this civil war, most, horrendously, at Assad’s hands, and several million more have been driven from their homes. But for some people, if it can’t be blamed on the West (or on Israel, which has quietly been treating Syrian wounded in its hospitals), it isn’t worth protesting.

That ended quickly. Good. The Washington Post reports:

The legal battle between Twitter and the U.S. government ended Friday as the Department of Homeland Security withdrew its demand that the tech company release information to identify an account holder whose tweets have been critical of President Trump.

The lawsuit threatened to become a major battle between Silicon Valley and Washington over free speech. But it was over almost before it began. The social networking site filed a lawsuit Thursday to protest the order, saying that it violated the user’s First Amendment right to free expression. But Twitter dropped its suit Friday, saying in a court filing that because “the summons has now been withdrawn, Twitter voluntary dismisses without prejudice all claims.”

Alt Immigration thanked Twitter and the ACLU.

https://twitter.com/ALT_uscis/status/850399183127273472

Ron Wyden sent a letter urging Customs and Border Protection to do an internal review into how and why CBP issued the summons.

My letter to CBP asking for an explanation to ensure this doesn't happen again pic.twitter.com/TNkLYh8CZO

— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) April 7, 2017

The Post continues:

Courts have traditionally given a high degree of protection to political speech, including the right to speak anonymously or with a pseudonym. That includes, in many circumstances, government employees who are critical of the agencies for which they work.

“This is just, as best as I can tell, the government trying to figure out who is expressing criticisms, and that is chilling,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

If the goal was to quiet the dissent, it seems to have failed. The number of followers for the Twitter account grew from “over 32,000” to more than 150,000 in less than 24 hours.

I’m one.