Richard Rothstein points out that social engineering is not just when people try to undo housing segregation – it’s also when people segregate housing in the first place.

President-elect Donald Trump proposes to nominate Ben Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Mr. Carson has expressed opposition to the Obama administration’s new HUD requirement that cities and suburbs develop plans to end their segregation or face possible loss of federal funds. He calls this “social engineering,” and says that such well-intentioned programs have unintended consequences that their proponents later come to regret. Instead, he says, emphasis should be placed on revitalizing distressed minority neighborhoods in central cities.

What Mr. Carson’s view ignores is that the racial segregation of every metropolitan area in the nation is also the result of “social engineering”—the purposeful efforts of federal, state, and local governments to create and enforce the residential separation of the races. What the Obama administration has begun are plans to undo this social engineering. Failing to continue these plans doesn’t avoid social engineering—it perpetuates it.

Carson grew up in Detroit and claims that that gives him insight into depressed neighborhoods, but Rothstein says that knowing how they got that way is crucial. It didn’t just happen; it was made to happen.

In 1948-49, the Detroit City Council held hearings on 12 proposed public housing projects in outlying (predominantly white) areas. Mayor Cobo vetoed all 12; only housing in predominantly black areas was approved. At the time, there was an enormous civilian housing shortage, and both whites and blacks needed public housing. Had the rejected sites been approved, families of both races would have resided in public housing located throughout the city, setting an integrated pattern that might well persist to this day.

But the mayor actively prevented that integration from happening. Social engineering.

During this period, one developer applied to the federal government for financing to construct housing in Detroit that would be restricted to white families only. Fearing possible future integration, the Federal Housing Administration approved his application only on condition that he construct a concrete wall, six feet high and a foot thick, to separate the proposed development from a neighborhood where African Americans lived.

Uh…wow. A wall. An actual wall. Like Trump’s wall to protect us from bad hombres. Like the Berlin wall. President Trump, tear down that wall.

The Feds built a bomber plant in Willow Run during the war, and built housing for the workers there. The housing was restricted to white people, and so were jobs at the bomber plant. That’s your social engineering right there.

The city of Hamtramck basically ethnically cleansed itself of African Americans.

Public officials in Detroit suburbs adopted explicit policies to exclude African Americans, preventing them from leaving the neighborhoods where Ben Carson grew up. In 1956, for example, the mayor of Dearborn, a suburb to the west of Detroit, announced, “Negroes can’t get in here. Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire. That’s generally known.” One black family that purchased a Dearborn home in defiance of the city policy found its gas turned off and garbage uncollected, and finally moved out. The mayor of Warren, a suburb to the north of Detroit, announced “I won’t tolerate Warren being used as a guinea pig for integration experiments.” Other suburbs maintained similar policies, social engineering the concentration of African Americans in the city itself.

Note the echo of Carson’s thinking: that integration is an “experiment” while segregation is not.

Policies like these not only segregated the Detroit metropolitan area, but every metropolitan area in the nation. Certainly, private prejudice was involved, as well as private discrimination. But without the social engineering of federal, state, and local government, the nation would have a much more integrated landscape than it does today, and the distressed inner city conditions that Ben Carson proposes to address would be, at the least, much less severe.

Is there any chance that Ben Carson will ever pay any attention to Richard Rothstein? Probably not.

The Russian ambassador in Turkey was killed in Ankara today.

A gunman in Turkey wearing a business suit and tie opened fire Monday on Russia’s ambassador, killing the diplomat and wounding several others at photo exhibit in the Turkish capital, officials said. The gunman was killed as panicked people scattered for cover in the gallery.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. But video posted on social media purported to show a Turkish-speaking attacker decrying violence in Syria, where Russia is a key backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

…

Russia and Turkey, a foe of Assad, recently joined to broker a deal to evacuate civilians and rebel fighters from the last opposition enclaves in Aleppo, a major Syrian city that has been under relentless attacks from Syrian forces and their allies.

“Allah Akbar! Do not forget Aleppo!” said the gunman, according to the widely circulated video. “Do not forget Syria! Do not forget Aleppo! Do not forget Syria! As long as our lands are not safe, you will not be safe!

The authenticity of the video could not be independently confirmed.

Meanwhile, in Sarajevo, Archduke Franz-Ferdinand stepped into his car…

Larry Colburn died a week ago. He was the last survivor of the crew that intervened to stop the massacre at My Lai.

Mr. Colburn was the last surviving member of a three-man helicopter crew that was assigned to hover over My Lai on Saturday morning, March 16, 1968, to identify enemy positions by drawing Vietcong fire.

Instead, the men encountered an eerie quiet and a macabre landscape of dead, wounded and weaponless women and children as a platoon of American soldiers, ostensibly hunting elusive Vietcong guerrillas, marauded among defenseless noncombatants.

They dropped smoke flares to mark the wounded so that the soldiers on the ground could find and help them; when they came back around they found all the wounded dead.

Audaciously and on his own initiative, the pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., swooped down and landed the copter.

“Mr. Thompson was just beside himself,” Mr. Colburn recalled in an interview in 2010 for the PBS program “The American Experience.” “He got on the radio and just said, ‘This isn’t right, these are civilians, there’s people killing civilians down here.’ And that’s when he decided to intervene. He said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this, are you with me?’ And we said, ‘Yes.’ ”

Mr. Thompson confronted the officer in command of the rampaging platoon, Lt. William L. Calley, but was rebuffed. He then positioned the helicopter between the troops and the surviving villagers and faced off against another lieutenant. Mr. Thompson ordered Mr. Colburn to fire his M-60 machine gun at any soldiers who tried to inflict further harm.

…

Mr. Thompson, Mr. Colburn and Glenn Andreotta, the copter’s crew chief, found about 10 villagers cowering in a makeshift bomb shelter and coaxed them out, then had them flown to safety by two Huey gunships. They found an 8-year-old boy clinging to his mother’s corpse in an irrigation ditch and plucked him by the back of his shirt and delivered him to a nun in a nearby hospital.

Crucially, they reported what they had witnessed to headquarters, which ordered a cease-fire. By then, as many as 500 villagers had been killed.

To our disgrace. Oradour-sur-Glane, Srebrenica, Jallianwala Bagh, My Lai.

Seymour M. Hersh, the independent journalist who later uncovered the My Lai massacre, said of Mr. Colburn in a phone interview on Friday that “for a door gunner in Vietnam to point his machine gun at an American officer” under those circumstances “was in the greatest tradition of American integrity.”

…

The full extent of the gang rapes, massacre and mutilations by Charlie Company in My Lai and another hamlet, on the South Central Coast, was not exposed until two months after Mr. Colburn was discharged.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning report by Mr. Hersh for The Dispatch News Service in November 1969 provoked international outrage and eventually resulted in charges against more than a dozen officers. Only one, however, was convicted: Lieutenant Calley, for the murder of 22 civilians. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but ended up serving only three and a half years under house arrest at Fort Benning, Ga.

…

My Lai became a paradigm for unbridled brutality and an object lesson in battlefield ethics, but the crewmen whose audacious intervention prevented even more bloodshed were largely forgotten.

Their heroism was acknowledged with Bronze Stars, which they considered inappropriate recognition: The Bronze Star is awarded for bravery under enemy assault, they reasoned, and they had demonstrated courage in the face of friendly fire.

After the investigations and trial, Mr. Thompson and Mr. Colburn received something else, too: hate mail.

“One of the most infuriating things is being called a whistle-blower, as if we went and ratted someone out,” Mr. Colburn told Vietnam Magazine. “That is completely false; there was no back-stabbing going on. We were right in their face at My Lai. We were ready to confront those people then and there. And we did, the best we could.”

H/t Lady Mondegreen

Have the cats of Istanbul.

Hundreds of thousands of Turkish cats roam the metropolis of Istanbul freely. For thousands of years they’ve wandered in and out of people’s lives, becoming an essential part of the communities that make the city so rich. Claiming no owners, the cats of Istanbul live between two worlds, neither wild nor tame –and they bring joy and purpose to those people they choose to adopt. In Istanbul, cats are the mirrors to the people, allowing them to reflect on their lives in ways nothing else could.

Critics and internet cats agree – this cat documentary will charm its way into your heart and home as you fall in love with the cats in Istanbul. This film is a sophisticated take on your typical cat video that will both dazzle and educate.

In Theaters February 10th, 2017

Produced by Ceyda Torun and Charlie Wuppermann
Directed by Ceyda Torun

 

William Easterly also (i.e. like me) has disdain for this habit of making stupid generalizations about massive geographical “groups” – groups in scare quotes because they’re not the groups the generalizers say they are. “Coastal elites” versus “flyover country” – how meaningless can you get?

I was born in West Virginia and spent all of 10 days there as an infant before my family moved to Ohio.  Perhaps that’s a license for me to say why Appalachians are poor, drink too much, and voted for Donald Trump. The best-selling and widely praised “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” by J.D. Vance, proceeds along those lines. But I shouldn’t single out that book: Sloppy analysis of collections of people — coastal elites, flyover America, Muslims, immigrants, people without college degrees, you name it — has become routine. And it’s killing our politics.

And clogging up our heads with stupid.

Three laws guide this bogus analysis of groups. First, define the group by the outcome you are trying to explain. Second, invoke a stereotype and exaggerate it. Third, endow the group with innate permanent properties, akin to racial characteristics. Together, these errors establish a kind of collective guilt, blaming an entire ill-defined group for the failings of its individuals, even if the offenders are a tiny minority. This is both divisive and false — and all the more toxic because of its flavor of intellectual propriety.

Divisive, and false, and stupid. It’s the love-child of Tom Friedman and David Brooks, and it’s stupid.

First, defining the group by the outcome you are trying to explain:

Vance (who’s actually a third-generation Appalachian immigrant to Middletown, in western Ohio) tells how his grandparents smashed up a pharmacy and threatened a clerk who’d told his son not to play with a toy on display: “If you say another word to my son, I will break your fucking neck.” Hence, the definition: “Destroying store merchandise and threatening a sales clerk were normal to Mamaw and Papaw. That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do when people mess with your kid.”

When Appalachians move to western Ohio, Vance notes, “hillbilly values spread widely along with hillbilly people.” How do you know they’re still hillbillies? Because they wreck pharmacies. Defining Appalachians as those who are poor, uneducated, and violent, we find that Appalachian culture causes poverty, lack of education, and violence.

So, using that logic, somebody in Manhattan once ordered a latte at Starbucks while carrying the latest NYRB, therefore the coastal elite is in a bubble out of touch with the pharmacy-smashers in South Dakota. Or something.

The second law of pseudo-analysis of groups says, reinforce stereotypes. In the case of Appalachia, these have a long history — “Deliverance” and all that. Recent fires in the Smoky Mountains aroused suspicions about the “moonshine stills of the poor, ignorant hillbillies.” This takes the badly defined group fully into the realm of caricature. (Note that when Appalachians complain about such accounts, Vance and other analysts see a flawed culture that “makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.” )

You can watch the news media doing this all the time – all those little vignettes where they go out into the world to Talk To Someone, so that we can all then feel we’ve heard a Representative Sample of what people are thinking. I seriously wish they would stop doing that.

Group stereotypes typically have a kernel of truth, reflecting some trait which is over-represented — but the likelihood of the trait’s occurring is then greatly exaggerated. Consider the elderly Floridian. Florida’s proportion of elderly people is indeed above the national average, but not as much as you think — 17 percent are 65 or older, compared to a national average of 13 percent.

You know what that’s like? The finding that men tend to think women dominate conversations far more than they actually do. A number of women in a group approaching half but still short of it will be reported as a large majority; that kind of thing.

In the U.S., we “coastal elites” are likely to condemn stereotypes when they involve immigrants, nonwhites, or religious minorities. But we’re more accepting of stereotypes that portray Southern, Midwestern, uneducated, working class whites as stupid, racist, and homophobic. (You wonder why so many rejected our advice on how to vote?) On the other hand, if you’re thinking, “Speak for yourself” — you’re right! “Coastal elite” is another stereotype. We don’t all disdain Appalachia or flyover America.

The crucial point is that all these stereotypes purport to be findings. In fact, they’re the opposite: a refusal to see vast individual variation within groups.

There’s a slippage from these stereotypes, he says, to thinking the stereotypes are inherent characteristics.

The idea is that all group members have a biological or innate propensity to behave a certain way. Studies suggest instead upsurges of bad or extreme behavior by some members of such groups for historical, changeable, circumstantial reasons. There’s no evidence for innate, permanent traits.

We understand this for some groups, but not for others. We understand Floridians don’t have a biological tendency to be elderly, and that Florida wound up with more old people for reasons of history and climate. But many anti-racist liberals see Appalachians as akin to an inferior race innately prone to racism.

It’s all bogus. Groups don’t have characters or personalities or minds. “Coastal elites” and “flyover country” are equally meaningless.

And then there’s Mark Lilla’s piece from November 28.

He starts by saying the US is diverse, without saying what he means by “diverse.”

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

Is that right? So it’s more “unifying” to revert to the idea that straight white men should have all the power and influence and most of the money, while the rest of us just tag along in their wake?

No, I don’t think so. I think these struggles over equality may be disunifying in the short term, but in the long term they lead to better, more stable, more just unity.

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another.

That sounds nice, and it might be nice if this were a different country with a different history. But it’s not. It’s this country with this history: the one that started out in life as a slave country, and stayed that way for most of its history, and even after formally ending slavery continued with de facto slavery for nearly another century. That’s not some little detail, it’s a giant scar across the whole face of our history. There’s also the expropriation of the native population and the internment of Japanese citizens only 75 years ago. Given that actual history, claiming we are “a nation of citizens who are in this together” is insulting to the people who were never treated as “in this together” for almost the whole of our history. There’s a lot of work to do before that claim can be honestly made.

So, yeah. I’m still one of those pesky recalcitrant types who think that straight white men shouldn’t be telling us underlings that we are in this together until that’s actually the case. Not yet, Mark Lilla, not yet.

So let’s read those two “down with identity politics” pieces written by people who don’t need “identity politics.”

First Kristof May 7.

WE progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

That’s a silly observation. It’s a category mistake. Progressives think women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims and so on shouldn’t be systematically excluded from various societal goods simply on the basis of who they are. That has nothing to do with what kind of people progressives seek out as friends and/or political comrades. No, I don’t have to make a point of befriending conservatives or religious believers on the grounds that belief in equal rights entails it.

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.

That could be true, but the way he phrased it is again a mixing of categories. A point of view isn’t necessarily a stigmatization of the opposed view. “Intellectual diversity” isn’t necessarily a good thing, because it depends. There are standards in intellectual work, and those standards filter out people who don’t meet them. That’s as it should be. You don’t want to include charlatans and buffoons and conspiracy-mongers in your “intellectual diversity.” You don’t want to include hacks, either.

To me, the conversation illuminated primarily liberal arrogance — the implication that conservatives don’t have anything significant to add to the discussion. My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination.

Oh, my – that’s an unfortunate set of analogies. Yes, oddly enough, I do have more compassion for war victims and trafficked children than I have for conservative scholars facing purported discrimination. I hope everyone does, including conservative scholars.

The stakes involve not just fairness to conservatives or evangelical Christians, not just whether progressives will be true to their own values, not just the benefits that come from diversity (and diversity of thought is arguably among the most important kinds), but also the quality of education itself. When perspectives are unrepresented in discussions, when some kinds of thinkers aren’t at the table, classrooms become echo chambers rather than sounding boards — and we all lose.

No. Conservatives, yes, but evangelical Christians, no. Practicing evangelical Christians can’t contribute to intellectual or scholarly or educational discussion, because that’s not what they do. Diversity does not demand that they be represented on university faculties.

Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents).

In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.

Sigh. Again, this is just silly. What if Marxists are more drawn to the social sciences than Republicans are? This isn’t a question of inborn characteristics, it’s a question of acquired tastes and interests.

He does go on to cite actual studies.

The scarcity of conservatives seems driven in part by discrimination. One peer-reviewed study found that one-third of social psychologists admitted that if choosing between two equally qualified job candidates, they would be inclined to discriminate against the more conservative candidate.

Yancey, the black sociologist, who now teaches at the University of North Texas, conducted a survey in which up to 30 percent of academics said that they would be less likely to support a job seeker if they knew that the person was a Republican.

The discrimination becomes worse if the applicant is an evangelical Christian. According to Yancey’s study, 59 percent of anthropologists and 53 percent of English professors would be less likely to hire someone they found out was an evangelical.

But that’s not discrimination in the pejorative sense. Evangelicals have an extra filter, and it’s a filter that screens out much of what is important to disciplines like anthropology and literature. I don’t think we should be treating literalist religion as a mere arbitrary marker when in fact it’s a very substantive view of the world, which can interfere with more thoughtful views of the world. It’s not ideal for an academic.

“Of course there are biases against evangelicals on campuses,” notes Jonathan L. Walton, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard. Walton, a black evangelical, adds that the condescension toward evangelicals echoes the patronizing attitude toward racial minorities: “The same arguments I hear people make about evangelicals sound so familiar to the ways people often describe folk of color, i.e. politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor.”

Horseshit. That’s just manipulative. The two are not comparable and we’re not required to treat them as if they were.

Universities should be a hubbub of the full range of political perspectives from A to Z, not just from V to Z. So maybe we progressives could take a brief break from attacking the other side and more broadly incorporate values that we supposedly cherish — like diversity — in our own dominions.

Should they? Really? Should there be KKK perspectives, Nazi perspectives, ISIS perspectives, Opus Dei perspectives?

A Nature editorial urges us to do the impossible – ” fight discrimination in all its forms” while not “excluding conservative voices from debate.”

How possible or impossible that is of course depends on what is meant by “excluding from debate.” That activity tends to be used in different senses depending on where the user is in the paragraph. It tends to mean one thing in its first appearance and another thing in the next sentence and a third in the one after that. Or, in other words, it tends to be deployed as a nice respectable goal in airy generalizations, without much effort to explain how it actually works.

Nature was prompted by a couple of Times think pieces, one by Nicholas Kristof in May and the other by Mark Lilla days after the election.

The article by Mark Lilla, a researcher at Columbia University in New York City who specializes in the history of Western intellectual, political and religious thought, called for an end to what he described as an overemphasis by liberals on racial, gender and sexual identity politics. He believes that this focus distracts from core fundamental concepts of democracy and so weakens social cohesion and civic responsibility.

That’s an article or book I’ve read many many times over the past twenty years or more. There’s usually something to it; it’s true that identity politics can get obsessive and narrow and unproductively hostile. On the other hand it’s so difficult not to notice that these things are so often written by people who are not in need of “racial, gender and sexual identity politics.” It’s so difficult not to notice that Mark Lilla and Nicholas Kristof are not subject to misogyny or racism or homophobia.

In short, [Lilla] asserted that many progressives live in bubbles; that they are educationally programmed to be attuned to diversity issues, yet have “shockingly little to say” about political and democratic fundamentals such as class, economics, war and policy issues affecting the common good. Of direct relevance to the US election, he argued that the excessive focus on identity politics by urban and academic elites has left many white, religious and rural groups feeling alienated, threatened and ignored in an unwelcoming environment where the issues that matter to them are given little or no attention.

Wait. How is it that class affects the common good but sex and race do not? How could that be the case? Class is about hierarchy, just as sex and race are. Some people benefit from class and others don’t; some people benefit from class by exploiting the people who don’t benefit from class. That’s what “class” is. Talking about it is “divisive” in exactly the same way talking about sex and race is. Economics also works differently for different classes, sexes, and races.

Also, white people and religious people are not the persecuted or neglected minority here. Rural people are to some extent, but that’s also what rural means to more than some extent. Rural means far fewer people around, and that means services much less densely provided. It’s not possible to provide the amenities of a city without the population density of a city. That fact is not the fault of the bubble-dwelling elites with their identity politics. It’s economics – that which Lilla wants the bubble-dwellers to pay more attention to.

Lilla argues, perhaps unconvincingly, that fixating on the concerns of particular groups has been divisive, and he calls instead for a focus on unifying issues that affect the majority of people in the United States, with highly charged narrower issues such as sexuality and race tackled with a more-measured sense of scale. But it need not be a trade-off.

Ah yes, good idea – let’s stop paying attention to the ways the majority can shit on minorities, and go back to treating the majority as all there is. Let’s go back to ignoring sex and race, and letting white men run everything unopposed.

The article comes at a time when many in science and academia are rightly worried that Trump’s odious racist, sexist and anti-intellectual remarks during his campaign risk unacceptably broadening the limits of acceptable discourse — and freeing and normalizing people’s worst base instincts and a rhetoric of hate. Not surprisingly, the column has been controversial and has sparked vigorous debate.

But the discussion echoes points made earlier this year by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, directed at academics. Kristof, who has long championed diversity issues and so can hardly be accused of conservative bias, argued in a column entitled ‘A confession of liberal intolerance’ that academics are often selectively tolerant, but are intolerant when it comes to considering conservative or religious viewpoints.

It’s shocking, isn’t it. All conservative and religious viewpoints have is everything, while the pesky lefty intellectuals have…each other.

Kristof also argued that the low and plunging representation of conservatives and evangelicals on US faculties, and bias against these groups, is itself impoverishing intellectual diversity and discourse. He pointed to an effort to change this state of affairs: the Heterodox Academy, a website set up by centrist social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University to advocate tangible remedies. His column did not go down well with liberals. “You don’t diversify with idiots,” stated one of the most highly recommended comments.

Again, it depends how you define things. But it seems fatuous to me to lament a lack of evangelicals on university faculties. Evangelicals are by definition opposed to the fundamental approach to inquiry that universities are there to teach. People who are wedded to the literal truth of one “holy” book are disqualified from being competent academics. There’s no need for affirmative action to make sure biblical literalists are well represented on university faculties.

Academics must be vigilant and resist normalization of Trump’s crude vision of society, but must also look in the mirror. A significant chunk of the US population voted for Trump. Are some bigots and racists? Yes; but most aren’t, and progressive academic liberals can’t simply dismiss them as retrograde.

Yes they can, and so can we. It may be true that some Trump voters are not bigots and racists, but Trump’s open and insistent sexism and racism did not prevent them from voting for him. So yes, we damn well can dismiss people who voted for him as retrograde, because they are.

A remark said to be by Hitler in Mein Kampf – although, oddly, when I look it up on Google I find it quoted (and attributed to Hitler in Mein Kampf) in a wide array of books but not in MK itself. I would think normally the original source would be the first result. So this is said to be Hitler:

The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that
in it the individual, who in becoming an adherent of a new
movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of
being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater
community, something that has a strengthening and encour-
aging effect on most people. The same man, in the frame of
a company or a battalion, surrounded by all his comrades,
would set out on an attack with a lighter heart than he
would if left entirely to himself. In the crowd he always
feels a little sheltered even if in reality a thousand reasons
would speak against it.

There’s a purpose to all these fascist rallies.

Today in Parliament:

MPs have voted to pass a bill to improve domestic violence support services and provision in the UK.

The bill has now passed its second reading and will be sent to committee for further consideration, before it can receive a third reading by MPs and then become law.

But there was opposition. Yes, really: actual opposition to a bill to improve domestic violence support services.

During the vote in parliament earlier today, anti-feminism MP Philip Davies attempted to block the bill by speaking for over an hour against it. Campaigners said that while he spoke, survivors of domestic violence who were present in the gallery above the chamber, stood up and turned their backs in protest. MP Eilidh Whiteford, who introduced the bill, accused Mr Davies of acting “like a panto villain”.

Well, we’re living in BrexoTrump World now, and acting like a panto villain is the new hip thing to do.

Mr Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley, West Yorkshire, said the bill was too focused on women’s rights and did not do enough to address men’s rights. He said the bill was therefore “sexist” and “discriminatory” against men.

I hope he didn’t forget to say it was politically correct. That would be embarrassing.

Ratifying the Convention would mean support for domestic violence victims would be more robust. Survivors of abuse would be legally entitled to specialist support services such as refuges, counselling, and a 24-hour helpline for support. Age-appropriate education would also be implemented in schools to help pupils spot signs of abuse and seek help.

Gender-based violence can include female genital mutilation, forced marriage, and domestic or sexual abuse, as well as physical, emotional or sexual violence or harm.

And it hasn’t gone away yet.

Here’s a striking fact:

The 17 people who US president-elect Donald Trump has selected for his cabinet or for posts with cabinet rank have well over $9.5 billion in combined wealth, with several positions still unfilled. This collection of wealth is greater than that of the 43 million least wealthy American households combined—over one third of the 126 million households total in the US.

Affluence of this magnitude in a US presidential cabinet is unprecedented.

Well that’ll show the coastal elites in their bubble a thing or two.

The Hill reports that Ivanka Trump is going to have an office in the White House that’s usually kept for “the First Lady.” Julia Ioffe, a political journalist who writes for Foreign Policy and until yesterday wrote for Politico, tweeted about the hint of skeeviness in the story:

Either Trump is fucking his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?

Crude, but then it’s impossible to write honestly about Trump without crudity. Trump himself oozes crude from every pore, and that means that putting his words and actions into more genteel language is likely to misrepresent them. He is crude, he is a pig, he does see the world in such contemptuous and libidinous terms. He did, after all, agree with Howard Stern that his daughter is “a piece of ass,” on live radio. So yeah, we’re not going out of our way to be crude if we say maybe he’s fucking her, because maybe he is, and if he is that’s how he would put it.

Remember the Access Hollywood tape? It started with his failed attempt to fuck – his word – a married woman.

Donald J. Trump: You know and …

Unknown: She used to be great. She’s still very beautiful.

Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.

Unknown: Whoa.

Trump: I did try and fuck her. She was married.

Unknown: That’s huge news.

That’s Trump. That’s who he is. He doesn’t have sex with women, he fucks them.

In my view, that’s why Ioffe worded her tweet that way – because it’s Trump she was talking about.

But Politico doesn’t see it that way.

The respected political journalist Julia Ioffe’s tenure at Politico has come to an endafter she posted an unfortunate — and straight-up vulgar — tweet about Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka. Ioffe was already wrapping up her time as a contributor to Politico and moving to a new job at The Atlantic when she posted the ill-advised tweet, but now Politico is accelerating the process, bringing her contract to a premature close.

…

The political news organization promptly ended Ioffe’s contract, sending a textbook strongly worded letter — which of course leaked — from editor-in-chief John Harris and editor Carrie Budoff Brown to its employees:

“Gratuitous opinion has no place, anywhere, at any time – not on your Facebook feed, your Twitter feed or anyplace else. It has absolutely zero value for our readers and should have zero place in  our work” – but it wasn’t gratuitous. It was pointed, and it had the kind of value that pointed opinion can have.

I think Politico is dead wrong about this, especially since she said it on Twitter, not in a piece for them that somehow no editor saw before publication.

Ioffe has long been a favorite target of the less-reputable segments of Trump supporters — if you have a high tolerance for poorly Photoshopped, stomach-churning anti-Semitic memes, just give her name a Google image search.

Since Ioffe was already on her way out at Politico the censure doesn’t really count as a firing, per se.

But it’s a censure, and a mistaken one.