Dear Media:

Please stop calling them the “alt-right.” Just call them Nazis. They won’t be offended. Nazis are super hard to offend, unless you call them Jews.

-Andy Borowitz

The BBC seven hours ago:

Turkish MPs to vote on controversial underage sex bill

The BBC one hour ago:

Turkey withdraws child rape bill after street protests

One wonders why it was “underage sex” seven hours ago and “child rape” six hours later.

From the second article:

This bill sparked a rare thing here: cross-party opposition. The AKP MPs who proposed it insisted it would not pardon rapists or sexual abusers and was simply intended to exonerate men who marry underage girls apparently with consent.

Miss the point much? Consent is not meaningful in underage girls. Men exploit underage girls; their underageness makes that easier to do. Saying “Jeez they only want to marry them” makes it worse, not better. Marriage terminates all other possibilities before the girl is old enough to evaluate the situation.

However, critics said that in patriarchal Turkey, a young girl would feel unable to give consent and so the bill would have legitimised rape and encouraged child brides. When conservative, usually pro-government, women spoke out against it – including the president’s wife – the bill was doomed to failure.

Child marriage is a problem here. Former President Abdullah Gul famously married when he was 30 and his wife 15.

Men like them tight and easy to dominate.

But women’s groups say the solution is not controversial legislation such as this but real opportunities for girls. And they say the Islamist AKP has encouraged female subservience, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan calling childless women “deficient”.

It’s led to a huge rise in physical abuse of women, with the murder rate said to have increased by 1,400% between 2003 and 2010 – although some believe that number is partly due to more cases being reported than ever before.

It’s not “underage sex,” BBC, it’s child rape made even worse by child marriage.

H/t Joanne

Our new reality:

If you tuned in to CNN earlier today, you might have found yourself greeted by a chyron that could have been ripped straight out of a Newt Gingrich Nazi fanfic: Alt-Right Founder Questions If Jews Are People. The real question, of course, is whether our president-elect should distance himself from an explicit group of neo-Nazis. And according to CNN, the answer is a resounding “WEELLLL …”

That’s from that meeting Saturday.

An anchor whom no one seems to be able to name but who looks suspiciously like Jason Sudeikis in Mitt Romney makeup starts us on our journey:

Richard Spencer, he’s the man who actually coined that term, “alt-right.” He was in Washington this weekend. He was spewing, as he often does, what I can only describe as hate-filled garbage. Of Jews, Spencer said … “One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem.”

Does President Trump need to formally denounce and disavow these groups as a whole?

It’s too late for that, Trump has welcomed them into his “administration” (the one where he waves at the crowds and someone else does the actual work).

Moving on, though, there are the optics to consider. Does Trump really want to risk alienating Nazis when they’ve been such devout, loyal supporters? According to Berg:

Part of this is also a political calculation. They found that they need these people in their coalition to succeed, so can they disown them and cleanse their coalition of these people?

Can they cleanse the undesirables, indeed. CNN, unfortunately, offers no answers. Instead, all we get is a lively debate of the pros and cons of the president-elect denouncing people who question whether Jews are human, because they have been loyal parts of the coalition that put him in office.

CNN will be airing live executions of staffers within six months.

We’ll be numb to it soon.

Katy Evans-Bush is also repulsed by the Trump Mausoleum.

The world had 18 months to get used to Donald Trump, before the shock of the election result; it turns out what we weren’t ready for was his apartment. Just days after winning, the president-elect and his would-be British middleman, Nigel Farage, stood beaming together in Trump’s private elevator – a lift so gold, so garish, so glaring, that it could have come with an epilepsy warning. The internet shielded its eyes and began to get the picture.

Oh yes – let me find that.

[shudder]

It’s not just the bling – it goes way beyond that. It begins with Trump Tower itself, the squared-off monolith that’s like a steel and plate-glass alter ego. Out of the lift, you go through two gigantic – and one suspects totally bomb-proof – golden doors. The interior is furnished in what have been referred to as “warm neutrals”: gold, more gold – on the furniture, the ceilings, the fittings, the window frames – cream, rose, and, er, gold. There are pillars. There are curved arches, vaults in the lowish ceilings, faux rococo ceiling paintings, elaborate ceiling mouldings surrounding outsized cut-glass chandeliers, and claustrophobically thick carpets underneath. Not a surface is plain. There’s plenty of marble. There are also ornate carvings, over-the-top chairs, glass-and-onyx-topped tables with curling sweet dishes holding ordinary wrapped chocolates, statuettes of cherubs and lovers – all gold. The soft furnishings all look the same and all blend into the background, making the gold even more noticeable.

It’s nightmarish; it’s actively unpleasant. It might as well be bank statements. Gold can be beautiful in small doses. Globbed onto everything like so much ranch dressing onto iceberg lettuce? Not beautiful.

A quick look at dictator’s boudoirs – both online and in Peter York’s seminal book, Dictators’ Homes (now sadly out of print, but surely due a reissue?) – yields the surprising fact that very few dictators can keep up with Donald Trump for sheer bling.  Few of them can even keep up with him in ugliness, and those that manage both boil down to only a small handful.  Except for his own private gold elevator, barrelling from the Berghof straight up through the mountain itself to his lodge at the top, even Hitler went for a more ascetic, folkloric style. Mussolini had the real thing – an Italian Renaissance villa. And Tito lived the American suburban dream.  In his introduction, York cites “Outsider entrepreneurs”, including oligarchs, plutocrats and others in this category.

I’ve been inside quite a few rich people’s houses, and they don’t look anything like Trump Bordello. Some have struck me as way too much about expense and decorators and not nearly enough about fun and pleasure and color, but that’s the opposite of Trump’s fever dream of life inside Fort Knox.

Donald Trump’s penthouse is, on a smaller scale, even more gold than Versailles. But it is jarring and crowded; the eye has nowhere to rest, it looks too uncomfortable even to sit and have a talk. The style is in a battle to the death with the building’s plate glass and square construction, its oppressive, hulking ceilings, its lack of scale – it feels like a place to pretend to be alive in. As the Irish poet Mark Granier put it: “a golden tomb.”

By contrast, the homes of former US presidents like Reagan and GW Bush are simply very comfortable, easy on the eye, large, well-appointed homes, recognisably in the vernacular style of the American ranch house. They are authentically themselves, their houses (even professionally decorated) grow out of their roots, and, aside from some nice linens and so on, they utterly lack what York calls “the Wow factor”.

Exactly. There are antiques around, and it’s safe to assume they’re very pricey, but they don’t scream it at you. You don’t look around nervously for the Palace Guards coming to drag you away.

Our current class of dictators, oligarchs, sports stars, and alt-right radio hosts don’t give a toss about these kinds of refinements. It’s just BLING BLING BLING. The Trump apartment is not intended to be comfortable. Badly proportioned, stuffed wall-to-wall with ugly things (including the walls) and nothing restful or interesting to look at. No master artist sat in a workshop, being paid well to make something delightful for this place. Aping something like the form but not the function of the idea of Bourbon style, Trump’s apartment is actually more like an anti-Versailles. It’s the difference between patronage as power and power as power. It’s the triumph of a kind of deadness which shows itself in every other thing Trump does; its glitziness is exactly as barren as Damien Hirst’s diamante encrusted skulls, or paintings made out of real butterflies.

That is what it is. It’s dead. It’s heaps and piles and globs of yellow metal, and it’s dead.

Columbia University Provost John Coatsworth said in a statement today:

First, you should know that the University will neither allow immigration officials on our campuses without a warrant, nor share information on the immigration status of students with those officials unless required by subpoena or court order, or authorized by a student.  Moreover, New York City continues to be a sanctuary city, with special protections for undocumented immigrants, and Mayor de Blasio recently affirmed that local law enforcement officials will continue to operate consistent with that commitment.

If the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy is terminated or substantially curtailed and students with DACA status lose the right to work, the University pledges to expand the financial aid and other support we make available to undocumented students, regardless of their immigration status.  It is of the utmost importance that federal policies and laws do not derail the education of students whose enrollment at Columbia and other colleges or universities is made possible by DACA.  We subscribe to the view of the Association of American Universities that “DACA should be upheld, continued and expanded,” and we will continue to express that commitment in the future.

To provide additional support, the Office of University Life is hosting a series of small-group, private information sessions specifically for undocumented students in our community, including DACA recipients, to provide support and guidance regarding possible changes in the law.  Affected students can contact the Office directly for more information.  Separately, our International Students and Scholars Office (ISSO) is also scheduling information sessions and prepared to provide assistance via its telephone helplines to any of our international students with questions or concerns.  For more information about resources, support and reporting options regarding discrimination and harassment, please see http://universitylife.columbia.edu/news/2016/11/resources-students-and-other-columbia-community-members.

The commitments outlined above emerge from values that define what we stand for and who we are as a University community.  Indeed, Columbia College and the School of Engineering and Applied Science have amplified their commitment to undocumented undergraduate students pursuing their first degrees by continuing to meet their full financial aid needs as has long been our policy and also by treating applications of undocumented students no differently than those of students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents.  The experience of undocumented students at the College and Columbia Engineering, from the time they first seek admission through their graduation, will not be burdened in any way by their undocumented status.

Trump can see Columbia from his house.

The Atlantic has video of that talk Richard B. Spencer gave at the neo-Nazi meeting Saturday evening after most of the journalists had left.

I hit the stop button after he said “It’s not just that they are leftists and cucks. It’s not just that they are stupid.” That’s 50 seconds in.

It’s only a few men in a room. But…they’re connected to the next president.