And here we have Maine governor Paul LePage being “colorful.”

Paul R. LePage, the ever-combative Republican governor of Maine, refused on Friday to apologize to a Democratic state lawmaker for leaving a threatening and expletive-studded voicemail message that was criticized by some state Republicans and left top Democrats suggesting that Mr. LePage should resign.

You’ll be wanting to know what the expletives were. The Times doesn’t want to tell you, but I listened to a recording at Salon. The epithets were:

• You cocksucher.
• You little socialist son of a bitch cocksucker.

Not very gubernatorial, I think you’ll agree.

Mr. LePage did apologize in a statement Friday to the state for his choice of words in the voicemail message, but in a 35-minute news conference he said he was not apologizing directly to the Democratic state representative who was the target of his wrath, Drew Gattine. The governor said he was offended because he believed Mr. Gattine had called him a racist.

“I am enormously angry,” Mr. LePage said at his news conference, suggesting — perhaps not seriously — that he would step down if Mr. Gattine did as well. “I’m not shying away from what I called him.”

Precisely what Mr. LePage called Mr. Gattine is unprintable here, but, suffice to say, the profanity-laced voicemail message, which Mr. LePage left on Thursday and Mr. Gattine provided to The Portland Press Herald, was incendiary even by Mr. LePage’s uninhibited standards.

“Prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping black people,” Mr. LePage said in the message. “I’m after you. Thank you.”

It’s fine that Mr Gattine gave the recording to The Portland Press Herald, because the Gov told him to make it public.

After leaving the message Thursday, Mr. LePage told reporters from The Press Herald and the television station WMTW that he would like to have a duel with Mr. Gattine, saying he would point a gun directly between Mr. Gattine’s eyes.

That’s charming. I feel so proud of the United States these days.

The episode grew out of a town-hall-style meeting on Wednesday, where, according to The Portland Press Herald, Mr. LePage told an audience member that he kept a three-ring binder of photographs of arrested drug dealers in the state, which is in the grips of a heroin crisis, and that 90 percent of them were black or Hispanic.

Mr. Gattine said he believed Mr. LePage’s comments were racially charged, but he denied calling the governor a racist.

The Guardian has more on what the Gov said on Wednesday.

At a town hall event in North Berwick on Wednesday, LePage said the majority of drug dealers arrested in Maine were black or Hispanic in origin.

“I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison,” he said, “but they come. And I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ring binder, are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn. I didn’t make the rules – I’m just telling you what’s happening.”

At a subsequent press conference, video of which was released by the Press Herald, he said: “Look, the bad guy is the bad guy. I don’t care what colour he is. When you go to war, if you know the enemy and the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, then you shoot at red.”

Addressing the state’s Republican house minority leader, Ken Fredette, a military lawyer, he said: “Don’t you? Ken, you’ve been in uniform. You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of colour or people of Hispanic origin.”

Um.

The BBC has details of what the Gov said after leaving that phone message.

He later invited reporters from the Press Herald and WMTW TV channel to an interview to explain the voice message, and told them he wished he could shoot Mr Gattine in a duel.

“I’d like him to come up here because, tell you right now, I wish it were 1825,” Mr LePage said.

“And we would have a duel, that’s how angry I am, and I would not put my gun in the air, I guarantee you… I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt and he has not done a damn thing since he’s been in this legislature to help move the state forward.”

It’s the Era of the Bully.

There are a lot of ways to enforce orthodoxy. A very popular one right now is to accuse heretics of “denying my/our lived experience,” at which point the heretic had damn well better apologize and swear to do better, or else prepare to be shunned.

But lived experience isn’t a conversation-ender. People can claim to have experienced anything, including absurdities, so why should it be treated as ungainsayable? People have claimed to be victims of  Satanic rituals, alien abductions, the Freemasons, reverse racism, hauntings, The Jews, misandry – you name it. They’re not always right, and they’re not always telling the truth. We’re not required to believe everyone’s stories about “lived experience,” so the accusation of failing to do so shouldn’t be a conversation-ender, much less grounds for shunning.

Furthermore, experience is one thing, and what we call it is another. There’s an enormous gap between experience and language, and it’s a necessary part of critical thinking to poke and prod the way we name things. People can claim their lived experience tells them they are and always have been women despite having male bodies, but that doesn’t mean they’re right, even though it’s their experience they’re talking about. We can be wrong even about ourselves – but who doesn’t know that? What’s that “even” even doing there, as if it’s surprising that we can be wrong about ourselves? We lie to ourselves, but much more we just plain get things wrong. The subjective isn’t infallible – to put it mildly.

The politics of trying to ignore this is not a healthy robust politics. It’s the opposite of that. It’s a politics of temper tantrums and lying, and that won’t work out.

So there was a book launch today in Townsville, Queensland in Australia of Prostitution Narratives, a compilation of sex trade survivor testimonies. The launch was disrupted by pro sex trade advocates.

Members of the public were invited to the book launch at a Townsville domestic violence service over three weeks ago, through advertising on social media.

The domestic violence service that offered the use of their conference room, as they do for many groups,  was contacted by a representative of local sex industry group RESPECT, a couple of weeks ago. They said they disagreed with the event and asked to leave their flyers at the venue.  The host service agreed to accept the flyers.

On Friday last week sex trade advocates visited the domestic violence service saying they had information to offer and asked to put up posters of partly naked women in the sex trade “looking empowered”.  While the host in no way discouraged their attendance at the event it was made clear that the posters would not be allowed because they would cause offence to survivors, and no offensive conduct would be tolerated.

They could have given a better “because” than that, I think. They could have simply said no, this is our event, and we’re not obliged to display your posters that take a view fundamentally opposed to our view.

That’s clear enough, isn’t it? An anti-racism event isn’t obliged to display racist posters just because someone asks. A feminist event isn’t obliged to display misogynist posters just because someone asks. That’s a perfectly legitimate reason, and there’s no need to get into the weeds of “offence” and “offensive.”

The book launch was subsequently held at another venue because the domestic violence service provider was not able to ensure attendees’ safety. 

The response from the sex trade advocates was extremely threatening. They said they would not be responsible for the behaviour of their group members at the event. At the launch itself, former president of the Scarlet Alliance, Elena Jeffreys ( HERE ), stood on a chair and interjected while survivors were speaking. She attempted to harass and, in my view, intimidate both survivors and other speakers at the event.

This type of harassment, and what I see as threats against survivors who give voice to their experiences is becoming increasingly common, in my view.  Sex trade advocates are perhaps alarmed at the rising tide of people who are coming to understand the reality of the sex trade, and the harms it causes, especially to women and children.

The sex trade lobby’s continuing aggressive attacks on survivors’ freedom of speech exposes it for the violent, abusive, manipulative and coercive trade it is, in my view as a survivor of this trade.  I also find the intimation of threat to a domestic violence service absolutely unconscionable.

And not really all that feminist, either.

Maajid Nawaz had an excellent piece on the “burkini” issue at the Daily Beast yesterday. He says the ban is absurd and petty, and also playing into the hands of the Islamists, who want to see a religious war cleaving the world into two factions. But he also says that the whole “modesty” thing is terrible.

There is no better way to kickstart dividing people along exclusively religious lines than by committing atrocities in the name of Islam. Their hope is that everyone else also begins to identify Sunni Muslims primarily by their religious identities, in reaction to the atrocities. In this way, religious identity has won and citizenship becomes redundant.

But the backward trajectory of contemporary liberalism is matched by a backward trajectory within Islam today.

In modern Muslim-majority contexts and up until the 1970s, the female body was not shamed out of public view. As one Egyptian feminist asserts, this was mainly due to the social dominance of the relatively liberal, middle-class elite in urban centers.

But throughout the ’80s, theocratic Islamism began replacing Arab socialism as the ideology of resistance against “the West.” As is always the case with misogynist dogma, the war against the “other” necessitated defining what is “ours” and what is “theirs”—and our women, of course, were deemed “ours.”

Suddenly, women’s bodies became the red line in a cultural war against the West started by theocratic Islamism. A Not Muslim Enough charade was used to identify “true” Muslims against “Western” stooges. Religious dress codes became a crucial marker in these cultural purity stakes. Only the fanatic can ever win in this Not Muslim Enough game. Any uncovered woman was now deemed loose, decadent, and attention seeking.

Mahnaz Nadeem has an excellent piece on the burkini ban at Sedaa.

She looks back to a time when Muslims weren’t under relentless pressure to demonstrate their religiosity.

Before then Islam was cultural and spiritual and no-one was publicly over-preoccupied with proving how puritanical they were; they were more concerned about the day-to-day and making the most of their arrival to this land of opportunity. Iranian Fatwas, Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine issue, 9/11 and Wahhabi funding changed our psyche so that we came to adopt religious positions by default on absolutely everything under the sun.

Which is a bad trend, because the religious position isn’t always the best one, to put it mildly.

Muslim women who wear the costume are paradoxically rejecting the confines of their home and are wanting to participate in the liberating activity of enjoying the outdoors. They have not decided to envelope themselves in an all-concealing burqa to ensure they go undetected and unrecognised.

Rather the wet-suit provides a Muslim woman an opportunity to dip her toe in the water literally and metaphorically which ordinarily she may not entertain were she required to expose more of her body. It is the first step toward the Muslim community appreciating that the Muslim woman can be part of the outdoors as much as the indoors.

There may be a multitude of other reasons a Muslim woman or any woman for that reason wishes to wear it: she may not want to be sun burned; she may have a skin-complaint, she may want to keep warm; she might be body conscious for non-religious reasons; it just might be more comfortable.

Here’s a surprising thing: bikinis actually aren’t comfortable at all for most women. You have to be truly flawless to feel ok wearing those things where people can see you. Beach anxiety is a running joke and has been for decades.

‘Creeping Sharia’ has had its day and if we want to survive in Europe we need to have a far more intelligent strategy, where we can keep hold of our Islamic faith yet not offend the dominant population’s sensibilities. It is going to be a very tricky task indeed, and will need some intelligent thinking rather than a defensive victim approach. Our conduct and a secular attitude is going to speak much louder than any attempts at religious PR.

In short the “burkini” ban is the cumulative result of years of tolerance towards Islamism encroaching into the public sphere, but this recent attempt to deal with it has resulted in unfairly targeting Muslim women. Instead, the pulpits and criminal elements need to be taken more seriously by French authorities and Europe at large, even perhaps reflecting on our relationships with countries that espouse extremist ideology.

Encroaching on the civil liberties of Muslim women’s rights to enjoy the sun and water is not the solution. Equally Muslims need to appreciate the honeymoon period of encroaching Sharia is over.

Muslim men could wear burkinis in solidarity. That would make the whole thing seem less targeted at women, and less calculated to put them in the wrong no matter what they do.

Breaking news: France’s highest administrative court has ruled the burkini ban illegal.

The State Council upheld a challenge by human rights groups which argued that the ban in the Riviera resort of Villeneuve-sur-Loubet infringed personal freedoms in a ruling that is likely to set a legal precedent for 29 other towns that have banned the garment.

The ban “constituted a serious and manifestly illegal infringement of fundamental liberties, ” the State Council said in its judgement.

Patrice Spinosi, a lawyer for the Human Rights League, said the decision to “suspend” the ban would also apply to the other 29 French towns.

I’m sure you’re all well familiar with this incident in Nice:

There’s no denying it’s beyond bizarre to see four armed cops standing over a woman and forcing her to take some clothes off.

In more news from the Moral Squalor Files – the ACLU is suing an Arkansas county for setting up a debtors’ prison.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the City of Sherwood, its district court judge, and Pulaski County. The suit claims they’re violating a person’s due process rights, and preying on the poor, by creating a never-ending spiral in hot check cases.

This lawsuit claims that the Sherwood courts are trapping people into a never-ending spiral of repetitive court proceedings and ever-increasing debt, adding it’s been happening for the past 25 years or so.

Squalid though we are, we don’t allow debtors’ prisons.

“In this country, you cannot be jailed if you cannot pay your debts. That’s called debtors’ prison and that’s something we did away with some 200 years ago,” said Rita Sklar, ACLU of Arkansas Executive Director.

The suit is on behalf of four people who were convicted of “hot check crimes.”

“A single bounced check written 10 years ago for $15 can be leveraged into a debt of thousands and thousands of dollars in fines and fees for inability to pay the original check and then inability to pay the payments that were set up,” added Sklar.

It goes on to say the hot check court hearings held every Thursday are held in secret, with no transcripts available and closed off to the public. It also adds that hot check defendants are unknowingly signing a waiver of counsel because they’re told they must fill the form out to enter the courtroom.

Well that doesn’t sound at all suspect.

You can read the lawsuit on the article.

A couple of days ago it was Michelle Marie getting a barrage of abuse on Twitter. The next day it was hackers abusing Leslie Jones. Sexism and racism meet to form the fun new game of Attack the Visible Black Woman.

Leslie Jones, a co-star of this year’s “Ghostbusters” movie who has been besieged in the past month by online abusers who have targeted her appearance and her race, was victimized again on Wednesday when her personal website appeared to have been hacked.

The hackers inserted a picture of the gorilla Harambe on the site, and exposed what appeared to be explicit photos of the actress, along with pictures of her driver’s license and a passport, and images of her with stars like Rihanna, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West.

Because she’s in Ghostbusters, because she’s female, because she’s black, because because because because – a bunch of doodz feel entitled to violate her privacy, hack her website, put intrusive racist sexist shit on her website, and just generally do whatever they can to make her life bad, for their own amusement.

Can we have a safe space from this? Can we be allowed to do what we do without being the targets of angry boy-men? No, we cannot.

Ms. Jones, 48, had spent much of the past month battling online trolls who sent her a stream of racist imagery, pornography and abusive language. She briefly left Twitter, but later returned to tweet about the Rio Olympics.

In the hours after Ms. Jones’s site was taken offline, high-profile defenders offered public support.

“These acts against Leslie Jones are sickening,” the musician Questlove wrote in a post on Twitter. “It’s racist & sexist. It’s disgusting. This is hate crimes. This ain’t ‘kids joshing round.’”

Others, including Paul Feig, the director of the “Ghostbusters” film, the comedian Patton Oswalt and the singer Katy Perry defended the actress on Twitter.

Meanwhile the abusers were hard at work planning their next action.

The University of Chicago has written a little note to incoming students, in which it tells them not to bother expecting trigger warnings or safe spaces.

They all received a letter recently from John Ellison, dean of students, which went beyond the usual platitudes of such letters and made several points about what he called one of Chicago’s “defining characteristics,” which he said was “our commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression.” Ellison said civility and respect are “vital to all of us,” and people should never be harassed. But he added, “You will find that we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion and even disagreement. At times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort.”

To that end, he wrote, “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

I added an Oxford comma in that last sentence. Sorry, but it’s better with it. This is not a safe space for people who hate the Oxford comma. Trigger warnings of an approaching Oxford comma are at my discretion.

In the fall of 2014, Peter Salovey, Yale University’s president, used his welcome speech to freshmen to encourage them to respect free expression.

“In the last year or two, we have seen more than the usual number of events on college and university campuses across this country in which the freedom to express ideas has been threatened. Invitations to provocative speakers have been withdrawn; politicians, celebrities and even university presidents invited to deliver commencement addresses have — under pressure — declined to speak to graduates; student protesters have had their signs destroyed by other members of a campus community,” Salovey said. “In the most troubling of these ‘free speech’ incidents, speakers of various political persuasions have been shouted down and rendered unable to deliver remarks to campus groups who had invited them. Although we have not seen these kinds of episodes at Yale in recent decades, it is important on occasions like this one to remind ourselves why unfettered expression is so essential on a university campus.”

And the following year all hell broke loose.

A new Assigned Male comic, from the series by Sophie Labelle:

Sophie Labelle

Liar liar pants on fire.

Have you ever seen any women saying what the woman in the second panel says? That trans people “deserve to suffer a slow death and be raped in a dark alley”? I don’t recall ever seeing that or anything like it, while I do recall seeing a lot of the inverse – trans women calling down violence on feminist women.

Sophie Labelle – translation: Wisey Thepretty – is doing that thing called PROJECTION.

It’s a funny thing that there’s so much ragey abuse from trans women to women – and so little from trans men to men or women. Why would that be, do you think? Could it possibly have anything to do with socialization? Hmm?

The Swedish writer Kajsa Ekis Ekman takes a hard look at feminist women who rush to the defense of johns.

There is something very odd about the prostitution debate. While the absolute majority of sex buyers are male, an overwhelming majority of intellectuals defending prostitution are women. It’s a strange phenomenon that most definitely needs its own analysis.

…

At the forefront of international “sex work” discourse, we generally do not find a sex buyer, but a female academic. In any magazine, at any conference, at any event where the john is to be even remotely criticized — a pro-prostitution female academic is there to defend him.

Who is she? Well, she calls herself “subversive,” “revolutionary,” even “feminist.” That is exactly why the john needs her as his ambassador. A defence of prostitution coming from this woman makes prostitution look queer, LGBT-friendly, modern, fair trade, socialist — the very epitome of female liberation. But most importantly, when she speaks, we forget that the sex buyer exists.

Doesn’t that sound exactly like Greta Christina? Or maybe that’s just me.

The tacit agreement between the john and the pro-prostitution female academic is that she will do anything to defend his acts, while ensuring that he stays in the shadows. She will speak incessantly about prostitution, but never mention him. Her task is to make sure prostitution seems like an all-female affair. The queer academic will use the prostituted woman as a shield, blocking the john from the limelight. She will use the prostituted woman any way she can — analyzing her, re- and deconstructing her, holding her up as a role model, and using her as a microphone (i.e. a career booster), thereby positioning her as “good” vs. the “evil” feminist.

The “evil” feminist is the one who thinks prostitution exploits women.

This academic has her own definition of intellectual debate. When she speaks, she calls it “listening.” According to her, she doesn’t actually speak in favor of prostitution, she merely “listens to sex workers.” The louder she speaks, the more proof that she “listens.” When someone opposed to prostitution speaks, however, she calls it “silencing.”

…

Here is the truth: the function of this academic is not that of a revolutionary or a feminist — she is not trying to defend women — rather, she is the sex buyer’s nanny. One of the oldest patriarchal functions that exists. She soothes him when he is worried and takes on his enemies. She makes sure nobody will take away his toys, whatever he does to them.

Read the whole thing; it’s brilliant.

There’s Two Women Travel. You can just read their tweets, and the BBC has a story.

The description on their Twitter bio was simple: “Two Women, one procedure, 48 hours away from home.” But more than 40,000 tweets about their journey revealed a conversation that was far more complex.

The Twitter account @TwoWomenTravel was set up on Saturday by a pregnant Irish woman and her companion. It documented their journey from Ireland to the UK for an abortion.

Because of course they can’t get one in Ireland, still under the heavy thumb of the Catholic church.

As hundreds showed their solidarity for the woman and her companion, their actions gained attention from high-profile social media users like comedian and host of the ‘Late Late Show’ James Corden.

The bishops are not your friends, Ireland.

Sam Kriss went to a Conway Hall event to hear from the brave champions of Free Speech.

Last night, I watched the trolls announce their revolution. At the launch of the Young British Heritage Society – something describing itself as a “new conservative and libertarian national student organisation dedicated to opposing political correctness on the university campus” – chairman Danial Mirza asked his audience for a show of hands: who among them had been banned from Facebook or Twitter? A loose thicket of arms suddenly rose out of the crowd.

These are the inexplicably furious young reactionaries of the internet, the people who every so often make the news, whenever they’re accused of ruining the life of another liberal journalist or feminist campaigner.

In order to protect free speech!

The biggest bogeyman stalking the hall was feminism. “They’re nothing like the original feminists who just wanted to vote,” one told me. “They seem to be actively anti-male.” Another explained his admiration for Donald Trump. “He’s getting rid of this horrible third-wave feminism movement that’s perpetuating racism and sexism. The only way racism will end is if we stop talking about it.”

It’s so not the case that “the original feminists” wanted the right to vote and nothing else. Some of the suffragists were one-issue, but they weren’t the only feminists there were.

[T]he Young British Heritage Society is the latest half-formed thing to rise out of our increasingly stupid free speech wars. Its general secretary, Jamie Patel, used his brief speech to announce that “cultural Marxists have hijacked the country’s institutions”, and that “any attempt to celebrate British history” is silenced by political correctness.

What is that “cultural Marxists” thing? I’ve seen trolls saying that before and I can never figure out what they think they’re talking about. It’s a bit of an oxymoron, “cultural Marxism.”

Free speech here doesn’t really mean free speech. These are, after all, people from the same alt-right milieu who in ” Gamergate” threw an extended tantrum over video-game journalists writing things they didn’t approve of, with the implicit prescription that these things should not be allowed to be written, and then another one over an all-women Ghostbusters film, with the implicit prescription that this film should not be allowed to have been made.

…

The anti-PC brigade aren’t angry that they can’t say what they want; they’re angry that when they do say what they want, other people sometimes disagree with them. The society is a protest against the unacceptable censorship of people edging away from them at parties when they start holding forth about how feminism poisons everything; it’s a fury against the fact that people get offended when you’re offensive to them.

All this is tied up with a deeply dispiriting debate-nerd pedantry. Speakers never tired of making fetishistic invocations of Logic and Reason and Facts…

Oh yeah, I know those types. They’re the ones who pipe up at “Skeptic” events: “Why are you dragging your feminism into my skepticism?” They’re the ones who think a proper skeptic is someone without any moral or political commitments.

But anyway, Kriss says, the crowd wasn’t really there for the deep thinking, they were there for Milo Yiannopoulos. They were all crushed out on him.

For his fans, Milo Yiannopoulos isn’t just a washed-up journalist with a head like a broom and a knack for annoying overly serious students; he’s a living god and an object of desperate, panting desire. “I’d love to meet him,” one acolyte told me. “I love Milo so much. He represents truth, logic and common sense. He’s amazing.”

A few people were trying to look like Milo, sporting the bizarre new far-right uniform of peroxide hair and denim jackets. When the sweat-stifled air got too much and Milo took his cardigan off midway through his talk, an anguished groan rippled through the crowd. In his question-and-answer session, hardly anyone could speak to him without a tremor in their voice. Milo is the king of the dweebs, but it’s hard to see why. He is, in the end, a deeply boring man.

Yes he is.

What he wants to be is an erudite, sardonic breaker of false idols, the man who says the unsayable and does it with style. In fact, he’s a try-hard. Little dabs of Christopher Hitchens and William F Buckley creep into his mannerisms; I’d be very surprised if he hadn’t spent endless hours watching all the late lamented tosspots’ bloviations on YouTube, practicing them aloud, perfecting the clipped dismissive tone of the rational, logical idiot.

Exactly! They all worship Hitchens, these bozos, and think they would have been his BFF if only he’d lived long enough to meet them. It makes me tired. (You know if you look at a troll’s Twitter bio and it has a photo of or a quotation from Hitchens – or, shudder, both – you need hesitate no longer over the block button.)

But whatever you think of Buckley and Hitchens, their arrogance came naturally. Milo’s, meanwhile, is all stage-managed, and drearily relentless. “I haven’t been in England lately,” he said. “I’ve been busy getting really famous and successful.” Later he remarked that “you’ll never have my looks or my hair, or my wardrobe, but I can give you tactics and strategies”.

But underneath it all he’s as pedantic a debate nerd as anyone else in that room, just one who’s learned to substitute a pompous drawl for the usual asthmatic wheeze.

A profoundly boring man.

This is awfully literal for a comic…