A nasty item out of Brighton:

A senior lecturer convicted of beating a former student he was in a relationship with was allowed to continue teaching, despite the protests of his traumatised victim.

Dr Lee Salter, a media and communications lecturer at the University of Sussex, remains employed by the institution after being found guilty of assaulting Allison Smith, a 24-year-old student he met during an induction day at the university.

He was convicted on July 13th.

Ms Smith had been punched in the face, knocked out and stamped on, and said she had salt poured into her eyes and ears.

Pedagogy at its finest.

Dr Salter was charged on 20 June and, despite repeated complaints made to the university, was allowed to continue teaching as normal.

When The Independent contacted the university two weeks ago, a spokeswoman said Dr Salter remained an employee. The Independent understands that as such he could have been able to teach in the coming term.

It was only when The Independent continued to pose questions that a source involved in the trial said his employment status had “changed” in that he has now been suspended from teaching.

One imagines the administrative grumbling…”Oh all right then, if you’re going to make such a big fuss about it…”

During the 10-month period between his arrest and conviction, Dr Salter continued to teach, the university has admitted, while Ms Smith said she remained so traumatised she was afraid to leave the house.

This is despite regulations laid out on the university’s own website which say “staff and students are subject to disciplinary procedures that, amongst other things, proscribe violent behaviour”.

The policy reads: “The University will take disciplinary action in accordance with its procedures against anyone who behaves in a violent manner including, should it be necessary, the immediate exclusion of the perpetrator from the campus.

“The University may also seek injunctions to exclude the perpetrators of violence from University premises in order to protect staff and students from further violent incidents.”

Unless it’s violence against female persons? Is that it? Or violence committed by cool dudes who teach media and communications?

BuzzFeed has a long piece about how thoroughly for what a long time Twitter has failed to do anything about Twitter harassment.

[H]arassment on Twitter is rampant — so much so that it has become a primary destination for trolls and hate groups. So much so that its CEO declared, “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.” So much so that numeroushigh-profileusershavequittheservice, citing it as an unsafe space. Today, Twitter is a well-known hunting ground for women and people of color, who are targeted by neo-Nazis, racists, misogynists, and trolls, often just for showing up. Just this summer, actor Leslie Jones was driven off Twitter after a barrage of racist comments and death threats, only to return after a personal reassurance from Dorsey himself. Last week, Normani Kordei of the pop group Fifth Harmony also stepped away from the service after suffering years of “horrific and racially charged” tweets. Despite its integral role in popular culture and in social justice initiatives from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, Twitter is as infamous today for being as toxic as it is famous for being revolutionary. And unless you’re a celebrity — or, as it turns out, the president of the United States of America — good luck getting help.

Indeed. They’ll look at the most obvious, sustained, targeted abuse and just say nope, we don’t care.

According to 10 high-level former employees, the social network’s long history with abuse has been fraught with inaction and organizational disarray. Taken together, these interviews tell the story of a company that’s been ill-equipped to handle harassment since its beginnings. Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority. On Twitter, abuse is not just a bug, but — to use the Silicon Valley term of art — a fundamental feature.

The “abiding commitment to free speech” thing is so infuriating – because free speech isn’t about enabling and protecting abuse. It’s never been a charter for assholes to torment people for giggles. Twitter should have figured that out from the beginning.

This maximalist approach to free speech was integral to Twitter’s rise, but quickly created the conditions for abuse. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, which have always banned content and have never positioned themselves as platforms for free speech, Twitter has made an ideology out of protecting its most objectionable users. That ethos also made it a beacon for the internet’s most vitriolic personalities, who take particular delight in abusing those who use Twitter for their jobs. This spring, the Just Not Sports podcast posted video of sports fans reading a sampling of the hateful tweets that the sportswriters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro received while writing and reporting. The video amassed over 3.5 million views on YouTube. Its message: This level of depravity is commonplace on Twitter.

…

Looking back on Twitter’s early years, multiple former senior employees cite Twitter’s disproportionately white, male leadership — a frequent, factual critique of Silicon Valley’s biggest and most influential tech companies — as creating an environment where building tools to combat harassment was a secondary concern. “The original sin is a homogenous leadership,” one former senior employee told BuzzFeed News. “This is part of what exacerbated the abuse problem for sure — because they were often tone-deaf to the concern of users in the outside world, meaning women and people of color.”

Abuse doesn’t have the same meaning to white men as it does to women and people of color.

All the while, the abuse intensified and the public began to take notice. In 2013, Caroline Criado-Perez launched a campaign to put Jane Austen on UK currency and quickly became the target of more than 50 rape threats per hour — which forced Twitter to roll out a “report abuse” feature for individual tweets. The feature came roughly six years into the company’s history and more than five years after Waldman’s ordeal. “It feels like, not only did they have opportunities early on to tackle this, but they had the ability to step up and be a leader in this space — to be proactive instead of reactive,” Waldman said. “That they haven’t done that is beyond me and it’s reckless.”

Around that time, high-profile harassment cases became a weekly, if not daily, occurrence, especially in the UK. Sinéad O’Connor was driven off the service in 2011; she later told the Daily Mail she was “getting too much abuse.” Downton Abbey actor Lily James quit after she became the target of hundreds of hateful tweets about her appearance. Actor Matt Lucas had to shut down his account after trolls wouldn’t stop harassing him after the death of his partner.

In the US, stories of Twitter harassment of women, people of color, and religious minorities appeared with increasing frequency, coming to a head in August 2014, when Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda was forced to quit Twitter after trolls flooded her mentions with photoshopped images of her recently deceased father. Williams’ departure from Twitter went viral and prompted Twitter’s Trust and Safety head, Del Harvey, to condemn the attacks. “We will not tolerate abuse of this nature,” she said, noting that the company would work to find policy fixes to prevent cases like Williams’.

But of course they would and will and did.

It was also around this time that Twitter began broadcasting grisly ISIS beheadings and Gamergate’s multipronged misogynist harassment campaign toward female gamers. Harvey’s team rolled out more streamlined forms for reporting abuse, dispensing with its cumbersome nine-part questionnaire and adding back-end flagging tools for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team. One month later, Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist writer and video game critic, took to her Tumblr page and posted 157 of examples of misogyny, gendered insults, victim blaming, incitement to suicide, and rape and death threats she’d received in a recent six-day stretch on Twitter. Despite the overtures from Twitter, the trolls were winning.

…

Nearly all the former employees BuzzFeed News spoke to praised Harvey’s Trust and Safety team for its commitment to curbing harassment, but suggested that failures on the product side left it hamstrung. “They were on the front lines working with users and trying so hard,” a former senior employee said, “but getting caught in a rock and a hard place between what the stated mission of the company was and the resources available to create that environment.”

They were also limited by a workforce that multiple former employees say fundamentally didn’t understand what abuse looks and feels like. “The decision-makers were not people who got abuse and didn’t understand that it’s not about content, it’s about context,” Miley said. “If Twitter had people in the room who’d been abused on the internet — meaning not just straight, white males — when they were creating the company, I can assure you the service would be different.” A 2015 Women, Action, and the Media study revealed that, as of 2014, Twitter’s leadership was 79% male and 72% white.

Twitter put out a statement about the BuzzFeed article today, saying the usual blah blah blah. They haven’t fixed it and I doubt they ever will.

I’m hoping this post is off-the-charts atypical. It’s from a transgender dating site, TransSingle. The post is titled Why Get A Transgender Girlfriend.

The modern cis dating market is almost a Mad-Max Thunder Dome dystopia. Anyone who has been in the cis dating market for some time finds to his dismay that cis-women in the modern dating market have more issues than Time magazine. It is a ruthless winner-takes-all-situation. Cis-women are hyper judgmental beings, and men have been reduced to being circus performers who have to constantly entertain the cis-women non-stop or face rejection.

Wow. Talk about Assumed Male.

It starts with the cis dating market, as if the subject is dating from all points of view, but then we realize with a jolt that it’s solely from the male point of view – and the “cis” male at that. The “anyone” at the beginning of the second sentence turns out to be male halfway through. So it’s not “anyone” after all, it’s any man – but the author apparently doesn’t even notice the difference between the two. And then, moving briskly on, we get to the part where we hear about how awful “cis” women are…but not, oddly enough, anything about “cis” men. Cis women are mentioned repeatedly, but cis men, never. Trans men are not mentioned either. For some reason men are taken for granted, without being labeled cis, but women are not – men are men, but women are cis women. Why is that?

And, furthermore, cis women are terrible while men are just folks, just like the rest of us, just good people looking for relationships. It’s almost as if the author of this post detests women.

And then there’s the substance of the complaint – women are judgy demanding bitches, and men have to keep them entertained every second. Hmm. That sounds more like MRAs on speed than trans dating advice.

But it gets worse.

Modern women have a plethora of issues which make them caustic; it can even be argued that modern cis-women would not get any male attention if the almighty love hormones were not at play. Add to that the vast majority of cis-women do not act feminine, care little about their appearance, and do not know how to respond to male affection appropriately.

Yeah, clearly a full-on misogynist here, one who thinks women have some sort of duty to “act feminine” and “care about their appearance” and “respond to male affection appropriately” (i.e. accept all overtures?).

Then comes the peripateia: the trans woman takes over the duties.

The first thing that you have to understand is that, despite what the mass media and the society says, transgender woman are women, and in many ways they are probably the only women around.

Right. Women aren’t women, only trans women are women. I’ve seen that claim before, but have always told myself it was only outliers who said things like that.

A transgender woman responds to male affection with feminine gratitude, which is rare among your average cis-woman. Cis-women, with their mentality of entitlement, conclude that male affection and attention are their birthright, and hence treat the men around them like toys to be played with and discarded at will.

The bitches.

See what I mean about the pattern? Cis-women on the one hand, and men on the other. Men need trans women, and women need to fuck right off. Might trans women like trans men? That’s not discussed.

Transgender women are also very attractive, and a simple overview of a Transgender Dating Site will prove that the cultural myths about transgender woman are just petty lies that have no truth in reality. Trans-women take much better care of their appearance than the slovenly modern cis-woman.

The bitches. The ugly, slovenly, filthy bitches.

The average man is so disillusioned with the dating market that he can be forgiven for his lack of enthusiasm. In fact, many men have just given up and are no longer interested in finding their soul mate. Men cannot be blamed for what is essentially the caustic nature of cis-women. However, men would be losing out if they allowed their lack of enthusiasm to stop them from trying Trans dating. Men have to understand that cis dating has reached its end and Transgender dating in the way of the future. It is about time that dating was about love and fun, rather than joyless work as cis dating has become.

Men are fabulous, and women are horrible. Trans women are also fabulous, and trans men – say what? Never heard of them.

So. I’m hoping this post is off-the-charts atypical.

Orac found some choice photos of Phelps with the cupping in progress.

https://www.instagram.com/p/7djtuUyx7j/

And there’s Natalie Coughlin – saying it hurts a lot. Benign?

Laughing because it hurts so bad. Gonna leave a mark! #AthleteLife

A photo posted by Natalie Coughlin (@nataliecoughlin) on Dec 9, 2015 at 11:02am PST

And here she is looking downright scalded:

Gee, I hope my #GoldenGoggles dress is open-backed.

A photo posted by Natalie Coughlin (@nataliecoughlin) on Nov 20, 2013 at 3:54pm PST

Orac also shares a photo of cupping bruises turned necrotic.

Guest post by Bruce Everett.

It’s a peculiar thing, watching people who slowly slide towards fascism without realizing it. Their fear of humiliation from mostly imaginary threats is a given, but what’s really striking is how a number of them – even the ones with university educations – have a propensity to call out really odd targets as being fascists, in a way totally divorced from the facts of 20th century history.

Left-wing unionists aren’t perfect, and some of them can be authoritarian and down right nasty. But even when they are authoritarian, they aren’t fascists – they can’t be.

Ditto with calling feminists “fascist”. Fascism has always, without exception, on one way or another, positioned women as second class citizens. Not every feminist can be perfect, and some aren’t very nice people, but all the same it’s ridiculous to associate their politics with fascism because fascism rejects feminism (either by stealth, implication or often explicitly).

So you get these people, who’re easily swayed by demagoguery and dire warnings of existential threat, and they get their backs up before a feminist, or a left-wing unionist, or any of the other textbook enemies of fascism, makes a criticism, explicit or otherwise.

Maybe it’s a bad album review. Maybe they’ve pointed to an politically inconvenient, well sourced and inductively strong fact about domestic violence or immigration statistics. Maybe they’ve opined that vigilante street patrols aren’t making anyone safer, and called people’s motives into question.

Whatever it is, it sticks in Whiny McWhinyPants’s craw, so Whiny whines “FASCIST!” before sitting down to cover Whiny’s chest in crumbs, all while mendacious pundits, YouTubers and crackpots tell Whiny that Whiny’s the victim, and that this other bunch of innocent people are responsible for Whiny’s embarrassment. That and maybe that someone needs to teach these people a brutal lesson in not embarrassing Virtuous People. [Insert dog whistle]

Reeves Wiedeman, who wrote a long profile of Simone Biles for the New Yorker, says how the tv coverage of women’s gymnastics is shit – it’s that it avoids explaining the technicalities to focus on drama instead, pretty much on the grounds that that’s what the laydeez want, because we’re stupid.

In defending its coverage of gymnastics and other Olympic sports, NBC often falls back on the fact that more women than men watch the Olympics, which the network believes should affect the way it covers the events. “They’re less interested in the result and more interested in the journey,” John Miller, NBC’s chief marketing officer for the Olympics, said last month, explaining the network’s coverage. “It’s sort of like the ultimate reality show and miniseries wrapped into one.”

Giggle giggle giggle.

Biles is perhaps the greatest gymnast of all time, and these Olympics may be the only time most Americans will get to see her perform. Might they want to know what makes her so good? There is, for instance, the fact that she requires fewer steps and less speed to get into the meat of tumbling runs, enabling her to fit more skills, and score more points, in her routines.

There you go. Yes, I would have liked to know that. I could see some of her amazingness just by looking, but I couldn’t see that. I could see that she was fitting in more skills, but not that she required fewer steps and less speed. Yes, I would have been interested.

The killer fact is in the final paragraph.

One of the factors preventing Americans from appreciating just how difficult it is to do what an Olympic gymnast does is the fact that competitors are expected to perform their routines without betraying any evidence of effort. Watching LeBron James drive into the lane, bounce off multiple defenders, and then rise above them seems so impressive in part because James grimaces along the way. Serena Williams growls with every shot. The effort is obvious. A gymnast, meanwhile, is expected to risk life and limb with a smile on her face. “You’re never supposed to show that it’s difficult,” O’Beirne said. She pointed out that there is no such requirement for male gymnasts. “You can trace that back to the eighteen-hundreds, when women wore corsets and they were supposed to act like they weren’t in horrible pain. Why can’t Nastia wear her bitch face?” When you’re dealing with perhaps the greatest gymnastics team of all time, explaining to Madeleine just how difficult it is to be as great as they are should be ratings fodder enough.

Good god. They’re not supposed to show the effort.

As a matter of fact I did notice Laurie Hernandez shifting from a smile to an effort-grimace during her tumbling runs. I was interested to see that, and watched for it. It didn’t mar her performance. Difficult things are difficult.

Max Bearak at the Washington Post on the dreadful situation in Baluchistan:

Baluchistan is a place that desperately needs lawyers.

Pakistan’s largest province by area, it is the home of a decades-old separatist insurgency, fueled by real grievances over neglect and lack of political representation. It is also increasingly the target of Sunni extremists, who bomb and kill its Shiite minorities. What leaders the province has are widely considered corrupt. Dozens of local journalists have been kidnapped in the past few years. It is nearly impossible for foreign reporters to enter Baluchistan. Lawyers are almost all that give the province a semblance of justice.

And now a large percentage of them have been slaughtered.

They were packed into an emergency room where the body of a slain colleague lay, riddled with gunshot wounds. A widely circulated video showed lawyers milling about the hospital before an enormous explosion. A Pakistani Taliban offshoot claimed the attack, as did the Islamic State, though analysts say the latter’s claim is dubious.

And it’s not as if it will be easy to replace them. If you were a lawyer would you want to move to Baluchistan?

The global response has been muted. Ban Ki-moon, Hillary Clinton and other international figures issued brief statements. Pakistan’s leaders did much the same. No officials have been held responsible for the security breakdown at what should have been a highly guarded scene. The website of Dawn, a Pakistani English-language newspaper, had only a day-old story and photo gallery about the attack on its homepage on Tuesday evening.

The response should not be muted.

Photo of lawyers killed in #QuettaAttack shared widely on Twitter.Many mourning a'generation of lawyers'#QuettaBlast pic.twitter.com/1rXPd42659

— shaimaa khalil BBC (@Shaimaakhalil) August 9, 2016

Inspire posted on Facebook:

Yesterday after the conviction of Tanveer Ahmed who murdered Asad Shah, Bradford Council of Mosques told BBC Newsnight that the Government should reintroduce blasphemy law in the UK as “faith communities have the right not to be offended.”

We at Inspire firmly disagree and would oppose any attempt to bring back any kind of blasphemy law. There is no right not to be offended. There is is however the right to free expression and freedom of religion.

And while we’re on the subject of more or less veiled or implied or ambiguous threats – Peter Walker shared this cuddly story about a guy who “monitored” cops at a Portland (Oregon) precinct for months, from a car that held enough weapons and ammunition to take down a platoon.

A 39-year-old man who police describe as a “self-proclaimed Constitutionalist” was arrested Sunday with a cache of weapons.

Officers first noticed Eric Eugene Crowl parked outside Portland Police Bureau’s East Precinct in April. He would reportedly sit in his gray Chevrolet Tahoe and film police officers as they entered and left the building during shift changes, police said.

He also had a police scanner in his car, according to PPB.

On April 22, an officer spoke over the police radio frequency to report that he had seen Crowl watching and filming officers over the past week. Crowl was pulled over during a traffic stop, and when officers asked him why he had been following police he responded by saying, “it was his right to do so and he was a ‘free man.’”

In a way, it is his right to do that, in some sense. (I don’t know if there are any laws against it or not.) Citizens have a moral right to monitor public officials. But…in other ways maybe not. Do they have a moral right to do that from a car full of loaded guns? No, I don’t think so.

On June 21, an officer with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force went to Crowl’s home on the 14700 block of SE Rhone Street. Crowl reportedly told the officer “his intention of videotaping and scanning the police was to hold law enforcement accountable.”

Crowl allegedly had a negative experience with PPB and Washington County Sheriff’s Office in the past and took it upon himself to weed out any “bad apples”.

Crowl told the JTTF investigator that “he did not mean to harm anyone or cause any problems to law enforcement who are doing their job accordingly,” records state.

The problem with that is that you can’t “hold law enforcement accountable” by filming cops going in and out of the precinct during shift changes. All that does is…well, threaten, frankly. The stuff the police need to be held accountable for doesn’t happen as cops go in and out for shift changes. This implies that it’s logistically quite difficult to hold police accountable by monitoring them in a useful way, and that’s true, because they’re work is reactive by nature, as opposed to scheduled. Parking outside the precinct with a camera isn’t going to work as a form of monitoring the police for examples of brutality or racial profiling or the like.

To put it another way: scary shit.

I’d forgotten this. Sarah Palin’s cross-hairs on political “enemies” – one of whom was Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head days later.

Two of the worst guys in the world have patched up their quarrel. Putin and Erdoğan are besties again.

What brought the two he-men back together?

[A]fter the 15 July coup attempt in Turkey, Mr Putin expressed support for Mr Erdogan. He did not criticise Mr Erdogan’s crackdown on political opponents and purge of alleged “plotters” in state institutions.

The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford says Russia is keen to capitalise on Turkey’s cooling relations with the West following the failed coup.

Mr Erdogan was angered by criticism from the EU and the US of the mass detentions of suspected plotters.

If people are giving you the stink-eye because of your brisk way with human rights, who ya gonna call? Not the same kind of bleeding heart human rights-lovers who are scowling at you, but a standup no bullshit fuck all this PC nonsense guy like Putin, that’s who.

It’s not all roses and chocolates though. They have their differences.

They back opposing sides in Syria. Turkey is furious at the scale of Russian air support for Syrian government forces, as Mr Erdogan reviles Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Russia has accused Turkey of backing Islamist anti-Assad groups, including some accused of “terrorism” in Russia.

Turkey is at war with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the PKK’s Syrian allies. Mr Erdogan has accused Russia of arming the PKK.

For centuries Russia and Turkey have been rivals for influence in the Caucasus and Black Sea region.

Turkey was also angered by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, accusing Moscow of violating the rights of Crimean Tatars. The Muslim Tatars have long had close ties to Turkey.

Russia annexed Crimea??! I thought that was Obama! Or Hillary! Or future-Hillary! Someone like that.

From the “what are they thinking?!” files –

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group classified as a terrorist group in Egypt, qualify for asylum in the UK if they are considered under threat of persecution. In its revised guidelines on the group, the UK Home Office said that asylum can be sought over “a fear of persecution or serious harm by the state because of the person’s actual or perceived involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The 22-page document Country Information and Guidance Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood, was updated this month. It said that in cases of high profile supporters of the group, including journalists, at risk of persecution, “a grant of asylum would be appropriate.”

Well don’t stop there. Grant asylum to the people who took over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge last winter too, because they’re being “persecuted” by the state right now, for breaking a whole bunch of laws.