Jeff Sessions recused himself from the investigation into Russian interference with the election. That means he should not have issued this statement:
Don’t get too comfortable
May 9th, 2017 4:01 pm | By Ophelia BensonTrump has fired Comey. This could be the beginning of a coup.
FBI Director James B. Comey has been dismissed by the president, according to White House spokesman Sean Spicer – a startling move that officials said stemmed from a conclusion by Justice Department officials that he had mishandled the probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Comey was fired as he is leading a counterintelligence investigation to determine whether associates of President Trump may have coordinated with Russia to meddle with the presidential election last year. That probe began quietly last July but has now become the subject of intense debate in Washington. It is unclear how Comey’s dismissal will affect that investigation.
Read that second paragraph … Read the rest
Few accused of blasphemy walk free
May 9th, 2017 11:33 am | By Ophelia BensonNow for some literal oppression and violence:
A court in Indonesia has sentenced the capital’s Christian governor to two years in prison for blasphemy against Islam, in a decision that has cheered Muslim conservatives and crushed the hopes of advocates of a more pluralistic and tolerant path for their nation.
Jakarta Gov. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, nicknamed “Ahok”, had not been expected to do time in jail, as prosecutors had sought only a suspended sentence.
But in Indonesia, few accused of blasphemy walk free. Reuters reports that Ahok was taken to a prison in east Jakarta where, according to his lawyer Tommy Sihotang, he would remain “despite his appeal process unless a higher court suspended it.”
There was no “blasphemy.” … Read the rest
Count the scare-quotes
May 9th, 2017 11:08 am | By Ophelia BensonAnother entry, this one by Ani Dutta. What’s interesting about this one is the nested hedging and qualifying, which is so recursive that you end up unable to figure out what the claim is.
… Read the restI have a feeling that I’m not going to be riding any popularity waves with this one, but I wanted to register my discomfort with the way in which ‘trans / gender non-conforming’ and ‘people of color’ voices have often been essentialized and homogenized in the wake of the controversy on Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article that defends ‘transracialism’ and makes analogies between ‘transgenderism’ and ‘transracialism’. I do not say this ‘as’ a trans/gender non-conforming person of color (categories I use with discomfort given their US-centric
Two years ago
May 9th, 2017 9:59 am | By Ophelia BensonInteresting. Cressida Heyes wrote that apology by the Associate Editors of Hypatia, but a couple of years ago she said something that would probably get the Guardians of Total Correctness on her ass too.
It’s a piece about Dolezal from July 2015 asking if we can really.
… Read the restAfter being outed publicly, Dolezal brought her case to the court of public opinion, saying she is transethnic and drawing parallels between her and Caitlyn Jenner’s transgenderism.
But Hernandez-Ramdwar says being transethnic and being transgender is not the same thing.
“They do not choose to be transgender – they just are,” she says pointing out that transgender people are often dealing with actual physical, chromosomal, genetic identity elements. “On the other hand, if
18 more days
May 9th, 2017 6:00 am | By Ophelia BensonWhat did Donnie from Queens know and when did he know it?
… Read the restLess than a week into the Trump administration, Sally Q. Yates, the acting attorney general, hurried to the White House with an urgent concern. The president’s national security adviser, she said, had lied to the vice president about his Russian contacts and was vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow.
“We wanted to tell the White House as quickly as possible,” Ms. Yates told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Monday. “To state the obvious: You don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians.”
But President Trump did not immediately fire the adviser, Michael T. Flynn, over the apparent lie or the susceptibility to blackmail. Instead, Mr. Flynn remained
Witness tampering
May 8th, 2017 5:42 pm | By Ophelia BensonTrump is in fact engaged in witness tampering, on Twitter.
It’s this one:
Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Counsel.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017
I was shocked by how inappropriate that is from a president talking about a Senate hearing, but it took a lawyer friend to point out that it’s witness tampering.
Some observers are reporting it that way.
… Read the restRep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) is asking whether Donald Trump committed a federal crime by engaging in witness intimidation with a tweet about Sally Yates. If Trump was convicted of witness intimidation, he could be sentenced to up to 20
Testifying
May 8th, 2017 3:56 pm | By Ophelia BensonFormer acting Attorney-General Sally Yates is testifying before a Senate subcommittee.
Ms. Yates said that in the first days of the Trump administration, she told the White House counsel that Mr. Flynn was susceptible to Russian blackmail.
“General Flynn was compromised in regard to the Russians,” Ms. Yates said at the hearing.
She testified that Mr. Flynn’s conduct was “problematic.” Though Ms. Yates did not publicly reveal her underlying concerns, she did refer to discussions about sanctions between Mr. Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the United States.
The White House initially mischaracterized those discussions. Mr. Trump ultimately fired Mr. Flynn over those discrepancies.
“Mischaracterized” and “discrepancies” are polite ways of putting it. There are harsher ways.
… Read the restThe White House
Many harmful aspects
May 8th, 2017 11:41 am | By Ophelia BensonKelly Oliver posted the link to her piece on Facebook. There are some extraordinary comments on the post.
… Read the restHanna Vered Lipkind I am sorry Kelly was insulted. But she reduces all of the outrage to petty insult and mischaracterizes the nature of the critiques and harms expressed by her trans and black colleagues, delegitimizing them, and doubling the harmful silencing effected by Tuvel’s article in the first place. How difficult would it be to acknowledge that, yes, there were many harmful aspects to Tuvel’s article, and there are very real contentions at play here? Real people with real pain this past week, folks. Reducing cries of epistemic injustice to “thought policing” is nowhere near a fair characterization. Generally, a
Outrage has become the new truth
May 8th, 2017 10:58 am | By Ophelia BensonKelly Oliver, a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt, tells us about the backstage maneuvers in the Ostracism of Rebecca Tuvel.
… Read the restThe dust-up on social media over Rebecca Tuvel’s article, “In Defense of Transracialism” published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, has given a new meaning to the public/private split central to the history of feminism. For decades, feminists have argued the personal is political, and explored the politics of our private lives. The split between what people wrote to both Rebecca Tuvel and to me in private, and what they felt compelled to say in public is one indication that the explosion of personal insults and vicious attacks on social media is symptomatic of something much bigger than
The importance of lived experience
May 7th, 2017 4:48 pm | By Ophelia BensonA friend of Rebecca Tuvel’s, Alison Suen, writes at Daily Nous about what all this has been like from that “standpoint.”
… Read the restRecently, amid the controversy over Hypatia’s publication of Rebecca Tuvel’s “In Defense of Transracialism,” there has been a lot of talk in the philosophical community about the importance of lived experience. I have been reflecting on my lived experience over the past week, as one of Rebecca’s friends. Speaking from the perspective of someone who has been on the sidelines watching this whole affair unfold, I am not sure if I am ready to, as Sally Haslanger says, “go forward,” and “not focus on Rebecca Tuvel, the individual and the philosopher, and to shift
Reading it feels like eating scented cotton balls
May 7th, 2017 4:17 pm | By Ophelia BensonUsually NPR is far too bland and timid and mainstream for me these days, but Annalisa Quinn’s review of Ivanka Trump’s “book” is pleasingly blunt.
… Read the restTrump’s new book shares a name and a mission with her company’s marketing campaign: Women Who Work. Organized into sections with titles like “Dream Big” and “Make Your Mark,” Women Who Work is a sea of blandities, an extension of that 2014 commercial seeded with ideas lifted (“curated,” she calls it) from various well-known self-help authors. Reading it feels like eating scented cotton balls.
“My company was not just meeting the lifestyle needs of today’s modern professional woman with versatile, well-designed products,” Trump writes, undermining the care she has taken in interviews to avoid
Time in prison for illegal campaign donations, tax evasion and witness tampering
May 7th, 2017 11:42 am | By Ophelia Benson… Read the restSHANGHAI — Like many American firms that come to China looking for money, Kushner Companies on Sunday tried to woo a Shanghai audience with promises of potentially big returns and a path toward living in the United States.
But for Bi Ting, who attended the event, part of the appeal was political: Jared Kushner is the son-in-law of — and a powerful adviser to — President Trump. Virtually unheard-of in China just months ago, he is now known here as a deeply influential figure in American politics.
“The Trump relationship is an extra point for me,” Ms. Bi said, adding that she and her husband had not decided whether to invest.
The Kushner Companies’ China roadshow,
C’est Macron
May 7th, 2017 11:03 am | By Ophelia Bensonhttps://twitter.com/France24_en/status/861279279996391426… Read the rest
Editors must stand behind the authors of accepted papers
May 7th, 2017 9:56 am | By Ophelia BensonThe editor of Hypatia repudiates the apology by the Associate Editors.
Critics blasted the article as a product of white and cisgender privilege, said it discounted important scholarly work by transgender and black academics, and accused its author of using harmful language.
Hundreds of scholars signed their names to an open letter calling on the journal to retract the article.
The journal didn’t go that far, but the apology, which came with a pledge to reconsider Hypatia’s review process, still seemed like an extraordinary step. Some academics applauded the swift response to widespread criticism; others criticized the unorthodox action of a journal in condemning its own publication of an article.
And, especially, the venomous lie-filled attack on an untenured … Read the rest
Ireland and Pakistan, BFFs
May 6th, 2017 6:17 pm | By Ophelia BensonI said good evening but that was before I saw this BBC item:
Police in the Republic of Ireland have launched an investigation after a viewer claimed comments made by Stephen Fry on a TV show were blasphemous.
Officers are understood to be examining whether the British comedian committed a criminal offence under the Defamation Act when he appeared on RTE in 2015.
Fry had asked why he should “respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world…. full of injustice”.
I’ve said all that, many times. Come and get me.
… Read the restAppearing on The Meaning of Life, hosted by Gay Byrne, in February 2015, Fry had been asked what he might say to God at the gates of
The Code of Publishing Ethics
May 6th, 2017 6:09 pm | By Ophelia BensonA series of useful comments at Daily Nous:
… Read the restMost of the discussion above seems to concern the academic and moral rights and wrongs of Professor Tuvel’s article. But the “open letter” is not simply a criticism of that article: it is a demand that Hypatia retract the article (and take various other actions going forward).
Hypatia is published by Wiley and so falls under Wiley’s policy on retraction, which reads, in relevant part: “On occasion, it is necessary to retract articles. This may be due to major scientific error which would invalidate the conclusions of the article, or in cases of ethical issues, such as duplicate publication, plagiarism, inappropriate authorship, etc.” Wiley also subscribes to the Code
A grave misuse of the term “harm”
May 6th, 2017 5:36 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe CHE has a piece by Suzanna Danuta Walters, the editor of Signs, on the Hypatia mess.
A young philosopher, Rebecca Tuvel, writes an article in which she considers claims to transracial and transgender identities. The result is a firestorm of condemnation — nasty emails, a petition to retract the article, and, worse, a journal that will not stand up for its own peer-reviewed articles. (That last point is complicated by an internal rift within the journal, Hypatia. The editor, Sally J. Scholz, does stand by the article. It was, she writes in a statement, the associate editorial board that disavowed Tuvel’s paper.)
“Disavowed” meaning they shat all over it.
… Read the restThere are scholars whose work needs to be
Motivated reasoning?
May 6th, 2017 4:51 pm | By Ophelia BensonThere’s one thing about the Hypatia Associate Editors’ attack on Rebecca Tuvel’s paper and self…
From Justin Weinberg’s post:
Between the complaints on social media and the open letter, sufficient pressure has been put on Hypatia that members of its board of associate editors have already issued an apology for publishing Tuvel’s essay in which they state that “Clearly, the article should not have been published.” The speed with which this has all happened is extraordinary.
The apology is in the form of a public Facebook post from Cressida Heyes, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Alberta.
A friend pointed out to me that Tuvel discusses an argument of Heyes’s in … Read the rest
A privileged group relative to much of the population
May 6th, 2017 11:53 am | By Ophelia BensonThere’s a guest post at Crooked Timber on the Hypatia wharblegarble by Holly Lawford-Smith, a political philosopher at the University of Melbourne. She starts with a comparative versions exercise.
… Read the restSomething bad happened recently. Here’s what I thought it was: a member of a marginalized group within our profession (a pre-tenure woman) published a paper; a group of philosophers were angry about the paper; those same philosophers signed an open letter to Hypatia calling for retraction of the paper; Hypatia issued an apology for publishing the paper; another group of philosophers rallied in defence of paper’s author, against both the journal and the group of philosophers who were angry about the paper in the first place. This would be bad, because