Jordan Peterson explains the tragedy of why men can’t control women: it’s because they’re not allowed to hit us so it’s all just hopeless, hopeless. It’s fatal for the culture, is what it is.
Power to change the world
May 19th, 2018 10:48 am | By Ophelia BensonNo I didn’t watch the RoYal WedDing, and I was pretty staggered last night to see CNN “covering” it (to the exclusion of anything else) at 5 a.m. London time when all there was to say was “Well the sun is coming up and the crowds aren’t here yet but THEY WILL BE by god”…but all the same I’m getting a kick out of the sermon the royal stiffs got to listen to.
The sermon-giver was Michael Curry, the presiding bishop of the US version of the Anglican church, aka the Episcopalian. (I was dragged to Episcopalian church a few times as a kid. It didn’t take.) He’s the first African-American head of the church. His sermon was a … Read the rest
Cultural exchange
May 19th, 2018 10:13 am | By Ophelia BensonAn exchange student from Pakistan was killed in the Santa Fe school shooting.
Sabika Sheikh, aged 18, had been on the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange & Study Abroad programme (YES). The programme is run by the US state department, and was set up in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks to bring students from Muslim-majority nations to the US on a cultural exchange.
That’s something the US and Pakistan have in common: plenty of lethal violence.
Sabika Sheikh family
… Read the restHer parents, Abdul Aziz and Farah Sheikh, told the BBC they heard about the shooting through television news.
They said they confirmed their daughter’s death within an hour by speaking to school administrators. Ms Sheikh’s body would be returned
Handcuffed and shaking in the cold wind
May 18th, 2018 4:14 pm | By Ophelia BensonVia G Felis, Sam Levin at the Guardian tells the appalling story of a guy brutally arrested and held for months as a suspected “Black Identity Extremist”:
… Read the restRakem Balogun thought he was dreaming when armed agents in tactical gear stormed his apartment. Startled awake by a large crash and officers screaming commands, he soon realized his nightmare was real, and he and his 15-year-old son were forced outside of their Dallas home, wearing only underwear.
Handcuffed and shaking in the cold wind, Balogun thought a misunderstanding must have led the FBI to his door on 12 December 2017. The father of three said he was shocked to later learn that agents investigating “domestic terrorism” had been monitoring him for
Cargo cult intellectualism
May 18th, 2018 11:14 am | By Ophelia BensonA representative of that strange creature, Woman, does a profile of Jordan Peterson in the Times.
Mr. Peterson, 55, a University of Toronto psychology professor turned YouTube philosopher turned mystical father figure, has emerged as an influential thought leader.
Not to be confused with an intellectual or scholar or thinker. He’s more like Jim Jones.
… Read the restThe messages he delivers range from hoary self-help empowerment talk (clean your room, stand up straight) to the more retrograde and political (a society run as a patriarchy makes sense and stems mostly from men’s competence; the notion of white privilege is a farce). He is the stately looking, pedigreed voice for a group of culture warriors who are working diligently to undermine mainstream
C’est normal
May 18th, 2018 9:46 am | By Ophelia BensonMore people killed in a school shooting in Texas.
Between eight and 10 people have been killed in a shooting at a Texas high school, say police.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told reporters the majority of the dead at Santa Fe High School were students.
A student is in custody after the attack at the school, which is about 40 miles (65km) south of Houston.
The death toll makes this the deadliest school shooting since the one in February at Parkland, Florida.
We rank them now. They’re so regular and frequent and routine that we rank them by body count and don’t bother with the ones that kill only two or three. Shootings in schools are just a … Read the rest
The most beautiful lake country on the continent
May 17th, 2018 6:07 pm | By Ophelia BensonMore damage Trump is determined to do, this time to a wilderness area in northern Minnesota:
… Read the restToday this region, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, looks almost exactly as it appeared 10,000 years ago when Paleo-Indians lived there. Sigurd Olson, the naturalist and writer who guided there for three decades, called it “the most beautiful lake country on the continent.” Few who see it would disagree. Today it is the most visited wilderness area in the United States.
But now this special place is at great risk.
Late last year the Interior Department concluded that the two expired leases held by a Chilean-owned company, Twin Metals Minnesota, should be reinstated for copper and nickel mining near the border
Balance in all things
May 17th, 2018 1:08 pm | By Ophelia BensonHuh. Speaking of absurd moral panics over “black identity politics,” here’s an item from Foreign Policy, also last October, that I saw not via the ravings of Sam Harris but via Trump’s “they’re not people, they’re animals.”
As white supremacists prepared to descend on Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, the FBI warned about a new movement that was violent, growing, and racially motivated. Only it wasn’t white supremacists; it was “black identity extremists.”
Amid a rancorous debate over whether the Trump administration has downplayed the threat posed by white supremacist groups, the FBI’s counterterrorism division has declared that black identity extremists pose a growing threat of premeditated violence against law enforcement.
Oh no, it’s the black identity extremists coming to … Read the rest
Sam says we have to get out of the identity politics game
May 17th, 2018 11:18 am | By Ophelia BensonUpdating to add: I forgot to point out that the tweet is from last October.
Sam Harris is unbearable.
Sam Harris attacks BLM & @tanehisicoates, calls them delusional & insists there's no racism in America because Obama served as POTUS. pic.twitter.com/A8RM1gBIL9
— Saeen (@_Saeen_) October 27, 2017
I recommend listening to that one-minute clip, to get the full sense of how his flat cold affectless voice combines with his smugly confident words on a subject he knows NOTHING about to create a monster of I’m Not a Racistism.
… Read the restVirtually everything that’s said, in the identity politics space, about what’s happening, is at best slanted. There are Trumpian levels of dishonesty on the left around these topics, and it’s harmful. And
A textbook case of how dehumanizing rhetoric works
May 17th, 2018 10:09 am | By Ophelia BensonTrump’s “They’re not people, they’re animals” is not being forgotten in the onslaught of news.
Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot all called their opponents "parasites" or "vermin" or "animals." Dehumanization is what you do to unwanted social groups before killing them https://t.co/5nMMSZzeP9
— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) May 17, 2018
Read this thread if you think “he was talking about MS-13!” is a meaningful response to Trump’s disgusting comment yesterday. https://t.co/2ZS7OAwyUz
— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) May 17, 2018
So I did read it; it’s outstanding. A few highlights:
… Read the restThis is a textbook case of how dehumanizing and racist rhetoric works. The question references a hypothetical MS-13 member. Trump immediately pivots to a vaguer “people trying to come into the country”
Happy annivs Don
May 17th, 2018 9:42 am | By Ophelia BensonTrump watches his morning Fox, flips out, composes wrathful tweet.
President Trump marked the first anniversary of the special counsel’s Russia investigation Thursday by repeating accusations that the FBI had a confidential informant inside his 2016 campaign and by calling the probe “disgusting, illegal and unwarranted.”
Trump tweeted: “Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI ‘SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT.’ Andrew McCarthy says, ‘There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.’ If so, this is bigger than Watergate!”
I’m not sure Watergate is the analogy he’s looking for.
… Read the restGiuliani told The Washington Post and other news organizations Wednesday that the special counsel’s team
How it starts
May 16th, 2018 3:43 pm | By Ophelia BensonLeon Mugesera called Tutsis “cockroaches.”
In 1992, then an official in Rwanda’s ruling Hutu party, Mugesera told more than 1,000 party members that they should kill Tutsis and dump their bodies in the river.
Milošević called Bosnians “internal enemies.”
Hailed as “the new Tito”, Milošević propagated a message of extreme Serbian nationalism, calling for the expansion of the Serbian state into Bosnian territory. In a 1988 Belgrade speech, Milosevic identified Bosniaks as the “internal enemy”, a gesture eerily similar to Hitler’s pre-WWII demonization of the Jews in Germany.
Trump said immigrants are not people, “they’re animals.”… Read the rest
Our own Wannsee conference
May 16th, 2018 3:10 pm | By Ophelia BensonHe says it. He says it.
President Trump during California #SanctuaryCities Roundtable: "These aren't people. These are animals."
Full video here: https://t.co/alyS47LI5V pic.twitter.com/ifXicTHHP0
— CSPAN (@cspan) May 16, 2018
Fingers crossed behind back ok sir?
May 16th, 2018 12:24 pm | By Ophelia BensonTrump’s lawyer basically told Walter Shaub that Trump’s financial disclosure wasn’t true and asked if that would be ok, USNews reported a year ago:
President Donald Trump’s attorneys initially wanted him to submit an updated financial disclosure without certifying the information as true, according to correspondence with the Office of Government Ethics.
Attorney Sheri Dillon said she saw no need for Trump to sign his 2016 personal financial disclosure because he is filing voluntarily this year. But OGE director Walter Shaub said his office would only work with Dillon if she agreed to follow the typical process of having Trump make the certification.
He put it more strongly on Twitter just now.
… Read the restThe strangest moment in my entire career
Any inquiry you may be pursuing
May 16th, 2018 11:31 am | By Ophelia BensonThe Times on Trump’s oopsie:
President Trump’s financial disclosure, released on Wednesday, revealed for the first time that he paid more than $100,000 to his personal attorney, Michael D. Cohen, as reimbursement for payment to a third-party.
That is, this is the first time Trump has admitted it to the feds.
… Read the restMr. Trump’s disclosure of the 2016 payment to Mr. Cohen raises the question of whether he erred in not reporting the debt on last year’s disclosure form. The document released Wednesday said that Mr. Trump was reporting the repaid debt “in the interest of transparency” but that it was “not required to be disclosed as reportable liabilities.”
Yet a letter accompanying the report sent to Rod J. Rosenstein,
With omission under false statement liability
May 16th, 2018 11:07 am | By Ophelia BensonThis could get interesting.
SIREN: by disclosing Cohen debt on his just-released 278, Donald Trump just substantiated our @crewcrew criminal complaint that he should have disclosed it last year as well. Form is here https://t.co/vgHYnPwTqE and our criminal complaint is here https://t.co/gunUDr90Cw
— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) May 16, 2018
SIREN: by disclosing Cohen debt on his just-released 278, Donald Trump just substantiated our @crewcrew criminal complaint that he should have disclosed it last year as well. Form is here https://oge.app.box.com/v/Trump2018Annual278 … and our criminal complaint is here
… Read the restBREAKING: @OfficeGovEthics agrees with our @CREWcrew analysis that Trump was required to report Cohen debt & sends last year’s form with omission under false statement liability to DOJ & Rod Rosenstein in case
Don’t forget the Tupperware
May 16th, 2018 10:56 am | By Ophelia Benson… Read the rest[Jessica] Mock was about to check out Sunday at the Publix near Lake Jackson when she realized she’d forgotten to pick up Tupperware. She left her cart in the lane to get some and found another woman trying to check out ahead of her when she returned.
The two argued, and the victim moved to a different lane. They both checked out about the same time and left the store only seconds apart. Before leaving, the victim used an expletive and said, “I’ll meet you outside.” Mock replied, “I’ll see you outside.”
The victim unloaded her groceries and returned her cart, running into Mock again along the way. Mock pulled a small handgun
You’re asking about a private organization’s dealings
May 15th, 2018 4:37 pm | By Ophelia BensonVanity Fair asks: is China straight-up bribing Trump?
… Read the restSo it was a bit odd to see Trump pull a complete 180, suddenly insisting that the company and its 75,000 Chinese jobs must be saved, though to be fair, tweeting “Look, China just pumped $500 million into a Trump Organization project so I had to do them a solid” might not have gone over so well.
Oh, that’s right—according to multiple news outlets, the president’s total about-face on China came just 72 hours after the developer of a theme park outside Jakarta, known as MNC Lido City, with whom the Trump Organization has an agreement to license its name, signed a deal to receive $500 million in Chinese government loans,
Wait – change of plans
May 15th, 2018 4:05 pm | By Ophelia BensonNorth Korea appears to have sprung the trap on Trump.
North Korea is casting doubt on next month’s summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Trump over joint Air Force drills taking place in South Korea, which it says are ruining the diplomatic mood.
…
North Korea suggested that the drills were putting the proposed summit between Trump and Kim, scheduled for June 12, in jeopardy.
“The United States will also have to undertake careful deliberations about the fate of the planned North Korea-U.S. summit in light of this provocative military ruckus jointly conducted with the South Korean authorities,” said KCNA, the North’s Korean Central News Agency.
Aw. Donnie was all excited about his Nobel Peace Prize.… Read the rest
