People outside the US are surprised that we’re doing such a staggeringly bad job of preventing the virus from exploding.

With confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. hitting 5 million Sunday, by far the highest of any country, the failure of the most powerful nation in the world to contain the scourge has been met with astonishment and alarm in Europe.

We’ve always been crap on the social justice, equality, fairness side, but we were good on the techy side. Now? We’re Major Kong riding the nuke down, waving his hat and hollerin’.

Much of the incredulity in Europe stems from the fact that America had the benefit of time, European experience and medical know-how to treat the virus that

This is what Rebecca Solnit ignored in her perky reference to the last night of the last lesbian bar in San Francisco and what a lot of “trans men” were present:

Today I grabbed a latte at my local Starbucks. There’s no drive-thru there, and I found myself darting into the premises with a feeling of dread. The young lesbian on testosterone was at the counter again. Two other servers are also transing lesbians. I’ve seen them before.

I can tell they would have been young butch lesbians in any other era. I can tell because I was a young butch lesbian in this hating world once. The only difference between them and me is time – I was just

Rebecca Solnit ffs. I’d expect better from her.

She grew up in San Francisco. It was “in its heyday the loudest, proudest queer town around.” It was all about kindness and liberation.

As I’ve watched transphobia explode in the American right and the British whatever, I’ve thought over my own experience. San Francisco has been for a century or so a sanctuary city for dissident, rebel and queer people, so I suspect I have lived my whole adult life in a place with more trans people per capita than almost anyplace else. Transphobes are always warning us that if trans people live in peace and legal recognition and even have rights, there will be terrible consequences, but I assume that

Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed:

Like many academic debates, one currently rocking the music theory world is esoteric. But the controversy — about the legacy of the late Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker — has grown legs because it involves accusations of anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism and, now, censorship.

…

Late last year, when conferences still happened in person, [Philip] Ewell delivered a plenary address at the society’s annual conference. Ewell, who is Black, argued that Schenker’s known white supremacist views informed his hierarchical approach to music theory. The talk, in which Ewell referred to Schenker as “an ardent racist and German nationalist,” was part of a much longer, since-published paper on the “white racial frame” in music theory.

Ewell

One for the “that’s just embarrassing” file:

White House aides reached out to South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem last year about the process of adding additional presidents to Mount Rushmore, the New York Times reported.

Meaning, Trump hacks asked South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem if she would please add Donald Trump’s face to the four faces carved into that slab of rock to make the world’s tackiest whatever-that-is.

According to a person familiar who spoke with the Times, Noem then greeted Trump when he arrived in the state for his July Fourth celebrations at the monument with a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included his face.

Noem has noted before Trump’s “dream” to have his face on Mount

We’ve hit 5 million cases in the US, which is more than any other country. Aren’t we clever. The midwest is going to be swamped.

Health specialists predict a sharp increase in deaths across the region in the coming weeks that will be made significantly worse in some states by the politicians who followed Donald Trump’s lead in undermining medical advice and in questioning the value of masks.

Anthony Fauci, the president’s lead coronavirus expert, recently warned the midwest’s political leaders to follow the science.

“Some states are not doing that,” he said. “We would hope that they all now rethink what happens when you don’t adhere to that. We’ve seen it in plain sight in the southern states

A first! A milestone! A barrier broken down! Eyes on the prize!

“For the first time in British history, an openly non-binary person is campaigning for the leadership of a UK political party.

Tom Pashby launched their historic bid for deputy leader of the Green Party in June.”

How amazing for people to see people who look like this in power! https://t.co/myNamRRSA7 pic.twitter.com/DuESLBaE2s

— #IAmLabelFree ♥️ (@LabelFreeBrands) August 9, 2020

Ooooooooooooh the first openly non-binary person. Think of all the trembling non-binary persons in their closets, feeling newly empowered.

Only…what is it that’s “openly,” exactly? What is it about Tom Pashby that makes him “non-binary”? Is that supposed to mean neither female nor male but a pleasing mix of both? … Read the rest

Too easy.

If cis is a slur what do cis people want us to call them? “Non-trans”? If we want to center transness that also works for me.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) August 9, 2020

People. That’s all. Just people, Chase. We want you to call women women and men men. That’s all. It’s easy, it’s simple, it’s routine.

You’re creating a problem where there is no problem. No one needs a special label to distinguish between women and men who say they are women. Women are just women; men who say they are women are just men.

The whole ideology pretty much rests on Word Magic, doesn’t it. If we say “trans woman” often enough people will come to … Read the rest

The trumpies have a lot of nerve.

France and Germany have quit talks on reforming the World Health Organization in frustration at attempts by the United States to lead the negotiations, despite its decision to leave the WHO, three officials told Reuters.

“We quit but we still get to boss you.”

That’s not how that works.

European governments have also criticised the WHO but do not go as far as the United States in their criticism, and the decision by Paris and Berlin to leave the talks follows tensions over what they say are Washington’s attempts to dominate the negotiations.

“Nobody wants to be dragged into a reform process and getting an outline for it from a country which

This is so sad (and scary and unfair and unreasonable). A school superintendent in Arizona tells a Washington Post reporter what that’s like now:

The governor has told us we have to open our schools to students on August 17th, or else we miss out on five percent of our funding. I run a high-needs district in middle-of-nowhere Arizona. We’re 90 percent Hispanic and more than 90 percent free-and-reduced lunch. These kids need every dollar we can get. But covid is spreading all over this area and hitting my staff, and now it feels like there’s a gun to my head. I already lost one teacher to this virus. Do I risk opening back up even if it’s going to

Trump is systematically and openly trying to rig the election by destroying voting rights…the rights that so many civil rights activists faced violence and death for demanding.

Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee have taken to the courts dozens of times as part of a $20 million effort to challenge voting rules, including filing their own lawsuits in several battleground states, including Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Nevada. And around the time Trump started musing about delaying the election last week, aides and outside advisers began scrambling to ponder possible executive actions he could take to curb mail-in voting — everything from directing the postal service to not deliver certain ballots to stopping local officials from counting them after Election

It’s interesting to learn that there’s turmoil at Facebook over how to deal with Trump’s election frauds.

“I do think we’re headed for a problematic scenario where Facebook is going to be used to aggressively undermine the legitimacy of the US elections, in a way that has never been possible in history,” one Facebook employee wrote in a group on Workplace, the company’s internal communication platform, earlier this week.

For the past week, this scenario has been a topic of heated discussion inside Facebook and was a top question for its leader. Some 2,900 employees asked Zuckerberg to address it publicly during a company-wide meeting on Thursday, which he partly did, calling it “an unprecedented position.”

Zuckerberg’s remarks came

Here’s a surprise – guess what show biz celebrity guy is terfing up a storm on Twitter? Not one I would have guessed in a million tries.

In case you cannot see the tweet I replied to because the person protected their tweets: pic.twitter.com/RTMvw4b2DZ

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) August 8, 2020

How about infant females put to death in cultures where males are preferred, LGB teens who come out to unaccepting parents and are tossed out on the street or beat up or worse, etc…? All of them are presumed to be under your label of “cisgendered” https://t.co/LUZ6WAsa6g

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) August 8, 2020

https://twitter.com/WilliamShatner/status/1292117818788339713 … Read the rest

Laurie Penny. Good grief.

When I’m being a Feminist In Public I’ll use she. I earned that pronoun with a lot of hard work. I have friends with PhDs, but I don’t call them ‘doctor’ when we’re chatting on the phone.
But if you know me or it’s a non-professional setting, ‘they/them’ feels right. Thank you.

— Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) August 7, 2020

The stupidity takes my breath away. Not LP’s personal stupidity, necessarily, but the stupidity of this whole new Pronoun Doctrine, and weird baroque rationalizations of it like this.

No, she/they is not comparable to tu/vous. Referring to women as “she/her” is not formal or stiff – and it’s not familiar or forward, either. It’s just humdrum ordinary … Read the rest

Swamp.

Pandemic raging, millions of people out of work, and the president is is going to address it from his country club with a bunch of wealthy members who pay him personally. https://t.co/g8I0IDLt3M

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) August 7, 2020

Before news conf Trump was caught on a hot mic telling people at club…”You’ll get to meet the fake news tonight. You’ll get to see what I have to go through. Who’s there? Oh all my killers are there, wow. So you’ll get to see some of the people that we deal with every day”

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 8, 2020

Trump turned his Bedminster news conference into a rally, bashing the press and drawing applause from his golf

Meanwhile…

The White House is playing "Live and Let Die" before Trump's arrival at a thinly disguised campaign event in Ohio that the state's governor cannot attend because he just came down with Covid-19, the disease that killed over 1,400 Americans yesterday. pic.twitter.com/AGumBfSFb8

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) August 6, 2020

Tasteful.… Read the rest

The New Zealand Herald reports:

The US Government has warned its citizens to be very cautious about travelling to New Zealand because of our “23 active cases” of Covid-19.

Um. Yes. Be VERY VERY CAREFUL about leaving a country where there have been 4,858,596 cases so far, with 56,105 new cases today, and traveling to one where there are…23. WATCH OUT. MIND HOW YOU GO.MAYBE INJECT SOME BLEACH.… Read the rest

Hahahahachokehahahahahahaha

Jerry Falwell Junior taketh an indefinite leave of absence:

The move comes days after Falwell received criticism for posting a photo to social media that showed him with his pants unzipped alongside a woman who is not his wife.

I saw that earlier this week and was so traumatized I wiped it from my memory.

Between the NRA suit, Falwell’s meltdown and D’Souza’s Thighland hilarity, this week in Trumpland has has a real Layla-montage-from-GoodFellas feel to it.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) August 7, 2020

Falwell is the son of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, who founded the evangelical Christian Liberty University and the conservative Moral Majority movement that rose to prominence in the Reagan era.

Falwell

Also…… Read the rest

We know Trump doesn’t read much. He’s apparently never seen the name “Yosemite” in writing before.

It’s also worth noticing that little spasm of exuberance or whatever it is when he gets to say “Old Faithful” – he perks up and bounces his head back and forth when he says it. He loves stupid nicknames for some reason. “Honest Abe” “Old Faithful” – these are his happy places.

But Yo Semite – yeah. That’s one for the ages.… Read the rest