Originally a miscellaneous comment by Bjarte Foshaug.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been reading up on the topic of democratic breakdown lately, if not to look for hope, then at least to move the sense of existential dread from a purely visceral “gut” level to something that can be understood and dealt with intellectually. These books include:

The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder

The People vs. Democracy by Yascha Mounk

Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Snyder (who had a major best-seller a couple of years ago with his short pamphlet “On Tyranny”, another must-read!) spends a lot of time on the conflict between Russia and … Read the rest

Sneaky: if you just say “trans” then it sounds like another progressive breakthrough and occasion to celebrate.

To get a call up to your club’s first team is every Argentinian boy’s dream. Or so the traditional tango goes.

“Now it’s the girls’ dream … too,” Mara Gómez, who became the first trans footballer to play in a top-flight Argentinian league earlier this week, tells the Guardian. Gómez signed a contract with Villa San Carlos in the recently professionalized women’s Primera División, after years of journeying through the amateur leagues.

It’s all very confusing, and that’s not accidental. This is a man, taking a place on a women’s team. There’s nothing progressive about it.

Gómez’s achievement is not a global first

Trump is no fun any more.

[TERRY] GROSS: Do you have any clues about whether it’s affecting his mental health?

[MAGGIE] HABERMAN: You know, I am of the theory – I know that there’s lots of portraits of him as the mad king and disintegrating and so forth. I think that he is depressed sometimes. I think that he has been very churlish with his staff. But I think that most of what you’re seeing was pretty clear that you were likely to see, or we were likely to see, all along. I do not subscribe to the theory that Donald Trump has changed, particularly. I think he is who he has always been.

GROSS: You say he’s been

Trump is working desperately to kill more people before he’s thrown out of the building. Listen, it’s Krissmiss – you can’t expect a guy to give up the chance to kill people for Krissmiss can you?

Despite public health guidelines warning against indoor gatherings, the White House has pressed ahead with as many as two dozen of its traditional holiday events.

Not “holiday events” you god-hating socialists, Krissmiss events. With the holly, and the lights, and the turkey mac and cheese.

Oh yeah and that other thing, what’s its name. Jared will know, ask Jared.

On Wednesday night, Trump hosted about 200 guests for the annual Hanukah celebration. Photos and videos posted on social media showed most attendees wearing masks

The things people will say on this subject…

The thing with the TERFs creating a moral panic about trans women playing women's sports is that even aside from HRT removing and strength and speed advantage, there aren't even really gender differences until you reach the most elite levels of sport, and even then it's iffy.

— Kathryn Bright Christmas Lights ✒️ (@KEBrightbill) December 11, 2020

Riiiiiiiight.

That's especially true considering that the best women's athletes in an awful lot of team sports played on boys' teams for most if not all of their youth sports careers.

— Kathryn Bright Christmas Lights ✒️ (@KEBrightbill) December 11, 2020

The whole point is moot anyway because after a few years on estrogen, trans

Let’s learn a little about the spirit of Humboldt. Deutsche Welle on his 250th birthday in 2017:

He was fluent in the principal languages ​​of the old and new world, and lived through long periods of his busy life in the most important European cultural centers such as Paris, Rome, London, Vienna and Berlin. Even though he was sometimes in the shadow of his well-traveled brother Alexander, he was equally significant, especially for his pioneering work as an education reformer.

…

As he reformed an antiquated curriculum, Humboldt insisted that teachers and university professors should be an “advocate for the education of young people.” Systematic learning and holistic education through art and music were just as important as mathematics

So just so we're clear, I just got no-platformed from a university talk for proposing to argue "woman"=adult human female, because this "can and perhaps must" be understood as disparaging "a particular group of people". Cool, cool, cool, cool. https://t.co/RkfNIujCye pic.twitter.com/Q2xwwpFK94

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) December 10, 2020

The rest of that conversation:

Now, with regard to 1., abstracts normally undergo (blind) peer-review. They would never have made such an egregious error. This explanation is ridiculous. It is more likely that transactivists demanded the de-platforming of Prof. Stock, once her name appeared on the programme.

— Miroslav Imbrisevic (@Miroandrej) December 10, 2020

Thank you Miroslav, that is very kind of you. The topic as originally offered to me was "Bodies,

The ZAS conference is on Oppressive Speech, Societies & Norms. “Silencing, Speaking up & Free Speech” is one of the themes. The irony of organizing such a conference and then booting one of the speakers is conspicuous.

You regret that this went online. pic.twitter.com/9aiREDqIfE

— EH6 (@EH6x) December 10, 2020

It reads to me as if it fits the theme of the workshop (which isn’t “scientific” in the first place – “oppressive” is not a scientific concept) perfectly.

ZAS elaborates on the theme:

Speech can be used to change societies in bad ways. It supports institutional oppression, establishes new oppressive norms, silences opponents, spreads disinformation and propagates feelings of hate. Online communities magnify the effects of individual speech acts.

One for the “you couldn’t make it up” file.

In other news, yesterday I got no-platformed from this philosophy series at @ZASBerlin on "oppressive speech". (You just could NOT make this shit up). Til yesterday, this title and abstract were published under theme 5, but I've now been told to withdraw. https://t.co/OX89GApf26 pic.twitter.com/7CrVALPW24

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) December 10, 2020

The series is about oppressive speech, so they…oppress one of the speakers they invited to speak about oppressive speech.

/and clearly, pressure was being brought to bear by those higher up in the organisation. But is quite funny – in completely unhumorous sense of "funny" – that I can defend my views, held by most people, to MPs in Parliament,

Last week a Democratic state senator in Georgia, Elena Parent, went to a hearing organized by Republicans to tell lies about the election.

Trump attorneys, led by Rudy Giuliani, presented the hearing with a raft of conspiracy theories and baseless claims that tens of thousands of dead people and other ineligible individuals had voted.

The Republicans hadn’t warned Parent that the event would be attended by Giuliani, Trump’s henchman in his mission to undermine American democracy until this week when the former New York mayor came down with Covid-19. So she had no idea that a big crowd of far-right fanatics and the media outlets that feed them lies and falsehoods would also be in the chamber.

So … Read the rest

Annals of Corruption:

Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., sold his Washington, D.C., home last year to a brokerage industry official whose organization is under the purview of a committee Perdue sits on. The deal was made off market, without the home being listed for sale publicly.

Though an appraisal provided to ProPublica by the buyer found that Perdue sold for slightly under market value, four local real estate experts disagreed, telling ProPublica that the almost $1.8 million sale price Perdue garnered seemed high. Their estimates of the premium ranged from a few thousand dollars to as much as about $140,000. A fifth expert said the price was squarely fair market value.

You have to ask yourself, why would Perdue … Read the rest

It turns out the warrant was fraudulent. Oops.

Earlier this week, state police in Florida conducted an armed raid of COVID data scientist Rebekah Jones’ home, seizing her electronic devices and pointing guns at her kids, in retaliation for the fact that she blew the whistle on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ COVID coverup.

DeSantis says he didn’t know about the raid. Everyone else says ha.

The state claimed that the raid was justified because Jones was suspected of hacking into an internal network to send a message to state employees about COVID. But now it turns out the message was simply sent to an email address that it had made publicly available. This means the warrant was fraudulently obtained,

The National Organization for Women doesn’t know what a woman is.

Transphobia is a feminist issue. Equal means equal. That includes equality for all women, not just a certain type of woman.Read more about #LGBTQIARights and our other core issues at now.org/issues

No, transphobia is not a feminist issue. Misogyny is a feminist issue, but transphobia is not. Yes, equal means equal, but feminism is still about equality for women and girls, not women and girls plus men and boys who say they are women and girls. Women are allowed to have our own campaign groups just as other people are. We don’t have to “share” any more than other groups do. We don’t have to change the subject … Read the rest

Yeah yeah. It’s the CITIES that are the problem. Let’s all secede to a farm and make America great again.

Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show Wednesday that the U.S. may be “trending toward secession.”

Or just trending away from Trump. One of those.

As Limbaugh talked about liberal cities like New York and San Francisco, he took up a question of whether “we can win the culture.”

By leaving cities like New York and San Francisco? No, because a lot of the culture comes from there. What you would win wouldn’t be the culture, it would be some desiccated fragment of it.

Not that everyone has to live there, obviously, but if you secede from all things liberal, … Read the rest

No let’s normalize calling misogynists “misogynists.”

Normalise calling transphobes “cunts” 2021

— Rahul Kohli (@RahulKohli13) December 4, 2020

The guy has 321 thousand followers.

The tweet has 16 thousand likes.

Twitter kicks women off Twitter for being critical of gender dogma, but not men for saying let’s call feminist women “cunts.” (He didn’t say feminist women but we know damn well that’s what he meant. He didn’t mean men.)… Read the rest

A son’s obituary:

Dr. Marvin James Farr, 81, of Scott City, Kansas, passed away Dec. 1, 2020, in isolation at Park Lane Nursing Home. He was preceded in death by more than 260,000 Americans infected with covid-19. He died in a room not his own, being cared for by people dressed in confusing and frightening ways. He died with covid-19, and his final days were harder, scarier and lonelier than necessary. He was not surrounded by friends and family.

Marvin was born May 23, 1939 to Jim and Dorothy Farr of Modoc, Kan. He was born into an America recovering from the Great Depression and about to face World War 2, times of loss and sacrifice difficult for most

Pakistan, Punjab – whatever, dude.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday seemed to confuse two separate issues when he reiterated the UK government’s stance that any dispute between India and Pakistan was for the two countries to settle bilaterally

Would have been an unremarkable thing to say, if that had been the question.

British Sikh Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, who has been leading a drive to keep the protests by the Indian farmers against the government’s agricultural reforms in the news in Britain, repeated one of his previous Twitter statements on the issue in the House of Commons during the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) session.

“Many constituents, especially those emanating from Punjab and other parts of

Giuliani continues to insist that refusing to wear a mask is a wise move.

Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer and a former mayor of New York City, was admitted to a Washington, D.C., hospital on Sunday, after traveling across the country in his futile attempt to overturn the election results. Giuliani did not wear a mask during meetings last week in Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia, exposing lawmakers and others to the virus.

During an interview with New York radio station 77 WABC, the hosts asked Giuliani if his views on the virus have changed, now that he is sick and in the hospital. They mentioned former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who contracted the virus after attending a super-spreader

#OVERTURN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2020

… Read the rest

This week’s Jesus and Mo:

snerk

J and M on Patreon… Read the rest