All entries by this author
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Feb 20th, 2017 12:04 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Huh. It turns out that it is possible for Milo Yiannopoulos to say something that will motivate conservatives to de-platform him. Nothing to do with the public humiliation and bullying of women, of course, oh god no, that could never possibly be a reason to tell him to fuck right off.
Milo Yiannopoulos lost his keynote speaking slot at the Conservative Political Action Conference after tapes surfaced of the right wing provocateur and senior Breitbart editor advocating for sexual relationships between “younger boys and older men.”
“Due to the revelation of an offensive video in the past 24 hours condoning pedophilia, the American Conservative Union has decided to rescind the invitation,” said Matt Schlapp, chairman of the group which
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
10 comments
Tags: Milo Yiannopoulos
Feb 20th, 2017 11:38 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Donnie from Queens is still insisting on his tv-sourced claim that Sweden is in tragic disarray because of the Foreign Hordes, even as everyone in sight tries to explain to him that Fox News isn’t the best place to get intel.
Officials in both countries expressed alarm and dismay on Monday at Mr. Trump’s remarks. Senator Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said the president should get his information from intelligence agencies and not from television.
Right?? I told him that myself yesterday, but I doubt he manages to read all the responses to his tweets. (I’m kidding. I know damn well he doesn’t read any of them. If he did how would he find time to watch Fox News?)
The
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
6 comments
Tags: Trump
Feb 19th, 2017 5:26 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
I still say people are confused about this.
Campaigners have welcomed a decision by a private girls’ school to allow students to use boys’ names and wear boys’ clothes should they wish under a new “gender identity protocol”.
Oh golly, a girl can wear jeans and call herself Jack. Couldn’t she do that before? Perhaps the school had a very narrow uniform policy which meant she couldn’t wear jeans, and now the school has made it less narrow. Good, but that’s not “a new gender identity protocol.” It’s just wearing trousers instead of skirts.
St Paul’s girls’ school in west London, whose former pupils include the MP Harriet Harman and the actor Rachel Weisz, will now consider requests from
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
60 comments
Feb 19th, 2017 4:43 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump explained on Twitter that his random remark about last night in Sweden was actually about this thing he saw on tv last night. So he’s like those people who prattle artlessly about what Joanie said as if everybody knows who Joanie is when nobody knows who Joanie is. I’ve always said his Theory of Mind was shit, and this is an excellent illustrations of that. We were supposed to understand “Sweden last night” as “that stupid thing on Fox News that Donald Trump watched last night.”
Derp.
So … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
6 comments
Tags: Trump
Feb 19th, 2017 3:57 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
#PrayForSweden
https://twitter.com/quintasinjustas/status/833327104234225665
https://twitter.com/aarontor/status/833338084775297025
https://twitter.com/truewhitehouse/status/833418021460811777
SO MANY IKEA jokes, and no Volvo jokes, no ABBA jokes, no Wallander jokes, no Stieg Larsson jokes? Sad.
https://twitter.com/jesseberney/status/833117578604212224… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
4 comments
Feb 19th, 2017 3:36 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The National Secular Society via Spiked:
University administrations are becoming increasingly “censorious”, with 43% of universities censoring speech that might “offend” religious people, according to online magazine Spiked.
The magazine’s Free Speech University Rankings (FSUR) claims that 63.5% of UK universities “actively censor speech”.
Launching its third annual analysis of campus censorship, Spiked said: “The fight for the freedom to criticise religion, to blaspheme, was at the very heart of the historic fight for free speech. Yet it seems some universities, terrified of offending students of faith, are turning the clock back.”
It highlighted London South Bank University’s Code of Practice for Freedom of Speech, which warns students that one definition of an ‘unlawful meeting’ is one “at which
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5 comments
Feb 19th, 2017 12:09 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Don’t worry, we have checks and balances.
Except that we don’t.
We have them provided various conditions apply…but otherwise, we don’t. So they’re not really checks and balances in the sense we’ve always understood, are they.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic points out this obvious problem.
Donald Trump’s Thursday press conference was so meandering and deranged that it brought the basic ebb and flow of all politics to a halt, as power brokers across Washington, including Republicans on Capitol Hill, stopped what they were doing to watch along in amazement.
Amazement at what? It’s been obvious all along how mindless and malevolent he is, hasn’t it? So amazement at what? I guess the fact that no one … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
7 comments
Tags: Trump
Feb 19th, 2017 10:45 am |
By Ophelia Benson
You have your Last Year at Marienbad, your Last Tango in Paris or Halifax, your Last Week in Kidderminster – and your Last Night in Sweden. What happened on that Last Night? We don’t know, but we know it was bad.
https://youtu.be/PESFM-51pOQ
During a campaign-style rally on Saturday in Florida, Mr. Trump issued a sharp if discursive attack on refugee policies in Europe, ticking off a list of places that have been hit by terrorists.
“You look at what’s happening,” he told his supporters. “We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?”
This is how he actually said it:… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
16 comments
Tags: Trump
Feb 18th, 2017 3:39 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Little Hitler is ranting about the media at his Nazi rally. I heard him squawk “But despite all their lies” before I turned the sound off. He’s a fascist piece of crap and he’s going to keep on with this shit until he gets it, or drops dead trying.
In his speech, Mr Trump said he wanted to speak to Americans “without the filter of fake news”.
Describing the media as “dishonest”, he repeated his assertion that some outlets “don’t want to report the truth” and were making up their stories about him.
“We will continue to expose them,” he said, pledging to “win, win, win”.
In his speech, the president also:
- Repeated his campaign pledge to keep America
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
6 comments
Tags: Nazi Trump
Feb 18th, 2017 11:28 am |
By Ophelia Benson
So Trump’s insatiable need for total, uncritical admiration, or worship, is messing up that “fine-tuned machine” in a very tangible sense: it’s making it impossible for them to fill their thousands of vacancies.
During President Trump’s transition to power, his team reached out to Elliott Abrams for help building a new administration. Mr. Abrams, a seasoned Republican foreign policy official, sent lists of possible candidates for national security jobs.
One by one, the answer from the Trump team came back no. The reason was consistent: This one had said disparaging things about Mr. Trump during the campaign; that one had signed a letter opposing him. Finally, the White House asked Mr. Abrams himself to meet with the president about
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
5 comments
Tags: Trump
Feb 18th, 2017 10:51 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Life in the Trump administration – if they find out you wrote something critical of Trump in the past, they physically remove you from the premises.
A top aide to President Trump’s housing secretary nominee, Ben Carson, was fired and led out of the department’s headquarters by security on Wednesday after writings critical of Mr. Trump surfaced in his vetting, according to two people briefed on the matter.
Shermichael Singleton, who was one of the few black conservatives in the Trump administration, had been working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development since Jan. 23 as a senior adviser. He was preparing a cross-country tour for Mr. Carson, who is expected to be confirmed by the Senate this
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
10 comments
Tags: Trump
Feb 18th, 2017 9:59 am |
By Ophelia Benson
I do wish journalists would learn to stop portraying Milo Yiannopoulos as some sort of legit commentator or thinker or even forsooth fellow journalist. He’s a Twitter troll. That’s it. That’s all he is, that’s his only claim to fame, and it’s not something anyone should be taking seriously.
Despite a brief flare-up of controversy that preceded it, a conversation between Milo Yiannopoulos, the incendiary right-wing author and lecturer, and Bill Maher, the comedian and host of HBO’s “Real Time,” on that program Friday night was a largely docile, chummy affair. There was little conflict or cross-examination, as both men chided the political left for avoiding or drowning out Mr. Yiannopoulos’s views rather than engaging with them.
He’s not an … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
7 comments
Tags: Milo Yiannopoulos
Feb 17th, 2017 5:56 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Silencing of the press doesn’t have to be as crude as an actual armed shutdown. It can be just a constant stream of implicit threats of an actual armed shutdown.
Maybe it’s the story you decide against doing because it’s liable to provoke a press-bullying president to put the power of his office behind his attempt to destroy your reputation by falsely calling your journalism “fake.”
Maybe it’s the line you hold back from your script or your article because it could trigger a federal leak investigation into you and your sources (so, yeah, jail).
Or, maybe it’s the commentary you spike because you’re a publicly supported news channel and you worry it will cost your station its federal financing.
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
2 comments
Tags: Free press, Trump
Feb 17th, 2017 5:40 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Robert Reich an hour ago:
Trump this morning escalated his attack on the free press: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” he tweeted.
Even if most Americans understand that a President of the United States calling the media the “enemy of the American people!” is unprecedented, delusional and dangerous, there will be some percentage of Americans who are becoming persuaded by his ever more strident attacks.
The result is to undermine the independence of the press in our society — making Trump the arbiter of truth in our society.
Last night, the Republican Party and Trump’s campaign websites posted a 25-question “Mainstream
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
2 comments
Tags: Robert Reich, Trump
Feb 17th, 2017 4:15 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Today in TrumpOnTwitter.
Oh well if Rush Limbaugh said so.
Since then he’s been busy with stuff like that Rally at the Orlando airport. But then a couple of hours ago he went Full Fascist.
The press is the enemy of the people, according to him. Once again he’s inciting hatred and, … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
9 comments
Tags: Trump
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