Awwwww nice, Nate Berg at the Guardian tells us how awesome it is for cities to provide barns for sex workers so that man can have drive-through sex:

The city [Köln] reasoned that if sex work was going to happen, it should be in a safe and clean space. It was decided that sex work would be allowed only in certain parts of the city – and in order to encourage both sex workers and their customers to abide by this rule, in one of the permitted areas the city built a facility specifically for sex.

Located on the edge of town, the result is a kind of sex drive-through. Customers drive down a one-way street, into a roughly

I’m ruminating on the dissenting comments about the rhetoric of reason post, and the puzzle of how the slave society justified itself to itself, and the related puzzle of how abolitionists – whose cause seems so self-evident to us now – were seen as raving maniacs and extremists, and from there I arrived at James Fitzjames Stephens’s review of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, which I consider a classic of the genre.

Stephens begins with the opposition of vehement passion and chilly reason:

Mr. Mill’s small volume or long pamphlet on “The Subjection of Women” is intended to prove “that the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes– the legal subordination of one

Rick Wilson (anti-Trump Republican pundit) asks:

Why’s it so hard for us to say out loud that Trump has lost his mind?

Reporter Joy Reid has an answer that I don’t really get.

Chalk it up to the powerful media compulsion to normalize him as president. He is president, so the things he says and does are done in the name of the office, and so media writ large strains to import even the crazy stuff into the normal formula for covering a president.

I don’t get why it’s not the other way around. I don’t get why the media compulsion is to normalize him as president as opposed to normalizing the office by refusing to normalize him. … Read the rest

Kathleen Stock, at Brian Leiter’s blog, on the latest blacklistings:

I see that the blog of the Institute of Art and Ideas has taken down a piece ( Download The current transgender debate polarizes Western societies like no other) to which Holly Lawford-Smith and I contributed, alongside Julie Bindel, Robin Dembroff, Susan Stryker and Rebecca Kukla. I assume the reason to be the fuss the latter three have been making on social media and letters to the editor since the piece was published.

One complaint I’ve seen from them is that I have no relevant expertise in this area. Yet my contribution links to my forthcoming piece on sexual orientation, sex, and gender, in the Aristotelian Society proceedings.

Eve Fairbanks argues at the Washington Post that there is some overlap between the rhetoric of the dark web types and that of the “respectable” antebellum defenders of slavery.

My childhood home is just a half-hour drive from the Manassas battlefield in Virginia, and I grew up intensely fascinated by the Civil War. I loved perusing soldiers’ diaries. During my senior year in college, I studied almost nothing but Abraham Lincoln’s speeches. As I wrote my thesis on a key Lincoln address, Civil War rhetoric was almost all I read: not just that of the 16th president but also that of his adversaries.

Thinking back on those debates, I finally figured it out. The reasonable right’s rhetoric is exactly

So a woman is actually being prosecuted for telling a man he’s a man. Sorry to link to the Mail, but naturally the better sources are looking fixedly in the other direction.

[Kate] Scottow, 38, will face magistrates on charges of making malicious communications over social media comments about trans campaigner Stephanie Hayden.

The Crown Prosecution Service said she had been charged over ‘persistent’ messages designed to cause ‘annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety’ to another person between September 2018 and May 2019.

There’s something of an infinite regression here, it seems. Is she being prosecuted for “misgendering” or is it for persistent tweeting at someone? The CPS quote looks as if it’s the latter, but if it is, then … Read the rest

Philosophers chat:

Jason Stanley:

I have been surprised that this point has not been more salient. It is shocking.

@Valar_Festivus TFW you realize that AOC was widely condemned across the political spectrum for suggesting that jails for migrants were like concentration camps but Bret Stephens can compare being mocked on Twitter to the Holocaust and everyone is fine with it.

Rachel McKinnon:

White male privilege is very very potent and should never be underestimated.

Yes, McKinnon actually said that, apparently without irony.

Or maybe it’s more bragging? “Potent” is an interesting word to use.… Read the rest

So now I’m curious about Bret Stephens and especially about his excitingly original take on climate change, so I’ve hit the googles to learn more. David Roberts at Vox reported in May 2017 that Stephens had been hired away from the Wall Street Journal. Oh that kind of “diversity.”

Though the paper defends the hire in the name of opinion diversity, Stephens is a very familiar sort of establishment conservative — a cosmopolitan, well-educated, reflexively pro-Israel war hawk (who once wrote a column on “the disease of the Arab mind”) who thinks anti-racists are the real racists but moderates on select issues to demonstrate his independence.

Guys like that are a dime a dozen, I promise you.

Stephens

David Karpf points out how much worse it would all have been if he were not a white guy.

The controversy began earlier this week after reports of a bedbug infestation at the Times. Karpf, an activist and former Sierra Club board member who says he has been particularly disappointed with Stephens’s takes on climate change, made a joke about the conservative writer, whose columns have prompted some dismayed readers to cancel subscriptions.

“The bedbugs are a metaphor,” Karpf tweeted Monday. “The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”

“He tends to write pretty lightweight, poorly researched columns about things that I know something about,” Karpf explained later. “So I’ve always seen him as this person that everyone complains about but we just

Vivian Ho at The Guardian on Bret Stephens’s Revenge Column:

On Friday, Stephens used his weekly column to issue a warning about the modern dangers of hateful comments disseminated through mass communications, drawing a line from Hitler’s radio addresses to the power of social media today.

In the ultimate subtweet move, Stephens didn’t even reference what had happened on Twitter – rather, the column casually dropped a quote about bedbugs in relation to the burning of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto.

Nothing to do with David Karpf at all! Pure coincidence!

David Klion doesn’t buy the coincidence theory:

My jaw is on the floor

David Karpf, the author of the tweet that started the saga, told the Guardian he was

Somewhat breathtaking – Trump appears to have tweeted classified intelligence again.

President Trump has tweeted what experts say is almost certainly an image from a classified satellite or drone, showing the aftermath of an accident at an Iranian space facility.

Along with text that someone wrote for him, because he’s not literate enough to have written it himself.

It says:

The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One.

NPR goes on:

NPR broke the news of the launch failure on Thursday, using images

Trump continues the Torture Children program:

Migrant girls being held by the Trump administration are being given only very limited access to items as basic as sanitary pads and tampons, according to a lawsuit that claims to put fresh light on the “appalling” conditions being endured by youngsters.

Earlier this year, it was revealed children being held in facilities in Texas operated by immigration authorities, were being detained in circumstances United Nations (UN) human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said appalled her. Children were denied access to showers, adequate food or bedding, allegedly in breach of a 20-year ruling.

Now, in a lawsuit filed by 19 states, further details have been provided by some of those children, who

Even John Bolton can’t keep Trump’s love.

Bolton, who has long advocated an expansive military presence around the world, has become a staunch internal foe of an emerging peace deal aimed at ending America’s longest war, the officials said.

His opposition to the diplomatic effort in Afghanistan has irritated President Trump, these officials said, and led aides to leave the National Security Council out of sensitive discussions about the agreement.

…

At the zenith of his influence, Bolton enabled the president to act on his most aggressive instincts and outmaneuvered other Cabinet officials with less experience in the interagency process. But his tough management style and bellicose worldview have frayed relations with some colleagues.

You’d think it would endear … Read the rest