Oliver Burkeman points out that we can’t actually know what “the right side of history” is going to be.

Earlier this month, as the bundle of disordered impulses currently serving as president of the US prepared to fly to London, the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, argued in this newspaper that the visit would put Britain on “the wrong side of history”. I tend to agree the trip shouldn’t have happened, if only to guard against the risk of a national cheeseburger shortage, but it’s time we dropped that “wrong side of history” argument. Like the crevice down the back of a sofa, full of coins and old bits of Play-Doh, the Wrong Side of History has become a crowded place

News from London:

Mark Field has been suspended as a Foreign Office minister after a video showed him pushing a female Greenpeace activist against a pillar and grabbing her neck while she protested at the chancellor’s Mansion House speech.

Police are investigating third-party reports of assault made against Field, who has since apologised to the protester. The MP for the Cities of London and Westminster said he had felt threatened when the protester walked past him and was worried she might have been armed.

I watched the video several times yesterday afternoon. It’s pretty shocking.

Correct me if I'm wrong:
Mansion House is the home of the Lord Mayor of London & regularly hosts the PM. Security would have

Yet another petition saying ignore those uppity women. This one is strikingly crude and badly written for purported academics. It’s also of course a crock of shit.

As academics, researchers, teachers, professional staff, and practitioners in the Higher Education sector, we are compelled to write to rebut the arguments put forward in the article published in the Sunday Times on 16th June.

Compelled? Really? Who is compelling them? What are the sanctions?

They don’t mean are compelled, of course, they mean feel compelled – which is where this whole disagreement started. Feeling isn’t necessarily being. Adults really are supposed to know the difference.

The article cited a letter signed by a group of about thirty academics who claim that

Daniel Kaufman at the Electric Agora tries to figure out this “feeling like a ___” puzzle. He too starts from Alice Roberts’s Twitter claim yesterday –

If someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels female – I cannot tell her she is ‘wrong’. Would you?

What if someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels like a manatee, or a potato peeler, or a street lamp, or Lake Louise? Would I tell him he is ‘wrong’? I don’t know, it depends on the nature of the conversation, in what context it takes place, how free I am to escape, and similar contingent facts. But all things … Read the rest

CFI on the Supreme Court ruling on the Bladensburg cross:

Today’s ruling on the constitutionality of the Bladensburg cross makes plain the Supreme Court’s allegiance to the religious right and its contempt for the separation of church from state, said the Center for Inquiry.

The Bladensburg Peace Cross is a 40-foot concrete Latin Cross located on state land in Maryland and maintained at taxpayer expense.

“Rather than uphold the Establishment Clause, the bedrock principle of liberal democracy that bars the state from endorsing religion, this Supreme Court is clearly determined to see it ripped from the Constitution and thrown in the trash,” said Nick Little, CFI’s Vice President and General Counsel. “The very suggestion that a gigantic cross, maintained

The Telegraph reports:

A pharmacist working for LloydsPharmacy refused to give a woman the morning after pill, because it went against her “personal beliefs”.

The customer, named only as Siani, 41, had paid £30 for the emergency contraception online before going to collect it from the Brighton branch of Lloyds, located inside a Sainsbury’s.

She reportedly called the pharmacy from her car to check that it was ready, and was told by the on-duty female pharmacist that she would not dispense the pill as it went against her “personal beliefs.”

Siani was told to come back the next day, or travel to the next nearest branch – 10 miles away. As it was a Sunday, most other local chemists

Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber has a more reasonable, less vituperative dissenting response to the letter to the Times.

Last Sunday at letter appeared in the Sunday Times attacking the LGBT charity Stonewall for its work with British universities as a threat to academic freedom.

That’s why I had to say “less vituperative” as opposed to “non-vituperative.” The letter doesn’t attack Stonewall.

The letter was signed by some reasonably prominent figures, such as Kathleen Stock (Sussex) and Leslie Green (Oxford) as well as motley others (including a Brexit Party candidate). It is no accident that the letter appeared in the Sunday Times, which together with its companion paper the Times has, for at least a year, maintained an

Helen Christophi at Courthouse News:

The Trump administration argued in front of a Ninth Circuit panel Tuesday that the government is not required to give soap or toothbrushes to children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border and can have them sleep on concrete floors in frigid, overcrowded cells, despite a settlement agreement that requires detainees be kept in “safe and sanitary” facilities.

All three judges appeared incredulous during the hearing in San Francisco, in which the Trump administration challenged previous legal findings that it is violating a landmark class action settlement by mistreating undocumented immigrant children at U.S. detention facilities.

Tell us again that these are not concentration camps, that they’re nothing like concentration camps, that they have nothing to … Read the rest

Interesting.

He’s an academic himself – a historian – so he’s in one of those other fields.

I do have a theory for why it's such a thing in the UK–it's bc the US is more religious so it's easier for Americans to buy into the problematic-but-perhaps-useful-first-step narrative of "trans = X soul in Y body" (note popularity of transphobia among British "sceptics")

— Bill Black (@williamrblack) June 18, 2019

By “transphobia” he of course means just not buying all the wack truth claims, and his theory for why there is less skepticism about the wack truth claims in the US is the fact that we buy other wack truth claims more easily so we also buy the truth claims … Read the rest

Oh yes, that weirdo type of feminism that is only for women, not women plus men who say they are women. So unreasonable.

Another brand of feminism that only includes ‘some’ women. Even your hashtag tells its own story. Btw I’m pleased to say my views on trans women are the views of our collective party and shadow cabinet including my boss Jeremy. #LoveAllMySisters https://t.co/IWsJFnzlQr

— Angela Rayner (@AngelaRayner) June 18, 2019

Imagine talking smack about a brand of anti-racism that only includes people of color instead of being for people of color and white people who say they are people of color.

But that wouldn’t happen, because it’s only women who are seen as accommodating enough and supine enough … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Feeling≠being.

Practically speaking, in most situations, I wouldn’t say anything, for the same reasons I generally don’t get into discussions about very personal matters.

But if this were one of those conversations that is an exception for some reason: no, I wouldn’t say “you’re wrong.” But I would ask — with genuine curiosity — “how do you know? What does being a woman FEEL like to you?”

Because frankly, I wouldn’t know how to answer the question “what does it feel like to be a man?” [Insert jokes about my inadequacies here. You can’t ask for a better setup.] I could tell you a bit about how it feels to be treated… Read the rest

Daughters are not slaves.

Muslim father faces jail for psychologically abusing his daughters in the first case of its kind.

Salamat Khan, 63, exerted such domineering control over his household that his children felt like they were “living in a prison”.

His daughters felt as if they were living in a prison, not his children. His son joined in the psychological abuse of the daughters. Is there some sort of pattern here? To do with what kind of people abuse and what kind are the abusers? I have a feeling there is but I can’t quite pin it down.

The father-of-nine had already married off three of his daughters to selected husbands, but “cast out” two of his daughters,

Another strange thing to think.

https://twitter.com/DrJoGrady/status/1140729246110953472

Universities & colleges should be sanctuaries, not spaces where staff & students are exposed to oppressive attitudes from those charged to teach them.

Really? Universities and colleges should be sanctuaries? What about being places where people on the edge of adulthood learn things they didn’t know before, and learn how to learn new things, and learn to question things they thought they knew, and to ponder why they thought they knew them?

In short, no, universities and colleges should not be sanctuaries. They should of course be places where people are treated decently, and where the older professionals in charge don’t use their status to bully or abuse students or other underlings…but sanctuaries, no. … Read the rest

Trump loves to say US air quality is getting cleaner and cleaner thanks to him. Is he right?

Pfffffffff. Of course not.

Over the last two years the nation had more polluted air days than just a few years earlier, federal data shows. While it remains unclear whether this is the beginning of a trend, health experts say it’s troubling to see air quality progress stagnate.

There were 15% more days with unhealthy air in America both last year and the year before than there were on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when America had its fewest number of those days since at least 1980.

Some of that has to be because of the summer wildfires … Read the rest

Hope Hicks is refusing to answer questions. They think they’re gods, don’t they.

Former White House communications director Hope Hicks is not responding to any questions about her time at the White House in a closed-door congressional interview Wednesday, angering Democrats who say they expect to go to court to force her to answer their questions.

White House attorneys are objecting to all questions related to the White House, Democrats say, all the way down to where Hicks sat in the West Wing. But Hicks is answering questions about her time on the Trump campaign, which is not covered by executive privilege.

None of it is covered by “executive privilege.”

The White House is not asserting executive privilege, but

Alice Roberts, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham and President of Humanists UK, has been Twitter-arguing with people who found the Natural History Museum’s tweets about queer giraffes and non-binary gorillas absurd.

This one is particularly interesting to me:

https://twitter.com/theAliceRoberts/status/1141261931556286464

It’s her reply that interests me, but I’ll just note about the quoted passage from her book…I wonder if she would write that now. I wonder if now she would stop, and think, and frown, and then censor herself. I wonder if she would stop to think about it and then decide that it would be “transphobic” to allow that sentence to appear.

That’s a hypothetical though. Her actual reply today says “If someone who … Read the rest

A woman expresses passionate eagerness to erase the very category of women and girls.

https://twitter.com/VetNurseVibes/status/1130584532237856768

So after all these years of trying and trying and TRYING to get marketers to stop dividing humans into strong bold brilliant boys and weak pretty stupid girls were a big mistake? So we actually shouldn’t be trying to tell girls they can be strong and bold and brilliant? We should actually stop doing that because her “trans son” wants to rise above the muck of being a female person? Well fuck that for a game of soldiers.… Read the rest

The Smithsonian Magazine notes that concentration camps started long before Hitler took power.

Spain was having trouble persuading the Cuban people to stop rebelling, so they decided to round up the peasants who were supporting the rebels.

Civilians were forced, on penalty of death, to move into these encampments, and within a year the island held tens of thousands of dead or dying reconcentrados, who were lionized as martyrs in U.S. newspapers. No mass executions were necessary; horrific living conditions and lack of food eventually took the lives of some 150,000 people.

…

These camps did not rise out of nowhere. Forced labor had existed for centuries around the world, and the parallel institutions of Native American reservations and