Meet Washington state legislator Ed Orcutt, Republican. He thinks bikers are bad for the environment.

This is from 2013, but it’s funny enough to be resurrected now.

Representative Ed Orcutt (R – Kalama) does not think bicycling is environmentally friendly because the activity causes cyclists to have “an increased heart rate and respiration.”

This is according to comments he made in an email to a constituent who questioned the wisdom of a new bike tax the legislature is considering as part of a large transportation package.

A bike tax does seem like an incredibly stupid idea. You want to encourage bikes, not tax them.

We spoke with Rep. Orcutt to confirm the email’s authenticity and to get further clarification.

“You would be giving off more CO2 if you are riding a bike than driving in a car,” he said. However, he said he had not “done any analysis” of the difference in CO2 from a person on a bike compared to the engine of a car (others have).

“You can’t just say that there’s no pollution as a result of riding a bicycle.”

Here’s that email he sent to the constituent.

I laughed a lot, thereby giving off more CO² than the cruise ship that just chugged away from here.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The US military and the people who should be supervising the US military are doing such a bad job of addressing sexual harassment that the UN has taken notice, Jenna McLaughlin reports at Mother Jones. How impressive is that? I feel so proud.

The US military has a problem with sexual violence. That’s the conclusion of the Universal Periodic Review Panel, a UN panel that aims to address the human rights records of the 193 UN member states. This is the second time that the panel has scrutinized the United States; the first was in 2010, when the list of concerns included detention in Guantanamo Bay, torture, the death penalty, and access to health care. Its latest report came out Monday morning, and there was a surprising addition to the predictable laundry list of US human rights violations.

In one of 12 final recommendations, the UN Council urged the US military “to prevent sexual violence in the military and ensure effective prosecution of offenders and redress for victims.”

As opposed to, you know, not preventing sexual violence in the military and not ensuring effective prosecution of offenders and redress for victims.

The UN panels likely decided to investigate US military sexual violence in response to a report last year from the Service Women’s Action Network and Cornell Law School’s Avon Global Center for Women and Justice and the Global Gender Justice Clinic. It analyzed statistics from the Department of Defense, survivors’ stories from federal cases, and interviews with survivors.

The report concluded, “In cases where an act of sexual assault has already been committed in the military, the U.S. oftentimes fails to promptly and impartially prosecute and effectively redress the assault and thereby violates servicemen and women’s rights under international law.”

The UN HRC pointed to probably the worst thing about the military’s way with sexual assault, which is that they deal with it in house. Who else does that? Oh yes, the Vatican.

The UN Human Rights Council evaluation targeted the military’s reporting process, in which the decision of whether to prosecute cases of alleged sexual assault or harassment is left to superiors in the chain of command rather than an outsider with experience in sexual assault. For years, activists and lawmakers in the United States have tried to change this protocol—but leaders in the military have balked at bringing civilians into bases and military academies to investigate alleged assaults. Advocates say that commanders should not be in charge of handling these cases, since they are not trained in legal or criminal matters and often directly supervise both the victim and the perpetrator. Victims often are afraid to report the assault, fearing retribution or inaction. In a 2014 RAND Corporation survey of service members who reported sexual assaults, 62 percent of those who responded claimed they experienced social or professional retaliation after reporting unwanted sexual harassment, including being fired.

Surprise surprise.

Denmark’s representative to the UN Human Rights Council, Carsten Staur, recommended“removing from the chain of command the decision about whether to prosecute cases of alleged assault.”  His comments marked the “first time that a human rights body has called upon the U.S. to remove key decision-making authority from the chain of command in cases alleging sexual violence,” noted Liz Brundige, the Avon Global Center’s director, in a press release.

The State Department, the Pentagon, and the US representative to the United Nations did not respond to requests for comment on the council report.

Well hey, it’s not as if they’re supposed to be accountable to the citizenry.

Oh wait. Yes they are. Why did they not respond?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The marriage equality referendum in Ireland is in a week and it’s close. Aoife at Consider the Tea Cosy is hosting guest posts for equality. Here is The No side’s warped understanding of democracy is a bad joke:

In the course of this referendum debate there have been many complaints, in particular from the No side, about an undemocratic atmosphere of censorship. When No posters are defaced by unknown persons, they behave as if the Yes campaign had ordered an official strike. When a mural depicting two men embracing was permitted on George Street in Dublin, they behaved as though the government was conspiring against them to give the Yes campaign more publicity.

In short, they are trying to pin the actions of some rogue vandals on the entire Yes campaign, as well as attempting to politicise the everyday culture and celebrations of the LGBT community. We, as gay people, feel that we can no longer hold hands in the street without having someone from the No side present to “give balance” to the situation. In the process of indignantly claiming their democratic rights, they’ve virtually censored our lives and personal histories.

Read on. And tell your friends.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A random tweet spotted in a crowd.

…liberalism is about individual liberty & free speech, not about authoritarian rules to protect sensibilities.

Classical liberalism is, but then that’s why classical liberalism by itself isn’t enough.

Or to put it another way, one thing I find increasingly repellent about some classical liberals is this disdain for other people’s “sensibilities” – this assumption that “sensibilities” is all they are, and that they’re kind of a joke. The tweeter checks most of the privilege boxes – male, pale, Anglo, straight, educated – so isn’t subject to the kind of social contempt that people who check fewer boxes may be.

Individual liberty and free speech are good, and so is equality.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More Richard Rothstein. NPR, Morning Edition, May 6.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Scenes of West Baltimore’s troubled neighborhoods do raise natural questions. One is why they seem heavily segregated generations after legal segregation ended.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Richard Rothstein studied that question. He’s with the Economic Policy Institute, and he says Baltimore neighborhoods reflect a national legacy of segregation. Generations ago, during President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the federal government started subsidizing a lot of housing. But they did it a certain way.

RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: The New Deal was a coalition of Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats. The Southern Democrats were segregationist, and in many cases, the Northern Democrats compromised with them in order to get housing programs enacted.

Result: housing programs for white people.

INSKEEP: From the 1930s onward, white people moved into new houses. Many were in new suburbs like Levittown, N.Y. Black people got public housing apartments in the same center cities where they already lived. Decades later, there’s an enormous gap between the grandchildren of one group and the grandchildren of the other.

ROTHSTEIN: In 1947, when Levittown was first opened, homes were sold to white, working-class families for about $8,000 apiece. That is about $125,000 today. African-Americans were prohibited from buying into those developments, even though they had the economic means to do so.

Well, a half-century later, those homes are now selling for $500,000. They are no longer accessible for working-class families. We passed a law in 1968 saying that African-Americans now have the right to buy into Levittown. But giving them a right to buy into a place that’s no longer affordable when they could have bought into it when it was affordable had they been permitted to do so is not a very meaningful right. In that half-century, the white families, working-class families who moved into Levittown gained equity appreciation of perhaps 350-400,000 dollars. They used that wealth to send their children to college. They bequeathed it to their children and grandchildren.

African-Americans living in crowded central city areas were able to accumulate none of that wealth. As a result, today, nationwide, African-American wealth is 5 percent of white family wealth. That enormous difference is entirely attributable to federal housing policy, to suburbanize the white population and keep African-Americans in central cities.

Gruesome, isn’t it.The famous prosperity of the 50s and 60s was systematically confined to white people. I knew that, up to a point, but I didn’t know housing developments were racially exclusive. That’s all the more pathetic coming right after WW2.

INSKEEP: Now, help me connect this history to the news because we’ve been focused on Baltimore because of a police force that is accused of – well, a number of police officers are accused of killing a man, and we have reports of a pattern of this kind of abuse. What is the connection between historic housing segregation and historic wealth gaps and this kind of police behavior in a community?

ROTHSTEIN: Well, the police behavior is something that should be remedied. It’s a terrible criminal operation on the part of the police departments. But it doesn’t start with police departments. When you have a low-income population concentrated in the area, little hope, unemployment rates in places like inner city of Baltimore are two and three times the rate for whites, well, you get behavior in those kind of communities that reinforces police hostility. It becomes a cycle of misbehavior and police aggression, and it’s attributable to the concentration of disadvantaged families in very crowded inner-city communities.

And to the creation of the disadvantage itself. I didn’t know Levittown and Daly City were white-only, but I bet that’s not a secret to the people who were shut  out. Talk about white privilege…

ROTHSTEIN: Well, I do think that Americans have forgotten this history of a purposeful, racial segregation. You know, in 1970, during Richard Nixon’s first term, he had a secretary of housing and urban development, George Romney, the father of the recent presidential candidate. Romney said that the federal government has created a white noose around African-American communities in urban areas, and it was the federal government’s obligation to untie that noose. And he implemented a series of programs designed to force metropolitan areas to desegregate. He denied federal funds for sewers and for water projects to communities that didn’t take action to desegregate, and he actually denied federal funds to Baltimore County because it refused to desegregate its area.

Eventually, the Nixon administration reined him in. The program he was following was terminated. He was forced out [as] the secretary of housing and urban development, and we haven’t had anything that aggressive since. But we once knew, the American public knew, even moderate Republicans like George Romney knew that the federal government had established the segregation, and they understood it was a federal government obligation to undo it. But since that time, we’ve forgotten this history, and we think somehow these ghettos arose by accident and there’s nothing we can do about them to reverse the segregation.

Our glorious history.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

There’s a new audio message that IS says is from its beloved führer Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Whoever it is has a charmingly blunt message for those of us who decline to submit to Allah.

The speaker says: “There is no excuse for any Muslim not to migrate to the Islamic State… joining [its fight] is a duty on every Muslim. We are calling on you either to join or carry weapons [to fight] wherever you are.”

He adds: “Islam was never a religion of peace. Islam is the religion of fighting. No-one should believe that the war that we are waging is the war of the Islamic State. It is the war of all Muslims, but the Islamic State is spearheading it. It is the war of Muslims against infidels.”

So if we give in because of our terror, then we become obliged to join that war of Muslims against infidels. Until every last human on earth has surrendered to the poison, the war will continue.

Their god is a hideous god.

Also, they’re only a mile from Palmyra. That’s terrible news.

Rising out of the desert and flanked by an oasis, Palmyra contains the monumental ruins of a great city that was one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world, according to Unesco.

The site, most of which dates back to the 1st to the 2nd Century when the region was under Roman rule, is dominated by a grand, colonnaded street.

At the southern end of the 1.1km street is the great temple of Bel, considered one of the most important religious buildings of the 1st Century in the East and of unique design.

Syria’s director of antiquities, Maamoun Abdul Karim, said that if Palmyra were to fall to IS, it would be an “international catastrophe”.

Wikimedia commons

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

There was an exceptionally good interview on Fresh Air yesterday with Richard Rothstein, explaining the way ghettoization in the US was an official government policy, along with the fact that it fully accounts for the massive wealth gap – as distinct from income gap – between blacks and whites. Whites were able to buy cheap decent housing in the 40s and 50s while blacks were not, so that became the equity that is now the wealth that while people have while black people have 5% of that wealth. 5%.

5%. That’s a lot of university educations not paid for, houses not bought, equity not built.

Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, has spent years studying the history of residential segregation in America.

“We have a myth today that the ghettos in metropolitan areas around the country are what the Supreme Court calls ‘de-facto’ — just the accident of the fact that people have not enough income to move into middle class neighborhoods or because real estate agents steered black and white families to different neighborhoods or because there was white flight,” Rothstein tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

Or, at least, that it’s a mix of that and more deliberate causes. I think that’s what I thought. But whatever I thought, I did not know the scale of what Rothstein said.

“It was not the unintended effect of benign policies,” he says. “It was an explicit, racially purposeful policy that was pursued at all levels of government, and that’s the reason we have these ghettos today and we are reaping the fruits of those policies.”

They transcribed highlights.

On how the New Deal’s Public Works Administration led to the creation of segregated ghettos

Its policy was that public housing could be used only to house people of the same race as the neighborhood in which it was located, but, in fact, most of the public housing that was built in the early years was built in integrated neighborhoods, which they razed and then built segregated public housing in those neighborhoods. So public housing created racial segregation where none existed before. That was one of the chief policies.

That’s one. I did not know that. It’s so easy for me not to know it, isn’t it.

The second policy, which was probably even more effective in segregating metropolitan areas, was the Federal Housing Administration, which financed mass production builders of subdivisions starting in the ’30s and then going on to the ’40s and ’50s in which those mass production builders, places like Levittown [New York] for example, and Nassau County in New York and in every metropolitan area in the country, the Federal Housing Administration gave builders like Levitt concessionary loans through banks because they guaranteed loans at lower interest rates for banks that the developers could use to build these subdivisions on the condition that no homes in those subdivisions be sold to African-Americans.

And I did not know that. Holy shit. Daly City was another one, just south of San Francisco; all white, thank you very much. Those little houses in Levittown and Daly City? Worth a fortune now. Gee what a shame that African-Americans were never allowed to buy them when they were $10 k. Rothstein broke it down for us: at the time those houses were worth two years at an average wage. Now they’re worth seventy.

Another nice kicker? Rents were higher in black-segregated areas, because segregated housing was scarcer. Lose lose lose every way you turn.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Another CBC reporter offers some thoughts on “punch her right in the face fuck her right in the pussy.”

It was trending on Twitter across Canada Tuesday after it happened to a CityNews reporter outside of a Toronto FC game. Except once they yelled it into her microphone, Shauna Hunt fought back. She asked them why they did it. Now the video of her confronting them has gone viral.

Hunt told them it happens to her ten times per day and I don’t doubt it. My dad called me one evening from Manitoba because he’d seen it happen live on a broadcast — and he fumbled to explain what he heard before I cut him off and told him I knew what they said.

In the past year, it’s happened to me on College Avenue in Regina outside of Balfour Collegiate. It happened twice in one day as I tried to film promos outside of the Country Jamboree in Craven. It also happened to my male colleague, Adam Hunter, three times in one week while he covered a story at the Court of Queen’s Bench just last month. It’s happening all the time.

Remember “How do we beat the bitch?” Said to John McCain at a campaign event in 2007 – by a woman? This reminds me a little of that.

As with any job, there’s a lot of assumed ‘occupational hazards’ when you work as a reporter in the public eye and it does require a bit of a thick skin. You might be subject to unfriendly words from people who don’t like your news station, or the news station they think you’re from, or the news altogether.

I can take that.

…

But when people yell something vulgar, misogynistic and rude at me or into my microphone, I shouldn’t need to tell them it is unacceptable.

Shauna Hunt asked her hecklers what their mothers would think about them doing that. Please think about your mothers, sisters, friends and other women in your lives when you yell something that’s meant to degrade me, and all the women you’ve ever met.

My workplace is one of my favourite places in the world. Don’t subject me to sexual harassment while I’m doing my job.

Don’t do your bit to create the assumption that contempt for women is universal.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I did my Freethinker column about the death toll from theocratic murderers over the past few months. It’s not a very cheerful story.

Here’s Amnesty Italy, resisting the trend:

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

An NPR story from 2011:

During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith argues that it’s important to define and describe dehumanization, because it’s what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.

“We all know, despite what we see in the movies,” Smith tells NPR’s Neal Conan, “that it’s very difficult, psychologically, to kill another human being up close and in cold blood, or to inflict atrocities on them.” So, when it does happen, it can be helpful to understand what it is that allows human beings “to overcome the very deep and natural inhibitions they have against treating other people like game animals or vermin or dangerous predators.”

Yes, but I think it can also be helpful to understand what it is that allows human beings to overcome the at least somewhat natural (in my view) inhibitions they have against treating sentient animals like…cartoon characters. Killing an animal quickly in order to eat it is one thing and torturing it for fun is quite another.

Human beings have long conceived of the universe as a hierarchy of value, says Smith, with God at the top and inert matter at the bottom, and everything else in between. That model of the universe “doesn’t make scientific sense,” says Smith, but “nonetheless, for some reason, we continue to conceive of the universe in that fashion, and we relegate nonhuman creatures to a lower position” on the scale.

Yes but we don’t want to torment sentient animals (in my view) even if we do see them as lower on a hierarchy of value, at least most of us don’t. We may want to use them and be indifferent to whatever discomfort and fatigue that costs them, but that’s some steps away from deliberately tormenting them.

Don’t mind me; I’m just collecting material.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

In Chechnya…

A journalist has left the southern Russian republic of Chechnya amid fears for her safety, after writing that a teenage girl was being forced to marry a police commander much older than her.

Elena Milashina had written that the local police head, Nazhud Guchigov, had threatened reprisals against the girl’s family if she was not handed over.

The police commander was also said to be married to another woman.

Ms Milashina’s newspaper said she fled after her safety was threatened.

That’s an interesting style of “police head.” Sounds more like a crime boss.

Chechnya’s authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a diehard loyalist of President Vladimir Putin, has in recent years outlawed the abduction of brides and underage marriage.

Although polygamy is banned under Russian law, reports say the Chechen leader is in favour of it.

He took to his Instagram account on Thursday to criticise Russian media coverage of “this fuss ordered by some liberals”.

“The girl’s parents gave their blessing to this marriage,” he claimed, arguing that reports to the contrary were filled with lies.

That’s nice, but what about the girl herself? She’s not a power tool, to be loaned back and forth as long as the owner is happy with the arrangement.

Elena Milashina was said to have visited the girl’s village of Baytarki on Thursday, but then left Chechnya after being warned by police officers from Siberia of a potential threat to her safety from Chechen police.

The Chechen interior ministry said it was “extremely surprised” by the alleged threat and accused the reporter of acting provocatively by entering people’s homes in the village.

Right. Just the way Avijit Roy and Washiqur Rahman and Ananta Bijoy Das “acted provocatively” by writing down their opinions about religion. How dare a journalist go to a place and talk to people there?

Oh well, I’m sure the police chief deserves a nice tight teenager.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Mediaite also wrote about Shauna Hunt’s encounter with the pussy-fanciers, with some new (to me) information.

Last fall, female journalists at the CBC penned an op-ed calling for the end of “FHRITP” pranks, calling them “violent and offensive” and saying those who engage in them suggest “that a woman who is doing what can be a pretty serious and intellectually rigorous job can be reduced to simply a sexual object which can be taken at will.”

Of course, less than four months later, a man pretending to be a Delta passenger did just that to none other than MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

How did I miss this for so long?!

So, back to November last year.

Even though the first one was a hoax, the phrase “fuck her right in the pussy” has turned into a meme in and of itself, with people shouting it during news broadcasts, in the middle of sports broadcasts, even placing it on signs.

However, they’ve also screamed the phrase at female journalists, two of whom spoke out today against the prank, calling it unoriginal and threatening towards women.

Reporter Morgan Dunlop wrote an op-ed for the CBC, which tastefully edited the phrase to “FHRITP”, arguing that it intimidated women and would hurt their careers:

You are not advancing an organic movement. You are copying what one guy set up as a spoof. We can see your face and hear your voice and so can your girlfriend, your sister, your mother, your daughter.

It’s not funny. It makes women feel uncomfortable. You make women feel uncomfortable.

But that of course is the goal. That’s what makes it “funny.”

The op-ed for the CBC seems to be the video I posted yesterday, of several reporters including one man saying what a crappy idea the whole thing is.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Stewart on Facebook:

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Hindu reports on anger at the inaction of the Bangladesh government over this string of public murders.

The hacking of another blogger-activist to death in Bangladesh has set off a storm of criticism against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, with noted author Taslima Nasreen saying people had “given up any expectation” that she would act against the killers.

…

In an exclusive interview to The Hindu, Ms. Nasreen said the “killings prove that the Hasina government isn’t taking action against the groups that are targeting them because of votes. The government thinks if it arrests them they will be considered anti-Islam.”

While much of Mr. Das’ work was on scientific theories of evolution, he had also written a poem eulogising Ms. Nasreen recently, in which he had praised her for “not compromising on feminist principles” despite death threats issued against her over two decades.

Protesting the murder, activists of Shahbagh Gonojagoron Mancha, the group Mr. Das headed, took out a procession and held a rally at Dhaka’s Shahbagh. They also condemned the repeated killings of the bloggers and free thinkers and blamed the murder on the government’s failure to arrest attackers and hold trials.

And the government looked fixedly in another direction.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

How does cruelty and sadism get normalized?

Another passage from the “Humanitarian Revolution” chapter of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature –

Warning: torture, again

But the practical function of cruel punishments was just a part of their appeal. Spectators enjoyed cruelty, even when it served no judicial purpose. Torturing animals, for instance, was just good clean fun.

In 16th-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning,

warning

in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. [p 145]

He goes on, but I yanked my eyes away after the first words; no way I’m going to type them.

Yet people watched it for amusement.

How does this work?

On me it produces a visceral, unavoidable flinching, accompanied by some mild shock-like symptoms.

Now, I’m not a particularly delicate flower. I’m not reporting my reaction to boast of my great sensitivity, because I don’t think my level of sensitivity is at all unusual. I think it’s just normal.

I’ve tried mentally substituting a less charismatic animal, but it doesn’t make much difference.

The explanation is reasonably clear in the case of psychopaths, but they’re a small minority, so that doesn’t help.

There are explanations of how it works when people have to do it in one sense or another – at gunpoint or because they’re part of a disciplined organization and the like, but that doesn’t explain recreational torture-spectating.

I’ve never understood the appeal of bullfights and dog fights and cock fights.

I don’t understand how people can hack a helpless unarmed human being to death with machetes.

I don’t know how this works.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)