Elizabeth Warren on Trump, the guy who loves to call people “Loser!”:

Let’s be honest – Donald Trump is a loser. Count all his failed businesses. See how he kept his father’s empire afloat by cheating people with scams like Trump University and by using strategic corporate bankruptcy (excuse me, bankruptcies) to skip out on debt. Listen to the experts who’ve concluded he’s so bad at business that he might have more money today if he’d put his entire inheritance into an index fund and just left it alone.

Trump seems to know he’s a loser. His embarrassing insecurities are on parade: petty bullying, attacks on women, cheap racism, and flagrant narcissism. But just because Trump is a loser everywhere else doesn’t mean he’ll lose this election. People have been underestimating his campaign for nearly a year – and it’s time to wake up.

People talk about how “this is the most important election” in our lifetime every four years, and it gets stale. But consider what hangs in the balance. Affordable college. Accountability for Wall Street. Healthcare for millions of Americans. The Supreme Court. Big corporations and billionaires paying their fair share of taxes. Expanded Social Security. Investments in infrastructure and medical research and jobs right here in America. The chance to turn our back on the ugliness of hatred, sexism, racism and xenophobia. The chance to be a better people.

More than anyone we’ve seen before come within reach of the presidency, Donald Trump stands ready to tear apart an America that was built on values like decency, community, and concern for our neighbors. Many of history’s worst authoritarians started out as losers – and Trump is a serious threat. The way I see it, it’s our job to make sure he ends this campaign every bit the loser that he started it.

Ah yes, this again.

Melissa Block at NPR says Think Twice Before Telling A Woman To Smile.

After the primaries last Tuesday a cable news guy tweeted at Hillary Clinton: “Smile. You just had a big night.”

Suffice to say, women – were not amused.

“Said no one to a man, ever” tweeted one.

Another offered: “Women LOVE it when you say this.”

And on it went, until comedian Samantha Bee was prompted to launch the hashtag “Smile for Joe,” thereby prompting a slew of women to post selfies as they make like Grumpy Cat: frowning, grimacing, and scowling.

The cable news guy said predictable “lighten up ladies!” type of thing – so why is this so annoying?

Because even women who don’t happen to be running for the highest office in the land are all too familiar with men telling them — not asking them, telling them — to smile.

Maybe it starts with well-intentioned grandparents when you’re a kid. And then graduates to not-so well-intentioned, unsolicited sidewalk advice when you’re older.

And to vitally necessary phrases like “bitchy resting face” because we all know women’s faces are public property at all times.

This kerfuffle over women and smiling? it’s not new territory, though it IS new for a presidential campaign. Back in 1970, the feminist writer Shulamith Firestone proposed her “dream action” for the women’s liberation movement: she called for “a smile boycott” in which, she wrote, “all women would instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles — henceforth smiling only when something pleased THEM.”

But it didn’t work, and the orders to smile have not stopped. Global warming will have wiped out all mammalian life before that happens.

Chris Moos on Twitter:

So @nonajasmine, why did you delete ur tweet attacking Muslim women challenging gender segregation as “unfeminist”?

It is unfeminist to lecture other women on what they should do and think & I include Muslim women in that

No. Feminism is not endorsing everything any woman says or does or thinks. It never has been. Feminism is all about saying X is better than Y, and that of course includes saying it to women.

It would be nice if this had changed more by now. Tell children to draw a pilot or a surgeon and what happens?

No prizes for getting it right.

A new short film has highlighted how children as young as five years old have already learnt common gender stereotypes and think of certain career opportunities as being more likely to be filled by men.

Kids in a school were asked to draw people in job roles, including firefighters, surgeons and pilots.

“Have a think in your head what this person looks like to you,” one of the teachers asked them.

Out of the 66 pictures drawn by the children, 61 pictures were of men and only five were of women.

Well the women are busy empowering themselves by dancing.

So the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) asked the internet for suggestions for the name of their new ship. Currently in the lead, whupping Endeavour, Henry Worsley, David Attenborough, Falcon, and similar grown-up names, is Boaty McBoatface. I think that would be a fabulous name for a boat – although Hotty McHotterson would also be nice.

The £200 million polar research vessel, which will be operational in 2019, is set to sail the waters of Antarctica and the Arctic carrying a team of 90 scientists and support staff.

In a statement NERC said: “Tonne-for-tonne, the ship – together with NERC’s existing two blue water research ships – will provide the UK with the most advanced floating research fleet in the world and will help put the UK at the forefront of ocean research for years to come.”

NERC was looking for a name to reflect the ship’s prowess in the oceans, symbolising the pioneering work they will undertake.

When thinking of submissions, they advised: “We’re looking for an inspirational name that exemplifies the work it will do.

“The ship could be named after a local historical figure, movement, or landmark – or a famous polar explorer or scientist.”

Ah well if they stipulated then they probably won’t go with Boaty McBoatface, but it was a nice idea.

Here’s Rebecca Reilly-Cooper at Coventry Skeptics in the Pub last Monday. I’m told it was the best-attended event they’d had in ages, and very well received.

She’s doing a talk at Conway Hall in May but that sold out on the first day.

Meghan Murphy detects some incoherence in the libertarian feminist approach to “sex work.”

Surprise! Gaming is a sexist industry that pornifies women. Through a particularly hypocritical post, even for Jezebel, it has come to light that Microsoft hired women in sexualized Catholic schoolgirl outfits to dance at an afterparty hosted by Xbox in San Francisco during last week’s Game Developer Conference.

Welcome to the industry, laydeez.

One woman who attended the party, named Kamina Vincent, a producer at an Australian games studio, told Jezebel that she spoke to one of the “dancers,” who told her “they had been hired to speak with attendees and encourage them to the dance floor.” Vincent correctly pointed out, “Decisions like these reinforce that women are decoration instead of a part of the industry.” You know, just like the video games themselves do, and just like pornography itself does: position women as decorative things for men to look at, use, and abuse, but never to view as full, equal human beings.

Brianna Wu, a video game developer who has been subjected to ongoing harassment by the man-children of Gamergate, told Jezebel:

“The problem is not the women. I am a sex-positive feminist and so are most women in the game industry… They are just trying to make a living. The issue is, this is wildly inappropriate at a professional networking event.”

Indeed. And so with that, we are left to wonder what, exactly, is an appropriate space for women to be paid to sexualize teen girls for the titillation of men? Both Wu and Jezebel, as a whole, are supporters of the sex industry — they advocate to legalize prostitution and treat pornography as something empowered women “choose.”

So they’re trying to have it both ways, are they? Saying it’s cool in general to position women as decorative things for men to look at and fuck but not cool to do that at a tech afterparty? If it’s cool in general why isn’t it cool at a tech afterparty?

Murphy shares some tweets by Brianna Wu saying how great sex work and Playboy are, and how sex-positive and pro-sex work and pro sexual empowerment she is.

The analysis doesn’t fly. As I wrote earlier this month, you can’t have both objectification and liberation. You can’t say that turning women into sexualized objects for male pleasure contributes to inequality and excludes women from participation in traditionally male-dominated spaces (i.e. life) but then say it’s totally acceptable in other spaces and, more generally, in society-at-large. Where is the invisible line drawn?

As Wu’s colleague, Anita Sarkeesian, points out, objectification dehumanizes women — not just some women, but all women. Treating women as things that exist for men normalizes male entitlement, which, in turn, creates rape culture and, more generally, a misogynist society.

How’s that worked out so far?

That day in the forest was traumatic for Reserve Police Battalion 101. They didn’t like shooting people in the head all day. A few of them asked for and got transfers.

Christopher Browning continues:

The problem that faced Trapp and his superiors in Lublin, 
therefore, was not the ethically and politically grounded oppo- 
sition of a few but the broad demoralization shared both by those 
who shot to the end and those who had not been able to 
continue. It was above all a reaction to the sheer horror of the 
killing process itself. If Reserve Police Battalion 101 was to 
continue to provide vital manpower for the implementation of 
the Final Solution in the Lublin district, the psychological 
burden on the men had to be taken into account and alleviated.

In subsequent actions two vital changes were introduced and 
henceforth — with some notable exceptions — adhered to. First, 
most of the future operations of Reserve Police Battalion 101 
involved ghetto clearing and deportation, not outright massacre 
on the spot. The policemen were thus relieved of the immediate 
horror of the killing process, which (for deportees from the 
northern Lublin district) was carried out in the extermination 
camp at Treblinka. Second, while deportation was a horrifying 
procedure characterized by the terrible coercive violence 
needed to drive people onto the death trains as well as the 
systematic killing of those who could not be marched to the 
trains, these actions were generally undertaken jointly by units 
of Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Trawnikis, SS-trained 
auxiliaries from Soviet territories, recruited from the POW 
camps and usually assigned the very worst parts of the ghetto 
clearing and deportation. 

Problem solved. The police had to round up the Jews for transport, but they didn’t have to do (all) the killing. They had help with the rounding up.

In fact they still had to do a lot of killing, because anyone who couldn’t march to the train station was shot immediately. But apparently it was enough less to make the difference.

In short, the psychological alleviation 
necessary to integrate Reserve Police Battalion 101 into the 
killing process was to be achieved through a twofold division of 
labor. The bulk of the killing was to be removed to the 
extermination camp, and the worst of the on-the-spot "dirty 
work" was to be assigned to the Trawnikis. This change would 
prove sufficient to allow the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 
to become accustomed to their participation in the Final Solu- 
tion. When the time came to kill again, the policemen did not 
"go crazy." Instead they became increasingly efficient and 
calloused executioners. 

Which is pretty horrifying when you think about it. It means if the horrors are at a distance, we don’t care about them. Even if we know all about them, we don’t care about them unless the blood is actually spattering into our faces.

Lifton writes that the doctors in the extermination camps were concerned about one thing: how to dispose of the corpses. There was a huge consignment from Hungary at one point and the crematoria were completely overwhelmed, so the corpses had to be incinerated in trenches outside. How do you do that? It’s a technical problem. That’s what the doctors talked about. They criticized each other for coming up with bad solutions.

From 2005, a visit to the Zendik commune:

Lunch at Zendik is, like much else at the commune, more than it appears to be. Long before the farmers finish scraping their bowls, the group-therapy session starts up. A thin, blond woman in her mid-20s garners attention with an “Ahem, everybody” and tells the table that Helen has something to share. Helen’s a short, stout woman who “realized everything was bullshit,” dropped out of Harvard, and moved to Zendik. (She has since left the commune.)

Helen shares that she has “a date” with a guy at the table named Talon. She plans to get pregnant. Talon drops his fork, then goes back to eating lunch.

Helen’s declaration of intent to get knocked up leads to a drawn-out group analysis of her personality. Is she using pregnancy as an excuse to act out her natural desire to hump random men, which has been repressed by her strict Catholic upbringing? Does she want a child because she’s ready to be a mother, or because she has other emotional needs to fill, such as a feeling that she is not accepted by the group or that she hasn’t found someone to love? After a bowlful of tears, she decides that it’s not time to get pregnant, though the random sex will continue. Talon looks relieved, and the group moves on to the next farmer.

Another session on another day:

“I don’t know,” said a guy near the center of the table. “I think it’s his attitude. His attitude’s just got to change. He brings me down, man.”

I found an empty chair against the wall and pulled it in toward the table, where a friendly-looking Laotian-American guy, Vong, slid over to make room.

I eventually gathered that they were in the middle of the all-too-familiar scene that ends many reality-show episodes. The group was discussing dumping one of its members. The bad vibes didn’t last for long, though; someone demanded a change of subject.

Are you twitching yet? Or is that just me? I have a terrible attitude.

A new woman started to join the commune, one with a long-term girlfriend.

The gentlemen on the farm, when her arrival was discussed, tended to focus on her sexuality. They doubted that she was a “real” lesbian and were convinced they could overcome what they saw as a minor barrier.

She told me how excited she was to be in a place where she could focus on her art. I had been there long enough by then to know that she was in for a rude awakening. Very few of the members do any actual art—there’s no time; everyone’s working—unless you count work as art. The Zendik philosophy, as articulated on its Web site, refers to “Life Artistry,” which “takes the rigors of Art—the workmanship, the daring, the objectivity and intensity of focus—and applies them directly to the problems of Life itself, providing a framework of critique and self-awareness that is woefully absent from our common day-to-day reality.…In this way, Life itself becomes the Art, an object of endless fascination, where there are no limits on the potential of imagination and creativity.”

Three months after my first visit to the farm, I got a call from Welsh in Milwaukee. “They kept telling me that I was only a lesbian because of the influence of the Death Culture, and now that I was in a loving family I should embrace my hetero side,” she said. The line didn’t work.

Though she was disturbed by the incessant advances, she said, the real reason she left had more to do with the lack of revolutionary zeal on the farm. “They advertise themselves as revolutionaries, but they’re nothing but a bunch of dropouts…who couldn’t hack it in the real world. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, and I wish them the best, but they shouldn’t try to recruit people who are actually interested in making the world a better place.”

And they probably shouldn’t try to push lesbians to turn straight, either.

Kimberly Winston at Religion News Service reports on the debut of a new atheism plus social justice network, The Orbit. You may have heard about it a couple of months ago when there was a leak.

“The Orbit,” a collection of 20-plus new and existing blogs,  took off Tuesday (March 15) and will focus on social justice and activism through an atheist lens.

“This group is founded from the beginning as a group dedicated to atheist social justice voices,” said Greta Christina, author of an eponymous blog on The Orbit. “We were also focusing on a diversity of voices when we were building this network from day one.”

Look at all the good they do.

“Our site is feminist and progressive,” The Orbit’s site says. “We know black lives matter and that no one is illegal, we know trans women are women and that sex work is work, and we support a socially conscious atheist movement. As atheists, we believe criticism of religion must fall within this framework.”

Is that progressive or libertarian? A lot of people I know consider it libertarian.

Many Orbit bloggers migrated from other atheist platforms at Skepchick and Patheos, but the bulk came from Freethought Blogs. Rumors of discord at these platforms spread throughout 2015, but writers say they are focused on the future.

Discord??? Surely not!

I probably shouldn’t laugh, but I do.

From the Onion, a first-timer messes up the Iditarod.

After running directly into the grandstands during the Iditarod’s ceremonial start and veering 55 miles off course late Tuesday to chase a marmot, Siberian husky and rookie sled dog Melvin apologized to his musher and fellow canines Wednesday for making a complete fool of himself in the early stages of the annual 1,150-mile race.

“First Iditarod jitters, I guess,” the visibly contrite Melvin told reporters Wednesday at the Rainy Pass checkpoint. “I feel like such a moron. Here I am in the last great race on earth and I’m blowing it. I mean, 100 times out of 100, when my musher yells, ‘Gee,’ I turn right. But yesterday I go left down an icy slope into a bunch of evergreens and nearly break everyone’s neck.”

That sounds like Cooper. Last Saturday we were walking down a trail from some bluffs to a beach, and he thought it would be a good idea for him to leave the trail and try to walk down the very steep muddy wet slope. I explained to him that it wouldn’t.

Melvin has gotten his squad into several embarrassing scrapes thus far, one of which occurred at Willow Lake when, in an effort to find a place to nap, he twirled around three times while still in full harness, fouling his lines and entangling his team in multiple snarls. In addition, as the team was on route to Skwentna, a child spectator threw an imaginary stick over the team, and Melvin chased it 300 miles back to the first checkpoint at Yentna Station.

That’s the part where I lost it, and I’m in the library. I’ll be so happy when my connection hardware is fixed.

“I’m too ‘in my head’ right now, you know? I have to remember my training from when I was a pup and just be natural,” said the dog, adding that despite his most recent failures, he believes he was born for this. “No more stopping in the middle of a run to find a private place to go to the bathroom. Why would I even do that? I know I’m running in the Iditarod, for crying out loud. And I’m certainly not going to sprint into my teammates ever again, because that means I’m destroying our neck and tug lines, and I’m going completely the wrong way.”

“I need to stay focused,” Melvin continued. “Also, I think I’m going to go chase that big moose over there.”

Squirrel!

H/t Barbara

So many of my friends shared this piece by Jemima Lewis in the Telegraph. (Yes, the Telegraph. Why do you think I mentioned the many friends?)

A primary school in Hartfield, East Sussex, held a “transgender day” recently, to encourage the tots to explore issues of gender-fluidity.

But was it to encourage them to explore? Or to teach them the formulas they’re expected to repeat. The current version of transgender dogma doesn’t welcome exploration, as Lewis points out.

I want my children to be open-minded about gender and sexuality. I want them to have the run of the dressing up box, from Cinderella to Spiderman, for as long as they feel drawn to sparkly nylon. I want the boys to feel able to cry, and their sister to punch them in the head. As far as is possible in a world full of stereotypes, I want them to steer clear of pigeonholes. And right now, gender politics seems to me nothing but floor-to-ceiling pigeonholes.

You can be agender, bi-gender, cisgender, demigender, graygender, intergender, genderless, genderqueer or third gender – but by God, you will accept a label. Go gingerly when applying it in public, though, especially if you are unpractised and over-40: this new language is as orthodox and closely-policed as any medieval catechism.

That doesn’t put it strongly enough. All those labels are for people under-40 (or better yet under-30 or can we say under-25?) who are the first people ever to have realized that men can like skirts and women can like driving fast. Except of course that they’re not, but they think they are, so their views on the subject are not as enlightened or enlightening as they think they are.

The rules of gender-fluidity have been laid down incredibly fast, and have already calcified into a set of unchallengeable truths. You are how you feel. Gender identity is a self-realisable truth. I have no doubt that there are some children – a tiny minority – who suffer from gender dysmorphia right from the off, and will never feel comfortable in the body they were born into. But most children, left to their own devices, can change identities a hundred times a day and move up and down the gender spectrum without ever requiring a change of label.

Trans activists, like old-school misogynists, are forever patrolling the perimeters of male and female behaviour, making sure we all adhere to some kind of type.

And how funny that is, because it’s exactly what feminism was meant to free us all from.

By “funny” of course I mean tragic and disgusting.

The “industry” that like to gamble with other people’s money and make us pay for it when the gamble doesn’t go their way – that industry doesn’t like Elizabeth Warren because she thinks it should be sensibly regulated in order to avoid global financial meltdown like the one in 2008. Since this highly useful and public spirited industry doesn’t like Warren, Republicans also don’t like Warren.

A Republican congressman on the House Committee on Financial Services thinks Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), one of the most vocal advocates for Wall Street reform, needs to be “neutered.”

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.) made the comments during a panel discussion at an American Bankers Association conference Wednesday. According to Politico, Luetkemeyer said people needed to “find a way to neuter” Warren, whom he called the “Darth Vader of the financial services world.”

And the financial services world, of course, is pure Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker, right? Pocketing huge profits while taxpayers pick up the pieces at the same time as they lose all their savings.

Nita Chaudhary, co-founder of UltraViolet, an advocacy group working to expand women’s rights, said the comments showed how GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s rhetoric had seeped into political discourse.

“Luetkemeyer should immediately apologize to Senator Warren for his offensive language,” she said. “There is plenty of room for disagreement in Washington, but resorting to sexist name-calling should have no place in our political discourse.”

Oh come on, where would we be without sexist name-calling? The sluts and bitches would run everything, am I right?

My internet connection will be fixed Monday (it’s an actual physical problem with the physical infrastructure, not my technical incompetence), so posting will probably still be light until then.

Meanwhile here’s something to read by the excellent Sarah Ditum.

Boys grow up by getting bigger, stronger, louder. The things that a male child is encouraged to be good at are, by and large, things esteemed in the male adolescent too. But for girls, adolescence is a time of loss. Becoming a woman means giving things up, explains Deborah Cameron in The Myth of Mars and Venus, and taking up new and feminine occupations: “In particular, [girls] abandon physical play: instead of using their bodies to do things, they start to focus on adorning them.” Somewhere in the passage between being a child and becoming a grown-up, girls learn that our bodies are not ourselves, but a portable property that we must cultivate, display, and trade for the best bargain we can make.

I stopped climbing trees. I learned to shave my legs. The grazes on my knees faded. The scabs on my shins bloomed where my clumsy razor peeled away ribbons of skin. I was embarrassed to sweat. There were no lunchtime games of netball for girls at my school – just the option to walk circuits of the field, talking, looking, always wary of a rogue shot from the boys’ football game. I decided I was not a physical person. It would be undignified to run – and so began a long career of dodging PE, which got even easier once I was at secondary school and could claim period pains. I was not a physical person, I was just rendered physically incapable of taking part by my female physiology.

I occasionally try to remember when I stopped climbing trees. I was stopped by age almost-fifteen because we moved back to town and the place we moved to had no big climbable trees. It’s possible that I was still climbing them until that move; I can’t remember. I hope so.

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.

If you want evidence of the contempt of Conservative punditry for the working-class whites who vote for them, look no further than the National Review:

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America…

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”

The Right needs little excuse to lecture poor people on how it’s all their own fault, but I’m pretty sure that David French and Kevin Williamson are going on about “Personal responsibility” here in order to disavow any personal moral responsibility on the part of movement Conservatism for the rise of Citizen Trump.

Where I apparently agree with Kevin Williamson (the original piece is behind a paywall, so I’m going by this “defense,”) is, we both think Trump’s supporters have a sense of aggrieved entitlement.

We disagree about the nature and causes of that imagined entitlement. Williamson seems to think the poor whites attracted to Trump are morally dysfunctional (and uppity re their betters at National Review) because that damned Welfare State has conditioned them to expect that the government won’t let them and their children starve. I think that they’re morally culpable for buying into the racism and xenophobia that the Right has been exploiting for decades, that lets them blame their economic problems on black and brown people, and foreigners.

But those economic problems are real. They cannot be handwaved aside with that handy conservative mantra “Personal Responsibility.”

Strangely enough, the full text of Ordinary Men is available online, in more than one place. Here’s one. I wonder if it’s some sort of public interest thing.

Here’s a bit from where it started getting really hard to continue (but it all was, and it’s cumulative):

When the first truckload of thirty-five to forty Jews arrived, an 
equal number of policemen came forward and, face to face, were 
paired off with their victims. Led by Kammer, the policemen 
and Jews marched down the forest path. They turned off into the 
woods at a point indicated by Captain Wohlauf, who busied 
himself throughout the day selecting the execution sites. Kam- 
mer then ordered the Jews to lie down in a row. The policemen 
stepped up behind them, placed their bayonets on the backbone 
above the shoulder blades as earlier instructed, and on Kam- 
mer 's orders fired in unison. 

In the meantime more policemen of First Company had 
arrived at the edge of the forest to fill out a second firing squad. 
As the first firing squad marched out of the woods to the 
unloading point, the second group took their victims along the 
same path into the woods. Wohlauf chose a site a few yards 
farther on so that the next batch of victims would not see the 
corpses from the earlier execution. These Jews were again forced 
to lie face down in a row, and the shooting procedure was 
repeated. 

Thereafter, the "pendulum traffic" of the two firing squads in 
and out of the woods continued throughout the day. Except for 
a midday break, the shooting proceeded without interruption 
until nightfall. At some point in the afternoon, someone "orga- 
nized" a supply of alcohol for the shooters. By the end of a day 
of nearly continuous shooting, the men had completely lost track 
of how many Jews they had each killed. In the words of one 
policeman, it was in any case "a great number." 32 

When Trapp first made his offer early in the morning, the real 
nature of the action had just been announced and time to think 
and react had been very short. Only a dozen men had instinc- 
tively seized the moment to step out, turn in their rifles, and 
thus excuse themselves from the subsequent killing. For many 
the reality of what they were about to do, and particularly that 
they themselves might be chosen for the firing squad, had

probably not sunk in. But when the men of First Company were 
summoned to the marketplace, instructed in giving a "neck 
shot," and sent to the woods to kill Jews, some of them tried to 
make up for the opportunity they had missed earlier. One 
policeman approached First Sergeant Kammer, whom he knew 
well. He confessed that the task was "repugnant" to him and 
asked for a different assignment. Kammer obliged, assigning him 
to guard duty on the edge of the forest, where he remained 
throughout the day. 33 Several other policemen who knew Kam- 
mer well were given guard duty along the truck route. 34 After 
shooting for some time, another group of policemen approached 
Kammer and said they could not continue. He released them 
from the firing squad and reassigned them to accompany the 
trucks. 35 Two policemen made the mistake of approaching 
Captain (and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer) Wohlauf instead of Kam- 
mer, They pleaded that they too were fathers with children and 
could not continue. Wohlauf curtly refused them, indicating that 
they could lie down alongside the victims. At the midday pause, 
however, Kammer relieved not only these two men but a 
number of other older men as well. They were sent back to the 
marketplace, accompanied by a noncommissioned officer who 
reported to Trapp. Trapp dismissed them from further duty and 
permitted them to return early to the barracks in Biigoraj. 36 

Some policemen who did not request to be released from the 
firing squads sought other ways to evade. Noncommissioned 
officers armed with submachine guns had to be assigned to give 
so-called mercy shots "because both from excitement as well as 
intentionally [italics mine]" individual policemen "shot past" 
their victims. 37 Others had taken evasive action earlier. During 
the clearing operation some men of First Company hid in the 
Catholic priest's garden until they grew afraid that their absence 
would be noticed. Returning to the marketplace, they jumped 
aboard a truck that was going to pick up Jews from a nearby 
village, in order to have an excuse for their absence. 38 Others 
hung around the marketplace because they did not want to 
round up Jews during the search. 39 Still others spent as much 

time as possible searching the houses so as not to be present at 
the marketplace, where they feared being assigned to a firing 
squad. 40 A driver assigned to take Jews to the forest made only 
one trip before he asked to be relieved. "Presumably his nerves 
were not strong enough to drive more Jews to the shooting site," 
commented the man who took over his truck and his duties of 
chauffeuring Jews to their death. 41 

After the men of First Company departed for the woods, 
Second Company was left to complete the roundup and load 
Jews onto the trucks. When the first salvo was heard from the 
woods, a terrible cry swept the marketplace as the collected Jews 
realized their fate. 42 Thereafter, however, a quiet composure — 
indeed, in the words of German witnesses, an "unbelievable" 
and "astonishing" composure — settled over the Jews. 43 

 

But then it gets much worse.

The thing is…it’s so horrifyingly easy to get people to kill other people. We know that; we see it every day; but it’s still horrifying.

I’ve been reading Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, and as an offshoot from that this morning I read some of chapter 7 of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. I would have read more but I had to stop because I couldn’t take it. I’d forgotten how horrible it is reading it.

It’s about a police battalion, made up of middle-aged men because all the younger men were in the military, who were assigned to kill all the Jews except the able-bodied men (who were sent to a work camp) in a Polish village by walking them into the woods, making them lie down, and shooting them.

It’s horrific, and at the same time it’s instructive. I plan to continue once I get my strength back.