Category: Notes and Comment Blog

It’s never not weird that Giuliani started out as a scourge of mobsters and then turned into one. Maureen Dowd writes:

Giuliani went from cleaning up corruption to ginning up corruption, from crimebuster to criminal defendant in Georgia and unindicted “Co-Conspirator 1” in D.C. Rudy, the prosecutor who made his reputation aggressively pursuing RICO cases, is now Rudolph William Louis Giuliani, a defendant in the Georgia RICO case about the deranged plot to steal the election.

We have seen many cases of mobsters turning state’s evidence for prosecutors. But now we have the rare experience of seeing a prosecutor turn into a mobster.

After all those years spent prosecuting the Five Families in New York, Giuliani surrendered himself to the lamest mob boss there ever was: Don Trump.

We saw the coup attempt play out, but it’s startling to see the Georgia indictment refer to “this criminal organization,” “members of the enterprise,” “corruptly solicited” and “acts of racketeering activity.”

Trump, mentored by mob lawyer Roy Cohn, always loved acting like a mobster, playing the faux tough guy, intimidating his foes, swanning around like John Dillinger, Al Capone and John Gotti. He told Timothy O’Brien, the author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” that he admired Gotti because the mobster sat through years of trials with a stone face. “In other words, tough,” Trump said.

Which Trump isn’t. He’s many things, but tough isn’t one of them. He’s sadistic, ruthless, self-dealing, callous, all that, but he’s not tough. He’s a big whiny baby.

“Trump both fetishized mobsters and did business with them,” O’Brien told me. “The way he fetishizes mobsters informs this fascination he has about Putin and Kim Jong-un. He loves ‘bad-ass’ guys who roll like they want to roll. He sees himself the same way.”

But he’s not bad-ass, he’s lard-ass.

The passive-aggressive self-flattery is off the charts.

We get it – you want everyone to think you’re very very very very kind, you’re all about kindness, you put kindness first on all occasions, you’re a kind kind kind man. We get it; we get that you think that. We get that you think you’re massively kind and we’re cruel bitches. We get it.

But you’re not. You’re not, for instance, “kind” to women. Being “kind” to men who claim to be women entails being very unkind to women, and that’s what you’re doing.

We get that you think the default for kind people is to heap flattery on men who call themselves women while ignoring all the objections of women. We get that. We also get that you’re wrong, and that you keep flattering yourself in the most blatant embarrassing way.

Life on a cooking planet:

About 15,000 households have been ordered to evacuate in Canada’s British Columbia, as firefighters battle raging wildfires that have set homes ablaze. Officials said a “significant” number of buildings caught fire in West Kelowna, a city of 36,000 people, and more than 2,400 homes were evacuated. A state of emergency has been declared for the entire province, where hundreds of separate fires are burning.

Meanwhile there are only about a thousand people left in Yellowknife.

In British Columbia, evacuation orders grew from covering 4,000 homes on Friday afternoon to about 15,000 in the space of an hour. Another 20,000 homes are under alert. Premier of the province, David Eby, said that evening that the situation had “evolved rapidly” and officials were braced for “an extremely challenging situation in the days ahead”.

“This year, we’re facing the worst #BCWildfire season ever,” Mr Eby wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Given these fast-moving conditions, we are declaring a provincial state of emergency.”

…

Canada is having its worst wildfire season on record, with at least 1,000 fires burning across the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).

Experts say climate change increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires. Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more and more moisture out of the ground – which can provide fuel for fires that can spread at an incredible speed, particularly if winds are strong.

We’re all living on a stovetop with all the burners on.

Blah blah blah women must not be allowed to have anything for themselves blah blah trans blah blah blah.

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) says it is temporarily banning transgender women from competing in its women’s events. The FIDE said individual cases would require “further analysis” and that a decision could take up to two years. The move has been criticised by some players and enthusiasts.

…

Yosha Iglesias, a trans woman professional chess player with the FIDE rank of chess master, said the policy would lead to “unnecessary harm” for trans players and women. “This appalling situation will lead to depression and suicide attempts,” Iglesias said.

See? That’s all he’s got. Men must be allowed to take what belongs to women or they will get depressed and kill themselves. Trans “activism” should be called The Infinite Blackmail Note. Just take a hike, dude. Chess for women is by definition for women, so get lost.

Another shipment of pestilent bullshit:

I am reading it and it is indeed horrifying. The case:

My name is Almut Gadow. For almost 10 years, I taught law at the Open University. I was dismissed for questioning new requirements to indoctrinate students in gender identity theory, in ways which, I felt, distorted equality law and normalised child sexual exploitation.

I am bringing an employment tribunal claim arguing that I was harassed, discriminated against, and unfairly dismissed because I reject gender ideology and believe in academic freedom, and that this breached human rights protections for academic free expression.

…

In 2021/22 the Open University’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion department announced plans to incorporate its political ideologies into ‘all current curriculum’.  The law degree on which I taught was redesigned around a ‘core theme’ of ‘liberating the curriculum’, reflecting these ideologies.  

Criminal law tutors were told that, to ‘liberate the curriculum’, our classes now had to introduce diverse gender identities and teach students to use offenders’ preferred pronouns. I questioned if incorporating gender identity theory might be an unnecessary distraction or even unwise. I described gender theory as hotly contested, and as recently developed in wealthy Western countries. I pointed out that (not) believing in gender identity is a protected religious or philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010, and said law tutorials are no place to promote one’s beliefs.

I also highlighted some of the implications of describing offenders according to self-identified gender in our work. I said a criminal lawyer’s role is to present facts, that sex is a relevant fact for offences involving perpetrators’ and/or victims’ bodies, and that no offender should be allowed to dictate the language of his case in a way which masks relevant facts.   I said an assailant’s language about himself and his offence should not automatically be adopted over his victim’s, and that lawyers and courts sometimes need to describe offenders in terms with which the latter might not agree – calling the innocent-identifying perpetrator ‘guilty’, or the trans-identifying male ‘he’.

When I raised these questions, in an online forum for law tutors to discuss what they teach, management had no answers.  Months later, they were cited as reasons for my dismissal. Managers spuriously alleged that my ‘unreasonable questions’ had created an environment which ‘isn’t inclusive, trans-friendly or respectful’, thus violating the transgender staff policy and codes of conduct. In fact, I had broken no lawful rule by probing the academic soundness of what I was expected to teach. 

Christing fuck. Imagine the lawyers that are going to emerge from this form of “education.”

But don’t worry, it gets worse.

I further incurred the wrath of the curriculum liberators when I asked them to define their key concepts such as ‘LGBTQ+’. It had become apparent to me that some treated ‘minor attraction’ (i.e. paedophilia) as part of the ‘diverse sexualities and gender identities’ Open University law teaching now seeks to ‘centre’.  The criminal law module culminated in an assignment in which students had to discuss a relationship between an adult and a minor. Students would gain marks by describing child and adult as each other’s ‘boyfriends’, but lose marks if they considered whether the adult was grooming the child or committing a sexual offence.

My request for clarification was spuriously described as further misconduct. Curriculum liberators complained that it had made them feel undermined, harassed, bullied and reputationally damaged. In fact, asking colleagues to explain core concepts of their output is just part of everyday academic work, but curriculum liberators were unable to do so here.

I despair. Dangerous idiots are taking over everything.

The BBC’s AntiSocial on “queering” museums.

The debate sparked by reviewing historic collections through a queer or LGBT lens. A “queering the collection” blogpost from the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth was criticised for making what some saw as tenuous links between historic objects from the ship and the experience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. Supporters of “queering” museums and galleries say it’s needed to redress a traditional approach to history that has often ignored non-heterosexual people or stories. But it’s led to controversy and criticism that some institutions have gone too far by focusing on the LGBT angle at the expense of others or imposing a modern interpretation that wouldn’t have made sense at the time.

Dominique Bouchard, Head of Learning and Interpretation at English Heritage

Mary Harrington, Contributing Editor at UnHerd

Jackie Stacey, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester

Josh Adair, Professor of English at Murray State University

It won’t surprise you to be told that Mary Harrington was especially good.

Interesting.

The * in trans* leads to a clarification at the bottom of the poster: “In this case, trans refers to people who identify as transgender, transsexual, two-spirit, non-binary, genderqueer, or gender diverse.” In other words, anything and everything. Any guy who feels like going right on into the women’s washroom [rest room, toilet, bathroom, WC, etc] is welcome to; all he has to do is say he’s gender diverse. Who’s going to challenge him on that? Who even knows what the fuck it’s supposed to mean? So come on in, bros, fill the place up, make it so bro-friendly that women won’t go near it. Stupid bitches will have to stay home and it serves them right, yeah?

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Empowering the bullies.

I think the block feature is an absolute necessity to prevent harassment.

It’s true that mass-blocking tools were bad: the promotion of block-lists to true believers to get them to isolate themselves from dissenting views was a move straight out of the Scientology playbook. But I don’t think that problem — which appears to have largely abated anyway; I don’t hear about mass block-lists anymore — merits getting rid of the block feature altogether.

Very often we have to be able to block specific accounts from replying to our posts, because they harass us. It’s true that people can create sockpuppet accounts to circumvent blocks, but very often harassers want to reply under their real identities, with their main accounts that have amassed large followings, not under anonymous accounts with few followers.

Not all accounts are equal — some have vastly more reach than others — and we need to be able to block the accounts that have amassed large followings and use them for targeted harassment.

Muting isn’t good enough either. If someone’s following you around the internet and bringing along a gang to shout lies about you every time you speak, it’s not enough that you personally tune them out, because everyone else will see the lies.

Also, blocking harassers is a way to prevent them noticing when you speak. Once blocked, they would have to create a sockpuppet account and seek you out specifically in order to be notified when you tweet. Without that block feature, your speech could just show up in their twitter feed — an open invitation for them to harass you.

I can’t see how getting rid of the block feature will be anything but a disaster for victims of harassment.

Yes, we do want someone who knows how to utter a coherent sentence, whether to us or to Putin or to Zelensky. That’s one reason we don’t want Trump.

Word is he’s gonna snub the debate and have a chat with Tucker Carlson instead.

Musk tells us he is getting rid of the block feature. Auschwitz Museum tells him why that’s a terrible idea.

The whole reply:

Failing to address the antisemitic and Holocaust denial comments that appear under our posts commemorating the victims of Auschwitz would be a disservice to their memory.

We’ve chosen to block users who promote denial and hatred. This decision stems from our deep dedication to our mission. We need a secure space to do this.

Engaging in discussions with people and accounts that seek to abuse the memory of victims of Auschwitz is against the values we believe in. These individuals do not seek discourse; they aim to inflict pain. In this context, blocking is a necessary step to ensure that these harmful voices don’t persist in their repetitive attacks on memory.

In today’s digital age, social media platforms shoulder significant moral responsibility. They should actively counter hate speech and halt its normalization.

A platform that disregards the need to defend the memory of the victims demonstrates a disregard for creating a respectful and empathetic online environment.

Blocking users isn’t a mere action; it’s a practical measure. Often, reporting accounts that spread hostility remains an unanswered call. Blocking provides a way to protect the memory of people who suffered and were murdered in Auschwitz.

And this applies across the board. Muting just hides responses from the original account; blocking prevents the responses from appearing at all. Musk is throwing open the door to abusers and bullies and verbal sadists.

We’re the creationists???

Talking to people who know that men are not women is like talking to creationists.

So we’re the ones engaged in magical thinking? We’re the ones who deny reality? We’re the ones who believe in the power of thought to change physical givens? We’re the ones who value faith and submission and compliance more than truth and evidence?

We’re the ones who believe what we’re told to believe as opposed to what it’s reasonable to believe? We’re the ones who conform? We’re the ones who let The Community tell us what we’re allowed to think?

We’re the ones who put fantasy ahead of reality – who let fantasy contradict reality? We’re the ones who believe in miracles? We’re the ones who think the body is mere dross and the soul is everything? We’re the mind-body dualists?

What a shambles.

Hahahaha nothing to do with being a woman.

Even Republicans are saying Trump is lying.

Former President Donald Trump now says he won’t be holding a news conference next week to unveil what he claims is new “evidence” of fraud in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election — even though no fraud has ever been substantiated — citing the advice of lawyers as he prepares to face trial in two criminal cases that stem from his election lies.

No compelling evidence of the wide-scale fraud Trump alleges has emerged in the two-and-a-half years since the election in Georgia or elsewhere, despite Trump’s baseless claims. Republican officials in the state have long said he lost fairly and three recounts there confirmed President Joe Biden’s win.

“Rather than releasing the Report on the Rigged & Stolen Georgia 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings as we fight to dismiss this disgraceful Indictment,” Trump wrote on his social media site Thursday in announcing his reversal.

He should get that on a sweatshirt – Irrefutable & Overwhelming.

Trump’s renewed attacks on the integrity of Georgia’s vote this week drew swift criticism from state’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, whom Trump had tried to lobby as part of his efforts to overturn his loss in the battleground state.

“The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward – under oath – and prove anything in a court of law,” Kemp wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump had tried to pressure to unilaterally overturn the results of the election and who is now challenging Trump for the Republican nomination, echoed that message.

Nobody believes him. His crackpot army doesn’t so much believe him as want to burn everything down.

Trump cancels himself.

Note that that’s all one sentence – one long, tangled, inelegant, confusing, direction-changing, clumsy sentence. Man woman person camera tv.

Investigating:

Officials in the US state of Georgia are investigating online threats made against members of the grand jury that indicted Donald Trump on Monday. Personal information, including the addresses and photos of the jurors, were shared on right-wing platforms. Fulton County Sheriff’s Office said it was aware of the threats, and was trying to track down those behind them.

The names of the jurors were published in the indictment, a routine practice in Georgia. But after their identities emerged in that document, supporters of former President Trump seemingly compiled further information available online and posted photographs and addresses to forums, including the social media site Telegram…

Officials said that along with jurors’ personal information, threats against them were also shared. Police say the threats could amount to jury intimidation.

Ya think?

More on the Yellowknife evacuations:

This is Canada’s worst-ever wildfire season with more than 1,000 active fires burning across the country, including 265 in the Northwest Territories. Experts say climate change has exacerbated the wildfire problem.

Drought has been a contributing factor to the number and intensity of this year’s fires, officials say, with high temperatures exacerbating the situation. Much of Canada has seen abnormally dry conditions.

Shane Thompson, the territorial environment minister, said the evacuation order had been issued late Wednesday to give people time to get out before the weather turned bad.

“The urgency is, fire changes drastically … the conditions are in our favor right now, but that will change on Saturday,” he told the CBC.

In total, about 65% of the Territories population of 46,000 people would be evacuated, he said.

There’s only one two-lane road out of Yellowknife to Alberta.

So far about 134,000 square km (52,000 square miles) of land in Canada have been scorched, more than six times a 10-year average. Nearly 200,000 people have been forced to evacuate at some point this season.

“The territories have never seen anything like this before in terms of wildfire … it’s an unimaginable situation for so many,” Mike Westwick, the territories’ fire information officer, told the CBC.

See…we were thinking this would happen to future people, who don’t matter, because they don’t exist [yet].

Oh shut up bro.

There’s no such thing as “cis” female pals, much less feminist ones. Women are in no need of a prefix or adjective to indicate that we are women, because the word “women” already does that. “Cis” is superfluous. It’s there to trick us into thinking there are two kinds of women, the female kind and the male kind. There aren’t. There is only the one.

It’s perfectly possible to “support trans people” without insisting that men can be women.

If empathy is a good thing why not have some for women? There are a hell of a lot more women than there are men who call themselves women, so why all the exaggerated concern for a few confused men at the expense of billions of women?

Farking hell.

The purported names and addresses of members of the grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and 18 of his co-defendants on state racketeering charges this week have been posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC News has learned.

NBC isn’t naming the website for obvious reasons.

The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment. District Attorney Fani Willis faced racist threats ahead of the return of the indictment, and additional security measures were put in place, with some employees being allowed to work from home.

The grand jurors’ purported addresses were spotted by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan research group founded by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator and staffer for the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.

“It’s becoming all too commonplace to see everyday citizens performing necessary functions for our democracy being targeted with violent threats by Trump-supporting extremists,” Jones said. “The lack of political leadership on the right to denounce these threats — which serve to inspire real-world political violence — is shameful.”

Not to mention the lack of Trump saying don’t do that…coupled with the abundance of Trump encouraging threats and naming and all the rest of the poisonous brew.

“These jurors have signed their death warrant by falsely indicting President Trump,” a post on a pro-Trump forum read in response to a post including the names of jurors, which was viewed by NBC News.

Welcome to the Mafia.

There are norms, and there are laws. Trump likes to smash both.

The Trump presidency generated an enormous amount of discussion about “norms”—the unwritten rules of American political life that everyone tacitly agrees to and that keep democracy functioning. Many of these norms had been somewhat invisible until Trump began shattering them, by doing things like profiting from his business during his time in office or demanding that the Justice Department investigate his political enemies.

But what makes a norm a norm is, at least in part, the fact that it’s not necessarily a legal obligation. When Trump bulldozed through these collective agreements about how politicians and particularly presidents should behave, in many cases there was no obvious means by which to punish him, legally speaking, or hold him back. Much of the public learned for the first time that many things they believed had been required by law—such as the expectation that presidential candidates release their tax returns—were essentially just gentlemen’s agreements. Trump’s actions raised this question so frequently that The Washington Post launched a podcast titled, simply, Can He Do That? Often, the Post’s reporters discovered, the answer was “yes.”

I’m definitely part of that public who kept thinking he was breaking at least rules, if not laws, and finding out otherwise.

Among the many norms that have long held up American democracy is the shared belief that political candidates should accept the outcome of a free and fair election. And if, after the 2020 election, Trump had confined his discontent to grousing on Twitter about supposed fraud, that would have violated this norm but, in all likelihood, not have been illegal. Yet according to both Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Trump’s actions moved from destructively poor sportsmanship to outright illegality when he began actively scheming to hold on to power. “The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won,” the Smith indictment states.

He may have had a legal right to lie about the election, but I still say he had no moral right to do that.

But Trump “also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”

Sometimes, then, the answer to the question Can he do that? is actually “no,” at least not legally. Consider, for example, Smith’s decision to charge Trump under Title 18, Section 241, of the U.S. Code, a civil-rights statute first passed during Reconstruction to empower the federal government to combat white-supremacist attacks on Black Americans. Courts have since interpreted the law as prohibiting efforts to interfere with both the process of voting and the accurate counting of the vote.

I bet Trump has no idea what Reconstruction was.

State law adds to this landscape, too. Repeatedly throughout his presidency, Trump arguably violated his own oath of office and encouraged others to violate theirs. At the federal level, the oath isn’t judicially enforceable; the president’s adherence to it can’t be investigated by a prosecutor or charged by a grand jury. It is, once again, a reflection of a normative commitment to carrying out the duties of the office in the public interest. Georgia, though, criminalizes the violation of an oath by a “public officer” in the state. And the Fulton County indictment charges Trump with soliciting Georgia officials—whom he pressured to overturn the state’s election results—to violate their oaths.

That Trump has been charged with these crimes doesn’t mean he’ll be convicted. And securing accountability for his wrongdoing is a much larger project than criminal law, whether at the state or federal level, can carry out on its own. After all, Trump will be busy campaigning for the presidency at the same time as prosecutors are hoping to bring these cases to trial—and even following a conviction, voters could still decide to grant him a second term. But the indictments are a signal that the foundation of American democracy rests on more than norms alone. These prosecutors aren’t criminalizing politics. They’re criminalizing, well, actual crimes—ones that Trump and his allies are alleged to have committed.

A bold move.