The sentencing hearing for Roger Stone is happening now.

Jackson spent much of the first hour of the hearing criticizing Stone’s actions.

Stone’s actions “led to an inaccurate, incorrect and incomplete report” from the House on Russia, WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, Jackson told the court. She also said she believed Stone’s threats to witness Randy Credico deserved a stronger sentence.

In other words Stone’s actions meant that the Mueller report couldn’t nail Trump. The perjury did what it was meant to do.

Stone also potentially threatened her on social media, the judge said.

“I suppose that I could say Roger Stone didn’t intend to hurt me … it’s just classic bad judgment,” Jackson said, then dismissing that idea. “It wasn’t accidental.”

“Incendiary activity is precisely what he’s known for,” she said. “The court should not sit idly buy, shrug its shoulders and say ‘that’s just Roger being Roger,'” Jackson said as Stone closed his eyes at counsel’s table, fiddling with a pen and shifting his weight.

See also: Trump being Trump. Yes, they’re being what they are, and that’s the problem.

Jackson also delivered a veiled swipe at the President during the hearing.

“For those of you who woke up last week” and decided sentencing guidelines are harsh, Jackson said, courts and defense lawyers have been acknowledging that for some time.

I think there’s some confusion here. No sentence is too harsh when it’s imposed on the poor, the female, the brown, the foreign-born. It’s when it’s imposed on prosperous white men named Smith or Stone that it’s excessive.

Pride parade shuts down a lesbian event. Makes sense.

A lesbian event has been removed from Sydney, Australia’s LGBT Pride after a vocal minority protested the participation of a popular lesbian YouTuber with critical views towards transgender self-ID.

Arielle Scarcella runs an LGBT-centred YouTube channel with over 630,000 subscribers.

She has also spoken out against self-ID laws which have enabled biological males to be transferred to women’s prisons after the commission of serious offences, such as sexual assaults. In 2018, Scarcella collaborated on a video with Blaire White discussing how lesbian sexual preferences that do not include an attraction to biological males who transition to female were not “transphobic.”

Les-Talk was originally planned to be one of the events featured at Sydney Mardi Gras, the local Pride parade and festival. A panel-style discussion also featuring Tania Safi of Buzzfeed, the event began to draw ire from trans rights activists for including Scarcella. A petition was launched on February 15 demanding Scarcella be removed and replaced “preferably by someone of intersectionality.”

In other words they shut her down for talking about the fact that lesbians are being shut down. This loop is getting tedious.

The petition was launched by Johnny Valkyrie, a transman and drag performer most notorious for a January incident at the Brisbane National Library. Valkyrie hosted Drag Storytime at the library, and was one of the two performers confronted by demonstrators from the University of Queensland National Liberal Club chanting “drag queens are not for kids.” The protestors were filmed and dox[x]ed. 

The dox[x]ing resulted in one of the protestors, an openly gay student named Wilson Gavin, committing suicide the next day. Valkyrie used the opportunity at the library to raise funds for his “top surgery,” including a post on the day-of Gavin’s death—later updating the post to claim it was made prior to knowledge of his passing.

And today Valkyrie is flushed with a new triumph.

Les-Talk was not officially cancelled, but was disassociated from Mardi Gras, according to a Facebook post made on the event’s official page.

Sorry, folks, but trans people are in charge of all the things now.

It takes the breath away:

Queensland police have revealed that a man who killed his wife and three children by dousing them with petrol and setting them alight had a history of domestic violence and was known to them.

Not just murder but murder by extreme agony.

But in comments that have shocked domestic violence campaigners, the force says they are keeping an “open mind” about suggestions the 42-year-old Rowan Baxter had been “driven too far” and are appealing to people who knew the couple to come forward to understand his motives.

…

On Thursday, Det Insp Mark Thompson confirmed domestic and family violence orders had been granted against Baxter, saying there had been “a number of engagements of police” between the couple.

…

“When it comes to Hannah we have dealt with her on a number of occasions and worked with the Brisbane Domestic Violence Centre in supporting Hannah throughout her family issues. And we’ve also referred Rowan Baxter to support services as well.”

But in comments that drew an immediate and angry response from domestic violence advocates, Thompson also said police would keep an “open mind” about Baxter’s motives and wanted to speak to people who knew both families.

His motives for setting a woman and three children ON FIRE???

“We need to look at every piece of information and to put it bluntly there are probably people out there in the community that are deciding which side, so to speak, to take in this investigation,” he said.

“Is this an issue of a woman suffering significant domestic violence and her and her children perishing at the hands of the husband, or is it an instance of a husband being driven too far by issues he’s suffered by certain circumstances into committing acts of this form?”

Probably the latter. Definitely probably. The children probably got too loud sometimes. Won’t somebody please think of the men who set people on fire when they get frustrated?

Jane Clare Jones reads another piece by another trans activist, this one by

Torr Robinson, a person with they/them pronouns who is the Trans Officer for London Young Labour and one of the founders of the recent pledge defaming Woman’s Place and calling for us to be expelled from the Labour Party.

Is it a good piece? It is not. Does it contain surprises? It does not.

The piece is called For Trans Liberation, and this idea is summoned throughout. There is, however, no specification about what Torr is calling for liberation from, or what the specific demands for liberation are.

There never is. There is never any explanation of what “trans rights” are, either. There is only ever slogan-brandishing.

… the overwhelming majority of the piece is about the fight against transphobia, and it would seem therefore that the overall thrust is about ‘liberation from transphobia.’ (In this it mimics one of our most common observations about the TRM. Why have you not devoted your considerable resources and organisational power to pushing for the material resources that you need, rather than going all in on trying to politically abolish sex and bullying the many women who object? Answer: Because ‘Trans Liberation’ isn’t actually ‘Trans Liberation.’ It’s ‘Trans Validation.’ And what ‘Trans Validation’ demands is that we all collude with you that sex does not exist.)

Quite so. “Validation” is not a reasonable political goal in the first place, especially when what we are supposed to validate is an absurd fiction. As I’ve said long past the point of tedium, there is no “right” to be confirmed or believed or “validated” as something one is not. If anything it’s the other way around – we all have a right not to be compelled to affirm lies. I can accept that some men are acutely uncomfortable with being male and can relieve their discomfort by thinking of themselves as female. That doesn’t violate our understanding of the world. But accepting that acute discomfort with being male equals literally being female is a different thing altogether and, like Alice, I can’t believe that. Even if I try I can’t. The most I can do is echo it, and I think there are good reasons not to echo lies, and there are many good reasons not to echo that one. The fact that women are women, and only women are women, and we have not achieved full liberation from male dominance yet, is one such good reason.

Jane goes into the whole thing in detail, with her usual panache.

Oh gee, some House Republicans are unhappy about Blagojevich’s commutation.

Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich profusely thanked Trump for commuting his prison sentence in a press conference today.

He would, wouldn’t he.

“We want to express our most profound and everlasting gratitude to President Trump,” said Blagojevich, appearing alongside his family. “How do you properly thank someone who’s given you back the freedom that was stolen from you?”

Says the guy who wanted to sell Obama’s Senate seat for $$$.

But others are less thrilled about Blagojevich’s commutation, considering he was caught on tape trying to sell a Senate seat.

A group of House Republicans from Illinois released a statement yesterday calling Blagojevich “the face of public corruption” in the state and saying they were “disappointed” by Trump’s decision.

Gee. If only he’d been impeached…

Sure, Hogan Gidley. Whatever you say.

Aaron Rupar at Vox 9 days ago:

President Donald Trump is campaigning on criminal justice reform efforts that reduce sentences for nonviolent offenders, while suggesting he’d like the American justice system to work more like ones in authoritarian countries where drug dealers are executed after “fair but quick” trials.

Well, exectution is a reduced sentence in a way…

Just days after his Super Bowl ad and State of the Union speech highlighted his support for legislation that makes a modest effort to reduce prison sentences at the federal level, Trump on Monday said the best way to further reduce the quantity of fentanyl in the US is to follow China’s lead.

“States with a very powerful death penalty on drug dealers don’t have a drug problem,” Trump said during a White House event with governors. “I don’t know that our country is ready for that, but if you look throughout the world, the countries with a powerful death penalty — death penalty — with a fair but quick trial, they have very little if any drug problem. That includes China.”

…

It should be noted that Trump’s claim about China and other authoritarian countries having “very little if any drug problem” is false. Records from the Chinese government indicate that there are more than 2.5 million officially registered drug users in the country, and that the total has increased significantly in recent years. (The real numbers are likely much higher since not all drug users have registered with the state.)

I bet they haven’t. Anyway, increase, decrease, who cares – let’s just execute people we don’t like. It’s good for the mood.

Mo transitions.

J and M on Patreon

Who is Joe Grogan? According to his Twitter bio:

Assistant to the President & Director of the Domestic Policy Council Tweets may be archived: http://wh.gov/privacy

Which is kind of creepy since he apparently thinks of most of us as an occupying enemy.

Power swing? What does that mean – that Trump and his goons will be shooting at people?

God I wish this were over.

Brendan O’Neill is wrong about most things but not about the hot new trend of pretending reality can be altered by saying a magic word or two.

Imagine if a politician went on TV and said ‘The Earth is flat’. Or ‘Man didn’t really land on the Moon, you know’. We would worry about that politician’s fitness for public life. Well, Dawn Butler has just done the trans equivalent of that. She appeared on Good Morning Britain yesterday and said babies are born without a sex.

There are a lot of things you could say that about. Babies are born without a language. Babies are born without a religion. Babies are born without a driver’s license. Babies are born without a political affiliation. Babies are born without a list of top 10 movies. But a sex? No.

Last week, a group called the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights issued a purge-like document insisting that everyone in the Labour party bow down to the mantra that ‘trans women are women’ and ‘trans men are men’ or risk being branded a transphobic bigot and booted out of the party.

You would think the Labour Party would be a little less eager to shun people who don’t believe men are women than, say, Freethought Blogs.

To put this bluntly, this means if you do not accept that someone with a penis and a beard who calls himself Sharon is a woman — a complete woman, as much as your mother, wife or sister is a woman — then you are a hateful creature who has no place in the Labour party.

And here we are roughly reminded that Brendan O’Neill is wrong about most things. He apparently assumes that women don’t read, or at least don’t read the Spectator. It’s not just your mother, wife or sister who is a woman, Brendan; some eccentric people are actually women themselves. Amazing, isn’t it?

Still, he does say some necessary things.

We need to recognise the seriousness of all this. A senior Labour figure is flat-out denying scientific truth on national TV. Another senior Labour figure is proposing putting male rapists into close, walled quarters with vulnerable women. This is backward thinking. It feels like a kind of hysteria, where otherwise sensible people are saying things that are clearly untrue and even unhinged.

Rather like the alien abduction thing, except that this is political, and doing more harm to women and girls every day.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

The Nation piece the ACLU shared is by Dave Zirin, who does not have any personal stake in whether or not girls and women can continue to compete against other girls and women without an admixture of some boys and men who “identify as” women. He’ll be fine either way.

Naturally his piece reflects that indifference.

There is a right-wing campaign afoot using the presence of transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming women in sports as a stalking horse to attack the already limited and precarious civil rights held by the trans community.

That’s just a lie about “gender nonconforming women.” Nobody objects to gender nonconforming women in sport or on women’s teams. Nobody.

Around the country, legislation is being introduced aimed at keeping high school trans athletes off the playing field.

Again: no. Keeping male high school trans athletes out of girls’ competitions.

Three cisgender high school girls—Selina Soule, Chelsea Mitchell, Alanna Smith—and their mothers put their names on a suit against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference’s policy that allows trans girls to compete in races with cisgender female opponents. In their suit, they misgender two track and field competitors, saying that it is time to call for an end to “boys displacing girls in competitive track events in Connecticut.”

So man Dave Zirin is saying that it’s more important not to “misgender” two boys who say they are girls than it is to let girls compete against girls.

But don’t worry, he gave Chase Strangio three long paragraphs to explain why girls don’t have any right to compete against girls.

The ACLU is still at it.

The image doesn’t really help them make their case – it comes across as a threat rather than a brave expression of solidarity. Miller and Yearwood are both conspicuously much bigger than the girls on the girls’ team, so the image just looks as if they’re going to run over us.

The purification continues.

And what are transphobes? Whatever the loudest trans activist says they are, of course.

So feminist women who are “ideological” in the sense of continuing to think that women are women and men are not women should be expelled.

And imprisoned?

It gets so wearying, watching political figures – people who directly affect our lives in many ways, or who aspire to – mouthing the nonsense as if it were just ordinary fact-based language. The weariness washed over me reading about Rebecca Long-Bailey’s “clarification” in the New Statesman:

Rebecca Long-Bailey’s team has clarified the Labour leadership contender’s position on same-sex spaces and the Equality Act 2010 to the New Statesman following her interview with Andrew Marr yesterday.

Long-Bailey supports reform of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) to allow for trans people to self-identify as their preferred gender, as do all the candidates for the Labour leadership. Her team has clarified, however, that she would not reform the 2010 Equality Act, as has been reported following her interview with Marr.

In the increasingly heated debate over trans rights, confusion is widespread over the difference between what is covered by proposed reforms to the GRA to allow self-identification, as backed by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and current provisions in the Equality Act.

The Equality Act identifies “gender reassignment”  (i.e. being trans: having a gender identify that is different to that assigned to you at birth) as a protected characteristic…

That’s the bit. This is government we’re talking about, and we’re having to take seriously people’s positions on “having a gender identify that is different to that assigned to you at birth.” That’s not a government thing! It’s as if hopeful government-people were talking solemnly about what fantasies we’re allowed to have and what others are strictly forbidden. “Gender identity” that differs from sex is not a real thing that government needs to protect or banish. It’s exhausting seeing adults echoing solemn platitudes about it as if it were real as mud.

Jo Bartosch writes:

The markers of masculinity and femininity are not ‘inside us’, as internal essences which we express, and then demand that the outside world recognise as our true selves. Rather, gender identities surround us, in the messages, images and expectations we are born and then socialised into, as social animals. We may be born male or female, but we become feminine or masculine.

That. It’s one reason it’s so annoying when people drone on about their inner sense of being the sex they’re not – this clueless, childish lack of awareness of socialization. How can anybody possibly know that her/his “feeling” about something external and factual is 100% internal as opposed to being a product of many years of being socially embedded? How can people possibly know their “gender” comes from within unless they’ve been raised without social media, tv, radio, movies, books, education…friends, siblings, parents, human contact of any kind? They can’t. There is no pure Within for people raised among other people. The self is always mediated by other selves. The cult of the self is a dead end.

The words we use to describe ourselves and others rest on a consensus as to their meaning. Male or female, like short or tall, or black or white, are words that reference an objective, shared reality. The moment we give in to those who insist they identify as such and such, we violate that linguistic consensus and sense of shared reality.

A different aspect of the same point. We can’t have a pure uncontaminated self unless we’re raised by ants, and we can’t have a personal language unless we want to communicate only to our precious uncontaminated selves.

Hopeless.

That’s Julia Long asking the question.

Lisa Nandy says firmly “I believe fundamentally in people’s right to self-ID.”

She doesn’t though. She doesn’t believe in people’s right to self-identify as Lisa Nandy for instance (apart from the few people who really are named Lisa Nandy). She doesn’t believe in people’s right to self-identify as the rightful occupants of her house. She doesn’t believe in people’s right to self-identify as the owners of her car. She doesn’t believe in people’s right to self-identify as the MP for her constituency. She doesn’t believe in people’s right to self-identify as the prime minister, the mayor of London, her doctor, the director general of the UN, her cousins, the head of the Bank of England, the pilot of the plane she’s about to board…and so on. She doesn’t. It would be batty and unsafe to believe in such a right, and that’s why there is no such right. We all have the right to fantasize however we like, but that doesn’t translate to a blanket right to “self-identify” and be endorsed as such by all the world.

At 2:33:

2:33: But I think if you deny the right of trans people to exist, and you deny their very basic human rights, then no meaningful dialogue is possible at all.

But nobody is denying anyone’s right to exist.

Lisa Nandy is Lisa Nandy and not Andrew Windsor. It’s not denying her right to exist to say that, and it still wouldn’t be even if she “identified as” Andrew Windsor – not least because such a right would violate the rights of Andrew Windsor. We can imagine or pretend (privately) or dream that we are something we’re not, but we can’t enforce our imaginings on anyone else.

Nandy tells a story of a “girl” in her constituency who has been transitioning for two years and what a difficult process it is, then says she will never say anything that would make that “girl” feel bad. It’s quite ok to make a whole population of women feel bad though. The end of her story got a round of applause.

Sigh. Yeah.

Snerk.