Andrew Sabiski is out.

Andrew Sabisky, who was brought into Downing Street by Johnson’s senior aide Dominic Cummings as part of his appeal for “misfits and weirdos”, became the subject of intense media scrutiny after details emerged of his views on subjects ranging from black people’s IQs to whether benefits claimants should be encouraged to have fewer children.

But amid mounting criticism within the Conservative party after No 10 stood by the appointment, Sabisky said that he would be stepping down as a “contractor” to No 10.

He tweeted: “The media hysteria about my old stuff online is mad but I wanted to help [the government] not be a distraction. Accordingly I’ve decided to resign as a contractor. I hope No 10 hires more [people with] good geopolitical forecasting track records and that media learn to stop selective quoting.”

If he’d been “controversial” but clever it would be one thing, but no.

One Conservative MP from a BME background said: “I’m not necessarily against hiring intellectually interesting people with sometimes controversial views, but this guy just doesn’t seem very smart, and if you are not very smart and at the very least appear bigoted that cannot be a good look for the party. By all means we should be against ultra-woke nonsense, but we should also stand against alt-right nonsense too.”

Especially from people who don’t seem very smart.

Dr Adam Rutherford, a geneticist and author, accused Sabisky and Cummings of being “bewitched by science, without having made the effort to understand the areas he is invoking, nor its history”.

He said the “moral repugnance” of the remarks was “overwhelming”, adding: “I am all for scientifically minded people advising government … [but] this resembles the marshalling of misunderstood or specious science into a political ideology. The history here is important, because this process is exactly what happened at the birth of scientific racism and the birth of eugenics.”

Away with all this emotionalism. The only issue is whether it would “work” or not.

I guess we’ll have to start paying attention to this Andrew Sabisky fella.

Downing Street has refused to condemn controversial past remarks on pregnancies, eugenics and race reportedly made by a new adviser.

This appears to be why Dawkins was musing aloud about eugenics yesterday, with such stimulating results.

Labour said Andrew Sabisky should be sacked for suggesting black people had lower average IQs than white people and compulsory contraception could prevent “creating a permanent underclass”.

Compulsory contraception for…whom? The parents of the future permanent underclass? How would he know which those were, exactly? Cue Dawkins explaining that it would totally work and we shouldn’t confuse that fact with whether it’s a good idea or not.

Mr Sabisky, appointed after the PM’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings called for “misfits and weirdos” to apply for jobs in Downing Street, has been contacted by the BBC for comment.

Define “misfits and weirdos.” Be sure to include “according to whom?” and “in what context?”. Show your work. Cite your sources.

Donald Ayer was a Deputy Attorney General under George Bush 1 and he sees how crooked Barr is. It’s pathetic that Trump’s army pretend they don’t.

Beginning in March with his public whitewashing of Robert Mueller’s report, which included powerful evidence of repeated obstruction of justice by the president, Barr has appeared to function much more as the president’s personal advocate than as an attorney general serving the people and government of the United States. Among the most widely reported and disturbing events have been Barr’s statements that a judicially authorized FBI investigation amounted to “spying” on the Trump campaign, and his public rejection in December of the inspector general’s considered conclusion that the Russia probe was properly initiated and overseen in an unbiased manner. Also quite unsettling was Trump’s explicit mention of Barr and Rudy Giuliani in the same breath in his July 25 phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, as individuals the Ukrainian president should speak with regarding the phony investigation that Ukraine was expected to publicly announce.

It’s all way more like being a crime boss’s lawyer than like being a nation’s legal supervisor.

Then there’s the whole thing about launching his own investigations for highly trump-facing reasons.

When Barr initiated a second, largely redundant investigation of the FBI Russia probe in May, denominated it criminal, and made clear that he is personally involved in carrying it out, many eyebrows were raised.

And many “fuck”s were articulated.

But this past week has taken the biscuit.

The evenhanded conduct of the prosecutions of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn by experienced Department of Justice attorneys have been disrupted at the 11th hour by the attorney general’s efforts to soften the consequences for the president’s associates. More generally, it appears that Barr has recently identified a group of lawyers whom he trusts and put them in place to oversee and second-guess the work of the department’s career attorneys on a broader range of cases.

The “but Trump’s tweets” interruption changed none of that, it was just Barr pretending to be not dirty.

Bad as they are, these examples are more symptoms than causes of Barr’s unfitness for office. The fundamental problem is that he does not believe in the central tenet of our system of government—that no person is above the law. In chilling terms, Barr’s own words make clear his long-held belief in the need for a virtually autocratic executive who is not constrained by countervailing powers within our government under the constitutional system of checks and balances.  

It’s a hell of an eccentric thing to believe, for someone raised in a country that preens itself on being not a monarchy. Why would he think one person’s judgment is always and everywhere preferable to that of several? Why would he trust our weird election system, where empty prairie states have more say than crowded industrial/agricultural states, to pick one human who can be trusted with all that unfettered power?

Barr would make real Nixon’s vision that if the president does it, it may not be challenged by the Department of Justice, or from any other agency of the executive branch. But Barr’s efforts to place the president above the law go far beyond foreclosing interference through checks that might arise within his own branch. His department has been very active, and he has personally been quite vocal, in working to cripple the traditional checks and balances on presidential prerogatives that arise from the distinct, co-equal roles of Congress and the courts.

Read the whole thing.

No shit, Sherlock.

That’s right, I don’t think trans girls are girls. I think they’re boys who think they “feel like” girls or feel better thinking of themselves as girls or various other explanations of that kind. I don’t think any of that is the same as literally being a girl. I also don’t think there’s anything surprising or weird in my view on the matter.

I also think there are some “trans girls” who are simply pretending in order to play their sport in competition with girls instead of boys, because they become instant winners and record-breakers that way. Yes, I damn well do think that’s unfair. I also think it’s unfair even if the boy really does think he feels like a girl. I think that because it’s true.

Go ahead, “Chase,” be shocked.

Good grief.

The Washington Post suggests that Trump influences people:

Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered “Ban Muslims” at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle-schoolers linked arms, imitating the president’s proposed border wall as they refused to let nonwhite students pass. In Ohio, another group of middle-schoolers surrounded a mixed-race sixth-grader and, as she confided to her mother, told the girl: “This is Trump country.”

Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

It would be very strange if it were otherwise, since children don’t live in a bubble sealed off from media and other people. Of course some children imitate Trump.

“It’s gotten way worse since Trump got elected,” said Ashanty Bonilla, 17, a Mexican American high school junior in Idaho who faced so much ridicule from classmates last year that she transferred. “They hear it. They think it’s okay. The president says it. . . . Why can’t they?”

This is why I hate his Twitter performance so much, and why I pay so much attention to it. It’s not inert. It’s poisoning everything, probably for years or decades into the future.

Asked about Trump’s effect on student behavior, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham noted that first lady Melania Trump — whose “Be Best” campaign denounces online harassment — had encouraged kids worldwide to treat one another with respect.

Also, there are reindeer in Lapland. Grisham’s reply is contemptuous in its irrelevance. Kids worldwide don’t pay any attention to Melania Trump, and Melania Trump’s malevolent husband vomits his hatreds on Twitter many times every day. Melania Trump’s saying something bland about respect doesn’t make so much as a dent in Trump’s avalanche of bile.

And it’s not just kids.

Three weeks into the 2018-19 school year, Miracle Slover’s English teacher, she alleges, ordered black and Hispanic students to sit in the back of the classroom at their Fort Worth high school.

At the time, Miracle was a junior. Georgia Clark, her teacher at Amon Carter-Riverside, often brought up Trump, Miracle said. He was a good person, she told the class, because he wanted to build a wall.

“Every day was something new with immigration,” said Miracle, now 18, who has a black mother and a mixed-race father. “That Trump needs to take [immigrants] away. They do drugs, they bring drugs over here. They cause violence.”

Make racism great again.

Some students tried to film Clark, and others complained to administrators, but none of it made a difference, Miracle said. Clark, an employee of the Fort Worth system since 1998, kept talking.

Still, Miracle said, school officials took no action until six weeks later, when Clark, 69, tweeted at Trump — in what she thought were private messages — requesting help deporting undocumented immigrants in Fort Worth schools. The posts went viral, drawing national condemnation. Clark was fired.

But most teachers don’t make that mistake, and they don’t get fired.

Maybe they should just drug them, or lock them up?

News from New Zealand:

Girls who want to wear pants or shorts at a Southland high school have to see a guidance counsellor first.

James Hargest College in Invercargill is in the process of updating its uniform but in the meantime, girls who want to wear unisex pants or shorts must have it cleared by their parents. To do that, they are required to visit a counsellor.

But wearing trousers is just…wearing trousers. I do it every day without any counseling at all.

Principal Andy Wood said the talk with a guidance counsellor first was to make sure they had “thought through the possible reactions of other kids” if they wore the pants or shorts. He did not expand on what those reactions might be.

Has Principal Andy Wood been outside at any time over the past 100 years or so? Because girls in trousers are really not such an unusual sight now.

H/t Rob

Former DoJ officials issued a statement calling on William Barr to resign.

We, the undersigned, are alumni of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) who have collectively served both Republican and Democratic administrations. Each of us strongly condemns President Trump’s and Attorney General Barr’s interference in the fair administration of justice.

As former DOJ officials, we each proudly took an oath to support and defend our Constitution and faithfully execute the duties of our offices. The very first of these duties is to apply the law equally to all Americans. This obligation flows directly from the Constitution, and it is embedded in countless rules and laws governing the conduct of DOJ lawyers. The Justice Manual — the DOJ’s rulebook for its lawyers — states that “the rule of law depends on the evenhanded administration of justice”; that the Department’s legal decisions “must be impartial and insulated from political influence”; and that the Department’s prosecutorial powers, in particular, must be “exercised free from partisan consideration.”

And those aren’t just polite formulas that DoJ officials are free to ignore – they’re rules that they are required to follow.

All DOJ lawyers are well-versed in these rules, regulations, and constitutional commands. They stand for the proposition that political interference in the conduct of a criminal prosecution is anathema to the Department’s core mission and to its sacred obligation to ensure equal justice under the law.

And yet, President Trump and Attorney General Barr have openly and repeatedly flouted this fundamental principle, most recently in connection with the sentencing of President Trump’s close associate, Roger Stone, who was convicted of serious crimes. The Department has a long-standing practice in which political appointees set broad policies that line prosecutors apply to individual cases. That practice exists to animate the constitutional principles regarding the even-handed application of the law. Although there are times when political leadership appropriately weighs in on individual prosecutions, it is unheard of for the Department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors, who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President, as Attorney General Barr did in the Stone case. It is even more outrageous for the Attorney General to intervene as he did here — after the President publicly condemned the sentencing recommendation that line prosecutors had already filed in court.

Barr has to know this. I still keep wondering how he squares it with thinking of himself as good and right – which I’m guessing is how he does think of himself.

Such behavior is a grave threat to the fair administration of justice. In this nation, we are all equal before the law. A person should not be given special treatment in a criminal prosecution because they are a close political ally of the President. Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies.

We welcome Attorney General Barr’s belated acknowledgment that the DOJ’s law enforcement decisions must be independent of politics; that it is wrong for the President to interfere in specific enforcement matters, either to punish his opponents or to help his friends; and that the President’s public comments on DOJ matters have gravely damaged the Department’s credibility. But Mr. Barr’s actions in doing the President’s personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words. Those actions, and the damage they have done to the Department of Justice’s reputation for integrity and the rule of law, require Mr. Barr to resign. But because we have little expectation he will do so, it falls to the Department’s career officials to take appropriate action to uphold their oaths of office and defend nonpartisan, apolitical justice.

For these reasons, we support and commend the four career prosecutors who upheld their oaths and stood up for the Department’s independence by withdrawing from the Stone case and/or resigning from the Department. Our simple message to them is that we — and millions of other Americans — stand with them. And we call on every DOJ employee to follow their heroic example and be prepared to report future abuses to the Inspector General, the Office of Professional Responsibility, and Congress; to refuse to carry out directives that are inconsistent with their oaths of office; to withdraw from cases that involve such directives or other misconduct; and, if necessary, to resign and report publicly — in a manner consistent with professional ethics — to the American people the reasons for their resignation. We likewise call on the other branches of government to protect from retaliation those employees who uphold their oaths in the face of unlawful directives. The rule of law and the survival of our Republic demand nothing less.

And then there’s an invitation to sign if you’re a former DoJ official, and a link to follow to do so. There are 1142 so far.

Originally a comment by Claire on It would totally work.

The only way to do it is to emulate how we breed animals and plants for specific traits: you have to very carefully select for the traits you want and literally force them to breed. People wouldn’t have any choice on who to breed with or indeed whether to breed at all. And any inferior offspring would be killed. It’s even more dystopian than Brave New World.

Anyway, electing for high intelligence would probably be in contradiction to docility. In authoritarian regimes, killing off the intellectuals is fundamental for a reason. You can’t have a docile herd without it. And we are not naturally herd animals, whereas most domesticated animals are. They’re easier to handle.

I’m not defending Dawkins here but I can see where he’s coming from in a way that would probably be lost on most people outside of biology. It’s easy for me to see this dispassionately, as Dawkins does, with humans as just another animal. Unlike Dawkins, I appreciate the concepts of sociology, anthropology, and psychology – humans (and some of the non-human primates) are not in fact quite like other animals. Although, for clarity, I don’t consider him a part of my field. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, not a geneticist. And frankly, not a particularly good one, just a loud one.

But most importantly, he’s wrong.

Francis Galton, who is considered one of the fathers of genetics and in more specific terms one of the pioneers of my specific field. He was a big fan of eugenics and was Darwin’s cousin. He spent years studying trait variation in populations and this led naturally (naturally at the time, this was the 19th century) to considering how to improve the stock of the human race. I won’t go into more detail because it’s a whole lecture series on its own but he actually invented a number of methods and approaches we still use today.

This is the context that Dawkins has stripped from this conversation. Twitter is not the right medium for this kind of discussion.

It’s an uncomfortable heritage (the irony of which is not lost on me). Those of us in population genetics, genetic epidemiology, and statistical genetics owe a lot to Galton, but some of his ideas were hideous. We have to accept that.

So, why are Dawkins and Galton wrong?

When we raise cattle for milk or pigs for meat or wheat for flour, we observe traits and deliberately select for the ones we want. But to do that, we have to account for the traits that come with that. Cattle raised for milk or meat would not survive in the outside world. Their biology has been distorted to the point that they are reliant on humans to support characteristics that evolution would otherwise select against.

The idea of breeding (or genetically engineering) a superior human is biological nonsense. You select for one trait, you’re selecting for and against a bunch of others and you never know what they are in advance. Most genes are pleiotropic (which means they have more than one function) and they interact, so it’s just impossible to engineer either by breeding or by engineering a “superior” human, whatever your metric of superior is. They wouldn’t be able to survive.

tl;dr Any species that can’t afford to be reliant on another’s care for survival cannot survive on its own. All species survive by being adaptable. A human herd bred for “superiority” would die off pretty quickly because evolution is no longer working with the environment of the outside world. The environment always wins.

I saw that “Dawkins” was trending on Twitter so I had to look.

But what is meant by “work” here? What is the “eu” in “eugenics”? What kind of “eu” are we talking about? What “facts” are we invoking?

He didn’t say. The tweet just stands alone, with nothing leading up to it and no elaboration following it. He did later respond to the fact that people responded though.

So the “eu” he has in mind is faster running or higher jumping?

If so…I still don’t see what his point is. The “could” in “we could breed” leaves out the fact that it would take a whole new arrangement of society to do that – which is to say no, actually, we couldn’t, unless you think we “could” also install a Brave New World type of social structure that would be stable for generations. It’s not true that we “could” do that for the simple reason that no woman is ever going to agree to gestate babies for the purpose of Higher Jumping.

Plus I still don’t see what his point is because who disagrees with what is apparently his basic point that it’s theoretically possible to breed humans for particular desired traits? It’s also theoretically possible to breed humans for food; we know that; it’s not really something we need to be told.

Even people who aren’t 100% “trans women are the most oppressed ever and you have to give them whatever they demand” are still desperately cautious about how much they’ll let women keep. Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian for instance:

When Nandy told a recent hustings that “trans women are women” there were whoops of delight. But ask around for women feeling alienated from Labour over this issue and they’re easily found.

Some are survivors of domestic violence who resent being told to “educate yourself”. Others are bewildered that decades of loyally knocking on doors seemingly hasn’t earned them the right to be heard. They long to hear someone defend what is still Labour’s official policy: promoting trans equality but defending powers in equality law that let organisations exclude trans women from all-female spaces in exceptional circumstances.

In exceptional circumstances? Women’s organizations should be required to include men (who say they are women) unless the circumstances are exceptional? We can’t just have women’s organizations as a matter of routine, because women need to organize and we have a right to organize as women? Being able to say men aren’t invited isn’t allowed unless we have a damn good reason, with other people deciding what “damn good” means?

That’s like saying labor unions have to include bosses in ordinary circumstances. It’s like saying LG organizations have to include straight people unless they have a damn good reason not to. It’s like saying women don’t have a right to organize, basically.

Yet it’s still not too late to find common ground. No compassionate human being should want a woman who has been raped or brutalised to feel traumatised all over again by sharing counselling or refuge services with someone they perceive as a threat. Even a person who poses no danger whatsoever can inadvertently frighten a traumatised person, if something about them – a sound, a scent, a habit – triggers flashbacks. But nobody should want trans people to feel unsafe or cast out, and barring a trans woman from women’s services seems the cruellest of personal repudiations.

No, it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. I can think of much crueller ones. It seems at most disappointing for men who want to be accepted as women. Women need women’s services in a way that men don’t, even men who say they are women. Being a man who thinks of himself as a woman is not the same kind of thing as being a woman, and all this pressure to pretend it is is just more oppression and I’m sick of it.

Some refuges have now accepted trans women (excellent risk assessment helps, and careful laying out of accommodation). Some schools absorb gender-questioning pupils without fuss; teens queue happily for mixed Topshop changing rooms; and with time, maybe we’ll wonder why unisex loos were ever an issue.

Because by then men will have stopped raping and molesting and spying on women? Hahaha that’s funny, of course not. So why then? No reason, just a pious hope that ignores the reality of being (not pretending to be) a woman.

Huh. Trump is basically invading US cities he considers insufficiently harsh to immigrants.

THE TRUMP administration will send specially trained officers from the southern border to so-called sanctuary cities to help with immigration enforcement operations in a clear escalation of President Donald Trump’s ongoing conflict with localities that limit law-enforcement cooperation with immigration authorities.

Not specially trained in the sense of being humane, scrupulous, cautious, but in the sense of being extra violent.

The officers will be sent by Customs and Border Protection, the agency which houses Border Patrol, to aid in arrest operations carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Operations will take place in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Boston, New Orleans, Detroit and Newark, New Jersey, according to The New York Times, which first reported the development.

Not Seattle. We’re a sanctuary city. Maybe they don’t like rain.

The officers being deployed include those assigned to specialized tactical teams within CBP, like the elite Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or BORTAC.

BORTAC agents have training similar to special forces personnel and often wield specialized equipment. They carry out high-risk security operations along the border, such as raiding drug stash houses or targeting individuals known to be violent.

In other words, they’re an invading army. Awesome.

The move to send the agents to aid ICE appears in part aimed at sending a message to immigrants in the 10 cities where operations are scheduled to take place and could escalate what are otherwise normal enforcement actions.

And the message is: “we hate you and want to unleash violence on you so that you will go away and never come back.”

The border agents will reportedly be used for backup on ICE operations and providing a show of force.

In case we’ve been coming across as a bunch of pacifist sissies.

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph – the Telegraph, please note, not the Guardian, even though she’s a Guardian columnist. The Guardian must have refused to publish it.

I am well aware that Twitter is not the real world. But then nor is the Labour Party. Out of all the issues that might be bothering the leadership contenders – anti-Semitism, a reconnection with lost voters, a plausible response to Boris Johnson – instead, a bizarre set of pledges has been issued on trans rights.

Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey have signed it. It suggests the expulsion of “transphobic” members from the party and says that organisations such as Woman’s Place and the LGB Alliance, which are concerned to keep same sex spaces for women, are hate groups that have to be fought.

In other words Labour has said a big “fuck off” to women.

But this is not actually about trans folk at all. It is about a denial that women need safe spaces, whether that’s in prison or refuges.

That and more. It’s about a denial that women are oppressed or marginalized, it’s about barely disguised hatred of women, it’s about expecting women to give way to everyone else, it’s about hostility and contempt and venom that doesn’t have to be hidden any more.

Feminism and gay rights didn’t happen via Momentum. Some of us are aware that competing sets of rights may clash and we need to talk. I merely note that this discussion is always about trans women and not trans men.

Why is that? And who is the enemy of trans people? Who rapes and kills them? Feminists? Or men? The last time I saw threatening male behaviour was outside the Woman’s Place meeting at Labour conference.

Enough of us have had enough of being told what a woman’s place in the Labour Party is. We will go elsewhere. We already have.

And we won’t be handing out sandwiches.

Walter Shaub thinks Trump’s strong-arming of New York is not getting nearly enough attention.

Or (or and) it could be that in the firehose of bad shit that Trump sends out every day it becomes very difficult to spot the top maximum utmost worst things.

Trump does think he is in effect a king. Someone surely must have told him that in fact the powers of a president are not those of a king, but he equally surely must have paid no attention.

And Barr is his enabler.

Barr was once seen as a potential check on Trump’s overt desire to take command of the justice department, deploying its investigators and prosecutors at his whim and his will. But this week, critics warn, the attorney general has been revealed as an eager accomplice in eroding norms meant to insulate the criminal justice system from political interference, threatening the bedrock principle of equality before the law.

I’m not sure who once saw Barr as a potential check on Trump’s overt desire to take command of the justice department; the way I remember it there were some faint hopes that he might be more principled than Sessions (let alone Whitaker), but also plenty of pessimism.

“We fought a revolution against kingly prerogative,” said [Paul] Rosenzweig. “At its most extreme, Trump’s actions post-impeachment in the last week reflect his belief that he really has, as he said, an absolute right to intervene anywhere in the executive branch. And there’s a word for that.

“People with absolute rights are kings.”

And presidents don’t bounce around shouting that they have an absolute right to do X…unless they’re Trump. He’s a first that way; he’s the first to be that unselfconsciously authoritarian and that reckless about saying so, and he’s the first to be historically and institutionally illiterate enough to think it’s true.

“Bill Barr has turned the job of attorney general and the political appointee layer at the top of the justice department on its head,” said Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under Bill Clinton.

“In past administrations of both political parties, the function of the political appointees at the justice department has been to insulate the rest of the department from political pressure. And Bill Barr instead has become the conduit for that political pressure.”

All for…what? An end to abortion rights? A permanent Republican stranglehold on elections? Lower taxes for billionaires? Copper mines in all the national parks?

Barr has not been untouched by the turbulence of the last week. Reported threats of additional resignations drove him on Thursday to grant a TV interview in which he complained that Trump’s tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job” and vowed: “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.”

A Trump spokesperson said the president’s feelings were not hurt. Barr was said to have warned the White House of what he was going to say.

And nobody believed a word of it.

The interview was met with outrage and eye-rolls among critics who saw a wide divergence between what Barr said and everything else he has been doing.

“I think Bill Barr is shrewd, deliberate, smart, calculating, careful, and full of it,” tweeted the former US attorney Preet Bharara.

The real Barr, critics say, has a 12-month track record as a spearhead for Trump’s attack on justice, beginning with public lies about the report of special counsel Robert Mueller and running through his intervention in the case of Roger Stone.

In short he’s a hack and a very bad man.