Grifter Princess Ivanka has the gall to say her crime family is not profiting from Donnie’s presidency.

Ivanka Trump brushed off criticism that her family has profited off the presidency and said Friday a big difference between her family and Democrat Joe Biden’s is that President Donald Trump amassed his fortune before he entered politics while Biden’s wealth is “derivative” of his time in office…

Ivanka Trump, a White House adviser, pushed back against nearly three years of ethics complaints and lawsuits accusing the Trumps of trying to turn the presidency to their financial advantage.

His hotel a short walk from the White House? The one where Barr throws expensive parties? And foreign governments book stays? His golf course in western Ireland where Pence stayed when he had meetings in Dublin? Trump shouting on Twitter that everyone should read Junior’s book? That kind of turning the presidency to their financial advantage?

Government watchdogs have criticized Trump for unethically mixing official business with promotion of his own interests.

Trump is the first president in modern history who has not walled himself off from his business holdings. He makes frequent trips to his for-profit golf clubs, collects dues at his members-only properties and hosts fundraisers and foreign delegations at hotels that bear his family’s name.

I guess the princess means aside from all that.

The NY Times reports:

Not long before the Ukrainian president was inaugurated in May, an associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s journeyed to Kiev to deliver a warning to the country’s new leadership, a lawyer for the associate said.

The associate, Lev Parnas, told a representative of the incoming government that it had to announce an investigation into Mr. Trump’s political rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., and his son, or else Vice President Mike Pence would not attend the swearing-in of the new president, and the United States would freeze aid, the lawyer said.

The claim by Mr. Parnas, who is preparing to share his account with impeachment investigators, challenges the narrative of events from Mr. Trump and Ukrainian officials that is at the core of the congressional inquiry. It also directly links Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, to threats of repercussions made to the Ukrainians, something he has strenuously denied.

But Mr. Parnas’s account, while potentially significant, is being contradicted on several fronts. None of the people involved dispute that the meeting occurred, but Mr. Parnas stands alone in saying the intention was to present an ultimatum to the Ukrainian leadership.

This is all so bizarre. Rudy Giuliani is not a government employee, he’s not part of Trump’s administration, which means among other things he’s not subject to any of the oversight and vetting such an employee faces – but it also means he has absolutely no business running around the world trying to extort favors from foreign heads of state, and the same goes for his “associates.” What is some random private citizen doing threatening the president of Ukraine?? It’s nuts.

It seems Don Junior was booed out of his own book event because he’s…not right-wing enough? Jeez, conservatives are so easily triggered. Pass me a hanky.

Donald Trump Jr. apparently failed to grasp the hypocrisy in refusing to answer questions for an event to promote his new book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us, which is dedicated to mocking liberals and their so-called political correctness.

But the president’s eldest son’s missteps were not lost on the audience at UCLA on Sunday, where his own supporters, frustrated with the lack of a Q&A opportunity, filled the event with incessant booing.

So then his girlfriend, a former Fox “News” performer, taunted them with not being able to get a date.

The Guardian has more:

At first, Trump and Guilfoyle tried to ignore the discontent, which originated with a fringe group of America Firsters who believe the Trump administration has been taken captive by a cabal of internationalists, free-traders, and apologists for mass immigration.

What about the white mice? Don’t they get a credit?

When the shouting would not subside, Trump Jr tried – and failed – to argue that taking questions from the floor risked creating soundbites that leftwing social media posters would abuse and distort. Nobody was buying that.

In minutes, the entire argument put forward by the president’s son – that he was willing to engage in dialogue but that it was the left that refused to tolerate free speech – crumbled.

“I’m willing to listen…” Trump began.

“Q and A! Q and A!” the audience yelled back.

“We’ll go into the lion’s den and talk …” Trump tried again.

“Then open the Q and A!” came the immediate response.

Guilfoyle, forced to shout to make herself heard, told students in the crowd: “You’re not making your parents proud by being rude and disruptive.”

Then they left. So the question is…were they triggered?

Julie Bindel wrote about Sophie Wilson and Spearmint Rhino a week ago, starting from the humiliation of Labour under Corbyn:

Sophie Wilson, a 23-year-old Sheffield councillor who was last week selected as Jeremy Corbyn’s candidate for Rother Valley, has campaigned against feminists trying to close a notorious club, and for the “right” of women to “choose” to work there.

Last year, Wilson was carpeted by Sheffield City Council after a complaint about her online conduct was partially upheld. She had tweeted that the women protesting the existence of lap dancing clubs in the city — many of whom are survivors of sexual exploitation — were “trashy SWERFS”. Another tweet read: “SWERFS and TERFS are usually one in (sic) the same, aren’t they?”

So this is a (very young and thus inexperienced) woman calling feminist women “trashy” because they oppose treating women as receptacles for men, selected as a Labour candidate. They couldn’t find someone who doesn’t call feminist women trashy? Really?

Wilson joined a protest earlier this year to save the Spearmint Rhino club when its licence was under threat. Feminists campaigning for its closure had released film footage, obtained covertly, which allegedly showed dancers “sexually touching customers”. The club, according to the campaigners, breached more than 200 regulations.

I have seen similar things at lap dancing clubs with my own eyes. In 2004 I visited a number of them, posing as the PA of a businessman who was persuaded to join him for a few drinks. I found that many of the clubs were fronts for prostitution, and that the women were routinely sexually harassed.

Being sexually harassed is empowering! If you’re paid for it. I guess.

Unfortunately for Sophie Wilson, she has a formidable opponent in Sammy Woodhouse, who, if Wilson is elected, would be her constituent. Woodhouse has in the past courageously spoken about the abuse she suffered at the hands of grooming gangs in her home town, and has published a book about her experiences, called Just a Child.

Woodhouse was failed by the authorities, but nevertheless put heart and soul into helping police and prosecutors nail the perpetrators of the biggest sex scandal of modern times: the Jay Report uncovered the abuse of 1,400 children in Rotherham.

Woodhouse doesn’t see sexual abuse as empowering.

“Fun feminists” have long supported the pro-prostitution lobby, buying the lies that prostitution can be “sexually liberating” for women, and this group somehow lends its voice to other campaigns against patriarchal control of our bodies. But prostitution, of which stripping is a part, is about the right of men to access women’s bodies, and to view and treat us as commodities.

Sammy Woodhouse in fact worked at Spearmint Rhino after she escaped the grooming gang, and she doesn’t see it the way Sophie Wilson does.

Lap dancing, she says, is anything but feminist: “Rotherham is known all over the world for its exploitation, and we have a woman standing who is in favour of exploitation,” she said. “That lot say it’s empowering. But let me tell you, there is nothing empowering in sitting on some sweaty man’s lap grinding into his dick.”

What Wilson is defending is unconscionable, for as Woodhouse put it: “If you put a bloke on a street corner selling girls, we call him a pimp. Put him in a suit and stick him in a licensed lap dance club and we call him a businessman. He’s just a pimp in a suit.”

I suppose Wilson would say that’s trashy talk.

Even Parents Magazine? What next, The Mainstream Herald? The Churchy Gazette? Middleground Digest?

Headline:

Mom’s Viral Post Celebrates That ‘Some Women, Some Non-Binary People, & Some Men’ Get Their Periods

Yunh hunh, and some bats make webs, some spiders echolocate, some tigers knit, some orcas play Bach cello suites, some houses are made of cotton candy, some cars can climb trees, some hats can fill out tax forms – let’s see some viral posts celebrating that.

Last month, Always announced that the Venus symbol would be removed from their sanitary products’ packaging to be more inclusive of transgender and non-binary people. “For over 35 years Always has championed girls and women, and we will continue to do so,” Always’ parent company, Procter & Gamble said in a statement, according to NBC. “We’re also committed to diversity & inclusion and are on a continual journey to understand the needs of all of our consumers.” Now, a mom from Hull, England named Milly Bhaskara is furthering the conversation, showing parents how easy it is to introduce your L.O. to the concept that women aren’t the only people who menstruate.

Her L.O. is four. Of course you can introduce your L.O. age four to the concept that [your choice of bullshit here], because children age four believe what adults tell them. They don’t have anything to compare it to, they don’t have other information, and they don’t yet have brains mature enough to do skepticism.

Bhaskara—who boasts 173K followers and is known for her posts on mental health awareness and body acceptance—posted a super-cute photo of her 4-year-old son Eli holding a pin board sign that reads, “Some men have periods too. If I can get it, so can you.”

Super cute! Also not true! In fact complete and utter bullshit!

There are some women who call themselves trans men, and they can have periods (unless the blockers have prevented them), but that doesn’t mean men can. Men can’t.

The proud mom’s caption: “Some men have periods. Some non-binary people have periods. Some women have periods. Eli has been told about periods since he saw blood on my pants a couple of years ago. I didn’t use the language of women have periods because it’s not entirely inclusive.”

Bhaskara continued, “I told him that SOME women, SOME non-binary people and SOME men have periods. It was easy for him to accept as he hadn’t had to unlearn the engrained societal norm, but if a 4-year-old can grasp it, I’m sure most of us can have a crack at unlearning transphobic/misinformed norms and open our minds… ya think?”

That poor kid.

Janice Turner in The Times:

A friend told me his student daughter had become a feminist activist. Check out her Facebook page, he said. So I did, expecting posts on the gender pay gap or #MeToo. Instead I discovered the campaign to which she and her mates devoted their energy was to save the Sheffield branch of Spearmint Rhino.

Seriously? A lap-dancing club? Indeed, a multinational lap-dancing corporation, where men from London to Las Vegas can pay near-naked women to grind on their crotches in private booths. Spearmint Rhino, whose posters of strippers dressed in sexy uniforms for “naughty schoolgirl” parties were banned by the advertising watchdog, and which exists to flatter and feed the sexual entitlement of men, according to its founder John Gray.

Not just any old Spearmint Rhino either but Sheffield’s, where the council recorded 74 breaches of the licence and 145 of the club’s own code of conduct, including sexual touching and masturbation. Yet outside the club with placards, demanding the council ignore such violations, were women students.

I suppose all those breaches of the licence and the code of conduct were recorded by wicked SWERFs, right? Who else doesn’t want women exploited and put in danger? The Spearmint Rhino feminists told Sheffield council that stripping “plays a huge role in empowering women.” Hell yeah. Don’t go into law or engineering or politics, be a stripper. That’s where the real power is.

Among the club’s most vocal supporters was Sophie Wilson, 23, a Sheffield councillor and now the prospective Labour candidate for Rother Valley.

Given this constituency includes part of Rotherham, you’d expect Ms Wilson to be mindful of the town’s recent sexual abuse scandal, aware that 20 men were jailed for grooming, rape and trafficking, that her voters include some of the 1,500 female victims. These grotesque crimes, the ensuing cover-up and recriminations, have left a festering wound. No surprise that residents voted for a zero-tolerance policy on sexual entertainment venues: from next year Rotherham council won’t renew any strip club licences.

Yet instead of reaching out to victim groups, Ms Wilson has gone to war against one of Rotherham’s bravest survivors. Sammy Woodhouse described being raped and impregnated as a 14-year-old by Arshid Hussain, now jailed, in her memoir Just A Child.

…

Sammy Woodhouse is aghast that middle-class students believe lap-dancing clubs are empowering. Or that Sophie Wilson responded to Spearmint Rhino’s offer of a free night out as reward for saving their licence with an excited: “I’m up for it.” In response, Ms Wilson called Woodhouse — a Rother Valley voter — “SWERF trash”. It is hard to believe such an immature, insensitive person could be selected for a seat beset with complex problems. But the Rother Valley long-list compiled by Labour’s NEC excluded most local candidates. Ms Wilson was a Momentum choice.

That is blood-chillingly horrible.

Yet sadder than this betrayal of South Yorkshire voters by the party they have always trusted with power is the mindset of Spearmint Rhino feminists. Has the first generation raised on internet porn come to believe that sexual objectification is normal, even desirable? They call themselves “sex positive”, implying that women who oppose lap-dancing clubs ain’t getting any. (As if the sex trade has any respect for female pleasure.) They say lap dancers just need unionisation and for men to tip them well.

This, remember, is the #MeToo generation that calls a hand on a knee sexual assault and railed against entitled businessmen ogling hostesses at the Presidents Club charity ball last year. Yet it does not see that the narrative that gave Harvey Weinstein impunity to grab any passing starlet is played out in every £30 private dance. Wrapped up in their own narcissism and “identity” they are blind to the bigger picture. They are Spearmint Rhino’s useful feminist idiots. Ladies, you’ve been had.

A tale of the German Democratic Republic (aka the GDR aka East Germany) and doping:

40 years of the official GDR were done, the Berlin Wall was about to be dismantled to the sound of the scuttling feet of Stasi (secret police) operatives dashing for the archive and the shredder.

Thankfully, there was just too much to shred, too much to hide, too many notes to wipe from the slate of history. They included scribblings of the precise dosages of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs – some of them clinically trialled on human guinea pigs – that fuelled the GDR sports medals and records factory.

…

The Stasi kept files on about 5.6 million people. The archive of what survived runs to 111 km (69 miles) of files in total, about half of that kept at the Stasi Records Agency’s headquarters in Berlin, the rest at its 12 regional offices. It includes written documentation, photos, slides, film and sound recordings and stretches to samples of the sweat and body odour collected from the subjects of interrogation.

The archive includes vast tomes of information on State Research Plan 14:25, the systematic doping program that had its roots in the 1960s and was bolstered by the establishment of the ‘uM’ – unterstützende Mittel’ or supportive means – working group in 1974 in response to the 1972 advance of techniques to detect doping and their adoption by the International Olympic Committee at the dawn of realisation that cheating would be cancer to the Games.

The dawn? Of realization? The IOC didn’t think all along that cheating would be doubleplus ungood to the Games?

Men were doped too but the virilisation effect of Oral Turinabol and other steroid compounds that effectively turned girls and women into boys in sporting-performance terms (and, with further intervention, literally in some cases) meant that it was in women’s sport that we saw the most dramatic dominance of swimming ever witnessed in the history of the sport.

That history resonates today in various forms, including the addition of transgender male-to-female athletes excelling in women’s sport because of the physical advantages accrued from growing up as boys.

In other words, cheating. Cheating cheating cheating.

On 26 August 1993, after the former GDR had disbanded itself to accede to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990, records were opened and State Plan 14:25 confirmed: the Stasi, the GDR state secret police, supervised systematic doping of East German athletes from 1971 until reunification in 1990. Doping existed in other countries but the GDR was officially unique in so far as having a state plan designed to win in international sport as a way of saying ‘look how great our democratic republic and socialist/communist state is’.

The body and bulk of what was discovered is now held in places public and private in several countries, safe from the long arm of any single authority that may ver wish to suppress the truth. Some of that evidence was used in legal cases against coaches, doctors and others in the German doping trials of the late 1990s and subsequent compensation claims by athletes who suffered a spectrum of woes, from personal health, physical and psychological problems to the horrors of inheritance in the form of children born with club feet and a variety of other disabilities.

Yet now there’s a supposedly “progressive” movement that demands doping on demand for people who decide their “gender identity” has been mislabeled.

Oral Turinabol was just part of the poisonous cocktail of substances administered not only to medal-winning ‘ambassadors in tracksuits’ but to many who were never destined to make it beyond the Berlin Wall. Like the bulk of good but not world-class swimmers in the world, they were club swimmers – but with a dark difference; they served as human guinea pigs to test the effectiveness of substances that had never been clinically trailed in labs before b[e]ing administered to the athletes.

Now it’s trans people, especially children and adolescents, who are the guinea pigs.

More moles:

Former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley alleges that two of President Trump’s senior advisers tried to recruit her to secretly undermine the administration from the inside.

That’s Business Insider’s way of wording it.

In her explosive new memoir, Haley claims former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly attempted to bring her in to subvert the president, according to The Washington Post which obtained the book prior to its release.

Haley refused their attempts to convince her to “save the country,” noting Tillerson and Kelly were suspicious of and threatened by her relationship with the president. During her time in the administration, Haley demonstrated an “obligation to carry out [Trump’s] wishes since he was the one elected by voters,” wrote Washington Post reporter Anne Gearan.

See these are all different things. Undermining the administration is not the same as subverting the president is not the same as saving the country.

Also, it’s not true that Trump is the one elected by voters. He’s the one elected by the (grotesquely lopsided) Electoral College. The voters elected Clinton by more than three million. It’s accurate to say he was elected, it’s not accurate to say he was elected by voters.

“Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country,” Haley wrote in “With All Due Respect.”

Kelly and Tillerson are not great themselves, in fact Kelly is downright rotten, but they’re not the headlong disaster that Trump is.

Ray Blanchard interviwed at Quillette:

I published my early writings on autogynephilia in specialty journals with very small circulations. I intended them for a tiny readership of clinicians who specialized in the assessment and management of gender-dysphoric patients. However, this work attracted the attention of two individuals who decided to promote it more broadly, one online (Anne A. Lawrence) and one in a book (J. Michael Bailey). These efforts, especially the book, enraged three influential trans women—two of them senior academics—who attempted to get Bailey fired from his teaching position at Northwestern University for writing it. This campaign has been documented in detail by Alice D. Dreger, a medical historian. Paradoxically, the efforts of trans activists, then and today, to completely suppress any mention of autogynephilia in public discourse has resulted in an increased public awareness of it. I think the self-defeating behavior of trans activists has persisted because the idea of autogynephilia cuts too close to the bone. If the idea had no resonance with them, they would simply have ignored it, and the idea of autogynephilia would just be one of many forgotten hypotheses of gender identity disorder.

Subsequently other strange and unexpected (to me) events befell my notion of autogynephilia. Modern trans activists reframed transsexualism/transgenderism as a political problem rather than a clinical problem. The flat denial that autogynephilia exists became a canon of modern trans activism, trans activism become a sub-department of the Social Justice Movement, and the Social Justice Movement became a primary combatant in the ongoing, pervasive Culture Wars.

And that is the hell we are now living in. The flat denial that autogynephilia exists became a canon of modern trans activism, along with the flat assertion that trans women are women, and the accompanying dictat that failure to accept and echo that assertion is evil, the most evil evil possible, and deserving of ostracism and violence.

And that’s fucked up. No other branch of political activism is like that, because it’s nonsensical and thus tyrannical. To be an Approved Person you have to affirm falsehoods, and you have to keep on affirming them many times every day, and you have to bully and harass anyone who refuses to Affirm the Falsehoods, and you have to insist that trans women are the most marginalized vulnerable group in the universe. You have to “center” your politics, including your feminism, on men who fetishize themselves as women. How’s that working? Badly.

Jonathan Freedland on Labour and antisemitism.

For most progressive-minded, remain-leaning folk, is it even a dilemma? I’m not sure. To them the logic must seem simple and straightforward: they want to eject a cruel and useless government and stop Brexit, and that means denying Boris Johnson a majority and replacing him with Jeremy Corbyn, who will end austerity and hold a second referendum. Job done.

But it’s not that simple for him, much as he would like it to be.

The thought of it prompts in me, and the overwhelming majority of the community I grew up in, a fear that we have not known before.

I’m referring to Britain’s Jews who, for the first time in their history, have concluded that someone hostile to them is on the brink of taking democratic power. Yes, of course, not every single British Jew holds that view. But the most recent poll found that 87% regard Corbyn as an antisemite, meaning an anti-Jewish racist.

He lists some cringe-making examples of Corbyn’s antisemitism. (That sounds as if a “but” is imminent. It’s not. The examples make me cringe; no buts.) Labour has dismally failed to do enough about it.

We’re meant to cheer that Chris Williamson has been barred from standing again as an MP. But Jews remember that, even when Williamson’s penchant for egregious Jew-baiting was well known, Corbyn was still praising him. Just a few months ago, in fact, Corbyn called him “a very good, very effective Labour MP. He’s a very strong anti-racist campaigner. He is not antisemitic in any way.”

…

Plenty advise Jews to shelve their angst in return for a government that will stop Brexit (Jews are overwhelmingly pro-remain). In effect, Jews and their would-be allies are being told that some racism is, if not quite acceptable, then a price worth paying. That seems to have been the bargain struck with those Labour “moderates” who were once so admirably vocal in their denunciation of the leadership on this issue and who are now – minus Tom Watson – knocking on doors to put Corbyn in No 10: you’ve got your second referendum, now shut up about the Jews. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, to be part of a small community that can be so quickly cast aside for the supposed greater good.

I’m guessing it’s quite like being part of a large community that can be so quickly cast aside for the supposed greater good, by which I mean women. The smallness v largeness should make a difference, because surely they make a massive difference to the level of vulnerability, and yet…it doesn’t seem to be working that way.

But that’s a side note…except that it’s also a confirmation of “wtf lefty comrades, what are you doing??”

Many, Jews included, ask themselves how bad would it really be. What’s the worst that could happen? Of course this isn’t the 1930s and, despite the Sunday Telegraph’s front page, most Jews would not leave the country. But that the question is even in the air, that someone who sees Jews as not quite “us” – “they don’t understand English irony” – is deemed eligible to be prime minister, makes our presence here feel conditional and shaky. And, whether Corbyn makes it to Downing Street or not, to realise that the historic party of social justice in this country finds a little bit of racism acceptable for the sake of the larger cause, and that many millions of voters agree – well, that realisation contains its own heartbreak. It means that what we thought about this country wasn’t quite true.

I understand that to many, all this will sound overwrought. I’m afraid that Jewish history has made us that way, prone to imagining the worst. We look at our usually sparse family trees and we can pick out the pessimists, those who panicked and got out. It was they who left their mark on us. You see, the optimists, those who assumed things would work out for the best, they never made it out in time.

I have nothing optimistic to add.

Some dastardly fiend stabbed the Alabama Trump Baby balloon.

A towering Baby Trump protest balloon was knifed and deflated by someone unhappy with its appearance during Donald Trump’s Saturday trip to Alabama, organisers said.

The incident occurred during the president’s visit to watch a University of Alabama football game. The balloon, which is more than 6.1 metres (20 feet) tall, was set up in a nearby park.

Jim Girvan, the organiser of a group that “adopts” out Baby Trump balloons for protests, said a man charged the balloon with a knife and cut a 2.4-metre (8-foot) gash in the back. Girvan said the unidentified man was taken into custody.

Good! Throw the book at him!

Robert Kennedy, a volunteer “baby sitter” who brought the balloon to Tuscaloosa, said the balloon immediately began to sag after it was cut.

The day had been going mostly smoothly, Kennedy said. Some people yelled “Trump 2020” as they passed while others posed for selfies with the balloon. But then Kennedy said a man sidled up on the back of the balloon and attacked it with a knife. He ran away but was caught by police officers, Kennedy said.

In memoriam:

How difficult can it be?

It took a marathon school board meeting. It followed months of divisive debate, including two student walkouts. It came after the student newspaper opted for change for similar reasons.

“It” is another high school dropping its longtime “Redskins” mascot, with this one in Idaho proving a particularly contentious exercise.

Hm. Maybe we could shorten these exercises with a new plan: all teams named “Redskins” will alternate between that and “Whiteskins” every week until people get the point.

As reported by the Washington Post, Teton High School (Driggs, Idaho), which sits just outside Yellowstone Park and the Wyoming border, announced Tuesday evening it would retire its “Redskins” mascot at an undetermined date in the near future. The decision followed a formal school board vote in which four of five board members voted to discontinue the Redskins moniker, which has been in use at the school since 1929.

So it actually took the people of Driggs, Idaho 90 years to figure out that calling the high school football team a racist epithet is not a particularly useful or benign thing to do. Humans are so disappointing.

The story is from July; I hope football season isn’t being too painful for the bereft fans of the old name.

Lara Adams-Miller shared some anti-suffrage images yesterday. It’s always unnerving to see how very venomous they were.

“Shut up, terf” and “punch a terf” rhetoric is nearly indistinguishable from anti-suffrage rhetoric.

Those go way beyond just shut up – they urge torture.

Suffer, bitch!

More:

A man’s foot on her breasts, a hundred-twelve*-pound concrete block on her abdomen and crotch, while she is choked and drowned by a great vat of soup. Clear enough?

*correction

Originally an item for the Miscellany Room from Screechy Monkey. 

So, Slate has a really, really shitty sex advice column called How To Do It. It presents a real dilemma for me: from Slate’s point of view, a click is a click, so they can’t tell that I sometimes read it just for the train wreck value as opposed to actually thinking the authors give good advice.

(Why is it shitty? Well, aside from the issue I’m about to complain about, I’m reminded of something Dan Savage once said when asked if he had any advice for young people who want to be sex advice columnists. After noting that he wasn’t interesting in encouraging competition, he said the one mistake that he noticed in most of the college newspaper sex columns was that the authors are constantly making it all about their own sex lives. Everything is about them and their personal sexual history and their kinks etc. and not about helping out readers. Anyway, “How to Do It” is a textbook example of that — the male co-author really wants you to know that he’s had a lot of dick in his life.)

But here’s why I brought it up.

In a column Dated October 10, 2019, a reader wants to know if it’s ok for her to just flat-out ask potential dates their penis size. The author responds by commiserating with her about how men will lie about it, but otherwise just offers advice on how to go about filtering for size, and ends with a you go, girl!:

I want to also encourage you to continue to openly fish for big dick via your profiles. Why not ask guys if they’ve got what you want? If it’s off-putting, great. You’re filtering out the dick not up to your standards from the jump. Saves everyone time. I believe there’s nothing wrong with coming across as slutty or overexperienced, and anybody cool and/or hung will respect you as a woman who knows what she wants. Be proud of that.

Ok, fine, whatever — if something is important to you, sure, put it in your profile and ask about it. Fine. I basically agree with that, whether it’s size or hair color or religion or whatever.

Less than a month later, a reader says that although he’s open to dating trans women, he’s not interested in ones with a penis, and is it ok to ask.

I’m sure you can see where this is likely going. To be fair, the two columnists don’t flat-out call the writer a bigot, and oh-so-graciously acknowledge that it’s ok to have a preference when it comes to type of genitals…. BUUUUUTTTT… maybe she doesn’t need you to touch “her” penis? Shouldn’t you give people a try? Maybe you should grow as a person, and get to KNOW people as human beings instead of being so obsessed with genitals. “[I]nquiring about the contents of prospective sex partners’ underwear will turn a lot of people off. He’d be doing it to filter certain people out, but I think he’d more often be filtering himself out for asking the question in the first place” Etc.

I’m just amazed by the lack of recognition of the double standard.

An authoritarian state boss abusing his power who isn’t Trump:

A British Indian author and journalist has been stripped of his Indian citizenship after he wrote an article criticising the regime of the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Aatish Taseer, who was born in the UK but raised in India and spent a further decade living there from the age of 25, was stripped of his overseas citizenship of India (OCI) status on Thursday.

Taseer, who has written multiple books on India, described the government’s move as “highly suspicious and systematic”. He added: “They are making an example of me and sending a warning message to other journalists.”

Wouldn’t Trump love to do that.

The decision followed the publication of his cover piece for Time magazine in May, just before the Indian elections, titled India’s divider in chief, which was highly critical of Modi’s actions while in power.

“Within India, the Modi government has completely altered the media climate, everyone critical has been muffled or silenced,” said Taseer. “And now my case shows that even those who think they are protected because they write abroad or for a foreign publisher, they are not going to be safe either.”

He may never be able to go back to India. His mother and grandmother are there, and he says he may never see them again.

The reason given by the home ministry for its action was that Taseer had “concealed the fact that his late father was of Pakistani origin” and was therefore ineligible for OCI status.

But Taseer denied this, saying his connection to Pakistan had never been hidden and had simply made him an “easy target”. He was not given official written notice that he had been stripped of his OCI status and instead found out via a public tweet from the ministry on Thursday.

Again: very Trump.

In September Taseer received a letter saying the government was taking action against him for allegedly defrauding the home ministry and his OCI status was under review.

It followed an alleged smear campaign against him in India led by Sambit Patra, the spokesperson for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party, and which was then picked up by Modi himself after the publication of the Time magazine article, where Taseer was repeatedly described as having an anti-India agenda due to his “Pakistani political family” background.

Are Modi and Trump twins?

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Taseer’s fate showed that Modi’s governing party was intolerant of criticism and freedom of the press. Under Modi, in power since 2014, India has fallen to 140th out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders.

Pen America, which defends freedom of expression, said: “Harassing critical writers and journalists not just in India but globally is a disturbing new low for Modi’s government that’s already put Indian democracy on its heels.”

Fake News anyone?

To the surprise of no one we learn that Mick Mulvaney too is implicated in the Ukraine extortion.

Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney approved a White House meeting for the Ukrainian president – if Ukraine announced investigations tied to Joe Biden, a political rival of Donald Trump, according to testimony unveiled on Friday by the congressional committees pursuing an impeachment inquiry.

Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, “blurted out” that Mulvaney had approved the meeting if the Ukrainians announced an investigation of Burisma, a gas company that formerly employed Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son, said Fiona Hill, a national security council member who was deposed by the committees last month.

Hill’s account was corroborated by simultaneously released testimony by another firsthand witness to the conversation, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman.

Look, if Mulvaney were the kind of guy who wouldn’t do terrible things just because Donald Trump told him to, Donald Trump would never have made him acting chief of staff.

Hill described for investigators a 10 July meeting attended by herself, Sondland, nationals security adviser John Bolton, Ukrainian officials and others.

Hill testified:

“Then Ambassador Sondland blurted out: ‘Well, we have an agreement with the chief of staff for a meeting if these investigations in the energy sector start.’ …And Ambassador Bolton immediately stiffened and ended the meeting.”

Awkward.

And speaking of special rules for women – a conversation among some feminists on Twitter brought up the familiar issue of Why is it always women who have to wear the torture shoes or tight lacing or tiny dress in freezing cold?

Jennifer Lawrence has criticized “sexist” media coverage of her fashion choices in a new Facebook post.

The Oscar-winning actor, currently on a press tour for thriller Red Sparrow, responded to comments suggesting that the sleeveless Versace outfit worn during a photocall in London implied that she was being mistreated alongside her coat-wearing male co-stars.

“Wow. I don’t really know where to get started on this ‘Jennifer Lawrence wearing a revealing dress in the cold’ controversy,” she wrote. “This is not only utterly ridiculous, I am extremely offended. That Versace dress was fabulous, you think I’m going to cover that gorgeous dress up with a coat and a scarf? I was outside for five minutes. I would have stood in the snow for that dress because I love fashion and that was my choice.”

An article in Jezebel had the headline, Please Give Jennifer Lawrence a Dang Coat, showing the actor’s co-stars, Joel Edgerton and Jeremy Irons among them, wearing large coats and scarves.

John Phillips/Getty Images

Oh hey, you know what, there’s something else to notice about that photograph. See the tidy symmetry? Two men, then Jennifer Lawrence, then two more men. Oh hey guess what this is yet another movie with a man, a man, a man, a man, and a woman. Any hope it passes the Bechdel test?

But to her point. It’s her choice, she says – but is it, really? On a superficial level maybe it is, maybe nobody told her to wear a glam dress and glam shoes, but realistically, could she have shown up for a photocall dressed exactly the way the men are? Could the men have shown up dressed the way she is?

Come on. There are conventions about these things, and they’re not all that relaxed. Lawrence can dress the way the men are on her own time, but not when she’s doing glam duty on the job. The men cannot dress the way Lawrence is unless they decide to “transition.” It’s not a mere coincidence that the way the men are dressed leaves them able to run if they need to while Lawrence is quite literally hobbled by what she’s wearing. No doubt she does love fashion, but that doesn’t mean we can’t question the norms of what both sexes are allowed or pressured to wear.