The front page of the Baltimore Sun today:

On the one hand you have the political or philosophical concept of freedom of speech, and on the other hand you have the commercial interest of various people who make lots of money by selling tv shows and magazines and tabloids, and/or the advertising they purvey. If we want to think about the political or philosophical concept of freedom of speech, we’re well advised to consult Tocqueville or Mill or Orwell rather than Murdoch or O’Reilly or…Zuckerberg.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is not impressed by Zuckerberg’s credentials to instruct the masses on free speech.

For his entire adult life, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has been able to make up in hubris what he lacks in education. He continued that trend on Thursday while addressing students at Georgetown University in Washington DC, in what was billed as a major manifesto on “free speech”.

“I am here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression,” Zuckerberg said, as if anyone beyond the growing collection of authoritarian dictators seriously argues against it.

And as if Facebook didn’t have a conspicuous habit of suspending or banning women who express skepticism about the ability of men to become women by simply declaring it to be so.

Zuckerberg’s unsophisticated thoughts on free speech generated a manifesto that can only be called incoherent. Unsurprisingly, Facebook’s content regulations have been incoherent in design and in practice.

Imagine how insulting it must have been for hundreds of the brightest young minds in America, many of whom have considered deeply the history of American constitutional law and the ways it influences democracy, to sit politely and listen to billionaire who seems to have barely cracked a book on the subject and can’t seem to form a clear line of argument.

He’s a billionaire. Why would he bother cracking a book?

The speech was so weak and poorly structured that it could not have served as worse evidence in an argument for the value of speech itself. The event would have been much more valuable to Zuckerberg and his audience if the Georgetown public policy students had lectured him about the history and value of free speech. They, after all, know things and are trained to think and write clearly.

Zuckerberg made a thing that sold well. That’s not the same as knowledge or ability to think and write clearly.

For being such a key player in the young 21st century, Zuckerberg embraces an outdated, 19th-century view of speech. For him there is actually something like a marketplace of ideas through which the best ideas prevail once we encounter evidence and argument. The problem is, Facebook undermines any attempt to sustain such a practice.

We largely solved the challenge of the 19th century. By 2019 we have managed to offer most people in the world a platform for expression and a tool for constant, affordable human communication. In much of the world, speech remains beyond the reach of state control. That’s all fine, except it creates a new problem we have yet to confront.

The problem of the 21st century is cacophony. Too many people are yelling at the same time. Attentions fracture. Passions erupt. Facts crumble. It’s increasingly hard to deliberate deeply about complex crucial issues with an informed public. We have access to more knowledge yet we can’t think and talk like adults about serious things.

Is Trump the inevitable result of that state of affairs?

So Mulvaney says yeah there was a quid pro quo, deal with it, ya big bunch of anti-corruption wimps.

Or almost that.

A senior White House official has admitted military aid to Ukraine was withheld partly to pressure Kyiv to investigate allegations on the Democrats and the 2016 election.

Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said President Donald Trump had mentioned Democratic “corruption”.

But Mr Trump was also concerned about wider corruption in Ukraine, he said.

Yeah like socialist corruption and Mexican corruption and…uh…Muslim corruption. Stuff like that.

Briefing reporters on Thursday, Mr Mulvaney gave a lengthy answer to a question about Ukraine, saying the president had told him Ukraine was a “corrupt place” and that Mr Trump didn’t want to spend aid and “have them use it to line their own pockets”.

This is Trump talking – Trump accusing other people of corruption and lining their own pockets. Trump.

Mr Mulvaney also said that the president “did not like” the fact that European countries weren’t providing much military aid to Ukraine.

“Those were the driving factors,” he said. “Did he also mention to me in past the corruption related to the DNC [Democratic National Convention] server? Absolutely. No question about that.

“But that’s it. That’s why we held up the money.”

Ok then, thanks for being so candid.

When reporters put to him that he had described a “quid pro quo”, Mr Mulvaney replied: “We do that all the time with foreign policy,

“There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy. That is going to happen. Elections have consequences. And foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration,” he said.

He also said that the move had been made in connection with “an ongoing investigation by our Department of Justice”.

But a senior Justice Department official told CBS News: “If the White House was withholding aid in regards to the cooperation with any investigation at the Department of Justice, that is news to us.”

A person familiar with the reaction inside the department said officials were “utterly confused” and “angry” at Mr Mulvaney for saying the aid was withheld in connection to an investigation, CBS reports.

Well they’re just a bunch of whiners.

Originally a comment by What a Maroon on Not angels.

As many of you know, I spent some time in Turkey about 30 years ago. In total I was there for about a year, including a summer in Istanbul and about ten months in Ankara. While I was in Ankara, I also had the opportunity to travel around the country, and visited pretty much every region. I met a lot of wonderful people there and had a fantastic time, and have many cherished memories. Of course spending a year in the country three decades ago doesn’t give me any real insight into what is going on now, but the recent actions of the government have brought back some memories.

If you’re in Turkey, it’s hard to avoid Kurds, though you may not realize it. In Istanbul there was the shoeshine boy who wanted to clean my sneakers; impressed with his persistence, I finally agreed to him cleaning one of my shoes. In Ankara, I had several Kurdish students, though even admitting that was an act of trust on their part. One of them took me around one weekend to show off the apartment he had just bought (that was still under construction), and then brought me to the office of his uncle, a prosperous dentist in the center of the city. While we were there, his uncle took out some cassettes he had hidden away and played them for us. The music was fairly typical Turkish pop from the time, but the songs were in Kurdish, a language that was officially unrecognized and effectively prohibited. Again, this was an enormous amount of trust on their part.

In the summer we had about five weeks of vacation, so I took a long, slow tour around the country. Toward the tail end of the tour, I found myself in Diyarbakır, in the south, wandering around with some time to kill before my next bus. A kid of around 17 approached me offering to take me to a carpet shop. This was a fairly common occurrence in Turkey at the time, and with nothing better to do I agreed, though I made clear I wasn’t interested in buying anything. He took me to the shop, where the served me tea while a man roughly my age (mid-twenties at the time) launched into his spiel about how the carpets were woven while another man in his thirties or forties looked on. Eventually the older man left, and the tone of the younger man changed. He abandoned the spiel, explained that the older man was his math teacher and a Turk, and then explained that he was a Kurd, and denounced Turkey as a fascist state. Yet another act of trust.

I don’t have any grand conclusions to draw from these relatively random encounters, but I’m sickened by what the Turkish government is doing now in Syria, and by our role in it, and I want to believe that the people I knew thirty years ago would be sickened too.

From Gordon Sondland’s prepared statement to the impeachment inquiry:

On May 23, 2019, three days after the Zelensky inauguration, we in the U.S. delegation debriefed President Trump and key aides at the White House. We emphasized the strategic importance of Ukraine and the strengthening relationship with President Zelensky, a reformer who received a strong mandate from the Ukrainian people to fight corruption and pursue greater economic prosperity. We asked the White House to arrange a working phone call from President Trump and a working Oval Office visit. However, President Trump was skeptical that Ukraine was serious about reforms and anti-corruption, and he directed those of us present at the meeting to talk to Mr. Giuliani, his personal attorney, about his concerns. It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing the President’s mind on Ukraine was Mr. Giuliani. It is my understanding that Energy Secretary Perry and Special Envoy Volker took the lead on reaching out to Mr. Giuliani, as the President had directed.

And that right there is stark raving mad. Why should they talk to Trump’s personal anything about a foreign policy matter? What business does Trump have “directing” them to do so? None in both cases.

Indeed, Secretary Perry, Ambassador Volker, and I were disappointed by our May 23, 2019 White House debriefing. We strongly believed that a call and White House meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky was important and that these should be scheduled promptly and without any pre-conditions. We were also disappointed by the President’s direction that we involve Mr. Giuliani. Our view was that the men and women of the State Department, not the President’s personal lawyer, should take responsibility for all aspects of U.S. foreign policy towards Ukraine.

Which is not so much a “view” as just obvious reality. How should an administration deal with other countries? By going out and collecting some random people to do the work, or by continuing to rely on the people trained and qualified and security-cleared to do the work? The president’s personal lawyer should no more take over that work than the president’s dentist should.

Sondland and Volker and Perry decided obeying the order to rope in Rudy was preferable to ditching the meeting, so they went ahead.

But I did not understand, until much later, that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the President’s 2020 reelection campaign.

It’s not the kind of thing you’d expect…from a normal president.

Trump’s hair will be on fire all day today.

I feel somewhat shattered at the loss of Elijah Cummings. Dan Rodricks in his hometown paper, the Baltimore Sun:

“We are better than this.”

Elijah Cummings said that over and over again, urging his fellow Americans and his fellow Baltimoreans to believe it — and to be it.

The U.S. congressman from Maryland, who died early Thursday morning at 68, was a long-time warrior for justice, truly a great man. He spoke truth to power even as a member of the power class. And the Democrat was not above pleading, with rival Republicans or constituents, for what he knew was right.

He chose politics and public life because he wanted a better country, a better city. Immersed in the complex problems of both, he kept his eyes on the prize all through his career. As a member of Congress, with oversight of government operations at a range of levels, Cummings was in the role of examiner, and what he examined was usually bad — from incompetence by bureaucrats to price gouging by corporations to the abuses of power of the executive branch. And so his words were often aspirational, uttered while mired in mud, yet pointing us toward a mountaintop.

He knew what he wanted, and he knew what he did not want.

He did not want the children of migrants separated from their parents at the border. “We are better than this,” he said.

He wanted the president to be civil, courageous, kind and honest. He wanted the president to abide by the Constitution.

“We are better than this. We really are,” Cummings said in February, after Michael Cohen described his sordid undertakings as the president’s one-time lawyer. “As a country, we are so much better than this.”

But wait, there’s more! James Kirkup introduces us to Deputy Chief Constable Julie Cooke of Cheshire Police.

DCC Cooke has rather a big job in Cheshire, where there were more than 30,000 violent crimes in the year to August 2019 and the monthly rate of violent crime is up by more than 50 per cent in the last year. 

Fortunately, however,  DCC Cooke has still managed to find time to make a video marking International Pronouns Day.

Marking what??!

No, I know what; I had heard of it; it’s just that it’s so idiotic, and so idiotic-squared that anyone is paying attention to it, let alone making police videos about it.

If you’re not familiar with that occasion, the DCC is here to explain that pronouns are very important and we should always take care to use the pronouns – he/she/they/ze/whatever – that other people want us to use for them. This is especially important to “people who identify as transgender and gender non-conforming,”  DCC Cooke says.

That it, it’s especially important to people delusional enough to think they can change sex and narcissistic enough to think they can force the entire world to pretend their delusion is true. A somewhat niche market, I’d have thought.

The DCC tweets:

Today marks #pronounsday – seeking to make sharing, educating and respecting personal pronouns commonplace. @pronounsday

How is this any of the police’s business?

“It is so important to understand the pronouns that somebody wishes to be used for them,” the uniformed DCC tells us in her video, filmed in front of a Cheshire Constabulary background – just in case we were in any doubt about whether this is an official police communication.

“Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal wellbeing. It also can be used as a form of abuse for them, and that just isn’t right,” DCC Cooke says.

But, again, what does this have to do with the police? Why are the police trying to micromanage people’s language in such fine detail that they’re issuing instructions on what pronouns to use? None of it makes any sense.

More pathetic Qusilings who don’t even know they’re Quislings.

Women’s Book History:

Good morning! Just a reminder that our page celebrates things related to book history for all of the following:

– cis women
– trans women
– cis men
– trans men
– nonbinary folks

and everyone else in between! We usually post about women, but that’s because that’s our jam. We do, and always have, included trans women in our category of “women’s book history” and this stance is not up for debate. If this bothers you, we encourage you to keep scrolling. Anyone who posts harassing messages about trans women will have those comments deleted and then they will be banned from the page.

For people who are as all-powerful and privileged as women are, we sure do have a hard time being allowed to speak.

Despite professing commitment to free speech principles, today Massey University announced they would be revoking their agreement with Speak Up For Women to host their event ‘Feminism 2020’ at their Wellington Campus.

So in other words they’re going with Don’t Speak Up For Women.

Citing “external advice on its health, safety and wellbeing obligations under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, and its duty of care to the University community,” Massey have once more proven that they are willing to cave to activist intimidation tactics.

“The staff and students of Massey were never at any risk from our event nor from the speech of the four women speaking at it. We are a group of women wanting to talk about our rights. This should not be controversial in 2019,” says Speak Up For Women spokeswoman Ani O’Brien.

Wasn’t there an interval of a year or two when women were allowed to talk about our rights? Surely that’s enough for any sex other than the male one.

Massey University states a commitment “to the values of academic freedom, the freedom of speech, and the freedom of expression, as values that lie at the very heart of the tradition of a university and academic inquiry.” However, in the light of de-platforming more speakers due to pressure from activists, it appears that these statements are just lip service.

“A clear picture has emerged that shows that certain public organisations and educational institutions are completely ruled by thugs’ veto. New Zealanders should be aware that we are living in a country where a small group of activists are dictating who can and cannot speak in public spaces using threats and intimidation,” says Ms O’Brien.

“We’ve seen an extremist activist group simply threaten to protest events and in response Auckland Council cancel or move the event. Now at Massey, health and safety is being used to threaten legal action and they have cancelled. If a group of Kiwi women – mums, teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, unionists, professionals, students – have been deemed too ‘dangerous’ to be allowed to hold an event, who on earth will be permitted to by these wannabe-fascists?”

Oh we all know the answer to that. People who aren’t women.

Speak Up For Women are determined that they will go ahead with their event nonetheless and are currently in the process of finding a new venue; “this has shown us once again how important it is that we continue to fight to speak openly about women’s rights.”

But also how absolutely pathetic it is that we have to.

First, this is the Daily Mail, so caution is advised – but, that said, if the facts are as stated…there’s an issue. The claim is that judges have been ordered to give harsh sentences to people convicted of “transgender and homophobic hate crimes” – that is, hate crimes against LGB and trans people. New sentencing guidelines say six months in prison should be the minimum.

But what are they defining as hate crimes? That’s the crucial question, and from what we’ve seen lately it includes dissenting from various wild truth-claims about Magic Gender Changing.

The instructions, which will come into effect on January 1, follow a series of cases in which police have been accused of launching heavy-handed investigations into transgender hate crime allegations.

This year Surrey Police quizzed a Catholic mother-of-five after she was accused of ‘misgendering’ the trans daughter of an activist on social media by using the pronoun ‘him’.

Last week Thames Valley Police launched an inquiry into possible public order hate crimes by demonstrators who put up stickers in Oxford with messages such as: ‘Woman: noun. Adult human female.’

So it appears to be at least theoretically possible that feminist women could be sentenced to six months in prison for putting up stickers that say women are adult human females.

Apparently the UK is edging toward making it a criminal act to say that women are women.

It seems there is no corresponding move toward harshly sentencing men who threaten to kill women they label “TERFs”?

Notice that feminist women don’t threaten to kill men who claim to be women, we simply say that men are not women, not even if they “identify as” women.

So women could be thrown in jail for saying women are women, while men remain at liberty to threaten to kill women for saying women are women.

The guidelines, which judges and magistrates must follow unless they can show doing so would run against justice, are the first to apply to public order offences – which include the offence of ‘stirring up hatred based on race, religion or sexual orientation’.

But not sex. Yes really: not sex. Gender identity yes, but sex no. Apparently there is no such thing as hatred or contempt or oppression or exploitation based on sex, i.e. of women by men.

The number of hate crimes reported to police has reached 100,000 a year for the first time.

Home Office figures showed a 10 per cent increase this year, with a surge in allegations of homophobic and transphobic abuse.

Police must record an incident as a hate crime if a victim believes they were targeted over their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.

But not sex. Not sex. Not sex. The Rachel McKinnons and Jessica Yanivs are the truly oppressed, while women are the privileged powerful domineering cruel oppressors.

White House people are upset because…they can’t keep doing whatever they want without any oversight? I guess?

Inside the West Wing, sources say, there is escalating concern about administration witnesses who are giving depositions on Capitol Hill.

Pence’s lawyer Matthew Morgan says but history and precedent.

“Instead of being accountable to the American people and casting a vote to authorize what all agree is a substantial constitutional step, you have instead attempted to avoid this fundamental requirement by invoking the Speaker’s announcement of an ‘official impeachment inquiry’ at a press conference?” Morgan wrote in a letter to House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel, and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff.

Morgan added, “Never before in history has the Speaker of the House attempted to launch an ‘impeachment inquiry’ against a President without a majority of the House of Representatives voting to authorize a constitutionally acceptable process.”

Hmm, never before in history. Shall we draw up a list of things Trump has done that never before in history has a president done? It would be very long, and most of the things would be bad things.

Also on Tuesday, George Kent, the State Department official in charge of Ukraine policy, was the latest witness to be questioned. Fiona Hill, Trump’s former Russia adviser, sat down for more than 10 hours on Monday.

Watching this, officials are growing frustrated because they are mainly being forced to learn about what these officials divulged from news reporters. There is no White House counsel present in the room and officials are not given transcripts or readouts after they leave, one person told CNN.

Now they know how we feel.

Let’s all congratulate Dawn, Naomi and Kirsten:

Congratulations Dawn, Naomi, and Kirsten for coming First, Second, and Third – your efforts are to be commended and I’m looking forward to watching you in future races.

And there he is in all his glory:

Sport is a human right! Cheating at sport is a human right!