Trevor Phillips on wokeism:

It is two centuries since this country abolished the Test Acts under which people were required to make a pledge of religious observance to qualify for public office or the civil service. But once again employees are being required to sign up to statements of belief or face denunciation, demotion and dismissal. Arcane arguments about white privilege and Pythonesque disputes about whether men can be women are no longer confined to warring left-wing sects or social media; they are eating away at the heart of leading institutions, corporations and government itself.

“Say that men can be women or you’re fired.”

Much of this turmoil began with the best of intentions: a long overdue focus on ethical behaviour in corporate and public life. In 2018 more corporate chief executives lost their jobs for misconduct than were fired for poor performance; the #MeToo movement has left its mark. But the drive for decency is steadily being hijacked by extremists, bringing a dark edge of censoriousness to the quest for better workplace behaviour. JK Rowling, infamously, has been threatened with “cancellation” for sardonically pointing out that there is such a thing as a woman. Kevin Price, a Labour councillor, resigned from Cambridge city council and faced pressure to leave his post as a porter at the university because he refused to sign a statement that “trans women are women”.

See also: fish are not chairs, tomatoes are not buses, owls are not bars of soap, planets are not cigarettes.

The intolerant aspect of wokeism has become plainer than ever. Its strictures against “offensive” language brought some of its adherents close to apologising for the massacre at Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, suggesting that the journalists bore some responsibility for the Islamist attack by declining to censor themselves.

Remember the long exhausting war over that? I sure do. All those woke novelists trying to get PEN to decide not to honor Charlie Hebdo after all…when the bodies were barely cold.

Serious people on both sides of the Atlantic are drinking deep at the well of racial self-abasement. A much-lauded course at the prestigious Duke University in the US teaches that there are 15 characteristics to white supremacy culture, including perfectionism, a sense of urgency, worship of the written word and, amazingly, objectivity, all of which, it is argued, need to be jettisoned.

Yes let’s throw out the written word and objectivity, that would usher in utopia in a heartbeat.

The greatest tragedy in all of this is that the gurus of wokedom have persuaded thousands of idealistic young people who rightly want to change the world into supporting what is actually a deeply reactionary movement. The trans activists can only realise their aim of being able to enter spaces reserved for women by erasing the female sex. Critical race theory remains credible only so long as black and brown people continue to fail. In the end, the woke movement is turning into an echo of the very oppressors it claims to be combating. After all the statues come down, and women’s prisons are opened to all and sundry, the celebrities and social media warriors will move on to the next fashionable cause — and minorities will still be less likely to win the top jobs, and women will still be the victims of violence. The only thing that will have changed is the bitterness of a generation whose idealism was betrayed.

He’s not wrong.

Originally a comment by As The Smoke Rises Upward on Very precise indeed.

I take all the sanctimonious defenses of the (uncontested) personhood of trans people as a kind of tacit admission. Atwood can’t engage with actual gender-critical arguments because then she would have to respond with the party-sanctioned genderist dogma, and she can’t do that without making some readers wonder if maybe the terves do have a point after all.

“Lesbians are morally deficient if they don’t want to sexually engage with male genitals.” Well, that’ll go over just fine with cultural conservatives, but it might raise an a few eyebrows among the liberals who still believe that “trans” simply means “super mega gay” and imagine the LGBT as one big happy family.

“Anything uniquely pertaining to the health or reproductive rights of vagina people/ cervix people/ uterus people/ ovary people/ breast people must never be spoken of as a women’s issue. After all, not all women have vaginas/ cervixes/ uteruses/ ovaries/ breasts, and not all people with vaginas/ cervixes/ uteruses/ ovaries/ breasts are women. In fact, we’d prefer not to fully acknowledge that the people with vaginas are also the people with cervixes, uteruses, et cetera. If we zoom out and look at the bigger biological picture instead of playing ad-libs with an anatomy textbook, we might be forced to use the f-word. No, not that f-word—the other one, the one that rhymes with email.” Another tough sell. Hard not to trigger at least a few red flags.

“It is good and right and just to sterilize children and teens who aren’t even old enough to consent to sex in the nane of affirming their gender identity. It is wicked and evil and hateful to ask why the number of children and teens supposedly requiring this treatment has increased by several thousand percent over the past decade. It’s also rank bigotry to raise any concerns about the long-term health effects of what is basically a medical experiment.” Oof, good luck spinning that so everyone will swallow it—it’s going to stick in a craw or two.

And so on and so forth. Atwood’s a gifted writer and her name alone carries a great deal of leftist cachet, so she could make the case for all of these points as effectively as anyone. But inevitably, no matter how painstakingly she rhetoricized, she would still be stuck arguing positions that not all of her fellow liberals would continue to accept once they understood what it was they were really supposed to be accepting. Easier to sidestep the minefield altogether: you never have to say anything you don’t want to when you’re debating a strawwoman.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on All he’s got now is breaking stuff.

But there is some poetic justice here because he has been cheating for months. Now his tactics are coming back to bite him. He told Republicans not to vote by mail and they didn’t, but the result is he has been experiencing this slow drip-drip of disaster over the past few days.

I know it wouldn’t be a good look for the Biden Administration to go after Trump, (though it looks like there are plenty of other entities lined up to have a go at him for quite some time), however much he desrves it, but I do hope they investigate his interference with the Post Office. It sure looks like it was a plot to take advantage of people’s reluctance to vote in person during the pandemic and to delay, block and dismiss the millions of mail in votes, which were guaranteed to be heavily Democrat. The combination of Trump months-long delegitimizing voting by mail (essentially a command or warning to his supporters not to use this avenue to vote), and putting one of his own stooges in charge of gumming up the works at the post office sure looks like a put-up job. If there was any “stealing” of the election going on, that was where it was happening.

I also hope that those involved were stupid enough to commit their thoughts to writing, and these records will be discoverable and acted upon. This is much bigger than the financial corruption, self-dealing and venality that Trump flaunted, which was itself bad enough. The election interference goes to the heart of American democracy itself. This has to be pursued, as Trump has laid down a path that others may try to follow, learning from his mistakes. That path must be blocked, securely and permanently. America’s next would-be dictator may not be as flagrantly interested in gross, obvious financial gain, and may not be such a complete fucking moron.

Margaret Atwood interviewed in the Times:

The Handmaid’s Tale made her not only a famous writer, but also a public figure. The oppressed class of women in the book bore a clear feminist message. Opinions were expected of her. But she was, and remains, too meticulous to give easy answers.

“Look up kinds of feminism, and you’ll find 75 of them. So when people ask me about feminism, I ask them which type and they never know.”

Fair enough. It’s a good plan to be precise about what one thinks, what one endorses, what one signs up to.

On the subject of trans rights she is very precise indeed. After our conversation she emails me a video attacking JK Rowling’s view of the issue. Rowling defends the ultimate biological reality of sexual differences as a feminist cause: “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.” Atwood also emails a Scientific American article stating the opposite case: “Why the new science of sex and gender matters for everyone.”

“The most bothersome thing about me,” she explains, “is that I’m a strict agnostic. By which I mean there’s a difference between belief and fact. And you should not confuse the two. You can believe all you like that trans people aren’t people, but it happens not to be a fact. It is not true that there are only two [gender] boxes. So the two questions to ask about anything are: is it true? And is it fair ? So if it’s not true that there are only two gender boxes and that gender is fixed and immutable, is it fair to treat trans people as if they’re not who they say they are?”

That’s precise? You’ve got to be kidding. It’s not precise to imply that dissenters from trans ideology “believe that trans people aren’t people” – in fact it’s a venomous calumny. People lose their minds on this subject, I swear, and I mean it literally – Atwood has a brilliant mind and that’s just a stupid thing to say. And she said it in an email, so it wasn’t just blurted out in conversation, it was typed out and then not reconsidered and withdrawn. Nobody thinks that trans people are anything other than people. What could make her temporarily dumb enough and malicious enough to say that? She’s never had that kind of full-on commitment or loyalty to feminism, so why is she suddenly a fanatic about transgenderism?

So, yeah, we know it “happens not to be a fact” that trans people are not people. Duh. Rabbits don’t talk about their gender identity or their women’s brains in men’s bodies.

Fine, it’s not true that there are only two [gender] boxes, but it is true that there are only two sex boxes, DSDs notwithstanding.

It is true to say that there are two sexes (with a small percentage of DSDs) and that sex is what it is, and yes it can be fair to treat any people of any kind as if they’re “not who they say they are” if they are lying or deluded or both. There is no moral law or imperative to treat people as if they “are who they say they are” in all situations no matter what. Trump says he is a stable genius; we do not have to treat him accordingly.

There’s also this.

I had seen it but I hadn’t realized it was Ruby Bridges. I’m more familiar with this one, which gets me by the throat every time.

The silhouette in the Kamala Harris one is from the Norman Rockwell painting.

Comic interlude:

Donald Trump’s increasingly desperate bid to hang on to the White House crossed into abject farce on Saturday, after his campaign staged a purportedly major press conference at a Philadelphia landscaping business situated between a crematorium and sex shop.

All your needs catered for in one quick stop.

On Saturday morning, as Trump played golf and continued to baselessly accuse the Democrats of stealing the election for Joe Biden, the president announced, in a tweet that was subsequently deleted, a “big press conference” at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia.

That’s the downside to tweeting while driving a golf cart.

Trump quickly altered his statement, revealing that the press conference venue was not a Four Seasons hotel, but Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a suburban business between a crematorium and an adult book store on the outer edges of the city.

“Big press conference today in Philadelphia at Four Seasons Total Landscaping – 11.30am!” the president tweeted at 9.45am.

To be exact, in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping. It doesn’t get much more glam than that.

The Trump campaign has not publicly said whether this was, as it would appear, a case of mistaken identity. Either way, the press conference, headlined by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, went ahead in the car park of the garden centre in what USA Today called an “industrial park”.

We’re sure this isn’t an outtake from the Borat movie? Did Rudy “adjust his shirt” some more?

“I could write jokes for 800 years and I’d never think of something funnier than Trump booking the Four Seasons for his big presser, and it turning out to be the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot between a dildo store and a crematorium,” TV writer Zack Bornstein wrote on Twitter. Author Geraldine DeRuiter commented: “The real hero today is whoever answered the phone at Four Seasons Landscaping and offered no clarification whatsoever until it was too late. I salute you, my fellow patriot.” … Journalist Maggie Serota commented: “I will watch an 11-part Ken Burns documentary on the Four Seasons Landscaping story.”

Four Seasons Landscaping will become a new catchphrase.

Mary Trump tells us what to expect from her evil uncle:

This is what Donald’s going to do: he’s not going to concede, although who cares. What’s worse is he’s not going to engage in the normal activities that guarantee a peaceful transition. All he’s got now is breaking stuff, and he’s going to do that with a vengeance…

He’ll be having meltdowns upon meltdowns right now. He has never been in a situation like this before. What’s interesting is that Donald has never won anything legitimately in his entire life, but because he has been so enabled by people along the way, he has never lost anything either. He’s the kind of person who thinks that even if you steal and cheat to win, you deserve to win.

But there is some poetic justice here because he has been cheating for months. Now his tactics are coming back to bite him. He told Republicans not to vote by mail and they didn’t, but the result is he has been experiencing this slow drip-drip of disaster over the past few days. Oh, you have these huge margins! Now your margins are shrinking. Oh, Joe Biden’s ahead. Now his margins are growing. It must have been like slow torture, but he set up this failure for himself.

Will he ever grasp that fact though? It seems unlikely. Grasping facts does not seem to be one of his skills.

From what I understand, the thing that really ruined his election night was Fox News – his safe zone – calling Arizona days earlier than everyone else. 

Good. I hope it burns.

After January, things look bleak for Donald. He has more than $400m of debt coming in the next four years. Why at this point would his lenders cut him any slack? He has never paid anyone back. His businesses are in the tank. He has destroyed his brand.

Maybe he can sell everything and move to Oklahoma to live a quiet life.

Interesting.

The full passage reads:

Establish a new Task Force on Online Harassment and Abuse to focus on the connection between mass shootings, online harassment, extremism, and violence against women. As highlighted above, Biden will convene a national Task Force with federal agencies, state leaders, advocates, law enforcement, and technology experts to study rampant online sexual harassment, stalking, and threats, including revenge porn and deepfakes — and the connection between this harassment, mass shootings, extremism and violence against women. The Task Force will be charged with developing cutting-edge strategies and recommendations for how federal and state governments, social media companies, schools, and other public and private entities can tackle this unique challenge. The Task Force will consider platform accountability, transparent reporting requirements for incidents of harassment and response, and best practices. 

Trump intends to sulk as long as he can get away with it.

The president, who has spent months trying to undermine the election results with unproven allegations of fraud, pledged on Saturday to go forward with a legal strategy that he hopes will overturn state results that gave Biden the win in Tuesday’s vote.

Not gonna happen.

The president’s allies and advisers privately admitted that the former New York businessman’s chances of overturning the election results and staying in the White House were slim. While preparing for an eventual concession, they called for time to let the legal challenges run their course.

…

Republicans are trying to raise at least $60 million to fund legal challenges in several states, alleging foul play and seeking donations, sources told Reuters. More than half of the money raised would go to paying down the campaign’s debts, the fine print on email and text solicitations says.

Thieves and cheats to the last.

“He should make sure every vote is counted and demand transparency. That puts him on solid rhetorical grounds,” said another former White House official.

No it doesn’t. His behavior is not normal. This is not what losing candidates normally do.

Republicans outside the White House warned that Trump could tarnish his legacy if he does not eventually make a graceful exit, and erode his future political power. “It will be impossible for him to run again in 2024 if he’s seen as a sore loser,” a Congressional Republican source said.

Will it? Everybody knows he’s a sore loser; he throws tantrums every five minutes.

“President Trump is entitled to take the time he wants to absorb this. It was close and it’s not productive to demand an immediate concession,” said Ari Fleischer, who was a White House press secretary in the George W. Bush administration.

No he’s not. He’s not a toddler who broke his balloon, he’s an adult man with every advantage, unfair as well as fair, and he’s throwing a public tantrum because he lost. He’s “entitled” to jack shit.

“The best thing to keep this country together is to give the president a reasonable period of time to accept the results.”

What would that be? Ten years? Twenty? During which he refuses to leave?

The president gets a reasonable time to go back to Manhattan, and that’s it.

More congratulatings.

They won’t be throwing candies in her face.

Allons-y!

4 year nightmare over.

Parteeeeee.

Almost as soon as television networks called the presidential race Saturday morning for former vice president Joe Biden, his supporters began flocking to the streets. The celebrations that ensued — unbridled jubilation, dancing, singing and chanting — represented a release of emotions after an excruciating four-day wait for the election results, but also of a release of four years of pent-up frustration and anger at President Trump, some said.

“Some” as in many millions.

In New York, the show of support was especially reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic, when residents poured out of their apartments nightly to applaud hospital workers and first responders risking their lives to treat coronavirus patients. Shouting and music could be heard from rooftops across the city.

I’ve been thinking of that Italian opera singer in Florence who sang “Nessun Dorma” on his balcony early in the lockdown.

We done won.

In the afternoon, as Trump’s motorcade returned to the White House from his golf course in Sterling, Va., where he had spent the morning, crowds celebrating Biden and Harris’s win booed loudly.

No more motorcades for him.

No.

One, no, because Trump is evil, transparently evil, so no we’re not going to be extra special nice to the fans of an evil sadist 5 minutes after he lost the election. (Also ever.)

But two, no we do not feel the same. This isn’t just about losing and winning, this is about voting for an evil sadist and not doing that. The feelings on losing are not the same.

Meanwhile, back in Loserville –

At least five people within President Donald Trump’s orbit have tested positive for coronavirus, including his chief of staff and a top campaign aide, becoming the latest administration officials to be infected with the virus after a string of outbreaks in the West Wing.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, top campaign aide Nick Trainer, who has been crunching the numbers when it comes to election data, and at least three other people in the White House, including a deputy for Meadows, have tested positive, multiple sources told CNN.

And have they been wearing masks and distancing, or better yet staying home? Of course not.

Trump campaign staffers told CNN they are furious because the leadership in the campaign never sent out an email informing staff of the positive cases or cautioning them to stay home for the time being. Meadows was in the office multiple times this week without a mask.

Meadows, 61, told people after Tuesday’s election that he had contracted Covid, but it wasn’t clear when he first tested positive, according to sources. In the past, he has appeared skeptical of coronavirus mitigation measures and has not often been seen wearing a mask.

He traveled with Trump aboard Air Force One during his final campaign swing on Sunday and Monday, accompanied the President on a visit to his campaign headquarters on Tuesday and attended a White House election night party where he came into close contact with members of the President’s family. He was not seen wearing a mask during any of those engagements.

I do hope they all get it.

White House officials are now alarmed, given Meadows has been around other staffers while potentially contagious, one aide tells CNN.

One White House official who was around Meadows several times this week said they were not notified that he had tested positive, though staffers are being told that “contact tracing was done.”

Meadows has been a leading skeptic inside the White House about the mitigation measures recommended by the coronavirus task force, viewing the panel as largely sidelined.

“Skeptic” isn’t the right word. “Dumbass” is more accurate.

Heads of state are breathing a HUGE SIGH OF RELIEF.

Remember when Trump tried to yank Trudeau’s arm off at the front door of the White House? And failed because Trudeau was expecting it and stiff-armed him with the other hand?

Portugal.

Fiji. I read the other day that getting back into the Paris Agreement is at the top of the list.

Belgium.

Iceland.

And the nation of Cher.

Aw yeah.

(Now disperse quickly – lots of aerosols with all that screaming.)

Sidney Blumenthal says Trump’s struggles will be NO USE.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe sent a team to view the American election, a routine exercise they have performed nine previous times. But this time they were shocked by what they observed. “Nobody – no politician, no elected official, nobody – should limit the people’s right to vote,” said Michael Georg Link, a member of the German parliament who led the group. “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions.”

This was his last chance to shame us.

Apart from the next few weeks, which is another bad holdover from the 18th century, but he’s going to face a lot less compliance now that his underlings hope to save some shreds of a future in DC.

Trump’s actions to stop or suspend the counting of votes and to certify the results is precisely the classic transgression for which the US has rebuked tinpot dictators, including in the state department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. Trump’s call specifically flies in the face of Article 23 (b) of the American Convention on Human Rights, of the Organization of American States, to which the US is a signatory, which guarantees the right “to vote and to be elected in genuine periodic elections, which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and by secret ballot that guarantees the free expression of the will of the voters”.

“…except in the case of Donald Trump.” That’s in there somewhere, isn’t it?

One after another, the states’ ballots will be counted. The results will be known. They will be certified. And Biden will be declared the winner. Trump’s attempt to crown himself king will be his last failed reality show. Instead, he will be the first president since Benjamin Harrison to have lost the popular vote for president twice, the first time paradoxically as the winner but the second as the natural loser. Trump will soon be, as the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “the Emperor of Ice Cream”.

Hope so!

Tom Frank says yes hooray but let’s not forget that it’s the Democratic Party’s move away from the working class to centrist pro-biz policies that got us to Trump. Me, I doubt that it’s quite that simple or direct or cut and dried, but on the other hand the move is undeniable.

Biden’s instinct, naturally, will be to govern as he always legislated: as a man of the center who works with Republicans to craft small-bore, business-friendly measures. After all, Biden’s name is virtually synonymous with Washington consensus. His years in the US Senate overlap almost precisely with his party’s famous turn to the “third way” right, and Biden personally played a leading role in many of the signature initiatives of the era: Nafta-style trade agreements, lucrative favors for banks, tough-on-crime measures, proposed cuts to social security, even.

Of course the years of everyone in the Senate overlap in the same way, because we all inhabit the same block of time. Biden has been in the Senate longer than most, because he’s a geezer, but still he’s not unique in his dates.

What Biden must understand now, however, is that it was precisely this turn, this rightward shift in the 1980s and 90s, that set the stage for Trumpism.

Let us recall for a moment what that turn looked like. No longer were Democrats going to be the party of working people, they told us in those days. They were “new Democrats” now, preaching competence rather than ideology and reaching out to new constituencies: the enlightened suburbanites; the “wired workers”; the “learning class”; the winners in our new post-industrial society.

… In the place of the Democratic party’s old household god – the “middle class” – these new liberals enshrined the meritocracy, meaning not only the brilliant economists who designed their policies, but also the financiers and technologists that the new liberalism tried to serve, together with the highly educated professionals who were now its most prized constituents…

However, there are consequences when the left party in a two-party system chooses to understand itself in this way. As we have learned from the Democrats’ experiment, such a party will show little understanding for the grievances of blue-collar workers, people who – by definition – have not climbed the ladder of meritocracy. And just think of all the shocking data that has flickered across our attention-screens in the last dozen years – how our economy’s winnings are hogged by the 1%; how ordinary people can no longer afford new cars; how young people are taking on huge debt burdens right out of college; and a thousand other points of awful. All of these have been direct or indirect products of the political experiment I am describing.

In short, it’s been a period of sharply rising inequality, and that’s not something to celebrate.

The fun part –

Trump LOST. He LOST. He’s a LOSER. He LOST.

He’s fired. We fired him. You’re FIRED, Dumb Donny. Get out. Leave the silver where it is. We’ll be checking your luggage.

Gonna lose all your “friends” Donny. They never did like you, they just wanted the crumbs from your table. Your crumbs have no more value because you LOST.

Losing loser is refusing to leave. Security will have to remove him.