Meanwhile, in Trump’s America –

A 39-year-old man has been charged with felony assault of a minor in Montana after he allegedly slammed a 13-year-old boy to the ground for not taking his hat off during the national anthem. The incident took place Saturday at the Mineral County Fair and Rodeo in western Montana. Witnesses told a local CBS affiliate that as the anthem began, Curt Brockway grabbed the teen, picked him up, and then slammed him headfirst to the ground. As people nearby approached, Brockway said he slammed the boy to the ground because of his hat. “He said (the boy) was disrespecting the national anthem so he had every right to do that,” eyewitness Taylor Hennick said.

So, what are we respecting when we “respect” the “national anthem”? Are we “respecting” a country where certain gestures and postures are mandatory when a particular song is heard, on pain of extreme violence?

Why would we respect a country like that? It sounds like a horrible dystopian nightmare, not like something to respect.

What does Curt Brockway think the song stands for, I wonder. Slavery? Genocide? Conquest? Capital punishment? Endemic poverty?

“There was a little boy lying on the ground,” Hennick told the Missoulian. “He was bleeding out of his ears, seizing on the ground, just not coherent.” She said she had heard a “pop” when the anthem began and recognized the boy as the neighbor of a family member. The injuries sustained by the boy were severe: He was taken to a local hospital where he was diagnosed with temporal skull fractures before being flown to a children’s hospital in Spokane, Washington. The boy’s parents said he continued bleeding from the ear for nearly six hours after the incident.

Yeah yeah yeah but national anthem. Respect it or die.

Another post attacking gender-critical feminists at Daily Nous…an exceptionally bad one this time.

It starts badly.

The following is a guest post* by three philosophers who wish to remain anonymous (though their identity is known to me).

As many people have been pointing out on Twitter – this is Jason Weinberg allowing three authors to be anonymous while they attack named people. Isn’t there something a little skeevy about that?

But also…

The current crop of trans-exclusionary “gender-critical” philosophers is first and foremost an activist movement. Their writings and behavior are best understood as aimed at achieving their activist ends, such as preventing trans women from using facilities designated for women, or making it more difficult for trans women to be legally recognized as women. Like other activists, they will denigrate or vilify their opponents, make use of dogwhistles, appeal to people’s baser emotions to increase support for their cause, and ignore inconvenient facts. Far from being worthwhile contributions to a scholarly discussion, their writings rehash discredited claims from the 1980s (if not earlier), express demeaning and offensive ideas about trans people, and inhibit truly careful, critical, and thoughtful scholarly debate.

The claim that they are three philosophers becomes hard to believe. Three philosophers wrote that?

We don’t want to advance a view about the correct way to respond to these writings. We understand the worry that suppressing them could do more harm than good. Our main point is that readers need to understand that the central problem is not how to uplift the message of “gender-critical” voices, but how to understand them as activists, and how to manage content that is disrespectful, fear-mongering, and misleading, while avoiding harm to the scholarly community.

Nawwwwwww, come on, they’re pulling our leg, they’re not philosophers.

But it gets worse.

It’s disrespectful to publicly speculate about your colleagues’ genitals, about whether you wish to have sex with them, or about who else wishes to have sex with them. This kind of speculation creates a hostile environment, and does not conduce to legitimate academic debate. And yet, we often see “gender critical” philosophers scrutinizing trans people’s bodies and sexualities in inappropriate ways.

Consider Kathleen Stock’s recent lecture for the Aristotelian Society, which discusses whether lesbians would or should want to have sex with trans women. Stock objects to “two conclusions” typically drawn by her opponents.

The first conclusion effectively says that a lesbian, understood as subject with a ‘female gender’ who is disposed to desire others with a ‘female gender’, might, as such, straightforwardly and repeatedly experience attraction to trans women as part of the normal terms of their own orientation, even under ideal conditions (see for instance, Chuck Tate 2012). The second is that any trans woman who is exclusively attracted to others with a ‘female gender’ counts as a lesbian (Chuck Tate 2012; Sharpe 2019). In other words, biologically male people can be the objects of genuine lesbian desire, and even can be lesbians themselves.

There are many reasons to be wary of such claims… But the main point to take away from present discussion is that such claims look confused.

Stock appears to be making the following two claims:

1. Trans women are not objects of genuine lesbian desire (although lesbians might under “abnormal” or “non-ideal” circumstances experience sexual desire for trans women).
2. Trans women cannot be lesbians.

There’s no reason for academic philosophers to publicly debate the sexual desirability of trans people in this way. This is something we can all sort out in our own private lives.

No. These are not philosophers. Not possible.

At the end:

Comments are closed here, but readers are welcome to discuss this post on Twitter (#DNrecognizing) as well as on the Facebook update for this post.

That’s nice. The authors are anonymous but they get to name their targets, and comments are closed. Hold still while I punch you.

Peter Strzok is suing the bastards.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t pay attention to FBI personnel issues, because what the hell would I know about it, but Trump’s bullying is so disgusting that I do pay some attention.

Peter Strzok accuses the FBI of violating his privacy by sharing the text messages with journalists.

“The campaign to publicly vilify Special Agent Strzok contributed to the FBI’s ultimate decision to unlawfully terminate him,” the suit says.

Strzok was removed from a special probe into links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia after the Justice Department’s inspector general found the messages. He was fired from the FBI in August 2018.

Using his FBI phone, Strzok sent text messages disparaging Trump as a presidential candidate to FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

Shock-horror: his FBI phone! On the other hand who has caused more harm to the FBI, Strzok or Trump?

Strzok’s lawsuit alleges that “unrelenting pressure from President Trump and his political allies in Congress and the media” caused the FBI deputy director to ignore a disciplinary recommendation to demote and suspend Strzok rather than fire him.

He also says that the government acted unfairly because it had “consistently tolerated and even encouraged” pro-Trump “political speech” by other officials.

Strzok is seeking to be reinstated, receive back pay and get an official declaration that the government violated his constitutional rights.

I hope he wins.

Thank you xkcd.

H/t Dave Ricks

Representative Veronica Escobar:

The White House invited me to join @realDonaldTrump during his visit to El Paso. My response was clear. I requested a phone call with him today in order to share what I have now heard from many constituents, including some who are victims of Saturday’s attack.

My message would’ve been that he needs to understand that his words are powerful and have consequences. Using racist language to describe Mexicans, immigrants and other minorities dehumanize us. Those words inflame others.

The domestic terrorist who came to El Paso to kill innocent people had his sights set on Hispanics and immigrants. He took 22 lives, injured more than two dozen.

I have publicly said [Trump] has a responsibility to acknowledge the power of his words, apologize for them, and take them back because they are still hanging over us. I asked for a call so I could say this to him over the phone and ask for a dialogue that could lead to healing.

I was told that @realDonaldTrump is “too busy” to have that conversation.

I declined the invitation because I refuse to be an accessory to his visit. I refuse to join without a dialogue about the pain his racist and hateful words & actions have caused our community and country.

Tomorrow, I will again be spending time with fellow El Pasoans who are dealing with the pain and horror left in the wake of this act of domestic terrorism fueled by hate and racism.

Who is she? She’s the Representative for El Paso, first elected last November.

Trump has no business being “too busy” to talk to her, especially since we all know he’s not “too busy” to watch hours and hours of Fox News and to spend more hours tweeting his rages and resentments and racist insults. He has plenty of time to talk to her, he just doesn’t want to, because he’s all hat and no cattle.

Remembering Toni Morrison:

Toni Morrison, who didn’t publish her first book until she was almost 40, penned roughly a dozen novels, most lauded among them 1987’s “Beloved,” about a former slave who kills her baby to ensure it is never enslaved. “Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Her books gazed unflinchingly on the lives of African Americans and told their stories with a singular lyricism. Her talent for intertwining the stark realities of black life with hints of magical realism and breathtaking prose gained Morrison a loyal literary following.

Themes such as slavery, misogyny, colorism and supernaturalism came to life in her hands.

It seems slightly odd to say “roughly a dozen” but I’m guessing it’s because she did some genre-crossing, so it depends on what you count as a novel.

“I didn’t become interested in writing until I was about 30 years old,” she later said. “I didn’t really regard it as writing then, although I was putting words on paper. I thought of it as a very long, sustained reading process — except that I was the one producing the words.”

Reading and writing can be very intertwined. I read with a spiral notebook always at my elbow, because sometimes – often – I need to write something down. I have more than fifty of them. I recommend the practice.

Then-President Barack Obama awarded Toni Morrison the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

“I remember reading ‘Song of Solomon’ when I was a kid and not just trying to figure out how to write but also how to be and how to think,” Obama said at the ceremony, referecing to Morrison’s 1977 novel.

Ah the fun-loving white boys:

i guess mitch is ok with a bunch of his white boys symbolically attacking a cutout of aoc

One choking, one pointing at her crotch – all good clean fun. Hurr hurr.

Updating to add an observation:

It’s worth noting that strangulation is an almost uniquely gendered crime. A large majority of victims are women (often intimate partners of their attackers) and the vast, vast majority of perpetrators are men.

It’s one of those areas where the size and strength advantage is relevant.

About the Dayton mass-murderer:

[P]olice said there was nothing in the background of 24-year-old Connor Betts that would have prevented him from purchasing the .223-caliber rifle with extended ammunition magazines that he used to open fire outside a crowded bar.

Nothing at all?

High school classmates of the gunman who killed nine people early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, say he was suspended for compiling a “hit list” of those he wanted to kill and a “rape list” of girls he wanted to sexually assault.

Oh, that.

The entire paragraph reads:

High school classmates of the gunman who killed nine people early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, say he was suspended for compiling a “hit list” of those he wanted to kill and a “rape list” of girls he wanted to sexually assault. The accounts by two former classmates emerged after police said there was nothing in the background of 24-year-old Connor Betts that would have prevented him from purchasing the .223-caliber rifle with extended ammunition magazines that he used to open fire outside a crowded bar.

I would have led with the nothing in the background part, myself.

CNN has more:

Another former high school classmate, who asked not to be identified out of concerns for his privacy, also recalled being summoned to a school administrator’s office and being told he was “number one” on the list of students Betts wanted to kill.

He said the list was separated into two columns: a “kill list” for boys and a “rape list” for girls.

Chivalry is not dead.

A fourth person, who also asked not to be named for privacy reasons, said, “All I know is there was a list of violent actions and a list of names including mine.”

She said some of the names were female students who, like her, turned him down for dates. She said Betts often simulated shooting other students and threatened to kill himself and others on several occasions.

“He loved to look at you and pretend to shoot with guns, guns with his hands,” she said.
Another former classmate, who was not on the list, said he met Betts through a “friend of a friend.” He said whenever they hung out, Betts would talk about violence and use harsh language about women, like calling them “sluts.”

I take it back about chivalry.

Saturday the official Twitter account of Mitch McConnell for the Senate tweeted:

The Grim Reaper of Socialism at #FancyFarm today. #FancyFarm139

Amy McGrath is his Democratic opponent. That’s her name on the tombstone in the lower right corner. She tweeted this morning:

Hours after the El Paso shooting, Mitch McConnell proudly tweeted this photo. I find it so troubling that our politics have become so nasty and personal that the Senate Majority Leader thinks it’s appropriate to use imagery of the death of a political opponent (me) as messaging.

As far as I can tell it was the campaign account that tweeted it rather than McConnell himself, but that’s a minor distinction, especially since the tweet is still sitting there.

But please, tell us more about the role of video games.

The Trump gang drives another scientist out of government work:

One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how rice loses nutrients due to rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Lewis Ziska, a 62-year-old plant physiologist who’s worked at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service for more than two decades, told POLITICO he was alarmed when department officials not only questioned the findings of the study — which raised potentially serious concerns for the 600 million people who depend on rice for most of their calories — but also tried to minimize press coverage of the paper, which was published in the journal Science Advances last year.

Will there be anyone left by January 2021?

Last week, an intelligence analyst at the State Department said he left his post after administration officials blocked his testimony to Congress about the wide-ranging national security implications of climate change. A National Park Service employee also stepped forward, alleging she lost her job after refusing to scrub mentions of human-caused climate change from a peer-reviewed paper that was set to publish.

A POLITICO investigation revealed last month that USDA has routinely buried its own climate-related science and other work on climate change that continues. POLITICO also recently reported USDA suppressed the release of its own plan for studying and responding to climate change.

It’s so crazy. What do they think is going to happen? Climate change will be rough for poor people but it will leave rich people alone? That their children and grandchildren will be just fine because they’ll have enough money to deal with it?

Ziska, in describing his decision to leave, painted a picture of a department in constant fear of the president and Secretary Sonny Perdue’s open skepticism about broadly accepted climate science, leading officials to go to extremes to obscure their work to avoid political blowback. The result, he said, is a vastly diminished ability for taxpayer-funded scientists to provide farmers and policymakers with important information about complex threats to the global food supply.

Well, the less we know, the freer we are to make colossal mistakes.

Ziska and another leading researcher at USDA, Naomi Fukagawa, who is the director of USDA’s Human Nutrition Research Center in Beltsville, had collaborated for more than two years with scientists at the University of Washington, University of Tokyo, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Southern Queensland, in Australia, and Bryan College of Health Sciences, in Lincoln, Neb., on what they considered a groundbreaking achievement. The paper looked at how an atmosphere increasingly rich in carbon dioxide could affect rice, which some 600 million people rely on for the majority of their calories, particularly in developing Asian countries.

600 million people is a lot. Their nutrition would seem to be important.

The study found that rice not only loses protein and minerals, which confirmed earlier research, but they also for the first time found that key vitamins can drop.

The journal editors anticipated that the paper would attract international press interest, so they asked the researchers to have their institutions help prepare a press packet. USDA officials initially wrote their own press release to tout the findings, but ended up spiking the release at the last minute because they said senior officials within ARS had concerns about the paper, according to emails obtained by POLITICO from one of the study’s other co-authors.

A communications official went as far as to call the University of Washington and suggest the university reconsider its plans to promote the paper.

Ziske asked for a meeting with the senior officials. No response.

“That’s when it occurred to me,” he said. “This isn’t about the science. It’s about something else, but it’s not about the science.”

My guess? It’s about the profits.