Nouvelle intrusion en maillot couvrant à Grenoble

Jun 24th, 2019 12:55 pm | By

A “burkini” protest in Grenoble:

Muslim women in France are disobeying the rules at a local swimming pool by wearing burkinis.

In a protest inspired by US civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, they bathed in suits covering their entire bodies – apart from the face, hands and feet – in the city of Grenoble on Sunday.

The Jean Bron swimming pool is among many in France that ban burkinis.

Leave Rosa Parks out of it. It’s not the same thing. Banning a garment is not the same as banning people.

After changing into burkinis, the Muslim members of the group were told by lifeguards that their swimsuits were not allowed.

Despite this, they entered the pool and bathed for about an hour with members of the community, many of whom cheered and applauded them for doing so.

It’s complicated. Banning the garment means banning women and girls who feel required to wear the garment, whether because they think their god requires it or because their male relatives force them to wear it or something in between. On the other hand permitting the garment works to normalize it and perhaps increase the pressure on other women and girls to wear it.

Burkinis, a mix of the words “burka” and “bikini”, are marketed to Muslim women as a way for them to swim in public while adhering to modesty edicts.

And that’s just it, isn’t it. What are “modesty edicts”? Why do they govern what women can wear but not what men can wear? Why do women have to swim in yards of cloth while men don’t?

But banning it seems coercive too. It’s a very yes but no but issue.

(Note that the French don’t call it a “burkini.” It’s not clear why the BBC does.)

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 8 comments


Non-responsive boilerplate wibble

Jun 24th, 2019 11:41 am | By

Remember that dopy letter last week full of empty platitudes about being inclusive and supportive, and extra special vulnerability and respect for gender identity? The one by and for and to academics – people whose job it is (or should be) to say things clearly? Now there’s a followup article saying Y We Did It and you’ll be astonished to learn it’s the same empty platitudes all over again.

On 16 June, a letter from 34 academics to The Sunday Times argued that university policies to include trans and gender diverse people, in particular the Stonewall Diversity Champions programme, were in tension with “academic freedom of thought”. For us – as ordinary academics working in higher education – this felt like just the latest in a slew of media coverage on trans people which has ranged from the critical to the sensationalist. Setting out to write a response, we found that what we really wanted to do was something much greater: a manifesto, an affirmation of our LGBTQIA+ colleagues at all levels of higher education.

Or, maybe, not so much “much greater” as “much easier.” They set out to write a response and then realized that would require actually engaging with the arguments of the letter – and I’m guessing they didn’t want to do that because they don’t actually have any arguments in response. All they have is the same old boilerplate about being inclusive and supportive and extra special vulnerability and respect for gender identity. Non-responsive boilerplate wibble looks better in A Manifesto than it does in a response, because responses are supposed to, you know, respond.

In this new piece about Why They Did It they say it’s all gone swimmingly.

At the time of writing, our manifesto – our contribution to the debate – has attracted the signatures of more than 6,000 university staff from across the world. We have also received a vast number of personal responses expressing relief and gratitude that someone has taken a vocal stand in support of trans, gender-diverse and other queer students and colleagues, representing the views of what feels like the silent majority against the few critical voices in the media.

Relief and gratitude that someone has taken a vocal stand? Representing the views of what feels like the silent majority? There are people taking that vocal stand all over the place, complete with threats and images of guns, knives, baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire. The silent majority is far from silent.

Amid these responses, too, have been many heartbreaking stories from trans and gender-diverse people: fear of what colleagues will think of them; an ever-present question of whether their identity (reflected through their pronouns and name) will be denied; fear for their physical safety. In short, fear for whether their dignity as individual human beings will be observed and respected.

Heartbreaking? Fear of what colleagues will think of them is kind of the human condition, isn’t it? Or at least occasional anxiety about it. Very few people are completely free of worry about how well they pass as not-weird not-wrong not-freakish to the rest of the world. The nonsense about whether their fantasy “identity” (the one that negates their actual literal identity) will be denied is not worth a second of attention. Fear for their physical safety is a bad thing, for sure, but then trans activism as a movement is causing a lot of women to have that fear too. As for “fear for whether their dignity as individual human beings will be observed and respected” – again, that’s the pious empty blather again. Nobody is attacking or threatening or belittling their dignity as individual human beings. They’re entitled to as much of that as everyone else is (and no more). The issue isn’t their dignity as individual human beings, it’s their campaign to force us all to agree that they are what they are not. What about our dignity as individual human beings? Eh?

By not recognising trans people within our universities as being who they are, we deny them the dignity of their own identities.

But it’s not who they are. It’s who they say they are, which is a different thing. Consider: they could say they are Rasputin returned from the dead. They could say anything. Anyone could; we all could. Just saying isn’t magic, and we don’t have any moral obligation to agree that people are who they say they are when that saying contradicts the material reality we can detect with our eyes and ears.

Trans, gender-diverse, and other queer people are not problems to be theorised and hypothesised. They are living, breathing human beings.

Well, yes, of course they are, but the point is that the “trans” bit is something that can and should be “theorised and hypothesised” – aka analyzed and discussed and thought about and puzzled over. They don’t get to sew the trans bit onto themselves like Peter Pan sewing his soul shadow onto himself so that they can treat it as inviolate. It’s a novel idea, it’s morphing and inflating every day, and it makes large claims on us; of course we have to be able to discuss and dispute it freely.

There’s more of the same pious gibberish but I’m sick of it now. Basta.

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What civil liberty is this exactly?

Jun 23rd, 2019 3:53 pm | By

The Connecticut ACLU is working with the two trans-identified high school boys who race with the girls and scoop up all the prizes.

Two transgender high school track and field athletes responded Wednesday to a Title IX complaint alleging that the runners prevented other female runners from top finishes and potentially from college scholarships.

The complaint filed earlier this week on behalf of three female track and field athletes in Connecticut argues that the two transgender runners, both of whom were assigned male at birth but identify as female, have “competitive advantages.” The complaint seeks to overturn the policy of the state’s high school athletics governing board, the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which allows athletes to compete based on the gender they identify with.

Both boys are visibly much taller and more muscular than the girls on the team. Of course they have competitive advantages, and of course they’re taking advantage of trans mania to win races they would otherwise lose.

“I have faced discrimination in every aspect of my life and I no longer want to remain silent,” said Bloomfield High track and field standout Terry Miller, one of the two transgender athletes cited in the complaint. “I am a girl and I am a runner. I participate in athletics just like my peers to excel, find community and meaning in my life. It is both unfair and painful that my victories have to be attacked and my hard work ignored.”

It’s not unfair for boys to race against boys.

I wonder how supportive Terry Miller would be if all the fastest boys “identified as girls” and joined him in competing against the actual girls.

Miller, along with Andraya Yearwood, who attends Cromwell High, have been working with the American Civil Liberties Union as the complaint begins to unfold. Miller won the State Open 200-meter title for the second straight year in 2019 and won the Class S titles in the 100 and 200, as well as the New England 200-meter championship. Yearwood, who is also transgender, finished third in the 100 meters in Class S and fourth in the 100 in the State Open.

Because they were competing against girls.

The national American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney also issued a statement Wednesday, calling it “heartbreaking.”

Attacking two black young women who are simply participating in the sport they love just because they are transgender is wrong, it is dangerous, and it is distorts Title IX, which is a law that protects all students on the basis of sex,” ACLU attorney Chase Strangio said. “Efforts to undermine Title IX by claiming it doesn’t apply to a subset of girls will ultimately hurt all students.”

On the basis of sex: men are not women and women are not men.

Boys are not “a subset of girls,” even if they are trans. Boys are not girls.

Title IX:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Miller and Yearwood are boys and should compete with boys. Saying boys should compete with boys is not exclusion or denial of benefits or discrimination.

The Connecticut ACLU has been tweeting about this a lot. Tough shit, girls, you lose.

https://twitter.com/acluct/status/1141833116367106050

Goodbye girls. You can always go back to knitting.

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Sorry female athletes, sucks to be you

Jun 23rd, 2019 3:23 pm | By

I hope the ACLU of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Colorado, California et al. knows better than that.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 12 comments


Where’s the fire?

Jun 23rd, 2019 12:49 pm | By

This is somewhat puzzling.

I don’t get it. Why is the London fire department, or Fire Service as it’s called over there, giving LGBT+ workshops? Why is the Fire Service doing that any more than grocers or bus drivers or bankers or plumbers would?

Lots of people asked about that.

https://twitter.com/ZerenaMoose/status/1142389718480539654

Abby Crawford never answered the question, that I saw.

I’m all for equality, and even equalities, but I don’t see what that has to do with sending someone from the Fire Service into schools to do LGBT+ workshops. I just cannot see the connection. Maybe surgeons should be turning up at the Fire Service to give electrical engineering workshops?

The Fire Service has an equality and diversity page.

Equality, diversity and inclusion are fundamentals at London Fire Brigade – and long have been. We’re one of the most diverse cities in the world, and we value the contribution that every community makes to London.

We exist for our communities, and we’re proud to celebrate and support the diversity of London as an inclusive team that represents the city we serve.

That all seems entirely sensible and useful. Fire fighters have to burst into people’s houses, perform rescues, get all up in their business in every way. It seems fine to have community outreach and internal advice on inclusiveness. But how they get from that to doing LGBT+ workshops in schools is beyond me.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 8 comments


Auschwitz-Goldenbridge-Clint Facility

Jun 23rd, 2019 11:42 am | By

Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker reports that this week lawyers interviewed a lot of children being held in nightmare border prisons, in order to monitor compliance with Flores.

The conditions the lawyers found were shocking: flu and lice outbreaks were going untreated, and children were filthy, sleeping on cold floors, and taking care of each other because of the lack of attention from guards. Some of them had been in the facility for weeks.

That sounds…so…familiar.

It sounds, for instance, like the conditions at the work camp part of Auschwitz, where Margo and Anne Frank died of typhus. But this isn’t the Nazis. This is us. This is our government doing exactly, yes exactly, what the Nazis did – herding people they have decided to despise and abuse into filthy camps to live in disease-promoting conditions.

Chotiner talked to a lawyer who had interviewed children at the Clint Facility. She found it has far more children than its purported capacity. The bosses have “expanded” capacity, but what that turned out to mean was an added warehouse which increased capacity by 500 children. It has no windows.

Her group started with the youngest, and they were shocked at how young they were.

And then we started to pull the children who had been there the longest to find out just how long children are being kept there. Children described to us that they’ve been there for three weeks or longer. And so, immediately from that population that we were trying to triage, they were filthy dirty, there was mucus on theirshirts, the shirts were dirty. We saw breast milk on the shirts. There was food on the shirts, and the pants as well. They told us that they were hungry. They told us that some of them had not showered or had not showered until the day or two days before we arrived. Many of them described that they only brushed their teeth once.

Safe and sanitary, is the Flores standard.

So, in any event, the children told us that nobody’s taking care of them, so that basically the older children are trying to take care of the younger children. The guards are asking the younger children or the older children, “Who wants to take care of this little boy? Who wants to take of this little girl?” and they’ll bring in a two-year-old, a three-year-old, a four-year-old. And then the littlest kids are expected to be taken care of by the older kids, but then some of the oldest children lose interest in it, and little children get handed off to other children. And sometimes we hear about the littlest children being alone by themselves on the floor.

Many of the children reported sleeping on the concrete floor. They are being given army blankets, those wool-type blankets that are really harsh. Most of the children said they’re being given two blankets, one to put beneath them on the floor. Some of the children are describing just being given one blanket and having to decide whether to put it under them or over them because there is air-conditioning at this facility. And so they’re having to make a choice about, Do I try to protect myself from the cement, or do I try to keep warm?

But it gets worse.

So, on Wednesday, we received reports from children of a lice outbreak in one of the cells where there were about twenty-five children, and what they told us is that six of the children were found to have lice. And so they were given a lice shampoo, and the other children were given two combs and told to share those two combs, two lice combs, and brush their hair with the same combs, which is something you never do with a lice outbreak. And then what happened was one of the combs was lost, and Border Patrol agents got so mad that they took away the children’s blankets and mats. They weren’t allowed to sleep on the beds, and they had to sleep on the floor on Wednesday night as punishment for losing the comb. So you had a whole cell full of kids who had beds and mats at one point, not for everybody but for most of them, who were forced to sleep on the cement.

There’s more. Of course there is.

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The threats are coming from INSIDE the legislature

Jun 23rd, 2019 11:21 am | By

Oregon’s one of those funny states with a reputation for granola hats and peace-loving recycle bins, but the reality is that it has a big share of right-wing god-n-guns types. Apparently they have seized the state legislature.

Oregon’s statehouse shut down for safety concerns on Saturday. But the threats weren’t coming from anonymous trolls or foreign fighters—they were coming from the state’s Republican senators, who have teamed up with right-wing militias to threaten violence over a climate change bill.

Eleven of Oregon’s Senate Republicans fled the state this week to avoid a vote on a bill that would cap greenhouse emissions. The group, believed to be hiding in Idaho, left the state senate with too few lawmakers to hold a vote. But the move is more than a legislative maneuver. The missing senators have partnered with right-wing paramilitary groups to threaten violence, should they be brought back to Oregon.

I’ve thought of a better plan. How about they make peace with the legislature, and instead team up with paramilitary groups to fight the environment? Right? Wouldn’t that be a great idea? It would keep them busy and harness all that rage, and there’s at least a chance that they would win and the environment would surrender and stop being all climate changey.

The state senate had scheduled sessions on Saturday, but cancelled them after reports of several militias’ two-day “Rally to Take the Capitol” this weekend.

“Oregon State Police has recommended that the Capitol be closed tomorrow due to a possible militia threat,” a spokesperson for the senate president told the Associated Press on Friday night.

A rally to take the Capitol. So we’re in the actual junta stage now? Dave Andress has a tweet about how all this rage and violence is at bottom about the doom of climate change. I’ll go find it…

Found it.

There have been walkouts in Oregon before, from both parties, but they didn’t include threats.

Multiple senators are believed to have fled to Idaho, with right-wing militias flocking to their aid. While leaving the statehouse before the walkout, Republican Sen. Brian Boquist implied that police officers who pursued them should be ready to die. “Send bachelors and come heavily armed,” Boquist warned police in a televised interview shortly before his walkout. “I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon. It’s just that simple.”

State police said they were aware of Boquist’s remarks, but were not commenting on them. Boquist and his colleagues are supported by several right-wing militias that made more explicit threats.

After Oregon Gov. Kate Brown called on state troopers to return the lawmakers to the capital, the paramilitary group the Oath Keepers suggested violence against her.

“Gov. Brown, you want a civil war, because this is how you get a civil war,” the Oath Keepers wrote on their public Facebook page. Beneath the post, Oath Keeper fans suggesting hanging, arresting, or taking up arms against Brown.

Bumpy night.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 10 comments


Warnings are forbidden

Jun 23rd, 2019 10:31 am | By

The shunning is well under way.

Sarah Honeychurch, a fellow in the Adam Smith Business School at Glasgow University, was among more than 30 academics who signed the letter in last week’s Sunday Times. It registered “disquiet” over a programme run by the charity Stonewall in which “anti-scientific claims are presented . . . as objective fact”.

The guidance includes instructing academics on using gender neutral pronouns such as “zie” and “ey”, as well as insisting that “one in 100 are born with an intersex trait” and that trans women should be allowed to use female changing rooms.

…

Last week Honeychurch, an editor of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, received a formal email from Chris Friend, the managing editor, stating: “Unless I have misunderstood the intentions of the letter or the convictions of your signature, I must ask that you resign your position as editor for HPJ.”

No must about it, of course. It’s like that “we are compelled” from the other day.

To be fair, it’s an idiom of sorts. It expresses moral urgency as opposed to literal compulsion. I’ve probably used it myself, and I’ve almost certainly seen it without objecting to it when it’s in aid of a moral view I agree with. But when one doesn’t agree, the idiom becomes obtrusive.

Another signatory of the Sunday Times letter, Michele Moore, honorary professor at Essex University, who has edited the journal Disability & Society for many years, is also facing calls to resign after warning that autistic and other children might be harmed if they are wrongly encouraged to question their gender, which could lead to taking hormones and later surgery.

A petition from 750 colleagues calls on her to step down. She said her career hung in the balance because of the campaign, but the journal’s publishers and people from around the world were being supportive.

I feel compelled to say “What a load of nonsense.”

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments


Lift that face, chop those tits

Jun 23rd, 2019 10:10 am | By
Lift that face, chop those tits

Maybe it’s all a plot by Big Plastic Surgery.

Not really, but it’s certainly a gold mine for Big Plastic Surgery, also for Mid-size and Tiny Plastic Surgery. In the latter category is Dr. Beverly Fischer MD for instance. (Isn’t Dr./MD redundant? A bit trumpian?) Doc Beverly has a most alluring Twitter header.

Capture

Her profile is more advertisement than profile:

All your #PlasticSurgery needs! Lips, Face, Body. #Halo, #SculpSure, #BioTe & More. Get the best beauty tips, advice & special offers 👉http://bit.ly/2o0u9RZ

She urges us to get a facelift.

But don’t go thinking she’s about nothing but the appearance – she’s a Pride supporter too!

It’s Pride month! Cut your tits off! Low low price with our $750 discount!

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 9 comments


Trump endorses common sense

Jun 22nd, 2019 4:00 pm | By

Trump blithers about Iran.

President Donald Trump said Saturday that military action against Iran was still an option for its downing of an unmanned U.S. military aircraft, but amid heightened tensions he dangled the prospect of eventually becoming an unlikely “best friend” of America’s longtime Middle Eastern adversary.

Trump also said “we very much appreciate” that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard chose not to target a U.S. spy plane carrying more than 30 people.

Yes, that’s how it’s done. Just sound like an awkward child thanking an adult for a birthday present, and everything will be fine.

“The fact is we’re not going to have Iran have a nuclear weapon,” he said as he left the White House for a weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat. “And when they agree to that, they are going to have a wealthy country, they’re going to be so happy and I’m going to be their best friend.”

For the next few months until he’s either impeached or voted out. Not much of a payoff.

“Everybody was saying I’m a war monger. And now they say I’m a dove. And I think I’m neither, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told reporters. “I’m a man with common sense. And that’s what we need in this country, is common sense. But I didn’t like the idea of them knowingly shooting down an unmanned drone and then we kill 150 people.”

He added: “I don’t want to kill 150 Iranians. I don’t want to kill 150 of anything or anybody unless it’s absolutely necessary.’”

What if it’s burgers? He’s perfectly happy to kill 150 burgers any day of the week.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 7 comments
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Flower flower fuck terfs flower flower

Jun 22nd, 2019 3:11 pm | By

I saw this on Twitter.

Apparently it’s from Edinburgh Pride. I’d love to know what the rest of the “BRICKS NOT” sign says, but the “NO MORE TERFS” sign with the picture of a woman’s mouth talking and the “fuck TERFs” are informative on their own. Pride is about hating feminist women now. Whoopdydoo.

What Gordon Ramsay has to do with it I don’t know.

Updating to add: MP Joanna Cherry also saw it.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 12 comments


You always have a choice

Jun 22nd, 2019 11:42 am | By

If you knew…

If you knew of a child who was being forced by a parent or guardian to sleep on a cold concrete floor, in overcrowded surroundings, with screaming lights always on overhead that made it hard to sleep, with limited access to a bathroom, no way to brush their teeth, no soap and no towel — would you do something?

Of course you would. You would dial 911 (in the US) and report the circumstances and location.

But if the child is a migrant, it’s government policy to do that to them.

In 2014 — during the Obama administration, it should be noted — several young immigrants caught along the border said they had been given dirty water to drink and kept in crowded, frigid cells.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee of Los Angeles ruled that children taken into federal immigration custody must be kept in “safe and sanitary” facilities.

The judges of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, upheld Judge Gee’s ruling two years ago. But this week, Sarah Fabian, senior litigation counsel for the Department of Justice, told the three-judge panel she thought the phrase was vague.

It’s not all that vague. “Safe” includes not unhealthy, so it rules out sleeping on a concrete floor, sleeping with lights on all night, sleeping in the cold…and so on.

Judge Marsha Berzon asked Fabian: “You’re really going to stand up and tell us that being able to sleep isn’t a question of ‘safe and sanitary’ conditions?”

Judge William Fletcher said, “Cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you’ve got an aluminum foil blanket? I find it inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary.”

“It may be they don’t get super-thread-count Egyptian linen, I get that,” he added, and said the soap provided didn’t have to be perfumed. But plain soap, he said, “sounds like it’s part of ‘safe and sanitary.’ “

Judge A. Wallace Tashima said, “If you don’t have a toothbrush, if you don’t have soap, if you don’t have a blanket, it’s not safe and sanitary. Wouldn’t everybody agree to that?”

Everybody except people who take orders from Trump.

Matthew Miller points out that they aren’t forced to.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments


Like Bastille Day but with Trump

Jun 22nd, 2019 10:53 am | By

Trump is finally getting his big Parade of Sojers along with a Nürnberg-style rally starring himself.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt gave details Wednesday on a makeover of the traditional Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to accommodate a speech by President Donald Trump at the Lincoln Memorial.

A day after Trump officially began his re-election campaign in Florida, Bernhardt said the July 4 events will include the military parade Trump has wanted since being impressed by the July 14 Bastille Day festivities in Paris he attended in 2017.

They call him “sir,” you know. Did you know that? They do. The generals call him sir. If you ask him he’ll do a re-enactment for you.

In a release, Bernhardt, whose department includes the National Park Service, said the National Independence Day Parade along Constitution Avenue NW from 7th Street to 17th Street NW will feature marching bands, a fife and drum corps, floats, military units, giant balloons, equestrian and drill teams and more” in a “red, white and blue celebration of America’s birthday!”

As opposed to previous July 4 events on the Mall, this year’s will also include a flyover by military jets, Bernhardt said.

In other words it will be militaristic and fascist-leaning in a way that is new and abnormal and highly undesirable.

Some previous presidential observations:

In 2008, President George W. Bush hosted a naturalization ceremony at the White House for 72 new U.S. citizens from 30 countries, the Park Service said.

In 2010, President Barack Obama hosted a barbecue on the south lawn of the White House for 1,200 members of the military and their families.

I prefer those.

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Bush 1’s legacy

Jun 22nd, 2019 9:53 am | By

Jeffrey Toobin tells us what Clarence Thomas has been up to lately, starting with a grotesque case out of Mississippi:

A Mississippi prosecutor went on a racist crusade to have a black man executed. Clarence Thomas thinks that was just fine.

That’s the message of an astonishing decision today from the Supreme Court. The facts of the case, known as Flowers v. Mississippi, are straightforward. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it, in his admirably blunt opinion for the Court, “In 1996, Curtis Flowers allegedly murdered four people in Winona, Mississippi. Flowers is black. He has been tried six separate times before a jury for murder. The same lead prosecutor represented the State in all six trials.” Flowers was convicted in the first three trials, and sentenced to death. On each occasion, his conviction was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court, on the grounds of misconduct by the prosecutor, Doug Evans, mostly in the form of keeping African-Americans off the juries. Trials four and five ended in hung juries. In the sixth trial, the one that was before the Supreme Court, Flowers was convicted, but the Justices found that Evans had again discriminated against black people, and thus Flowers, in jury selection, and they overturned his conviction.

I’m confused by this, because it sounds like double jeopardy over and over again. It also sounds odd that the same prosecutor was on all the cases even though the convictions kept getting overturned.

As Kavanaugh recounted in his opinion, Evans’s actions were almost cartoonishly racist. To wit: in the six trials, the State employed its peremptory challenges (that is, challenges for which no reason need be given) to strike forty-one out of forty-two African-American prospective jurors. In the most recent trial, the State exercised peremptory strikes against five of six black prospective jurors. In addition, Evans questioned black prospective jurors a great deal more closely than he questioned whites. As Kavanaugh observed, with considerable understatement, “A court confronting that kind of pattern cannot ignore it.“

However much it would like to.

Yet Thomas, the one black person on the court, says yes this is awesome, let’s have more of this.

But Thomas can, and he did. Indeed, he filed a dissenting opinion that was genuinely outraged—not by the prosecutor but by his fellow-Justices, who dared to grant relief to Flowers, who has spent more than two decades in solitary confinement at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman prison. Thomas said that the prosecutor’s behavior was blameless, and he practically sneered at his colleagues, asserting that the majority had decided the Flowers case to “boost its self-esteem.”

Aka “virtue-signalling.” I guess it’s better to have evil-signalling? Evil racism-signalling?

Despite Thomas’s usual silence on the bench (he did ask a question during the Flowers argument), he is clearly feeling ideologically aggressive these days. In his Flowers dissent, Thomas all but called for the overturning of the Court’s landmark decision in Batson v. Kentucky, from 1986, which prohibits prosecutors from using their peremptory challenges in racially discriminatory ways.

Gotta let those prosecutors do their racist thing, because…let’s see…because anything else is just political correctness? Do I have that right?

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Yes we will no we won’t yes we will wait what time is it again?

Jun 21st, 2019 7:09 pm | By

The Post reports on the childish chaos of Trump Playing War all day and then telling the world that he’s a Big Boy and he can Change His Mind.

The plans had been drawn, the targets set, and a single word from the commander in chief would have activated the U.S. military to strike a foreign adversary. But President Trump was having second thoughts.

After giving his top Pentagon officials permission to prepare for U.S. military strikes against Iran, Trump convened his top advisers in the Oval Office on Thursday evening and began asking crucial questions just minutes before the operation was set to commence, according to officials familiar with the episode.

Cool that he asks crucial questions, but the trouble is, the questions had already been asked and answered. This isn’t somebody marshaling all the reasons on both sides and then making a judgement, this is somebody playing dress-up.

What are the potential risks, he asked. How many people could be killed? What could go wrong?

Trump had already been briefed in detail on such questions earlier in the day, including a Pentagon estimate of up to 150 Iranian casualties.

But hey, why not ask them all over again at the last minute, so that you can tell dramatic stories about yourself the next day? I mean why not?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wishing he’d gone ahead. I’m wishing he weren’t a childish idiot with no clue what he’s doing.

“We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die,” Trump wrote Friday on Twitter, embellishing several of the events in question. “150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it.”

The whole thing is so that he could get that “sir” in there. He’s so excited that he gets to tell us that generals call him sir. (I bet they swallow quite a lot of vomit as they do it, too.)

Trump’s reversal was the culmination of 24 frenzied and frenetic hours marked by public inconsistencies, congressional bewilderment and palpable concern among national security experts that the administration might inadvertently stumble into the kind of bloody Middle East conflict that the president had campaigned so vigorously against.

Simply because the president’s brain might as well be cream of wheat for all the use it is.

The administration’s debate over how to respond to the drone attack played out over the course of four meetings at the White House on Thursday beginning at 7 a.m. Trump was supportive of military action throughout the day as Pentagon officials, lawmakers and national security officials made their cases for or against escalation, making his sudden change of mind all the more striking to those inside the administration.

He just loves surprises!

He didn’t bother to tell Congress that strikes were planned.

Later in the afternoon, the Pentagon was gearing up to announce a strike. Around 6 p.m., defense officials including Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist huddled with Shanahan in his office overlooking the Potomac River.

That’s when Trump started to ask key questions, as he huddled in the Oval Office with top advisers, including White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

The president was especially interested in the number of potential casualties, noting that Iran’s downing of a drone hadn’t killed any Americans. He was told again that as many as 150 Iranians could be killed.

“I thought about it for a second, and I said, ‘You know what? They shot down an unmanned drone, plane, whatever you want to call it. And here we are sitting with 150 dead people that would have taken place probably within a half an hour after I said go ahead.’ ” Trump said in an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Friday. “And I didn’t like it . . . I didn’t think it was proportionate.”

Light goes on in trumpian brain. “Ohhhhhh, people will be killed. Well why didn’t somebody say so?!”

Trump’s decision to call off the strikes, citing the potential casualties, came as a surprise to Pentagon officials who had spent the late afternoon gearing up for the operation. Some Defense Department officials had privately expressed concerns because they saw it as a major escalation, officials said.

Trump’s cancellation at about 7 p.m. came about two hours before the strikes were supposed to occur.

Whatever. Two hours, two seconds, who cares – hey is there any ice cream left?

Trump told advisers Friday morning that he was glad he didn’t go forward with the strikes.

He also claimed on Twitter that new sanctions had been imposed on Iran on Thursday night. But officials said later Friday that no new measures had been imposed.

The whipsaw approach left some in Congress concerned that the president didn’t have a clear strategy for managing relations with Iran.

Ya think?

 

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 12 comments


Vulgar thug claims it’s all lies to sell books; world laughs

Jun 21st, 2019 4:58 pm | By

Trump has (of course) put out a disgusting “statement” (that reads as if written in crayon on a cereal box) saying nuh-uh he never did.

CNBC has the text:

Regarding the “story” by E. Jean Carroll, claiming she once encountered me at Bergdorf Goodman 23 years ago. I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book—that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.

So presidential.

Shame on those who make up false stories of assault to try to get publicity for themselves, or sell a book, or carry out a political agenda—like Julie Swetnick who falsely accused Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It’s just as bad for people to believe it, particularly when there is zero evidence. Worse still for a dying publication to try to prop itself up by peddling fake news—it’s an epidemic.

Ms. Carroll & New York Magazine: No pictures? No surveillance? No video? No reports? No sales attendants around?? I would like to thank Bergdorf Goodman for confirming they have no video footage of any such incident, because it never happened.

Bergdorf Goodman didn’t “confirm” anything, nor did they do it as a favor to Trump. They said they no longer have any tape from that period, which is not surprising – stores don’t keep surveillance tapes for decades just for the hell of it.

False accusations diminish the severity of real assault. All should condemn false accusations and any actual assault in the strongest possible terms.

If anyone has information that the Democratic Party is working with Ms. Carroll or New York Magazine, please notify us as soon as possible. The world should know what’s really going on. It is a disgrace and people should pay dearly for such false accusations.

He wrote that pile of dung himself, with a little cleanup from the professionals. It’s all Donald, lying and DARVOing and threatening and flattering.

This is the guy who brags about grabbing women by the pussy, so yes, I’m going to believe her story before I believe his bullying bluster.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 7 comments


No more than three minutes

Jun 21st, 2019 3:26 pm | By

Another woman reports another sexual assault by the current president of the US – this one a full-on rape as opposed to a mere grab her by the pussy.

The woman is E. Jean Carroll, advice columnist for Elle magazine.

25 years ago she ran into Trump at Bergdorf’s, and he enlisted her to help him shop for “a girl.” She suggested a hat, a purse, he said underwear. He finds a filmy item and tells her to try it on, she says you try it on, they go back and forth with her thinking he’s bantering.

“But it’s your size,” I say, laughing and trying to slap him back with one of the boxes on the counter.

“Come on,” he says, taking my arm. “Let’s put this on.”

This is gonna be hilarious, I’m saying to myself — and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity. As we head to the dressing rooms, I’m laughing aloud and saying in my mind: I’m gonna make him put this thing on over his pants!

At that point she asks and answers some questions – were there no salespeople around, did she tell anyone, did she go to the police, why hasn’t she said anything until now.

So now I will tell you what happened:

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates. I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue.

It doesn’t sound like the best sex ever, even from his point of view, so one has to wonder what his point was. Just vulgar dominance display? I guess. Just…entitlement, aggression, misogyny, engorged ego, “when you’re a celebrity they let you.” Whatever.

So now it’s her turn to be pilloried by every MAGA clown on the planet.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 1 Comment »
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We are toast anyway

Jun 21st, 2019 11:48 am | By

What was that about melting again? From the tundra to the Himalayas:

Over the last several years, on Mt. Everest, veteran alpine guides have reported seeing an increasing number of human skeletons and frozen corpses. One guide named Gelje Sherpa told the Times that when he first summited, in 2008, he found three bodies, and during a recent season he found six.

Seems to be a sign that the glaciers are melting.

A new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, added a significant layer of proof, finding that, over the past forty years, the average rate that the Himalayas have lost ice has doubled. While the paper’s findings have dire consequences for the millions of people who live just below Himalayan glaciers, they are also vitally important in aiding officials and engineers tasked with planning for the region’s entire population of 1.6 billion people, all of whom rely on the rivers that these glaciers feed.

You know, little rivers like the Ganges and the Brahmaputra and the Yellow and the Indus…

Scientists were hoping that it would be more complicated than warmer temperatures—>melting glaciers, but the evidence is indicating that it’s not.

Based on many other studies, the suspicion already had been that temperature is the main climate driver melting glaciers. “Of course, if it gets warmer, ice melts, we knew that,” Schaefer said. But he would have been happy if the study showed that melting is much more variable, and more strongly impacted by other factors. “We were obviously hoping that for the environment, and the livelihood of society, that it would be a more local pattern,” he said. “Instead, this means that just everywhere these glaciers will follow the temperature curve.” Schaefer added, “Of all the possibilities, that’s the worst result.”

So good-bye glaciers hello mass famines.

Schaefer told me that people often ask him when the Himalayas are going to be ice-free. “It’s a little bit like asking, When are the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets gonna be gone?” he said. (Greenland’s summer heat is already weeks ahead of average, breaking the record for such extensive melting of its ice sheet at an early date.) “They are interesting questions, but they are not that relevant for us. If the ice sheets are gone, we are toast anyway. We will be gone way before.”

And it appears that there is no way the ice sheets won’t be gone.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
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Which is the wrong side of the round table?

Jun 21st, 2019 10:58 am | By

Oliver Burkeman points out that we can’t actually know what “the right side of history” is going to be.

Earlier this month, as the bundle of disordered impulses currently serving as president of the US prepared to fly to London, the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, argued in this newspaper that the visit would put Britain on “the wrong side of history”. I tend to agree the trip shouldn’t have happened, if only to guard against the risk of a national cheeseburger shortage, but it’s time we dropped that “wrong side of history” argument. Like the crevice down the back of a sofa, full of coins and old bits of Play-Doh, the Wrong Side of History has become a crowded place in recent years. Among those consigned to it have been Brexiteers, anti-vaxxers, vaccine proponents, feminists who don’t accept the idea of gender as an innate essence, the leftwing Somali-American politician Ilhan Omar, and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Owen Jones is one who is fond of locating feminists on the wrong side of history. If it turns out to be OJ who is on the wrong side in say 30 years (assuming there’s any history left on a baking planet), I hope he’s fully aware of it…but doubt he will be.

Appealing to the judgment of history involves consulting a bunch of imaginary people from the future, so it’s hardly a surprise when they turn out to agree with whoever is doing the consulting.

In other words it’s a laughably easy claim to make, because who can demonstrate that you’re wrong?

The real hazard, though, comes when the idea is used by contemporary pontificators to avoid confronting the possibility that they, themselves, might be wrong. Once you’re confident of history’s position, you needn’t ask whether your critics might have a point; you can dismiss them as anachronistic fuddy-duddies who haven’t caught up with the latest advance toward moral truth. The irony is that it is a good idea to reflect on the judgment of history – not to reinforce your opinions, but rather to unsettle them, and infuse them with a dose of humility. The past is full of periods when people endorsed ridiculous or horrifying views, but they evidently didn’t think so at the time. Why should any of us be immune, just because our time happens to be now?

The not thinking so at the time is permanently interesting to me. Slavery, in particular, is always a nagging open question – how was it possible, how was it possible for so long in a nation that bragged about its own love of liberty and rights. Samuel Johnson pointed out that discrepancy crisply:  “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” He wasn’t keen on yelps for liberty himself, but all the same he wasn’t wrong about the mismatch.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 5 comments


A tiny handbag full of leaflets

Jun 21st, 2019 9:57 am | By

News from London:

Mark Field has been suspended as a Foreign Office minister after a video showed him pushing a female Greenpeace activist against a pillar and grabbing her neck while she protested at the chancellor’s Mansion House speech.

Police are investigating third-party reports of assault made against Field, who has since apologised to the protester. The MP for the Cities of London and Westminster said he had felt threatened when the protester walked past him and was worried she might have been armed.

I watched the video several times yesterday afternoon. It’s pretty shocking.

The activist, Janet Barker, said on Friday that she was incredulous at his reaction and welcomed the suspension but would not press criminal charges. “I think it is something best dealt with in the court of opinion,” she said.

Barker said Field had pushed her so hard as they reached the door that she had almost fallen. She said he should take anger management classes. “I want him to think about what he did, why he did it and address his behaviour.”

She said she had made no sudden movements or behaved in any way that could have been construed as physically threatening. “I had a phone and a tiny handbag, which was open and full of leaflets,” she said. “The only thing I was armed with was peer-reviewed science.”

…

Philip Hammond was preparing to deliver his set-piece address in the City of London when dozens of Greenpeace activists interrupted him to give an alternative speech about the climate crisis, video footage shows.

In a statement released in the early hours of Friday before his suspension, Field said he had reacted “instinctively”. He said he “grasped the intruder firmly in order to remove her from the room as swiftly as possible.

“I deeply regret this episode and unreservedly apologise to the lady concerned for grabbing her but in the current climate I felt I needed to act decisively to close down the threat to the safety of those present.”

Yeah. She could have had a missile in that tiny purse.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments