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.

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.

Correct me if I'm wrong:
Mansion House is the home of the Lord Mayor of London & regularly hosts the PM. Security would have checked people on entry.
So I don't buy the "The Greenpeace lady might have a machine gun tucked in her dress" defence, Mark Field.pic.twitter.com/f62KI6UBSk

— Femi (@Femi_Sorry) June 21, 2019

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.

Yet another petition saying ignore those uppity women. This one is strikingly crude and badly written for purported academics. It’s also of course a crock of shit.

As academics, researchers, teachers, professional staff, and practitioners in the Higher Education sector, we are compelled to write to rebut the arguments put forward in the article published in the Sunday Times on 16th June.

Compelled? Really? Who is compelling them? What are the sanctions?

They don’t mean are compelled, of course, they mean feel compelled – which is where this whole disagreement started. Feeling isn’t necessarily being. Adults really are supposed to know the difference.

The article cited a letter signed by a group of about thirty academics who claim that Stonewall is stifling academic freedom. We entirely reject the position taken in the letter that promoting an educational environment free from harassment and bullying via the Stonewall Diversity Champions programme contradicts the principles of academic freedom.

Ahhhhh but that’s not the position taken in the letter, now is it. Naughty. Of course the letter doesn’t advocate an educational environment full of harassment and bullying.

The letter muddles the distinction between the concept of academic freedom, and the statutory public sector equality duties of higher education institutions. For the former, the right to conduct academic debates, research, and publish activities without fear of retribution by those in power, is the cornerstone of the academy. Whilst the latter relates to the institutional duties towards legally protected groups to eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation, promote equality of opportunity and foster good relations through the practices of higher education institutions. Debating gender pronouns within an academic context is part of academic freedom whereas the refusal to respect the gender pronouns of an individual to be used in class is not.

But the right to force people to refer to an individual as the sex that individual is not is an absolute right? Why is it? Who says it is? Why don’t we get to resist this move to compel us – literally compel this time – to counteract our own perceptions every time we mention This One Special Person?

Calling it “the refusal to respect the gender pronouns of an individual” reverses the agency at issue here. Respecting the gender pronouns of an individual isn’t a real thing; it’s a political invention and a way to force unwilling people to pay extra attention to narcissists. In ordinary life we don’t “respect” people’s pronouns, we just use them as a convenience to avoid having to repeat people’s names every time we mention them. That’s it. It’s just a convention of grammar. “Respect” has nothing to do with it. A politics that is all about trying to ruin the lives of academic women over pronouns is a politics that needs to be shot into the sun.

Stonewall provides a holistic and systematic approach for Diversity Champions to assess their policies and practice against each other through the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index (WEI). Participation in the WEI is voluntary but enables public, private and third sector organisations to evaluate and share good practice. This benefits not just members of the LGBT+ communities but all staff and students by fostering a more inclusive organisational culture. We are deeply concerned that a false claim of victimhood, under the guise of academic freedom, risks being legitimised to discredit universities and Stonewall when recent news and data about the experiences of LGBT+ communities show increasing levels of reported homophobic, biphobic and transphobic hate crime, harassment and discrimination.

And the solution is pronouns? Get a grip.

We unapologetically advocate for an academy where debates are intellectual and ethical, where everybody can be authentic to be who they are, and where everyone treats each other with respect and dignity.

What does “where everybody can be authentic to be who they are” mean? Can white people who feel a strong affinity for black culture demand to be treated as black because that’s the only way they can be authentic to be who they are? No. They’d be slapped down hard if they tried. Can white people who have one Sioux or Cherokee ancestor five generations back demand to be treated as Native American because that’s the only way they can be authentic to be who they are? Nope. In both cases, the rest of the world would say no, that’s not authentic, that’s the very opposite of authentic, so cut it out. But a man who says he’s a woman? Oh that’s completely different, because [insert something here]. “Authentic” my ass.

We also encourage our colleagues in the sector to challenge prejudice and aggression towards trans and all other minoritised groups. We stand in solidarity with trans staff and students and will continue to challenge views that run counter to our goal of an inclusive academy.

Not inclusive of people who disagree with us though. Of course not.

Daniel Kaufman at the Electric Agora tries to figure out this “feeling like a ___” puzzle. He too starts from Alice Roberts’s Twitter claim yesterday –

If someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels female – I cannot tell her she is ‘wrong’. Would you?

What if someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels like a manatee, or a potato peeler, or a street lamp, or Lake Louise? Would I tell him he is ‘wrong’? I don’t know, it depends on the nature of the conversation, in what context it takes place, how free I am to escape, and similar contingent facts. But all things being equal, escape being readily available, and he asked my opinion? I probably wouldn’t tell him he’s wrong right off the bat, I’d ask him what he meant. If he meant it literally and never giggled even once, I’d just say he might think he felt like one of those items (or any other) but that doesn’t mean he is one.

Anyway, feeling like is one thing, and identifying as is another.

The use of ‘identify’ in the context of sex and gender is odd.  A judge can order that a plaintiff not be identified, meaning that the person’s identity should be kept a secret. One can identify oneself with a political movement, by which one means that one should be associated with it.  One can identify with the plight of a people, meaning that one has sympathy for – or even empathizes with – them.  A doctor can identify the cause of a cough, meaning that he has found the bacterial or viral or other thing that is responsible for it.  A suspect can be identified by the police, meaning that they have determined who he is.

But what could it mean to “identify as a man/woman”?  From what I can discern from gender self-ID theorists and activists, it could mean one of two things, both of which strike me as untenable.

The first is reflected in the Alice Roberts quote, above: for me to identify as a man/woman is to feel like I am one.

But, he explains, there is no such thing.

…one is male or female, but one doesn’t feel male or female, just as one is a mammal, but one doesn’t “feel like a mammal.”

I can sort of get a grip on the idea of feeling like a mammal if I get to add “as opposed to a bird/reptile/fish.” I’m squishy like a mammal, earthbound like a mammal, unable to breathe under water like a mammal. I even have mammaries! But that’s a very attenuated sense of feeling like a mammal, and it’s certainly not the kind of thing one would bellow at people during Twitter arguments. It’s not political. It’s not what the dogmatists mean when they talk about feeling like/identifying as a woman.

The second pursues the line of gender: to feel like a man/woman is to feel masculine or feminine; manly or womanly.

And guess what that is. No prizes; it’s stereotype city, and no we don’t want to go there.

It would be regressive, then, to take this tack in trying to make sense of “identifying as” a man/woman and even worse to suggest that meeting these sexist expectations makes a person one or the other. For decades, feminists and other forward-thinking people have been fighting against precisely these sorts of expectations and rejecting the idea that such notions of manliness or womanliness should determine what one is or what one should do.

Or even how one should dress. No, putting on a dear little skirt and some red silk shoes won’t make you a woman if you’re not in fact a woman. Clothes are just clothes. You could put them on a horse, or a manatee, or a street lamp (not so much a potato peeler or Lake Louise); they don’t make you into anything (other than someone who is wearing those clothes for the moment).

The notion of “identifying as” a man/woman, then, is either incoherent or retrograde. It is the farthest thing from being liberatory or progressive, and I find it hard to understand why anyone interested in advancing the cause of trans people would want to have anything to do with it, let alone plant their flag in it. As I have argued many times, everything required to make a complete and compelling case for trans civil rights is already contained within the liberal tradition. And beyond the advantage of being grounded in a stronger, more rigorous, more universal set of principles, to pursue such a course would avoid the sexist logic and tropes that have done so much to put trans activism in conflict with its feminist and gay/lesbian counterparts.

Wouldn’t it be nice if people listened.

CFI on the Supreme Court ruling on the Bladensburg cross:

Today’s ruling on the constitutionality of the Bladensburg cross makes plain the Supreme Court’s allegiance to the religious right and its contempt for the separation of church from state, said the Center for Inquiry.

The Bladensburg Peace Cross is a 40-foot concrete Latin Cross located on state land in Maryland and maintained at taxpayer expense.

“Rather than uphold the Establishment Clause, the bedrock principle of liberal democracy that bars the state from endorsing religion, this Supreme Court is clearly determined to see it ripped from the Constitution and thrown in the trash,” said Nick Little, CFI’s Vice President and General Counsel. “The very suggestion that a gigantic cross, maintained by taxpayers, and looming ominously over the landscape does not imply an endorsement of Christianity is utter madness. That this Orwellian redefinition of facts and language has been sanctified by the highest court in the land is simply frightening.”

The Bladensburg Cross was dedicated in 1925, and initially stood on private land. However, in 1961 the land was turned over to the state, and the cross has been maintained at tax payer expense since then. It stands on a traffic circle in the middle of a busy public road, illuminated at night.

“No symbol represents Christianity more fully and obviously than the Latin cross,” continued Little. “To those driving in Maryland’s D.C. suburbs, this cross stands stark and alone as a public declaration of the Christian nature of government. It dismisses the equal citizenship not only of those Marylanders who hold a different faith or none at all, but also callously ignores the sacrifice of countless military personnel who were atheist or non-Christian. The wall of separation now has a 40-foot cross-shaped hole in it.”

…

In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg correctly addressed the sectarian nature of this ruling and its disrespect for both non-believers and followers of non- Christian religions, writing, “Today the Court erodes that neutrality commitment, diminishing precedent designed to preserve individual liberty and civic harmony in favor of a ‘presumption of constitutionality for longstanding monuments, symbols, and practices.’” The display of the Latin cross, “the ‘defining symbol’ of Christianity,” conveys “a message of exclusion” to non-believers. Justice Ginsburg is correct in observing that the “principal symbol of Christianity around the world should not loom over public thoroughfares, suggesting official recognition of that religion’s paramountcy.”

Now this is interesting. I was just wibbling on about what we mean by “exclusion” a few hours ago, pointing out that some kinds of exclusion are desirable and necessary. Some are, and some are not. I think government sponsorship of religion in general, and especially of one religion in particular, is neither desirable nor necessary.

The Telegraph reports:

A pharmacist working for LloydsPharmacy refused to give a woman the morning after pill, because it went against her “personal beliefs”.

The customer, named only as Siani, 41, had paid £30 for the emergency contraception online before going to collect it from the Brighton branch of Lloyds, located inside a Sainsbury’s.

She reportedly called the pharmacy from her car to check that it was ready, and was told by the on-duty female pharmacist that she would not dispense the pill as it went against her “personal beliefs.”

Siani was told to come back the next day, or travel to the next nearest branch – 10 miles away. As it was a Sunday, most other local chemists were closed.

Come back next day for a morning after pill. Let’s see if we can spot the problem here.

“I’m old and stroppy enough to make a fuss, but what if I was a teenager?” Siani, who has a son, told Metro.

“I don’t think it’s remotely acceptable that Lloyds Pharmacy created a situation where they discriminate against women by having the only branch in the city that is open on a Sunday staffed by a lone pharmacist who will not dispense women’s services. And I don’t think it’s acceptable that they will sell a service that their staff refuse to deliver after accepting payment.”

It’s not. If the pharmacist doesn’t want to dispense a particular medication, that pharmacist should go into a different line of work.

“I’m a mum in my 40s, I have very little shame left, but there will be girls having the same experience who have nothing like the resources I do. You expect that sort of nonsense in America, but not here,” Siani added.

It’s no better here! We don’t accept it! We know it happens, but we don’t accept it!

Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber has a more reasonable, less vituperative dissenting response to the letter to the Times.

Last Sunday at letter appeared in the Sunday Times attacking the LGBT charity Stonewall for its work with British universities as a threat to academic freedom.

That’s why I had to say “less vituperative” as opposed to “non-vituperative.” The letter doesn’t attack Stonewall.

The letter was signed by some reasonably prominent figures, such as Kathleen Stock (Sussex) and Leslie Green (Oxford) as well as motley others (including a Brexit Party candidate). It is no accident that the letter appeared in the Sunday Times, which together with its companion paper the Times has, for at least a year, maintained an almost daily campaign against transgender people and the organizations and individuals who support them and which has also been to the fore in attacking universities around largely spurious concerns about “free speech”.

That’s why I had to say “more reasonable” as opposed to “very reasonable.” It’s not true or reasonable to say that the Times has “maintained an almost daily campaign against transgender people,” because the campaign (or series of related articles, which I think are pretty far from daily) is not against transgender people, it’s in disagreement with some of the claims made by the transgender movement.

The letter to the Sunday Times was framed in terms of supposed threats to academic freedom posed by Stonewall guidance and training to universities. Of course, freedom of speech, inquiry and opinion within the academic community is of great importance. Stonewall too recognize that in their documents. But it is also vital that universities as places of education and as workplaces function as environments where everyone is able to participate and work together with dignity, rather than places where some are excluded or humiliated because of their race, sex, sexuality or gender identity.

Well, sure, depending on what we mean by certain words within that statement. Universities should be places where no one is humiliated; it’s pretty easy to assent to that. It’s not quite as easy to agree to the “excluded” part because (as I keep saying to the point of tedium) it depends what you mean. Universities do exclude lots of people – most people in fact. Universities have entrance requirements, and they charge tuition. Exclusion is key to their functioning in many ways. That’s not what Chris is talking about, but that’s just it – the words “inclusion” and “exclusion” are used more as slogans than as usefully accurate labels. I don’t know of anyone who wants to exclude transgender people from universities or disciplines or classes, and I don’t think simply declining to agree that transgender people are literally and in every sense the sex (gender) they identify as counts as unjust “exclusion.” I think Chris is saying, somewhat too indirectly, that trans people are excluded and humiliated unless everyone agrees that they are literally and in every sense the sex (gender) they identify as. I think that’s saying more than can be demonstrated.

The authors of the letter to the Times are, at best, cavalier in their attitude to the effects that this “debate” is having on trans people, who experience the very validity of their standing within society as put in question by the discourse around transgender.

I don’t really know what that means.

I wonder if it’s Chris who is being somewhat cavalier? I wonder if he’s considered the possibility that the validity of trans people’s standing within society depends much less on the compliance of the authors of the letter to the Times than it does on the population at large – people on the bus, people on the street, people at the pub, people at Waitrose, people at parties, and on and on.

Maybe the idea is that if academics “validate” trans people and their “standing within society” then the rest of the population will follow? But I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s that easy.

 The letter alleges that Stonewall seeks to ban from universities any outside speaker who questions “that trans people are the gender they say they are” but I see a factual claim — and a true one — about the effect of outside speakers who hold a range of views (including advocating conversion therapy) namely that such speakers “cause LGBT people to feel deeply unsafe”.

So it’s a true factual claim that outside speakers who hold a range of views (including advocating conversion therapy) “cause LGBT people to feel deeply unsafe”. So all the views of these outside speakers, no matter which views they are, cause LGBT people to feel deeply unsafe. That’s quite a large claim, and not a very fair one.

Just as the effect of speakers preaching hate against other groups may reasonably be take into account by universities in deciding to invite them onto campus, so trans people are entitled to similar protections.

But first you have to agree that the Outside Speakers are preaching hate, and they and we their friends or allies or both don’t agree to that. Kathleen Stock doesn’t preach hate. None of the gender critical philosophers I know preaches hate.

Comments are turned off on the post, which is a pity. I’d be interested to see what other philosophers think.

Helen Christophi at Courthouse News:

The Trump administration argued in front of a Ninth Circuit panel Tuesday that the government is not required to give soap or toothbrushes to children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border and can have them sleep on concrete floors in frigid, overcrowded cells, despite a settlement agreement that requires detainees be kept in “safe and sanitary” facilities.

All three judges appeared incredulous during the hearing in San Francisco, in which the Trump administration challenged previous legal findings that it is violating a landmark class action settlement by mistreating undocumented immigrant children at U.S. detention facilities.

Tell us again that these are not concentration camps, that they’re nothing like concentration camps, that they have nothing to do with concentration camps.

“You’re really going to stand up and tell us that being able to sleep isn’t a question of safe and sanitary conditions?’” U.S. Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon asked the Justice Department’s Sarah Fabian Tuesday.

U.S. Circuit Judge William Fletcher also questioned the government’s interpretation of the settlement agreement.

“Are you arguing seriously that you do not read the agreement as requiring you to do anything other than what I just described: cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you’ve got an aluminum foil blanket?” Fletcher asked Fabian. “I find that inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary.”

We get a useful explainer of the Flores settlement, which governs this:

The settlement at issue came out of Jenny Lisette Flores v. Edwin Meese, filed in 1985 on behalf of a class of unaccompanied minors fleeing torture and abuse in Central America.

Finally agreed upon in 1997, the settlement established guidelines for the humane detention, treatment and release of minors taken into federal immigration custody. The guidelines include the right to a bond hearing and requirements that immigration authorities timely release children to parents or guardians and place those not released in facilities that meet certain standards. The facilities are supposed to be “safe and sanitary.”

In an interesting plot twist, the Obama administration tried to tweak it:

The settlement landed back in court in 2015, when class members moved to enforce it following the Obama administration’s announcement that it would scrap bond hearings because they conflicted with newer immigration laws. In legal filings, the class contended the elimination of bond hearings and dirty and dangerous conditions at short-term holding facilities operated by the Border Patrol violated the agreement.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles granted the class’ motion and ordered the appointment of an independent monitor to ensure government compliance with Flores.

Gee said the administration had breached Flores by failing to provide detainees with adequate food and clean drinking water, or with hygiene items like soap, toothbrushes and towels. She also concluded that the children were being deprived of sleep and access to bathrooms, and were subjected to near-freezing temperatures.

So that wasn’t on Trump’s watch, it was on Obama’s watch.

Trump’s people argued that soap wasn’t included in Flores, the judges retorted that it was too obvious to be spelled out.

Interesting.

He’s an academic himself – a historian – so he’s in one of those other fields.

I do have a theory for why it's such a thing in the UK–it's bc the US is more religious so it's easier for Americans to buy into the problematic-but-perhaps-useful-first-step narrative of "trans = X soul in Y body" (note popularity of transphobia among British "sceptics")

— Bill Black (@williamrblack) June 18, 2019

By “transphobia” he of course means just not buying all the wack truth claims, and his theory for why there is less skepticism about the wack truth claims in the US is the fact that we buy other wack truth claims more easily so we also buy the truth claims of trans dogma more easily. That’s quite an admission for a transdogmaphile.

He ended up with this bit of wisdom:

I'm not saying philosophers are uniquely transphobic–I'm guessing philosophy gives folks a language they can use to make transphobia sound reasonable, in a way that history etc don't

— Bill Black (@williamrblack) June 18, 2019

Or to put it another way, philosophers are trained to analyze truth claims to see how well they stand up, so they’ve become well familiar with how quickly and thoroughly the truth claims of trans dogma go splat.

But that’s transphobia, so it must be bullied out of existence.

Oh yes, that weirdo type of feminism that is only for women, not women plus men who say they are women. So unreasonable.

Another brand of feminism that only includes ‘some’ women. Even your hashtag tells its own story. Btw I’m pleased to say my views on trans women are the views of our collective party and shadow cabinet including my boss Jeremy. #LoveAllMySisters https://t.co/IWsJFnzlQr

— Angela Rayner (@AngelaRayner) June 18, 2019

Imagine talking smack about a brand of anti-racism that only includes people of color instead of being for people of color and white people who say they are people of color.

But that wouldn’t happen, because it’s only women who are seen as accommodating enough and supine enough and fucking stupid enough to accept this crap.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Feeling≠being.

Practically speaking, in most situations, I wouldn’t say anything, for the same reasons I generally don’t get into discussions about very personal matters.

But if this were one of those conversations that is an exception for some reason: no, I wouldn’t say “you’re wrong.” But I would ask — with genuine curiosity — “how do you know? What does being a woman FEEL like to you?”

Because frankly, I wouldn’t know how to answer the question “what does it feel like to be a man?” [Insert jokes about my inadequacies here. You can’t ask for a better setup.] I could tell you a bit about how it feels to be treated as a man in society, or to interact with others on that basis. I suppose I could come up with an answer about what it feels like to have male genitalia. But those are different questions, as I would think trans people would be quick to point out. I don’t have some internal sense that tells me I’m male, or have a “male brain,” or anything like that, and I can’t even imagine what that would mean. As with pretty much everyone, I conform to some of our culture’s gender stereotypes and not to others.

I think I can wrap my head around gender-related body dysphoria, meaning that I can grasp the notion of having some feeling that your body should be different than it is. But again, we’re told that being trans doesn’t necessarily entail that. So I’m back to being flummoxed.

It’s like that claim that humans have a “sensus divinitatis” that gives (most) people a knowledge of god. I mean, I assume that people who claim to have a sense of god, in their brain or their heart or whatever, to be speaking truthfully of their subjective experience. And I’ve never had any interest in trying to talk someone out of a religious belief that is essentially “well, I feel it/Him/Her in my heart.” But I do insist on my right to object to a claim that a sensus divinitatis is an actual objective thing, and that therefore God exists because your subjective experiences tell you so. (To say nothing of the rather offensive related implication that atheists are either lying or brain-damaged.)

Daughters are not slaves.

Muslim father faces jail for psychologically abusing his daughters in the first case of its kind.

Salamat Khan, 63, exerted such domineering control over his household that his children felt like they were “living in a prison”.

His daughters felt as if they were living in a prison, not his children. His son joined in the psychological abuse of the daughters. Is there some sort of pattern here? To do with what kind of people abuse and what kind are the abusers? I have a feeling there is but I can’t quite pin it down.

The father-of-nine had already married off three of his daughters to selected husbands, but “cast out” two of his daughters, when they married men that he did not “approve of”.

As a result, Khan claimed the sisters were “dead to the family” and tried to stop two other unmarried daughters leading a Westernised lifestyle.

Khan was found guilty and will be sentenced next week.

Three of Khan’s daughters wed in Pakistan in arranged marriages, but two others married Muslim men who were not “arranged” for them.

Khan then refused to let his other two daughters – Madina, 21, and Maryha, 24 – go out in the evenings, or meet their friends, and forced them to cook and clean for him in their “traditional” Islamic household.

In other words he imprisoned and enslaved them.

Giving evidence to the court, Madina Khan said that her role was “staying at home, cooking and cleaning”, that she was forbidden from socialising with friends outside of college and that she was “scared” of her father.

She claimed that her “aggressive” brother had threatened to kill her more than once and on the night the police were called “this time I thought he was going to do something”. She added: “He was enraged. It’s been like living in a prison”.

Her mother added that Salamat Khan and her son “make the decisions” and she was encouraged not to contact her rebel daughters.

Another strange thing to think.

https://twitter.com/DrJoGrady/status/1140729246110953472

Universities & colleges should be sanctuaries, not spaces where staff & students are exposed to oppressive attitudes from those charged to teach them.

Really? Universities and colleges should be sanctuaries? What about being places where people on the edge of adulthood learn things they didn’t know before, and learn how to learn new things, and learn to question things they thought they knew, and to ponder why they thought they knew them?

In short, no, universities and colleges should not be sanctuaries. They should of course be places where people are treated decently, and where the older professionals in charge don’t use their status to bully or abuse students or other underlings…but sanctuaries, no. Education isn’t always soothing; it doesn’t always even feel “safe” in the sense of cozy and reassuring. New ideas and new ways of thinking can seem threatening, but they’re worth the discomfort.

Also, I suspect Grady’s claim rests on the pervasive trope that trans people, mostly meaning trans women, are especially “vulnerable” and fragile and in need of protection…which is odd when you remember that trans women are not literal women. Yes, boys and men can be bullied and abused for not being Manly enough, but male bodies are still not fragile as cobwebs.

Several people share my skepticism of the idea that universities should be sanctuaries.

What does it mean that universities and colleges should be "sanctuaries"? Should they become silent meditation spaces devoid of critical thought, kept separate from anything which anyone decides is an "oppressive attitude"? How about discourse, dialogue & conversation takes place

— Tom Smith (@SmithTGeo) June 18, 2019

Universities and colleges should NOT be sanctuaries. When you go there, you should expect to be challenged, and be open to learning about different views.

— Ori (@_JustOri_) June 18, 2019

Universities are not sanctuaries. They are places of advanced scholarship, free inquiry, research and tertiary education.

They most certainly must not be allowed to continue to be sanctuaries for traders of pseudoscience or snake oil salesmen, as has been recently revealed.

— Rattlecans (@rattlecans) June 18, 2019

Trump loves to say US air quality is getting cleaner and cleaner thanks to him. Is he right?

Pfffffffff. Of course not.

Over the last two years the nation had more polluted air days than just a few years earlier, federal data shows. While it remains unclear whether this is the beginning of a trend, health experts say it’s troubling to see air quality progress stagnate.

There were 15% more days with unhealthy air in America both last year and the year before than there were on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when America had its fewest number of those days since at least 1980.

Some of that has to be because of the summer wildfires problem, I would think.

Air quality is affected by a complex mix of factors, both natural and man-made. Federal regulations that limit the emissions of certain chemicals and soot from factories, cars and trucks have helped dramatically improve air quality over recent decades. In any given year, however, air quality can be affected by natural variations. That may be what’s behind the stalled progress, scientists say.

…

Scientists say that it is too early to see the effects of changes in environmental policy of the Trump administration, which took office in January 2017.

But they say looser restrictions and lax enforcement would almost certainly reverse the gains that have been made in recent decades, potentially turning what has so far been a modest, two-year backslide into a dangerous trend.

…

In an email, the EPA told The Associated Press the increase in unhealthy air days in 2017 “is largely associated with wildfires” in the west and it is studying 2018 before officially announcing its annual air trend data.

Air pollution experts agree wildfires likely have had a role, along with random variation, a stronger economy which leads to more consumption of fuels, and a changing climate. Higher temperatures increase the chances for fires and smog.

But moves to deregulate industries that pollute do not make the air cleaner.

Hope Hicks is refusing to answer questions. They think they’re gods, don’t they.

Former White House communications director Hope Hicks is not responding to any questions about her time at the White House in a closed-door congressional interview Wednesday, angering Democrats who say they expect to go to court to force her to answer their questions.

White House attorneys are objecting to all questions related to the White House, Democrats say, all the way down to where Hicks sat in the West Wing. But Hicks is answering questions about her time on the Trump campaign, which is not covered by executive privilege.

None of it is covered by “executive privilege.”

The White House is not asserting executive privilege, but arguing that Hicks has absolute immunity from testifying as a senior adviser to President Donald Trump. Democrats called that legal claim “ridiculous” and “absurd” as they signaled they will likely challenge it in court.

“There is no such thing as absolute immunity that prevents someone from answering questions about any subject related to their work in an administration. It just doesn’t exist,” said Rep. David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat. “This is an ongoing effort by the president of the United States to obstruct, to prevent Congress from finding the facts and behaving as if he’s above the law.”

Well he feels like someone who is above the law. Don’t we have to respect that?

The White House’s objections to Democrats’ questions were expected, as White House Counsel Pat Cipollone sent the House panel a letter Tuesday evening arguing that Hicks was immune from testifying about her time at the White House as one of the President’s senior advisers, citing executive privilege protections.

“Because of this constitutional immunity, and in order to protect the prerogatives of the Office of President, the President has directed Ms. Hicks not to answer questions before the Committee relating to the time of her services as a senior adviser to the President,” Cipollone wrote.

Because of this constitutional immunity that doesn’t exist.

I am watching Obstruction of Justice in action, as @TheJusticeDept is objecting to everything that Hope Hicks wants to say during her tenure in the White House. The Administration's position is absurd & they will lose in court.

What is the @realDonaldTrump Administration hiding? https://t.co/BqhkJJlbU5

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) June 19, 2019

Trump is desperate to avoid having Hicks answer questions about crimes-obstruction of justice & campaign finance violations. She isn’t his wife or his priest & no privilege covers her knowledge of criminal conduct. https://t.co/Ls9lsbMqoj

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) June 19, 2019

Trump is now asserting that there is a privilege that permits his former staff & allies to avoid testifying about his potentially criminal conduct. There's no pretense that this is about deliberative activities in the WH. And no such privilege exists. https://t.co/SCLpPceL4m

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) June 19, 2019

Three little words.

"Obstruction of justice," Pelosi says when I asked her about WH saying Hope Hicks cannot answer questions about her time at the WH pic.twitter.com/CLdUERqsxq

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 19, 2019

Alice Roberts, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham and President of Humanists UK, has been Twitter-arguing with people who found the Natural History Museum’s tweets about queer giraffes and non-binary gorillas absurd.

This one is particularly interesting to me:

How I feel in myself has no bearing on what someone feels. If someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels female – I cannot tell her she is ‘wrong’. Would you?

— Prof Alice Roberts (@theAliceRoberts) June 19, 2019

It’s her reply that interests me, but I’ll just note about the quoted passage from her book…I wonder if she would write that now. I wonder if now she would stop, and think, and frown, and then censor herself. I wonder if she would stop to think about it and then decide that it would be “transphobic” to allow that sentence to appear.

That’s a hypothetical though. Her actual reply today says “If someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels female – I cannot tell her she is ‘wrong’. Would you?” That’s what interests me.

Of course, first of all, it depends what she means. (I asked her but don’t know if she’ll reply.) Maybe she just means it’s not comfortable or polite and usually probably not even ethical to tell strangers they’re wrong about what they “feel” about themselves. But if she means it more generally and abstractly, that we can never think people are wrong about what they “feel” about themselves – that’s nonsense, and it’s antithetical to a scientific outlook. Why? Because people can be wrong about themselves, even if it’s an inner feeling, even if they feel the inner feeling strongly. Treating self-feelings as absolutely true and immune to rebuttal is sheer dogmatism.

That is, naturally, all the more germane when people are making factual claims that contradict what shows on the surface. Trump “feels” he is a stable genius, but there is much external evidence that points to a different conclusion.

Roberts’s hypothetical someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes may not be wrong about what he feels, but he’s probably wrong that what he feels=what he is. What we “feel” we are doesn’t necessarily determine what we actually are. It’s not that easy.

A woman expresses passionate eagerness to erase the very category of women and girls.

Just purchased #Period supplies for myself & my #Trans son. After being a lifelong user of @Always products, I am profoundly disappointed in this trans/non-binary/queer-exclusionary design. “Bold Like A Girl”? “Strong Like A Girl”? “Brilliant Like A Girl”? Come on, #Always! pic.twitter.com/0momjxING8

— Vibes From A Veterinary Nurse (@VetNurseVibes) May 20, 2019

So after all these years of trying and trying and TRYING to get marketers to stop dividing humans into strong bold brilliant boys and weak pretty stupid girls were a big mistake? So we actually shouldn’t be trying to tell girls they can be strong and bold and brilliant? We should actually stop doing that because her “trans son” wants to rise above the muck of being a female person? Well fuck that for a game of soldiers.

The Smithsonian Magazine notes that concentration camps started long before Hitler took power.

Spain was having trouble persuading the Cuban people to stop rebelling, so they decided to round up the peasants who were supporting the rebels.

Civilians were forced, on penalty of death, to move into these encampments, and within a year the island held tens of thousands of dead or dying reconcentrados, who were lionized as martyrs in U.S. newspapers. No mass executions were necessary; horrific living conditions and lack of food eventually took the lives of some 150,000 people.

…

These camps did not rise out of nowhere. Forced labor had existed for centuries around the world, and the parallel institutions of Native American reservations and Spanish missions set the stage for relocating vulnerable residents away from their homes and forcing them to stay elsewhere. But it was not until the technology of barbed wire and automatic weapons that a small guard force could impose mass detention. With that shift, a new institution came into being, and the phrase “concentration camps” entered the world.

You’ll never guess who resorted to them next.

After defeating Spain in Cuba in a matter of months, the United States took possession of several Spanish colonies, including the Philippines, where another rebellion was underway. By the end of 1901, U.S. generals fighting in the most recalcitrant regions of the islands had likewise turned to concentration camps. The military recorded this turn officially as an orderly application of measured tactics, but that did not reflect the view on the ground. Upon seeing one camp, an Army officer wrote, “It seems way out of the world without a sight of the sea,—in fact, more like some suburb of hell.”

The US “liberated” Cuba and the Philippines and promptly unliberated them by taking over the colonial rule. Just kidding about the anti-imperialism thing!

The Boer War, Namibia, and on it went. The Nazis drew on a long and much-used tradition. Trump is reviving it, because that’s the kind of evil sack of shit he is.

Many people have reacted to Liz Cheney’s “internment camps for migrants are not the Holocaust, learn some history” tweet.

https://twitter.com/KatzOnEarth/status/1141028078468128770

Enuf w/ “ICE camps are concentration camps but they’re not gassing people” or “we should take action before things get worse.”

Concentration camps aren’t good enough?? Even if Auschwitz was never built the Warsaw Ghetto wasn’t reason enough to tear down the Third Reich??

— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) June 18, 2019

GOP seems to be embracing the "it's not as bad as Auschwitz" defense for their concentration camps on the border. That's a bad defense.

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) June 18, 2019

https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/1141010617257668608

And in the “massively missing the point” category, step up Dinesh D’Souza.

Nazi concentrarion camps were forced labor camps. They were not for illegal immigrants but rather for war captives, internal dissidents and Jews. Some like Auschwitz had extermination facilities so they also functioned as death camps. So where is the valid analogy here? https://t.co/vrjFNavyWy

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) June 18, 2019

Nazi concentration camps weren’t for “illegal immigrants” because oddly enough Germany wasn’t a hugely popular destination for immigrants during the Third Reich. They were for despised people the Nazi regime wanted to control and, with any luck, destroy. Putting migrants and asylum seekers in camps is not radically different from putting dissidents and Jews…and gays and gypsies and the disabled in camps. The whole idea fits in the category Putting Despised People in Camps. It’s not a good look. We did it with the Japanese internments, we’re pretty much doing it now with mass incarceration, and putting migrants and asylum seekers in camps will be the same bad look and the same horrendous disgraceful brutal way of carrying on. Don’t bother trying to defend it.