Apparently Trump is livid about a Republican campaign ad:
President Trump lashed out after an ad titled Mourning in America criticized his response to the coronavirus pandemic. The ad was released by The Lincoln Project, a super-PAC launched by a handful of Republicans including George Conway, a prominent lawyer and husband to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.
Show us the ad then.
Owen Jones is well known for being…what to call it…officious is perhaps the best word. For poking into stuff that’s not really his concern, for seeking out people to prod and scold and censure, for being tooth-grindingly self-righteous and smug. He is of course a devoted Trans Ally and policer of women who don’t think Gender Indenniny is the most important cause of all time.
His latest exercise in policing other people is a WHAT IS THAT ON HIS BOOKSHELF.
Never mind that, why does he have a copy of Atlas Shrugged? Why a book about cold cream? Why the Oxford Dictionary of Scottish History? So many mysteries, so little time.
But seriously. We have books for a lot of reasons. It’s not necessarily a matter of love, much less of endorsement. We can have some books for purposes of research or curiosity. Politicians probably have an unusually wide range of reasons for hanging on to particular books. But more than that it’s just so…peering, prying, snooping, sniffing, sneering. It’s so intrusive. I’m enjoying seeing people’s bookshelves as they do broadcasts from home; I wish Chris Cuomo had a bookshelf behind him in his basement instead of those two dull white armchairs. I look to see what books they have out of curiosity but I hope it wouldn’t occur to me to ask the world why Don Lemon or Jake Tapper or Rachel Maddow has THAT book.
Andy Lewis shared his. I have some of those too.
The Post tells the story of how Trump and Kushner put Trump’s continued grip on power ahead of the survival of X thousands of their fellow citizens.
In late March Trump was disgruntled about models that predicted deaths from the virus ranging from 100,000 to 240,000 Americans at best, but he was much more disgruntled about the economy and his prospects. What’s a quarter of a million people compared to the next four years of Donald Trump’s life?
Trump was apprehensive about so much carnage on his watch, yet also impatient to reopen the economy — and he wanted data to justify doing so.
He wanted data to justify doing what he wanted to do, as opposed to data to inform his decision about what to do. That’s Trump.
So the White House people made up their own models, which said everything would be fabulous, go back to work.
Although Hassett denied that he ever projected the number of dead, other senior administration officials said his presentations characterized the count as lower than commonly forecast — and that it was embraced inside the West Wing by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other powerful aides helping to oversee the government’s pandemic response. It affirmed their own skepticism about the severity of the virus and bolstered their case to shift the focus to the economy, which they firmly believed would determine whether Trump wins a second term.
That is, they wanted the count to be lower, for their own selfish reasons, so they decided it was going to be lower, for their own selfish reasons. One the one hand hundreds of thousands of lives, on the other hand the continued power and self-enrichment of Trump and his callow fishbelly son-in-law. We’re called on to die of the virus so that Don and Jared can collar even more millions of corrupt $$$.
Trump directed his coronavirus task force to issue guidelines for reopening businesses, encouraged “LIBERATE” protests to apply pressure on governors and proclaimed that “the cure can’t be worse than the problem itself” — even as polls showed that Americans were far more concerned about their personal safety.
But our personal safety doesn’t matter compared to Trump’s personal opportunity to shout at us from the White House and inhale all the loose change in the world.
By the end of April — with more Americans dying in the month than in all of the Vietnam War — it became clear that the Hassett model was too good to be true. “A catastrophic miss,” as a former senior administration official briefed on the data described it. The president’s course would not be changed, however. Trump and Kushner began to declare a great victory against the virus, while urging America to start reopening businesses and schools.
“It’s going to go. It’s going to leave. It’s going to be gone. It’s going to be eradicated,” the president said Wednesday, hours after his son-in-law claimed the administration’s response had been “a great success story.”
…
Trump crowned himself “the king of ventilators” and boasted of his work shoring up supply chains, yet shamed governors for asking for too many supplies for besieged hospitals and health-care workers in their states. At one point, he seemed to suggest that hospitals were selling protective gear provided by the federal government on the black market.
Meanwhile he’s been stealing ventilators and PPE from states so that he can hand them out to governors who flatter him and withhold them from those who don’t. Our lives versus his vanity; an easy choice for him.
Fauci and Birx and others with medical degrees formed their own group that met daily.
Some in the “doctors group” were distressed by what one official dubbed the “voodoo” discussed within the broader task force.
…
The doctors group strove to present a unified front to the president on various medical and scientific issues. They recently discussed how antibody tests, designed to identify people with possible immunity from the virus, are not a panacea to reopening the country because the results sometimes are inaccurate.
“There’s a little bit of a God complex,” one senior administration official said of the group. “They’re all about science, science, science, which is good, but sometimes there’s a little bit less of a consideration of politics when maybe there should be.”
That is, they focus on the disease, when they should be paying more attention to Trump’s desire to be re-elected.
Trump has peppered his new chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and other senior aides with phone calls “in almost every single hour of the day,” sometimes well after midnight, according to one senior official.
That’s so Trump. It’s a side issue but it’s so Trump. He’s awake, so what does he care that it’s 2 a.m. He’s awake, so other people have to talk to him. He’s awake, so other people don’t need sleep. Trump alone matters.
[B]y month’s end, as Trump cheered businesses reopening in Georgia, Texas and several other states “because we have to get our country back,” the total dead climbed past 63,000, with no sign of slowing down.
Never mind that, how is Trump doing?
World leaders came together in a virtual online summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.
Missing from the roster was the Trump administration, which declined to participate, but highlighted from Washington what one official called its “whole-of-America” efforts in the United States and its generosity to global health efforts.
Why did the Trump administration decline to participate? Is Trump too busy fantasizing that he’s the new Lincoln?
The conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to fund research and mass-produce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus that has killed nearly 250,000 people worldwide.
With the money came soaring rhetoric about international solidarity, and a good bit of boasting about each country’s efforts and achievements, live and prerecorded, by Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Boris Johnson, Japan’s Shinzo Abe — alongside Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan.
Trump skipped a chance to boast about his non-existent achievements. Weird. The administration is not saying why Trump refused to participate.
“It’s the first time that I can think of where you have had a major international pledging conference for a global crisis of this kind of importance and the U.S. is just absent,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who worked on the Ebola response in the Obama administration.
“Just absent” sums us up right now.
What went wrong? No battery in the smoke alarm:
The disastrously tardy, inadequate, confused, and (for many citizens) confusing response of the federal government to covid-19, both before and after the first case, derives from too many factors to list here, but I’ll mention two: failure to appreciate the sars and mers warnings, both delivered by other coronaviruses; and loss of capacity at high government levels, within recent years, to understand the gravity and immediacy of pandemic threats. The result of that loss is what Ali Khan means by lack of imagination. Beth Cameron, a former head of the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense on the National Security Council staff, calls it the absence of “the smoke alarm.” Those in power who are charged with “keeping watch to get ahead of emergencies” need to smell the smoke and smother the fire while it’s small, Cameron told me. “You’re not going to stop outbreaks from happening. But you can stop outbreaks from becoming epidemics or pandemics.” She led the directorate from its establishment, following the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, until March, 2017. It survived under her successor for a little more than a year, and then, after John Bolton became the national-security adviser, it was dissolved. A smoke alarm doesn’t work when the battery has been removed.
Dennis Carroll, a former research virologist, led a pandemic-threats unit at the U.S. Agency for International Development for almost fifteen years. In 2009, he created a large program called predict, dispersing about two hundred million dollars in grants to support discovery of potentially dangerous new viruses before they spill over into humans. That program is ending, due to “the ascension of risk averse bureaucrats,” he told the Times, last October. He mentioned the White House closure of the N.S.C. health directorate as a parallel instance, and said that both Congress and the Administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama were “enormously supportive,” but then came the current chill winds.
“Chill winds” is a very emollient substitute for “brainless greedy crook who understands nothing but money that flows to him.”
Trump decided Lincoln would be a good look on him.
President Trump gave a two-hour interview to Fox News on Sunday night in the Lincoln Memorial. His mix of self-pity and self-congratulation was startling, especially given the backdrop, as more than 67,000 Americans have been killed by an invisible enemy that has yet to be contained and the country plunges deeper into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Yebbut look. Lincoln. Trump is another Lincoln. Right? Sure.
“They always said … nobody got treated worse than [Abraham] Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse,” said Trump, pointing toward the statue of a president who was assassinated days after winning the Civil War. “You know, I believe we’ve done more than any president in the history of our country in the first three years, three-and-a-half years. I really believe that.”
The fact that Trump really believes something is not a reason for anyone else to believe it. Rather the reverse.
Trump’s claim that no president has been treated worse than he came in response to a question from a supporter named Carolyn Perkins, a retired nurse and elementary school guidance counselor.
“The question I have is about your manner of presentation,” Perkins said. “Why do you use descriptive words that could be classified as bullying? And why do you not directly answer the questions asked by the press but instead speak of past successes and generally ramble? The U.S.A. needs you. Please let go of those behaviors that are turning people away from you. Please hold on to your wonderful attributes that make you our great leader and let go of other characteristics that do not serve you.”
If you take the bullying and boasting and rambling away what’s left? What are those wonderful attributes exactly?
“Look, I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen,” Trump responded. Motioning toward the statue of the 16th president, the 45th president said: “The closest would be that gentleman right up there.”
And yet, Lincoln didn’t respond to hostility with torrents of personal abuse. It’s almost as if that’s not the only possible way to react.
Trump’s boast about “winning” came as he once again seesawed over his estimate of the number of Americans who will die from the contagion. “Look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75,000, 80,000 to 100,000 people,” he said, arguing that more than 2 million might have died if he hadn’t acted to slow the spread. “I really believe we could have saved a million-and-a-half lives.”
Second invocation of what he really believes. It’s typical of his inability to think that he thinks his really believing something would make it true.
Shaina Cruz of Cullman, Ala., a single mother, said she was already living paycheck to paycheck when she lost her job in March. “I haven’t received a stimulus payment or anything from unemployment,” she told the president. “I’m behind on every bill, about to evicted and have had to rely on donations in order to feed my children. I feel frustrated and I feel scared, not knowing where to turn or what to do. What advice do you have for me and others in my situation? Is there more help coming?”
Trump promised that help is coming. “You’re going to get another job or you’re going to get a better job. You’ll get a job where you make more money, frankly, and I think that’s going to happen,” he told Cruz.
He thinks it’s going to happen. That’s not what she asked. She asked about actual help, now. His thinking she will get a better job is not that help.
The president predicted that the economy will be “incredible” next year and start to transition back to a good place in the third quarter. “I really believe that,” he said. “I have a good feel for this stuff.”
Third “really believe.” Still doesn’t make anything happen.
The historian Eric Foner from a talk at Swarthmore in 2013:
One other point, and this I think is important to anybody here who is studying in a history class, you will have heard about this, not necessarily, but reconstruction is a prime example of what we call the politics of history. I’m not just talking about a historian is a Democrat or a Republican or something like that, I’m talking about the way historical interpretation both reflects and helps to shape the politics of the present, the time that is the historian is writing in.
For many, many years, certainly into the, well past the middle of the 20th century, what we call the old or standard view of reconstruction dominated historical writing and textbooks and popular thinking. In a nutshell, in a very brief summary, that view saw reconstruction after the Civil War as the lowest point. The low point in the whole saga of American democracy. According to this point of view, which is not taught in schools anymore I don’t think, but is still widely accepted by people who were educated maybe a generation ago, President Lincoln, at the end of the Civil War, just before he was assassinated, wanted to bring the defeated South back into the Union in a lenient and quick manner.
He was assassinated, his policy was continued allegedly by his success, Andrew Johnson. Johnson was thwarted in his effort to reunite the nation by some of the villains of the piece, the radical Republicans in Congress. Either because of his hatred for the South or from another point of view, the desire to fasten the grip of Northern capitalism on the South. These radicals took over Congress, overturned Johnson’s policy, and instituted what we call radical reconstruction based on black suffrage, based on giving black men the right to vote.
Because black people, according to this view, are inherently incapable of intelligently exercising political rights, there followed an orgy of corruption and misgovernment in the South. Presided over by carpet baggers, that is Northerners who went down to the South to reap the spoils of office, and scalawags, who were white Southerners who cooperated with these governments.
Blacks, although it was called black reconstruction before Dubois, they really were not actors, they were more manipulated by others. They were more childlike, and these whites manipulated them in order to get into power. Eventually, groups like the Ku Klux Klan decided enough was enough and overthrew these governments and restored what was politely called home rule, or what we should really call white supremacy, in the Southern states.
What are the politics of this view? This interpretation had an amazing longevity. Historians make their living overturning what previous historians have done. That’s our job, we’re always trying to prove the guy who came before us as wrong. To remain the accepted view of a period of American history for 50 or 70 years, is unheard of. There’s no other era of American history where the same view was dominant in 1900 as in 1960, let’s say.
Impossible. This was true of reconstruction. Why? Because this view of reconstruction was congruent with the racial system of the United States in the Jim Crow era, until the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Because what were the lessons of that old view? One, it was a mistake to give black men the right to vote. Reconstruction proved that black men are not capable of voting because they misused the vote. Therefore, any effort to give African Americans back their right to vote, which was taken away around 1900, would just lead to another reconstruction. The alleged horrors of reconstruction were always invoked when efforts were made to expand or restore political democracy, that is to say, in the South.
The history is not taught that way any more. Foner is one of the major figures in that change.
Female spaces need better protection after trans woman sex assault on girl, say campaigners
The subhead:
Campaigners have called for greater protection of female-only spaces after a trans woman sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl in a supermarket toilet.
How do they know the perp is a trans woman? How do they know the perp is not just a man who claims to be a trans woman so that he can use the women’s toilets for the purpose of assaulting girls? How does anybody know that? How can can anybody ever know that? Given the adamant ideology that a trans woman is anyone who claims to be a trans woman (and that said trans woman is also a woman), how can anyone ever know that?
Why is the Scotsman (ironic name) being so polite to a guy who assaulted a child in a toilet? Why is it taking his self-identification so seriously? Why is it pretending he’s a woman who sexually assaulted a child as opposed to a man claiming to be a trans woman?
Katie Dolatowski, 18, admitted sexual assault after grabbing the girl by her face and forcing her into a cubicle in Morrisons in Kirkcaldy before ordering her to remove her trousers.
A very womany thing to do.
She also told the girl, who managed to escape after punching Dolatowski in the face, that there was a man outside who would kill her mother.
See…women kind of resent being told to accept this guy as a woman even though he grabs girls by the face and pushes them into toilet stalls and tells them their mother will be killed. We think it’s adding insult to injury.
Dolatowski also tried to film a 12-year-old in the toilet of Asda Halbeath, Dunfermline, last February.
But please, continue to call Dolatowski a “trans woman.” His feelings must be respected.
Robert Reich on Trump’s kill them all plan to “re-open the economy”:
Donald Trump is getting nervous. Internal polls show him losing in November unless the economy comes roaring back.
But of course the economy isn’t going to “come roaring back” no matter what Trump does. But never mind that, he’s going to force a re-opening no matter how many people die gasping for breath.
Step 1: make it a choice between the virus and starvation.
Trump’s labor department has decided that furloughed employees “must accept” an employer’s offer to return to work and therefore forfeit unemployment benefits, regardless of Covid-19.
Trump’s ally, Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, says employees cannot refuse to return to work for fear of contracting the disease. “That’s a voluntary quit,” making someone ineligible for benefits.
Pure evil.
GOP officials in Oklahoma are even threatening to withhold the $600 a week of extra unemployment benefits Congress has provided workers, if an employer wants to hire them. Safety is irrelevant.
“If the employer will contact us … we will cut off their benefits,” says Teresa Thomas Keller of the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission.
Step 2 is secrecy. Block Fauci from talking to Congress; dawdle over testing.
Step 3: sing a song of freedom.
Trump called on citizens to “LIBERATE” states like Michigan, whose Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, imposed strict stay-at-home rules.
Michigan has the third-highest number of Covid-19 deaths in America, although it is 10th in population. When on Thursday Whitmer extended the rules to 28 May, gun-toting protesters rushed the state house chanting: “Lock her up!”
Trump said she should “make a deal” with the gun-toting fascists.
Meanwhile, the attorney general, William Barr, has directed the justice department to take legal action against any state or local authorities imposing lockdown measures that “could be violating the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens”.
Making this about “freedom” is absurd. Freedom is meaningless for people who have no choice but to accept a job that risks their health.
Naw, the right to die for the boss is the most sacred right of all.
Step 4: give employers a “liability shield” against lawsuits by workers and customers.
No price is too high to pay for Donald Trump’s continued tyranny.
The White House has blocked Dr Anthony Fauci from testifying to Congress, saying it would be “counterproductive” for the senior member of the White House coronavirus taskforce to talk about the government’s response to the pandemic in a House committee hearing.
“Counterproductive” to whom? What product would Fauci’s testifying be counter to? Why would it be bad for Congress to oversee the Trump administration’s incompetent response to a pandemic that has killed 70 thousand of the country’s people in a few weeks?
On Twitter on Saturday morning, Trump insisted it was safe for the Senate to return to the Capitol.
…
“Likewise the House, which should return but isn’t because of Crazy Nancy P[elosi],” Trump added. The House speaker has said members should not return next week – in response to guidance from Monahan.
Nearly 200 members of Congress are more vulnerable to serious complications from a Covid-19 infection because they are 65 and older. Pelosi herself is 80. It is unknown how many are also at-risk because of underlying conditions or who live with people who would be at greater risk if they contracted the illness.
…
McConnell, the Senate majority leader who is requiring senators, staff and US Capitol employees to return on Monday despite Monahan’s recommendations, is doing so in part because of his election-year focus on pushing conservative judicial nominees through the Republican-majority Senate.
A generation of woman-hating judges is well worth a few dead Senators, I guess…but how will McConnell make sure they’re all Democratic Senators?
Oh well if you’re going to threaten the employees ok then.
The mayor of an Oklahoma city amended an emergency declaration requiring customers to wear face masks while inside businesses after store employees were threatened with violence.
Stillwater Mayor Will Joyce announced the change Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the declaration took effect.
“In the short time beginning on May 1, 2020, that face coverings have been required for entry into stores/restaurants, store employees have been threatened with physical violence and showered with verbal abuse,” City Manager Norman McNickle said in a statement. “In addition, there has been one threat of violence using a firearm.”
So rules that protect public safety are no longer rules that protect public safety, but violations of the rights of The Sovereign Individual. The divine Ego is more important than any number of people who want to avoid getting the virus.
McNickle said that many of the people who objected to wearing the masks have “the mistaken belief the requirement is unconstitutional.” He said it’s upsetting that while people have the right to exercise their beliefs, they are also putting others at risk.
People have the right to exercise their beliefs up to a point. The “belief” that they get to refuse to wear a mask to protect others from a deadly virus is miles past that point.
“The wearing of face coverings is little inconvenience to protect both the wearer and anyone with whom they have contact,” McNickle said, condemning those who threatened violence. “It is unfortunate and distressing that those who refuse and threaten violence are so self-absorbed as to not follow what is a simple show of respect and kindness to others.
It is. It’s one of the very worst things about the rotting pumpkin in the White House, this encouraging and boosting and cheering on of hostile threatening violent selfishness as a principle of life.
The Oxford Student Union votes to ban everything.
A motion which mandates the Oxford University Student Union (SU) to condemn the use of “hateful material” in mandatory teaching was passed in Student Council this Thursday.
The motion also resolves to create a new SU Policy, entitled “Protection of Transgender, Non-binary, Disabled, Working-class, and Women* Students from Hatred in University Contexts”.
Note that transgender comes first and women come last (and have an asterisk, which oh what now).
Named the ‘Academic Hate Speech Motion’, the motion sets to establish a new policy on hate speech within the University to include ‘incitement of hatred on the grounds of gender identity, disability, and socio economic status, including to trans, non-binary, disabled, working-class, and women*’.
Current University policy on academic free speech protects most academic speech as long as it is within the law. The motion notes that hate speech which is ableist, misogynistic, classist or transphobic is not criminalised but believes that the University should amend the relevant policy to ‘ensure that trans and non-binary people, women, and disabled people receive equivalent protection from hateful speech within University contexts as groups which are protected by the criminal law’.
What protection is that exactly? What criminal law protects groups from hateful speech?
The motion also mandates the SU to lobby for trigger warnings on readings lists and for lectures, tutorials, and examinations with content deemed prejudicial against the aforementioned groups to be non-compulsory for students. It asserts that arguments based on “free speech policy are inapplicable” when students are “required by the University to listen to the speech in question”
And who will decide which content is “prejudicial”? Why, the very same people who are coming up with these motions, of course. They know best, and nothing will be lost by forcing everyone to obey their orders.
Trump has opened up a huge jar of stupid today. It’s a good thing he doesn’t have anything important to do, because where would he find the time?
Oh yes that nice Mr Kim who murdered his brother and Otto Warmbier and who knows how many thousands of North Koreans. How lovely that he’s back and well.
He has SO much free time he can send public thanks to individual people who proclaim themselves his fans.
And that’s only a tiny sample.
It was in the daily briefing for weeks, but he never reads the daily briefing (or anything else), so oh well.
U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.
But the president has no attention, so his attention can’t be called to things.
For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.
But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.
Always with the normalizing. He never reads the PDB, and I bet he never shows patience for the oral summary either.
The frequency with which the coronavirus was mentioned in the PDB has not been previously reported, and U.S. officials said it reflected a level of attention comparable to periods when analysts have been tracking active terrorism threats, overseas conflicts or other rapidly developing security issues.
In other words the kind of thing you really would expect a president – even a mediocre one – to pay attention to.
Trump spent much of February publicly playing down the threat while his administration failed to mobilize for a major outbreak by securing supplies of protective equipment, developing an effective diagnostic test and preparing plans to quarantine large portions of the population.
Sadly, playing it down didn’t succeed in making it go away.
So I remained curious about Gazi Kodzo who wrote that pair of tweets about Anne Frank the BECKY the KAREN. I found his Twitter is suspended. His Facebook is not. He’s full of revolutionary zeal about all the beckies and karens who raised an eyebrow at his karening of Anne Frank.
For all y’all using dead African and Indigenous jews as a way to un-mayo Anne Frank! #2BFrank She is a Karen! Listen to an actual African Indigenous Jew! Our Comrade Yismael Asher Yehauda
The link is to Black Hammer:
#2BFrank Black Hammer is too busy doin the work protecting poor and working class colonized people, organizing against ongoig colonial genocide, to give two shits to rub together about one little white girl. Cry about it, that’s ur #whiteprivelege
He’s too busy to give two shits about one little white girl who died of typhus in Auschwitz, but he’s not too busy to say he’s too busy to give two shits about her. I’d have thought the first would consume a lot less of his valuable time and effort than the second.
About that “Karen” thing…
Was Anne Frank a “Karen”?
In since-vanished but much-screenshotted (and still search-appearing) tweets, Gazi Kodzo, someone evidently of YouTube activist fame/notoriety, pointed an emoji middle finger at… Anne Frank?
As one does.
A BECKY as well as a KAREN.
To be sure, there is plenty of room to point out that we’re better at shock-horror at genocides Over There than at genocides Right Here. That probably applies to humans in general as well as USians in particular. But it’s surprisingly easy to talk about that without calling Anne Frank either a Becky or a Karen, and by the same token it’s easy to talk about it without calling anyone a Becky or a Karen.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy goes on:
Is “Karen” — or the similar “Becky” — an anti-racist protest against white ladies who call the cops at the drop of a hat? Or is it sexism posing as progressivism?
Mostly the second, in my view, especially when it’s white men doing it, as it so very often is.
It seems to me you don’t see a whole lot of progressives jeering at a “Denzel” or “Stokely.” It seems to me you don’t see a whole lot of progressives jeering at a “Truman” or a “Barney.” It seems to me you don’t see a whole lot of progressives jeering at a “Juan” or a “José.” It seems to me it’s not a thing progressives do, because it looks…wrong. Bad, racist or racist-like, homophobic or homophobic-like, xenophobic or xenophobic-like. But somehow when it’s women the squick factor isn’t there. Why is that? Why does it feel ok and even progressive to use dismissive contemptuous personal names for a kind of woman you dislike when it doesn’t feel ok to do that for a kind of man you dislike?
Updating to add another example, this time from Pharyngula:
The Idaho playground rebellion was grotesque, and the different rules for white people are grotesque, but it’s entirely possible to say that without saying “a flock of Karens” just as it’s possible to say that without saying “a bunch of cunts.”
H/t latsot
Uh oh, it turns out that lockdown presents problems for trans people. Why did no one think of this?? Why did no one put a stop to the whole thing?! All these selfish privileged exclusionaryist people for whom lockdown is such a massive party, what were we thinking?
International transgender rights groups are warning [that] global coronavirus lockdown restrictions have led to trans people being denied healthcare. Many have had surgeries delayed, and some are struggling to access hormone therapy and counselling services.
But is that healthcare? Are the surgeries in question health-preserving? Is hormone “therapy” meant to make men resemble women and women resemble men really therapy?
And, even if you think they are, are they urgent? Are they more urgent than the non-emergency surgeries and therapies that many people are having to wait for? If so, how? Why?
We’re not told. We’re given the usual stories, of children who don’t like the clothes considered mandatory for their sex, one in Kenya to make doubt even more reprehensible, but we’re not given real explanations.
It’s a long thread so I’ll just quote the rest.
It was reported and got me a 12-hour ban from Twitter. I was forced to delete the tweet. Thing is, the people who espouse trans-activist rhetoric are, mostly, people interested in global betterment and social justice. They’re good people, aren’t they? I started thinking. Why do good people believe bad ideas? And from that base, why do ALL people believe bad ideas. And then, why do good people ENFORCE bad ideas? The answer, I think, is that they are not given any choice. There is no discourse, there is only what is permissible and what is not.
There is some choice here though. There is more than there was a few years ago. One isn’t quite so far out on a fragile limb when questioning the bad ideas now.
I am a critical theorist with two master’s degrees and a PhD. I have taught cultural studies at university level. Ironically, my specialism is post-structuralism and postmodern theory – from which much of the trans-gender studies orthodoxy of 2008 onwards emerged.
And that, folks, is literally how old this ideology is. Ten years, give or take. It had earlier antecedents but the slogans and argot with which we are now familiar – the language that is now protected. Ten years old.
How has it taken root so quickly and absolutely? One explanation is that its tenets are *memetic*. Memes, in Dawkins original sense, are transmittable units of culture. Idea-bites – rather than nuanced arguments. Ideology reduced down to slogans.
You see this in much recent ideological communication over social media. Unlike other discourse, memetic slogans are immutable. They are nuggets of dogma that are easy to transmit, replicate rapidly and are difficult to remove once embedded.
The speed of replication is as important as multiplication and simplicity. They spread fast and wide and are difficult to challenge once they become the foundations of discourse.
Does this sound like anything? They are viruses.
This mechanism has firmly entrenched the tenets of trans-activism into the permitted discourse of some institutions so effectively that any attempt to interrogate or examine them at all is now considered hate speech. They have quickly become “protected”.
A curious side-effect of this is that you cannot even ask why. You cannot interrogate the mechanism of transmission, you cannot examine evidence or nuance or meaning.
Indeed you cannot. I tried that back on Freethought Blogs and was told very explicitly that you cannot. You cannot even try to figure out exactly what the claims are, you can only repeat the correct words in the correct order.
And the final irony. Twitter is partially responsible for this cultural shift. Alongside other platforms, it has increased the reach of all ideas and reduced their complexity to a finite number of characters.
The world becomes a place where dogmatic idea-bites stand in for discourse and, once entrenched, become protected. They are protected not by law, but by cancelling, banning and blocking. By amassing a following and ending conversation.
This is not confined to trans-activism. Every extreme benefits from this. Any ideology that is absolute and inflexible. Anything that can be reduced to an idea-bite. “Build the wall”. “Brexit is Brexit”. “We can’t let the cure be worse than the disease”.
Make America Great Again. But her emails. Dirty cops. LIBERATE MICHIGAN!
H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?
