It seems Louis CK is back, and Matthew Dessem at Slate has heard the bootlegged tape.

And what he’s been up to, judging from the material, is bemoaning the money he lost, fuming over young people and political correctness, and writing some really killer jokes about the respective penis sizes of various ethnic groups. It’s not just that it’s not funny: it’s positively sickening. Here, for example, is the way C.K. ends a bit about visiting his doctor (described earlier in the joke as old, and Jewish, and touchy-feely):

And he said, “You need to stop eating ice cream.” I said, “You need to go fuck yourself. And don’t ever touch me again, you old faggot. You old fucking Jewish fag. Get your fucking hands off me.” You’re fucking with my ice cream, I get upset.

Transgressive. Or is it just – you know – what it looks like? Venom?

Whatever you think about C.K.’s past use of slurs in his act, his old material at least made some attempt to think about what they meant. There’s no payoff here except for the slur itself: The entire joke is that he’s so mad about not being able to eat ice cream that he’ll casually use it, even with someone who—as he spends the whole build-up establishing—he otherwise likes. It’s cheap and it’s hacky. But it has nothing on the five solid minutes (!) he devotes to lamenting the fact that people have stopped using the word retarded. After reminiscing about how often people said it during his childhood—and saying it over and over again himself, sometimes in a comically exaggerated Boston accent—he lands on this:

But we started to feel shitty about it, so we changed it to intellectually challenged. What the fuck, it’s—don’t name the kid a thing he can’t say out loud. An intellectual challenge is can you translate Shakespeare into Latin and make it rhyme. These kids are not intellectually challenged, they’re intellectually fuckin’ done. They are! It’s not their sport!

Etcetera.

C.K. is doing a George Carlin thing, acting like he’s telling forbidden truths, but spends five minutes riffing on “Christ, people with intellectual disabilities are stupid.” So stupid, in fact, that, according to C.K., “They don’t give a fuck what you think of them,” if anyone was looking for a permission slip to go back to using a slur. And speaking of people who don’t give a fuck what you think of them, Louis C.K. is such a rebel that he doesn’t give a fuck what you think of him, as he made clear, seemingly in response to someone leaving or giving him a dirty look around four minutes into his killer material at the expense of the intellectually disabled:

What’re you, gonna take away my birthday? My life is over, I don’t give a shit. You can, you can be offended, it’s OK. You can get mad at me. Anyway. So why do black guys have big dicks? Let’s talk about that for a minute.

This isn’t particularly terrible in the great scheme of things, but…

…but it irritates.

I have a couple of minor resolutions for 2019 (draw more, cook more) but my major one is to understand my own gender identity and expression better. If that means nails and dresses, fabulous; if something else, I'm excited to find out.

— Josh Spero (@joshspero) December 30, 2018

Why does it irritate? The public announcement of plans for self-absorption, for one thing. “My major resolution for 2019 is to spend more time contemplating the glory of me.” That and the fact that it’s presented as right-on and enlightened. That, to my mind, is one of the most glaring problems with the ideology of transitude: the way it flips narcissism into a progressive ideal. News flash, “folx”: narcissism is the opposite of progressive. Always. Obsessing over your very own Special Rose-scented Idennidee cannot possibly be progressive. Self-obsession takes you nowhere but to greed and self-dealing.

The other is the shallow brainless antifeminist idea that “gender identity” is All About Nails and Dresses. As many actual feminists responded, try instead doing all the domestic work and getting yelled at in the street and being talked over by the men at work – then you might begin to have a clue. Mister Nails and Dresses responded by blocking all those actual feminists. Of course he did.

Ah I found the source of the Eureka march story.

HERE IT IS ON FACEBOOK

December 28 at 9:25 AM

The below PSA has just been released. Thank you to the women and men who helped make this decision.

Humboldt County organizers and supporters of the annual Women’s March have decided to not hold a rally in Eureka on January 19th. This decision was made after many conversations between local social-change organizers and supporters of the march.

The local organizers are continuing to meet and discuss how to broaden representation in the organizing committee to create an event that represents and supports peoples who live here in Humboldt. Up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation from several perspectives in our community. Instead of pushing forward with crucial voices absent, the organizing team will take time for more outreach. Our goal is that planning will continue and we will be successful in creating an event that will build power and community engagement through connection between women that seek to improve the lives of all in our community.

The group is exploring holding an event in March to celebrate International Women’s Day. Anyone interested in helping organize these events are welcome and encouraged to attend.

The Eureka Women’s March organizing committee encourages local supporters to attend the Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration in Eureka on January 21, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Putin is probably putting these stories in his scrapbook.

This Eureka Women’s March story is starting to piss me off, because it’s broken out of the far-right enclave now but I still can’t find a primary source – neither the Facebook group nor the putative press release.

The Washington Post for instance – it just repeats the reporting without linking to the sources it cites.

Organizers of the 2019 Eureka Women’s March, originally scheduled for Jan. 19, said in a statement that the decision came after numerous conversations with leading local activists and supporters of the march.

“Up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation from several perspectives in our community,” the Facebook statement read. “Instead of pushing forward with crucial voices absent, the organizing team will take time for more outreach.”

Did it? Did the Facebook statement read that way? Where is it? Why not link to it?

This seems like pretty crappy journalistic practice.

While many of the Facebook group’s members applauded the organizers’ efforts to diversify the rally, others expressed dissatisfaction with the decision.

“Local Organizers have let themselves be duped, What kind of crowd do they expect when you have 77.86% of the population being White?” group member Terri Selfridge commented on the post that announced the cancellation of the march. “Organizers PLEASE RECONSIDER!!!”

Newsweek did the same thing.

It’s annoying.

Monday: Updating to add: I did find the Facebook group later in the day.

Peter Beinart says the authoritarian nationalist wave has one commonality:

[B]esides their hostility to liberal democracy, the right-wing autocrats taking power across the world share one big thing, which often goes unrecognized in the U.S.: They all want to subordinate women.

To understand global Trumpism, argues Valerie M. Hudson, a political scientist at Texas A&M, it’s vital to remember that for most of human history, leaders and their male subjects forged a social contract: “Men agreed to be ruled by other men in return for all men ruling over women.” This political hierarchy appeared natural—as natural as adults ruling children—because it mirrored the hierarchy of the home. Thus, for millennia, men, and many women, have associated male dominance with political legitimacy. Women’s empowerment ruptures this order.

But then you pause to ask why “the hierarchy of the home” seemed natural. Maybe it’s just because of the dimorphism: male humans dominate female humans just as male gorillas dominate female gorillas. Then again humans aren’t gorillas, and bonobos do things somewhat differently, so maybe it’s not that simple.

Because male dominance is deeply linked to political legitimacy, many revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries have used the specter of women’s power to discredit the regime they sought to overthrow. Then, once in power themselves, they have validated their authority by reducing women’s rights. In a 1995 paper, Arthur Gilbert and James Cole of the University of Denver observed that French revolutionaries made Marie Antoinette a symbol of the immorality of the ancien régime and that Iranian revolutionaries did the same to Princess Ashraf, the “unveiled and powerful” sister of the shah. After toppling the monarchy, the French revolutionaries banned women from holding senior teaching positions and inheriting property. Ayatollah Khamenei made it a crime for women to speak on the radio or appear unveiled in public.

And the Arab spring “revolutions” went the same way.

In their book, The Hillary Doctrine, Valerie Hudson and Patricia Leidl note that when the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi replaced the longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Morsi quickly announced that he would abolish the quota guaranteeing women’s seats in parliament, overturn a ban on female circumcision, and make it harder for women to divorce an abusive husband. After Muammar Qaddafi’s ouster, the first law that Libya’s new government repealed was the one banning polygamy.

On the one hand women must be kept away from any kind of power, on the other hand their fathers and husbands must be empowered to treat them like shit. No to seats in parliament, yes to female genital mutilation.

Commentators sometimes describe Trump’s alliance with the Christian right as incongruous given his libertine history. But whatever their differences when it comes to the proper behavior of men, Trump and his evangelical backers are united by a common desire to constrain the behavior of women.

To be honest, that’s putting it too mildly. Trump doesn’t want to just constrain the behavior of women, he wants to degrade them, grind them into the dirt, monster them, put targets on them. His contempt for women is visceral and intense.

Beinart concludes that to break this pattern it’s necessary to start with the hierarchy at home.

Compare the United States, the Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, and Poland with the countries of northern Europe, where women’s political power has become more normal. In 2017, women made up 48 percent of Iceland’s parliament. In Sweden, the share was 44 percent; in Finland, 42 percent; and in Norway, 40 percent. In the countries that have recently elected gender-backlash authoritarians, the rates are lower, ranging from Italy’s 31 percent to Hungary’s 10 percent. This doesn’t mean a Nordic Orbán or Bolsonaro is impossible: Northern Europe has its own far-right parties. But it’s harder for those parties to use gender to delegitimize the existing political order, because women’s political empowerment no longer appears illegitimate.

It no longer appears illegitimate, in large measure, because gender equality has become more normalized in the home. In 2018, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published the amount of time per day that women and men spent doing unpaid household chores such as cleaning, shopping, and child care. If you calculate the gender gap in each country, a pattern emerges. There is a striking correlation between countries where women and men behave more equally in the home and countries where women are more equally represented in government.

Feminists have always known that.

Errr…what?

News from northern California:

The organizers of the annual Women’s March have decided not to hold a rally in Eureka on Jan. 19, as previously planned, because they say participants do not represent the diversity of the area.

Excuse me? How can they possibly know that? People at a march can just show up, and the organizers can’t know in advance how “diverse” they are or aren’t.

“This decision was made after many conversations between local social-change organizers and supporters of the march,” organizers said in a press release.

They said organizers will continue to meet and discuss how to broaden representation to create an event that represents Humboldt County.

“Up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation from several perspectives in our community,” the press release went on to say. “Instead of pushing forward with crucial voices absent, the organizing team will take time for more outreach. Our goal is that planning will continue and we will be successful in creating an event that will build power and community engagement through connection between women that seek to improve the lives of all in our community.”

Or they could just go ahead with the march and see who shows up.

On the other hand, this source is a Sinclair tv station, and all the other sources I found are extreme-right (Breitbart, Free Republic, etc). I can’t find the press release itself, only extreme-right outlets quoting from it. I can’t find the march on Facebook, although last year’s is there. I’m not sure how reliable or accurate this is. If it is, I remain curious how they can know a march is too white before the march happens.

People tried hard to de-platform Caroline Norma but they didn’t quite get there.

Five days before I was scheduled to speak at a conference on Historical Materialism at the University of Sydney, I received an email from the organizers, explaining that they had refunded my registration fee and struck me from the conference program. They told me that comments I’d made in an online opinion piece three years earlier made my attendance inconsistent with “the commitment of the Historical Materialism Sydney conference organizers to creating an inclusive space for people with diverse gender identities.” In the greatest of ironies, my piece had criticized leftists for playing wedge politics in order to purge radical feminists from progressive circles. The conference was certainly a leftist one: its title, “Historical Materialism,” refers to a Marxist view of history as emerging out of social relations and their contradictions, rather than out of enlightened progress. In keeping with this politically structuralist theme, and as an historian who has written books from a similar standpoint, I’d proposed the talk, “Keeping alive the myth of property in the person: Prostitution in today’s capitalism.”

It’s almost funny that organizers of a conference on historical materialism tried to shoo away a scheduled speaker because she doesn’t genuflect to magical claims about “gender.”

Dr Norma did give her talk, but she was the only person on the panel, because the two other women skunked.

They might have been influenced by an “open letter” posted to social media demanding I be no-platformed from the event and encouraging attendees to boycott my presentation. Indeed, it was mostly boycotted. To date, I have received no word of apology from either the University of Sydney or conference organizers for this slight on my professional reputation, or for their breach of principles of academic good conduct…

Well, reputation, principles, academic good conduct…they’re not materialist enough. Gender, on the other hand…

We know from the history of left organizing that ideological fitness tests are applied deliberately for political purposes. They are applied for the benefit of the people whose interests a movement is seeking to advance. How they are applied clearly signals who is being prioritized.

As to whose interests the Australian left is pursuing, the antics over my attendance at the Historical Materialism Sydney conference gave the game away. Questioning the notion that gender is a matter of how we feel about ourselves, rather than a matter of how we have been systematically treated throughout our lives, was turned into a crime more serious than ignoring tens of thousands of Asian women in brothels on every street corner of Australia’s cities. But the comedic disproportion of this scenario wasn’t accidental. It was manufactured in service of male interests that are now coming under pressure from feminist challenge.

Over the last few years, the Australian left has seen the #MeToo and violence against women movements become entrenched causes of its constituents — young female ones in particular. This growing movement poses a threat to the interests of the male left, which have always ignored violence against women and been sexually libertarian in nature.

Gender bollocks as cover for male sexual violence…but then why do so many women sign up? Massive social pressure is one reason, but I’m not sure that’s all. The history remains to be written.

Do women actually act like this? I don’t mean aren’t all women naturally gentle and benevolent at all times, because of course we’re not, but do we act like this? In my experience no, we don’t, not ever, because we can’t. We just can’t. We wouldn’t get away with it, it wouldn’t work, no one would put up with it for a second, no one would be intimidated by it, no one would keep saying “I apologize, ma’am,” no one would just stand there while we kicked a display to the floor.

Men, though? Even some men who are not bad guys, but…they nevertheless let themselves lose their temper that way, and shout that way, and intimidate everyone in sight that way.

Shouty Guy in Store Tantrum is doing what too many guys do. It’s kind of a giveaway, “ma’am.”

"It's MA'AM! It's MA'AM! You called me sir! Take it outside and I'll show you sir!"

Just watch this. It's no anomaly. Everyone needs to wake up. This crap is getting worse, and sane human beings need to work together to stop it.https://t.co/SsYjTwc1cs

— 4thWaveNow (@4th_WaveNow) December 28, 2018

Some people have a very strange idea of “morality.” The BBC reports:

A female Islamic State group member accused of letting a five-year-old girl die of thirst in scorching sunlight is facing war crimes charges in Germany.

The 27-year-old German, identified as Jennifer W, and her husband bought the child as a house “slave” in the IS-occupied Iraqi city of Mosul 2015.

Her husband chained the girl up outside after she fell ill and Jennifer W did nothing to save her, prosecutors say.

…

The five-year-old girl was among a group of prisoners-of-war when Jennifer W and her husband bought her.

German media say the child may have been a member of the Yazidi minority, many of whom were captured and enslaved by IS as the militant group swept across northern Iraq in 2014.

“After the girl fell ill and wet her mattress, the husband of the accused chained her up outside as punishment and let the child die in agony of thirst in the scorching heat,” prosecutors said in a statement.

“The accused allowed her husband to do so and did nothing to save the girl.”

Jennifer W travelled to Iraq in 2014, where she became a member of IS’s self-styled morality police, the allegations against her say.

Her role saw her patrol parks in Mosul and another IS-occupied city, Fallujah, armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, a pistol and an explosives vest, prosecutors said.

“Her task was to ensure that women comply with the behavioural and clothing regulations established by the terrorist organisation,” said the statement.

So “morality” is forcing women to wear tent-like garments that render them effectively invisible. “Morality” is not giving water and shade to a sick child chained up in the sun, nor is it abstaining from “buying” a child as a slave in the first place. “Morality” has nothing to do with compassion and kindness, it’s all about the systematic forcible violently-enforced concealment of women.

The New Yorker posts a cartoon by Emily Flake on Facebook.

Our old friend the intersection between god and Santa again…but many commenters instead saw anti-Semitism.

–I agree this smacks of Anti-Semitism. At the very least a typically erroneous Christian stereotype of Jewish scripture.

–This is antisemitic. And it’s sparking hateful comments.

–This would be funny, if it wasn’t anti-semitic!

–That feels really antisemitic. And not funny.

–One anti-semetism from your increasing pathetic magazine. Shame on you..

Etc. There’s even a whole essay on it at Religion News Service!

The idea of an “Old Testament Santa” is anti-Judaism 101.

First of all, the very term “Old Testament.”

“Old Testament” is an unconscious piece of anti-Judaism. “Testament” means “covenant.”

To say that the Jewish Bible, or the TANAKH, is the old testament implies that the covenant that God made with Israel is old — as in, outmoded, out of step, out of style. To put it in computer terms, the old covenant needs an upgrade — to a new covenant, a new testament — through Jesus.

For that reason, many sensitive Christians no longer refer to our Bible as the Old Testament. Some refer to it as the “first testament.” Some even respectfully call it what we call it — the TANAKH.

Second, Santa wielding a whip. Here we have the following implication — that the God of the so-called Old Testament is a cruel, vengeful God — and that the God of the Christian New Testament is a loving God. God of justice vs. god of love.

The idea is very powerful, and very old.

It dates back to the first century Christian theologian, Marcion.

And so on and so on, for many words…all as if the cartoon had appeared in a Christian magazine and were making a Christian argument when any fule kno Santa was invented by the Coca Cola company.

H/t Dave Ricks

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The Covenant.

When I learned Santa Claus was definitely just a story (I’d had my suspicions for a while,) I did think of God, and while I didn’t turn into a baby atheist immediately, I’m quite sure a seed of skepticism was planted.

My seeds of doubt were planted in public school, when there was still a fair amount of religious stuff (particularly songs we sang during daily “opening excersizes.”) One of those songs, “God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall,” was one of the things that started me on the road to doubt:

God sees the little sparrow fall,

It meets His tender view;

If God so loves the little birds,

I know He loves me, too.

I wanted to know why God didn’t catch the sparrow. It was not obvious to me that his seeing the falling sparrow he failed to catch meant that he had any regard for me. Catch the sparrow, then we’ll talk. I’m sure that kindly Mrs. Luke would have been saddened that teaching this children’s song of childlike (or childish?) faith had a result directly opposite to the one she had intended. This was grade three, so I would have been around eight years old. I know maybe the year before I’d tried staying up late in Christmas Eve in my oldest brother’s room, to listen for Santa. (His room was closest to the chimney, so it was a natural place for a Santa stakeout). I don’t ever recall trying the milk and cookies thing; sleigh bells on the roof would have been enough. God was much less inspiring of empirical investigation or hypothesis testing. God drove no reindeer.

So I learned about God and Christianity. I remember thinking very seriously about it all, and trying to read the Bible (I was an early reader.) I also remember thinking it all sounded a bit unlikely, a bit like a story, but grownups believed it and said it was true, so…

Atheism took a lot longer than Santa letdown, but I’d given up on traditional Christianity by the time I got to high school. I’d read the Gospels, and was rather impressed with some of Jesus’s ideas. But I had no interest in Paul’s letters or Acts or any of the other bits of the New Testament. I noticed some of the variations and discrepancies between the Gospels, and learned a bit about their origins in specific times and places, for particular audiences (and much later, learning that each had their own theological axes to grind).

I came up with my own set of rules or guidelines as to what a fair, just god should and should not be and most traditional religions missed most of the boxes I needed or ticked the ones that were deal breakers. In the course of this progression into disbelief, I never sat up on a stakeout for god. God was never going to be that “real” or corporeal; I’d already absorbed enough theological cop outs that I knew that such a being wasn’t going to be knocking on the door or coming down the chimney… I would tell people I was agnostic or atheist depending on what kind of day I was having. Oddly enough I tended to ascribe my “better days” to my agnostic phases while on a bad day There Was No God. It was my early thirties when the final, attenuated flickers of deistic ideation finally guttered out.

And it started with that little sparrow.

Kirstjen Nielsen issued a statement yesterday:

Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen Statement on Passing of Eight Year Old Guatemalan Child

Murderous, callous, and chickenshits. The word is death. Nielsen’s statement is on the death of the eight year old Guatemalan child.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen M. Nielsen today released the following statement on the eight year-old Guatemalan national who passed away shortly before midnight on December 24 at Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center in Alamogordo, New Mexico:

“In the evening hours of December 24^th, a child who had been apprehended with his father by the Border Patrol attempting to illegally enter the United States, died at an El Paso hospital after being taken for emergency treatment for the second time in less than 12 hours.  This tragedy, the death of a child in government custody is deeply concerning and heartbreaking. In the last 24 hours, I have a directed a series of additional actions to care for those who enter our custody.”

Then she gets to the “they’re swarming our border” part.

“Our system has been pushed to a breaking point by those who seek open borders. Smugglers, traffickers, and their own parents put these minors at risk by embarking on the dangerous and arduous journey north. This crisis is exacerbated by the increase in persons who are entering our custody suffering from severe respiratory illnesses or exhibit some other illness upon apprehension.  Given the remote locations of their illegal crossing and the lack of resources, it is even more difficult for our personnel to be first responders.”

Yes, it’s all their fault. They come here solely to get on our nerves and to get publicity when their children die.

That’s the St Louis. They weren’t on that ship for the fun of it.