Sure, Hogan Gidley. Whatever you say.

Aaron Rupar at Vox 9 days ago:

President Donald Trump is campaigning on criminal justice reform efforts that reduce sentences for nonviolent offenders, while suggesting he’d like the American justice system to work more like ones in authoritarian countries where drug dealers are executed after “fair but quick” trials.

Well, exectution is a reduced sentence in a way…

Just days after his Super Bowl ad and State of the Union speech highlighted his support for legislation that makes a modest effort to reduce prison sentences at the federal level, Trump on Monday said the best way to further reduce the quantity of fentanyl in the US is to follow China’s lead.

“States with a very powerful death penalty on drug dealers don’t have a drug problem,” Trump said during a White House event with governors. “I don’t know that our country is ready for that, but if you look throughout the world, the countries with a powerful death penalty — death penalty — with a fair but quick trial, they have very little if any drug problem. That includes China.”

…

It should be noted that Trump’s claim about China and other authoritarian countries having “very little if any drug problem” is false. Records from the Chinese government indicate that there are more than 2.5 million officially registered drug users in the country, and that the total has increased significantly in recent years. (The real numbers are likely much higher since not all drug users have registered with the state.)

I bet they haven’t. Anyway, increase, decrease, who cares – let’s just execute people we don’t like. It’s good for the mood.

Mo transitions.

J and M on Patreon

Who is Joe Grogan? According to his Twitter bio:

Assistant to the President & Director of the Domestic Policy Council Tweets may be archived: http://wh.gov/privacy

Which is kind of creepy since he apparently thinks of most of us as an occupying enemy.

Power swing? What does that mean – that Trump and his goons will be shooting at people?

God I wish this were over.

Brendan O’Neill is wrong about most things but not about the hot new trend of pretending reality can be altered by saying a magic word or two.

Imagine if a politician went on TV and said ‘The Earth is flat’. Or ‘Man didn’t really land on the Moon, you know’. We would worry about that politician’s fitness for public life. Well, Dawn Butler has just done the trans equivalent of that. She appeared on Good Morning Britain yesterday and said babies are born without a sex.

There are a lot of things you could say that about. Babies are born without a language. Babies are born without a religion. Babies are born without a driver’s license. Babies are born without a political affiliation. Babies are born without a list of top 10 movies. But a sex? No.

Last week, a group called the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights issued a purge-like document insisting that everyone in the Labour party bow down to the mantra that ‘trans women are women’ and ‘trans men are men’ or risk being branded a transphobic bigot and booted out of the party.

You would think the Labour Party would be a little less eager to shun people who don’t believe men are women than, say, Freethought Blogs.

To put this bluntly, this means if you do not accept that someone with a penis and a beard who calls himself Sharon is a woman — a complete woman, as much as your mother, wife or sister is a woman — then you are a hateful creature who has no place in the Labour party.

And here we are roughly reminded that Brendan O’Neill is wrong about most things. He apparently assumes that women don’t read, or at least don’t read the Spectator. It’s not just your mother, wife or sister who is a woman, Brendan; some eccentric people are actually women themselves. Amazing, isn’t it?

Still, he does say some necessary things.

We need to recognise the seriousness of all this. A senior Labour figure is flat-out denying scientific truth on national TV. Another senior Labour figure is proposing putting male rapists into close, walled quarters with vulnerable women. This is backward thinking. It feels like a kind of hysteria, where otherwise sensible people are saying things that are clearly untrue and even unhinged.

Rather like the alien abduction thing, except that this is political, and doing more harm to women and girls every day.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

The Nation piece the ACLU shared is by Dave Zirin, who does not have any personal stake in whether or not girls and women can continue to compete against other girls and women without an admixture of some boys and men who “identify as” women. He’ll be fine either way.

Naturally his piece reflects that indifference.

There is a right-wing campaign afoot using the presence of transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming women in sports as a stalking horse to attack the already limited and precarious civil rights held by the trans community.

That’s just a lie about “gender nonconforming women.” Nobody objects to gender nonconforming women in sport or on women’s teams. Nobody.

Around the country, legislation is being introduced aimed at keeping high school trans athletes off the playing field.

Again: no. Keeping male high school trans athletes out of girls’ competitions.

Three cisgender high school girls—Selina Soule, Chelsea Mitchell, Alanna Smith—and their mothers put their names on a suit against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference’s policy that allows trans girls to compete in races with cisgender female opponents. In their suit, they misgender two track and field competitors, saying that it is time to call for an end to “boys displacing girls in competitive track events in Connecticut.”

So man Dave Zirin is saying that it’s more important not to “misgender” two boys who say they are girls than it is to let girls compete against girls.

But don’t worry, he gave Chase Strangio three long paragraphs to explain why girls don’t have any right to compete against girls.

The ACLU is still at it.

The image doesn’t really help them make their case – it comes across as a threat rather than a brave expression of solidarity. Miller and Yearwood are both conspicuously much bigger than the girls on the girls’ team, so the image just looks as if they’re going to run over us.

The purification continues.

And what are transphobes? Whatever the loudest trans activist says they are, of course.

So feminist women who are “ideological” in the sense of continuing to think that women are women and men are not women should be expelled.

And imprisoned?

It gets so wearying, watching political figures – people who directly affect our lives in many ways, or who aspire to – mouthing the nonsense as if it were just ordinary fact-based language. The weariness washed over me reading about Rebecca Long-Bailey’s “clarification” in the New Statesman:

Rebecca Long-Bailey’s team has clarified the Labour leadership contender’s position on same-sex spaces and the Equality Act 2010 to the New Statesman following her interview with Andrew Marr yesterday.

Long-Bailey supports reform of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) to allow for trans people to self-identify as their preferred gender, as do all the candidates for the Labour leadership. Her team has clarified, however, that she would not reform the 2010 Equality Act, as has been reported following her interview with Marr.

In the increasingly heated debate over trans rights, confusion is widespread over the difference between what is covered by proposed reforms to the GRA to allow self-identification, as backed by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and current provisions in the Equality Act.

The Equality Act identifies “gender reassignment”  (i.e. being trans: having a gender identify that is different to that assigned to you at birth) as a protected characteristic…

That’s the bit. This is government we’re talking about, and we’re having to take seriously people’s positions on “having a gender identify that is different to that assigned to you at birth.” That’s not a government thing! It’s as if hopeful government-people were talking solemnly about what fantasies we’re allowed to have and what others are strictly forbidden. “Gender identity” that differs from sex is not a real thing that government needs to protect or banish. It’s exhausting seeing adults echoing solemn platitudes about it as if it were real as mud.

Jo Bartosch writes:

The markers of masculinity and femininity are not ‘inside us’, as internal essences which we express, and then demand that the outside world recognise as our true selves. Rather, gender identities surround us, in the messages, images and expectations we are born and then socialised into, as social animals. We may be born male or female, but we become feminine or masculine.

That. It’s one reason it’s so annoying when people drone on about their inner sense of being the sex they’re not – this clueless, childish lack of awareness of socialization. How can anybody possibly know that her/his “feeling” about something external and factual is 100% internal as opposed to being a product of many years of being socially embedded? How can people possibly know their “gender” comes from within unless they’ve been raised without social media, tv, radio, movies, books, education…friends, siblings, parents, human contact of any kind? They can’t. There is no pure Within for people raised among other people. The self is always mediated by other selves. The cult of the self is a dead end.

The words we use to describe ourselves and others rest on a consensus as to their meaning. Male or female, like short or tall, or black or white, are words that reference an objective, shared reality. The moment we give in to those who insist they identify as such and such, we violate that linguistic consensus and sense of shared reality.

A different aspect of the same point. We can’t have a pure uncontaminated self unless we’re raised by ants, and we can’t have a personal language unless we want to communicate only to our precious uncontaminated selves.

Hopeless.

That’s Julia Long asking the question.

Lisa Nandy says firmly “I believe fundamentally in people’s right to self-ID.”

She doesn’t though. She doesn’t believe in people’s right to self-identify as Lisa Nandy for instance (apart from the few people who really are named Lisa Nandy). She doesn’t believe in people’s right to self-identify as the rightful occupants of her house. She doesn’t believe in people’s right to self-identify as the owners of her car. She doesn’t believe in people’s right to self-identify as the MP for her constituency. She doesn’t believe in people’s right to self-identify as the prime minister, the mayor of London, her doctor, the director general of the UN, her cousins, the head of the Bank of England, the pilot of the plane she’s about to board…and so on. She doesn’t. It would be batty and unsafe to believe in such a right, and that’s why there is no such right. We all have the right to fantasize however we like, but that doesn’t translate to a blanket right to “self-identify” and be endorsed as such by all the world.

At 2:33:

2:33: But I think if you deny the right of trans people to exist, and you deny their very basic human rights, then no meaningful dialogue is possible at all.

But nobody is denying anyone’s right to exist.

Lisa Nandy is Lisa Nandy and not Andrew Windsor. It’s not denying her right to exist to say that, and it still wouldn’t be even if she “identified as” Andrew Windsor – not least because such a right would violate the rights of Andrew Windsor. We can imagine or pretend (privately) or dream that we are something we’re not, but we can’t enforce our imaginings on anyone else.

Nandy tells a story of a “girl” in her constituency who has been transitioning for two years and what a difficult process it is, then says she will never say anything that would make that “girl” feel bad. It’s quite ok to make a whole population of women feel bad though. The end of her story got a round of applause.

Sigh. Yeah.

Snerk.

Andrew Sabiski is out.

Andrew Sabisky, who was brought into Downing Street by Johnson’s senior aide Dominic Cummings as part of his appeal for “misfits and weirdos”, became the subject of intense media scrutiny after details emerged of his views on subjects ranging from black people’s IQs to whether benefits claimants should be encouraged to have fewer children.

But amid mounting criticism within the Conservative party after No 10 stood by the appointment, Sabisky said that he would be stepping down as a “contractor” to No 10.

He tweeted: “The media hysteria about my old stuff online is mad but I wanted to help [the government] not be a distraction. Accordingly I’ve decided to resign as a contractor. I hope No 10 hires more [people with] good geopolitical forecasting track records and that media learn to stop selective quoting.”

If he’d been “controversial” but clever it would be one thing, but no.

One Conservative MP from a BME background said: “I’m not necessarily against hiring intellectually interesting people with sometimes controversial views, but this guy just doesn’t seem very smart, and if you are not very smart and at the very least appear bigoted that cannot be a good look for the party. By all means we should be against ultra-woke nonsense, but we should also stand against alt-right nonsense too.”

Especially from people who don’t seem very smart.

Dr Adam Rutherford, a geneticist and author, accused Sabisky and Cummings of being “bewitched by science, without having made the effort to understand the areas he is invoking, nor its history”.

He said the “moral repugnance” of the remarks was “overwhelming”, adding: “I am all for scientifically minded people advising government … [but] this resembles the marshalling of misunderstood or specious science into a political ideology. The history here is important, because this process is exactly what happened at the birth of scientific racism and the birth of eugenics.”

Away with all this emotionalism. The only issue is whether it would “work” or not.

I guess we’ll have to start paying attention to this Andrew Sabisky fella.

Downing Street has refused to condemn controversial past remarks on pregnancies, eugenics and race reportedly made by a new adviser.

This appears to be why Dawkins was musing aloud about eugenics yesterday, with such stimulating results.

Labour said Andrew Sabisky should be sacked for suggesting black people had lower average IQs than white people and compulsory contraception could prevent “creating a permanent underclass”.

Compulsory contraception for…whom? The parents of the future permanent underclass? How would he know which those were, exactly? Cue Dawkins explaining that it would totally work and we shouldn’t confuse that fact with whether it’s a good idea or not.

Mr Sabisky, appointed after the PM’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings called for “misfits and weirdos” to apply for jobs in Downing Street, has been contacted by the BBC for comment.

Define “misfits and weirdos.” Be sure to include “according to whom?” and “in what context?”. Show your work. Cite your sources.

Donald Ayer was a Deputy Attorney General under George Bush 1 and he sees how crooked Barr is. It’s pathetic that Trump’s army pretend they don’t.

Beginning in March with his public whitewashing of Robert Mueller’s report, which included powerful evidence of repeated obstruction of justice by the president, Barr has appeared to function much more as the president’s personal advocate than as an attorney general serving the people and government of the United States. Among the most widely reported and disturbing events have been Barr’s statements that a judicially authorized FBI investigation amounted to “spying” on the Trump campaign, and his public rejection in December of the inspector general’s considered conclusion that the Russia probe was properly initiated and overseen in an unbiased manner. Also quite unsettling was Trump’s explicit mention of Barr and Rudy Giuliani in the same breath in his July 25 phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, as individuals the Ukrainian president should speak with regarding the phony investigation that Ukraine was expected to publicly announce.

It’s all way more like being a crime boss’s lawyer than like being a nation’s legal supervisor.

Then there’s the whole thing about launching his own investigations for highly trump-facing reasons.

When Barr initiated a second, largely redundant investigation of the FBI Russia probe in May, denominated it criminal, and made clear that he is personally involved in carrying it out, many eyebrows were raised.

And many “fuck”s were articulated.

But this past week has taken the biscuit.

The evenhanded conduct of the prosecutions of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn by experienced Department of Justice attorneys have been disrupted at the 11th hour by the attorney general’s efforts to soften the consequences for the president’s associates. More generally, it appears that Barr has recently identified a group of lawyers whom he trusts and put them in place to oversee and second-guess the work of the department’s career attorneys on a broader range of cases.

The “but Trump’s tweets” interruption changed none of that, it was just Barr pretending to be not dirty.

Bad as they are, these examples are more symptoms than causes of Barr’s unfitness for office. The fundamental problem is that he does not believe in the central tenet of our system of government—that no person is above the law. In chilling terms, Barr’s own words make clear his long-held belief in the need for a virtually autocratic executive who is not constrained by countervailing powers within our government under the constitutional system of checks and balances.  

It’s a hell of an eccentric thing to believe, for someone raised in a country that preens itself on being not a monarchy. Why would he think one person’s judgment is always and everywhere preferable to that of several? Why would he trust our weird election system, where empty prairie states have more say than crowded industrial/agricultural states, to pick one human who can be trusted with all that unfettered power?

Barr would make real Nixon’s vision that if the president does it, it may not be challenged by the Department of Justice, or from any other agency of the executive branch. But Barr’s efforts to place the president above the law go far beyond foreclosing interference through checks that might arise within his own branch. His department has been very active, and he has personally been quite vocal, in working to cripple the traditional checks and balances on presidential prerogatives that arise from the distinct, co-equal roles of Congress and the courts.

Read the whole thing.

No shit, Sherlock.

That’s right, I don’t think trans girls are girls. I think they’re boys who think they “feel like” girls or feel better thinking of themselves as girls or various other explanations of that kind. I don’t think any of that is the same as literally being a girl. I also don’t think there’s anything surprising or weird in my view on the matter.

I also think there are some “trans girls” who are simply pretending in order to play their sport in competition with girls instead of boys, because they become instant winners and record-breakers that way. Yes, I damn well do think that’s unfair. I also think it’s unfair even if the boy really does think he feels like a girl. I think that because it’s true.

Go ahead, “Chase,” be shocked.

Good grief.