Trump’s vile spawn was quick to sneer at the woman who dared to report that Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her years ago.

Donald Trump, Jr., son of President Donald Trump, posted an image to his Instagram account on Sunday appearing to mock the woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

The image shows a piece of scrap paper with childish handwriting reading: “Hi Cindy, will you be my girlfriend,” followed by two boxes marked “yes” and “no.” “Love, Bret [sic]” the note ended.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BnwjBsVnSN1/?utm_source=ig_embed

Hur hur; such a funny guy.

Megan Garber at the Atlantic on this whole “all teenage boys try to rape girls, let’s have a little charity here” thing:

Ford’s account of the event has been corroborated by her husband; by a therapist, with whom she discussed the alleged event in 2012; by the notes of a 2013 therapy session, which refer to a “rape attempt” Ford survived as a teenager; and by a polygraph test Ford took on the advice of a lawyer who knows the doubt with which the world, still, reflexively responds to the recollections of women. What the professor describes, in her letter to her Congressional representatives and again to the Post, is by no means the typical stuff of mere youthful indiscretion. What Ford is talking about—what she has been talking about, for years—is not the behavior of kids simply being kids, boys simply being boys. What she is alleging, instead, is cruelty; it is entitlement; it is violence; it is assault.

And it’s not the case that all boys do it or that it’s just a normal part of being a testosterone-addled kid.

The White House—which of course has multidimensional interests in downplaying negative claims about Kavanaugh, particularly those involving sexual misconduct—has thus far defended its nominee in the broadest of terms, claiming its support for Kavanaugh and otherwise offering “no additional comment.” (Donald Trump’s evergreen advice on countering allegations of misconduct: “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead.”) A lawyer close to the White House, interviewed by Politico, reiterated the idea that, regardless of Ford’s claims, Kavanaugh’s nomination would not be withdrawn. On the contrary: “If anything, it’s the opposite,” the lawyer told the reporter Burgess Everett, suggesting that the White House has been, actually, galvanized by the allegations against its nominee. “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”

Really. Saying all males are that violent and entitled? That’s their defense?

And here is the deeper venality of the boys-being-boys defense: It normalizes. It erases the specific details of Christine Blasey Ford’s stated recollections with the soggy mop of generalized male entitlement. What red-blooded guy, after all, its logic assumes, hasn’t done, in some way, the kinds of things Ford has described? Who, as a younger version of himself, hasn’t gotten stumble-drunk, pinned down a woman, groped her, tried to undress her, and then, when she resisted, held his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams? (“It was drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven,” the Fox News columnist Stephen Miller tweeted, derisively.)

Once again, in much of the public discussion, the empathy settles on the man accused. There but for the grace, etc.: If youthful indiscretions like that are allowed to affect the fate of a basketball-coaching, soup-kitchen-volunteering, daughter-nurturing, carpool-driving Supreme Court nominee, whose fortunes wouldn’t be affected? “We’ve now gone from ‘he did this terrible thing at 17’ to ‘he’s a man who treated a woman like that,’” the professor and author Tom Nichols tweeted on Sunday. “Man, I hope all the people who are making this case had spotless lives at 17, because I sure as hell didn’t.”

Exactly. I spent much of yesterday afternoon, as you saw if you were around, disputing that tweet and a string of others defending the basic idea, from Tom Nichols. All his empathy was for the man, and the woman simply disappeared. Many people pointed this out to him, and still he kept on doing it. He can’t grasp that women actually exist even when people are saying it right to him.

The salient question about Ford’s allegations became, in some quarters, not whether they are true, but rather whether they count as allegations at all. The cruelties she describes—the alleged acts of dehumanization that left her traumatized, she says, as a 15-year-old and, still, as an adult—might be “terrible,” yes, but they are also … simply part of the natural order of things. Boys, figuring out how to be men. Locker-room talk, made manifest. “Drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven.” Who wouldn’t be implicated in that? Who doesn’t see himself, in some way, in this age-old story? If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.Americans talk a lot, these days, about norms. What will be preserved, in the tumult and chaos of today’s politics; what is worth preserving; what will fall away. Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was already, in the profoundest of ways, a matter of norms: It will determine, almost inevitably, whether the women of America maintain autonomy over their bodies. Here, though, in Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that a young Brett Kavanaugh compromised her autonomy in another way, another norm is being litigated: the way we talk about sexual violence. Whether such violence will be considered an outrage, or simply a sad inevitability. Whether it will be treated as morally intolerable … or as something that, boys being boys and men being men, just happens.

Tom Nichols repeatedly described it that way – as just a thing that happened between two teenagers. Denial is a powerful force.

The New Yorker has a long piece on Sarah Sanders as Trump’s battering ram.

Trump needed a stronger link to evangelicals and women, and Sanders was happy to provide one. Despite the differences in their family backgrounds—Mike and Janet Huckabee grew up poor; Trump didn’t—the candidate felt familiar to her. Huckabee was an economic populist; Trump claimed to be one, too. Huckabee had campaigned on a promise to “restore America’s greatness”; Trump’s slogan was “Make America Great Again.” Huckabee wanted to ban abortion; Trump had vowed to appoint pro-life advocates to the bench. Like Huckabee, Trump enjoyed ad-libbing while giving speeches.

Sanders relished the idea of helping an outsider like Trump defeat the people she viewed as the ultimate Washington insiders: the Clintons. She appreciated Hillary Clinton for advancing the cause of female candidates, but loathed her politics. “She has shown her utter contempt for anyone that doesn’t support her and doesn’t think like her, and I think that’s a really scary thing to have in a President,” Sanders said, on a talk-radio show.

So she works for Trump, who is such a contrast to Clinton that way: he of course never shows his utter contempt for anyone who doesn’t support him and doesn’t think like him.

No but seriously. If Clinton were president now we can be absolutely sure she would not be issuing multiple tweets every day insulting people who don’t support her or agree with her. We can be sure she wouldn’t be issuing any tweets of that kind at all, because that’s not an intelligent responsible adult thing for a president to do. So Sanders loathes the “basket of deplorables” but is fine with “Pocahontas” and “Cryin’ Chuck” and “a very low-IQ individual” and “you can grab them by the pussy” and all the rest of it.

Maybe what she said is not what she really meant. Maybe the problem is just that Clinton is obviously both intelligent and informed.

Officially, the White House press secretary’s job is to represent the President and the executive branch before the press and the public, and to relay media inquiries to the White House. Acrimony among these various parties isn’t unusual: Ronald Reagan once muttered, “Sons of bitches,” after reporters questioned him. But the Trump Administration’s relationship with the press transcends ordinary discord. The President’s toxic relationship with the media demands that a press secretary behave, at least publicly, less as a source of information than as a battering ram—especially during a moment of crisis, like now.

“Like now” being in the wake of the publication of Woodward’s book and the anonymous op-ed.

Sanders has labelled “Fear” a work of “fiction,” and attempted to trivialize its celebrated author by noting that she hadn’t read his books. The day that the Op-Ed appeared, she convened her staff, then launched a counterattack questioning the mystery author’s honor, deploying such Trumpian keywords as “pathetic” and “coward.” On Twitter, she urged Americans to call the “failing NYT”— Trump’s favorite (and erroneous) characterization of the newspaper—and demand the unmasking of the “gutless loser” who’d written the piece. Her tweet included the paper’s main phone number.

Two former White House ethics chiefs declared that Sanders’s tweet had violated federal law. One of them, Richard Painter, who worked in the Bush Administration, told Newsweek that Sanders was “using her official position to interfere with the freedom of the press.” This wasn’t the first abuse-of-power complaint. In June, Sanders was accused of employing the @PressSec account to target the Red Hen—a restaurant in Virginia that, when she went to dine there, asked her to leave.

It’s what a battering ram does.

Perhaps Sanders’s greatest asset at the podium is her embodiment of the Trump voter. The supposedly populist President is tremendously wealthy, as are many top Administration figures: Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Steve Mnuchin, and Kellyanne Conway. Like Sanders, Vice-President Mike Pence is also a heartland Christian, but he’s rarely on TV, and he lacks the combative instinct that she shares with Trump. Sanders’s briefings offer repeated confirmation to Trump’s base that the U.S. government is being run by Christians standing up to condescending Beltway insiders. In a characteristic flourish, Sanders defended immigrant-family separations by noting that “it is very Biblical to enforce the law.”

It may be biblical, but is it specifically Christian? It’s not very “if they take your coat, give them your shirt too,” now is it.

In the Obama Administration, press briefings happened almost daily, and regularly exceeded an hour. Sanders’s have become sporadic and typically last about twenty minutes. (Olivier Knox, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, has complained to Sanders about the infrequency of briefings.) According to the Washington Post, Sanders “manufactures urgency”—exuding a righteous impatience that simultaneously limits her exposure to difficult questions and makes her appear determined to keep reporters in their place. In previous Administrations, most press briefings were low-key affairs in which journalists downloaded policy details; reporters were allowed many follow-ups, and sometimes asked dozens of them. Sanders grumbles if someone asks more than two questions. A Post analysis showed that, in her first year, she spent less time informing the public than Spicer had done in half that time. When C-span asked Sanders why her briefings were so short, she said, “I don’t think I take as long to get to the point.”

This gets back to that point about being intelligent and informed, and being threatened by that. A normal adult presidency, however annoying it may find critical reporters, understands that it owes it to the public to keep reporters informed. This one has contempt for the very idea.

Reporters complain that Sanders’s briefings almost never involve substantive disclosures. Instead, she deflects questions and returns to the same talking points: “stock market, at an all-time high”; “isis, on the run.” A White House reporter told me, “I’ve never learned a single thing in that briefing room that’s been helpful to me. It’s the part of my job that I dread most. You’re either being spun or gaslit.” Mike McCurry, a press secretary under Bill Clinton, has lamented that, in the Trump era, live briefings have devolved into an “entertainment product.” More and more, Sanders presents a televised reënactment of Trump’s Twitter feed.

And what is that useful for?

When McCurry chastised a reporter, he generally did so off camera. But Trump thrives on bullying antagonists in public, and has urged his staff to “fight” the press. In Sanders, he has found an eager pugilist. After Trump tweeted that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand used to beg him for contributions at Trump Tower—and “would do anything for them”—a reporter asked Sanders if this had a sexual implication. “Only if your mind was in the gutter would you have read it that way,” she retorted. Sanders prefers short, tough interviews to “soft,” one-on-one encounters in which she might drop her guard and say something that she will regret. In public, she tends to handle reporters with the sort of eye-rolling derision that Fox News’ Tucker Carlson levies against liberal guests. In one notorious exchange, Sanders told CNN’s Jim Acosta, who she thinks performs for the cameras, “I know it’s hard for you to understand even short sentences.”

So basically what Sanders does has nothing to do with informing reporters, but is instead just a branch of Trump’s Permanent Mass Rally.

Republicans are preparing the buckets of mud.

Judiciary Committee Republicans sent out a memo criticizing “Democrats’ tactics and motives” and calling on Feinstein to release “the letter she received back in July so that everyone can know what she’s known for weeks.” And four people close to the White House said they expected Republicans to question the accuser’s vague memories and why Feinstein, up for reelection in November with the Democratic base hungry for anti-Trump fodder, sat on the accusation for months.

They’re going to attack Feinstein for not acting on the letter and attack anyone who does act on the letter. All bases covered.

Three of those people also said they expect the president to go after Kavanaugh’s accuser rather than to turn on the judge. They noted that Trump has done so before, not just denouncing his own accusers but also attacking those of others, notably, failed Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.

A lawyer close to the White House said the nomination will not be withdrawn.

“No way, not even a hint of it,” the lawyer said. “If anything, it’s the opposite. If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”

Pussygrabbers and rapists stick together.

God, he’s still doing it. The stubborn dishonesty of it and the absolute determination to remove the young woman who was assaulted from the picture is mind-boggling. Is this what Republicans are? Guys who struggle hard to draw a veil over attempted rape so that they can take women’s reproductive rights away at last?

As would mine. But I would not want to be the father who says: "Your life will now be defined by this one moment at a party, so just accept that it will be used at will at any point in your life."

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

It was more than a moment – they shoved her into the room, they locked the door, they turned the music up. It wasn’t “at a party”; it was upstairs from the party, where she had gone because she needed to pee.

But I'm still completely worried about stuff you did as a minor ending your career at 50. There's something in that I cannot get used to, and I have *always* felt this way. But @MalcolmNance made me think about this differently in a way a million other stupid insults didn't. /3x

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

It’s not “ending his career.” Potentially it will end his bid to be on the Supreme Court. That’s all.

Pretty sure I was around some felonies in the 1970s as a boy. Lots of drugs and bad stuff where I grew up. For a while, I was a kid who could just as easily have gone to jail as college. Maybe that's why I'm in a defensive crouch about this.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

But drugs are (mostly) a harm to the self. Assault is harm to the person assaulted. The issue isn’t a generalizes soup labeled “bad stuff”; the issue is sexual assault of a girl in a locked room.

I don't know, David. On the one hand, I'm rethinking this, because the argument that a national judge should be morally spotless, even to teen years, sways me. On the other, I'm not sure what happened between two teenagers and I'm creeped out by this emerging as the killer app.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

It didn’t HAPPEN. Assault is not a thing that happens; it’s a thing that an agent does.

That, for me, is the adult behavior that is even more disqualifying than anything that happened one night when he was 17.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

It’s not “anything that happened” – that is shifty, evasive, victim-erasing, agent-concealing language.

Some men can’t see that they’re erasing women even when you point it out to them directly. It’s astonishing.

Lordy lordy lordy – even Radio Free Tom, who is normally…sensible, at least.

Whoa. One was accused of as a continuing behavior while a senior supervisor at a Federal agency. The other's been accused of an incident of drunken assault at 17 years old. Both are terrible things, but they're not generically the same.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

It's giving me the willies to go back to "this happened between minors at a party in high school" as a permanent disqualification for anything. This is a powerful weapon that will be deployed again, and I think in ways that will have drastic and unintended consequences.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

ARGGGHHH! It did not “happen between two minors.” A minor male did it to a minor female. It wasn’t a mutual sex act, it was a teenage boy assaulting a teenage girl, while another teenage boy stood ready to provide backup.

It never ceases to amaze me the way some men – even apparently liberal men – just cannot see or imagine the point of view of women.

Now the woman who said Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both teenagers has gone public – with great reluctance.

Earlier this summer, Christine Blasey Ford wrote a confidential letter to a senior Democratic lawmaker alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her more than three decades ago, when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. Since Wednesday, she has watched as that bare-bones version of her story became public without her name or her consent, drawing a blanket denial from Kavanaugh and roiling a nomination that just days ago seemed all but certain to succeed.

Now, Ford has decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it.

Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.

While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”

She was able to get away when the drunk friend jumped on top of both of them.

She didn’t talk about it in detail until she told a therapist about it in 2012; the therapist took notes.

The therapist’s notes, portions of which were provided by Ford and reviewed by The Washington Post, do not mention Kavanaugh’s name but say she reported that she was attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.”

And a girls’ soccer coach at another elitist school, this time a Catholic school in DC.

Reached by email Sunday, Judge declined to comment. In an interview Friday with The Weekly Standard, before Ford’s name was known, he denied that any such incident occurred. “It’s just absolutely nuts. I never saw Brett act that way,” Judge said. He told the New York Times that Kavanaugh was a “brilliant student” who loved sports and was not “into anything crazy or illegal.”

Oh, he loved sports, well that changes everything – popular male athletes never assault women.

Christine Ford is a professor at Palo Alto University who teaches in a consortium with Stanford University, training graduate students in clinical psychology. Her work has been widely published in academic journals.

So…did a sports-loving teenage boy get drunk and assault a teenage girl at a drunken party? Or did a 51-year-old professor of clinical psychology tell a whopper about him, after carefully laying the groundwork for it in therapy six years ago?

For weeks, Ford declined to speak to The Post on the record as she grappled with concerns about what going public would mean for her and her family — and what she said was her duty as a citizen to tell the story.

She engaged Debra Katz, a Washington lawyer known for her work on sexual harassment cases. On the advice of Katz, who believed Ford would be attacked as a liar if she came forward, Ford took a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent in early August. The results, which Katz provided to The Post, concluded that Ford was being truthful when she said a statement summarizing her allegations was accurate.

By late August, Ford had decided not to come forward, calculating that doing so would upend her life and probably would not affect Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “Why suffer through the annihilation if it’s not going to matter?” she said.

But bits of the story leaked anyway, and reporters started contacting her.

On Friday, the New Yorker reported the letter’s contents but did not reveal Ford’s identity. Soon after, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) released a letter from 65 women who say they knew Kavanaugh when he attended high school from 1979 to 1983 at Georgetown Prep, an all-boys school in North Bethesda.

“Through the more than 35 years we have known him, Brett has stood out for his friendship, character, and integrity,” the women wrote. “In particular, he has always treated women with decency and respect. That was true when he was in high school, and it has remained true to this day.”

Skeptical people have been pointing out what a striking bit of luck it is that Grassley had that letter handy, almost as if he’d known all along that he might need it.

As the story snowballed, Ford said, she heard people repeating inaccuracies about her and, with the visits from reporters, felt her privacy being chipped away. Her calculation changed.

“These are all the ills that I was trying to avoid,” she said, explaining her decision to come forward. “Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.”

Which is heartbreaking. She shouldn’t be in that position.

We’ve been here before you know; Anita Hill. I watched that whole thing, riveted and enraged. It was utterly disgusting.

She married her husband in 2002. Early in their relationship, she told him she had been a victim of physical abuse, he said. A decade later, he learned the details of that alleged abuse when the therapist asked her to tell the story, he said.

He said he expects that some people, upon hearing his wife’s account, will believe that Kavanaugh’s high school behavior has no bearing upon his fitness for the nation’s high court. He disagrees.

“I think you look to judges to be the arbiters of right and wrong,” Russell Ford said. “If they don’t have a moral code of their own to determine right from wrong, then that’s a problem. So I think it’s relevant. Supreme Court nominees should be held to a higher standard.”

There’s more to it than that. There’s the specific issue of putting men on the court who see women as public property rather than human beings like themselves.

Philosopher Asia Ferrin explains why feminists must defer to trans women no matter what:

There has been some online discussion recently about how, or if, people can have open conversations about policies that aim to create more inclusive spaces for trans people, trans women in particular. I will not recount the conversation here, but readers might want to see these posts, first from Kathleen Stock, then a reply from Talia Mae Bettcher, and a reply to the reply from Stock. Similar themes also come up in a recent post here on hostility in such discussions.

That’s one way to put it, but it’s quite a loaded way. “Inclusive” has become a highly deceptive or tendentious word in some contexts, and this is one of them. Nobody wants “inclusive spaces” in all situations and contexts, and the reasons for that are not all “exclusionary” or racist or racist-like. To put it another way,  we are allowed to want privacy in some situations, and it can be a matter of life and death. Remember those girls in India who were raped and murdered because they had to go outside to crap?

Mostly women and men work together in shared spaces, but we know that that doesn’t always work out well for the women. That doesn’t mean the sexes should be segregated at work, but it does mean there’s an issue. One compromise people arrived at historically was that women could at least segregate themselves when they had to lift their skirts or take their trousers down to deal with physical imperatives. That means women do not necessarily want to “create more inclusive spaces for trans people” if that includes the places where they have to lift their skirts or take their trousers down, or take them off altogether to change into athletic gear. Women don’t necessarily want to be more inclusive about undressing, and they shouldn’t have to. They should not have to. Reasons for not wanting to include bruises, stab wounds, rape, and death. It’s not some stupid little whim and it’s not right-wing and it’s not cruel – it’s a core part of women’s ability to leave the house at all.

So, I’m put off by Asia Ferrin in the first paragraph, and I don’t warm to her as I read on.

I write primarily for the person who reads Stock’s writings and thinks “hmmm, good question: why do conversations about trans issues have to be so hostile or difficult? Some of Stock’s worries seem legitimate and worthy of further consideration.” I aim to explain, and in part defend, resistance and hostility to the conversation, at least as Stock presents it. In doing so, I will also problematize some of her analysis.

Yeah, we can’t have people thinking Stock’s questions are reasonable, and we should have lots of hostility toward her arguments and her.

Specifically, for our purposes, why might trans people and trans allies (myself included) express hostility—or exasperation, frustration, hurt, anger, betrayal, resistance, etc.—when someone proposes an investigation into whether trans women should have access to spaces typically designated as women only? There is much that could be said here, and again, much that has been said here, so I will aim to be relatively brief. One reason for such resistances is that it seems that a negative answer, that is, the claim that “no, trans women should not have access to spaces typically designated for women only” relies on one of the following premises:

Assumption A) Trans women aren’t women.

…

Assumption A) Trans women aren’t women. Stock defends this view, and the Gender Critical position generally, here. There is good reason to think this assumption is false, however, and thus a nonstarter. See here, here, here, and here. But even if it’s true, the assumption that trans women aren’t women doesn’t sufficiently ground the moral claim that Stock is after. One can’t derive the moral claim that trans women should be excluded from resources and spaces like homeless shelters, rape crises centers, changing rooms, hostels, public transport sleeping carriages, etc. from the descriptive claim that “Trans women aren’t women.”

But again, that’s a tendentious way of putting it. Men are already “excluded” from resources and spaces like some homeless shelters, rape crises centers, changing rooms, hostels, public transport sleeping carriages, and the like, because women need and want privacy from men in those situations. In a perfect world they wouldn’t need that because men would never take advantage of vulnerable women, but this is not that world.

Then she moves on to say the discussion is “hurtful and harmful.”

I can imagine that if someone wanted to have a discussion, or explore a thesis, that involved invoking this assumption about me, I would experience a range of emotions—e.g. fear, hurt, disappointment, anger, resentment, hopelessness, and/or betrayal. I would feel some or all of these things at once if someone implied that I was dangerous. Furthermore, when this assumption gets airtime and uptake from less well-intentioned individuals or groups, trans women’s lives can be compromised in physical, social, ontological, and political ways. In other words, trans women and trans allies would be expected to be upset when certain positions about gendered spaces depend upon an assumption about them as threatening.

Furthermore, this upset is normatively justified. Imagine a scholar wanted to discuss the legal status of Black people, making claims that invoked and implied the following: “Black people are dangerous to white people.” It would be unsurprising for a conversation involving these assumptions to make many Black people feel a range of emotions and thus inclined to shut down conversations in which these assumptions are made. Moreover, beyond emotional affront, the world is worse for Black people, due to white supremacy, when these ideas get airtime as worthy of consideration.

And, you see, women are to trans women as white people are to black people.

What?

No. No we are not. That’s one of the ways this movement goes all the way off the rails, and down the embankment and into our living rooms. Women as a class are not in the dominant or privileged position in this world, and that does not change just because you add the word “cis.” It’s embarrassing to see women themselves buying into that bullshit idea, and even doing their best to enforce it on other women.

Stock posted a reply today.

Eleazar David Melendez on Facebook:

They did not die in the hurricane.

They died in pain, at home, of kidney failure unable to access the dialysis clinic for weeks.

They died, gasping for hours near the end, when the oxygen tank they needed to breathe gave out.

They died in the dark and the heat of unsanitary ICU units, of burns or gunshot wounds received before the hurricane that they almost certainly would have survived otherwise.

They died, burning up with fever, of leptospirosis from being in touch with flood waters during the effort to save their neighbors.

They died in fear and confusion after being forced to go off their regular medication.
They died of heat stroke.

They died of diseases of antiquity, in a crisis of neglect unworthy the greatest, wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history.

They died. But we lived. And we remember.

Cartoon via Circe Torruellas:

That’s a good cartoon. That’s the essence of Trump right there.

H/t Katrina

Isaac Chotiner’s Buruma interview is today’s news in Abusers’ Corner; yesterday’s was John Hockenberry doing his “This has all been so sad for me” thing in Harper’s.

He starts off by telling us everything we know about him, which is why I stopped reading it yesterday, gagging. He goes on to tell us about all his stuff in a storage unit now, how important he used to be, how sad, poor him.

Then he tells us his friends don’t shower him with affection any more.

I have also faced unrelenting anger from both male and female colleagues. Or, more common and more painful, I have faced their stony and, in my view, cowardly silence. Only one of my accusers reached out or responded to my heartfelt queries. She had very useful and meaningful things to say, for which I am grateful.

Those other bitches, who failed to “reach out” to him just because he’d abused them in the past – the hell with them, right?

I have never been accused of anything that, in my view, could be construed as criminal or coercive.

Well naturally. You told yourself whatever story was necessary to make it ok to sexually harass women. That’s how that works.

But in the blink of an eye I have gone from being someone recognized on the streets of New York City as a journalist, author, and advocate for people with disabilities to someone who fears recognition and trembles at the prospect of running into some radio listener who has come to find me an object of pity or reproach. My mission here in part is to let you know a lot more of the truth about me and to deny what you may have heard that is false but gets repeated over and over without challenge.

In short, dear readers, it’s all about him.

And then…my god he writes an entire book about it. It must be 40 thousand words at least. It’s all as self-obsessed as the snippet above.

What the hell is wrong with everyone?

Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous yesterday:

Scientific American is a monthly magazine aimed at popularizing scientific and technological findings. But how trustworthy a magazine is it?

This question is prompted by several articles that Scientific American has published on topics in philosophy. It is wonderful that the magazine’s editors recognize how much philosophy is relevant to science and scientific practices. But the quality of those articles has been questionable.

Yes, I’ve noticed that, for instance when they publish Michael Shermer pretending to be a moral philosopher.

The uneven quality of Scientific American articles on topics I am familiar with has led me to question its trustworthiness more generally. I know I’m not alone in that questioning.

As for the quality of its articles on philosophy, let me stress that my complaint is not with the substance of the philosophical views their authors favor. Rather, it is that ideas, arguments, positions, and widely-used concepts have been deployed in mistaken or confused ways, or that highly relevant work (well known to experts) has been completely ignored. The result is that the magazine is misleading its readers about philosophy.

…

A few recent examples of this are “Does the Philosophy of ‘the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number’ Have Any Merit?” and “Will Science Ever Solve the Mysteries of Consciousness, Free Will and God?” by Michael Shermer, and “The Fate of Free Will: When Science Crosses Swords with Philosophy” by Abraham Loeb. I commented on the Shermer pieces here and here. The Loeb piece, which just came out earlier this week, is being referred to online by philosophers as “utter drivel” and “a trainwreck.” Read them for yourselves.

Ah look at that now, it is Michael Shermer.

Neither Shermer nor Loeb are philosophers. Shermer made his name as a popular “skeptic” of religion and psychics, and Loeb is an astrophysicist at Harvard. It’s great that they’re interested in philosophy. But it is unclear why Scientific American thinks that these people are the ones who should be informing their readers about philosophical matters. As Jeff Sebo, a philosopher who directs the Animal Studies M.A. program at New York University put it on Twitter:

i appreciate the liberal approach [Scientific American] takes to who can write what and look forward to pitching my piece about the physics of black holes from the perspective of a moral and political philosopher.

Shermer is convinced that he’s a profound and serious thinker.

From the comments:

Wow, that Shermer Utilitarianism piece is mind-boggling, really.

Yes that essay sucks… I particularly (dis)like the statement that ‘historically’ witch burners determined their course of action by applying a ‘utilitarian calculus’. Er, no they didn’t.

Oh good GRIEF.

Our $10+ Patrons now have access to A Day of Reckoning – 1 – Why can't we have civil conversations about race, politics, gender etc. featuring @SamHarrisOrg , @DouglasKMurray , @MaajidNawaz , @BretWeinstein & @EricRWeinstein . Moderated by @joshzepps
https://t.co/fgYPHzsZ7K pic.twitter.com/LVYbafBZHV

— Travis Pangburn (@ThePangburn) September 13, 2018

Why can’t seven guys team up to pronounce on gender? Why can’t six white guys plus one brown guy (see how woke we are?) tell us all what to think about gender and race, and charge money for it? Who doesn’t want to hear what all-male panels think about gender?

That’s the intellectual dark web. You can tell because it’s dark outside the window.

Welllll…

It’s like this: going to Salisbury to see the sights is plausible as part of an extended tourist adventure. I know this for a fact because I’ve done it myself – gotten a rail pass and run around visiting places for seven days. Salisbury was one of the places, and I wasn’t disappointed. But as a destination? On a one-day trip to London? Nah.

And now there’s Pyotr Verzilov. Masha Gessen at the New Yorker:

There is little I can say about the latest apparent poisoning in Russia that I haven’t said before. And before that. And more recently. That Russian enemies of the current regime are often killed, most frequently by poisoning, is now a fact that requires no elaboration. In the past decade and a half, many people have fallen mysteriously ill or have died of multiple-organ failure as a result of poisoning with toxins known or, more often, unknown. Pyotr Verzilov, a thirty-year-old artist and activist who is currently in intensive care in Moscow, appears to be the latest victim of an attack by poison.

I met Verzilov during Russia’s winter of protests, in 2011 and 2012, and got to know him while I was reporting a book on the protest-art group Pussy Riot. Verzilov was married to Nadya Tolokonnikova, then twenty-two, who was the mastermind of the group. He had been a philosophy student; an artist with the group Voyna (the Russian word for “war”), a precursor to Pussy Riot; and an all-around support person and publicist for the all-female Pussy Riot. During the two years when Tolokonnikova and another Pussy Riot member, Maria Alekhina, were behind bars, Verzilov worked to draw the world’s attention to the case, to keep appeals and complaints against their imprisonment coming, and to insure that the two young women, who were serving their sentences in different parts of the country, were communicating. He shuttled tirelessly between Moscow, the two prison colonies, and whatever courts were reviewing complaints related to the case. He even produced Pussy Riot clips featuring other group members.

Later he and Tolokonnikova separated but they still worked together.

On July 15th of this year, during the last game of the World Cup, in Moscow, four people dressed in police uniforms ran onto the field, disrupting the match. Almost immediately, the Pussy Riot Twitter account posted an explication of the action: it was meant as a reminder that, whatever progressive front Russia was putting on for the soccer championship, it was a police state. The four people on the field were three women and Verzilov, and that probably means that this was Pussy Riot’s first action that didn’t involve only women.

They were all arrested, but they received bizarrely mild sentences; Gessen suggests that if the protest hadn’t been at such a globally watched event, the punishment would have been a lot more harsh.

On Sunday, when tens of thousands of people were protesting across Russia, two of the participants in the soccer action were arrested again, ostensibly for a traffic violation. They were taken to jail and held for two days. One of the two was Veronika Nikulshina, Verzilov’s current partner. Verzilov posted on social media about the arrest in colorful detail, as he had done throughout Pussy Riot’s existence.

On Tuesday, the two women were brought to court. Verzilov attended. The judge sentenced the women to two days in jail and ordered them released for time served. When Verzilov and Nikulshina left, he complained of feeling unwell.

And he rapidly got worse, losing his sight, then his speech, then his ability to walk straight.

By the time he was in an ambulance, Verzilov was no longer fully conscious and was having seizures. Nikulshina told Meduza (and Tolokonniva confirmed) that, at around one in the morning, Verzilov was taken to the intensive-care unit of a toxicology center, an indication that the doctors at the Moscow hospital suspected that he had been poisoned.

That’s Trump’s beloved Putin.

These Trumps. Eric this time.

Eric Trump was talking up his father on Fox News on Wednesday morning when he was lobbed a friendly prompt from one of the network’s anchors.

During a segment that touched on Democrats’ calls for impeachment as well as the current success of the economy, “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy brought up the perception created by both Bob Woodward’s new book and the New York Times’s anonymous op-ed last week that the Trump administration is in chaos.

But they sure are getting a lot done, Doocy smarmed.

Trump then launched into an attack in the second person about someone who writes a “sensational nonsense book” and is rewarded with a CNN appearance, before making a remark that many interpreted as a racist dog whistle.

“It will mean you sell three extra books, you make three extra shekels,” he said. “I think people read through this. I know people read through this.”

Well that’s just normal US slang for money.

Nah it isn’t.

Although it is the word for the currency in Israel and an occasionally used slang term for money in the United States, it is also a common anti-Semitic trope on white-supremacist sites and in message boards threads about Jewish conspiracies, greed and supposed control of industries such as Hollywood, finance, media and publishing.

But surely Eric Trump doesn’t hang around on white-supremacist sites and message board threads about Jewish conspiracies, greed and supposed control of industries such as Hollywood, finance, media and publishing.