We see what he did there

Aug 26th, 2018 9:29 am | By

Ok I’m not going to join the rush to idolize John McCain, but this is a nice move:

John McCain requested that former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush deliver eulogies at his funeral, CBS News has confirmed. McCain, who had been suffering from an aggressive form of brain cancer, died Saturday at the age of 81 at home in Arizona. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush will deliver their remarks during a service at the National Cathedral.

Former Vice President Joe Biden will speak at a separate service honoring the senator in Arizona.

Zing. Very good.

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Fundamental needs

Aug 25th, 2018 5:44 pm | By

I saw this again in a tweet and was reminded of how awful it is.

As noted within Amnesty International’s policy on sex work, the organization is opposed to criminalization of all activities related to the purchase and sale of sex. Sexual desire and activity are a fundamental human need. To criminalize those who are unable or unwilling to fulfill that need through more traditionally recognized means and thus purchase sex, may amount to a violation of the right to privacy and undermine the rights to free expression and health.

I wrote about it back in August 2015 – it must have been just a day or two after I moved back here – but it’s amazing me all over again.

It’s sly, too. Notice the move: from desire to activity. It’s very odd to describe sexual desire as a fundamental need, but they have to do that to make the jump to activity. Obviously sexual desire is not itself a need – that’s like saying hunger is a need, thirst is a need, hypothermia is a need. Humans don’t need hunger, humans need sustenance in the form of food, and hunger is the prompt to get it and put it in our mouths.

But they put it that way so that we’ll nod along when they say sexual activity is a need, and maybe we won’t pause to ask ourselves if they mean that access to someone else’s body for sex is a fundamental need. But that of course is exactly what they mean, because the overall subject is prostitution. Amnesty International is saying, just like MRAs and incels, that people have a fundamental right to access to other people’s bodies for sex. It’s a rapists’ charter is what it is.

And, anyway, it isn’t a fundamental need. People don’t die for want of sex. The species does, but individuals don’t. Amnesty could make other claims, like sex is fundamental to a good life or sex is basic to happiness, but instead they made a claim that is both absurd and incompatible with the rights of others.

It occurs to me that that was before Trump hit his stride. It was before the pussy tape. It was before Harvey Weinstein. I wonder if they were starting now, if they would feel squicked about saying that.

Nah, probably not.

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Focus

Aug 25th, 2018 4:23 pm | By

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And what thanks does he get?!

Aug 25th, 2018 3:59 pm | By

People are laughing because Milo Yiannopoulos is complaining about being…neglected.

Let’s see what it’s about.

Oh noes – he’s been deplatformed.

When Politicon announced its 2018 lineup Wednesday, even the most casual observers noted a particularly strange booking: Milo Yiannopoulos.

The alt-right troll, who last year lost his job and his book deal after appearing to defend pedophilia in a YouTube video, was listed on the annual convention’s lineup as simply “Milo.

But after an evening of public outcry and fellow guest speaker Cameron Esposito, a stand-up comic, withdrawing her appearance in outrage, Yiannopoulos had disappeared from the event’s website.

Despite that, Yiannopoulos’ website on Thursday morning continued to promote his scheduled appearance at the annual confab best explained as a nightmarish Comic-Con for people interested in seeing right-wingfirebrandsargue with liberalcable-newspundits or Democraticlawmakers for multiple days in a row.

But promotion or no promotion, Politicon confirmed that he is not on the schedule.

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Summer break in Kasese

Aug 25th, 2018 3:28 pm | By

Something nice for a change. Bwambale Robert reporting from Kwasese Humanist School in Uganda:

Term two officially closes today 24th August 2018 and the school will reopen for term three on 17th September 2018.

Vocational skills training programs will go on at the Bizoha Humanist Center and at the Rukoki campus for tailoring, carpentry and welding classes.

I salute our dear parents, guardians, friends of the school in secular communities worldwide, the school staff and the students for making Kasese Humanist School what it is.

We are steadily moving forward.

Attached is an array of images at the Muhokya school and Rukoki campus.

With Science, we can progress.

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One of the very few philosopher-stars of this world

Aug 25th, 2018 12:52 pm | By

There’s this Avital Ronell thing – literature professor accused of sexually harassing a student. The Times has the newspaper version:

The case seems like a familiar story turned on its head: Avital Ronell, a world-renowned female professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University, was found responsible for sexually harassing a male former graduate student, Nimrod Reitman.

I’d like to pause for just a second to ask how “world-renowned” a literature professor can actually be. I think the honest answer is “not very,” and I think academics in literature departments have an embarrassing way of thinking otherwise. Very few academics of any kind are world-renowned, and those that are are very unlikely to be in the literature departments, no not even if they are renamed “Theory.” In other words Avital Ronell seems to reek of absurd lit-crit academic pretension right from the outset.

An 11-month Title IX investigation found Professor Ronell, described by a colleague as “one of the very few philosopher-stars of this world,” responsible for sexual harassment, both physical and verbal, to the extent that her behavior was “sufficiently pervasive to alter the terms and conditions of Mr. Reitman’s learning environment.” The university has suspended Professor Ronell for the coming academic year.

One of the what? She’s described by a colleague as “one of the very few philosopher-stars of this world”?? See what I mean? That’s not a thing in the first place, and literature is not philosophy in the second place. I repeat: even if you rename the academic study of literature “Theory” that still doesn’t make it philosophy.

And that isn’t a side issue in this story, because the story is about the way the wagons were circled around her on the basis that she’s Too Important to be accused of sexual harassment, which is…well it’s obvious what it is.

In the Title IX final report, excerpts of which were obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Reitman said that she had sexually harassed him for three years, and shared dozens of emails in which she referred to him as “my most adored one,” “Sweet cuddly Baby,” “cock-er spaniel,” and “my astounding and beautiful Nimrod.”

Coming in the middle of the #MeToo movement’s reckoning over sexual misconduct, it raised a challenge for feminists — how to respond when one of their own behaved badly. And the response has roiled a corner of academia.

Soon after the university made its final, confidential determination this spring, a group of scholars from around the world, including prominent feminists, sent a letter to N.Y.U. in defense of Professor Ronell. Judith Butler, the author of the book “Gender Trouble” and one of the most influential feminist scholars today, was first on the list.

Of course she was.

“We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation,” the professors wrote.

And that, my friends, is where out of control pretension gets you. “The dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation” – you couldn’t say it much more clearly than that, could you.

Brian Leiter commented acidly on all this back in June:

Blaming the victim is apparently OK when the accused in a Title IX proceeding is a feminist literary theorist

That would seem to be the takeaway from this remarkable letter (written, I am told, by Judith Butler) in support of Avital Ronell, who teaches in German and Comparative Literature at NYU:   Download BUTLER letter for Avital Ronell.   The signatory list reads like a “who’s who” of “theory” (as they call bad philosophy in literature departments), from Butler to Zizek (with a few honorable exceptions, of course).  But far more revealing is the content of the letter.

Professor Ronell, it seems, is the target of a Title IX complaint and investigation at NYU; the details are not known to me, and are not revealed in the letter.  But this is apparently irrelevant.  From the remarkable first paragraph (boldings added by me):

Although we have no access to the confidential dossier, we have all worked for many years in close proximity to Professor Ronell and accumulated collectively years of experience to support our view of her capacity as teacher and a scholar, but also as someone who has served as Chair of both the Departments of German and Comparative Literature at New York University.  We have all seen her relationship with students, and some of us know the individual who has waged this malicious campaign against her.  We wish to communicate first in the clearest terms our profound an enduring admiration for Professor Ronell whose mentorship of students has been no less than remarkable over many years. We deplore the damage that this legal proceeding causes her, and seek to register in clear terms our objection to any judgment against her.  We hold that the allegations against her do not constitute actual evidence, but rather support the view that malicious intention has animated and sustainedthis legal nightmare.

Imagine that such a letter had been sent on behalf of Peter Ludlow, Colin McGinn, John Searle, Thomas Pogge or anyone other than a feminist literary theorist:  there would be howls of protest and indignation at such a public assault on a complainant in a Title IX case.  The signatories collectively malign the complainant as motivated by “malice” (i.e., a liar), even though they admit to knowing nothing about the findings of the Title IX proceedings–and despite that they also demand that their friend be acquitted, given her past “mentorship of students”.

And her fame and fame and fame and fame.

But you get a real sense of the hypocrisy and entitlement of these precious “theorists” in the concluding paragraph of the letter addressed to the NYU President and Provost:

We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation.  If she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties, the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed.

We may put to one side that Professor Ronell’s “grace,” “keen wit” and “intellectual commitment” are irrelevant in a Title IX proceeding.  What is truly shocking is the idea that she is entitled to proceedings that treat her with “the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation.”  Apparently in the view of these “theory” illuminati dignity in Title IX proceedings is to be doled out according to one’s “international standing and reputation.”  So while Professor Ronell “deserves a fair hearing, one that expresses respect, dignity, and human solicitude,” other “lesser” accused can be subject, without international outcry, to whatever star chamber proceedings the university wants.  Moreover, only one outcome of the process is acceptable, regardless of the findings:  acquittal.  Any other result “would be widely recognized and opposed,” I guess because grace, wit and intellectual commitment are a defense against sexual misconduct and harassment.

With friends like these….

Yep. The snobbery and in-group loyalty are a sight to behold, all the more so in people who fancy themselves geniuses of “Theory” and therefore extra special skilled at looking behind the mask.

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A huge victory for South Africa’s far-right

Aug 25th, 2018 11:41 am | By

Steve Russell’s post linked to the SPLC’s The dangerous myth of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa. I’m more wary of the SPLC than I used to be, in the wake of their terrible mistake about Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but this stuff is in their wheelhouse.

On Wednesday, President Trump tweeted that he was instructing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into “the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.”

This is a huge victory for South Africa’s far-right, which has been lobbying foreign governments intensively over the past year. So far, they have managed to find a few sympathetic legislators in Western countries, but Trump is the first head of state to make such overtures.

The president’s statement is troubling because it signifies the mainstreaming of white nationalist narratives about “white genocide,” of which South Africa’s farm murders are an essential component.

Collaborations between the racist “alt-right” and their South African counterparts have ramped up. In the last year, YouTuber Stefan Molyneux has done a series of videos warning of collapse and imminent civil war in which he interviewed some of the most prominent names on South Africa’s far-right, including Simon Roche of the rightwing prepper group Suidlanders. In June, Lauren Southern released a slick documentary called Farmlands starring Roche.

…

As it inches closer to the mainstream, the narrative about “white genocide” in South Africa grows more sophisticated. Through their partnership with mature Afrikaner organizations, America’s white nationalist groups gain a host of misleading factoids and talking points that can be dangerously persuasive in the “fake news” era.

They explain that some of the victims of farm murders are non-white, in fact mostly black farmhands.

But even if all the victims were white, that still comes out to 72 murders annually in a country that averages nearly 50 murders per day. Outside of farms, the overwhelming majority of South Africa’s murder victims are non-white. On a pie chart of total murders, the slice representing the killings of white farmers would look like the second hand of a clock.

Contrary to sensational reports of escalating violence against white farmers, the long-term trend shows decline. Farm murders peaked at 153 in 1998, one year after the government declared them to be a “priority crime” and convened a series of task forces to address the issue.

Any number of murders is too many, but focusing on one tiny fraction of murders is probably done for a reason, not always a benign one.

Read on.

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The Nazis who fled to South Africa

Aug 25th, 2018 11:19 am | By

Stewart alerted us to this Facebook post by Steve Russell:

Mr. Trump is innocent of history, but I don’t know if he would care. My attention was gotten back when the UT Main Library was closed stack and I requested a very old book titled “The Race Problem in South Africa.” It turned out to be a book about the relations between Brits and Boers. The Boer War did not not settle it. The Brits would go so far as to intermarry with the indigenous Africans and that’s why when the Boers had their day, they had to create a special classification for “coloreds.” The Asian population was mostly Indian with a few Chinese, but for reasons too complicated for this post, the Nationalist government declared Japanese to be “honorary whites,” and so they did not have to carry passes that limited them as Asians. Anyway, it was not coincidence that the Nationalist government advocating apartheid came to power in 1948. Everyone knows that Hitler’s defeat sparked a diaspora (if I may indulge a little irony) of hardcore Nazis. Most of them went to Latin America and it was support from German immigrant communities that gave us many of the odious dictators the US supported in Latin America during the Cold War because they were anti-Communist. Of course they were–nobody is more anti-Communist than a Nazi.

Ok that right there is something I’d like to know more about. (For one thing I wonder how Nazi diaspora immigrant communities in various Latin American countries could have given us the odious dictators the US supported, when there can’t possibly have been all that many of them in any one country. He must have overstated that bit.)

Less visible were the Nazis who fled to South Africa. Proportionately, there were more of them, and they swelled the ranks of the Nationalist Party. In 1948, they got their way, and South Africa was governed by repressive methods that got more repressive as the black majority found a voice. Before 1960 the majority of blacks stood behind the non-violent African National Congress, sort of the NAACP of South Africa, rather than the Pan-Africanist Congress, which advocated violent revolution. The Sharpeville Massacre of unarmed blacks in 1960 knocked ANC off nonviolence and the faction within that wanted to fight with the PAC formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”). It was this fight Nelson Mandela refused to denounce when offered release from Robben Island if he would. Some never abandoned nonviolence–early on, Albert Luthuli and later Desmond Tutu. But Sharpeville enabled Robert Sobukwe of the PAC to say “I told you so” and most of the ANC leadership forsook nonviolence—Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo, and of course Mandela. It was literal Nazis running the propaganda machine that called these men “terrorists.”

And Ronald Reagan, for one, bought the lie, and supported the apartheid regime.

When Mandela was released, he used his substantial personal credibility to stand for peace and reconciliation. There was no throwing out the Afrikaners–the descendants of Dutch settlers had nowhere to go. But they always had the descendants of the violent fringe refighting the Boer War in alliance with Hitler’s refugees. These people are still at work. Nazis. Literally. They lie and they kill and they idolize Hitler. Mr. Trump has thrown in with them, but his breathtaking ignorance of history requires that we leave open the possibility that he knew not what he did.

His breathtaking ignorance of history is one powerful reason he should never have run for president or any other political office.

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Capone, like Trump, was a victim of the deep state

Aug 25th, 2018 3:58 am | By

Jonathan Chait on Dana Loesch on Trump as The Martyr Al Capone:

NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch informs her audience that the FBI is trying to pull the same tricks on Trump that they used to entrap the beloved Prohibition-era Chicago gang leader:

They’re trying to Al Capone the president. I mean, you remember. Capone didn’t go down for murder. Elliot Ness didn’t put him in for murder. He went in for tax fraud. Prosecutors didn’t care how he went down as long as he went down.

You might wonder why Trump’s supporters believe his legal defense is aided by analogizing him to a murderous criminal. Perhaps the answer is that Capone had several qualities that recommend him to the Republican grassroots base. He was a business owner — or, in modern Republican lingo, a Job Creator. He was an avid Second Amendment enthusiast. And, most importantly, Capone, like Trump, was a victim of the deep state.

Or perhaps the answer is that they are Trump supporters so why would they not also be fans of Al Capone? Being a Trump supporter at this point entails being a fan of a greedy bullying ruthless criminal, so why not Capone right along with Trump? It’s not as if Capone is worse than Trump, so why not? Trump hates da Feds and so did Capone so what more do they need?

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Another resignation

Aug 24th, 2018 5:35 pm | By

This seems unfortunate:

From his statement:

In light of recent events, I have taken the difficult decision to resign from the position of President-Elect of Humanist Students.

These events involved a retweet of mine saying ‘RT if women don’t have penises’, and certain other criticisms of the transgender movement, as well as suggestions to improve the movement’s actions. Sadly, these views were taken to be ‘transphobic’ by individuals who cannot tolerate any criticism, either of their movement or their ideas, and are unable to engage in a civilized conversation on issues they disagree on. These are individuals who think they hold the absolute right to determine which ideas can be discussed and what language can be used in a public forum.

Saying “women don’t have penises” seems like a very peculiar reason to be pressured to resign from a position. Compare:

  • cats don’t have feathers
  • fish don’t have fur
  • giraffes don’t have scales
  • eels don’t have fingers

I don’t suppose any of those claims would get people pushed out of a humanist leadership position. But saying “women don’t have penises” is different how?

If you’re not an orthodox “trans ally” then it’s different in no way, it’s just a banal statement of fact: women don’t have penises, men don’t have vaginas, SexEd 101 now let’s move on to the stuff we don’t know. But if you are an orthodox “trans ally” then it’s akin to racism. Logically it ought also to be akin to sexism, but it isn’t, because what sexism is has also been redefined, along with who has penises and who doesn’t.

But maybe it’s not that simple? Maybe saying it on Twitter (by retweeting it) is not a banal statement of fact but a form of unkindness or harassment toward trans women? That’s how some people see it, certainly, but then how are we to understand the frequent calls for violence against “TERFs”?

Back to the statement:

I may be wrong and women might indeed have penises, although I don’t believe that to be the case, but the backlash that took place after my comments, particularly within the organization, convinced me that, unfortunately and surprisingly, there are certain issues within the humanist movement which are undebatable — no effort was made, beyond name-calling, derogatory comments, and ad hominem statements, to convince me of the truth of the other side’s position.

I am a humanist, I remain a proud member of Humanist Students, and I will continue to support Humanists UK in their outstanding efforts to promote rational thinking and logic in society, challenge religious privilege, fight for human rights, and achieve freedom from religion, and establish a secular state. However, as an individual, I am not willing to give up my right to form my own opinion on controversial issues just because this might conflict with an organization’s position or offend some of its members, nor ask whether my position coincides with the organization’s before expressing myself. I believe that it is the individual who shapes an organization, not the other way round.

I do respect all transgender people, support their struggle to gain the rights they deserve and be of equal status to all other human beings — it is a real shame that people question the status of transgender individuals as human beings, and that the suicide rate for transgender individuals is alarmingly high. However, I have the right to disagree with certain actions of the transgender movement and express certain criticisms of the societal implications of sex and gender, and criticize how an individual can legitimately ‘be whatever they say they are’ i.e. how an individual chooses to identify herself.

One can be supportive and critical of an idea at the same time, and that, I believe, is the beauty of striving to be a skeptic and rational individual. The fact that you have the absolute right to identify yourself as you wish does not make you immune from criticism. Christopher and others have been too quick to judge my position on transgender issues — my position is an attack on ‘gender’ as a concept, and an attempt to point out some flaws in the logic behind the transgender movement followed by suggestions on how the movement can improve itself to be able to better reach its aims. If you are unaware of the other side of the debate (i.e. those criticizing your decision), this is not because it does not exist, but because you have silenced it.

Meanwhile women go right on not having penises.

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The one guy who knows everything

Aug 24th, 2018 4:13 pm | By

Adam Davidson at the New Yorker explains why immunity for Weisselberg is such a big deal.

In late 2016, I had lunch with a former high-ranking Trump Organization executive, a person who said he was happy to share dirt on his old boss, but who confessed to not having much dirt to share. This executive wrote a list of people whom I might contact to find out about anything potentially illegal or unethical that Donald Trump may have done. At the bottom of the list was the name Weisselberg. “Allen is the one guy who knows everything,” the person told me. “He’ll never talk to you.” I have had nearly identical conversations with different people who work or have worked for the Trump Organization many times since. They all described his role similarly: Allen Weisselberg, the firm’s longtime chief financial officer, is the center, the person in the company who knows more than anyone.

And he won’t talk to you…until now and “you” are prosecutors.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journalbroke the story that Weisselberg had been granted immunity by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York so that he could share information in the investigation of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and dealmaker. It is safe to say that the entire world of Trump watchers—those journalists, political folks, and advocates who carefully monitor every bit of Trump news—went bonkers. Weisselberg is the man who those people most want to speak. He is also the man who has, for decades, been the most circumspect.

As the C.F.O., Weisselberg tracked the money that came into the Trump Organization and the money that went out of it, former employees told me. I often found myself wondering what the Weisselberg part of the operation looked like. (I called and e-mailed him a few times, but, not surprisingly, never heard back.) Some told me he had a couple of bookkeepers, but that he personally handled most of the paperwork. Weisselberg knew who was paying or lending money to Trump, and he knew to whom Trump was giving money. When Trump became President, he placed his business interests in a revocable trust overseen by his son Donald Trump, Jr., and Weisselberg.

He knows where allllll the bodies are buried.

Since one of the Mueller investigation’s core aims is to understand whether the Trump campaign worked with Russia to sway the 2016 Presidential election, Weisselberg now seems to be a key witness. Worse, for Trump, if Weisselberg, fearing prosecution himself, tells prosecutors of other criminal activity in the organization, that information will likely be referred to other federal and state prosecutors, thus broadening the investigation of Trump’s business.

I wonder if it’s occurring to Trump about now that it wasn’t such a hot idea to run for president after all. It looks as if it could turn out that doing so got him and his children in a world of legal trouble, which wouldn’t have happened if he’d just gone on being a lying cheating thieving real estate swindler.

There are many open questions about how precisely the Trump Organization has made and spent its money in recent years. There is, for example, a question about where Trump got more than two hundred million dollars in cash to buy and lavishly upgrade a money-losing golf course in Scotland. In a deal in Azerbaijan, Trump knowingly did business with a family that is widely suspected of laundering money for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The F.B.I. has reportedly investigated the source of funds for a Trump-branded property in Vancouver, Canada; the Trump hotel in Toronto also has suspicious funding. These are just a handful of the many business deals that Trump has conducted that have signs of possible money-laundering, tax evasion, sanctions violations, and other financial crimes. Many of the key questions about Donald Trump revolve around his funding sources and his business partners: Did he knowingly receive funds from criminals? Did he launder money for criminals? Did he receive remuneration to look the other way when his partners broke the law? Was much of his business built on selling his famous name to make illegitimate projects seem viable? More broadly, where did his money come from? Where did his money go? And how much questionable activity has he hidden from the world? Trump himself may not know the exact answers to all of these questions. Perhaps Allen Weisselberg does.

…

There are now multiple investigations of the Trump Organization being conducted by special counsel, Robert Mueller, the New York Attorney General, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, the Manhattan District Attorney, the Southern District of New York, and—quite likely—other jurisdictions. President Trump is unable to stop most of these investigations. With Cohen and now Weisselberg providing information, it is becoming increasingly certain that the American people will—sooner or later—have a far fuller understanding of how Donald Trump conducted business. That is unlikely to go well for him.

Small consolation for all the damage he’s done.

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Violating the omerta

Aug 24th, 2018 11:10 am | By

The mob boss thing has not gone unnoticed. Jonathan Chait’s piece on it in New York magazine for instance, subtly titled “Trump Wants to Ban Flipping Because He Is Almost Literally a Mob Boss”:

The way a roll-up of the Gambino family, or any other crime organization, would work is that the FBI would first find evidence of crimes against lower-level figures, and then threaten them with lengthy prison sentences unless they provide evidence against higher-ranking figures in the organization. The roll-up moves from bottom to top. It would be extremely difficult to prosecute any organized crime if it were not possible to trade lenient sentences in return for cooperation.

In an interview with Fox News, President Trump offers his view that flipping is dishonorable, and is so unfair it “almost ought to be outlawed.”

It’s bitterly amusing to see Trump talking about “fairness” when it’s hard to imagine anyone more indifferent to fairness in general than greedy piggy mob boss Donnie Two-scoops.

Trump has also made clear, in tweets over the weekend, that he is not only opposed to false testimony. He opposes flipping on the boss as a matter of principle. Here he is over the weekend denouncing President Nixon’s lawyer John Dean as a “rat.”

Dean famously testified about Nixon’s obstruction of justice. Nobody claims Dean lied about Nixon. The sin in Trump’s eyes is that he flipped, violating the omerta. Trump even uses Mafia lingo, “rat,” to describe Dean’s cooperation with law enforcement. To gangsters, a rat is considered the worst kind of person because they pose the greatest danger to their ability to escape prosecution.

It is obviously quite rare to hear a high-ranking elected official openly embrace the terminology and moral logic of La Cosa Nostra. But Trump is not just a guy who has seen a lot of mob movies. He has worked closely with Mafia figures throughout his business career.

That’s the president of the US he’s talking about.

Like a mobster, Trump takes an extremely cynical view of almost every moral principle in public life, assuming that everybody in politics is corrupt and hypocritical. (Hence his defense of Vladimir Putin’s murdering journalists: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”) He also follows mafia practice of surrounding himself with associates chosen on the basis of loyalty rather than traditional qualifications. Since the greatest threat to a mafia don’s business is that subordinates will betray him, he typically surrounds himself with family members, even if they are not the smartest or best criminals.

Ok so now I’m imagining a scenario in which Don Junior gets immunity, aka flips.

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“Enquirer” is not quite the right word

Aug 24th, 2018 10:43 am | By

One reason Trump won.

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After a week of ferocious pushback

Aug 24th, 2018 10:19 am | By

However. Randolph County, Georgia, is not after all going to close 7 of its 9 polling places.

After a week of ferocious pushback — including two packed town-hall meetings in which residents berated local elections officials, as well as warning letters, threats of lawsuits by civil rights groups and national media coverage — county officials fired the consultant who came up with the plan.

Then on Friday morning, the Randolph County Board of Elections voted down the proposal to close seven of its nine polling locations, saying no changes would be made. The meeting of the two-member board lasted no more than five minutes.

“In the United States, the right to vote is sacred,” the board said in a statement, adding that displays of interest and concern have been “overwhelming and . . . an encouraging reminder that protecting the right to vote remains a fundamental American principle.” It said the board’s only interest was in “making sure elections in Randolph County are fair and efficient.”

Activists and residents applauded the action and said they would continue to meet and share information to make sure their voting rights were not eroded.

What they forgot to kill went on to organize.

For resident Sandra Willis, who lives in Cuthbert, the county seat, the controversy stirred up a painful but proud moment in her family’s history. During the 1950s, her aunt, Charlie Will Thornton, worked with voting rights activists in Randolph County despite threats from officials that she could lose her teaching job in neighboring Terrell County.

When Thornton continued her activism, she not only was fired from her job, but she could not find work in any of the surrounding counties. She ended up working briefly as a maid for a local family before finally landing another teaching job in Meriwether County, about 100 miles north of Randolph County. Thornton worked in Meriwether for 30 years, eventually becoming a principal. After more than three decades, she was able to get hired in her hometown and retired from teaching in Randolph County.

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.

Activists also said it was a reminder of the need for Congress to restore portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was severely weakened by a 2013 Supreme Court decision. The ruling dropped a requirement that states with a history of voter suppression first seek Justice Department approval before making changes to voting laws and procedures.

Well this Congress isn’t going to do that but the next one might.

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Executive-1

Aug 24th, 2018 10:04 am | By

Things are speeding up.

Allen Weisselberg, longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, has been granted immunity by federal prosecutors as part of their investigation into President Donald Trump‘s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, NBC News reported Friday, citing multiple people with knowledge of the matter.

Cohen admitted on Tuesday that he had facilitated unlawful payments to two women at Trump’s direction in order to keep unfavorable information about the president, who at the time was still a candidate, from becoming public. In a legal document related to the case, Weisselberg, who is referred to as “Executive-1,” is accused of instructing a Trump Organization employee to reimburse Cohen for one of the payments.

So that should be interesting.

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Guest post: Misrepresenting what is already an alarming situation doesn’t help

Aug 24th, 2018 9:17 am | By

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on The news has been all over South African media for months.

The thing with the farm attacks is that they are not particularly out of line with the general level of criminality within South Africa. The murder rate is very high no matter who you are, so it is actually more to do with the gross incompetence of our government than anything intentional.

It isn’t a matter of black people rising up against a past oppressor, it is a matter of criminals targeting the places where there is stuff to steal. The same level of brutality is unfortunately present within crime that hits informal settlements, business and suchlike.

With regards to the land expropriation debate – it isn’t entirely clear what is going to happen with it. Ramaphosa claims that the constitutional amendment he’s after is going to strengthen property rights, which it might due to provision 8 in section 25 of the South African constitution reading as follows:

8. No provision of this section may impede the state from taking legislative and other measures to achieve land, water and related reform, in order to redress the results of past racial discrimination, provided that any departure from the provisions of this section is in accordance with the provisions of section 36(1).

Which essentially means so long as the government justifies it by saying it is to correct the imbalances brought about by the long history of South African racism, it can do what it likes right now. The amendment might restrict them further.

The big scary thing in South African politics is Julius Malema, who has stood up in Parliament and declared whites should be grateful that he isn’t calling for genocide yet. The whole land expropriation debate is essentially aimed at taking the wind out of his sails,

The post Apartheid government more or less took after the US on the economy. One of the first things they did was lower taxes, followed by adopting a policy of pursuing foreign direct investment, and pushing a reserve bank policy of inflation targeting.

This is a policy set which favours the asset holders, who, due to apartheid, are mostly white. Our economy has lost diversity with larger businesses slowly taking over smaller ones, and we’ve seen an overall increase in the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, which were mostly already rich in 1994.

The whole expropriation debate essentially is a thing because of this. With regards to our farms for example, about 50% of our new farmers, who got farms under the post Mandela policy of land reform failed due to a lack of training and finance, and their farms went on the market and got bought by larger farming concerns because that’s who had the money to buy them.

A lot of these large concerns then started evicting farm workers and shutting down the schools that operated on those farms, creating a lot of the tension you see now.

Our issues have been further compounded by massive corruption in our government. During the Jacob Zuma era, despite his rise being in part on the basis of “radical economic transformation”, land reform essentially stopped as funds that were supposed to aid black farmers get off the ground were diverted to his homestead, or his corrupt cronies.

Now during Apartheid and the era before that, nobody paid black farmers who lost their land. At best a tribal authority might have gotten some compensation, but black South Africans didn’t get to pick their tribal authorities so it was a bit like you lost your house, and some random dude got paid a few hundred bucks compensation. One of the sore points of the new dispensation is the maintenance of these authorities who will quite happily evict people from their homes if Anglo American wants to build a mine under them.

Part of the land reform debate was actually about this problem, Kgalema Mothlanthe’s report on the Ingyoma Trust was essentially that it should be dissolved and the land under it given to individual Zulus with title deeds, rather than have it all belong to the Zulu king, because he wasn’t serving his people he was serving himself. The ANC and the EFF both wussed out on tribal lands however when the Zulu king threatened to start a civil war.

The upshot of all of this being economically we’re not all that different now to how we were under Apartheid even though there is no active policy of maintaining our inequalities. The land redistribution debate is born of the frustration that this has caused within our country.

Malema has been tapping into the general dissatisfaction this has caused to call for the nationalisation of all South African land, mines and banks. Malema’s racism goes beyond whites of course, he is also noted for his anti-Indian sentiment, and his party isn’t above feeding into general xenophobia either.

Though the EFF is only the third largest political party in South Africa, there is the risk that they use that general anger in South Africa to grow. Nobody who doesn’t wear a red beret wants that.

TLDR: You’ve got a bunch of people who were essentially robbed under apartheid and colonialism, who, once those systems ended, still didn’t get their stuff back, and a major political party pushing for taking that stuff back, and the ruling party more or less trying to figure out a way to do that in a way which won’t end up with the whole country going up in flames.

Misrepresenting what is already an alarming situation doesn’t help.

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Blowing past Charlottesville

Aug 23rd, 2018 6:10 pm | By

Stewart at Gnu Atheism:

If you haven’t been lurking in far-right groups in recent years, this may not have jumped out at you, but this Trump tweet is, in its signalling to the most extreme racist elements in society, a quantum leap more serious than just saying “on many sides” and “some very fine people” after Charlottesville. It is a dog-whistle of far more piercing intensity than anything we have yet heard from him.

That full statement:

New York, NY, August 23, 2018 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today issued the following statement concerning President Trump’s tweet on alleged land and farm seizures, and “large scale killing of farmers,” of white farmers in South Africa:

It is extremely disturbing that the President of the United States echoed a longstanding and false white supremacist claim that South Africa’s white farmers are targets of large-scale, racially-motivated killings by South Africa’s black majority.

White supremacists in the United States have made such claims for years.  In early 2012, ADL’s Center on Extremism documented how white supremacists in the United States were gearing up for protests as part of something they termed the “South Africa Project (SAP).” The goal of the organizers, which included representatives from major neo-Nazi, racist skinhead, “traditional white supremacist,” Christian Identity groups, as well as racist prison gangs, was to stop the alleged ‘genocide of Whites’ in South Africa. The protests originated in 2011 at the hands of Monica Stone, a long-time member of the Louisiana-based white supremacist Christian Defense League and immigrant from South Africa.

Since then, white supremacist references to “genocide” in South Africa have been common. Richard Spencer, for example, focused on the plight of the “Boers” in South Africa in his March speech at Michigan State University, suggesting the United States might see something similar.

We would hope that the President would try to understand the facts and realities of the situation in South Africa, rather than repeat disturbing, racially divisive talking points used most frequently by white supremacists.

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Glub

Aug 23rd, 2018 5:15 pm | By

TIME’s new cover:

Image may contain: one or more people and swimming

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The victims of the priests should watch out

Aug 23rd, 2018 5:11 pm | By

Lifesite News reports there’s a new Cardinal in Mexico who blames the victims of Catholic priests for what the Catholic priests did.

Reacting to the recent avalanche of reports of clerical sexual abuse around the world, a newly minted Mexican Cardinal has suggested that victims who accuse priests should be “ashamed” because they too have skeletons in their own closets.

Those who “accuse men of the Church should [be careful] because they have long tails that are easily stepped on,” said Cardinal Sergio Obeso Rivera according to a report in Crux.

Sounds like a threat.

“I’m here happy to talk about nice things, not about problematic things, it’s an accusation that is made, and in some cases it’s true,” said Obeso Rivera.

The cardinal’s remarks to journalists came after the release of a sweeping, two-year-long Pennsylvania Grand Jury investigation into sexual abuse by Catholic priests.  That report has sent shockwaves around the globe.

But the victims should be ashamed.

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Revulsion

Aug 23rd, 2018 12:59 pm | By

Oh god look at this cheap crook in action. Seeing it written down is bad enough but watching him saying it with his filthy lips is orders of magnitude more disgusting. This sleazy little hoodlum is the president of the US.

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