Oliver North, that guy in charge of funneling profits from weapons sales to Iran to right-wingers in Nicaragua who were waging war against the socialist government, has found a new low to burrow his way to: calling activists for gun control “terrorists.”

“They’re not activists—this is civil terrorism. This is the kind of thing that’s never been seen against a civil rights organization in America,” Oliver North told the Washington Times. “You go back to the terrible days of Jim Crow and those kinds of things—even there you didn’t have this kind of thing.”

By “a civil rights organization” he means the National Rifle Association, which he was just elected president of. I don’t consider the NRA a civil rights organization. I don’t consider the “right” to keep and bear arms a core civil right and I certainly don’t consider the NRA’s inflated and absurd version of that right – in which people have a “right” to keep and bear machine guns – any kind of civil right at all. Comparing the lobbying of the NRA to the civil rights movement is insulting and disgusting.

In referencing Jim Crow, North appeared to be comparing the plight of the NRA with civil rights activists who fought for racial equality in the 1960s, during a time in which many were beaten and murdered.

I don’t think Oliver North was out there with them.

May 13 updating to correct: Jared Keller explains that the event was not at the White House and wasn’t military spouses in general.

The photo was actually taken at the annual Joint Armed Forces of Washington Luncheon (JAFOWL) on April 24, not the White House. In fact, it only shows members of the Air Force Officers’ Spouses’ Club.

…

Given that the wives in this photo chose to marry Air Force officers — 20 percent of whom identify as a racial minority, below the rate for officers across the entire U.S. armed forces — it would make sense that there might be a distinct under-representation of black and Asian military spouses, and it’s certainly a problem. But the issue isn’t that the White House only invited white women — it’s that organizations like JAFOWL, though they serve the military and veterans communities admirably, are stuck in the f*cking 1950s.

Many others believe that groups like JAFOWL reinforce a hierarchy where officers’ spouses have a louder and more prominent voice than enlisted spouses, and Military Spouse Appreciation Day is a fantastic chance to get the Pentagon’s attention on like this. Sadly, Ron Klain ruined it with an inaccurate cheap shot at the White House — and in an age where all quarters of the government shout down their critics as “fake news,” this sort of inaccuracy can muddle the waters on a subject indefinitely.

H/t Sackbut

Wow.

The WH hosted military spouses today. Our armed forces are 40% non-white. The odds that — BY CHANCE — a group of 52 military spouses would contain no people of color are lower than 100 trillion to 1. So, umm…. pic.twitter.com/zi6XzmzYBd

— Ronald Klain (@RonaldKlain) May 11, 2018

Oliver North. We thought we’d escaped him, didn’t we. Not so fast there, buddy – he’s back. He’s the new head of the NRA, and he’s on Fox News saying all Iranians are liars.

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Colonel, you alerted me before we came on the air. I made some phone calls, top sources in Israel have confirmed that multiple rockets were fired at Israel within the last couple hours. And Israel has in fact — they were fired from Syria, Israel has responded. No Israelis were injured, though, in the attack against them. This having to do with Israel’s previous military attacks against Syria in recent weeks. Nothing to do with the Iranian deal, I was told, at a very high level.

OLIVER NORTH: Yeah, well, look, never believe an Iranian because if their lips are moving, they are lying.

“Colonel.”

Another one of these – another “___ while black” item. This time it’s falling asleep while working on a paper in the dorm common room while black.

Other entrants include: couponing while black, graduating too boisterously while black, waiting for a school bus while black, throwing a kindergarten temper tantrum while black, drinking iced tea while black, waiting at Starbucks while black, AirBnB’ing while black, shopping for underwear while black, having a loud conversation while black, golfing too slowly while black, buying clothes at Barney’s while black, or Macy’s, or Nordstrom Rack, getting locked out of your own home while black, going to the gym while black, asking for the Waffle House corporate number while black and reading C.S. Lewis while black, among others.

I recognize several of those without following the links – the graduating too boisterously one, the Starbucks, at least one of the buying clothes, the locked out of your own house.

Siyonbola is a first-year graduate student in the African Studies department at Yale. She had papers and books spread out in a common room while writing a paper Monday, but had flipped off the lights and went to sleep, she explained in her Facebook Live video.

Another graduate student, Sarah Braasch, walked in, turned on the lights and said she was calling police. The common room was off-limits for sleeping, she added.

There’s a slight gap there – between a claimed rule about not sleeping in the common room and calling the police. There are intermediate steps between a minor rule violation and calling the police. Life is full of rules, explicit and implicit, but they don’t all involve calling the police in cases of violation. It’s a rule violation to use the “10 items or fewer” line at the grocery store if you have 20 items in your cart, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth calling the police to deal with it. Sleeping in a dorm common room seems high on the list of non-police-worthy violations. It actually seems like the kind of violation it’s ok to ignore if it’s not bothering anyone. If Brasach wanted to do something in the common room – watch tv, work with the lights on, chat with friends, whatever – surely she could have just done that, leaving Siyonbola to move to her room to nap or go back to writing her paper according to preference.

Agitated, Siyonbola went to Braasch’s room, aiming a cellphone camera at her, and demanded to know why she had called the authorities.

“I have every right to call the police,” Braasch said after snapping a photo of Siyonbola. “You cannot sleep in that room.”

I don’t think that’s even correct. The police frown on frivolous calls. I don’t think we do have “every right” to call the police over a small rule violation. Do parents call the police when their children talk while chewing? I doubt it.

The issue is, of course, much bigger than Yale. People have picketed coffee shops and received apologies from CEOs and college presidents over viral issues of bias that spread at the speed of the Internet, giving institutions an instantaneous black eye.

And with the “while black” incidents piling up, the aggrieved parties have begun to point out the similarities — sometimes in the very videos they post.

And this is one of those places where “identity politics” and “standpoint epistemology” come into play, simply because white people don’t realize how much this kind of thing happens because it doesn’t happen to us. It’s fatally easy to do that homemade epistemology thing of rifling quickly through one’s memory for examples of the kind of thing under discussion, turning up nothing, and concluding that nothing is all there is. It’s fatally easy to forget that one’s own experience can’t always be assumed to stand for everyone else’s experience.

In a post on her Facebook page a day after the incident, Siyonbola also acknowledged that other black people have endured similar treatment.

“Grateful for all the love, kind words and prayers, your support has been overwhelming Black Yale community is beyond incredible and is taking good care of me. I know this incident is a drop in the bucket of trauma Black folk have endured since Day 1 America.”

Then she invited anyone reading her post to share similar stories.

By Thursday, 1,400 people had commented.

Maybe some day we can do better.

The Graun did a sarcastic Q&A about the Intellecshual Dark Web:

How do they hold their dangerous conversations? Through some kind of shadowy underground network? They go on Rubin’s YouTube show, which has 700,000 subscribers. Or they host popular podcasts, attracting thousands in monthly donations.

Talk about being sidelined.Who are these people? Among those often included are former Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro; husband and wife “professors in exile” Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, who resigned from Evergreen State College after denouncing a planned Day of Absence, where white students were asked to leave the campus; and psychologist and political correctness scourge Jordan Peterson.

You mean it’s all just … terrible people? Professional controversialists, I would call them. They come from both the right and sometimes left extremes of the political spectrum, but they all tend to combine some form of hardcore libertarianism with an unfortunate manner.

Libertarian plus obnoxious; a decent summary.

And this is popular? Oh yes. IDW members expound their dangerous ideas in front of packed houses – out of necessity, having been denied the more direct public forum of a professorship at a college you’ve never heard of.

It must be hard to to talk about being no-platformed in front of so many people. The bigger problem is that the movement is so ill-defined. Its free-thinking, “anything goes” nature means that mainstream intellectuals such as Steven Pinker are often included alongside cranks and show-offs including Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones.

Well it’s probably not so much the free-thinking, “anything goes” nature as it is the fact that a list of random cranks like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones is just that, while if you add people like Steven Pinker it seems more serious. I’m pretty sure Bari Weiss had that firmly in mind, writing for the Times and all.

Sam Harris is a kind of bridge between the two. He’s not an academic and he doesn’t write or think or discuss like an academic, but he did get that there PhD, so a lot of people are fooled into thinking he’s more thoughtful or disciplined or evidence-based than he really is. It’s a bit like the Templeton Foundation setting up all those think tanks and fellowships with names like “Cambridge” and “Faraday” in the title so that people will think they’re academic and serious and rigorous.

The BBC on a trial at the Old Bailey:

A teenage girl plotted a gun and grenade attack at the British Museum after her attempts to become a jihadi bride were thwarted, a court has heard.

Safaa Boular was 17 when she allegedly decided to be a “martyr” after her Islamic State fighter fiancé was killed in Syria, the Old Bailey was told.

It’s an interesting choice, the British Museum. Not Parliament (been done), not anything royal, not the Bank, not some hub of commerce – but a museum of history, art, culture, learning, archaeology. It is of course a product and symbol of Empire along with all that, but you can’t smash that symbol without smashing a lot of human heritage and knowledge. It’s always interesting that Islamists of the IS type are so eager to do that – the Bamiyan Buddhas, the shrines of Timbuktu, countless sites in Iraq, and on and on. Anything that they decide is not about Mohammed or Allah is to be smashed.

From a transcript of the Atlantic staff meeting Jeffrey Goldberg held along with Ta-nehisi Coates after (and about) the Kevin Williamson mess: Coates is asking himself why he didn’t say don’t hire him:

So I thought about it, like, you know how did I miss that? I’m Mr. Blackity Black, how did I miss that? And I think one of the things that happened is, again, like understanding the mission of The Atlantic, which I get. It might not be my mission, but I get it, and I work here. I understand it. Debate various views, you know, we fight it out. “Of no party or clique,” right? And I told Jeff this already, but we have been of a party and a clique. The Atlantic, like most magazines — not The Atlantic because it’s specifically bad, but for most of its history it has been basically white dudes. That’s what we’ve been. I mean not totally, not completely. We did publish Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King. And I mean, it’s not that that’s all we published, but that’s basically been what one would say the consensus is. When you have an already established consensus like that, certain values are then easily manifested.

That is such a crucial point and it gets overlooked so easily. “Of no party or clique” except the one of educated prosperous white men. The “educated” part is inevitable and necessary for a non-tabloidish magazine, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is itself a party or clique. One reason for that is simply that education and prosperity are linked, so education tends to filter out the points of view of people who aren’t prosperous and don’t have the card up the sleeve of education to get prosperous if they need to. You can be educated and poor but the poverty is more voluntary than is the poverty of people with little or bad education; it’s more voluntary and more subject to change – barring bad physical or mental health, which is another basis of cliques and parties.

I think one of the things that happened at this magazine now that I’ve championed, I’m happy to see just looking at this room. If we had done Atlantic University in 2008, 2009, ’10, ’11, ’12, ’13, it would not have looked like this. This publication is diversifying. And I wonder if that consensus that says of no party or clique then has to come up for question. What is debatable comes up for question because you bring different people in, and those people are not just brown-skinned or dark-skinned or women who would normally — you know, who are just the same as any other. Their identity — and I know this is bad in certain quarters, but I don’t think it is — that identity cannot be neatly separated from the job. So maybe the job changes a little bit.

The only kind of identity that can be neatly separated from the job is of course the usual one – the default one – white educated middle-class men healthy enough to do the job. That’s “normal” so the normal white guys can think their identity has nothing to do with the job; the weird abnormal people who don’t fit that description don’t have that luxury – or handicap, depending on how you look at it.

Alice Dreger could have been part of Bari Weiss’s absurd “intellectual dark web” but she decided not  to. Hilariously, part of her reason was that absurdly dramatic photography that y’all have been mocking overnight.

At some point, Bari decided to do a story on this—the “intellectual dark web,” not our dietary problems—and at that point I started joking about it, asking if we would all get to have a uniform. I had in mind the jumpsuits from The Incredibles. To me, the joke was the idea that a bunch of renegades would have anything in particular in common. It seems kind of, um, contradictory to consider us as a group since the point is we are all bad at group-think. Hence the desire for an ironic uniform.

At least, that’s supposed to be the point, but in fact a lot of the dark-webbers Bari Weiss wrote about are pretty good at their own brand of group-think. It’s easy to predict what many of them will say on a given issue, so are they really renegade or are they just one more faction? Look at a tweet by Michael Shermer or Sam Harris some time and see what a lot of groupy replies there are.

Anyway, when Bari called on my vacation in Hawaii to interview me on this, I just kept laughing at the idea. I told her I don’t get why I count as being on a “dark web” when what I say is out in the open.

Yes, I resigned my last academic job by choice, over censorship, but since leaving Northwestern’s medical school I haven’t been driven to some dark corner. On the contrary, people like Bari regularly invite me to write for major publications, something I’d do more if I weren’t doing a lot of intense investigative journalism for my city right now.

My point exactly. “Locked out of legacy outlets” my ass. The only ones “locked out” are the randos who are internet-famous but not genuine intellectuals. Mind you, there are plenty of people who are published by “legacy outlets” who shouldn’t be, like David Brooks for one horrible example. But the Dave Rubins and Carl Benjamins aren’t lost geniuses who would be gracing everyone’s breakfast table if only they were more Orthodox – they’re just mouthy dudes.

But, after we got back from Hawaii, the Times sent Pulitzer-winning photographer Damon Winter to take my photo in East Lansing, where I live, for this article. This was a weird scene. Damon wanted to do it at a very particular moment of sunset, out in a field with a bunch of reeds, so we parked ourselves behind the fire department in a park, with reeds.

Like the Sam Harris one – or was that sunrise rather than sunset? Nah, sunset so much more convenient.

After he left, I started thinking this was not the right story for me to be in. We had talked about who else would be in it, and it wasn’t so much as I didn’t want to be associated with those people as I didn’t know who most of them were. So, it wasn’t “I don’t want to be a member of any club that would have me” so much as “Who now? What now? What am I supposedly a key part of?”

I was also, frankly, worried about any article that was going to have a bunch of highly dramatized images.

And rightly so. Those photos make my skin crawl – they look cultish. It really does reek of thought-leaderism, as YNNB said.

I am not interested in darkness or dark connections. I want intellectualism, journalism, scholarship, and government to be about light, transparency, and facts. Peer review, checks and balances, open access. Not about clicks and skirmishes and dramatic photos taken at sunset.

And definitely not about thought leaders.

Obama on Trump’s bad move:

There are few issues more important to the security of the United States than the potential spread of nuclear weapons, or the potential for even more destructive war in the Middle East. That’s why the United States negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in the first place.

The reality is clear. The JCPOA is working – that is a view shared by our European allies, independent experts, and the current U.S. Secretary of Defense. The JCPOA is in America’s interest – it has significantly rolled back Iran’s nuclear program. And the JCPOA is a model for what diplomacy can accomplish – its inspections and verification regime is precisely what the United States should be working to put in place with North Korea. Indeed, at a time when we are all rooting for diplomacy with North Korea to succeed, walking away from the JCPOA risks losing a deal that accomplishes – with Iran – the very outcome that we are pursuing with the North Koreans.

That is why today’s announcement is so misguided. Walking away from the JCPOA turns our back on America’s closest allies, and an agreement that our country’s leading diplomats, scientists, and intelligence professionals negotiated. In a democracy, there will always be changes in policies and priorities from one Administration to the next. But the consistent flouting of agreements that our country is a party to risks eroding America’s credibility, and puts us at odds with the world’s major powers.

Debates in our country should be informed by facts, especially debates that have proven to be divisive. So it’s important to review several facts about the JCPOA.

First, the JCPOA was not just an agreement between my Administration and the Iranian government. After years of building an international coalition that could impose crippling sanctions on Iran, we reached the JCPOA together with the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia, China, and Iran. It is a multilateral arms control deal, unanimously endorsed by a United Nations Security Council Resolution.

Second, the JCPOA has worked in rolling back Iran’s nuclear program. For decades, Iran had steadily advanced its nuclear program, approaching the point where they could rapidly produce enough fissile material to build a bomb. The JCPOA put a lid on that breakout capacity. Since the JCPOA was implemented, Iran has destroyed the core of a reactor that could have produced weapons-grade plutonium; removed two-thirds of its centrifuges (over 13,000) and placed them under international monitoring; and eliminated 97 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium – the raw materials necessary for a bomb. So by any measure, the JCPOA has imposed strict limitations on Iran’s nuclear program and achieved real results.

Third, the JCPOA does not rely on trust – it is rooted in the most far-reaching inspections and verification regime ever negotiated in an arms control deal. Iran’s nuclear facilities are strictly monitored. International monitors also have access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain, so that we can catch them if they cheat. Without the JCPOA, this monitoring and inspections regime would go away.

Fourth, Iran is complying with the JCPOA. That was not simply the view of my Administration. The United States intelligence community has continued to find that Iran is meeting its responsibilities under the deal, and has reported as much to Congress. So have our closest allies, and the international agency responsible for verifying Iranian compliance – the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Fifth, the JCPOA does not expire. The prohibition on Iran ever obtaining a nuclear weapon is permanent. Some of the most important and intrusive inspections codified by the JCPOA are permanent. Even as some of the provisions in the JCPOA do become less strict with time, this won’t happen until ten, fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years into the deal, so there is little reason to put those restrictions at risk today.

Finally, the JCPOA was never intended to solve all of our problems with Iran. We were clear-eyed that Iran engages in destabilizing behavior – including support for terrorism, and threats toward Israel and its neighbors. But that’s precisely why it was so important that we prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Every aspect of Iranian behavior that is troubling is far more dangerous if their nuclear program is unconstrained. Our ability to confront Iran’s destabilizing behavior – and to sustain a unity of purpose with our allies – is strengthened with the JCPOA, and weakened without it.

Because of these facts, I believe that the decision to put the JCPOA at risk without any Iranian violation of the deal is a serious mistake. Without the JCPOA, the United States could eventually be left with a losing choice between a nuclear-armed Iran or another war in the Middle East. We all know the dangers of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. It could embolden an already dangerous regime; threaten our friends with destruction; pose unacceptable dangers to America’s own security; and trigger an arms race in the world’s most dangerous region. If the constraints on Iran’s nuclear program under the JCPOA are lost, we could be hastening the day when we are faced with the choice between living with that threat, or going to war to prevent it.

In a dangerous world, America must be able to rely in part on strong, principled diplomacy to secure our country. We have been safer in the years since we achieved the JCPOA, thanks in part to the work of our diplomats, many members of Congress, and our allies. Going forward, I hope that Americans continue to speak out in support of the kind of strong, principled, fact-based, and unifying leadership that can best secure our country and uphold our responsibilities around the globe.

The BBC on Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Iran deal:

Calling it “decaying and rotten”, he said the deal was “an embarrassment” to him “as a citizen”.

Going against advice from European allies, he said he would reimpose economic sanctions that were waived when the deal was signed in 2015.

In response, Iran said it was preparing to restart uranium enrichment, key for making both nuclear energy and weapons.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said: “The US has announced that it doesn’t respect its commitments.”

Trump has announced.

But then what is Trump but everybody’s idea of The Worst American?

Analysis by Jonathan Marcus, BBC defence and diplomatic correspondent

With a stroke of his pen President Trump has jeopardised the one agreement – good or bad -that seeks to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

He launched a scathing assault on the deal and its deficiencies, but he offered no alternative policy to put in its place.

He has put US diplomacy on a collision course with some of Washington’s closest allies.

And some fear that he may have brought a new and catastrophic regional war in the Middle East that much closer.

Other than that…

France, Germany and the UK – whose leaders had tried to change Mr Trump’s mind – have said they “regret” the American decision. The foreign ministry of Russia, another signatory, said it was “deeply disappointed”.

The European Union’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, said the EU was “determined to preserve” the deal.

Former President Obama said on Facebook that the deal was working and was in US interests.

…

The United Nations secretary general’s spokesman said Antonio Guterres was “deeply concerned” at the announcement and called on the other signatories to abide by their commitments.

But Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he “fully supports” Mr Trump’s “bold” withdrawal from a “disastrous” deal.

And Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional rival, says it “supports and welcomes” Mr Trump’s moves towards pulling out of the deal.

Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia. Brilliant.

This again. Somebody at the White House pretends Melania Trump wrote a thing that was actually written by someone in the Obama administration. Why do that?

US First Lady Melania Trump has been caught up in another plagiarism row, following the launch of her new online safety for children campaign on Monday.

A booklet put out by Mrs Trump bore a striking resemblance to one published under the Obama administration.

The text and graphics of the “Be Best” booklet were nearly identical to those in the previous edition.

Well that’s not “a striking resemblance,” it’s plagiarism. Words aren’t like faces; you don’t have a resemblance, you have the same words. The word “good” isn’t “like” the word “good”; it is that word.

Mrs Trump’s online safety booklet was initially billed on the initiative’s website as being “by First Lady Melania Trump and the Federal Trade Commission”.

After similarities to the Obama-era edition were picked up online, the text was revised to describe it as a “Federal Trade Commission booklet, promoted by First Lady Melania Trump”.

Why didn’t they just do it that way in the first place? What is wrong with them?

Launching the “Be Best” initiative at the White House on Monday, Mrs Trump said the aim was to promote healthy living, encourage positive use of social media, and combat opioid abuse.

“As we all know, social media can both positively and negatively affect our children, but too often it is used in negative ways,” she said.

Her decision to focus on cyberbullying has prompted questions about the behaviour of her husband, who frequently uses Twitter to attack and insult his opponents.

…

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was asked ahead of the launch of the initiative whether President Trump believed he bore any responsibility for the need to address cyberbullying.

“I think the idea that you’re trying to blame cyberbullying on the president is kind of ridiculous,” she said.

Sigh.

Jeff Sessions: Parents and children illegally crossing the U.S. border will be separated https://t.co/AWmbyUi7YE

— TIME (@TIME) May 8, 2018