Is it stupidity or corruption or both? Who knows, who cares, either way it’s appalling.

House Speaker Paul Ryan signaled Tuesday he isn’t supportive of the proposals to impose new restrictions on gun purchases, telling reporters “we shouldn’t be banning guns for law abiding citizens.”

During a weekly news conference in the wake of the mass shooting at a Florida high school that killed 17 people, the Wisconsin Republican added, “we should be focusing on making sure that citizens who shouldn’t get guns in the first place don’t get those guns.”

As if anyone can know which citizens “should” get guns and which shouldn’t. As if anyone can know that every time, infallibly, at a glance. As if people who sell guns are experts in this new science of Knowing Who Should Have Guns.

And even more to the point, as if anyone “should” have a gun that tears organs apart on entry, a gun that is designed not to disable but to blow to pieces. Why not just cut to the chase and let everyone buy bombs? We’ve got the drones, now give us the bombs – just think of the possibilities!

Ryan also emphasized the failure by law enforcement to respond to reports about the shooter.

“We see a big breakdown in the system here,” he said. “In this particular case, there were a lot of breakdowns — from local law enforcement, to the FBI getting tips they didn’t follow up on, to you know, school resource officers, who are trained to protect kids in these schools and who didn’t do that. That, to me, is the most stunning one of them all.”

Nope. The most stunning one of them all – and the most blown-to-bits one as well – is the fact that the guy the system failed to stop was able to take an AR-15 into that school and blow huge holes through 17 people such that they died, and slightly less lethal holes in others (I can’t find a number for the injured – three are currently still in hospitals). If Cruz had not been able to take such a deadly gun into the school, the failure to do anything about him would not have been so “stunning.”

There is no reason to make it possible for enraged civilian men to have military weapons.

Pressed about whether Congress was doing enough as students from the Florida high school make the rounds on Capitol Hill to urge top leaders to take action, Ryan again pointed to the problems preventing the incident, saying there was “a colossal breakdown” at the local level.

“Of course we want to listen to these kids, but we also want to make sure that we protect people’s due process rights and legal constitutional rights while making sure that people who should not get guns don’t get them,” Ryan replied. “This kid was clearly one of those people.”

The Second Amendment to the Constitution predates assault rifles.

Top best most fabulous intersectionalityism:

https://twitter.com/MunroeBergdorf/status/968439202462470144

Is Munroe Bergdorf a Russian troll?

Munroe Bergdorf got “facial feminization” surgery a month ago, and posts glam shots of the result.

https://twitter.com/MunroeBergdorf/status/967428325839921152

Fine; whatever; knock yourself out; but don’t be telling women how to do feminism correctly.

There are people corroborating the BuzzFeed story on Lawrence Krauss on social media.

Elise Andrew for one.

Adding my voice to this – in 2013 I attended an event with Krauss and considered requesting an interview. Was told by someone who works with him that “we don’t leave female journalists alone with Lawrence”. Decided not to do the interview.

This “whisper network” people are talking about wasn’t made up of people who didn’t like him and wanted to smear him. It was people who worked with him who didn’t want to deal with the drama.

The same would apply to other people who warned women about Krauss: the goal was not [necessarily] to smear Krauss but to warn the women. That’s how it works. Warnings about people are also damaging to the reputations of said people, but that’s inherently part of such warnings.

A comment on a public post by Daniel Bastian:

A few years ago, I watched him proposition an 18 year old who had recently escaped a home schooling religious cult. I wasn’t sure why people I used to be close to didn’t decide he was a lowlife right then and there.

Drip drip drip.

The Oath Keepers, a lunatic militia group, are organizing to “protect” schools by standing around outside them packing heat. What could possibly go wrong.

In Indiana, at least one member of the group, Mark Cowan, stationed himself outside of a Fort Wayne high school last week. He wielded a handgun and AR-15 while keeping watch near the premises, per local outlet WPTA-21.

Fabulous. And the school administration and teachers and students are supposed to know he’s protecting them as opposed to preparing to shoot them how exactly?

Bryan Humes, a leader in the Oath Keepers chapter in Indiana, said he’s not sure how many Oath Keepers are currently stationed outside of local schools, although he believes there are several. He said he also knows of other Oath Keepers keeping watch of schools outside of Indiana, but could not provide specific numbers.

“We’re just hoping that we can be a little added security. If the schools already have a resource officer, then the local sheriff, city and state police have another set of eyes and ears keeping an eye on things,” said Humes.

Paul Krugman notes the flood of resistance, or what he calls “a powerful upwelling of decency,” in for instance MeToo and the reactions to the Parkland massacre.

This isn’t what anyone, certainly not the political commentariat, expected.

After the 2016 election many in the news media seemed all too ready to assume that Trumpism represented the real America, even though Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote and — Russian intervention and the Comey letter aside — would surely have won the electoral vote, too, but for the Big Sneer, the derisive tone adopted by countless reporters and pundits. There have been hundreds if not thousands of stories about grizzled Trump supporters sitting in diners, purportedly showing the out-of-touchness of our cultural elite.

Not to mention an entire cottage industry around Hillbilly Elegy. It’s masochism, that kind of thing, journalists abasing themselves for being so damn elitist and smartyboots.

Political scientists have a term and a theory for what we’re seeing on #MeToo, guns and perhaps more: “regime change cascades.”

Here’s how it works: When people see the status quo as immovable, they tend to be passive even if they are themselves dissatisfied. Indeed, they may be unwilling to reveal their discontent, or to fully admit it to themselves. But once they see others visibly taking a stand, they both gain more confidence in their dissent and become more willing to act on it — and by their actions they may induce the same response in others, causing a kind of chain reaction.

Seems too obvious to be worth labeling, really. Trump himself triggered a regime change cascade, showing all the assholes that there are plenty of assholes out there. Show people a big basket of deplorables and they’ll make it into a whole warehouse of deplorables.

Such cascades explain how huge political upheavals can quickly emerge, seemingly out of nowhere. Examples include the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, the sudden collapse of communism in 1989 and the Arab Spring of 2011.

Now, nothing says that such cascades have to be positive either in their motivations or in their results. The period 2016-17 clearly represented a sort of Alt-Right Spring — springtime for fascists? — in which white supremacists and anti-Semites were emboldened not just by Donald Trump’s election but by the evidence that there were more like-minded people than anyone realized, both in the U.S. and Europe.

What we have here is a battle of the cascades…which we knew all along. The Republicans have gerrymandered everything so that our cascade has to be way bigger than theirs to overcome the baddies, but Krugman thinks it may be that big. Here’s hoping.

Prepare to become more Woke.

Today’s lesson: how to fight all the varieties of misia.

Offstage voices: The what?

Oh dear, you don’t know what misia is? How sad. Fortunately there is a page for laggards like you. It is the “what does ‘misia’ mean?” page. You’re welcome.

You may be wondering why our guide uses the suffix “misia” instead of the suffix “phobia.” If you’ve not encountered “misia” language before, you may also be wondering what it means. Well never fear! We are more than happy to explain this relatively new shift in language.

The suffix “phobia” comes from the Greek word for “fear of,” and so it denotes an intense aversion to the part of the word that precedes it (e.g. arachnophobia is a fear of spiders). Words like “homophobia” or “Islamophobia” are pretty recognizable, and most folks understand them to mean a position or perspective that is prejudicial and discriminatory against LGBTQIA+ identities and the religion of Islam respectively.

The problem with using “phobia” terms as labels for prejudice is that there are folks who actually have phobias (real anxiety disorders in which someone experiences intense anxiety or fear that they’re unable to control—Claustraphobia, for instance). So when we use terms like “homophobia,” we are equating bigotry with a mental health disorder, which does several problematic things:

• It relies on and reinforces the harmful stigma against mental illness (see the Anti-Ableism and Anti-Sanism tabs to learn more);
• It inaccurately attributes oppression and oppressive attitudes to fear rather than to hate and bigotry;
• It removes the accountability of an oppressive person by implying their actions and attitudes are outside their control.

So since labeling oppression with “phobia” suffixes is harmful, many folks are exchanging them for “misia” suffixes instead. Misia (pronounced “miz-eeya”) comes from the Greek word for hate or hatred, so similar to how Islamophobia means “fear of Islam,” the more accurate Islamomisia means “hatred of Islam.”

For these reasons, our guide will be using “misia” language in place of “phobia” in an effort to be as accurate, clear, and inclusive as possible.

Ok but I feel excluded by the word “folks,” so what about that, eh? Won’t somebody think about what I want?

But seriously – what is wrong with these people? Whoever they are, who wrote this shit. It purports to be from the library at Simmons College, but what does all this patronizing pedantic crap have to do with a college library? Who asked them? Who said they could tell everyone what to say?

Let’s take a cautious look at the transmisia page. Let’s notice that under “further reading” there are some links to Twitter hashtags. Let’s scroll down to “Cis fragility.”

Cis Fragility

Cis fragility (drawing on white fragility in critical race theory) is rooted in a desire to restore and reproduce cisnormativity. It is a combination of lack of stamina in interrogating their conceptions of gender, as well as a resistance to challenging those conceptions, often react[ing] with defensiveness [and] forcing trans people to do the emotional labor of comforting the cis person in addition to educating them.

Cis people exist in a social environment which validates their genders and reinforces a gender binary which corresponds to their lived experiences, giving them relative privilege to trans people. Cis people therefore can can exhibit a low tolerance for that which challenges their assumptions about gender and their conceptions of gender more broadly. (from Cis Fragility)

•  Cis Fragility
•  #CisFragility
•  Dear Cis People: Stop The Fragile Mindset
•  The Journey of #GoodCisPeople
•  The Reaction To #GoodCisPeople Proves Why We Need It
•  Internet Drama: The Handmaiden of Cis Fragility

Another link to a Twitter hashtag.

Anyway…this kind of thing…it’s no good. Collecting a bunch of sanctimonious jargon and dogmatic bullshit off Twitter and presenting it as Holy Writ is neither intelligent nor persuasive nor reasonable nor interesting. It turns off people on the left, so I can hardly bear to think what it does to people on the right.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on This brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism.

Part of the problem in the 2016 primaries is that the other candidates focused on attacking each other, assuming that the Trump bubble would burst, either on its own or because another candidate would take care of him. But in retrospect, it’s very obvious how by 2016, the GOP had stripped itself of many possible defenses to Trump even if they hadn’t waited until it was too late. What arguments could they have made?

1. “He doesn’t have the experience and qualifications.” Well, first, Republicans spent years pissing on the idea of government service as something of value, extolling millionaires as the real “job creators,” and insisting that what was needed was to bring the discipline of the private sector to the “swamp” of Washington waste. How could they then disparage the executive credentials of a (supposed) rich businessman? Second, after getting behind George W. Bush on the theory that “the president doesn’t have to be that bright as long as he has smart advisors,” and then lowering the bar to “a fairly dim half-term governor of Alaska can handle the job if needed,” it really is hard to start insisting on intellectual standards.

2. “He’s promising things he can’t possibly deliver, because they’re not even in the power of a President to accomplish.” The GOP’s media organs have spent the last couple of decades bemoaning the “War on Christmas,” NOW you’re gonna tell your voters that actually, Trump won’t be able to make anyone say “Merry Christmas” after all? Your foreign policy critique of Obama has generally been no more sophisticated than “Obama is a weak girly man. We will be strong and project strength, and then Putin and Kim and everyone else will respect us and back down,” so how can you now argue that Trump’s chest-thumping gorilla routine won’t work? He’s just taking your strategy and dialing it up to 11.

3. “He lies.” Conservative radio host Charlie Sykes (a never-Trumper) has explained this pretty well. Conservatives did such a good job of convincing their voters that the mainstream media is hopelessly biased against conservatives that there were effectively no referees left. Cruz and Rubio and Ryan and other “respectable” Republicans may have never out-and-out signed on to birtherism themselves, but they turned a blind eye to it, and Romney even begged for the Chief Birther Trump’s endorsement in 2012. The WaPo, NYT, CNN, et al. could run all the fact-checking pieces they want, but Trump just had to cry “fake news!” and their base was preconditioned to accept it. The only folks who could have possibly put the brakes on Trump would have been Fox News, and maybe some of the big radio guys (although I think Limbaugh’s influence was fading at this point anyway). And they had no interest in doing so — in fact, Trump had (shrewdly?) spent the last several years making himself available to any Fox show that wanted him, cultivating positive relationships with the hosts and audiences.

Another one.

The troubling details of a kidnapping that unfolded last week in the rural community of Dapchi in northern Nigeria after Boko Haram attacked a school and apparently made off with teenage hostages horrified the nation. As many as 110 girls have been missing since Monday, when armed militants stormed the school.

Many Nigerians were all the more outraged that the attack and the events that followed mirrored a similar kidnapping of nearly 300 schoolgirls in 2014 in the community of Chibok.

That episode grabbed the world’s attention and elicited promises from officials that it would never happen again. Nearly four years later, an estimated 112 of those students are still held hostage.

“Not even our 112 Chibok Girls would imagine ANY more Daughters of Nigeria would be FAILED AGAIN,” Oby Ezekwesili, a founder of the Bring Back Our Girls group that advocates the release of the Chibok students, said on Twitter.

There’s uncertainty about how many girls were kidnapped because some have been hiding and are slowly making their way back.

Officials have been careful to avoid acknowledging anyone was kidnapped in Dapchi. Instead, they say only that the girls are missing.

Witnesses, however, described seeing the girls in militants’ vehicles as part of what appeared to be a deliberate plan to steal them. And they said militants arrived at the town looking specifically for the building, which is a boarding place with about 900 students.

One resident who lives a mile outside Dapchi, who asked that his name not be used because he feared for his safety, said his neighbor was outside his home late in the day on Monday when militants pulled up, grabbed him and asked him to point them to the school. He told the fighters he didn’t know where it was and begged to be released. They threw him aside and headed toward the town.

Schools are soft targets.

Then, late Wednesday, the state’s governor, Ibrahim Gaidam, announced that the missing girls had been rescued. The next day, parents streamed into the school, expecting to hear news of their missing daughters.

But when Mr. Gaidam arrived, he apologized, saying he was mistaken and had relied on security officials whose information had turned out to be false. He told the crowd to view the events as part of God’s plan and to pray for the girls’ return, said Modu Goniri, a father whose two daughters are still missing.

As he spoke, some parents began wailing uncontrollably. A few fainted.

In nine months some of them will have grandchildren.

Originally a pair of comments by AJ Milne on Shade of pale.

Think it was David Brin also pointed out about Star Wars: the droids are pretty clearly sentient, intelligent beings… Yet they can be bought, sold, effectively enslaved with ‘restraining bolts’. And it’s not just villains who do so.

… I find it not at all surprising Sagan would raise the issues he did. It flows quite naturally, it seems to me, from other views on the possible diversity of life in the universe, how our own perspective is, as yet, probably quite limited, against all of what might be out there.

There seems to be this very poorly thought through attitude amongs the anti-social justice (or possibly just antisocial and antijustice) contingent that, somehow, there’s this bright line between some mythical, antiseptic domain of the ‘hard scientists’ and some terribly squishy, soft social domain thing. And this attiitude, again, I suspect, is rearing its head here.

And Sagan is, in fact, amusingly enough, a fairly clear exhibit that this is not at all a clean separation. Not that it should surprise anyone, really, that there isn’t, when the very categories, here, are reified pretty willy nilly…

There’s a legitimate case, maybe, that you can’t get from is to ought in any absolutely prescribed way. As in: nothing about the arrangement of the physical matter of the universe quite says we shouldn’t enslave people or just treat them like desert. On the slavery question, economists, I’m sure, could comment pretty brutally on when it does, kinda, work out, if all you’re looking at is a specific balance sheet. (I’d add, parenthetically: chattel slavery, though it absolutely can be a helluva deal for the plantation owner, isn’t necessarily guaranteed to be that great a deal for them; it may be one of the reasons it’s not around much anymore, or not anywhere where there’s any kind of modern economy going)…

But look at what the so-called ‘hard’ sciences are, and what ‘technology’ is. Nothing, at all, walls them off from the social world. And the social world, the rules we live by, are every bit as real as a booster rocket. And technology is really only important to us when it meets up with the human, and, generally, quickly after that, it will meet up with the social. A rocket booster isn’t interesting to us just because, out in space, away from perturbing bodies, it’s an unusually clean example of the third law in action…

It’s interesting because of where we can go with it, what we can send up with it, which may be, yes, a communications satellite (a thing with social interaction as its very reason for being, that), or a robot that will send back information on what we are curious about…

What’s behind this poorly considered idea of some mythical separation of these domains is, I think, mostly wishful thinking. People like to keep things simple, and some of them, especially, just don’t want some things to change. They’d like to say can’t we just talk about the canyons on Mars; those are cool; can’t we just talk about rockets; I like those…

But real life isn’t like that. Everything you learn has implications. And everything you invent has implications. And nothing you do, you truly do in a vacuum (even if you do it halfway to the asteroid belt). And while you’re looking through your microscope, probably someone’s making your lunch. And how they’re being paid cannot be entirely separated from you, either, or how you had time to look through that microscope…

Real life isn’t like that. Reality isn’t like that. And the sciences, after all, do try to concern themselves with studying reality…

… and actually good scientists, like Sagan, are of necessity curious and wide-ranging thinkers. Inevitably, they’re going to notice those things. They will notice the connections, even if you’d rather not think about them.

Sam issues a warning about The Frenzied Women.

Uh oh uh oh, was Carl an SJW?

When someone tells me Sagan would hate discussions about diversity and identity, I always think of his response to Star Wars in 1978: Why are they all white? pic.twitter.com/LKMCcxU82Z

— M.P. (@OmanReagan) February 24, 2018

A Guardian reporter goes to CPAC.

“Do you remember I started running and people would say, ‘Are you sure he’s a conservative?’” an exultant US president asked the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday.

“I think now we’ve proved that I’m a conservative, right?”

Or perhaps more accurately, the conservatives gathered in the cavernous ballroom proved they are all Trumpians now. There were “Make America Great Again” caps, raucous chants of “Lock her up!” and “Build that wall!” and loud boos for the demons of the left. Old-school Republicans were thin on the ground, usurped by a crowd that included young and sometimes rowdy students.

Old-school Republicans are nothing to write home about either, but Trump is a fantastic tool for making them look better. Maybe that’s the secret, and not Russia at all – it’s a plot to make “screw the poor” look respectable.

The spotlight was dominated a succession of administration members answering toothless questions. Speakers included Eric Trump (“The media of this country does not understand the tone of this country”); rightwing populists Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (“I want America first for the American people, I want Britain first for the British people and I want France first for the French people”); and Nigel Farage (“I thought Trump’d be good but I’ve got to tell you, he’s exceeded all expectations”).

There was also the former White House adviser and conspiracy theorist Sebastian Gorka, who roamed the corridors basking in attention when not shoving a reporter.

On Thursday, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, sought to reject post-Parkland demands for gun control with a speech couched in Trumpian language that savaged elites, the media, anti-fascist protesters, Hollywood, George Soros and the FBI.

Nothing about The Jews? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? The Illuminati? The Masons?