Time to equalize their pay, no?

Following up on the Alexander Acosta angle – Raul Reyes at CNN says he should resign. (The url indicates the piece dates from last March, but the headline says it’s updated, so it’s a mix of then and now.)

Until recently, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta was probably one of President Donald Trump’s least controversial Cabinet members. But now he is facing rising pressure over his handling of a sex offender case involving a well-connected billionaire.

On February 21, a federal judge ruled that Miami prosecutors, led by then-US Attorney Acosta, broke the law when they arranged a plea deal for billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in 2008 without conferring with his victims. Although Epstein was accused of trafficking children for sex, Acosta allowed him to negotiate an extremely lenient agreement that was kept secret from his victims — denying them the opportunity to affect the prosecutorial process. Now the victims might have a say: The judge gave the government 15 days to talk with the victims who sued and figure out what remedy should apply.

Not just a ludicrously lenient sentence but actually a sentence that broke the law.

At his 2017 confirmation hearing, Acosta was asked by Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia about the Epstein deal. “At the end of the day, based on the evidence, professionals within the prosecutor’s office decide that a plea that guarantees that someone goes to jail, that guarantees that someone register generally, and that guarantees other outcomes, is a good thing,” Acosta said.

In theory, that may be true; the reality was far different. Epstein served only 13 months in the private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. He was able to come and go for up to 12 hours at a time, six days a week. He was allowed to hire his own private security detail. During his subsequent year of probation under house arrest, he took numerous trips on his private jet.

*snort* That’s some house arrest!

Moreover, Acosta is on the verge of becoming a political liability for the administration. In addition to Judge Kenneth Marra finding that Acosta violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act by keeping Epstein’s deal a secret from his victims, the Justice Department has opened an investigation into his handling of Epstein’s plea deal. The White House, too, is looking into Acosta’s role in the Epstein case. And on February 22, lawmakers sent a letter to the President calling on him to demand Acosta’s resignation over Epstein’s “despicable unjust plea deal.”

And five months later we see that nothing has come of it. Justice shmustice.

There is no joy in calling for the only Latino in Trump’s Cabinet to step down. Still, Acosta’s role in crafting a sweetheart deal for a sex offender means he does not deserve to be serving at the highest level of government.

True, Acosta’s handling of Epstein’s case predates his Department of Labor tenure. Yet as we’ve learned from sexual abuse scandals involving Hollywood actresses and Olympic gymnasts, the passage of time is no excuse for avoiding a reckoning. The fact that Epstein’s plea deal was made more than a decade ago does not mean that Acosta should not bear accountability for his actions. Epstein’s victims, who are now in their 20s and 30s, are still living with the consequences of that secret agreement. Acosta deserves to do so as well.

Don’t place any large bets on it.

Opposing accounts are still opposing.

The National Theatre has denied accusations it refused to serve members of the LGBT community in its Green Room bar due to “gender or sexuality” discrimination.

No, it was due to “not flattering trans delusions” discrimination.

A group of lesbian women, straight women and men visited the bar on Friday  – the night before London’s Pride celebrations – and claim they were refused service and asked to leave by staff.

The “and men” is kind of interesting. I guess men are welcome no matter what and don’t have to fill out the form stating whether they’re gay or straight? But women do? Because _____?

The National Theatre confirmed it was investigating the claims although say it had “multiple witnesses” who could corroborate the group were asked to leave following a “series of disturbances”.

It insisted the “clothing, gender or sexuality” of the women played no part in the “reluctant” decision, which was a result of “refusal to put placards out of sight that featured messages which upset other customers” and “abusive behaviour” toward staff.

However, speaking to i, Anne refuted claims the group had taken placards into Green Room or acted in an abusive manner.

While she and a few others were served drinks upon their arrival that evening, she said friends who came shortly after were refused service.

The group were then approached by a member of the management team who asked them to leave.

Anne explained: “The duty manager came and spoke to a few of us and said that there were trans staff coming on duty at the next shift change who could find our t-shirts upsetting and could be seen as hateful.”

Well anything could be seen as hateful, especially by people who spend their entire waking lives looking for pretexts to call things hateful. But if we decide that T shirts defining what a lesbian is are hateful, then aren’t we taking a huge leap back into plain old homophobia?

National Theatre security staff and police were called soon after the exchange, Anne said.

She added: “At no point were we abusive to staff, we were very polite and respectful.

“The NT have defamed and discriminated against us which goes against our protected characteristics as set out in the EA 2010.”

Yes but all that has been superseded by the new dispensation in which the potential conjectured possible future upset of trans staff who haven’t arrived for their shift yet is infinitely more important than the right of lesbians to sit on chairs and consume drinks. Better be safe than sorry.

In a statement, the National Theatre’s joint chief executive Lisa Burger said: “While investigations into the incident are ongoing, multiple witnesses corroborate that a group who attended the Green Room restaurant on Friday 5 July were ultimately asked to leave the premises as a result of a series of disturbances.

“These began with their refusal to put placards out of sight that featured messages which upset other customers and contravened our visiting policy, and culminated in abusive behaviour towards our staff.

“The clothing, gender or sexuality of the group was not a factor in the decision, which was reluctantly taken on the basis of the group’s behaviour and what was said. The National Theatre must be an inclusive place for everyone, and that means asking visitors to conduct themselves in a way that respects that principle.”

The National Theatre must be an inclusive place for everyone, and that means ordering lesbians to get out before the trans staff arrive for their shift.

Jeffrey Epstein’s hobby may have caught up with him at last.

Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for allegedly sex trafficking dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005, and will appear in court in New York on Monday, according to three law enforcement sources. The arrest, by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force, comes about 12 years after the 66-year-old financier essentially got a slap on the wrist for allegedly molesting dozens of underage girls in Florida.

For more than a decade, Epstein’s alleged abuse of minors has been the subject of lawsuits brought by victims, investigations by local and federal authorities, and exposés in the press. But despite the attention cast on his alleged sex crimes, the hedge-funder has managed to avoid any meaningful jail time, let alone federal charges.

The new indictment—which, according to two sources, will be unsealed Monday in Manhattan federal court—will reportedly allege that Epstein sexually exploited dozens of underage girls in a now-familiar scheme: paying them cash for “massages” and then molesting or sexually abusing them in his Upper East Side mansion or his palatial residence in Palm Beach. Epstein will be charged with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors—which could put him away for a maximum of 45 years. The case is being handled by the Public Corruption Unit of the Southern District of New York, with assistance from the district’s human-trafficking officials and the FBI.

Doesn’t sound as if they’re looking for a slap on the wrist.

Another “prosecute the victim” story.

One evening last summer, Mikhail Khachaturyan decided that his living room wasn’t tidy enough, so he summoned his three teenage daughters one by one and doused each with pepper spray.

There was little unusual about this evening in the Khachaturyan household, according to court records, except for one thing: The sisters decided they couldn’t take the violence and abuse anymore.

They waited until their father fell asleep in his rocking chair and attacked him with a kitchen knife and a hammer. He put up a fight, but died within minutes.

The Khachaturyan sisters, now aged 18, 19 and 20, were charged last month with premeditated murder, in a case that has drawn outrage and shone a light on the way the Russian justice system handles domestic violence and sexual abuse cases.

More than 200,000 people have signed an online petition urging the prosecutors to drop the murder charges, which could land the sisters in prison for up to 20 years.

Remember when Putin gave a green light to domestic abuse?

Pressured by conservative family groups, President Vladimir Putin in 2017 signed a law decriminalising some forms of domestic violence, which has no fixed definition in the Russian legislation.

Police routinely turn a blind eye to cases of domestic abuse, while preventive measures, such as restraining orders, are either lacking or not in wide use.

Court filings showed that the Khachaturyan sisters were repeatedly beaten by their father, a war veteran, and sexually abused.

He kept a bunch of guns and knives in the house. He threatened neighbors as well as his daughters with violence.

Prosecutors acknowledge the extraordinary violent circumstances that pushed the teenagers to attack and eventually kill their own father, but they insist that Maria, Angelina and Krestina should be tried for murder.

The sisters’ lawyers argue that they were acting in justified self-defence in circumstances of lasting abuse and life-threatening violence.

H/t Rob

Male boss sexually harasses female underling. She records one of his phone calls. She is sentenced to six months in prison.

Indonesia’s top court has rejected an appeal by a woman who was sentenced to six months in prison for recording and sharing a phone conversation she had with her boss to prove that he was sexually harassing her.

The Supreme Court said Baiq Nuril Maknun was guilty of spreading “indecent” material.

Her boss reported her to the police in 2015 after the recording was circulated.

Rights groups condemned the ruling.

Nuril had complained of getting lewd phone calls from the head teacher of the school she worked at in Mataram, a city on the island of Lombok.

So she recorded one of his calls, and shared it with staff at the school and the head of an education agency. It went viral on social media. The man reported her to the police.

The Supreme Court found her guilty in November of “violating decency” under Indonesia’s electronic information and transactions law. On Thursday, it dismissed her efforts to have the verdict overturned, saying she had failed to produce new evidence.

The court also fined her 500 million rupiah (£28,200; $35,200).

The case has sparked outrage in Indonesia, with rights groups warning that the verdict sends a worrying message to victims of sexual harassment.

“We are concerned about the impact of this decision because it opens a door for perpetrators of sexual violence to criminalise victims,” Ade Wahyudin, executive director of the Legal Aid Foundation for the Press, told Reuters news agency.

H/t Soraya

Sometimes, explaining how patriarchal norms infuse laws is hard. NOT TODAY. After months of harassment, Nuril Maknun recorded one of boss’ phone calls. She’s been sentenced to at least 6 months in jail for “distributing lewd material.” He’s been promoted. https://t.co/2cDQxRvI5S

— Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly) July 6, 2019

I hate it when I agree with Brendan O’Neill, but it does happen sometimes. He’s dead-on with this one.

It’s Pride Month, all month because it’s the anniversary of Stonewall, which was a fine thing.

The gains made by gay-rights warriors over the past five decades have been amazing and important.

But the melting of that great liberatory moment into today’s bland and virtually mandatory forced Pride shenanigans is depressing. It tells a broader story about the demise of radical politics. The riotous counterculturalists of the Sixties and Seventies demanded freedom. They didn’t give a damn what the ‘moral majority’ thought of them  — they just wanted the moral majority to leave them alone.

(It’s not quite that simple. They wanted the moral majority to stop doing some things – bombing Vietnam into rubble, for instance – and to stop voting for people who ordered those things.)

Fast forward to 2019, and that historic human instinct to be left alone in liberty has been replaced by a needy and therapeutic politics of recognition. Now gay-rights activists don’t demand autonomy — they want validation.

I hate agreeing with Brendan, but those two sentences are gold. A needy and therapeutic politics of recognition is exactly right, and I detest it. That long needy bleat by the gender-whoopsie paleontologist yesterday – talk about needy. Needy isn’t political, needy is the opposite of political, needy is All About Me and that’s not politics but idiocy (in the Greek sense). The National Theatre blithering about making its staff feel supported is The Politics of Needy, and if it’s not stopped it will infantilize everyone and no one will be left to plant the crops.

This happened yesterday:

https://twitter.com/sargesalute/status/1147176523092439040

The Green Room is part of the National Theatre.

The Guardian does a Both Sides:

The National Theatre has become embroiled in a bitter war of words after a group of lesbian friends was refused service in the venue’s Green Room bar in the run-up to the Pride in London celebrations.

The women and their supporters claim their treatment at the hands of staff, who called the police, was a response to their campaigning stance on gender identity. Other witnesses in the bar have described their behaviour as disruptive.

The small group, who arrived with placards, included Anne Ruzylo, a political activist and former member of the Bexhill and Battle Labour party, and on Friday night she was one of those who complained on Twitter.

Ruzylo, who was wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Lesbian: a woman who loves other women”, tweeted that staff at the Green Room bar had “called the police to have women and lesbians removed because they don’t like the T-shirts we are wearing”.

On Friday night the National Theatre, which is to host a Pride after-party on Saturday night with the cabaret and drag pub the Glory as part of its River Stage festival, responded on social media, saying: “The NT has not and would not ever discriminate against an individual on the basis of their sexuality – or indeed because they were proudly declaring this on a T-shirt. We do, however, respect and value our trans staff, company and audience members. As such, if the behaviour of visitors impinges on their ability to feel supported and safe, we will take action.”

What a slushy mushy evasive way to claim that the women somehow made trans staff, company and audience members feel unsafe. What behavior? Sitting on chairs? Wearing shirts with words on? Existing as lesbians?

Lisa Burger, the joint chief executive of the National Theatre, said: “While investigations into the incident are ongoing, multiple witnesses corroborate that a group who attended the Green Room restaurant on Friday 5 July were ultimately asked to leave the premises as a result of a series of disturbances.

“These began with their refusal to put placards out of sight that featured messages which upset other customers and contravened our visiting policy, and culminated in abusive behaviour towards our staff.

Abusive behavior? Like, asking to be served, for instance?

I don’t believe there was any abusive behavior. I think this is the usual bullshit of translating “not repeating the dogma at every opportunity” into messages that upset people and abusive behavior.

The police arrived.

Is this a picture of lesbians being removed by the police from the Green Room SE1 because they are same sex attracted? pic.twitter.com/SR9QyLjnfQ

— Dr EM (@PankhurstEM) July 5, 2019

Which is worse – holding people captive in appalling conditions, or pointing out that people are being held captive in appalling conditions?

Adam Serwer discusses the issue:

The journalist Jonathan Katz argued in May that given the intent behind these facilities, and the conditions that migrants are being held in, they are best described as a concentration-camp system in the United States. That assessment was echoed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was promptly accused of trivializing the Holocaust. “Allegations that somehow the United States is operating in a way that is in any way a parallel to the Holocaust is just completely ludicrous,” Representative Liz Cheney wrote. Although Ocasio-Cortez did not mention the Holocaust, the association between the Shoah and concentration camps is strong, and attacking an opponent for hyperbole is easier than defending the torture of children—not that Cheney is at all opposed to torture.

The reaction to Ocasio-Cortez is unsurprising. Whatever the merits of her criticism, when those in power are caught abusing that power in ways that are morally indefensible and politically unpopular, they will always seek to turn an argument about oppression into a dispute about manners. The conversation then shifts from the responsibility of the state for the human lives it is destroying to whether those who object to that destruction have exhibited proper etiquette. If congressional Republicans—or, for that matter, their constituents—had expressed a fraction as much outrage over the treatment of migrant children in American detention facilities as they did in response to Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks, she would never have had cause to make them in the first place.

This variety of tut-tutting is irresistible to many ostensibly objective journalists, who by convention are barred from expressing opinions on policy but are welcome to lecture on tone, and take nearly every opportunity to remind the rabble of their obligation to be polite to their rulers. But to express outrage at the criticism of nefarious conduct while treating that conduct as a typical political conflict in which there are two equally valid positions is to take a side.

I wrote about it in The Freethinker last week.

Here we go again.

Brian Leiter points out an item:

Wollongong Undergraduate Students’ Association… (UPDATED)

…is a disgrace.  How can the Australasian Association of Philosophy permit such an event?  (And if the AAP isn’t hosting this event, why are they permitting the use of the AAP logo?)

What’s it done?

Scheduled an event for a conference on Monday with the thoughtful title “F**k off Holly Lawford-Smith”.

Under “Details” we get:

A well known TERF has been invited to speak at the Australasian Association of Philosophers conference at UoW. She has been overtly transphobic and is a huge supporter of the fake academic theories created by so called “gender critical” academics who use outdated terminology and ideas such as Blanchard’s theory on gender to discriminate against some of the most marginalised people in our society.

This is disgusting, this is unacceptable and this is coming from a university who supposedly supports queer students while allowing hate speech to be propogated on campus.

We at the Allsorts Queer Collective and the Wollongong Undergraduate Student Association find it outrageous that the university and AAP has allowed an explicit TERF to give a talk about exclusionary rights within women’s spaces.

She is not welcome to spew her disgusting discriminatory and exclusionary hate speech at our university. We must stand against this and send not only a message to Holly Lawford-Smith but to UoW that we will not stand for this kind of flagrant disregard for our community at our uni.

Four legs good, two legs bad. Washington’s army took over the airports. It’s all the same thing – mindless yelling, refusal to think, refusal to learn, pig-headed belligerence, brainless tribalism. It has no business in government and it has no business in universities.

Brian did a follow-up post.

I characterized the AAP response as “tepid,” but philosopher John Schwenkler (Florida State) wrote me with a more critical take, which he kindly gave permission to share:

It is not “tepid” — rather it’s effectively a slander of our colleague. The first paragraph begins by indicating that she wasn’t important enough to have been invited by the society, and ends by implying that her positions “conflict with [the AAP’s] commitment to support diversity in philosophy”. And then in the second paragraph there’s a clear suggestion that allowing someone like Holly to speak freely “conflict[s] with the aim of creating a space where everyone is able to participate”. Both of the latter claims are ludicrous.

I’m glad I don’t have to go to university with those “students.”

From Josephine Raap on Facebook:

The mother of a “Drag Kid” is shocked, shocked, that anyone would sexualize her son.

If you really think this mother is surprised, then you have been fooled. No, this mother who has overseen the extreme sexualization & grooming of her son is likely now doing damage control. https://t.co/juh0rcQgDU via @gaystarnews

— Jon K. Uhler, MS, LPC, CCTP (@JonKUhlerLPC) June 27, 2019

What could possibly cause anyone to sexualize a Drag Kid? How is sex even relevant?

https://twitter.com/JonKUhlerLPC/status/1144302466323951616

https://twitter.com/JonKUhlerLPC/status/1144305459026898945

CBC? Any thoughts?

Naturally there are jokes.

One if by Land.
Two if by Sea.
Three if by the Delta Shuttle from LaGuardia.

~Paul Revere#RevolutionaryWarAirports #facts

— M ❄️ (@ElnorFudd) July 5, 2019

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1147151495508451328

Dearest Abigail,

The situation at ye Olde Laguardia Airporte is untenable. Amparts and ramparts clogging metal detectors, and a scrum has begun betwixt Kanye of Cornwallis and Frederick Douglass.

I may not make it to Bowling Green.

Yours,
Philippe#RevolutionaryWarAirports

— BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ (@mmpadellan) July 5, 2019

The tide turned against the British when their gunpowder was re-routed through Newark and arrived at the wrong carousel at LaGuardia. They only received a voucher for 5 shillings for the inconvenience, sealing their fate against the Continental Army. #RevolutionaryWarAirports pic.twitter.com/NW6hSDD8Z8

— Lis (@LisMoxie) July 5, 2019

https://twitter.com/GaddieWindage/status/1147116206996041728

He said it. He said it. He actually said it.

He seriously can only just barely read. He reads like a 5-year-old who is still learning how. He barfs out each word like a hammer blow, wagging his head back and forth to keep time. He tries to make himself sound smooth and natural by having his voice go Up and Down word by word, which succeeds only in making him sound like a lunatic. And he sees airports where there are none.