Cory Booker’s statement

Jan 16th, 2018 5:37 pm | By

She’s not wrong.

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Fear that we might be seen as obstructive

Jan 16th, 2018 4:13 pm | By

An anonymous woman who works at the BBC on being the collective BBC Women:

The plural, BBC Women, is the collective name we have given ourselves in choosing to highlight a very simple principle: equal pay for equal work. It is a matter of the law, the Equality Act of 2010.

And the group of BBC women I am a part of now numbers more than 200, including some of the most high-profile at the corporation. We are women who support our colleague Carrie Gracie in her public and eloquent pursuit of that principle of parity. Women who may have specific pay grievances or none, but, above all, have become involved in this issue because it is the right thing to do. And because we all want things to improve for future generations in the industry.

The BBC is a wonderful institution, but women there are afraid right now.

That I write this anonymously is a sign of both fear and anger among many BBC women, who, even after joining the group, stay silent. Fear that we might be seen as obstructive for speaking out, and anger because the reason for our speaking out is neither obstructive nor designed to make trouble. We just want to see an existing law enforced.

…

But the BBC cannot trumpet its editorial independence in telling truth to power, only to expect its highly educated and talented employees to stay silent when they are lied to. And we have been lied to. Both in individual cases and collectively. You could argue that it is a form of gaslighting: continuing to tell women that there is no inequality and, over a period of time, they think they are imagining it.

And then there’s John Humphrys.

That the BBC management is said to be “deeply unimpressed” is good. But the private conversation isn’t just a sideshow, it is a symptom of a cultural malaise. It represents hardwired hostility and contempt towards women who demand what is right and legal. This can’t be shrugged off as “jocular exchange” or “banter” between old mates.

Hahahaha she wants to be paid as much as the blokes, silly bitch, can you believe it?

H/t Maureen

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog


A house is not a hole

Jan 16th, 2018 11:15 am | By

Oh gee, there’s even more. It turns out those two lying dogs aka two Republican senators who say Trump didn’t say “shithole countries” meant (but didn’t tell us they meant) he said “shithouse” instead.

Just when you thought the lawmakers involved in that “shithole countries” meeting at the White House on Thursday hadn’t covered themselves in enough shame, here comes a new development.

The Washington Post reported Monday night that the source of the dispute is less about the thrust of President Trump’s “shithole” comment and more about the second syllable of that vulgar word. It turns out that the statement Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) issued that sounded as though it was crafted by a dozen lawyers was written that way for a reason: Cotton and Perdue, according to three White House sources, believe Trump said “shithouse” rather than “shithole.” (The New York Times has a source saying the same thing.)

Well that changes everything. It’s hideously racist to refer to all of Africa as a shithole, while calling all of Africa a shithouse is a compliment of the highest kind. Like so: Trump’s brain is a shithouse. Laudatory and respectful, yes?

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You can never be racist enough for the base

Jan 16th, 2018 10:39 am | By

The Post has a detailed account of that meeting at the White House last week. It turns out “shithole” wasn’t the sum total of all the president’s racism.

Trump talked with Durbin on the phone that morning, all cheery about the prospects for a bipartisan deal on immigration; he invited Durbin and Lindsey Graham over for a meeting to do the deal.

But when they arrived at the Oval Office, the two senators were surprised to find that Trump was far from ready to finalize the agreement. He was “fired up” and surrounded by hard-line conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who seemed confident that the president was now aligned with them, according to one person with knowledge of the meeting.

Trump told the group he wasn’t interested in the terms of the bipartisan deal that Durbin and Graham had been putting together. And as he shrugged off suggestions from Durbin and others, the president called nations from Africa “shithole countries,” denigrated Haiti and grew angry. The meeting was short, tense and often dominated by loud cross-talk and swearing, according to Republicans and Democrats familiar with the meeting.

Trump’s ping-ponging from dealmaking to feuding, from elation to fury, has come to define the contentious immigration talks between the White House and Congress, perplexing members of both parties as they navigate the president’s vulgarities, his combativeness and his willingness to suddenly change his position.

He’s what the professionals call labile. That’s the opposite of being a stable genius.

Trump complained that there wasn’t enough money included in the deal for his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. He also objected that Democratic proposals to adjust the visa lottery and federal policy for immigrants with temporary protected status were going to drive more people from countries he deemed undesirable into the United States instead of attracting immigrants from places like Norway and Asia, people familiar with the meeting said.

Norway & Asia – a country of a few million & a region of several billion.

But more to the point we can see what he’s doing here – he’s wanting to shape the demographics of the US. I can think of someone else who wanted to shape the demographics of a large region in that way.

Attendees who were alarmed by the racial undertones of Trump’s remarks were further disturbed when the topic of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) came up, these people said.

At one point, Durbin told the president that members of that caucus — an influential House group — would be more likely to agree to a deal if certain countries were included in the proposed protections, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Trump was curt and dismissive, saying he was not making immigration policy to cater to the CBC and did not particularly care about that bloc’s demands, according to people briefed on the meeting. “You’ve got to be joking,” one adviser said, describing Trump’s reaction.

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly was in the room and was largely stone-faced, not giving any visible reaction when Trump said “shithole countries” or when he said Haitians should not be part of any deal, White House advisers said.

At one point, Graham told Trump he should use different language to discuss immigration, people briefed on the meeting said.

It’s unpleasantly easy to picture, isn’t it.

Trump had seemed for several days to be favoring a deal that Democrats could sign up to.

But some White House officials, including conservative adviser Stephen Miller, feared that Graham and Durbin would try to trick Trump into signing a bill that was damaging to him and would hurt him with his political base.

His base. His fucking base. His fucking base that is happy with his racist abuse. We mustn’t do what’s better for human beings and the country, we must do what makes Trump’s loathsome base happy.

So the Miller faction called the more racist senators and told them to come on over for the meeting.

“Once we saw what was going on in the meeting a few days earlier, we were freaked out,” said immigration hard-liner Mark Krikorian, who runs the Center for Immigration Studies. Trump, he said, “has hawkish instincts on immigration, but they aren’t well-developed, and he hasn’t ever been through these kind of legislative fights.”

After the Thursday meeting, Trump began telling allies that the proposal was a “terrible deal for me,” according to a friend he spoke with, and that Kelly and other aides and confidants were correct in advising him to back away.

The deal wasn’t racist enough. The base wouldn’t like it. The base wants more racism.

Trump was not particularly upset by the coverage of the meeting and his vulgarity after it was first reported by The Washington Post, calling friends and asking how they expected it to play with his political supporters, aides said.

“Everyone was saying it would help with the base,” which would agree with his characterization, one person who spoke with the president said.

How about a few lynchings? That would help with the base.

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Paul Ryan pretends to care

Jan 15th, 2018 3:12 pm | By

I find this intensely annoying.

Today we remember a great man and his work. We read his sermons. We recall his sacrifices. We give back. In doing these things, we raise our gaze and renew the spirit in which we serve one another. Such is the calling of #MLKDay

It’s completely empty. He could be talking about anyone. “His work” could be anything. “His sermons” could preach anything – patriarchy, white supremacy, hellfire, anything. His sacrifices for what? We give back what?

Paul Ryan is a very conservative libertarian Republican. King was not. Ryan would have no use for a living King today, and a living King today would be resisting everything Ryan did and said.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 19 comments


Ssh

Jan 15th, 2018 2:34 pm | By

A meaningful Martin Luther King day to you.

Watson Mere is a Haitian artist, which makes this all the more fitting.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments


Do we even have to argue about the right to equal pay?

Jan 15th, 2018 11:47 am | By

Suzanne Moore has thoughts on BBC blokeyness. She doesn’t enjoy being a guest on the Today show so that she can have John Humphrys barking at her about abortion.

Surely no one was surprised by the audio that leaked last week, revealing Humphrys’ fossilised attitude to the concept of equal pay. The programme has long been an old boys’ club, absolutely Westminster- and London-centric, and it ventures into many areas – science, culture, the internet, the north and, er, women – with a supercilious attitude.

But it’s more than that, it’s also Both Sides bollocks.

Meanwhile, Humphrys continues to “banter” away in the studio. This is 2018. Do we even have to argue about the right to equal pay? Apparently so.

But, for a long time, the BBC has been hampered on gender issues in terms of content, too, thanks to its now-quaint notion of impartiality. Its editorial guidelines say: “Due impartiality is often more than a simple matter of ‘balance’ between opposing viewpoints. Equally, it does not require absolute neutrality on every issue or detachment from fundamental democratic principles.” Female licence-fee payers are part of these democratic principles. Yet, as the Weinstein and #MeToo issues broke, I was asked – as were many writers – to debate whether the sexual harassment being discussed had even happened, or whether the response was going “too far”. Obviously, I refused, because I did not want to be pitted against idiotic misogynists, be they male or the go-to female mercenaries adored by radio and TV bookers. Is this balance? Sexual abuse: for or against?

I wrote a column last week about exactly that question – whether or not we get to see rules against sexual harassment as just that, basic social rules like the ones we learn in kindergarten, or as “ideology.”

The BBC literally has to get with the programme. There cannot be neutrality around unequal pay and sexual harassment. These cannot be presented as subjects for an entitled and defensive establishment to debate. And no, I do not want to have a heated discussion about it when I can simply switch it off.

But Balance! Both sides! The best argument will win! Truth always prevails!

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments


The other men who are earning too much

Jan 15th, 2018 10:51 am | By

John Humphrys, host of BBC Radio 4’s Today, apparently thinks Carrie Gracie has a hell of a nerve expecting to be paid as much as her male colleagues.

In a leaked conversation recorded before [last] Monday’s programme, Humphrys and the BBC’s North America editor Jon Sopel discuss Carrie Gracie’s comments on the gender pay gap following her resignation as the broadcaster’s China editor on Sunday.

Gracie announced she was resigning from the post in an open letter that was published on her website. She said she was quitting her post after learning that male colleagues, including Sopel, were earning significantly more than her for roles of the same seniority.

Sopel is the one who makes nearly twice as much as she does.

The two men had a phone conversation before an interview on the Today show which Humphrys was co-hosting with Gracie.

Humphrys says: “Slight change of subject, the first question will be how much of your salary you are prepared to hand over to Carrie Gracie to keep her, and then a few comments about your other colleagues, you know, like our Middle East editor [Jeremy Bowen] and the other men who are earning too much.”

Sopel replies: “I mean, obviously if we are talking about the scope for the greatest redistribution I’ll have to come back and say well yes Mr Humphrys, but …”

Meaning, I think, that Humphrys notoriously has the highest pay of all.

Humphrys says: “And I could save you the trouble as I could volunteer that I’ve handed over already more than you fucking earn but I’m still left with more than anybody else and that seems to me to be entirely just – something like that would do it?”

Seems to confirm my interpretation.

Sopel, who seems to be reluctant to have the conversation, says: “Don’t …”

Humphrys interjects: “Oh dear God. She’s actually suggested that you should lose money – you know that don’t you? You’ve read the thing properly have you?”

Sopel says he has, and Humphrys goes on: “And the idea is that I’m not allowed to talk to her about it throughout the whole course of the programme. Not a word.”

Meanwhile journalists who tweeted support for Gracie were not allowed to talk about the pay dispute on the air.

Miriam O’Reilly, who won an age discrimination case against the BBC after being dropped from Countryfile in 2011, said on Twitter that she was “disappointed to be stood down” from speaking on equal pay on Friday’s Today programme.

O’Reilly was leaked a copy of the recording, but says she did not pass it on to journalists at the Sun or the Times but was “glad it’s being brought to public attention”.

She said the tone of the conversation was “smug and condescending”.

Just a tad.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments


Fourth grade

Jan 15th, 2018 9:28 am | By

Newsweek reported last week – confirming what we all know – that Trump has the worst language skills of any of the last 15 presidents.

The analysis assessed the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and more than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels. Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry Truman, who spoke at nearly a sixth-grade level.

At the top of the list were Hoover and Jimmy Carter, who were basically at an 11th-grade level, and President Barack Obama, in third place with a high ninth-grade level of communicating with the American people.

I think the ones at the higher end pull their punches in the language department, i.e. they try not to talk over the population’s heads. We know Obama is very good at code-switching. I’m guessing that Hoover the engineer was lousy at code-switching in much the same way he was lousy at adapting engineer-think to the conditions of the Depression. In other words I really doubt that Harvard Law Obama has worse language skills than Hoover. At the other end though the effort is all to sound higher up the scale; I don’t think Trump is faking or code switching.

Factba.se has collected interviews, speeches and press conferences from previous presidents, using material publicly available from presidential libraries, and including the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, which contains presidential press conferences going back to Hoover in 1929.

The website excluded communiques issued by the last two presidents on social media and limited the study to unscripted words uttered at press conferences and other public appearances.

The words were run through a variety of lexicological analyses, besides the Flesch-Kincaid, and the results were the same. In every one, Trump came in dead last. Trump also uses the fewest “unique words” (2,605) of any president—Obama was the best at 4,869—and uses words with the fewest average syllables, with 1.33 per word, compared to positively multi-syllabic president Hoover at 1.57.

“By every metric and methodology tested, Donald Trump’s vocabulary and grammatical structure is significantly more simple, and less diverse, than any President since Herbert Hoover, when measuring “off-script” words, that is, words far less likely to have been written in advance for the speaker,” Factba.se CEO Bill Frischling wrote. “The gap between Trump and the next closest president … is larger than any other gap using Flesch-Kincaid. Statistically speaking, there is a significant gap.”

Zero surprise there, but it’s nice to have it quantified.

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Suddenly we come across as shrinking violets

Jan 14th, 2018 3:47 pm | By

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in the Telegraph offers another Oh no sex will die piece. She’s one of the hundred women who signed the open letter in Le Monde.

She had found the exposure of Harvey Weinstein liberating at first.

I had applauded Ronan Farrow’s superb New Yorker magazine report on the 13 women whose lives and careers had been blighted by Weinstein. I was unsurprised when investigations revealed that other Hollywood moguls had updated the casting couch tradition. In his inimitable style, US President Donald “grab-them-by-the-p….” Trump had given voice to the crass fantasies of a thousand men in positions of power.

At the time of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in New York, I was among the first Frenchwomen to write denouncing French politicians’ usual assumptions that any comely female journalist was for personal consumption.

But then came the hashtags and campaigns. The #MeToos and the #BalanceTonPorcs (“Rat on your pig”). In between black-dress selfies at the Golden Globes, naming and shaming became a social media indulgence. Forget investigative reporting: the People’s Tribunal of Twitter equated wolfwhistles with rape, pestering lads on the pull with serial abusers.

Wait. Did they? Did they really, or did it just seem that way because of numbers? I have my doubts, myself, because I’ve seen so many people saying over and over “we know there’s a difference.”

Decades after Simone de Beauvoir and Christiane Rochefort, after the 60s’ sexual revolution, many Frenchwomen find the picture of us emerging from this whole debacle deeply depressing. Suddenly we come across as shrinking violets, unable to shake off a bloke trying it on in a bar, traumatised for life the minute someone attempts frottage in a crowded Metro car. (I find that saying in a calm but VERY LOUD voice “Will you stop touching my a..!” makes enough commuters laugh that the culprit slinks off at the next stop.)

Do we? Do we really?

I don’t believe it. I think she’s making it up. I don’t think anyone claims to be traumatised for life by one grope or attempted frottage. That’s a false choice: it’s not “either bad enough to traumatize for life OR not worth mentioning at all.” We get to object to groping even though a single grope is not likely to traumatize us for life.

Also, the thing about attempted frottage in Paris is that it’s not just one, is it. It’s nice for her that she doesn’t mind it because she gets to make other passengers laugh when she objects, but that’s not a reason to argue that all women should react the way she does.

Suddenly, centuries of the unique French charm of men-women camaraderie and badinage are in danger of being erased, and replaced by puritanism.

Oh fuck off, as we puritans like to say. Of course they’re not! Camaraderie and badinage can flourish, even if sexual “badinage” is unwelcome in the workplace.

Human relationships are a complicated skein of trial and error. In America, they tend to live in a black-and-white world, a binary universe of ones and zeroes.

Ah yes, so we do; we’re a collection of stupid little peasants who haven’t managed to wipe the mud off yet.

H/t Rob

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 17 comments


Guest post: Puritanism didn’t want to empower anybody

Jan 14th, 2018 3:21 pm | By

Originally a comment by iknklast on The amount of labor women do each day.

replaced by puritanism

I so hate this trope…In a puritan world, women were often regarded as belonging to men, and they didn’t have a lot of say in who, when, or where they married. They were not given the option of refusing their husband once married to the person their parents approved. They were not allowed the sexual freedom to make their own sexual choices – in short, they were not allowed to say “yes”.

This is the opposite – the extreme opposite – of what the #MeToo and other feminist anti-groping crusaders are wanting. What most of us want is the ability to say “no” when asked (and not have to push away hands that didn’t bother to ask), but also the right to say “yes” if we are eager to be intimate with that individual. I see very little that could be more sex-positive than that.

What we are fighting against is not sex-positive behavior, it’s sex negative behavior. It makes sex a negative experience for women, and in some cases, may make them hesitate to ever say “yes” because their experiences with sex have been unpleasant, painful, forced, and embarrassing. And made them feel like a piece of meat.

Giving men the freedom to do whatever they want, and expecting the women to just deal with it (and be called sluts if they report any of it, or don’t fight hard enough against it) is going backward in time to a day when women were property, when they were bought, sold, traded, or bartered without any say in it, and they were vilified if some man took what they wanted, because it was assumed they “led him on”.

Now, I’m not saying these women are suggesting we should be bought, sold, traded, or bartered. They are just suggesting we should leave men alone to do what they want, as long as it is just something someone else might see as a petty annoyance, and as long as it isn’t a crime (and I suspect some of what they claim is okay actually is a crime, since touching someone without their consent in an attempt to make them do something they don’t want to do borders on assault and battery).

In short, empowering females is not Puritanism; Puritanism didn’t want to empower anybody.

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The wrong button

Jan 14th, 2018 11:41 am | By

Yesterday people in Hawaii were minding their own business when suddenly many of them were informed there was an incoming ballistic missile.

According to a timeline released by the state, the alert was triggered at 8:07 a.m. local time when, during an internal drill, an employee hit the wrong button. For 13 minutes it went uncorrected, until the emergency management agency sent an update on social media.

So that was an unpleasant 13 minutes for those people.

Many reported first hearing that the alert was a mistake from the Twitter account of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii).

Her tweet went out within about 15 minutes of the false alarm to her 174,000 followers. She was probably the first well-known authority figure to inform the public that there was no need to panic. News outlets picked up that clarification and spread it widely.

Trump, on the other hand…not so much. He was busy playing golf at the time. Three hours later he sent an urgent tweet about how the Fake Media are mean to him.

The White House did release a statement, well after the alert was revealed to be incorrect.

“The President has been briefed on the state of Hawaii’s emergency management exercise,” it read. “This was purely a state exercise.”

Well, they say he was briefed, but actually he was composing that Fake News tweet in his head instead of listening.

Consider his responses. First that statement, which has one obvious aim: To assure the American people that it wasn’t hisfault that the false alert went out — it was Hawaii’s. Then, that tweet, which shows what was preoccupying the president at the moment. Not that one of the 50 states had been briefly wracked with terror after a mistake was made by the people whose job it is to keep them safe. Instead, an insistence to the American people that the media is “fake news,” which was probably a response to the reports that trickled out bolstering a story from the Wall Street Journal that Trump had allegedly paid hush money to a porn star with whom he’d had an affair.

That was the thing that Trump urgently wanted to clear up: The media couldn’t be trusted when it reported on him.

Trump could have tweeted as soon as possible that the alert was a false alarm, sharing that information with millions of Americans immediately. He could have additionally shared information about what went wrong, and assured people that he would work to make sure that no such error happened again in the future. He could, at the very least, have sought to offer some emotional support to the people of Hawaii. He did none of these. He has, as of writing, done none of these.

Why not? Because he doesn’t care. He cares about himself, and that’s it.

Since the beginning of his presidency, Trump has rarely assumed that traditional leadership role of the presidency. He’s always taken a hostile attitude toward those who opposed his candidacy, certainly, but he’s also been apathetic about stepping up more broadly to inform, guide and assure the American public. The primary concerns Trump conveys to Americans are about Trump: About how he’s being treated, about how well he is doing, about the media and his opponents and how he just wants to make America great again. The White House releases statements and, as he did on Friday in recognizing Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Trump will read them or tweet about them. But it’s clearly not where his heart lies.

His heart lies with the wonder and glory that is Donald Trump, real estate peddler and liar extraordinaire.

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The amount of labor women do each day

Jan 13th, 2018 5:06 pm | By

The thing about sexual harassment is that it makes a lot of extra work for women, and that’s

  • not fair
  • another obstacle that women face but men don’t

Sara Maurer at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

[T]he #MeToo movement has made visible the amount of labor women do each day when they show up at work and redirect the conversation away from their bra size, tactfully pull hands off their body, or repeatedly find new ways to avoid the male supervisor who wants to discuss his sexual problems. That’s work. We don’t get paid for it, we don’t get credit for it, and we don’t want to do it.

We also don’t want advancement at work to depend on labor not required of men. Did male comedians have to sit in a room and watch Louis C.K. jerk off in order to network? If they didn’t, why should female comedians have to do that work? Did any man working for or with the radio host John Hockenberryhave to deflect multiple obsessive email solicitations, unwanted physical contact, and declarations of love? Did male graduate students of David R. Marchant have to put up with barrages of sexual insults to do field work with him?

Why should women have to do that work to get the same results? Why should we have to pretend that we don’t mind? Why should we have to be the ones to get over it? Couldn’t men just as easily self-monitor? Why not make men responsible for that labor?

Spare us all the talk about women rising above things and being strong enough to survive things and not being fainting damsels about things, and just don’t dump extra chores on us.

H/t Vanina

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Why did North Korea get left on Trump’s desk?

Jan 13th, 2018 3:57 pm | By

The Wall Street Journal did an interview with Trump on Thursday.

About that repetition thing…

He was asked how helpful China has been.

Mr. Trump: Not helpful enough, but they’ve been very helpful. Let’s put it this way, they’ve done more for me than they ever have for any American president. They still haven’t done enough. But they’ve done more for me than they have, by far, for any—I have a very good relationship with President Xi. I like him. He likes me. We have a great chemistry together. He’s—China has done far more for us than they ever have for any American president. With that being said, it’s not enough. They have to do more.

That’s three times, within seconds of each other.

He thinks Obama stuck him with North Korea kind of like sticking someone with all the dirty dishes after a party.

Mr. Trump: For instance, at the very beginning, you know Obama felt—President Obama felt it was his biggest problem is North Korea. He said that openly. He said that to me, but he said that openly. It is a big problem, and they should not have left me with that problem. That should have been a problem that was solved by Obama, or Bush, or Clinton or anybody, because the longer it went, the worse, the more difficult the problem got. This should not have been a problem left on my desk, but it is, and I get things solved. And one way or the other, that problem is going to be solved.

They should have fixed it before he got there, because it’s just rude to leave it for him. He’s a busy man, with much tv to watch, so they should not have dumped it in his lap that way.

WSJ: You think North Korea is trying to drive a wedge between the two countries, between you and President Moon?

Mr. Trump: I’ll let you know in—within the next 12 months, OK, Mike?

WSJ: Sure.

Mr. Trump: I will let you know. But if I were them I would try. But the difference is I’m president; other people aren’t. And I know more about wedges than any human being that’s ever lived, but I’ll let you know. But I’ll tell you, you know, when you talk about driving a wedge, we also have a thing called trade. And South Korea—brilliantly makes—we have a trade deficit with South Korea of $31 billion a year. That’s a pretty strong bargaining chip to me.

With that being said, President Xi has been extremely generous with what he’s said, I like him a lot. I have a great relationship with him, as you know I have a great relationship with Prime Minister Abe of Japan and I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea.

I have relationships with people, I think you people are surprised.

I bet the four WSJ reporters were very surprised by that point.

They ask him about an immigration deal.

The lottery system is a disaster, we have to get rid of the lottery system. The—as you know chain is—chain migration is a horrible situation. You’ve seen the ads, you’ve seen everything, you know all about chain.

This person on the west side that killed eight people and badly, you heard me say yesterday, badly, badly wounded about 12. I mean people losing arms and legs—nobody even talks about that. But they say killed eight and that’s it. I mean you have people—ones walking around without—missing two legs. And the person was running to stay in shape and now he’s missing two legs. Think of it.

How about that wall?

The wall’s never meant to be 2,100 miles long. We have mountains that are far better than a wall, we have violent rivers that nobody goes near, we have areas…

But, you don’t need a wall where you have a natural barrier that’s far greater than any wall you could build, OK? Because somebody said oh, he’s going to make the wall smaller. I’m not going to make it smaller. The wall was always going to be a wall where we needed it. And there are some areas that are far greater than any wall we could build. So, maybe someday somebody could make that clear, Sarah, will you make that clear please?

I saw on television, Donald Trump is going to make the wall smaller; no, the wall’s identical. The other thing about the wall is we’ve spent a great deal of time with the Border Patrol and with the ICE agents and they know this stuff better than anybody, they’re unbelievable.

They both endorsed me, the only time they’ve ever endorsed a presidential candidate, OK? And they endorsed us unanimously. I had meetings with them, they need see-through. So, we need a form of fence or window. I said why you need that—makes so much sense? They said because we have to see who’s on the other side.

If you have a wall this thick and it’s solid concrete from ground to 32 feet high which is a high wall, much higher than people planned. You go 32 feet up and you don’t know who’s over here. You’re here, you’ve got the wall and there’s some other people here.

WSJ: Yes.

Mr. Trump: If you don’t know who’s there, you’ve got a problem.

They stay on that theme for quite a long time, Trump explaining that you can’t see through concrete and the WSJ agreeing and Trump explaining it again. Then he explains that we need immigrants to do the jobs. Then he explains that Dreamers and DACA are not the same thing and he’s always telling people that. Very important; not the same thing. The WSJ says Yes.

Then something reminds him of the Wolff book, so he starts talking about libel laws. The WSJ asks why he gets so much fake news.

Mr. Trump: They dislike me, the liberal media dislikes me. I mean I watch people—I was always the best at what I did, I was the—I was, you know, I went to the—I went to the Wharton School of Finance, did well. I went out, I—I started in Brooklyn, in a Brooklyn office with my father, I became one of the most successful real-estate developers, one of the most successful business people. I created maybe the greatest brand.

I then go into, in addition to that, part-time, like five percent a week, I open up a television show. As you know, the Apprentice on many evenings was the number one show on all of television, a tremendous success. It went on for 12 years, a tremendous success. They wanted to sign me for another three years and I said, no, I can’t do that.

That’s one of the reasons NBC hates me so much. NBC hates me so much they wanted—they were desperate to sign me for—for three more years.

WSJ: Mr. President, you made reference to the book. Steve Bannon …

Mr. Trump: Just—and so—so I was successful, successful, successful. I was always the best athlete, people don’t know that. But I was successful at everything I ever did and then I run for president, first time—first time, not three times, not six times. I ran for president first time and lo and behold, I win. And then people say oh, is he a smart person? I’m smarter than all of them put together, but they can’t admit it. They had a bad year.

We all had a bad year.

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Writers from shithole countries

Jan 13th, 2018 11:10 am | By

A beautiful riposte:

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That time has come

Jan 13th, 2018 10:12 am | By

The US ambassador to Panama has resigned because he can’t work for Trump.

[John] Feeley’s departure had been communicated to State Department officials on Dec. 27 and was not a response to Trump’s alleged use of the word “shithole” to describe Haiti and African countries at a meeting on Thursday, U.S. officials said.

Trump denies using the term.

Feeley, one of the department’s Latin America specialists and among its senior most officers, made clear that he had come to a place where he no longer felt able to serve under Trump.

“As a junior foreign service officer, I signed an oath to serve faithfully the president and his administration in an apolitical fashion, even when I might not agree with certain policies,” Feeley said, according to an excerpt of a resignation letter read to Reuters on Friday.

“My instructors made clear that if I believed I could not do that, I would be honor bound to resign. That time has come.”

A State spokes confirmed that Feeley has resigned but told the flagrant lie that it was for “personal reasons.” No, being unable to work for the current head of state is not personal.

Speaking to reporters, Under Secretary of State Steve Goldstein said he was aware of Feeley’s planned departure on Thursday morning, before Trump’s alleged use of the vulgar term, and said the ambassador was leaving for “personal reasons.”

”Everyone has a line that they will not cross,“ ”Goldstein told reporters at the State Department. “If the ambassador feels that he can no longer serve … then he has made the right decision for himself and we respect that.”

But it’s still not “personal.” It’s substantive; it’s about policies and/or discourse; it’s not about illness in the family or wanting more time with the kids. That which is wrong with Trump is not “personal”; it’s all too public.

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Which country is the real shithole?

Jan 13th, 2018 10:02 am | By

Robin Wright at the New Yorker on Trump’s “tough” words about African countries:

President Trump’s credibility as a world leader has been, to borrow his vulgarity, shot to shit. With one word—just the latest in a string of slurs about other nations and peoples—he has demolished his ability to be taken seriously on the global stage. “There is no other word one can use but ‘racist,’ ” the spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, Rupert Colville, said at a briefing in Geneva. “You cannot dismiss entire countries and continents as ‘shitholes,’ whose entire populations, who are not white, are therefore not welcome.”

That’s what the US stands for at this moment – hateful racist contempt said aloud by our head of state, rebuked by the UN human rights body. The shame of it is scalding.

As I’ve found (to an embarrassing degree) over the past two years, many senior officials in foreign capitals and in embassies across Washington believe that he is simply articulating his intolerant and prejudiced world view. The White House signalled as much in its damage-control statement, on Thursday, explaining that the President wants to “make our country stronger by welcoming those who can contribute to our society, grow our economy and assimilate into our great nation.”

Some “damage control.” What the White House is saying there is that Trump’s “shithole countries” blurt is his way of saying that citizens of said “shithole countries” are – all, to a person – unable to contribute to our society and our economy. The explanation just makes the remark more insulting. “He didn’t mean anything insulting, he just meant we don’t want people from African countries immigrating here because they have nothing to contribute. That’s all.”

Trump is now preparing to attend the World Economic Forum, a gathering of global leaders in politics and business, held annually in Davos, Switzerland. Many American allies have long been wary of the President’s “America First” framework. After his remarks this week, the danger is that his counterparts will also view his agenda as “White First”—not a viable strategy in a world that places growing value on racial diversity.

I hope they make his life hell. I do. I hope he feels ostracized and shamed and humiliated. There’s clearly no hope of changing his mind, but maybe we can at least show him what it’s like.

Africa is home to 1.2 billion people and more than fifty countries. A whole continent can’t simply be stereotyped or dismissed. A cursory glance of Africa’s achievements includes Nobel Prizes in medicine, chemistry, physics, literature, and peace. (That’s one award Donald Trump will surely never win.) Africa is home to some of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Nigeria has built a vibrant film industry. South Africa’s peaceful transition from apartheid is a model for nations worldwide. Egypt includes a quarter of the Arab world’s population. Rwanda, once ravaged by genocide, is today a model for gender equality in politics: the East African nation has the world’s highest percentage of female lawmakers—more than sixty per cent. (As of last month, the United States ranked ninety-ninth among a hundred and ninety-three countries, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.)

We’re a shithole country ourselves, if you notice. Our rankings on items like maternal mortality and inequality are terrible; we don’t have a national health service; we have more people in prison than any other country; we have a grotesque rate of gun deaths. Shithole much?

Finally, the President’s coarse language will make it harder to make gains in his diplomatic agenda worldwide. Pity American diplomats, especially in non-white countries. The top U.S. envoy in Botswana was summoned to clarify whether the southern African nation is considered a shithole country, the Washington Post reported.

That was yesterday; today the US ambassador to Panama has quit because Trump.

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No apology forthcoming

Jan 13th, 2018 9:24 am | By

The African Union is displeased with Donald “shithole” Trump.

The organisation representing African countries has demanded that US President Donald Trump apologise after he reportedly called nations on the continent “shitholes”.

The African Union mission in Washington DC expressed its “shock, dismay and outrage” and said the Trump administration misunderstood Africans.

But, the Beeb continues, he denies it. Of course he does, the Beeb does not reply to itself, but he lies almost as often as he speaks, and he doesn’t hesitate to deny things we’ve all seen and heard. His denial is, epistemically speaking, pretty much worthless.

On Friday, Mr Trump on Friday tweeted that his language he used at the private meeting with lawmakers to discuss immigration legislation had been “tough”.

As if Africa were a naughty teenager who borrowed his car and put a dent in the fender. He loves to excuse his outrages with the label “tough,” as if he were the justifiably angry daddy of everyone on the planet.

[The African Union] said the “remarks dishonour the celebrated American creed and respect for diversity and human dignity”.

It added: “While expressing our shock, dismay and outrage, the African Union strongly believes that there is a huge misunderstanding of the African continent and its people by the current Administration.

“There is a serious need for dialogue between the US Administration and the African countries.”

It wouldn’t make any difference though. Part of his cognitive disability is the fact that he can’t learn. He’s stuck in a groove of repeating what he thinks he knows, and new knowledge can’t get a purchase.

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Wrong wave

Jan 12th, 2018 4:57 pm | By

Jezebel posts a laughably wrong bad inaccurate headline:

The Backlash to #MeToo Is Second-Wave Feminism

You what? The hell it is. #MeToo is second wave feminism, and the backlash is third wave. Mind you I think all the waves are stupid because none of it is that simple – the resurgence of feminism starting in the late 60s was hardly monolithic. However if you’re going to talk about waves at all you should at least get them right, and second wave was a lot more radical than its predecessors; that was the whole point. Noticing and pushing back against sexual harassment was part of that. (Lately I’ve seen claims that no one had even heard of it until the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Nonsense. I went to a workplace training session on it in the early 80s.)

The Jezebel piece is about Harpers and Katie Roiphe and all that.

Though specifics of the story’s content remain unclear, it’s possible that Harper’s will publish an already familiar critique of this particular moment. Perhaps I’m wrong, and Roiphe will offer a nuanced critique of the reckoning, free from the now stock phrases and lazy rhetoric of the contrarian essay (“hysteria” “sex panic” “victimhood” and “witch hunts”). Yet, given Roiphe’s long career as a self-styled feminist provocateur, her consistent rhetorical performance as the rare rational female voice is a sea of feminist hysteria, it seems unlikely. “I address the kind of Twitter hysteria that we are seeing here,” Roiphe told the Times.

Rophie’s record on this issue is abundantly clear and follows the narrative that women and other marginalized genders are uninjured by the fiction of harassment: “The majority of women in the workplace are not tender creatures and are largely adept at dealing with all varieties of uncomfortable or hostile situations,” Roiphe wrote in the New York Times in 2011. “Show me a smart, competent young professional woman who is utterly derailed by a verbal unwanted sexual advance or an inappropriate comment about her appearance, and I will show you a rare spotted owl.”

Very Spiked – Ella Whelan – Brendan O’Neill sort of bullshit, in short. It’s what she got famous for as an undergraduate in the 90s.

If Roiphe’s arguments, laid out in service to long-forgotten sexual harassment allegations leveled against the equally long-forgotten Herman Cain, sound familiar, it’s because they are. The New York Times published almost identical arguments last week in the form of a critique of the #MeToo movement, written by Daphne Merkin. Similar sentiments were expressed by 100 French women, including actress Catherine Deneuve and writer Catherine Millet, in an open letter in Le Monde, who said: “we do not recognise ourselves in this feminism” that holds male predators accountable for a spectrum of abuse.

The backlash to #MeToo is indeed here and it’s liberal second-wave feminism.

Nooooooo. Completely wrong. It’s third-wave feminism that is liberal-libertarian; second wave is more radical, not less. Katie Roiphe was part of the backlash against “second wave” feminism. To repeat: that’s what made her famous.

As the #MeToo conversations have escalated, prompting critical reconsideration of what constitutes a violation in the workplace and beyond, liberal second-wave feminists have been a prominent voice in bringing the reckoning to a premature conclusion, suffocating this deeply-needed cultural moment. Armed with a self-identified feminist conviction, they are often quick to deem the criminality of brutal physical attacks as the barometer for abuse—dismissing the precariousness of women rendered by institutional discrimination as self-imposed victimhood. Their use of feminist principals to justify their hesitancy in this space has become the new “I’m a feminist but…”—an empty gesture at best, a need to claim allegiance to old power structures while also asserting feminist credentials.

No, no, no, no, no. Stassa Edwards is making a fool of herself. She seems to be thinking “second wave: old: therefore conservative: therefore shutting down MeToo.” But no. It’s anti-feminists and conservatives who are trying to shut down MeToo: women like Christina Hoff Sommers. Sommers is not a second wave feminist. I don’t consider her a feminist at all, but the right adjective would be libertarian.

But one of the most powerful facets of #MeToo has been the beginning of a full-fledged dismantling of those exact power structures—be they work, institutions, legacy companies, prominent and highly-esteemed figures, and the biggest manifestation of power of all: every single time one of us looked away to protect one of the aforementioned reputations.

Fark. That’s why we’re part of it. It’s not our fault that it took the enormity of Harvey Weinstein to get people to pay attention at last.

What this moment exposes very cleanly about liberal second-wave feminists—and their shortcomings on the reckoning— is that they are still preoccupied with maintaining an established social order that—for both better and worse—has been profoundly ruptured by this moment. Donegan’s account was radical; anonymity insured by solidarity, and risk reduced. But the response, especially those that labored over form, imperfect method, and chastized recklessness of the list, smacked of this kind of limited liberal feminism, indebted as it is to the preservation of institutions and empowerment through them.

The ignorance of her.

The people at Jezebel should be embarrassed.

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One

Jan 12th, 2018 11:19 am | By

Speaking of immigrants, speaking of immigrants from African countries, speaking of immigrants from what Donald Trump is pleased to call “shitholes” – news outlets today are talking about Emmanuel Mensah, who came to New York from Ghana.

The Times did a story on him on December 29th.

Emmanuel Mensah was a handsome, strongly built young man in his late 20s who immigrated to the Bronx from Ghana five years ago. He joined the Army National Guard but returned to his apartment on Prospect Avenue in December, after graduating from boot camp with the rank of private first class.

And on Thursday night, he lost his life trying to save people from his furiously burning apartment building, one of 12 people to die in the blaze.

“He brought four people out,” said his uncle, Twum Bredu, who lives next door. “When he went to bring a fifth person out, the fire caught up with him.”

He was living in the apartment of a couple with four children.

Private Mensah, a decorated soldier who had been awarded a medal for marksmanship and was planning to join the military police, got that family to safety, then pulled out four more people, his uncle said, before returning to the building.

He never emerged; the authorities said he died of smoke inhalation.

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