Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Time to getcher nonbinary on

    Hey hey hey it’s International Nonbinary Day.

    So that’s means it’s…most people day. So that’s exciting. Ok, as you were.

    I’m Christian. Nonbinary femme. He/him/his and she/her/hers. Please don’t call me or refer to me as guy, man, bro, dude, sir, gentleman, Mr., etc. If there is a feminine version of a word (like “alumna”) use that for me. Happy #InternationalNonBinaryDay

    WHAT IS NONBINARY FEMME??? What can that possibly mean??? If you call yourself “femme” how can you also call yourself “nonbinary”? What are even words?

    Never mind, the important thing is, it’s all about him her alumna waitress princess nonbinaryette.

    It’s only cis gays who owe herhimwaitress? Not cis straights? So I don’t owe him this sharing then, but never mind, I’m doing it out of sheer generosity.

    He’s been working out the best way to correct everyone. That is some demanding labor, let me tell you; it can keep a princess up all night.

    So true. All that profundity and correctingness is very hard to capture in a selfie.

    H/t Josh

    HAPPY INTERNATIONAL NONBINARY DAY EVERYONE!!

  • What about the civil liberties of girls?

    The ACLU yesterday:

    Terry works hard to compete in the sport she loves. Her successes, just like all athletes’, should be celebrated, not attacked.

    "It is both unfair and painful that my victories have to be attacked and my hard work ignored. Living in a state that protects my rights is something that I do not take for granted." Terry Miller, high school athlete. Trans people belong in sports.

    Who is Terry Miller? The Connecticut high school athlete who, along with Andraya Yearwood, competes against girls in track despite having a male body.

    Doing that is not a “civil liberty” and should not be on the ACLU’s list of things to defend.

  • “They choose their own identity”

    Formulas. Speaking in formulas. Speaking in dopy unreasonable unexamined formulas. It doesn’t make for good thinking.

    Of course “trans men and non-binary individuals” are human beings. That’s not in question and never has been. Shouting that they’re human beings is answering a question that was never asked.

    But as for “they choose their own identity” – that’s where the mindless formulas fall apart. We don’t get to “choose our own identity” in every sense. We can choose the aspects that are subject to choice, and not the others. We don’t get to choose to be raccoons or toothbrushes or planets. We can pretend to be those things, if we like, but we can’t literally choose to be those things or billions of other things like them.

    “Identity” is a very baggy word, and it has become more baggy than ever with the new move to claim that sex is a matter of identity as opposed to material fact. It’s being used as a kind of magic wand to entitle people to claim to be something they’re not and physically can’t be, and the results are turning out to be less than salubrious.

  • Examples

    Wait, run that by me again?

    The Guardian:

    The presidential trolling, just ahead of the political talk shows, seemed guaranteed to light a fire, potentially as a distraction from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids announced by Trump and due to be carried out in major cities on Sunday.

    On CNN’s State of the Union Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, was asked if Trump’s tweets “feed into this impression that the president is racist and is pushing a racist agenda”.

    Cuccinelli said the tweets were examples of “rhetoric for the presidential race”.

    Excuse me? Telling four brown women, three of whom were born in the US, to “go back” is election rhetoric? And we just brush it off that way? Where are you “from,” Mr Cuccinelli? Would you like to hear Donald Trump telling you to go back there? Would you brush it off as election rhetoric?

    Pelosi hasn’t helped; she pretty much handed Trump the ammunition.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., responded to a dismissive comment by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about her supporters’ “public whatever” by tweeting that “that public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment.”

    Ocasio-Cortez’s remark was prompted by a comment from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who was quoted in The New York Times on Saturday criticizing the New York legislator and three of her Democratic colleagues — Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — for voting against a border funding bill that had the support of a majority of House Democrats.

    “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got,” Pelosi said, according to The New York Times.

    She needs to stop doing that. (I’m sure it’s annoying to have young, new, inexperienced colleagues throwing their weight around, but that just is how electoral politics works, and she shouldn’t respond in ways that give Trump an opening for new horrors.)

    Also, the Guardian (and anyone else who does it) needs to stop calling this kind of thing “trolling.” It might be trolling in a rando on Twitter, but from a president it’s dangerous racist incitement.

  • Saying no

    NOW can we start the impeachment hearings? Finally?

  • Shame

    Ohgodohgodohgod

    Oh nononononononono

    Noooooooooooooooooo

    NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

  • Droit de seigneur

    Money and power and status and malehood combined: one of the male royals may be unable to keep denying his part in Jeffrey Epstein’s hobby.

    Prince Andrew faces further embarrassment from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal after a judge ordered thousands of secret documents relating to an alleged “sex slave” of the tycoon to be released.

    About 2,000 files from a defamation case involving Virginia Roberts, an alleged trafficking victim, are due to be unsealed following a ruling by the US court of appeal this month. Roberts claims she was forced by Epstein to have sex with the Duke of York in London, New York and the Caribbean. Prince Andrew has strongly denied the claims.

    Well he would, wouldn’t he.

    In 2015 Roberts, now 35 and a mother of three, claimed she had been recruited as a “sex slave” by Epstein, a billionaire financier who was charged last week with trafficking girls as young as 14. Roberts alleged that she had been “procured for sexual activities” by Ghislaine Maxwell, who worked as a personal aide to Epstein and had been a friend of the duke.

    Maxwell then called Roberts a liar in an interview, and Roberts sued her for defamation. The case was settled, but we’re not told what that means. Most of the court documents were sealed.

    In a ruling this month, Jose Cabranes, a US appeals judge, said the public’s right to know outweighed the privacy rights of people who wanted to keep secrets. Days later Epstein, 66, was charged in New York with trafficking a “vast network of underage victims” between his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida. Epstein denies the charges.

    So, who knows, maybe the documents show that Andrew never did shtup underage Roberts. Or maybe they don’t.

    Andrew is not the only illustrious acquaintance to be embarrassed. Trump described Epstein as a friend in 2002, adding: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Bill and Hillary Clinton are also known to have been associates.

    However, none of the investment banker’s friendships has raised more eyebrows than his relationship with Andrew. Epstein attended the Queen’s birthday party in 2000 and visited Sandringham, Balmoral and Windsor Castle.

    The Times gives details on how their movements track during the relevant time slots. Maybe Andrew just kept being in the same place as Roberts for no particular reason, or maybe not.

  • Pence says everything is FINE on the border

    More on Pence’s brief visit to Theresienstadt a border detention center yesterday:

    Agents wore face masks, and video showed detainees packed into their holding areas surrounded by chain-link fence, the concrete floors littered with silver thermal blankets. Reporters accompanying Pence described the facility as smelling “horrendous.”

    A group of men detained behind chain link fencing shouted to news cameras, “No shower, no shower!”

    I wonder if this “no showers” thing is even more sinister than it looks at first blush. It’s bad enough if it’s just a matter of imprisoning non-criminals without sufficient planning and organization to provide humane conditions, but it’s worse if Trump and the gang are doing it on purpose. If the detainees smell horrendous then doesn’t that just do more to make onlookers think they’re bad smelly dirty people who should be punished for trying to get asylum here? Doesn’t it choke off fellow-feeling and empathy and replace it with revulsion?

    I leave it to your wisdom to determine.

    Pence said afterward that what he saw was evidence of a “system that was overwhelmed.”

    The experience did not appear to temper a statement he made earlier in the day that reports of mistreatment, filthy conditions and lack of basic necessities were “slanderous.”

    Yes, that’s the problem here, “slanderous” reporting as opposed to the horrific conditions being reported.

    The remarks were made during a roundtable discussion held after Pence toured a temporary holding facility near Donna-Rio Bravo International Bridge in Texas.

    At the 1,000-capacity facility in Donna, Texas, most of the detainees were lying on mats on the floor. The location held about 800 migrants.

    “I couldn’t be more impressed with the compassionate work that our Customs and Border Protection are doing here at this border facility,” Pence said.

    What a warm, compassionate, generous man he must be.

    He said President Donald Trump sent him so “the American people could see what’s happening here.” A reporter on the tour was not allowed to speak to children or adults being held.

    “It’s time we moved past the harsh rhetoric of the American left,” Pence said at the roundtable held in McAllen.

    It’s the left’s fault for objecting to the bad conditions, it’s not the right’s fault for imposing the bad conditions. Shoot the messenger; that will fix everything.

    “Every family that I spoke to told me that they are being well cared for,” he said.

    Which is not at all because they’re afraid of the guards. Definitely not. It’s slanderous to say it is.

    Hope Frye, a San Francisco immigration attorney who said she has toured all the federal migrant facilities in the Rio Grande Valley, was adamant that conditions have been deplorable.

    “The idea that this is false or exaggerated is really offensive to me,” she said. “It’s like saying migrants’ voices are untrue. It all paints the same picture — depraved indifference to the safety and welfare of children who come to us and are put in our care.”

    Depraved but Republican, so that’s ok then.

    Lindsey Graham wants them to be tortured more.

    “The problem we have here can be fixed, literally overnight,” Graham said.

    He sought support for his own legislation that seeks to force asylum seekers to apply for American safe harbor at home, immediately deport unaccompanied minors and increase detention time for migrant children.

    We’re a light unto the nations.

  • A conqueror of unimaginable odds

    Here’s the young woman who lost the gold medal to a man who changed his name to Laurel and competed against women:

    Samoa’s new golden girl, Feagaiga Stowers, is not just a Commonwealth Games Champion. She is an overcomer and a conqueror of unimaginable odds.

    But that wasn’t always the case.

    Several years ago, Stowers’ young life hit a snag. The victim of abuse, she was among the survivors of sexual violence who sought refuge and [was] given a second chance at life at the Samoa Victim Support Group (S.V.S.G.).

    She entered the Campus of Hope “shy and hopeless.”

    Well that girl was not the one the world saw at Carrara Sports and Leisure Centre at the Gold Coast on Monday night.

    When she stepped up to the competition platform in front of thousands at the stadium and millions watching from around the world, 17-year-old was smiling and confident, nailing the performance of a lifetime.

    Stowers was up against the heavy favourite, New Zealand transgender athlete Laurel Hubbard.

    But Hubbard dropped out because of an injury that time, so Stowers won the gold medal.

    Yesterday, the President of the Samoa Victim Support Group, Siliniu Lina Chang, congratulated Stowers.

    “Congratulations and best wishes Feagaiga.  We are so proud of you,” Siliniu said in a statement.

    …

    “At the Campus of Hope, Feagaiga was not into singing, dancing, sewing or cooking, but through weightlifting, she found a way to release her anger and her sense of hopelessness.”

    “Under a partnership with the Samoa Weightlifting Federation in 2015, some of our girl survivors of violence took up weightlifting as part of their rehabilitation programme, included in them was Feagaiga.”

    In 2018 she won a gold medal, but this year she lost the gold to a man. In a women’s competition.

  • Hubbard responded by blowing a kiss

    More “this is all perfectly fine” reporting on “Laurel” Hubbard’s cheating.

    New Zealand transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard clinched two gold medals as weightlifting competition concluded here today…

    Hubbard was favourite to win the gold medal at last year’s Commonwealth Games in the Gold Coast but had to withdraw mid-competition due to an elbow injury, which later required surgery.

    Her appearance in the Australian city divided opinion as Hubbard – born as Gavin before transitioning in her 30s – entered a female event.

    Opinion should be unanimous: this should not be allowed.

    Hubbard was eligible to compete at Gold Coast 2018 because she passed the International Olympic Committee criteria for transgender athletes after proving her testosterone levels stayed below certain levels in the 12 months leading up to the event.

    The criteria are woefully inadequate.

    I just cannot get over the fact that we are watching the destruction of female athletics and the people in charge are cheering it on.

    Hubbard put the controversy behind her, however, going head-to-head with Samoa’s Feagaiga Stowers and Iuniana Sipaia in today’s final, with the former having won Commonwealth Games gold last year in Gold Coast.

    Hubbard won the overall title with a lift of 268kg, with Stowers and Sipaia completing the podium on 261kg and 255kg.

    There was a cheer from the local crowd when Hubbard failed at a final clean and jerk lift, enabling Sipaia to take the gold medal in the discipline.

    Hubbard responded by blowing a kiss and waved to the crowd before departing the competition platform.

    Tee hee.

  • See the cold indifference

    Brace yourselves; this is horrendous.

    At the end Pence just turns and walks away.

  • Trying to find a carrier

    Man has deep thoughts on ethics – deep Catholic thoughts on ethics.

    https://twitter.com/BrandonAmbro/status/1149727620038369281

    A carrier. A carrier. As if that’s all it is, like carrying a bag of groceries.

    https://twitter.com/BrandonAmbro/status/1149728207685345281

    And yet all this constant thinking somehow doesn’t deliver up the thought that he shouldn’t refer to the prospective baby’s mother as a “carrier.”

    https://twitter.com/BrandonAmbro/status/1149729525401628673

    But it’s not just carrying that gestating women do. It’s far from just that. First of all she contributes the egg. The baby is hers as well as the father’s. I know it must be painful for same-sex couples that they can’t conceive together, but that’s just how it is, and calling the mother “the carrier” doesn’t change that.

    And it doesn’t end with the egg, obviously. That “carrying” includes nourishing the baby for nine months, sharing her entire body with the baby, living with the baby at all times. That’s a big deal.

    Then there’s the giving birth part. I understand it’s not entirely painless.

    Calling a woman who does that for someone else a “carrier” is dumbfoundingly insulting.

    “Ethcis” my ass.

  • Incitement

    Fascist president in action. (Yes literal fascist. This kind of open demonization of the press is right out of The Big Book of How to Fascist.)

  • Use it or else

    A lot of people are passing around this bit of genius:

    https://twitter.com/laurenarankin/status/1149499575348035584

    Would you like to try our Lobster Special today?

    All-caps all you like, but that doesn’t magically make your claims true.

    “Cis” just means you identify with the sex you were assigned at birth, she tells us. Yes, we know, and that’s why we reject the word. I don’t “identify with the sex I was assigned at birth.” I just am it, that’s all. It’s simply a fact. I don’t “identify with” it or embrace it or glory in it or anything else along those lines, I just have the humdrum normal awareness of the fact of it. It is what it is, as we so often hear about pretty much everything except what sex we are. It is what it is. We’re vertebrates, we’re mammals, we’re primates, we’re great apes. Those are all names, or labels, of course, but the criteria for them are specific and well known. What sex we are is like that. It’s not subjective, it’s not a feeling, it’s not like the soul, it’s not Spiritual.

    I don’t identify with it, and I wasn’t “assigned” it. I understand that it’s A FLIPPING WORD but all words are that, and we’re allowed to say some of them are inaccurate or tendentious or venomous or any number of other things that cause us to reject them. We’re not required to call ourselves cis or to agree with the confused ideology that tries to impose the word on all of us. Shouting in all caps ain’t gonna change that.

  • Open unabashed cheating

    Another successful theft of athletic glory:

    Kiwi weightlifter Laurel Hubbard has won gold at the Pacific Games in Samoa…

    Hubbard, a transgender athlete who is trying to qualify for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, won gold medals at Apia’s Faleata Sports Complex to become the Oceania senior champion, the Commonwealth senior champion, and the Pacific Games senior champion.

    The 41-year-old won with a total lift of 268kg in the women’s 87kg category on Saturday. Samoans Feagaiga Stowers and Iuniana Sipaia took home silver and bronze with respective lifts of 261kg and 255kg.

    In other words a 41-year-old man competed against women in weight-lifting and thus stole a gold medal from Feagaiga Stowers and a silver medal from Iuniana Sipaia. And the story carefully says nothing about that – the story carefully pretends it’s all perfectly normal and fair and what everyone wants.

    Hubbard wants to be on New Zealand’s Olympics team in 2020. These competitions are a necessary path to that. If Hubbard gets a place on the team that will mean a woman loses her place to him.

    https://twitter.com/nzolympics/status/1149879157465108483

    The 439 people talking about this are not doing so with warm congratulations for “Laurel” Hubbard.

    Many are pointing out the non-celebratory demeanor of Stowers and Sipaia. The woman who should have been there for winning the bronze is not shown.

  • But it says SAFE third country

    That doesn’t sound like a good plan.

    Guatemala is a country people are fleeing from.

    Reading the UN Dispatch piece:

    This is a guest post from Eric Schwartz,  the president of Refugees International. He previously served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration

    In a particularly egregious violation of law and common decency, the Trump White House is pressing U.S. diplomats to negotiate a “safe third country agreement” with Guatemala. This is a terrible idea which, if implemented, will put the lives of thousands of Central Americans at great risk. It is a violation so serious, that as a former assistant Secretary of State in charge of implementing refugee and migration policies,  I took the unusual step of writing a letter to the State Department’s Acting Legal Adviser Marik String, urging he and his office cease involvement in efforts to secure the agreement.

    Homework assignment: explain how Canada and Guatemala differ as places offering safe refuge to asylum seekers.

    A safe third country agreement is an exercise in responsibility-sharing between two governments on the handling of asylum claims, and the United States currently has only one such agreement—with the government of Canada. Under the arrangement, asylum seekers from any part of the world who enter Canada but then travel to the United States to seek asylum may be returned to Canada for asylum adjudications. Conversely, those who enter the United States and then travel to Canada to seek asylum may be returned to the United States. In other words, the agreement ensures that the asylum seeker’s claim is considered in the country that the asylum seeker has entered first.

    People from south of Guatemala mostly go through Guatemala to get here, so the Trump people are playing gotcha.

    [F]orcing asylum seekers into Guatemala would almost certainly run afoul of both U.S. and international refugee law, which specify that an asylum seeker may only be transported to a place where his or her “life or freedom would not be threatened on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” In fact, it is reasonable to expect that individuals being forced into Guatemala pursuant to a safe third country agreement would constitute a particularly vulnerable social group subject to grave risks at the hands of gangs and other criminal elements. Concerns on this score result from the extraordinarily high rates of crime, including homicide, in Guatemala, gang violence, and—perhaps most significantly—the absence of capacity of the government of Guatemala to provide even a modicum of services or security for returned asylum seekers—who would likely be in highly vulnerable situations for extended periods.

    Which is why many asylum seekers are seeking asylum from Guatemala. Sending asylum seekers there would be like sending people who are fleeing an erupting volcano to the vicinity of a different erupting volcano.

  • Camaraderie

     

    Oh those zany wacky folks at Border Patrol. They’re at it again.

    An unofficial commemorative coin has been circulating among Border Patrol agents at the U.S./Mexico border, mocking the task of caring for migrant children and other duties that have fallen to agents as families cross into the U.S.

    On the front, the coin declares “KEEP THE CARAVANS COMING” under an image of a massive parade of people carrying a Honduran flag — a caricature of the “caravan” from last fall, which started in Honduras and attracted thousands of people as it moved north. (While the caravan included many women and children, the only visible figures on the coin appear to be adult men.)

    The coin’s reverse side features the Border Patrol logo and three illustrations: a Border Patrol agent bottle-feeding an infant; an agent fingerprinting a teen boy wearing a backwards baseball cap; and a U.S. Border Patrol van. The text along the edge reads “FEEDING ** PROCESSING ** HOSPITAL ** TRANSPORT.”


    Dara Lind/Pro Publica

    People who have received or seen the coins

    said the coins were promoted via the secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol officials that, as ProPublica recently detailed, included racist and violent posts.

    The coin is part of a tradition of unofficial “challenge coins” — which generally outnumber official ones — which are common in the military and law enforcement as a way for members to celebrate achievements and build camaraderie.

    But outside observers found this particular coin anything but harmless.

    When you build camaraderie by mocking desperate people seeking asylum, you’re doing it the wrong way.

  • Punks in the rose garden

    The Guardian too noticed the herky-jerky quality of Trump’s address to the social media edgelords yesterday:

    In an hour-long rambling speech Trump ping-ponged through a series of lies and bizarre rants about social media companies’ “disgraceful” and “terrible bias”, made outlandish false claims about the census, Democrats’ positions on the border wall, Antifa, Chinese tariffs, the Golan Heights, the authenticity of his hair and other reliable Trump standards.

    Ping-ponged is a good word for it. We need another good word for the way he doesn’t just bounce from one subject to another but interrupts his own sentences to do so. It’s deeply weird, and probably diagnostic. He’s so distractable he’s distracted from his own blather.

    Also of note: there was a near brawl in the rose garden.

    Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser to the president with white nationalist sympathies, got into a shouting match with the Playboy reporter Brian Karem. After exchanging words, Gorka stormed over to Karem as if a fight was about to break out. “You’re not a journalist, you’re a punk!” he shouted. The Secret Service intervened.

    Very dignified, much classy.

    https://twitter.com/nick_ramsey/status/1149438819248365571

  • On the larger side

    It turns out there’s a cost to internalized misogyny. Who could have predicted that?

    The author is anonymous, fortunately.

    I am 24, and have always been self-conscious of how I looked “down there”. Not enough to put me off having sex and I never had complaints, but it was always in the back of my mind that my labia were on the larger side. I’d previously had cosmetic surgery on my ears, which went well, and figured that labiaplasty could also boost my confidence.

    “On the larger side” compared to what? The women in porn? Who makes these rules? Who decided that chopping off bits of the genitalia should be medicalized into the official-sounding “labiaplasty”? What is wrong with people?

    So she skipped out and had it done.

    Straight away, I knew something wasn’t right. Instead of a reduction, it was clear that my labia had been completely removed. That first week was the worst of my life. I cried several times a day, and even considered suicide. The enormity of my decision sunk in – I could hardly walk and even sitting down was a struggle.

    Now she’s terrified of ever having sex again.

    Yep, internalized misogyny definitely extracts a price.

  • Another “resigned following criticism”

    Acosta’s out.

    Donald Trump’s labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, has resigned following criticism of his handling of a 2008 plea deal with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who is awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking underage girls.

    Trump announced the news on Friday with Acosta by his side at the White House. “Alex Acosta is a great secretary of labor,” Trump said. “I hate to see this happen.” He said he did not ask Acosta to leave the cabinet.

    Acosta becomes the latest in a long line of high-profile officials to resign their post. The Trump administration holds the record for the highest turnover of cabinet and White House staff.

    Why? Several reasons. Because Trump is a nightmare; because Trump chooses terrible people; because Trump is impossible so when underlings try to temper or get around his horribility he fires them; because Trump wants all the focus on him at all times; because of general incompetence.

    Trump has since tried to distance himself from Epstein.

    Announcing Acosta’s resignation, he said: “Yes, I did have a falling out a long time ago. The reason doesn’t make any difference … I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years or more. I wasn’t a big fan of Jeffrey Epstein, that I can tell you.”

    Sure, he can tell us, but it’s a lie.