Aw. He mad.
Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 24, 2017
Princess Ivanka, wholly unqualified and uneducated as she is, is going to India to pretend she’s a real diplomat, but Tillerson isn’t playing along. Tillerson is wholly unqualified and uneducated too and I think he has no business being in that job, but I think he’s right not to help Princess I pretend she represents the State Department.
Days ahead of what should be a major moment for Ivanka Trump on the world stage, CNN has learned Secretary of State Rex Tillerson isn’t sending a high-level delegation to support her amid reports of tensions between Tillerson and the White House.
Multiple State Department officials, as well as a source close to the White House, have told CNN Tillerson’s decision not to send senior State Department officials to this year’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit, being held in India next week, is not related to his key project of slashing the Department’s budget, and is more to do with the fact Ivanka Trump is leading the US delegation this year. Trump was invited by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June, and this year’s theme is supporting women entrepreneurs.
The State Department puts on the large yearly event, which Secretary of State John Kerry and even President Obama attended multiple times. But this year, according to one senior State Department official: “No one higher than the deputy assistant secretary is allowed to participate. The secretary and his top staff have insisted on approving all travel– even the most minute details.”
“They (Tillerson and his staff) won’t send someone senior because they don’t want to bolster Ivanka. It’s now another rift between the White House and State at a time when Rex Tillerson doesn’t need any more problems with the President,” the official added.
Can you blame them? She’s the president’s kid, and she has no relevant experience or knowledge. Bobby Kennedy was at least a lawyer.
“Rex doesn’t like the fact that he’s supposed to be our nation’s top diplomat, and Jared and now Ivanka have stepped all over Rex Tillerson for a long time,” the source said. “So now, he’s not sending senior people from the State Department to support this issue. He’s not supporting Ivanka Trump.”
Maybe if they sent Trump’s car or one of his overcoats instead of Ivanka it wouldn’t be so bad.
That interview Terry Gross did with Luke Harding about his book on Trump and Russia.
The new book “Collusion” is about what the author, my guest Luke Harding, says appears to be an emerging pattern of collusion between Russia, Donald Trump and his campaign. Harding also writes about how Russia appears to have started cultivating Trump back in 1987. The book is based on original reporting as well as on the Trump-Russia dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. Harding met with Steele twice, once before and once after the dossier became public. Harding had a lot of good contacts to draw on for this book because he spent four years as the Moscow bureau chief for the British newspaper The Guardian. During that time, the Kremlin didn’t like some of the stories Harding was investigating, and in 2011, he was expelled. In Moscow, he learned a lot about Russian espionage partly through his own experience of being spied on and harassed.
The Russians were paying attention to Trump in the 1970s when he married Ivana, on account of how she’s from Czechoslovakia which was then a satellite of the Soviet Union.
But I think what’s kind of interesting about this story, if you understand the kind of Russian espionage background, is Trump’s first visit to Soviet Moscow in 1987. He went with Ivana. He writes about it in “The Art Of The Deal,” his best-selling memoir. He talks about getting an invitation from the Soviet government to go over there. And he makes it seem kind of rather casual. But what I discovered from my research is that there was actually a concerted effort by the Soviet government via the ambassador at the time, who was newly arrived, a guy called Yuri Dubinin, to kind of charm Trump, to flatter him, to woo him almost. And Dubinin’s daughter, sort of who was part of this process, said that the ambassador rushed up to the top of Trump Tower, basically kind of breezed into Trump’s office and he melted. That’s the verb she used. He melted.
GROSS: That Trump melted when he was flattered.
HARDING: Yeah. That Trump melted with this kind of flattery. And several months later, he gets an invitation to go on an all-expenses-paid trip behind the Iron Curtain to Soviet Moscow. Now, a couple of things which were important here. One of them is that his trip was arranged by Intourist, which is the Soviet travel agency. Now, I’ve talked to defectors and others who say – this is actually fairly well-known – that Intourist is basically the KGB. It was the organization which monitored foreigners going into the Soviet Union and kept an eye on them when they were there. So kind of he went with KGB travel. Now, according to “The Art Of The Deal,” he met various Soviet officials there. Who they were, we don’t know. But what we can say with certainty is that his hotel, just off Red Square, the National Hotel, would have been bugged, that there was already a kind of dossier on Trump. And this would have been supplemented with whatever was picked up from encounters with him, from intercept, from his hotel room.
He was in their file system. He was just a rich punk then, but you never know. Strange things can happen with rich punks.
You know, we can’t say that Trump was recruited in 1987. But what we can say with absolute certainty is there was a very determined effort by the Soviets to bring him over, and that moreover, his personality was the kind of thing they were looking for. They were looking for narcissists. They were looking for people who were kind of – dare I say it – corruptible, interested in money, people who were not necessarily faithful in their marriages and also sort of opportunists who were not very strong analysts or principle people. And if you work your way down the list through these sort of – the KGB’s personality questionnaire, Donald Trump ticks every single box.
Bing, bing, bing, bing. Narcissistic; corrupt; pussygrabber; morally empty. That’s our guy!
And there’s a kind of curious coda to this, which is, two months after his trip – actually, less than two months, he comes back from Moscow and, having previously shown very little interest in foreign policy, he takes out these full-page advertisements in The Washington Post and a couple of other U.S. newspapers basically criticizing Ronald Reagan and criticizing Reagan’s foreign policy.
In 1987. I did not know that.
When Trump started up with the birther crap, the Russians started cultivating him again.
HARDING: Yeah. And, Terry, what you also have to understand is that Putin has a kind of very clear goal here. He’s got a clear political goal, which is to get the United States to lift sanctions which were imposed by the Obama administration on Russia in 2014, after the war in Ukraine and after Putin basically stole Crimea using kind of military force. And the thing is, sort of sanctions play into the Russian domestic political conversation because despite what state TV says there they have had an overwhelmingly negative effect on the economy. People have felt them, they’re fantastically irritated. Putin’s kind of oligarchic inner circle, many of whom are now sanctioned. They can’t travel to the U.S., they can’t travel to the European Union. They can no longer access their yachts in the Mediterranean or their wine cellars in Switzerland. They see this as an affront and an indignity. And so Putin really wants to get rid of sanctions. And really, he viewed Trump as the best vehicle for doing that because Trump kept on saying let’s be friends with Russia. Meanwhile, we know that secretly his aides were emailing the Kremlin, asking for assistance with building a hotel in Trump Tower. And then of course, Trump wins, to Putin’s surprise. But the problem is that the Russia story becomes such a kind of billowing scandal that Trump is no longer kind of politically able to deliver an end to sanctions.
But what he can do is destroy everything within his reach here at home. Thanks, Putin.
And this is the thing with the kind of Trump-Russia story – that wherever you look, all of the people in Trump’s government, especially in its early stages, have a kind of Russia connection.
I mean, it’s – obviously, Trump did the picking, but it’s almost as if Putin had the kind of last word because we’ve got Wilbur Ross, who as well as the Bank of Cyprus, we now know was doing business of our shipping company with Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law. We have Michael Flynn, whose woes are well-known, but clearly, was taking money from Russia Today, the Kremlin propaganda channel, and other Russian interests and not declaring it. Then we have Rex Tillerson. I mean, he was a famous oil guy. I used to write about him in Moscow, and he got this Order of Friendship from Vladimir Putin – sort of a sky blue ribbon pinned to his chest. And he pops up as U.S. secretary of state almost from nowhere.
And so we go down the list, whether it’s from policy aids like Carter Page or George Papadopoulos, who’s pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, or Trump associates like Felix Sater, longtime business pal, or Michael Cohen, the personal lawyer, who’s married to a Ukrainian. I mean, the sort of constellation of Russian connections circling around planet Trump is just quite extraordinary. And I think this, more than anything else, is what Mueller is now looking at.
And then there’s Manafort and Yanukovich.
GROSS: Now, you mentioned that after Viktor Yanukovych won the presidency in Ukraine, and his campaign was managed by Paul Manafort, Yanukovych imprisoned his opponent, Tymoshenko. And that seems to be almost like an echo of the Trump campaign – people saying, lock her up, lock her up, about Hillary.
HARDING: Yeah. I mean, there are some astonishing parallels between what happened in Ukraine under Viktor Yanukovych between 2010, let’s say, and 2014, when the country kind of fell into war and what’s been happening into sort of 2016 and – first of all, this – the lock her up – Yanukovych actually really did lock up Yulia Tymoshenko.
She spent several years in jail. She was persecuted, harassed. And I think Yanukovych’s people would say, well, she did bad things. She stole money in the 1990s. Frankly, every Ukrainian politician from the ’90s, almost, has stolen money. So it looked very much like a case of selective justice and kind of political repression. And, of course, we had this kind of motif throughout 2016.
I remember vividly watching Michael Flynn addressing the Republican convention in Cleveland, looking really sober and serious, saying, you know, lock her up, lock her up; if I had done the tenth of the things that Hillary had done – well, of course, now we know that Flynn was secretly on Moscow’s payroll, hadn’t declared that, hadn’t declared much else. But first, the desire for vengeance to lock up your particular political opponents is very kind of former Soviet Union. And there are kind of other aspects, as well.
I mean, Yanukovych had a kind of family regime. His son became enormously rich after he became president, worth many hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, I’m not saying that Trump’s family have enriched themselves, but certainly, breaking with all precedent, that they play, politically, highly influential roles. Jared Kushner is a senior adviser. Ivanka is a senior adviser and has her father’s ear. And this is very much a kind of Eastern, almost Central Asian model of that kind that America has never seen before. It’s quite astonishing.
And corrupt, and anti-democratic, and incompetence-promoting, and generally horrible. We have these terrible, ignorant, unqualified, greedy, corrupt people running our government and our foreign policy. It’s a nightmare even without the Russia connection.
Short version: it’s even worse than we think.
Howard Blum at Vanity Fair has new reporting on just what Trump said in that private meeting with Kislyak and Lavrov right after he fired Comey last May.
They start with the relationship between US spies and Israeli spies: the US is the hulking senior partner but at the same time Israel shares valuable intel. Israel had been doing a good job of that in the months before Trump was elected.
It was against this reassuring backdrop of recent successes and shared history, an Israeli source told Vanity Fair, that a small group of Mossad officers and other Israeli intelligence officials took their seats in a Langley conference room on a January morning just weeks before the inauguration of Donald Trump. The meeting proceeded uneventfully; updates on a variety of ongoing classified operations were dutifully shared. It was only as the meeting was about to break up that an American spymaster solemnly announced there was one more thing: American intelligence agencies had come to believe that Russian president Vladimir Putin had “leverages of pressure” over Trump, he declared without offering further specifics, according to a report in the Israeli press. Israel, the American officials continued, should “be careful” after January 20—the date of Trump’s inauguration.
That’s not new information, but put that way it brought me up short. It’s really astounding. US intel told Israeli intel that the incoming US president is a captive of the Russians, so…don’t trust us while he’s in office.
The US president is working for the Russians.
It was possible that sensitive information shared with the White House and the National Security Council could be leaked to the Russians. A moment later the officials added what many of the Israelis had already deduced: it was reasonable to presume that the Kremlin would share some of what they learned with their ally Iran, Israel’s most dangerous adversary.
Trump n Putin n Iran. Fabulous.
Currents of alarm and anger raced through those present at the meeting, says the Israeli source, but their superiors in Israel remained unconvinced—no supporting evidence, after all, had been provided—and chose to ignore the prognostication.
I guess that’s why the wording brought me up short – because it’s been all claims with no real smoking gun as far as we in the public can tell, so I wasn’t really believing it.
On the cloudy spring morning of May 10, just an uneasy day after the president’s sudden firing of F.B.I. director James B. Comey, who had been leading the probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, a beaming President Trump huddled in the Oval Office with Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak.
And, no less improbably, Trump seemed not to notice, or feel restrained by, the unfortunate timing of his conversation with Russian officials who were quite possibly co-conspirators in a plot to undermine the U.S. electoral process. Instead, full of a chummy candor, the president turned to his Russian guests and blithely acknowledged the elephant lurking in the room. “I just fired the head of the F.B.I.,” he said, according to a record of the meeting shared with The New York Times. “He was crazy, a real nut job.” With the sort of gruff pragmatism a Mafia don would use to justify the necessity of a hit, he further explained, “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Yet that was only the morning’s perplexing prelude. What had been an unseemly conversation between the president and two high-ranking Russian officials soon turned into something more dangerous.
“I get great intel,” the president suddenly boasted, as prideful as if he were bragging about the amenities at one of his company’s hotels. “I have people brief me on great intel every day.”
He quickly went on to share with representatives of a foreign adversary not only the broad outlines of the plot to turn laptop computers into airborne bombs but also at least one highly classified operational detail—the sort of sensitive, locked-in-the-vault intel that was not shared with even Congress or friendly governments. The president did not name the U.S. partner who had spearheaded the operation. (Journalists, immediately all over the astonishing story, would soon out Israel). But, more problematic, President Trump cavalierly identified the specific city in ISIS-held territory where the threat had been detected.
As for the two Russians, there’s no record of their response. Their silence would be understandable: why interrupt the flow of information? But in their minds, no doubt they were already drafting the cable they’d send to the Kremlin detailing their great espionage coup.
It could be just Trump being Trump, showing off his new big boy pants. It could be. Or it could be even worse than that.
Yet there is also a more sinister way to connect all the dots. There are some petulant voices in official Washington who insist that the president’s treachery was deliberate, part of his longtime collaboration with the Russians. It is a true believer’s orthodoxy, one which predicts that the meeting will wind up being one more damning count in an indictment that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, will ultimately nail to the White House door.
But, for now, to bolster their still very circumstantial case, they point to a curiosity surrounding the meeting in the Oval Office—U.S. journalists were kept out. And, no less an oddity, the Russian press was allowed in. It was the photographer from TASS, the state-run Russian news agency, who snapped the only shots that documented the occasion for posterity. Or, for that matter, for the grand jury.
The Guardian reporter Luke Harding has a new book out which argues that Trump is and has been for decades actively colluding with Russia and Putin.
A student group at Laurier University, Lspirg Waterloo, has posted an essay explaining its positionality. LSPIRG stands for Laurier Students’ Public Interest Research Group; it identifies as a social justice group.
Dear Laurier Community,
Due to recent events on the Laurier Waterloo campus and the heightened media coverage, we feel it is our responsibility to speak out against the level of transphobia that has been emerging on campus and in on-line forms.
We have spent a lot of time over the last while speaking about “freedom of speech”. We have, however, not spent much time questioning how the increase of transphobic rhetoric on campus has been impacting students and the larger community. If there is one thing we request of the Laurier community at this time, it is to acknowledge whose voices are being left out when we see these constant articles hitting the news. Who is getting the most amount of air time. Who is getting lots of time to explain their side of the story. And who is not?
Trans students have, without a doubt, been silenced throughout this process. There have been a small handful of articles or interviews released that provide any sort of context from their perspective. And when they do get coverage (such as in the Cord), entire stacks of newspapers are destroyed and returned to the steps of the Cord. So we ask you again, who is being silenced in this situation? Who is having their right to share their side of the story taken from them? And who has little or no ability to change the public discourse?
But is the story in question about “trans students”? All of them? Do we know that? If so, how do we know it? Lindsay Shepherd is the one who was hauled before a tribunal of three people berating her for ridiculous reasons; why are “trans students” supposed to have equal coverage?
The post is framing the issue as if Shepherd had abused “trans students” but that of course is not the case. The three sanctimonious goons who bullied her are the Other Side of this story; the story is not directly about trans people or “trans students.”
The discourse of “freedom of speech” is being used in order to strip the ongoing situation of all its context. We need to shift that discourse so that we can actually see the underlying issues. We need to see what is at the root of this discussion and why trans students feel so passionately about it.
Or to put it another way, we need to claim and insist that this story about three academics bullying a grad student is actually about [all] trans students so that we can claim the “underlying issues” are quite different from the ones being discussed.
We need to acknowledge that “debates” that invalidate the existence of trans people or dehumanize trans people based on their gender is both a form of transphobia and a form of gendered violence. And we need to acknowledge that there is no neutral way to demand that someone defend their existence and their right to a safe educational environment.
Nah, you don’t. You don’t need to acknowledge claims that are not true. Nobody invalidated the existence of trans people or dehumanized trans people; that’s just the familiar irrational catastrophizing bullshit that everyone is so tired of.
For these reasons, we stand in solidarity with the trans students on campus who are continuing to make their voices heard despite brutal and harsh opposition. We stand in solidarity with the trans and non-binary students who are not making their voices heard. Who are keeping to themselves or staying silent out of fear, intimidation, exhaustion, or a range of other valid justifications.
Or, perhaps, because they have enough sense to realize the bullying of Shepherd is not about them and they don’t need to make everything about them.
We stand in solidarity with every trans and non-binary individual (student or not) who has been caught up in the whirlwind of social media and mainstream news that so consistently tells them that they are not important or worthy of having a voice in this discussion.
Nobody is telling them any such fucking thing. The melodrama is not persuasive.
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The child is not an astronaut.
I often find it useful to spell out just exactly what we are talking about rather than assume we’re all talking about the same thing just because we’re using the same words. When gender-critical feminists (formerly known as “feminists”) use the word “women” they are talking about something like “people with physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers” (let’s call them “women₁”). The trans lobby on the other hand are talking about people who think or feel a certain way [1] about themselves (let’s call them “women₂”). Obviously women₂ are about as different from women₁ as flying mammals (let’s call them “bats₁”) are from clubs for hitting baseballs (let’s call them “bats₂”). And yet trans activists insist on acting as if we were all talking about the same thing and try to have it both ways…
…by demanding that feminists who oppose the discrimination faced by women₁ based specifically on physical traits change their cause entirely and turn all their focus toward the discrimination against women₂ [2].
…by demanding that women₂ be allowed to compete in sporting events that are reserved for women₁ specifically to compensate for biological differences.
…by demanding that straight men₁ and lesbian women₁ who are attracted to women₁ based specifically on physical traits consider women₂ as potential partners.
…by demanding that women₂ be allowed to use restrooms that are reserved for women₁ specifically because of physical/biological differences.
…Etc… etc…
There is a reason why trans women₂ are so obsessed with being called the same as the people with physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers: Because they want everyone to accept that they are the same. However, since they don’t in fact have innate physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers, they have to argue that something else makes them the same as women₁, or – more precisely – that something else makes women₁ the same as them, hence the strong insistence on “female” ways of thinking/feeling that women₁ supposedly share with them, thus making them the same kind of people. Seen from such a point of view this is not simply about whether or not trans women₂ should be free to define who they are, but whether or not trans people should be free to define who women₁ are as well. As I keep saying, these implicit claims about what’s going on inside other people’s heads are precisely the part that I for one have the greatest problem with.
Also, since it’s impermissible (because exclusionary [3] to trans women) to ever talk of women₁ as an oppressed group in its own right with its own specific issues that are not entirely reducible to those faced by women₂, the trans lobby’s ultimatum to women₁ everywhere boils down to: “Allow the discrimination you face to go forever unaddressed, or have your name dragged through the dirt all over the internet”. If that’s not a hostile ultimatum, then nothing is.
_________________________
1. I’d like to be more specific than “a certain way”, but unfortunately I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Apparently it has nothing to with the old sexist gender roles and cultural stereotypes, but we’re never told what it does have something to do with.
2. Someone once accused me of strawmanning for making this very point. Apparently no one has suggested that feminists stop fighting for abortion rights etc. My response was to challenge him to specify why abortion rights (or anything else pertaining to the equality of women₁) is specifically a feminist cause without saying the same kind of things that got Ophelia and pretty much every other feminist I admire labeled as TERFs and demonized. “Pregnant people”, anybody? Obviously, I never got an answer.
3. Never mind that their definition of “woman” by necessity excludes anyone who fails to think or feel the required way about themselves. But hey, when has it ever been wrong for entitled, loud, aggressive people with dicks to tell women₁ their place in life?
What Trump should have been asking Xi about instead of three American basketball players who were going to be sent home anyway:
After the death in July of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was China’s most prominent democracy activist, many advocates wondered what would happen to his wife, the artist Liu Xia.
Ms. Liu, a painter and photographer, expressed a desire to relocate overseas after her husband’s death, but activists say that she is being held in unofficial custody away from family and friends.
William Nee, a China researcher for Amnesty International, said Ms. Liu was being punished “simply for being the wife of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.”
Friends of Ms. Liu hoped Mr. Trump, whose administration had previously called for her freedom, would raise the issue with Mr. Xi during his Beijing visit. But Mr. Trump has not said whether he did so, and the Chinese authorities have not offered any new details about her fate, adding to fears that the government may continue to restrict her freedom.
Is it at all likely that he did? Would he have been able to keep the facts about her in his head long enough? Would he have cared? I think the chances are zero.
Ilham Tohti had long called on the Chinese authorities to show greater respect for the culture of Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority who live primarily in Xinjiang, a western autonomous region. Mr. Tohti, an economics professor, documented abuses by the police in Xinjiang and urged the government to do more to defuse tensions between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group.
In 2014, Mr. Tohti was arrested and later convicted of promoting separatism. The government portrayed him as a demagogue who embraced hatred and violence. He was sentenced to life in prison, and the authorities have rebuffed calls to lessen his punishment.
We know Trump wouldn’t go for that. Uighurs are mostly Mooslims – oh no no no no no.
As a lawyer, Wang Quanzhang gravitated toward controversy, taking on cases that involved religious worshipers accusing the government of persecution and activists protesting forced demolitions of houses.
But in the summer of 2015, Mr. Wang’s career came to an abrupt end when he was detained by the police as part of a crackdown on hundreds of human rights lawyers across China. He was later accused of subverting state power and inciting social unrest.
Also not Trump’s kind of thing. He sides with power, not with human rights activists.
Heather Brunskell-Evans wrote a public statement to the Women’s Equality Party dated November 19th.
The Women’s Equality Party (WEP) has informed me that three Party Members have alleged that my “conduct” on the BBC Radio 4 Programme the Moral Maze on 15th November 2017 has “promoted prejudice against the transgender community”. The Party is currently giving weight to this allegation. As a Spokesperson for the Policy on Violence Against Women and Girls I have been informed I am under review by the Executive Committee.
The Committee is now examining my public statements including my blogs, social media, and on-line forums. It is also assessing whether I have complied with the Volunteer Agreement which I signed at the beginning of my term of office. If the Committee concludes my views do promote prejudice, ‘any decision of the Executive Body shall be effective immediately but may be appealed to the Appeals Body, whose decision shall be final’ [1.]
[1.] I mistakenly understood this statement to mean my membership would be revoked. WEP has clarified: ‘According to the Constitution, the Executive Committee will decide whether censure is required and what the appropriate sanction should be in those circumstances’
At the same time, the Party is completely silent about the “conduct” of a fellow panellist on the Moral Maze, Jane Fae. Fae, a trans woman who transitioned to a feminine identity in middle-age, is a speaker for Mermaids (the charity that supports children to transition). She alleged that the prescription of hormone blockers to delay puberty in girls, or the injection of testosterone at the age of 16, is of no greater social or moral concern than prescribing the contraceptive pill.
There are complex psychological and social reasons why, in a society structured by gender and the sexualisation of girls and young women, there is an unprecedented upsurge of girls declaring they are ‘really’ boys. However, there is no credible science to back the narrative that gender ‘identity’ (rather than biological sex) is innate. Hormone blockers have serious consequences on the body, including the probability of infertility. A substantive number of medical practitioners are extremely worried about this practice (as well as the serious medical interventions that usually follow, such as surgical removal of breasts) but daren’t speak out for fear of accusations of transphobia.
However, there is no credible science to back the narrative that gender ‘identity’ (rather than biological sex) is innate.
It’s not really even a scientific question – “identity” isn’t really a scientific category. Identity is a social or political or literary category, or all three or two of the three. Subjective states aren’t really scientific categories, because they’re too…subjective.
And that’s why all this noisy bullying insistence that there are definitely true facts about “gender identity” is so irritating, especially since the definitely true facts change every week or two.
To sum up: it’s all much too fuzzy and debatable to exile or punish or investigate people over. The WEP shouldn’t be investigating Brunskell-Evans.
I joined the Women’s Equality Party because I believed in a political party which would keep at the forefront the rights and safety of girls and women. Through the example of the Moral Maze, the Party has demonstrated it shares similar approaches to transgenderism and to girls and women’s rights as other political parties: it has not questioned Fae’s views whilst rendering my free speech ideologically suspect; it is concerned to protect the trans community rather than the swathes of girls who are increasingly subject to harmful medical practices.
I refute that I have promoted prejudice against the trans community either on the programme or through my writing and social media. I have called for transparent public debate, without fear of reprisal, of the social, psychological and physical consequences of the narrative that children can be born in ‘the wrong body’.
Both can be true, after all. It can be true that there are people who really do need to live as the Other sex (other than their natal sex or biological sex – both of which terms have been ruled impermissible, so apply your own adjective if you feel rumpled) and never look back, and that there are people who only think they do, temporarily, because of social contagion. In fact we pretty much know both are true, don’t we? We know the first category exists, and since we know some people have detransitioned, we also know the second one does. If both exist, what is so wicked about urging caution and low speed when dealing with teenagers? Teenagers haven’t finished cooking yet, so how can they possibly know for sure that they want to live as the Other sex forever?
But by this point the pouncing on Error has become an entrenched part of trans activism, so there we are. Not a good sitch.
From the Times (the London one): another woman no-platformed by university students for wrongthink about gender.
Heather Brunskell-Evans, a research fellow at King’s College London, who is also a spokeswoman for the Women’s Equality Party, told The Times that she believed such institutions were running scared from public debate, out of fear of offending the transgender lobby.
She had been asked by medical students from the Reproductive and Sexual Health Society at King’s to give a talk this week on the subject of pornography and the sexualisation of young women, at the college’s Guy’s Campus in south London.
But days after appearing on the Moral Maze, the Radio 4 series hosted by Michael Buerk, she was told that the event had been cancelled because of concerns that her views on “transgender health . . . would violate the student union’s ‘Safe Space’ policy”.
What views? On Moral Maze, Brunskell-Evans and a psychotherapist and two trans activists talked about defining gender.
The academic had argued in favour of transgender adults defining themselves “in whichever way they want”, but she questioned the advice being promoted to schools and youth groups by transgender organisations that positive affirmation was the only correct way to support children who expressed confusion over their gender.
She said: “If a child decides that it’s an astronaut, one can play along with this. One doesn’t have to moralise about it but quite clearly the child is not an astronaut. In fact it’s incumbent upon adults who are responsible for the welfare, psychological and social and medical, of children not to go along with this story.” It is understood her comments prompted three complaints from transgender members of the Women’s Equality Party, accusing her of “promoting prejudice against the transgender community”.
There’s no such thing as “the transgender community.” There are transgender people, there is trans activism, but there’s no such thing as “the community,” any more than there’s “the feminist community” or “the immigrant community.” In this context the word is being used to bully, making it sound as if skeptical academics are invading a peaceful little village at the foot of the Alps.
But the WEP is investigating Brunskell-Evans, who is their spokeswoman on violence against women and girls.
Dr Brunskell-Evans said she feared “there’s something very dark going on. People who were male are now in the Women’s Equality Party dictating what the party spokeswoman should say on issues affecting women and girls. You could not write this.
“The cowardliness of institutional response is more than reprehensible. No one will speak out. Good people are standing back, doing nothing, as others get pilloried. Organisations and individuals are petrified to be seen as taking any other view than unequivocally endorsing transgender doctrine. It’s truly shocking.
“How has the trans lobby become so powerful that people, including those medical practitioners about to be qualified in the specific field of sexual and reproductive health, are unwilling to tolerate a talk from me on another topic?”
Twitter, mostly.
Behold Nathan Rambukkana’s open letter to Lindsay Shepherd:
Dear Lindsay,
I wanted to write to apologize to you for how the meeting we had proceeded. While I was not able to do so earlier due to confidentiality concerns, including your privacy as a grad student, now that the audio of the meeting is public I can say more. While I still cannot discuss the student concerns raised about the tutorial, everything that has happened since the meeting has given me occasion to rethink not only my approach to discussing the concerns that day, but many of the things I said in our meeting as well.
First, I wanted to say that when I was made aware of the concerns, I was told that the proper procedure would be to have an informal meeting to discuss it. In the process of arranging this, others indicated they should attend as well. This is one of the facets of working at a university, that meetings can often become de-facto committees due to relevant stakeholders being pulled in. My main concerns were finding out why a lesson on writing skills had become a political discussion, and making sure harm didn’t befall students. However, in not also prioritizing my mentorship role as the course director and your supervisor, I didn’t do enough to try to support you in this meeting, which I deeply regret. I should have seen how meeting with a panel of three people would be an intimidating situation and not invite a productive discussion. Had I tried harder to create a situation more conducive to talking these issues through, things might have gone very differently, but alas I did not.
Second, this entire occasion, and hearing from so many with passionate views on this issue from across the political spectrum, has made me seriously rethink some of the positions I took in the meeting. I made the argument that first-year students, not studying this topic specifically, might not have the tool kit to unpack or process a controversial view such as Dr. Peterson’s, saying that such material might be better reserved for upper-year or grad courses. While I still think that such material needs to be handled carefully, especially so as to not infringe on the rights of any of our students or make them feel unwelcome in the learning environment, I believe you are right that making a space for controversial or oppositional views is important, and even essential to a university. The trick is how to properly contextualize such material. One way might be through having readings, or a lecture on the subject before discussion, but you are correct that first-years should be eligible to engage with societal debates in this way. Perhaps instead of the route I took I should have added further discussion in lecture, or supplementary readings. But instead I tried to make a point about the need to contextualize difficult material, and drew on the example of playing a speech by Hitler to do it. This was, obviously, a poorly chosen example. I meant to use it to drive home a point about context by saying here was material that would definitely need to be contextualized rather than presented neutrally, and instead I implied that Dr. Peterson is like Hitler, which is untrue and was never my intention. While I disagree strongly with many of Dr. Peterson’s academic positions and actions, the tired analogy does him a disservice and was the opposite of useful in our discussion.
Finally there is the question of teaching from a social justice perspective, which my course does attempt to do. I write elsewhere about reaching across the aisle to former alt-right figures as possible unexpected allies in the struggle to create a better more just society for all. But hearing all of the feedback from people and looking at the polarized response I am beginning to rethink so limited an approach. Maybe we ought to strive to reach across all of our multiple divisions to find points where we can discuss such issues, air multiple perspectives, and embrace the diversity of thought. And maybe I have to get out of an “us versus them” habit of thought to do this myself, and to think of the goal as more than simply advancing social justice, but social betterment and progress as a whole. While I think that such a pedagogical approach must still work not to marginalize some students, I think the issues are too complex to leave as a binary with protection of students on one side and protection of speech on the other. We should be striving for both, which is why I look forward to participating in Dr. MacLatchy’s task force looking into these issues at Laurier, and I hope perhaps you might consider doing the same so we could together work towards an even stronger institutional future.
I’m sorry this came to pass the way it did, and look forward to moving past this and continue working with you as my TA and perhaps in the future.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Nathan Rambukkana
The first thing that strikes me?
That is such terrible writing.
It’s so dead, so airless, so dull, so institutional.
Yet his field is Communication.
Bread and roses. We need bread but we also need roses, god damn it. We need justice and we also need beauty. We need equality and we need play. We need fairness and also humor.
That guy’s got no roses at all.
The substance? Well, take this sentence for a start:
I should have seen how meeting with a panel of three people would be an intimidating situation and not invite a productive discussion.
Come on. He couldn’t have not seen at the time how intimidating it was. You can hear it in her voice every time she speaks. You can hear it in their smug voices every time they speak, the three of them. Hello? “Communication”? Don’t try to tell us that a communications scholar was completely in the dark about how intimidating that setup was until well afterwards. Shorter: give me a fucking break.
Then take this half-sentence:
I’m sorry this came to pass the way it did…
Ah no you don’t. It didn’t “come to pass”; it was an act performed by agents, principally Dr Rambukkan himself. “Communication”?
I give it a D, and that’s being generous.
Killing net neutrality will be very bad.
Back in 2005, a small phone company based in North Carolina named Madison River began preventing its subscribers from making phone calls using the internet application Vonage. As Vonage was a competitor in the phone call market, Madison River’s action was obviously anticompetitive. Consumers complained, and the Federal Communications Commission, under Michael Powell, its Republican-appointed chairman, promptly fined the company and forced it to stop blocking Vonage.
That was the moment when “net neutrality” rules went from a mere academic proposal to a part of the United States legal order. On that foundation — an open internet, with no blocking — much of our current internet ecosystem was built.
On Tuesday, the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, announced plans to eliminate even the most basic net neutrality protections — including the ban on blocking — replacing them with a “transparency” regime enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. “Transparency,” of course, is a euphemism for “doing nothing.”
It’s like the courts ruling that pouring money into politics is fine as long as it’s all “transparent” – as if we all have the time and resources to keep track of who is bribing which senators. “Transparency” is no use to us; we want to use the damn internet, not spend all our time monitoring interference with it.
Companies like Madison River, it seems, will soon be able to block internet calls so long as they disclose the blocking (presumably in fine print). Indeed, a broadband carrier like AT&T, if it wanted, might even practice internet censorship akin to that of the Chinese state, blocking its critics and promoting its own agenda.
Allowing such censorship is anathema to the internet’s (and America’s) founding spirit. And by going this far, the F.C.C. may also have overplayed its legal hand. So drastic is the reversal of policy (if, as expected, the commission approves Mr. Pai’s proposal next month), and so weak is the evidence to support the change, that it seems destined to be struck down in court.
The problem for Mr. Pai is that government agencies are not free to abruptly reverse longstanding rules on which many have relied without a good reason, such as a change in factual circumstances. A mere change in F.C.C. ideology isn’t enough. As the Supreme Court has said, a federal agency must “examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action.” Given that net neutrality rules have been a huge success by most measures, the justification for killing them would have to be very strong.
It isn’t. The “justification” is that cable and phone companies want more money. They make lots already, but they want more, damn it. What their customers want is beside the point.
Mr. Pai faces a more serious legal problem. Because he is killing net neutrality outright, not merely weakening it, he will have to explain to a court not just the shift from 2015 but also his reasoning for destroying the basic bans on blocking and throttling, which have been in effect since 2005 and have been relied on extensively by the entire internet ecosystem.
This will be a difficult task. What has changed since 2004 that now makes the blocking or throttling of competitors not a problem? The evidence points strongly in the opposite direction: There is a long history of anticompetitive throttling and blocking — often concealed — that the F.C.C. has had to stop to preserve the health of the internet economy. Examples include AT&T’s efforts to keep Skype off iPhones and the blocking of Google Wallet by Verizon. Services like Skype and Netflix would have met an early death without basic net neutrality protections. Mr. Pai needs to explain why we no longer have to worry about this sort of threat — and “You can trust your cable company” will not suffice.
I’m so tired of living in Mordor.
Trump this morning:
It wasn’t the White House, it wasn’t the State Department, it wasn’t father LaVar’s so-called people on the ground in China that got his son out of a long term prison sentence – IT WAS ME. Too bad! LaVar is just a poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair. Just think..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2017
…LaVar, you could have spent the next 5 to 10 years during Thanksgiving with your son in China, but no NBA contract to support you. But remember LaVar, shoplifting is NOT a little thing. It’s a really big deal, especially in China. Ungrateful fool!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2017
The NFL is now thinking about a new idea – keeping teams in the Locker Room during the National Anthem next season. That’s almost as bad as kneeling! When will the highly paid Commissioner finally get tough and smart? This issue is killing your league!…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2017
Three race-baiting tweets in a row, two of them aimed at one obscure citizen…by the president of the US.
Every day a new plunge downward.
The Post says anyway Trump is bullshitting about what their fate would have been without his miraculous powers.
Trump is right that China’s criminal justice system has a very high conviction rate and that the punishment for theft ranges widely, from a couple of days to 10 years in prison.
But experts say the basketball players would have almost certainly escaped China without jail time. When foreigners commit minor offenses, Chinese officials are more likely to deport them instead of imprisoning them. It’s just not worth the diplomatic headache. “It’s nonsense,” Fu Hualing, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, told the New York Times of Trump’s assertion that he was solely responsible for the athletes’ release. “I would be surprised if they were even prosecuted.”
Jerome Cohen, an Asia expert and faculty director of New York University’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute, told USA Todaythat it’s “extremely unlikely” that the players would have been sentenced to any jail time. From the start, the players were given bail, a sign that Chinese officials weren’t going to push for a full sentence.
Facts are for libbruls.
Meanwhile, activists are asking why Trump didn’t use his sway to advocate for the release of some of China’s political prisoners, like Liu Xia, an artist, photographer and the widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. She is being held in unofficial custody away from family and friends, punished simply for being the wife of Liu.
Activists also highlighted the plight of Ilham Tohti, an advocate for China’s Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority that has long faced oppression. Tohti was imprisoned in 2014 and sentenced to life in prison. Wang Quanzhang, a human rights lawyer, was arrested in 2015 as part of a crackdown against human rights activists. No one has been permitted to visit him, and his wife says she doesn’t even know whether he’s alive.
Well you can’t expect Trump to care about people like that. One, they’re Chinese. Two, they’re disobedient to Authority, or married to people who are disobedient to Authority. Three, that Totey guy is a Mooslim. Four, they’re not American. Five, they’re Chinese. Six, he’s never heard of them. Seven, he doesn’t care.
Now, who’s ready for some golf?
The Times points out that Europe is tilting more towards National Pride than against it.
Far from the quieted theaters of Balkan conflict, nationalist passions, the clamor for redrawn frontiers and collisions of faith are rising anew, not to the crump of mortar fire and the stutter of machine guns, but in the recharting of the political landscape.
In October, Austria became the latest European nation to veer to the right, following Hungary and Poland. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany secured enough votes in national elections in September to enter Parliament for the first time. In many lands there is a sense of flux, from the secessionist yearnings of Catalonia in Spain to Britain’s planned departure from the European Union.
…
In Britain, many who voted in June 2016 to leave the European Union did so, they said, out of resentment of outsiders’ influence over their destinies and the presence of what they saw as unchecked European immigrants.
In Serbia, calls are intensifying for a return to the nationalist politics of the 1990s. Once-discredited senior officials from the barbarous government of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade — and not a few convicted war criminals — are reclaiming positions of prominence.
In the US there’s a racist maniac as head of state.
Commenting on the outcome of the trial in The Hague, Natasa Kandic, a leading Serbian human rights activist, said that with the atrocities in the Bosnian war, “we stopped being part of the civilized world.”
“Now we can see who stopped our progress and why we became a society without solidarity or compassion,” Ms. Kandic said.
It can happen to anyone. Beware.
The former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić, nicknamed the ‘butcher of Bosnia’, has been sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
More than 20 years after the Srebrenica massacre, Mladić was found guilty at the United Nations-backed international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague of 10 offences involving extermination, murder and persecution of civilian populations.
As he entered the courtroom, Mladić gave a broad smile and thumbs up to the cameras – a gesture that infuriated relatives of the victims. His defiance shifted into detachment as the judgment began: Mladić played with his fingers and nodded occasionally, looking initially relaxed.
The verdict was disrupted for more than half an hour when he asked the judges for a bathroom break. After he returned, defence lawyers requested that proceedings be halted or shortened because of his high blood pressure. The judges denied the request. Mladić then stood up shouting “this is all lies” and “I’ll fuck your mother”. He was forcibly removed from the courtroom. The verdicts were read in his absence.
Interesting how they go for the mother, isn’t it. Duterte called Obama “son of a whore.” It’s always a woman’s fault really.
Men and boys were the victims at Srebrenica though.
The one-time fugitive from international justice faced 11 charges, two of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and four of violations of the laws or customs of war. He was cleared of one count of genocide, but found guilty of all other charges. The separate counts related to “ethnic cleansing” operations in Bosnia, sniping and shelling attacks on besieged civilians in Sarajevo, the massacre of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica and taking UN personnel hostage in an attempt to deter Nato airstrikes.
The trial took 530 days spread out over four years, with more than 600 people testifying.
Relatives of victims flew into the Netherlands to attend the hearing, determined to see Mladić receive justice decades after the end of the war in which more than 100,000 people were killed.
Among those present was Fikret Alić, the Bosnian who was photographed as an emaciated prisonerbehind the wire of a prison camp in 1992. “Justice has won and the war criminal has been convicted,” he said after the verdict. Others were reduced to tears by the judge’s description of past atrocities.
Phil Nijhuis/AP
There are still people who think he’s a hero though.
The hearing, broadcast live, was followed closely in Bosnia. The Bosnian prime minister, Denis Zvizdić, said the verdict “confirmed that war criminals cannot escape justice regardless of how long they hide”.
In Lazarevo, the Serbian village where Mladić was arrested in 2011, residents dismissed the guilty verdicts as biased. One, Igor Topolic, said: “All this is a farce for me. He [Mladić] is a Serbian national hero.”
Mladić’s home village of Bozinovici retains a street named after the former general, where he is praised as a symbol of defiance and national pride.
That’s what “national pride” does to people.
But! Don’t worry – the Laurier Rainbow Centre wrote an emergency Facebook post to explain how transphobic it all is.
Dear Laurier Community,
In the face of recent media attention, we feel it is our responsibility to speak out against the climate of transphobia that is being fostered at Laurier. The university’s silence on these issues has allowed for a one-sided perspective to be cultivated in the media that is entirely disconnected from the experiences of trans people. We speak now as a collective of queer and trans students, asking you to engage critically with the media you read and to hold our community with care.
On Friday November 10th, an article was published in the National Post that disparaged the university’s response to a situation that emerged in a first year Communications course. We are obligated to uphold the confidentiality of all parties and, therefore, are unable to comment directly on the situation that instigated this article.* We can, however, speak to the ways in which this article, and the dozens that have been published since, are defending and perpetuating transphobic beliefs and attitudes.
*Nonsense; it was all over the press for days, with the protagonists named. Also a situation can’t “instigate” an article. They mean “inspired” or “motivated.”
Under the banner of freedom of speech, the news media have advanced a critique of institutional practices aimed at increasing inclusivity and challenging oppression. The always present but often unnamed ‘other’ at the center of these critiques, are the trans and non-binary individuals who these institutional practices would support. We must understand the ways in which these attacks on the “PC culture” of the university are, in actuality, attacks on the needs of trans people that these critics do not support.
The discourse of freedom of speech, is being used to cover over the underlying reality of transphobia that is so deeply ingrained in our contemporary political context. Ironically, these discourses seem intent on silencing those who speak out against the systemic violence perpetrated against trans people while propagating a far right ideology. In fact, recent empirical studies conducted by White and Crandall (2017) have shown that freedom of speech endorsement is predicted by underlying prejudicial attitudes.
So…they’re saying Rambukka was “speaking out against the systemic violence perpetrated against trans people” when he bullied and browbeat Lindsay Shepherd for using a brief clip of Jordan Peterson in her tutorial? How was he doing that? Shepherd wasn’t endorsing Peterson, so even if you accept the claim that Peterson is perpetrating violence against trans people, it’s not reasonable to claim that Shepherd is also doing so.
We must, therefore, be critical of the ways in which trans bodies are being appropriated as the battleground on which the war of freedom of speech is waged.
Really. Shepherd stole trans bodies and fought a battle while standing on them? Really? Why hasn’t this been reported?
Debates about gender neutral pronouns or the validity of trans identities are not only discussions about (dis)allowable speech but, also, affronts on the reality of trans experience. These debates, regardless of how “neutrally” they are presented, constitute a form of epistemic violence that dehumanizes trans people by denying the validity of trans experience.
No they don’t. You can’t use “regardless of” that way. You can’t say “regardless of the obvious fact that presenting an example of an opinion is not the same as embracing it, I’m going to say it is, because I want to” and expect to be taken seriously. That’s a good deal more “epistemically violent” than anything Lindsay Shepherd did.
For trans people, these debates invalidate their gender identity or expression as wrong or pathological, with very material impacts for their well-being. According to a national study, two-thirds of trans youth in Canada have engaged in self-harm and one-third have attempted suicide (Veale et al., 2015). For cisgender (non-trans) people, these debates validate the ideologies of cisnormativity and genderism that inform transphobia, once again with material impacts for trans people. According to the Trans Pulse project, for example, 20% of trans people in Ontario have been physically or sexually assaulted for being trans and 34% have been verbally threatened or harassed (Bauer & Scheim, 2015).
In this context, we must respond to the enactment and maintenance of transphobia and problematize media that upholds transphobic ideologies. We should take students’ concerns about their safety and well-being as a result of the intensification of these ideologies on campus very seriously. These concerns are real, with students accessing the Rainbow Centre for support around experiences of harassment in their classrooms, on campus, and in online forms, as a result of this increased media attention. The Rainbow Centre itself is being targeted on this issue, with antagonizing posters being left on our windows and emails criticizing our educational initiatives around Transgender Day of Remembrance.
These experiences of transphobia and their aforementioned implications, are the realities in which our conversations about this issue need to be embedded. We all have a responsibility to create an environment for learning and living in which trans people are safe from epistemic and transphobic violence. We all have a responsibility to speak out about these issues, and we call on our allies who have remained silent to please take a stance. This political moment is intent on derogating trans people in the name of freedom of speech and we cannot allow for this profound violence to be continued.
It isn’t violence. There are arguments that can be made about ways that speech can create climates that become friendly to violence; I think Trump did that during his campaign, for instance, and has been doing a lot of it since. But that doesn’t make the speech itself “violence” and people will just roll their eyes when you tell them it does.
Grade: F. Repeat the course.
So it appears Laurier is feeling a little embarrassed, or at least a little uncomfortable. It’s apologized to Lindsay Shepherd.
The president of Wilfrid Laurier University said the school is proceeding with a third-party investigation into the dispute with graduate student Lindsay Shepherd, but said recently revealed audio recordings of her interactions with her immediate superiors made it clear an apology was in order.
Shepherd said she discreetly recorded a meeting with three Laurier faculty and staff members in which she was roundly criticized for failing to condemn the views of polarizing University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who has refused to use gender-neutral pronouns. She had aired a clip of a debate featuring the professor as part of a communications tutorial.
Three people, to shame and berate one grad student.
“The conversation I heard does not reflect the values and practices to which Laurier aspires,” the university’s president, Deborah MacLatchy, said in a statement Tuesday. “I am sorry it occurred in the way that it did and I regret the impact it had on Lindsay Shepherd.”
Shepherd said she accepted and welcomed the apology, but felt it rang hollow coming on the heels of intensive media attention around her case.
…
The saga began earlier this month when Shepherd led two tutorial groups of students taking a first-year communications course.
As part of a lesson on the complexities of grammar, Shepherd said she was trying to demonstrate that the structure of a language can impact the society in which its spoken in ways people might not anticipate.
To illustrate her point, she said she mentioned that long-standing views on gender had likely been shaped by the gender-specific pronouns that are part of English’s fundamental grammatical structure.
And her use of the clip with Peterson was part of that illustration; attribution not use.
Rambukkana also apologized in an open letter to Shepherd…sort of apologized. Passive-aggressively half apologized and half said he was still right.
“While I still think that such material needs to be handled carefully, especially so as to not infringe on the rights of any of our students or make them feel unwelcome in the learning environment, I believe you are right that making a space for controversial or oppositional views is important, and even essential to a university,” he wrote in the letter.
“The trick is how to properly contextualize such material.”
Rambukkana also apologized for meeting with Shepherd in the company of two other colleagues, responding to criticism that such a set-up demonstrated a power imbalance.
Ya think? Bully.
Janine Nichols on Facebook November 16:
I worked with Al Franken for many years at SNL and beyond and he is in NO WAY a sexual harasser. In fact, I remember an instance in which he defended me from the unwanted advances of a piece of shit host I shall not name. When I think of the drug use and general debauchery of the Not Ready For Prime Time years — and believe me, we were pretty much always laughing — Franken was a fucking choir boy compared to others I could name. I never even saw him smoke any weed, though maybe he did: He was friends with, toured with, the Grateful Dead, after all. They had weed that made you forget your own name. THAT I remember!
The penalty for every sexual transgression cannot be ruination. If we’re going to achieve some culture-wide measure of enlightenment, we have to recognize this. Offensive sexual behaviors run from annoying to creepy to hideous to murder (list incomplete) and we have to find a way to acknowledge this. We’re up against centuries, fuck, millennia of patriarchy. It’s not going to be over by the time I leave this earth, but it’s going to be much much better for girls and women than it is today. And that’s going to make things better for men, too. Because we are going to use our growing power wisely, right? Not like MEN do.
I saw Michelle Goldberg on All In tonight. I am a fan of hers. I was shocked to hear her say that she has a column out calling for Franken’s resignation but she’s not really sure if she was right to do that. So maybe wait until you’re sure what you want to say before you say it? How’s that for an idea?
I accept Al’s apology. I note that it included the words “I am sorry,” which is more than C.K. or any other of the recently accused could muster. I’ll be stunned if there are more accusations against him. I never saw it in him. He’s been married to the same gal for over 40 years; they threw my wedding shower.
Franken could be mean as a snake, don’t get me wrong, and he had a badass temper; he was a pit bull. I imagine he is still capable of such behavior. But I never saw him sexually harass anyone and I hope to fuck he doesn’t resign.
There are degrees. I do think the photo was an asshole move, whether or not his hands made contact with her front bumps. I think it was an asshole move, but it’s not the same as a long history of skeeving on women at work. If a sweary colleague says he fucking wasn’t like that, and three dozen women who worked with him on SNL issue a statement saying the same thing, I tend toward believing them.
Three dozen women who worked with Sen. Al Franken during his tenure on “Saturday Night Live” came out in defense of the Minnesota Democrat facing allegations of sexual misconduct.
In the letter, the women slammed Franken’s behavior toward Leeann Tweeden — who accused the lawmaker of forcibly kissing and groping her more than a decade ago — as “stupid and foolish” but wrote that “not one of us ever experienced any inappropriate behavior” from the former SNL cast member.
“We feel compelled to stand up for Al Franken, whom we have all had the pleasure of working with over the years on Saturday Night Live (SNL). What Al did was stupid and foolish, and we think it was appropriate for him to apologize to Ms. Tweeden, and to the public,” the women wrote. “In our experience, we know Al as a devoted and dedicated family man, a wonderful comedic performer, and an honorable public servant.”
“That is why we are moved to quickly and directly affirm that after years of working with him, we would like to acknowledge that not one of us ever experienced any inappropriate behavior; and mention our sincere appreciation that he treated each of us with the utmost respect and regard,” they added.
There are degrees. Yes, I’m probably more inclined to say there are degrees when it’s someone who doesn’t use his political power to oppress women than I am when it’s someone who does; I’m funny that way.
Following Tweeden’s allegation, a group of former female staffers in Franken’s office and on his campaigns penned a letter in which they wrote that Franken “treated us with the utmost respect,” “valued our work and our opinions and was a champion for women both in the legislation he supported and in promoting women to leadership roles in our offices.”
In addition, his former chief of staff, Casey Aden-Wansbury, defended Franken, saying in a statement that “he has always worked hard to create a respectful environment for his staff.”
Yesterday a woman said he grabbed her firmly on the butt while taking a picture with her at a state fair. Make of it what you will.
Trump and his sleazy friends continue smashing everything.
The Federal Communications Commission announced on Tuesday that it planned to dismantle landmark regulations that ensure equal access to the internet, clearing the way for companies to charge more and block access to some websites.
The proposal, put forward by the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, is a sweeping repeal of rules put in place by the Obama administration that prohibited high-speed internet service providers from blocking or slowing down the delivery websites, or charging extra fees for the best quality of streaming and other internet services for their subscribers.
Good for AT&T and Comcast, bad for everyone else.
The plan to repeal the 2015 net neutrality rules also reverses a hallmark decision by the agency to declare broadband as a service as essential as phones and electricity, a move that created the legal foundation for the net neutrality rules and underscored the importance of high-speed internet service to the nation.
The proposal is widely expected to be approved during a Dec. 14 meeting in a 3-to-2 majority vote along party lines.
Smashing all the things.
The world of morning tv news is a closed book to me, a locked room, a sealed vault. The idea of tv news in the morning makes me feel queasy, sort of like chocolate cake for breakfast. This is why I didn’t know Charlie Rose was a big noise in morning tv. I thought he was a mystifyingly big noise in public tv chat shows late at night. Apparently he covered both ends of the day, which just goes to show what weirdly low standards we have in the US…as if we needed more evidence of that.
Gayle King, Norah O’Donnell, and Charlie Rose built “CBS This Morning” from a dusty franchise into a lively, news-focused broadcast, primarily around the banter and bon mots they shared as the show’s genial hosts.
Bons mots, please; adjectives agree with nouns in French. But anyway, see what I mean? Ugh – banter and bad jokes from “genial” people at dawn; shoot me now.
Anyway, point is, no bons mots this morning.
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Rose was absent, and Ms. King and Ms. O’Donnell were left to deliver the news that he had been accused by at least eight women of making crude sexual advances.
“None of us ever thought that we’d be sitting at this table in particular and telling this story,” Ms. King said grimly. “But here we are.”
Being ungenial.
The backstage drama of morning television rarely makes it on air in a genre that thrives on affability and studied ease.
But on Tuesday, “CBS This Morning” viewers witnessed an extraordinary public reckoning. The show’s producers devoted the opening 10 minutes of the show to an unvarnished account of the allegations that have been made against Mr. Rose, including a snippet from a media critic, James Warren, who said that the veteran broadcaster’s career was “probably toast.”
CBS fired him later in the morning.
You know, here’s another thing. He’s 75. Can you imagine a woman being one of the hosts of that show or any other show like it at age 75? It is to laugh. For men, age is added gravitas; for women, age is ewwwwwwwwwwww gross get out of here.
(Mind you, not absolutely all men. It hasn’t given Trump any more goddam gravitas.)
As a wave of harassment claims has cascaded across industries, news organizations have increasingly faced the delicate task of covering allegations against their own employees.
Mark Halperin of NBC News, the former New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier and Michael Oreskes, National Public Radio’s top editor, are among the prominent media figures to be accused of sexual misconduct. On Monday, The New York Times suspended Glenn Thrush, one of its White House correspondents, after the website Vox published an article in which four women described him engaging in inappropriate sexual behavior.
And since then people have been pointing out Glenn Thrush’s relentless obsession with Clinton’s emails. Makes ya think.
