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.

Now it makes sense.

Megyn Kelly has spoken out about an experience she had with the TV host [Charlie Rose], whom she also considers a friend. She recalled asking Rose to emcee the first event on her book tour last year, during which she said Rose hijacked the opportunity and instead interrogated her on the sexual-harassment accusations she had made against Roger Ailes. “The exchange felt to me like a cross-examine focused on one issue,” she said on Megyn Kelly Today. “I felt defensive in the exchange with Charlie and wound up angry about how he handled my book event. Obviously now his behavior makes more sense.”

Sinister sense, but sense.

Her response to it then: “I sent him a bottle of wine and a thank you note.” Correcting the audience’s applause at what seemed like Kelly taking the high road, Kelly said she only backed off because women are taught it’s “better to be nice” than challenge a man. “It’s well past time for us to express our upset,” she said. “The time has come. The time has come. We are in the middle of an empowerment revolution in this country.”

Taken long enough, hasn’t it.

Another one.

Eight women have told The Washington Post that longtime television host Charlie Rose made unwanted sexual advances toward them, including lewd phone calls, walking around naked in their presence, or groping their breasts, buttocks or genital areas.

The women were employees or aspired to work for Rose at the “Charlie Rose” show from the late 1990s to as recently as 2011. They ranged in age from 21 to 37 at the time of the alleged encounters. Rose, 75, whose show airs on PBS and Bloomberg TV, also co-hosts “CBS This Morning” and is a contributing correspondent for “60 Minutes.”

I can’t stand Charlie Rose and never watch him. It’s beyond me why he’s ever been a thing.

Within hours of the publication of this story, PBS and Bloomberg LP immediately suspended distribution of the “Charlie Rose” show. CBS announced that it was suspending Rose as it looked into the matter.

I suppose they’ll replace him with Deepak Chopra or one of those people who walk around on stages talking about vitamins.

Most of the women said Rose alternated between fury and flattery in his interactions with them. Five described Rose putting his hand on their legs, sometimes their upper thigh, in what they perceived as a test to gauge their reactions. Two said that while they were working for Rose at his residences or were traveling with him on business, he emerged from the shower and walked naked in front of them. One said he groped her buttocks at a staff party.

Naked Charlie Rose. Naked furious Charlie Rose. Nope, I’m not seeing the allure.

Rumors about Rose’s behavior have circulated for years. One of the authors of this report, Outlook contributing writer Irin Carmon, first heard and attempted to report on the allegations involving two of the women while she was a journalist at Jezebel in 2010 but was unable to confirm them. In the past several weeks in the wake of accusations against Harvey Weinstein, Carmon and Post investigative reporter Amy Brittain jointly began contacting dozens of men and women who had worked on the “Charlie Rose” show or interviewed for jobs there.

A woman then in her 30s who was at the Bellport home in 2010 to discuss a job opportunity said Rose appeared before her in an untethered bathrobe, naked underneath. She said he subsequently attempted to put his hands down her pants. She said she pushed his hands away and wept throughout the encounter.

In his statement he said: “I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realize I was mistaken.” Oh come on.

Rose’s eponymous show, with its trademark black background and round oak table, has been in production since 1991. What it lacks in mass viewership, the “Charlie Rose” show makes up for in prestige and high-profile bookings of the likes of former president Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Warren Buffett. Rose’s show is produced by Charlie Rose Inc., an independent television production company, and distributed by PBS. It is filmed at Bloomberg headquarters in Manhattan.

The prestige is what I don’t get. He’s dull, and he asks dull questions.

The “Charlie Rose” show prides itself on its highbrow intellectual ambition, but his life is glamorous, full of black-tie galas and famous friends. He can be charming and generous, consulting favored employees for their opinions on what to ask heads of state or whisking them off to exotic locations for interviews. But his wrath was swift and often fiercely personal, according to interviews with multiple former employees.

Maybe Star Dudes aren’t such a terrific idea after all.

Brian Platt at the National Post on C-16 and whether or not it makes it a Crime for people who teach in universities to show examples of more than one point of view by way of illustrating that there is often more than one point of view.

A federal bill passed last June that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity or expression had been hotly contested by critics who called it a drastic restriction on free speech rights.

Now, just five months after it became law, Bill C-16 has its first big controversy — and it shows how the legislation is being misinterpreted in practice.

Isn’t that one of the things critics warned about? I didn’t follow the discussion, but that generally is one of the things critics warn about when new laws turn up forbidding certain kinds of speech. Critics warn about it because it’s a thing that can happen. People are assholes, and they will pounce on opportunities to bully others the way those assholes pounced on Shepherd.

Lindsay Shepherd, a 22-year-old teaching assistant in communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, was disciplined this month by faculty for showing first-year students clips from a debate on pronouns and gender. The debate, aired on Ontario’s public broadcaster TVO, involved University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who’s become internationally known for railing against gender-neutral pronouns as radical left-wing indoctrination.

Shepherd was called into a meeting with her supervising professor, Nathan Rambukkana, as well as another professor and an official from the university’s diversity and equity office. In a recording, Rambukkana is heard telling a tearful Shepherd that she created a “toxic climate” for students by showing parts of Peterson’s argument, and compared it to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler.”

But Rambukkana goes further, telling Shepherd she’s also in violation of the legal regime created by C-16.

“These arguments are counter to the Canadian Human Rights Code ever since, and I know that you talked about C-16, ever since this passed, it is discriminatory to be targeting someone due to their gender identity and gender expression,” he says.

That was one of the more disgusting aspects of that trainwreck, the way they kept talking about targeting, as if she were doing any such thing.

Here, for the record, is what Bill C-16 does and doesn’t do when it comes to debates on transgender issues.

C-16 added gender identity and expressions as a category for what counts under Canada’s hate-crime laws, which include calling for genocide or wilfully inciting hatred toward an identifiable group. The categories of colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation and mental or physical disability were already on the list of identifiable groups.

The threshold for a conviction under these laws is high, and charges can only be laid with the approval of a province’s attorney general.

The bill also added the targeting of gender identity and expression as an aggravating factor in sentencing. This means that if you’re convicted of an offence such as assault, the sentence can be made harsher if there’s evidence you were motivated by hatred or prejudice on this basis.

If you’re giving a tutorial on communication in a university, not so much – Rambukkana notwithstanding.

Anyway, it’s part of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which doesn’t apply to people who work at universities.

Universities instead fall under provincial codes — but the Ontario Human Rights Code has included gender identity and expression for five years now, long before Peterson gained fame for his arguments.

Ok, so is it a crime under that code?

Nobody knows for sure, but it would be a stretch.

A workplace, housing or service provider covered by the provincial code could be forced to pay a fine or change their practices if found to be discriminating on the matter of gender identity or expression. But it’s unclear how the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario would rule on a case involving pronoun use.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission, which is separate from the tribunal and focuses on education, has a policy guideline saying that “refusing to refer to a person by their self-identified name and proper personal pronoun” could constitute gender-based harassment.

But the commission also says cases involving pronouns and free speech require a balancing act.

“The Supreme Court has also found that some limits on free speech are justifiable to protect people from harassment and discrimination in social areas like employment and services,” says a document posted online. “On the other hand, decision-makers have said that freedom of expression is much less likely to be limited in the context of a public debate on social, political or religious issues in a university or a newspaper.”

Cossman strongly doubts that showing some clips as part of an academic debate would lead to a discrimination finding.

“It is hard to imagine that a court would make such a finding,” she said. “The point of showing the video was to discuss the content of the ideas, and a court would have to balance the rights to non-discrimination with the values of academic freedom and freedom of expression.”

I’m strangely not reassured. It’s hard to imagine but not impossible.

Pronouns for fuck’s sake.

Alice Ollstein at Talking Points Memo makes the zany argument that if you destroy something, people will blame you for destroying it rather than the people who created it. Wild, huh?

As his administration has steadily chipped away at the Affordable Care Act, President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that the public will blame the Democratic Party for any health care fallout.

Now, as Republicans in Congress inch towards striking what could be the biggest blow yet to Obamacare—sticking a provision repealing the individual mandate into their tax bill—even some on the right are starting to sweat that the GOP will fully own the issue going forward.

“You can make an argument that Obamacare is falling of its own weight, until we repeal the individual mandate,” a grave-faced Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters in the halls of the Capitol on Thursday. “I hope every Republican knows that when you pass a repeal of the individual mandate, it’s no longer their problem. It becomes our problem.”

A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation confirms these fears. More than 60 percent of respondents, including a majority of Republicans, in the think tank’s November tracking poll said that Trump and the GOP are “responsible for any problems” with the Affordable Care Act going forward.

It seems so unfair, doesn’t it? Just because Trump has been shouting his intention to destroy the ACA all along, that’s no reason to blame him or the Republicans when they succeed in doing it.

More Republicans now also blame the Republicans for the demolition job.

That notable shift happened as the Trump administration took a number of blatant actions to undermine the Affordable Care Act—gutting outreach by 90 percent and in-person signup assistance by more than half, abruptly canceling billions in cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers, severing partnerships with dozens of community groups that promoted enrollment, and using the presidential megaphone and agency resources to attack the ACA and predict its imminent demise.

They’re doing all this why? Because they think people should be left without health insurance if they’re not rich. It’s the heart of the Republican creed: rich people are good and everyone else sucks.

Ok there’s this: Laurier university starts independent probe after teaching assistant plays clip of gender debate.

Oh no, not clip of gender debate!! Say it isn’t so!

Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University, said she ran afoul of school authorities after she aired a clip in two tutorials of a debate on gender-neutral pronouns featuring polarizing University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson.

The excerpt from TVO’s current affairs program The Agenda shows Peterson, who has famously refused to use gender pronouns other than “he” or “she,” defending his position against a professor who argued it was necessary to use the pronouns that a person prefers to be called.

As I just mentioned the other day, I don’t see Peterson as a serious or interesting source, but that’s way beside the point here. Shepherd was doing a “here are examples of opposing points of view on this subject,” not a “here are two of my very favorite thinkers for you to admire.” Peterson is conspicuous for his views on gender and pronouns, so it would make sense to use him for one pole.

The excerpt from TVO’s current affairs program The Agenda shows Peterson, who has famously refused to use gender pronouns other than “he” or “she,” defending his position against a professor who argued it was necessary to use the pronouns that a person prefers to be called.

Shepherd said she was chastised by her superiors for failing to condemn Peterson’s remarks outright and told her neutral approach to the clip was tantamount to remaining neutral on other objectionable views such as those of Adolf Hitler.

The university would not confirm what was said to Shepherd, but said it had enlisted an unidentified “neutral third-party professional” to “gather the facts” of the situation.

Well guess what, there’s a recording, and excerpts from it have been published. (Shepherd is very clear and her inquisitors are farther away and much less clear, so I assume it’s Shepherd who both recorded the inquisition and gave it to the press.)

I urge listening to it. It’s a little over 9 minutes, and it’s deeply disgusting.

I transcribed some. Do listen, though, to get the full sanctimony and confidence of her torturers.

Man: “It is discriminatory to be targeting someone due to their gender identity or gender expression. So, bringing something like that up in class, not critically – and I understand that you’re trying to, like –

LS: “It was critical. I introduced it critically.”

Man: “How so?”

LS: “Like I said, it was in the spirit of debate.”

Man: “Ok. In the spirit of the debate is slightly different than being like, ok, this is like a problematic idea that we might want to unpack – “

LS: “But that’s taking sides.” [1:48]

[skip ahead]

Man: “You’re perfectly entitled to your own opinion, but when you’re bringing it into the context of the classroom, that can be problematic.” [3:02]

Woman: “Let me mention the gender violence, the gender and sexual violence policy…doesn’t mean just violence but that does include targeting folks based on gender, so that includes transphobia, biphobia, homophobia, all those sorts of things are protected under the policy.”

She doesn’t mean “protected,” obviously, she means the opposite.

It’s awful. Awful. She’s there alone and they’re accusing her of all this nonsense, full of smugness and disapproval.

Back to the Star:

For Shepherd, the incident has raised fundamental questions about the purpose of a post-secondary institution.

Silencing unpopular opinions is not true to the spirit of an institution that purports to encourage intellectual exploration, she said, adding that launching a third-party investigation only reinforces that impression.

“This was an opportunity for the university to be like ‘it’s true, we should be able to have a debate, we’re sorry it became an issue and we’re happy to foster debate in the university environment,’ ” she said. “Instead, they’re being weird about it.”

Shepherd said the lesson to her communications tutorial class was focusing on the complexities of grammar.

Shepherd said she was trying to demonstrate that the structure of a language can affect the society in which it is spoken in ways people might not anticipate. To illustrate her point, she said she mentioned that long-standing views on gender had probably been shaped by the gender-specific pronouns that are part of English’s fundamental grammatical structure.

The clip of Peterson debating sexual diversity scholar Nicholas Matte, she said, was meant to demonstrate ways in which the existence of gender-specific pronouns has caused controversy.

Shepherd said a student complained about the clip, which she showed to two tutorials of roughly 24 participants each. In response, she said, her supervisors censured her for airing the clips, told her she was “transphobic” for playing them and said she ought to have spoken out against the positions Peterson expressed during the excerpt.

They’ve told her she has to submit lesson plans and put up with people spying on her classes any time they feel like it. She’s strongly considering leaving.

Yesterday Kashif Chaudhry went to a conference in Virginia – a conference about hating Ahmadi Muslims. Kashif is an Ahmadi Muslim, and a cardiologist. He’s writing up the conference, and in the meantime he has this public Facebook post about it:

Every American, but especially American Muslims, should be worried about this and must condemn it loudly. Whether its Islamophobes hating on Muslims, Neo-Nazis hating on Muslims and Jews, or Sunni extremists hating on Shia and Ahmadi Muslims, all Americans must condemn the hate and protect our values of pluralism and inclusivity.

Today, I went to an anti-Ahmadi “Khatme Nabuwat” conference in Virginia, a fundraiser by an extremist organization. I can’t believe the hatred that was being spewed by the extremist Sunni clerics in attendance and I was shocked at the extent of radicalization of Muslim youth occurring right here on American soil (America was repeatedly referred to as the “land of the infidels”) at the hands of these extremist clerics. I will be writing about the whole experience and sharing quotes of the speakers soon. For now, I will just share one interesting encounter. During the Q/A session, after letting the speakers know I was an Ahmadi Muslim, I asked Omar F. Khan (speaking in the picture), the director of the institute that organized the event and who reiterated how Ahmadis were infidels, how he defined a Muslim.

Me: “Maulana Sahib, how do you define a Muslim?”

Omar Khan: Anyone who recites the Kalima.

Me: I recited the Kalima loudly, turned to the crowd, and then back at the Maulana and asked if I was a Muslim by his definition now.

Omar Khan: “No. you have to believe in Khatme Nabuwat also.”

I recited verse 33:40 in which Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is called the Khataman Nabiyeen and said I believe in this verse 100%. Now what?

Another speaker interrupted and said mere words were not enough, and that I had to believe in his interpretation of Khatme Nabuwat.

Me: I asked them to come up with a definition of a Muslim and be consistent. I then asked Omar Khan what he thought of the Shia Muslims. “Are the Shias Muslims in your eyes because they believe in your interpretation of Khatme Nabuwat?”

Omar Khan: “No, the Shias are Kafirs (infidels). They cannot be considered Muslims.”

American Muslims must NOT allow such Takfiri, divisive, hateful, extremist-minded clerics to speak for us on US soil. It is these bigots who give us all a bad name. We must be the first to call them out. There is much more. Stay tuned for a comprehensive piece on my experience.

Tabatha Southey at MacLeans explains about Jordan Peterson.

“Postmodern neo-Marxism” is Peterson’s nemesis, and the best way to explain what postmodern neo-Marxism is, is to explain what it is not—that is, it is entirely distinct from the concept of “cultural Marxism.”

“Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values. “Postmodern neo-Marxism,” on the other hand, is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values with “cultural” taken out of the name so it doesn’t sound quite so similar to the literal Nazi conspiracy theory of “cultural Bolshevism.”

Ha. good to know. I’ve wondered in the past what “Cultural Marxism” might be, without feeling motivated enough to google it. It was a popular epithet among the he-man skeptics for awhile…or maybe still is.

To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi, but there’s a reason he’s as popular as he is on the alt-right. You’ll never hear him use the phrase “We must secure a future for our white children”; what you will hear him say is that, while there does appear to be a causal relationship between empowering women and economic growth, we have to consider whether this is good for society, “‘’cause the birth rate is plummeting.” He doesn’t call for a “white ethnostate,” but he does retweet Daily Caller articles with opening lines like: “Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.” He has dedicated two-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube videos to “identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege.”

A Peter Boghossian type, in other words, except he’s had way more success at making it pay.

As far as I can tell, Jordie—and not the cool “Geordi” from Star Trek either— rewards the devotion of his Patreon patsies with regular rants against “political correctness,” and relationship advice I can only call “Angry Oprah Says.” For USD $29.99, Petersonites can get access to the Self Authoring Suite (a USD $119.92 value!). Those looking for further opportunities to give him money can pay USD $9.99 for “100 question phrases” which “can be found, along with similar question sets, elsewhere on the web” so that they might learn how your personality compares to 10,000 others.

Pro tip: just take a personality test from the back of an issue of Glamour; you’ll only be out about five bucks, and you might find a free perfume sample.

He also gives book recommendations apparently drawn from a high-school English-class reading list. If somehow you missed them, Mistress Peterson is the portal to such obscure works as Animal Farm, OfMice and Men, and that cornerstone of the Western canon, Flowers for Algernon.

There is no polite way to put this, but since Peterson claims that “If you worry about hurting people’s feelings and disturbing the social structure, you’re not going to put your ideas forward,” I’m just going to say it: Spend half an hour on his website, sit through a few of his interminable videos, and you realize that what he has going for him, the niche he has found—he never seems to say “know” where he could instead say “cognizant of”—is that Jordan Peterson is the stupid man’s smart person.

That too is familiar. The he-man skeptics seem to be fatally drawn to them.

It’s easy to assume Peterson is deserving of respect. A lot of what he says sounds, on the surface, like serious thought. It’s easy to laugh at him: after all, most of what he says is, after fifteen seconds’ consideration, completely inane. But in between his long rambling pseudo-academic takes on common self-help advice and his weird fixation on Disney movies, is a dreadfully serious message.

What he’s telling you is that certain people—most of them women and minorities—are trying to destroy not only our freedom to spite nonbinary university students for kicks, but all of Western civilization and the idea of objective truth itself. He’s telling you that when someone tells you racism is still a problem and that something should be done about it, they are, at best, a dupe and, at worst, part of a Marxist conspiracy to destroy your way of life.

Ice cream, Mandrake? Children’s ice cream?

Here’s why legalized use of women for sex is so fabulous: it means that Good women won’t be attacked, only Bad Slutty women will.

Is it time to legalize prostitution? "When prostitution is decriminalized and regulated to some extent, as it is in the Dutch tippelzones, sexual predators are less likely to strike at random women and children." Could reduce rates of STD too. https://t.co/Y0iGZM82NW https://t.co/BiG9TMoc48

— Adam Khan (@Khanoisseur) November 16, 2017

See? Great. Herd the rapey men off into this area over here where the women it’s ok to rape are. Problem solved!

2. "Researchers at a public research institute in Netherlands discovered that when major cities in that country opened areas where street prostitutes could work legally, reports of rape and sexual abuse declined by as much as 30-40% in the first two years" https://t.co/Y0iGZM82NW

— Adam Khan (@Khanoisseur) November 16, 2017

Not counting the “street prostitutes” of course, and why would we count them? They ask for it.

Legalizing prostitution is a sustainable route to stop sexual assaults by curbing sexual frustration and increasing access.

— Erik Stanger (@erikforCO) November 16, 2017

Yes, increasing access! It’s a terrible mistake to restrict access by allowing women to say no to sex when they want to. Women are a natural resource, like air, and it’s not up to them how much access there should be. It’s up to the men who want increased access to decide.

Bill O’Neill – that Ohio judge who told us all what a large number of extremely attractive women he’s had sex with – has apologized.

Kidding; he hasn’t really.

If I offended anyone, particularly the wonderful women in my life, I apologize. But if I have helped elevate the discussion on the serious issues of sexual assault, as opposed to personal indiscretions, to a new level…I make no apologies. Suggesting the admitted conduct of Senator Al Franken and the alleged conduct of Judge Roy Moore are on the same level trivializes the serious subject at hand.

There are Democrats out there who are saying neither one of them pass the purity test to sit in the United States Senate. And that is sad.

And telling us what a large number of extremely attractive women he’s had sex with is exactly the way to fix it.

The Tampa Bay Times:

If you are an evildoer wishing to bring harm to the members of River at Tampa Bay Church, don’t expect congregants to turn the other cheek.

They’ll blast you.

So says a sign at the church, at 3738 River International Drive in Tampa, that delivers a stark warning to anyone thinking of wreaking havoc.

“PLEASE KNOW THIS IS NOT A GUN FREE ZONE,” it reads. “WE ARE HEAVILY ARMED — ANY ATTEMPT WILL BE DEALT WITH DEADLY FORCE — YES WE ARE A CHURCH AND WE WILL PROTECT OUR PEOPLE.”

The message is signed “THE PASTORS.”

The sign at the 21-year-old church was put up about a year ago, said Associate Pastor Allen Hawes.

If I were a churchy person that sign would make me turn around and find another church.

Super-right-on dude Owen Jones tweeted a classic of mindless phrase-mongering a couple of days ago.

https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/931241678622593025

Imagine being an opponent of trans rights and believing this was the one exception of history looking kindly on opponents of a struggle for minority rights. It is not going to happen. You are a) going to lose and b) be damned by history forever.

Why is that mindless?

One, because he is talking, of course, not about people who actually are “opponents of trans rights” but people who disagree that “identify as” is a magic phrase when it comes to sex but not when it comes to anything else. Two, because he is assuming that all “struggles for minority rights” are progressive and awesome and to be cheered on. It’s all formula and no thought.

On the first: I don’t know of anyone who thinks trans people should not have rights. The disagreement is over what is in fact a right. The core contested “right” in this dispute is the “right” to have one’s self-description accepted instantly and without question no matter what…in the case of trans people but not other people. Gender-critical types are not convinced that this is a genuine right.

How could it be a genuine right? If you try to apply it to other possible “identities” and self-descriptions its absurdity becomes immediately obvious. We’ve heard the strenuous efforts to explain why it works for sex but not for race or nationality or ethnicity or profession, but we don’t find them convincing. There is no such “right” as the right to compel the rest of the world to accept your personal conception of yourself. Would we even like it if there were? Hardly. It’s that basic morality issue: it might be great fun for you but how would it work if everyone did it? Badly, therefore you don’t get to be the one exception.

On the second: it’s just laughable that Owen Jones assumes all “struggles for minority rights” are good things. How difficult is it to think of minorities that are ruthless and power-hungry and cruel? White supremacists are a minority, Nazis are a minority, mass murderers are a minority, Ponzi schemers are a minority. Members of those groups as individuals have human rights, but do we want their groups to have rights particular to them? Nope. Jones didn’t actually mean “struggles for minority rights” – he meant something more like “struggles for approved-minority rights,”  but then that just begs the question. If the minority “right” in question is “Accept my claim about my sex no matter what” then we don’t agree that it’s a genuine right, and the word “minority” doesn’t change that.

There’s so much bad, impoverished, sloppy thinking behind this whole thing, and so much bullying substituted for actual thought, that it’s a tragedy. I think that’s what history is going to damn.

A student newspaper published by the School of Humanities of the Catholic St. Edward’s University proudly reports that St. Edward’s joined the list of right-on silencers who invite Julie Bindel to talk and then later call her back and say no we changed our minds. Who knew that Catholic universities were that “intersectional”?

Universities across the country have been facing backlash over their decisions to host or cancel speakers. Last week, St. Edward’s University joined the national conversation by cancelling a talk by British feminist and political activist, Julie Bindel, based on views she had expressed about the transgender community.

Jesus – it sounds as if they’re excited about being invited to join the cool kids’ table. “Hey everybody’s talking about all this no-platforming and now we’re one of the no-platformers!”

Bindel was scheduled by the Social Justice LLC to speak about her book, “The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Worker Myth” on Nov. 8. Bindel, a self-described radical feminist, is co-founder of the law reform group, Justice for Women. The group opposes violence against women and helps women who have been prosecuted for killing violent male partners.

So you can see why the Vatican wouldn’t like her…but it wasn’t the Vatican who called her up to say we don’t want you after all. It was people who fancy themselves lefty and social justicey and right on.

Early on the scheduled day of her talk, Bindel said she received a call rescinding the invitation. Kris Sloan, associate professor of education and director of the Social Justice LLC, confirmed that it was ultimately his decision to cancel Bindel’s appearance. She spoke at the University of Texas-Austin on Nov. 9.

On the day of her talk. That is so fucking rude and mean. And it’s nothing to do with social justice.

“This was my decision, I made this call,” Sloan said. “Was it right? I hope so. At the heart of my decision was the link to the living and learning, not just to the 96 students in that room, but the larger community and wanting to be good allies to the trans community and the gender non-conforming community on this campus.”

Oh shut the fuck up. Julie was there to talk about pimping, and she was invited, and she was no threat to “the trans community and the gender non-conforming community.” There was no shadow of a need to tell her hours before her talk “we don’t want you after all so nyah.” It’s display and nothing else, and what it displays is stupid and narrow and of no use to anyone.

Doing US book tour. Invited to a college by dept. head to talk about harms of sex trade. Queer ISIS trans cabal and allies bullied college into cancelling. This is not about *MY* free speech, just McCarthyite silencing of feminists who expose male violence and abuse.

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) November 8, 2017

It’s disgusting.

Concern from transgender student Marcus Kearns sparked the conversation about whether to host Bindel. Kearns Googled Bindel after Professor Laurie Heffron, who teaches the class Kearns is taking in the LLC,  announced the upcoming  lecture. He discovered articles Bindel had published that he considered to be transphobic, including a 2004 article in The Guardian entitled, “Gender benders, beware.”

Thirteen years ago. She’s apologized for the way she worded that article. She doesn’t word things that way now. She does outstanding important work. This whole thing is revolting and outrageous.

Bindel told Hilltop Views that the decision to cancel her talk was made by “cowards”  whom she called “morally bankrupt.”

“Everybody knows that I am no threat to trans people,” Bindel said. “There is absolutely no way that this group of people, the bullies, have read anything that I’ve written or said that has warranted this response. This is merely a tactic to shut down the voice of feminists that protest against male violence.”

Kearns was glad that the event was cancelled.

“Am I happy it did get cancelled?” Kearns said of the talk. “Yes, but it wasn’t my intention going in.”

“That can have really bad effects on people when you trust a school to bring in voices that are going to help you grow but they instead bring someone who tears you down,” he added. “If you’re going to have controversy, it has to be grounded in mutual respect.”

But she was going there to talk about her book, which is about pimping.

After considering feedback from the class, Pride, linked faculty, and a number of transgender individuals, Sloan made the final decision to cancel the event early Wednesday morning.

Citing Bindel’s confrontational tendencies and the risk to the community as major reasons, Sloan said that there was “no real value” to come of hosting her and that it wouldn’t “be a productive use of our time.”

But she had already been invited. They told her they’d changed her minds the day of her talk. It’s way too late to decide oh well there’s no real value to this and it wouldn’t be a productive use of our time so we’re going to call her up hours before her talk when she’s thousands of miles from home to tell her we’ve changed our tiny flea-bitten little minds.

Oh wait wait wait everybody, it turns out everything’s ok after all. This one judge in Ohio had lots of awesome sex with 50 very attractive females (his words) so there’s nothing to worry about. Whew!

Now that the dogs of war are calling for the head of Senator Al Franken I believe it is time to speak up on behalf of all heterosexual males. As a candidate for Governor let me save my opponents some research time. In the last fifty years I was sexually intimate with approximately 50 very attractive females. It ranged from a gorgeous blonde who was my first true love and we made passionate love in the hayloft of her parents [sic] barn and ended with a drop dead gorgeous red head from Cleveland.

Now can we get back to discussing legalizing marijuana and opening the state hospital network to combat the opioid crisis. I am sooooo disappointed by this national feeding frenzy about sexual indiscretions decades ago.

Peace.

What a relief, right? Imagine if they hadn’t all been very attractive? Imagine if there had been only forty of them, or [shudder] thirty?

Yeah but for real – dude missed the point, didn’t he. The issue isn’t having sex. The issue certainly isn’t how attractive Male Candidate X’s sex partners were or were not. The issue is harassment and assault and rape. I think the distinction is pretty obvious. You’d hope it was one that judges were well aware of.

That item about Jordan Peterson’s plan to create a List of courses he considers “neo-Marxist”  blah blah got my attention. As It Happens reported last week:

Psychology professor Jordan Peterson’s stated plan to build a website aimed at reducing enrolment in university classes he calls “indoctrination cults” has drawn the ire of his University of Toronto colleagues, who say it will make them the target of harassment.

“As a science professor, I’m not specifically targeted, but I still believe this website is morally wrong,” U of T physics professor A.W. Peet told As It Happens host Carol Off. “A number of students and faculty members who I’m in correspondence with are concerned about his plans.”

Peterson, who rose to fame in right-wing circles after his outspoken refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns, says he wants to use artificial intelligence to scour university curriculums for what he “calls post-modern neo-Marxist course content.”

“We’re going to start with a website in the next month and a half that will be designed to help students and parents identify post-modern content in courses so that they can avoid them,” he told CTV’s Your Morning in August.

“I’m hoping that over about a five-year period a concerted effort could be made to knock the enrolment down in postmodern neo-Marxist cult classes by 75 per cent across the West. So our plan initially is to cut off the supply to the people that are running the indoctrination cults.”

Grandiose much?

In a speech posted to his YouTube page on July 9, Peterson elaborates on what type of courses he aims to target with the website.

“Women’s studies, and all the ethnic studies and racial studies groups, man, those things have to go and the faster they go the better,” he said. “It would have been better if they had never been part of the university to begin with as far as I can tell.”

“Sociology, that’s corrupt. Anthropology, that’s corrupt. English literature, that’s corrupt. Maybe the worse offenders are the faculties of education.”

That’s not scholarship or dissent (or dissenting scholarship), it’s bullying.

The Globe and Mail:

Dr. Peterson has gained a high profile over the past 18 months for his criticism of what he believes is the dominance of Marxism, socialism and postmodernist ideas among university professors and students.

In the United States, a political advocacy group runs a website called Professor Watchlist that seeks to advance right-wing and libertarian ideas on college campuses. A professor in California who was identified on Professor Watchlist as having a “radical agenda” went into hiding after she received death threats, according to media reports.

Right-wing and libertarian ideas can be extremely “radical.” Radicalism is not confined to the left.

Dr. Peterson seems to suggest universities should teach a limited set of disciplines. Social sciences, law and humanities have all been infected by postmodernism, he says, as well as women’s studies and ethnic and racial studies.

Just a little bit sweeping?

Jordan Peterson has the solution to all this sexual harassment everywhere.

With all the accusations of sex assault emerging (eg Louis CK) we are going to soon remember why sex was traditionally enshrined in marriage…

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) November 10, 2017

Ho yus, that will fix it. Women were never sexually harassed until…what year was it again? 1964? If only women could be permanently imprisoned by marriage, all would be well.

Rachel Giese is not quite convinced.

[C]onsider his recent conversation with fellow provocateur Camille Paglia. Expressing his frustrations with women who disagreed with him, Peterson said that men can’t control “crazy women” because men aren’t allowed to physically fight women. “I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassed against me,” he said. “The parameters for my resistance are quite well-defined, which is: we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical. If we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is.”

It’s like Peterson has been cribbing talking points from Fight Club’s Tyler Durden. He adds that men unwilling to throw a punch are contemptible. “If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.”

So does that also mean if you [“you” are obviously a man here] are talking to a woman then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect? I think it can be safely assumed of most women that they won’t voluntarily “fight with” a man in the sense of throwing punches, so in Peterson’s world that must mean they’re contemptible, yes?

Peterson has said elsewhere that socialization has a role to play in addressing aggression among boys and men. But talking to [Camille] Paglia, he laments that his own socialization prevents him from taking a swing at a lady. Referring to a woman who accused him of being a Nazi, he said, “I’m defenceless against that kind of female insanity because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me.” It’s hard to decide which is creepier: Is it the suggestion, in Peterson’s rueful tone, that he’s kind of bummed out about the fact that he can’t hit women? Or is it the implication, if you were to follow his argument to its conclusion, that because women can’t be hit, they shouldn’t be allowed to participate in civil discourse with men at all?

But there’s also the creepiness of his casual assumption that it’s just normal to throw punches at men who accuse you of being a Nazi. People are supposed to grow out of that assumption in the course of childhood and adolescence. Peterson is an adult academic and he apparently clings to it.

But maybe it’s just something he says. Maybe he doesn’t mean it.

Just a few weeks after he posted his conversation with Paglia, however, there was a surprise retreat from his latest attention-grabbing escapade. Over the weekend, Peterson announced he was shelving his plans to create a website warning university students away from “corrupt” courses in programs like ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, English literature and women’s studies. After a group of University of Toronto faculty released a statement saying that Peterson’s proposed site “created a climate of fear and intimidation,” he capitulated, tweeting the project was on hiatus: “I talked it over with others and decided it might add excessively to current polarization.”

Why didn’t he just punch them all instead?