The Times on Devin Patrick Kelley, the guy who murdered 26 people in a small town church in Texas:

Mr. Kelley was clad in all black, with a ballistic vest strapped to his chest and a military-style rifle in his hands, when he opened fire on parishioners, turning this tiny town east of San Antonio into the scene of the country’s newest mass horror.

He had served in the Air Force at a base in New Mexico but was court-martialed in 2012 on charges of assaulting his wife and child. He was sentenced to 12 months’ confinement and received a “bad conduct” discharge in 2014, according to Ann Stefanek, the chief of Air Force media operations.

What a coincidence – he was a violent bully to the people closest to him, and he went on to be a violent bully to people at more of a distance.

Mr. Kelley started firing at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs not long after the Sunday morning service began at 11 a.m., officials said. He was armed with a Ruger military-style rifle, and within minutes, many of those inside the small church were either dead or wounded. The victims ranged in age from 5 to 72, and among the dead were several children, a pregnant woman and the pastor’s 14-year-old daughter. It was the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history. At least 20 more were wounded.

Will we do anything about it? No.

Speaking at a news conference in Japan, the first stop on his tour of Asia, President Trump called the shooting a “mental health problem at the highest level” and not “a guns situation,” adding the gunman was a “very deranged individual.”

And President Trump knows that how, exactly?

Isn’t it interesting that the truck slaughter in Manhattan was all about bad people getting into the country while the gun slaughter in Texas was all about a mental health problem.

The authorities said Mr. Kelley used an Ruger AR-15 variant — a knockoff of the standard service rifle carried by the American military for roughly half a century.

Almost all AR-15 variants legally sold in the United States fire only semiautomatically, and they were covered by the federal assault weapons ban that went into effect in 1994. Since the ban expired in 2004, the weapons have been legal to sell or possess in much of the United States, and sales of AR-15s have surged.

Ruger’s AR-15s made for civilian markets sell for about $500 to $900, depending on the model.

Institute Extreme Vetting for immigrants, but don’t even think about the surge in sales of AR-15s. If you’re killed by some rage-boy with an assault rifle, enjoy the experience knowing he’s a native son of the dear old USofA.

What was that we were saying about how it doesn’t work to send someone a furious abusive email and then announce that it’s confidential? How you can’t just send people shit they didn’t ask for and then order them to keep it secret? Behold Marc Randazza in 2014 saying exactly that, and unlike me he’s a lawyer.

This happens to all of us, from time to time. A lawyer sends you a letter with some threatening language on it that he thinks accomplishes his goal of making it “confidential.” You know, like this:

CONFIDENTIAL LEGAL NOTICE
PUBLICATION OR DISSEMINATION IS PROHIBITED

The correct legal response is “suck my ass” or whatever you want to say. Ok, fine, how about “your point is invalid”. Let’s go with that. It is nicer, after all. And I’m all about being nice.

Now here’s one thing you can rest assured of: If someone puts that foolishness on their letter, it is because they’re afraid of that letter getting out there. They can’t possibly have confidence in what’s in it. Look, I write a letter, I expect that it might wind up getting slapped on Simple Justice, with Greenfield making fun of it. Even then, I can’t seem to catch every typo. But you know what? If my name is on it, you can bet your ass that I’ll own it.

And here’s why you can make the chucklefuck who signed YOUR letter own it by publishing the shit out of it, if you want.

For starters, saying “This letter constitutes confidential legal communication and may not be published in any manner.” is about as legally compelling as Michael Scott yelling “I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY.” Lawyers do not have magic powers that turn letters into confidential communications. You’re more likely to find a lawyer who can turn water into funk than a lawyer who has the magic spell to make a letter confidential. Sure, there might be some rules that make them inadmissible for certain purposes in litigation. But, you wanna share that letter? Go right the fuck ahead. Unless you’ve agreed to confidentiality, it ain’t confidential.

And have you agreed to confidentiality? No you have not.

Here’s Michael Shermer trying it on that post of Phil Torres’s yesterday:

As for our email correspondence Torres, at the bottom of every email I’ve sent you appears this statement below. I have nothing to hide at all, but privacy laws exist for a reason and our correspondence is private. You asked if you could make it public and I declined. If you do not understand why the law protects peoples’ privacy, or why people want privacy, then you don’t understand what privacy means. Here is the statement that appears in every email I send out:

This private email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential information. Any unauthorized publication, broadcast, review, use, disclosure or distribution of its content, substance or meaning, by email, social media or any other means, is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

So ridiculous. “Is prohibited” – it sounds so official but is so meaningless. Prohibited by whom, Kemosabe? You can’t just slap “is prohibited” on things you don’t want other people to do and expect them to obey. The “unauthorized” is equally ludicrous. We don’t have to be “authorized” to talk about stupid shit people have said to us without our inviting them to.

Marc Randazza again:

Bottom line, no court has ever held I DECLARE CONFIDENTIALITY to be valid, nor has any court supported the “DON’T MAKE FUN OF ME BECAUSE COPYRIGHT” position – but an undisturbed case, relying on mountains of precedent, refutes it.

Bottom line: you send me unsolicited insults, don’t expect me to protect your “privacy.”

Big thanks to Screechy Monkey for citing the Randazza post.

Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail above a photo of a woman in heavy eye makeup with carefully groomed eyebrows and flawless skin, wearing a niqab.

Behold my proposed new autumn look for women in politics. The black, I think, is flattering and it radiates an air of cool unapproachability. No Minister would put his hand on the knee of anyone dressed like this; indeed, he’d have trouble finding her knee, or anything else.

Well, isn’t this what you want, all you squawking flapping denouncers of groping men and ‘inappropriate’ jokes?

You have lots in common with Militant Islamists on this subject. They, too, believe that all men must be assumed to be slavering predators.

And these beliefs lie behind the severe dress codes and sexual segregation which modern liberals claim to find so shocking about Islam.

Yet on this, it turns out that you agree with them. Any male action, any form of words you choose to disapprove of can and will be presumed to be guilty because, well, men are like that. The culprit will be ruined for ever.

Yes, certainly, if we denounce men who unilaterally grope women, then we are endorsing and even demanding imposition of the niqab on women.

Or not.

Those aren’t the only possible options, actually. We all probably have experience of them: of working (niqab-free) with men who don’t grope without an invitation. I think that’s much of the point: women should be free to work and play and walk around in the world without wearing buckets over their heads and without being groped (or worse) by men who apparently think women are a public utility.

Hitchens is coat-trailing, as right-wing assholes so often do. (See: Brendan O’Neill.) He can’t really be stupid enough to think that objecting to sexual harassment=believing that all men must be assumed to be slavering predators. Harvey Weinstein appears to be a slavering predator; it does not follow that all men are. That’s not very difficult, surely.

Phil Torres wrote a post yesterday about censorship among the atheists and skeptics.

As some of you know, after I published an article that was critical of what I would describe as a strain of anti-intellectualism among some skeptic leaders, Michael Shermer sent me an email complete with vulgarities, personal insults (e.g., you’re a bad scholar and you’ll never be a good scholar!), and basically a threat to harm my career because I’m a “backstabber” (search The Moral Arc for some fun reading about how Shermer sometimes fantasizes about murdering “backstabbers”! Seriously).

Similarly, after writing a critique of Peter Boghossian and James A. Lindsay‘s gender studies “hoax,” both blocked me on social media and the former even blocked my phone number! I have also been permanently banned from Jerry Coyne’s blog for literally asking, “So, why not focus on something else?,” which he angrily claimed was a violation of the blog’s rules (it wasn’t).

Douglas Murray at the Spectator says there can’t be any sex any more because of all these women persecuting men for THE TINIEST THINGS.

We are in the middle of a profound shift in our attitude towards sex. A sexual counter-revolution, if you will. And whereas the 1960s saw a freeing up of attitudes towards sex, pushing at boundaries, this counter-swing is turning sexual freedom into sexual fear, and nearly all sexual opportunities into a legalistic minefield.

The phrase “sexual opportunities” is interesting. Often that’s the issue: the way some men see women in a work environment as “sexual opportunities” when the women are there to work and don’t want to be seen as “sexual opportunities” rather than competent colleagues.

The rules are being redrawn with little idea of where the boundaries of this new sexual utopia will lie and less idea still of whether any sex will be allowed in the end.

Don’t be schewpid.

But it is away from the law — tied up in the ‘#MeToo’ movement that followed Weinstein’s downfall — that the real revolution is happening. Accusations of genuine and monstrous abuse are being mixed with news that a cabinet member touched a woman’s knee many years ago. This week The Crown actress Claire Foy was forced to issue a statement saying she had not been offended after angry Twitter users pointed out that actor Adam Sandler had touched her knee — twice — during their appearance on The Graham Norton Show.

I don’t believe she was forced to. Who would have forced her, and how? He means she felt like it. She is free to say she doesn’t mind, and we are free to say that assuming women are fair game for casual touching is part of the problem.

A new generation is being encouraged to redraw the lines of acceptability in a way that goes too far. What once was gauche has now become unacceptable.

God, the smug blindness.

Yes, the people with more power considered sexual harassment merely “gauche,” but that’s the whole point. What’s “gauche” to the groper is not necessarily merely “gauche” to the gropee. Murray is talking as if the only point of view is the male one, and women are just objects – objects can’t have a point of view.

Foremost propeller of this is a form of modern feminism which is in fact barely disguised misandry. Take an essay from the sociology professor Lisa Wade, which argues that ‘We need to attack masculinity directly. I don’t mean that we should recuperate masculinity — that is, press men to identify with a kinder, gentler version of it — I mean that we should reject the idea that men have a psychic need to distinguish themselves from women in order to feel good about themselves.’ Or, as Lara Prendergast has noted in this issue, other women writers have taken it upon themselves to issue strict instructions for men on how they must behave. This ‘feminism’ isn’t producing guides for helping men. It is producing manifestos for torturing them.

By expecting them to treat women like fellow human beings as opposed to “sexual opportunities.”

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern report at Slate:

On Friday, the Department of Justice filed an astonishing appeal with the Supreme Court, urging the justices to intervene in the Jane Doe case that seemed to have ended last week. Doe, an undocumented 17-year-old in a federally funded Texas shelter, was denied abortion access by the Trump administration, which argues that it can force undocumented minors to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. On Oct. 24, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Doe must be allowed to terminate her pregnancy, which she did the next day. Now the DOJ is urging the Supreme Court to vacate that decision—and punish the ACLU attorneys who represented Doe.

Gee. Here I thought we had an adversarial system, in which attorneys are allowed to dispute the government.

Make no mistake: With this filing, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department has declared war on attorneys and groups who dare to oppose it in court.

The Justice Department is doing three things here.

First, it wants the Supreme Court to punish the D.C. Circuit for issuing a decision that it believes to be egregiously wrong by wiping the entire ruling off the books. Second, the DOJ wants to eradicate a decision that sets a legal precedent it despises. Doe’s lawsuit was initially brought as part of a class action, and the ACLU will continue to litigate its broader claim against the Trump administration’s absolute bar on abortion access for undocumented minors. As long as the D.C. Circuit’s decision remains on the books, those lawsuits are almost guaranteed to succeed. The Justice Department wants it gone so that it can litigate this issue anew.

Third, and most importantly, Friday’s appeal is a flagrant effort to crucify the individual attorneys who represented Doe, and to terrify likeminded lawyers into acquiescence. The DOJ thus asks the Supreme Court to force Doe’s lawyers to “show cause why disciplinary action should not be taken” against the ACLU—either by the court itself or by state bars—for “material misrepresentations and omissions” designed to thwart an appeal.

Of course he is.

It’s hard to imagine a more ironic choice for America’s next ambassador-at-large for women’s issues.

The position is tasked with overseeing State Department programs to end gender-based violence and empower women and girls around the world. So, naturally, President Donald Trump is reportedly considering Penny Young Nance, a far-right Christian activist who opposed reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act; recently cheered on an attempt to block a pregnant teen immigrant from an abortion; and has called on Hollywood to write more scripts featuring strong male leads.

She can be an ambassador for helping women around the world to be more submissive and helpful to their Husbands.

Nance is the CEO and president of Concerned Women for America. The group’s agenda, according to its website, includes “protecting and supporting the Biblical design of marriage,” “protecting the sanctity of human life,” “ending sexual exploitation by fighting all forms of pornography, obscenity, prostitution, and sex trafficking,” and “defending religious liberty.”

Trump doesn’t believe any of that shit – but he does hate women, and he is a sadist, so this is his idea of a fun thing to do.

Yet another way Trump has been and continues to be unprecedentedly disgusting and cruel:

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who walked off his Army base in Afghanistan in 2009 and was held captive by the Taliban for five years, was ordered to be dishonorably discharged from the Army by a military judge on Friday, but received no prison time for desertion or endangering troops.

At a sentencing that took only minutes, the military judge, Col. Jeffery R. Nance of the Army, also reduced Sergeant Bergdahl’s rank to private and required him to forfeit $1,000 a month of his pay for 10 months. Prosecutors had sought 14 years in a military prison.

President Trump, who has labeled Sergeant Bergdahl a “dirty rotten traitor,” quickly criticized Friday’s sentence, calling it “a complete and total disgrace to our Country and to our Military.”

…

Politics have dogged the case from the start. The Obama administration embraced Sergeant Bergdahl — the national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, said that he had served with “honor and distinction” — a portrayal that angered many Republicans. Then, last year, Donald J. Trump made Sergeant Bergdahl a staple of his campaign speeches, denouncing him and calling for him to be executed.

Calling for him to be executed. That’s such a squalid brutal horrible look in a president.

Outside the military courthouse here, Sergeant Bergdahl’s chief defense lawyer, Eugene R. Fidell, called the sentence a “tremendous relief,” and said his client was still absorbing it after an “anxiety-inducing” day waiting for the decision.

Mr. Fidell then took sharp aim at President Trump, whose harsh comments about Sergeant Bergdahl may have contributed to the decision not to sentence him to prison: Colonel Nance had ruled earlier this week that he would consider the president’s statements as mitigating evidence.

“President Trump’s unprincipled effort to stoke a lynch-mob atmosphere while seeking our nation’s highest office has cast a dark cloud over the case,” said Mr. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School. “Every American should be offended by his assault on the fair administration of justice and disdain for basic constitutional rights.”

And he did it again today, making it more likely that someone will go after Bergdahl.

Once Mr. Trump was inaugurated, Sergeant Bergdahl’s defense team demanded that the case be dismissed. There was no way the sergeant could receive a fair trial, his lawyers said, since everyone in the military justice system now reported to President Trump as commander in chief.

Colonel Nance labeled President Trump’s comments about Sergeant Berdahl “disturbing” but declined to throw out the case. Then, last month, President Trump seemed to endorse his earlier sentiments about Sergeant Bergdahl, saying, “I think people have heard my comments in the past.”

After another protest by the defense, Colonel Nance ruled that he would consider the president’s comments as evidence in mitigation as he deliberated on a sentence.

People could conclude, the judge explained, that the president had “wanted to make sure that everyone remembered what he really thinks should happen” to Sergeant Bergdahl.

And now we know what he thinks should happen to Saipov.

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Oh, interesting. The Académie Française dit “non” to gender inclusive language.

The Académie Française, France’s ultimate authority on the French language, is under fierce attack for describing gender-neutral text as an “aberration” that puts the language in “mortal danger”.

The “Immortals”, as the 40 academy members – only five of whom are women – are known, have sparked a national row after declaring that “inclusive writing” has no place in the country’s grammar books, or anywhere else for that matter.

The thing is, having an “ultimate authority” on a language is a highly dubious enterprise to begin with from a linguistic point of view. I hate the way people say “it negatively impacted her” instead of “it harmed her” but I don’t get to enforce it. (Except when I’m editing other people.)

In a statement full of hyperbole, the academy condemned the increasing use of new spellings aimed at making written French less masculine, arguing that it could not see the “desired objective” of the changes.

French grammatical rules give the masculine form of a noun precedence over the female. Women on an all-female board of company directors are called directrices; if one man joins the board, they are referred to collectively as directeurs.

I remember being taught in school that rule that says “ils” trumps “elles” no matter how many “elles” there are and how few “ils.” If there are a billion “elles” and one “il” it’s still “ils.” It was an all-girls school, and we were deeply annoyed.

We weren’t wrong. That’s a stupid rule, and yes of course it sends a message.

I also remember someone saying to me a few years ago, “Oh, you’re an authoress.” A what? No I’m not. This is why “actor” is replacing “actress” and “wait staff” replacing waiters and waitresses.

For years, French presidents have addressed citizens as les Français et les Françaises instead of the strictly correct les Français, but the recent row was sparked by a new textbook aimed at primary school children that employs the inclusive style, and came into use for the first time this year.

After a vote last month, the Académie Française issued a unanimous “non” to the new style, deeming it far too complicated.

“Faced with the aberration of ‘inclusive writing’, the French language finds itself in mortal danger,” its statement read.

…

Established by Louis XIII’s chief minister Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, outlawed after the French Revolution and restored by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803, there have been a total of 726 members, only eight of whom have been women. The first, Belgian-born novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, was elected in 1980.

Speaking of language police, that first sentence is a mess – “established by” and “there have been” don’t go together. But that’s by the way.

In 2014, the academy opposed the feminisation of job titles, making Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo’s subsequent insistence on being called Madame la Maire (and not Madame le Maire) grammatically incorrect.

Eliane Viennot, professor of literature at Jean-Monnet University in St-Étienne and author of the book Non le masculin ne l’emporte pas sur le féminin! (No the masculine does not take precedence over the feminine!), said: “They [the academy] are extremely conservative.”

“If you ask people to list their favourite écrivains (writers) they will only mention male authors,” Viennot told France24 television. “It’s not until you ask them to list their favourite écrivainsand écrivaines that they think of women.”

In an opinion piece in Libération, she called for France to “pull the plug” on the academy.

“For 30 years they have never stopped trying to torpedo any evolution of the French language towards equality,” Viennot wrote.

I guess they prefer fraternity.