Pliny’s T shirt for International Women’s Day:

If you’re looking for an adventure, I wouldn’t advise looking for it in Saudi Arabia, at least not if you’re a woman. (Or a dissident man.)

At first, Saudi Arabia was an adventure for Bethany Vierra.

An American from Washington State, she taught at a women’s university, started a company, married a Saudi businessman and gave birth to a curly-haired daughter, Zaina.

And couldn’t go anywhere without his permission, right? And had to wear an abaya any time she left home, right? Not all that adventurey.

But since the marriage went sour and she sought a divorce, she has been trapped. Because of the kingdom’s so-called guardianship laws, which give men great power over women, she is unable to use her bank account, leave the country, travel with her daughter or seek legal help, according to her cousin, Nicole Carroll.

One wonders if she did any Googling before she went to Saudi Arabia.

Ms. Vierra, 31, is now divorced, but her ex-husband let her residency expire, meaning she has lost access to her bank account and cannot get authorization to leave the country, Ms. Carroll said. Their 4-year-old daughter cannot travel without her father’s permission, meaning that even if Ms. Vierra finds a way to leave the kingdom, her child may have to stay behind.

Crappiest adventure ever.

A State Department official declined to comment on Ms. Vierra’s case, citing privacy rules. But the consular information page for Saudi Arabia on the State Department’s website notes that even non-Saudi women need a male guardian’s permission to leave the country and that the United States government “cannot obtain exit visas for the departure of minor children without their father/guardian’s permission.”

It also says that when foreigners divorce Saudis, “Saudi courts rarely grant permission for the foreign parent to leave the country with the children born during the marriage, even if he or she has been granted physical custody.”

So that’s her life wrecked.

Let’s hear some more about how women have cis privilege.

People say (and apparently think) the most ridiculous things about “rights.”

Case in point:

pic.twitter.com/c7Jk1fnD5f

— Deborah C (@deborahmacnz) March 9, 2019

I don’t agree with the t-shirt but I understand how someone could be driven to wear it. I wouldn’t wear it, but it’s her right to express herself. Just like it’s your right to disagree.

— Deborah C (@deborahmacnz) March 10, 2019

There’s no such thing as a “right” to express oneself by carrying banners or wearing T shirts that say “KILL THE ___”.

There may be a legal right in some jurisdictions to do that, but it’s thin ice. But more to the point, legal rights aren’t the only kind, and it’s pretty clear the tweeter was talking about the broader kind of right, the moral right – and the tweeter is full of shit. No there isn’t a moral right to advocate murder. Advocating murder isn’t a form of self-expression, it’s a call for murder.

Isn’t it interesting that preceding struggles of the oppressed haven’t generally called for murder? The Civil Rights movement was divided on the issue of non-violence, but the factions opposed to absolute and total non-violence weren’t advocating murder, they were advocating self-defense. I think there was some “Kill the Bosses” rhetoric in some labor struggles in the IWW days, but I can’t swear to it. It’s not normal, it’s not “self expression,” it’s not a “right,” and it’s not ok.

Also I wonder why she uses “her” in reference to the wearer of the shirt. Because of the hair? But plenty of men have hair that long. The sun glasses? Unclear. The face? I can’t tell, myself. Oh maybe it’s the T shirt. I’m used to T shirts that are just T shirts, generic, either sex can wear them. I don’t wear the Special for Laydeez Only ones with low necks and shorter, tilted sleeves, so I forget that they’re a thing.

At any rate – nah. A “social justice” movement that advocates for killing feminist women has nothing to do with social justice.

Jonathan Chait looks at the question of why our minds boggle so stubbornly when we’re presented with the truth about Trump’s captivity to Russia.

The cause of this incredulity, I have come to suspect, lies in the vast distance the mind must travel between the normal patterns of American politics and the fantastical crimes being alleged. The Russia scandal seems to hint at a reality of fiction or paranoia, a baroque conspiracy in which the leader of the free world has been compromised by a mafiocracy with an economy smaller than South Korea’s.

The flaw lies in the assumption about what constitutes “normal.” In this case, the baseline should not be previous American elections, but other foreign elections in which Russia has intervened.

It’s that so-often useful concept/reply “It depends what you’re comparing it to.”

I suspect that we Americans, even the relatively unillusioned of us, have a hard time comparing even the shitshow of 2016 with “other foreign elections in which Russia has intervened.” We unconsciously think – in spite of everything – we’re better than that. Why? Other than the automatic narcissism of me mine ours? I don’t know. Generations of post-WW2 dominance, maybe, or unusual levels of credulity maybe, or both maybe; I don’t know. Anyway, what’s the pattern?

Moscow has cultivated right-wing parties overseas through a combination of covert payments to their leaders (often disguised as legitimate business transactions), illegal campaign donations, and propaganda support through traditional and social media. Russian election corruption scandals pop up in Europe all the time. Russia secretly and illegally funded Ukraine’s “Party of Regions”; France’s National Front party got a secret 2014 election loan from a Russian bank; the Brexit vote benefited from a huge donation from a British businessman who has secretly met with Russian officials dangling lucrative business deals. Just last month, Italian journalists discovered the leader of a right-wing party had negotiated a lucrative secret transaction with a Russian firm.

The fact that the same person who managed the campaign for the pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine next turned up (after a brief disappearance) to run the campaign of the pro-Russian candidate in the United States is merely one of an overwhelmingly long list of clues placing Trump in the pattern.

We’re not special.

Jeezus, Beeb, work on your headlines.

Oh well in that case maybe we care.

They must have thought again (or someone yelled at them), because if you click on the headline you get the story with a less narcissistic version…but the first one still appears in Top Stories.

Go back to headline school.