Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth

Aug 24th, 2017 12:24 pm | By

The Guardian reports that Exxon learned a useful trick from the tobacco business:

Read all of these documents and make up your own mind.

That was the challenge ExxonMobil issued when investigative journalism by Inside Climate News revealed that while it was at the forefront of climate science research in the 1970s and 1980s, Exxon engaged in a campaign to misinform the public.

Harvard scientists Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes decided to take up Exxon’s challenge, and have just published their results in the journal Environmental Research Letters. They used a method known as content analysis to analyze 187 public and internal Exxon documents. The results are striking:

  • In Exxon’s peer-reviewed papers and internal communications, about 80% of the documents acknowledged that climate change is real and human-caused.
  • In Exxon’s paid, editorial-style advertisements (“advertorials”) published in the New York Times, about 80% expressed doubt that climate change is real and human-caused.

Which get more read and have more influence over the voting public?

As Oreskes documented with Erik Conway in Merchants of Doubt, tobacco companies and several other industries that profited from harmful products engaged in decades-long campaigns to sow doubt about the scientific evidence of their hazards. As one R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company 1969 internal memo read:

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public

The results of this new paper show that Exxon followed this same playbook. While the company’s internal communications and peer-reviewed research were clear about human-caused global warming, its public communications focused heavily on sowing doubt about those scientific conclusions.

It’s that bogus form of “skepticism” that is so useful to corporations and Trump fans. “Do we really know that Obama was not born in Kenya? Can we really be sure?“

In its defense, Exxon spokespeople have asserted that the company didn’t suppress or try to hide its climate science research. While that’s generally true, it’s also true that Exxon’s public statements painted a very different picture about our understanding of human-caused global warming than the company’s scientific research and internal communications. The vast majority of those paid statements were aimed at manufacturing doubt, and often included the same misleading myths and charts that can be found on any run-of-the-mill climate denial blog.

Exxon’s scientists published some valuable climate research. Company officials discussed those findings internally. But in its public communications, Exxon officials decided to follow the tobacco industry playbook – claim that the science remains unsettled in order to undermine regulations and prevent a decline in public consumption of their dangerous products.

The tobacco industry was eventually found guilty of racketeering. Considering the findings of this new study, ExxonMobil may face a similar fate.

Who was the CEO of Exxon until a few months ago? Oh yes, the current US Secretary of State. I don’t see anything worrying or distasteful about that, do you?

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An alternative politics of memory

Aug 24th, 2017 11:20 am | By

Richard Vallely in American Prospect notes that we could always start putting up statues to something else.

Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee have vanished from Baltimore and New Orleans. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who authored the truly infamous part of the Dred Scott decision, is gone from Annapolis. So many have come down—or are up for possible removal—that The New York Times posted an interactive map to chart them all.

But there is an alternative politics of memory that Americans can also practice, and it might help to keep fascists out of public squares and do something concrete, literally at the same time: honor Reconstruction. Remembering Reconstruction ought not to shunt aside the politics of Confederate memorials. Yet remembering this pivotal era certainly deserves to be built into the new national politics of memory.

The way Reconstruction was taught for decades is a scandal.

The sesquicentennial of Reconstruction is September 1, 2017. Under the First Military Reconstruction Act of March 1867, a Republican-controlled Congress, having become justifiably concerned about profound legal and extra-legal threats to the statutory civil rights of black Southerners, gave the U.S. Army an administrative deadline of September 1 to directly register all black and white adult males in 10 of the 11 ex-Confederate states (Tennessee, the 11th, already had a biracial electorate.) Echoing the Freedom Summer of the civil rights movement, University of Chicago historian Julie Saville has called the summer of 1867 “Registration Summer.”

In the fall of 1867, this new biracial electorate elected delegates to state constitutional conventions. These elections set in motion deliberations in 1868 about the proper design and structure of new state governments that were designed to be radically more democratic than any of the South’s previous incarnations. Those state governments were also expected to formally support the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which established African American citizenship and more broadly a new, expansive view of civil rights.

But that’s not as thrilling as guys in uniforms shooting at each other.

Writing during the Great Depression, W.E.B. Du Bois carefully showed how deeply weird the then-dominant literature on Reconstruction was—he did this at the close of his 1935 masterpiece, Black Reconstruction. The standard view was that it was all a terrible mistake. Du Bois argued, rightly, that it was much more of a triumph than most educated whites understood. In colleges and graduate programs all around the country, people were buying into a racist caricature.

Thanks to that work’s enduring impact, and to the careful work of Du Bois’s great successors, historians John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward, and of theirstudents and successors like Eric Foner, Du Bois’s alternative view—that Reconstruction was a great democratic expansion—has become largely accepted.

So let’s start with the monument program.

There is an obvious place to start: Congress and the 16 (yes, 16) African American members from that era who served in both the House and Senate. Not a single bust of any one of them can be found in the U.S. Capitol. That should change. They were literally the world’s first black parliamentarians. It is a disgrace that the world’s most powerful legislature has ignored their service.

Another possibility is for the Supreme Court of South Carolina to memorialize its first African American justice, Jonathan Jasper Wright, who wrote some 90 opinions during his seven-year tenure on that court. At the time, the South Carolina Supreme Court was the only state supreme court to have an African American member.

Let’s do this thing.

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The mind totters

Aug 24th, 2017 10:33 am | By

Trump retweeted this.

He’s a grown man, and a head of state, and he retweeted this.

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His speech was without thought, it was devoid of reason

Aug 23rd, 2017 6:07 pm | By

Don Lemon is knocked sideways.

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All the finesse you’d hear in a middle school gym

Aug 23rd, 2017 5:35 pm | By

Hillary Clinton’s thoughts on being bullied on stage by Trump during the second debate:

“This is not okay, I thought,” Clinton said, reading from her book. “It was the second presidential debate and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces.

“It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, ‘Well, what would you do?’ Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘Back up, you creep. Get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.’”

The Post adds:

As The Post’s Sarah L. Kaufman wrote, Trump “paced and rocked and grimaced as spoke; he broke into her time by shouting over her. When she protested that she had not done the same to him, he shot back with all the finesse you’d hear in a middle school gym: ‘That’s ’cause you got nothin’ to say.’

“When it was his turn to speak, Trump got angry, pointed at her, swung his arms around with alarming force.”

His actions were widely mocked and criticized after the debate, and even featured in a “Saturday Night Live” skit that showed him zooming toward an unsuspecting Clinton.

“If a man did that to me on the street … I’d call 911,” political commentator and former Republican strategist Nicolle Wallace said, according to NBC News.

The New York Daily News headline the day after the debate read: “Grab a seat, loser.”

In the post-debate spin room, Clinton surrogates accused Trump of “menacingly stalking” the Democratic nominee. Two body language experts analyzed the debate and concluded Trump was trying to assert his power by roaming the stage while Clinton spoke.

“Trump’s constant pacing and restless movements around the stage attracted attention from Hillary’s words, and visually disrespected her physical presence on the stage, as in ‘I am big, you are small,’ ” David Givens, director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies, a nonprofit research center in Spokane, Wash., told The Post then.

And it worked. He won.

A guy on Twitter says maybe if she’d fought back she would have won.

Right…because women telling men to back off is always so universally popular.

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Could we please just stick to reporting what he said?

Aug 23rd, 2017 4:57 pm | By

Trump’s bestie the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal wants his reporters to report JUST THE FACTS dammit, like “Trump said some words this evening,” not this stinking opinion crap. Objectivity, god damn it!

[Gerard] Baker, in a series of blunt late-night emails, criticized his staff over their coverage of Mr. Trump’s Tuesday rally in Phoenix, describing their reporting as overly opinionated.

“Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting,” Mr. Baker wrote at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday morning to a group of Journal reporters and editors, in response to a draft of the rally article that was intended for the newspaper’s final edition.

He added in a follow-up, “Could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?”

Just reporting what he said would actually be misleading, because there was more to it than just saying. His gestures and grimaces and pauses contributed a great deal to the venom and frenzy of the event. It would be dishonest to omit that.

The draft, in its lead paragraph, described the Charlottesville, Va., protests as “reshaping” Mr. Trump’s presidency. That mention was removed.

The draft also described Mr. Trump’s Phoenix speech as “an off-script return to campaign form,” in which the president “pivoted away from remarks a day earlier in which he had solemnly called for unity.” That language does not appear in the article’s final version.

Meanwhile, Gerard “Objectivity” Baker is chummy with Trump. Remember that interview?

 This month, Politico obtained and published a transcript of a White House interview with Mr. Trump conducted by Mr. Baker and several Journal reporters and editors. Unusually for an editor in chief, Mr. Baker took a leading role in the interview and made small talk with Mr. Trump about travel and playing golf.

When Ivanka Trump, the president’s older daughter, walked into the Oval Office, Mr. Baker told her, according to the transcript, “It was nice to see you out in Southampton a couple weeks ago,” apparently referring to a party that the two had attended.

The Wall Street Journal is owned by the media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who speaks regularly with Mr. Trump and recently dined with the president at the White House.

 There’s your objectivity right there.

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One angry rant after another

Aug 23rd, 2017 12:31 pm | By

The Post has more on the horror in Phoenix.

Before the Gilded Nazi took the stage, four stooges told the audience that he’s a great, lovely, loving, spiritual guy who loves all god’s children. Then he made a liar out of all of them. (They were Ben Carson, a niece of Martin Luther King, Franklin Graham, and Pence.)

Trump spent the first three minutes of his speech — which would drag on for 75 minutes — marveling at his crowd size, claiming that “there aren’t too many people outside protesting,” predicting that the media would not broadcast shots of his “rather incredible” crowd and reminiscing about how he was “center stage, almost from day one, in the debates.”

“We love those debates — but we went to center stage, and we never left, right?” the president said, reliving his glory days. “All of us. We did it together.”

Over the next 72 minutes, the president launched into one angry rant after another, repeatedly attacking the media and providing a lengthy defense of his response to the violent clashes in Charlottesville, between white supremacists and neo-Nazis and the counterprotesters who challenged them. He threatened to shut down the government if he doesn’t receive funding for a wall along the southern border, announced that he will “probably” get rid of the North American Free Trade Agreement, attacked the state’s two Republican senators, repeatedly referred to protesters as “thugs” and coyly hinted that he will pardon Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County who was convicted in July of criminal contempt in Arizona for ignoring a judge’s order to stop detaining people because he merely suspected them of being undocumented immigrants.

But he went on so long that some people left, and other people stopped paying attention.

Early in his speech, when Trump still had the attention of his followers, he recited his definition of what it means to be a Trump supporter.

“This evening, joined together with friends, we reaffirm our shared customs, traditions and values,” Trump began. “We love our country. We celebrate our troops. We embrace our freedom. We respect our flag. We are proud of our history. We cherish our Constitution — including, by the way, the Second Amendment. We fully protect religious liberty. We believe in law and order. And we support the incredible men and women of law enforcement. And we pledge our allegiance to one nation under God.”

The bugle-call of the far right – nationalism, militarism, flag-worship, theocracy, police-worship, theocracy mixed with nationalism. Not a word about equality, human rights, justice, environmental stewardship, sharing, caring, progress, compassion…

Minutes later, Trump transitioned to a topic that he would return to again and again.

“What happened in Charlottesville strikes at the core of America,” Trump said, appearing to read from the teleprompters placed on stage. “And tonight, this entire arena stands united in forceful condemnation of the thugs who perpetrate hatred and violence.”

Many in the crowd lit up at the use of the word “thugs” and applauded. Later in the evening, Trump would repeatedly use the same word to describe the protesters who showed up to his campaign rallies.

“But the very dishonest media,” Trump continued, “those people right up there, with all the cameras.”

He was cut off by loud booing. He smirked and nodded in agreement. A few people shouted, “Fake news!”

“I mean truly dishonest people in the media and the fake media, they make up stories,” Trump said. “ … They don’t report the facts. Just like they don’t want to report that I spoke out forcefully against hatred, bigotry and violence and strongly condemned the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists and the KKK.”

Trump reached into his suit pocket and removed a different set of talking points.

“I’m really doing this to show you how damned dishonest these people are,” Trump said, promising that this would take “just a second” and would be “really fast.”

Trump then took more than 16 minutes to read the various statements that he made about Charlottesville over several days, noting the use of all-caps for one word and skipping over the part where he said that “many sides” were responsible for the violence. After reading each snippet, Trump would detail why that response was not good enough for the media.

“Why did it take a day? He must be a racist,” Trump said, the first of the five times he imitated people calling him a racist.

Along the way, Trump defended his use of Twitter and bragged that he went to “better schools” and lives “in a bigger, more beautiful apartment” than those who are considered elites. He said the “failing New York Times … is like so bad,” mocked CNN for its ratings and accused The Washington Post of being “a lobbying tool for Amazon” because the newspaper is owned by Jeffrey P. Bezos, who founded Amazon. The crowd repeatedly booed the reporters in their midst and chanted: “CNN sucks! CNN sucks!”

This is his “base.” It’s a small minority. Everybody knows it’s a small minority – yet Trump feels perfectly entitled to whip it into a frenzy in order to bully and intimidate the rest of us. It’s a small minority but it’s a heavily armed one.

“The media can attack me, but where I draw the line is when they attack you, which is what they do. When they attack the decency of our supporters,” Trump said, without explaining what he meant. “You are honest, hard-working, taxpaying — and by the way, you’re overtaxed, but we’re going to get your taxes down.”

Trump would return to taxes later — but first, he had to blame the media for “fomenting divisions” in the country, “trying to take away our history and our heritage” and “giving a platform to these hate groups.” He called reporters “sick people” and “really, really dishonest” and accused them of turning “a blind eye” to gang violence, public school failures and “terrible, terrible trade deals.”

“You would think they’d want to make our country great again, and I honestly believe they don’t,” he said. “I honestly believe it.”

Trump took a brief detour into immigration, prompting him to ask the crowd: “By the way, I’m just curious. Do the people in this room like Sheriff Joe?”

The crowd burst into wild cheers, thinking that Trump was about to pardon Arpaio — something the press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had said just hours earlier would not happen that day.

“So, was Sheriff Joe convicted of doing his job?” Trump continued. “You know what? I’ll make a prediction. I think he’s going to be just fine, okay? But I won’t do it tonight, because I don’t want to cause any controversy. Is that okay?”

He’s pickling us all in his filth.

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Nullification

Aug 23rd, 2017 12:13 pm | By

The rise of fascism scores another victory.

A federal jury in Las Vegas refused Tuesday to convict four defendants who were retried on accusations that they threatened and assaulted federal agents by wielding assault weapons in a 2014 confrontation to stop a cattle roundup near the Nevada ranch of states’ rights figure Cliven Bundy.

In a stunning setback to federal prosecutors planning to try the Bundy family patriarch and two adult sons later this year, the jury acquitted Ricky Lovelien and Steven Stewart of all 10 charges, and delivered not-guilty findings on most charges against Scott Drexler and Eric Parker.

So there you have it. If you’re right-wing enough and white enough and male enough you can hold federal law enforcement officers hostage at gunpoint and get away with it. Open season, folks.

“Random people off the streets, these jurors, they told the government again that we’re not going to put up with tyranny,” said a John Lamb, a Montana resident who attended almost all the five weeks of trial, which began with jury selection July 10.

“They’ve been tried twice and found not guilty,” Bundy family matriarch Carol Bundy said outside court. “We the people are not guilty.”

They’re not going to put up with “tyranny” – meaning, the “tyranny” of having to pay to graze their personal cattle on public land.

None of the defendants was found guilty of a key conspiracy charge alleging that they plotted with Bundy family members to form a self-styled militia and prevent the lawful enforcement of multiple court orders to remove Bundy cattle from arid desert rangeland in what is now the Gold Butte National Monument.

Bundy stopped paying grazing fees decades ago, saying he refused to recognize federal authority over public land where he said his family grazed cattle since the early 1900s. The dispute has roots a nearly half-century fight over public lands in Nevada and the West, where the federal government controls vast expanses of land.

…

All four men were photographed carrying assault-style weapons during the standoff near the Nevada town of Bunkerville, about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each had faced the possibility of decades in federal prison if they were convicted.

Jurors saw images of Parker and Drexler in prone shooting positions looking down their rifles through slots in the concrete barrier of an Interstate 15 freeway overpass toward heavily armed federal agents guarding a corral of cows below.

Defense attorneys noted that no shots were fired and no one was injured. They cast the tense standoff with more than 100 men, women and children in the potential crossfire as an ultimately peaceful protest involving people upset about aggressive tactics used by federal land managers against Bundy family members.

It’s not a “peaceful” protest if you’re pointing a gun. Being “upset” doesn’t change that.

The fasicsts will be having one hell of a party today.

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Guest post: It was divisions in the country

Aug 23rd, 2017 11:17 am | By

Originally a comment by iknklast on Trump whipped the crowd into fevered chants.

I will agree with Trump on one thing: he did not cause the divisions in the country. It was already existing divisions that he exploited to get elected. It was already existing divisions that led to so many Democrats not voting because they didn’t get the candidate they wanted.

It was divisions in the country that erected Confederate statues to clutter the landscape. It was divisions in the country that insisted on flying the Confederate flag, no I’m not a racist I just value my heritage, blah blah blah. It was divisions in the country that led to the bombing of abortion clinics and the killing of George Tiller. It was divisions in the country that led to the rise of the Tea Party because they couldn’t handle a president who wasn’t lily white. It was divisions in the country that led to the need for Affirmative Action and Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter and the Rainbow Coalition. It was divisions in the country that led to the death of Harvey Milk and Matthew Shepherd.

Every country has divisions; why does our country feel the need to take these to the point of death and destruction so very often? And to the election of an illiterate toddler in a man’s body to be head of the most powerful military force in the world?

For Trump, we know when he says we need to unite, he just means we all need to worship him, not criticize him.

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Trump whipped the crowd into fevered chants

Aug 23rd, 2017 7:59 am | By

Mark Landler and Maggie Haberman at the Times report that Trump blamed the media for the angry divisions in the country.

In an angry, unbridled and unscripted performance that rivaled the most sulfurous rallies of his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump sought to deflect the anger toward him against the news media, suggesting that they, not he, were responsible for deepening divisions in the country.

“It’s time to expose the crooked media deceptions,” Mr. Trump said. He added, “They’re very dishonest people.”

“The only people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media itself and the fake news,” he said.

Mr. Trump also derided the media for focusing on his tweets, which are his preferred form of communication.

“I don’t do Twitter storms,” said the president, who often posts a few tweets in a row on a given subject, with exclamation points.

It was the latest shift in what has become a nearly daily change of roles for this president: from the statesmanlike commander in chief who sought harmony on Monday evening by citing the example of America’s soldiers to the political warrior who, just a day later, preached unapologetic division to his supporters here, eliciting louder cheers with every epithet.

He’s a vulgar trashy brawler with a lot of money, and he got elected. We’re a sick country.

Mr. Trump accused the news media of “trying to take away our history and our heritage,” an apparent reference to the debate over removing statues to heroes of the Confederacy, which prompted the rally by neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville.

The president singled out a familiar list of malefactors — including the “failing New York Times,” which he erroneously said had apologized for its coverage of the 2016 election; CNN; and The Washington Post, which he described as a lobbying arm for Amazon, the company controlled by the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos.

Pointing repeatedly to the cameras in the middle of a cavernous convention center, Mr. Trump whipped the crowd into fevered chants of “CNN Sucks.” Members of the audience shouted epithets at reporters, some demanding that the news media stop tormenting the president with questions about his ties to Russia.

Scary enough yet?

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The latest fascist rally

Aug 23rd, 2017 7:40 am | By

Chris Cillizza gives the flavor of Trump’s rally last night by listing 57 berserk lies, threats, dog whistles, self-flatteries, and random collections of words.

President Donald Trump went to Arizona on Tuesday night and delivered what has now become a trademark speech: Full of invective, victimhood and fact-free retellings of recent historical events.

I went through the transcript of Trump’s speech — all 77 minutes — and picked out his 57 most outrageous lines, in chronological order. They’re below.

1. “And just so you know from the Secret Service, there aren’t too many people outside protesting, OK. That I can tell you.”

That’s the very first thing he said. It’s not true. There were thousands of people protesting.

5. “Our movement is a movement built on love.”

Says the man who spends most of his time spewing hatred and venom on Twitter and at “rallies” and in conversation. Says the man who has done more to stir up hatred and violence in this country than anyone ever. How dare he say that.

6. “We all share the same home, the same dreams and the same hopes for a better future. A wound inflicted upon one member of our community is a wound inflicted upon us all.”

The second sentence of this is verbatim from his speech on Monday. But as the rest of Trump’s speech shows, these are just words to him. He reads them but doesn’t understand them. Or believe them.

Then he says oh goody look at all the red hats – the red hats that stand for all that anger and venom. He doesn’t mean the love bullshit. He’s all about the anger and venom.

14. “If you’re reading a story about somebody, you don’t know. You assume it’s honest, because it’s like the failing New York Times, which is like so bad. It’s so bad.”

I have no idea what Trump’s point is here. But MAN, the New York Times is failing, right?!?!?

15. “Or the Washington Post, which I call a lobbying tool for Amazon, OK, that’s a lobbying tool for Amazon.”

Amazon doesn’t own the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos does.

16. “Or CNN, which is so bad and so pathetic, and their ratings are going down.”

I’ll just leave this here.

17. “I mean, CNN is really bad, but ABC this morning — I don’t watch it much, but I’m watching in the morning, and they have little George Stephanopoulos talking to Nikki Haley, right? Little George.”

A few things: 1. Trump watches TV constantly. 2. “Little George”: Trump as bully-in-chief.

He relentlessly attacks the mainstream media while promoting the shoddy Murdoch mouthpiece Fox.

28. “Now, you know, I was a good student. I always hear about the elite. You know, the elite. They’re elite? I went to better schools than they did. I was a better student than they were. I live in a bigger, more beautiful apartment, and I live in the White House, too, which is really great.”

Oh.dear.god.

30. “And yes, by the way — and yes, by the way, they are trying to take away our history and our heritage. You see that.”
This is demagogic language from Trump about the media. “They” are trying to rob us of “our history and our heritage.” You don’t have to look very hard to see racial and ethnic coding in that language.
31. “I really think they don’t like our country. I really believe that.”
Trump’s claim that the media doesn’t “like” America is hugely offensive. Offensive and dangerous. Imagine ANY other president saying anything close to this — and what the reaction would be.

It’s fascism, is what it is.

36. “You would think — you would think they’d want to make our country great again, and I honestly believe they don’t. I honestly believe it.”

The media, in Trump’s telling, is rooting against the country. Let me say again: Rhetoric like this is offensive, dishonest and dangerous.

He hints he’s going to pardon Arpaio. He threatens to shut down the government to extort payment for “the wall.” He makes a big fuss about not mentioning McCain by name because They told him not to, and attacks him without naming him. He attacks the other Arizona senator, also without naming him, for the same reason. He says that’s what he’s doing.

56. “They’re trying to take away our culture. They are trying to take away our history.”

[dog whistle]

That’s our head of state. That lying enraged toddler is our head of state.

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Yet another fascist rally

Aug 22nd, 2017 5:22 pm | By

Trumpkin is in Phoenix for his “rally,” which starts in about half an hour. Many people there are dreading it; many are protesting it.

Large protests are expected near the president’s rally in downtown Phoenix on Tuesday night, his first such event since he drew wide condemnation for his comments on the violence in Charlottesville, Va., this month.

The rally, scheduled for 7 p.m. local time at the Phoenix Convention Center, is Mr. Trump’s first visit as president to Arizona, where he made fiery remarks on a signature issue — immigration — during his election campaign last year.

The state is home to high-profile supporters of Mr. Trump, like Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County who built a national reputation on his hard-line stance against undocumented immigrants and was recently convicted of criminal contempt of court. But it is also home to staunch critics of Mr. Trump, like Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain, both Republicans who have feuded openly with the president.

Amid the fallout from Mr. Trump’s assertion that “both sides” were to blame for the violent clashes in Charlottesville, and following the president’s suggestion that he could pardon Mr. Arpaio, Phoenix is bracing for throngs of protesters to come out in 100-degree heat.

But he’ll just look out at all the red cap wearers cheering him and think they’re all that counts.

The mayor of Phoenix, Greg Stanton, a Democrat, has urged Mr. Trump to delay his trip.

“America is hurting,” Mr. Stanton wrote Monday, in an opinion piece for the Washington Post. “And it is hurting largely because Trump has doused racial tensions with gasoline. With his planned visit to Phoenix on Tuesday, I fear the president may be looking to light a match.”

Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, was planning to greet Mr. Trump but not to attend the rally, according to the Arizona Republic.

Neither Mr. Flake nor Mr. McCain, both of whom last week tweeted about their apparentdisapproval of Mr. Trump’s comments on Charlottesville, is expected to attend. Mr. Trump called Mr. Flake, who is up for re-election next year, “toxic,” and praised the senator’s primary opponent on Twitter last week. And, during the same news conference when he commented at length on Charlottesville, Mr. Trump took a jab at Mr. McCain, who derailed the Republican health care bill with a dramatic thumb-down vote on the Senate floor last month: “You mean Senator McCain who voted against us getting good health care?”

Other than that, he’s a popular guy.

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They’re on non-speakers

Aug 22nd, 2017 5:02 pm | By

Trump and Mitch McConnell are not getting along at all.

The relationship between President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has disintegrated to the point that they have not spoken to each other in weeks, and Mr. McConnell has privately expressed uncertainty that Mr. Trump will be able to salvage his administration after a series of summer crises.

What was once an uneasy governing alliance has curdled into a feud of mutual resentment and sometimes outright hostility, complicated by the position of Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine L. Chao, in Mr. Trump’s cabinet, according to more than a dozen people briefed on their imperiled partnership. Angry phone calls and private badmouthing have devolved into open conflict, with the president threatening to oppose Republican senators who cross him, and Mr. McConnell mobilizing to their defense.

…

In a series of tweets this month, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. McConnell publicly, then berated him in a phone call that quickly devolved into a profane shouting match.

During the call, which Mr. Trump initiated on Aug. 9 from his New Jersey golf club, the president accused Mr. McConnell of bungling the health care issue. He was even more animated about what he intimated was the Senate leader’s refusal to protect him from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Republicans briefed on the conversation.

Classic Trump. I detest McConnell, but honestly – what narcissism it takes for Trump to expect him to protect him from the FBI.

Mr. McConnell has fumed over Mr. Trump’s regular threats against fellow Republicans and criticism of Senate rules, and questioned Mr. Trump’s understanding of the presidency in a public speech. Mr. McConnell has made sharper comments in private, describing Mr. Trump as entirely unwilling to learn the basics of governing.

Yes; wasn’t that always obvious? Did McConnell think Trump was going to change just because he won the election?

Mr. Trump has also continued to badger and threaten Mr. McConnell’s Senate colleagues, including Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, whose Republican primary challenger was praised by Mr. Trump last week.

Mr. Trump was set to hold a campaign rally on Tuesday night in Phoenix, and Republicans feared he would use the event to savage Mr. Flake again.

If he does, senior Republican officials said the party’s senators would stand up for their colleague. A Republican “super PAC” aligned with Mr. McConnell released a web ad on Tuesday assailing Mr. Flake’s Republican rival, Kelli Ward, as a fringe-dwelling conspiracy theorist.

So it’s becoming a circular firing squad. Good.

The fury among Senate Republicans toward Mr. Trump has been building since last month, even before he lashed out at Mr. McConnell. Some of them blame the president for not being able to rally the party around any version of legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, accusing him of not knowing even the basics about the policy. Senate Republicans also say strong-arm tactics from the White House backfired, making it harder to cobble together votes and have left bad feelings in the caucus.

Well, again – of course. He’s stupid and ignorant and lazy; of course he doesn’t know even the basics about the policy. Had they not noticed?

 The combination of the president’s frontal attacks on Senate Republicans and his claim that there were “fine people” marching with white supremacists in Charlottesville has emboldened lawmakers to criticize Mr. Trump in withering terms.

Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee rebuked Mr. Trump last week for failing to “demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence” required of presidents. On Monday, Senator Susan Collins of Maine said in a television interview that she was uncertain Mr. Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee in 2020.

Too bad they didn’t prevent him from becoming president.

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If it talks like an asshole and acts like an asshole…

Aug 22nd, 2017 3:47 pm | By

A Muslim Facebook friend of mine posts a lot of interesting questions and observations about religion and belief. He’s very non-literalist, but he gets a good many literalist responses. I’ve just been arguing with one such literalist (on a public thread). The literalist said:

It’s a basic rule of interpretation that you can distinguish between the timeless and spirit or divine intent of a verse and the verse’s literal sense.
This is neither apologetics not esotericism. It’s a basic principle of logic.
The quran says to use intellect almost 50 times. You’re supposed to reflect on it with reasoning and analysis.

It is apologetics of course. It’s the classic way to defend all the shitty things in the Holy Books. You have to interpret. You can’t just look at the plain literal meaning and leave it at that, you have to think hard until you can find a different meaning, one that’s not quite so ugly.

Also, it’s not in any way a basic principle of logic that you can distinguish between the timeless spirit or divine intent of a verse and the verse’s literal sense. That claim has nothing to do with logic. It has everything to do with defensive dodging.

What kind of asshole god plays tricks like that on weaker stupider creatures? What kind of reckless god does that? What kind of asshole reckless god does that and then never comes back to correct the mistake? If a god did dictate the Quran surely it should have intervened a long time ago to fix the messes.

I asked those questions, but answer came there none.

I think that overall question is one of the biggies that make religion untenable. The god in question is supposed to be infinitely good yet the god in question lets us torture and slaughter each other to protect or avenge the god. I’m not seeing the goodness.

Updating to add: I did get a response after all, and much to my surprise my interlocutor saw my point. That doesn’t happen every day.

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Arm-in-arm

Aug 22nd, 2017 12:17 pm | By

Pence pretends to go high, actually goes low.

Asked on the unapologetically pro-Trump show “Fox & Friends” whether Pence agrees that Confederate monuments should be removed from the Capitol, Pence told host Ainsley Earhardt that he stands with the president in wanting to preserve those monuments that glorify traitors of the United States.

EARHARDT: Some are calling for the Confederate monuments at the Capitol to be taken down. Do you agree?
PENCE: Well, first off, I agree with the president that seeing people destroy public property in the name of any cause is just simply unacceptable. […] I hold the view that it’s important that we remember our past and build on the progress we’ve made. […] What we have to walk away from is the desire by some to erase parts of our history in the name of some contemporary political cause.

Oh please. The “history” that moving monuments erases is the “history” of putting up monuments to very literal white supremacy. Saying we shouldn’t erase that kind of “history” is like saying we shouldn’t desegregate schools because that erases our history of having segregated schools.

EARHARDT: So you’re in favor of keeping the monuments?

PENCE: Obviously, I think that should always be a local decision. […] I’m someone who believes in more monuments, not less monuments. What we ought to do is we ought to remember our history. But we also ought to celebrate the progress that we’ve made since that history. You know, when I walked, back in 2010, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis, arm in arm, and we remembered Bloody Sunday, and the extraordinary progress of the civil rights movement, I can’t help but think that rather than pulling down monuments, as some are wont to do, rather than tearing down monuments that have graced our cities all across this country for years, we ought to be building more monuments. We ought to be celebrating the men and women who’ve helped our nation move toward a more perfect union.

Monuments to literal white supremacy have not “graced” our cities, they’ve disgraced them. Our long heritage of formal, legal, crime against humanity racist exploitation and rights violation is not a thing to raise monuments to. Monuments aren’t history lessons in stone, they are tributes. We get to choose what we want to pay tributes to. We don’t put up monuments to Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, and we can also decide we don’t want monuments to slavery.

Pence is right that we should celebrate Lewis and his colleagues (let’s have a lot more celebration of Diane Nash, for instance), but that does not in any way depend on keeping monuments to slavery and white supremacy.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments


Guest post: Reductio ad Islamofobi (argument to Islamophobia fallacy)

Aug 22nd, 2017 11:10 am | By

Guest post by Tasneem Khalil, originally on Facebook.

My atheism is no secret – that I am an out-and-open murtad for many, many years. For various reasons, I prefer not to talk much about religion in public any more. I, however, remain deeply interested about theology (especially Islamic theology) and politics of religion (and its relationship with civil religions – my B thesis, for example, was on state-sponsored homophobia in the Islamic world).
Given my current area of work (Bangla jihadis), I also have to read up on elements of Islamic theology very often – for example, for a recent story, I had to skim through three books on Islamic history, just to get a better handle on the somewhat obscure philosophy of hanifiyyah in Islam. It was fun. Even more fun is talking to people – learning from others through debates about religion-theology-politics. And, in private settings, I do that very often (yes, I see your nodding heads).
What I am finding increasingly difficult though is having just a decent conversation about Islam, Islamic history-politics-theology with regular – note: regular – Muslims.
Without trouble, I can talk about Islam with Islamic theologians (say someone like Maulana Abdul Awwal Khan Chowdhury) for hours. Heck, I can even talk about Islam with relative ease with ISIS members and AQIS ideologues. A few weeks back, I had an interesting chat with an ISIS member about the Sufi concept of wahdat al-wujud (caveat: that was after he kindly reminded me that if I ever fall in ISIS hands, they will have to behead me). I even interviewed Anwar al-Awlaki’s Bengali publisher through very cordial communication.
With most of the regular Muslims (in my obviously subjective experience) it is a completely different story – one can not talk critically about Islam (especially about its prophet) without being called an Islamophobe (or, in some cases, some other post-modern mumbo-jumbo word invented at some Western university). As soon as these Mulims realise that they are on the verge of loosing an argument related to Islam, they transform themselves into little Edward Saids, lecturing about Islamophobia, Orientalism, Western epistemology etc. etc.
This tendency of equating criticism of Islam or critical discussion on Islam to Islamophobia is not only fallacious but also very, very dangerous. This creates a poisonous, unhealthy environment which is most detrimental to Islam and Muslims.
If regular Muslims do not allow for or engage in decent discussions about their religion without instinctively throwing accusations of Islamophobia, even towards the most banal critics of Islam, they do open up a space for more extreme (and repugnant) spokesmen of their religion. This is neither good for them Muslims nor us murtads and kafirs. This is further complicated by the presence of another group: non-Muslim, Western (mostly white) men and women who often act as the (self-appointed) guardians and coddlers of Islam and Muslims in the Western world.
It is high time we start talking to each other without engaging in argumentative fallacy.
With this background and in the spirit of civil debate and argumentation, I propose three rules regarding “Reductio ad Islamofobi” or “argument to Islamophobia” fallacy:
Rule # 1: If a Muslim or a sympathiser of Islam fears loosing a point in a critical discussion about Islam, s/he will immediately resort to “Reductio ad Islamofobi” and accuse the opponent of Islamophobia.
Rule # 2: If a Muslim or a sympathiser of Islam resorts to “Reductio ad Islamofobi” in order to win a point or to avoid defeat in a critical discussion about Islam, it should be taken that s/he has already lost the argument or debate.
Rule # 3: The first two rules regarding “Reductio ad Islamofobi” do not apply in situations where the opponent engages in anti-Muslim bigotry and racism.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments


The hammers see nothing but nails

Aug 22nd, 2017 10:33 am | By

Trump gave an awesome speech on Afghanistan yesterday, in which he laid out his bold new plan: he intends to win. He said that in a very firm emphatic voice, so we know it will happen.

The Times reports that what he actually wanted was to get the hell out, but that didn’t work out because he’d hired all those military guys to run his administration. Oops! Big laughs all around.

Trump went so far as to embrace Mr. Obama in his decision to pull out American troops.

“I agree with Pres. Obama on Afghanistan,” Mr. Trump wrote on Jan. 14, 2013. “We should have a speedy withdrawal. Why should we keep wasting our money — rebuild the U.S.!”

But once in the White House, Mr. Trump populated his cabinet with people who had a long history in Afghanistan. His defense secretary, Jim Mattis, is a retired Marine Corps general who lost troops in fierce combat there early in the war. His national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, ran an anti-corruption task force that worked with the Afghan government.

Oh darn, he didn’t think of that.

On Monday, a few hours before Mr. Trump was to speak, Breitbart published an interview with Mr. Prince, in which he criticized the president for not being more receptive to his proposal for mercenaries. “The presidency by its nature lives in a bubble,” Mr. Prince said. “When you fill it with former general officers, you’re going to get that stream of advice.”

Never mind. He said the goal now is to win, and that changes everything.

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Every other government regime in the world

Aug 21st, 2017 5:30 pm | By

So far Tillerson seems to be a dreadful Secretary of State.

He said some words on Friday about how we all condemn hate speech yadda yadda – of course without mentioning his foul-mouthed hate-spewing boss.

In a speech announcing a new effort to expand diversity at the State Department, Tillerson did not explicitly mention either Charlottesville or President Trump’s reactions to the presence of white supremacists and neo-Nazis there, but he said the events of the past week were on everyone’s mind.

“We do honor, protect and defend freedom of speech, First Amendment rights,” he said. “It’s what sets us apart from every other government regime in the world, in allowing people a right to expression. These are good things.”

That right there? That’s some terrible secretary of state-ing. He said only the US defends freedom of speech. Way to antagonize a great many allies who also defend freedom of speech, Rex.

“But we do not honor, nor do we promote or accept hate speech in any form. And those who embrace it poison our public discourse and they damage the very country that they claim to love. So we condemn racism, bigotry in all its forms. Racism is evil; it is antithetical to America’s values. It’s antithetical to the American idea.”

Well now there again – that’s just silly. Which of America’s values? What American idea? Racism has certainly not been antithetical to America’s values throughout its history, and indeed it was firmly entrenched in government until well into the 1960s. It took marches and broken heads and deaths to get a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act, and that barely scratched the surface. He makes himself less than convincing if he can’t even acknowledge the truth about the US.

But he did go on to talk about taking real steps to make the State Department less white, so that’s good.

Tillerson said he has ordered that at least one minority candidate be included for every ambassador post that comes open. That will help target future leaders, he said, so their careers can be nurtured.

“We need a more deliberate process to cultivate the abundance of minority talent we already have in the State Department,” he said.

Tillerson said the State Department will step up recruitment of African Americans at historically black colleges and universities. Colleges in Miami and Chicago with large Hispanic populations will also be seeing State Department recruiters, he said. And he said the recruitment and promotion drive should include women and members of the LGBT community.

Ok then.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments


WHITE MAN!

Aug 21st, 2017 4:01 pm | By

The message.

Image may contain: text

WHITE MAN!

Are you sick and tired of anti-white propaganda constantly being promoted by our universities, mainstream media, and government?

Are you sick and tired of being told that you have no right to exist because of alleged “historical wrong-doings”?

YOU ARE NOT ALONE!

No Radical Islam, No Cultural Marxism, No Zionism, No Radical Feminism

WE SAY NO MORE

Trump’s base.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 14 comments
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Gorgeous, horny, crush, beautiful, secretary

Aug 21st, 2017 1:02 pm | By

Explorers find yet another cache of hostility to women.

A pathbreaking new study of online conversations among economists describes and quantifies a workplace culture that appears to amount to outright hostility toward women in parts of the economics profession.

Alice H. Wu, who will start her doctoral studies at Harvard next year, completed the research in an award-winning senior thesis at the University of California, Berkeley. Her paper has been making the rounds among leading economists this summer, and prompting urgent conversations.

…

The underrepresentation of women in top university economics departments is already well documented, but it has been difficult to evaluate claims about workplace culture because objectionable conversations rarely occur in the open. Whispered asides at the water cooler are hard to observe, much less measure.

But now water cooler conversations have moved to the internet, and new ways of finding patterns have been worked out.

This is what Ms. Wu did in her paper, “Gender Stereotyping in Academia: Evidence From Economics Job Market Rumors Forum.”

Ms. Wu mined more than a million posts from an anonymous online message board frequented by many economists. The site, commonly known as econjobrumors.com (its full name is Economics Job Market Rumors), began as a place for economists to exchange gossip about who is hiring and being hired in the profession. Over time, it evolved into a virtual water cooler frequented by economics faculty members, graduate students and others.

It now constitutes a useful, if imperfect, archive for studying what economists talk about when they talk among themselves. Because all posts are anonymous, it is impossible to know whether the authors are men or women, or how representative they are of the broader profession. Indeed, some may not even be economists. But it is clearly an active and closely followed forum, particularly among younger members of the field.

Ms. Wu set up her computer to identify whether the subject of each post is a man or a woman. The simplest version involves looking for references to “she,” “her,” “herself” or “he,” “him,” “his” or “himself.”

She then adapted machine-learning techniques to ferret out the terms most uniquely associated with posts about men and about women.

The 30 words most uniquely associated with discussions of women make for uncomfortable reading.

In order, that list is: hotter, lesbian, bb (internet speak for “baby”), sexism, tits, anal, marrying, feminazi, slut, hot, vagina, boobs, pregnant, pregnancy, cute, marry, levy, gorgeous, horny, crush, beautiful, secretary, dump, shopping, date, nonprofit, intentions, sexy, dated and prostitute.

I count three out of the thirty that are neither demeaning nor sexual: levy, nonprofit, intentions.

The words that deal with men betray no such pattern.

It includes words that are relevant to economics, such as adviser, Austrian (a school of thought in economics) mathematician, pricing, textbook and Wharton (the University of Pennsylvania business school that is President Trump’s alma mater). More of the words associated with discussions about men have a positive tone, including terms like goals, greatest and Nobel. And to the extent that there is a clearly gendered theme, it is a schoolyard battle for status: The list includes words like bully, burning and fought.

Wu points out that the anonymity of the posts removes social pressure to be something other than a shit. That of course is what I’ve been saying for years (so many years, way too many years): that the anonymity of Twitter and discussion boards and so on makes this kind of dreck possible.

Wu looked at themes as well as vocabulary.

This part of her analysis reveals that discussions about men are more likely to be confined to topics like economics itself and professional advice (with terms including career, interview or placement).

Discussions of women are much more likely to involve topics related to personal information (with words like family, married or relationship), physical attributes (words like beautiful, body or fat) or gender-related terms (like gender, sexist or sexual).

Men are complicated people who think and work; women are blobs who get poked and have babies.

To be sure, the online forum Ms. Wu studied is unlikely to be representative of the entire economics profession, although even a vocal minority can be sufficient to create a hostile workplace for female economists.

Janet Currie, a leading empirical economist at Princeton (where Ms. Wu works as her research assistant), told me the findings resonated because they’re “systematically quantifying something most female economists already know.” The analysis “speaks volumes about attitudes that persist in dark corners of the profession,” Professor Currie said.

And other professions, and intellectual interests, and fandoms, and and and…

Some economists say they find the discourse on econjobrumors.com to be a breath of fresh air. George Borjas, an economics professor at Harvard, wrote on his blog last summer that he found the forum “refreshing.”

Professor Borjas said: “There’s still hope for mankind when many of the posts written by a bunch of over-educated young social scientists illustrate a throwing off of the shackles of political correctness and reflect mundane concerns that more normal human beings share: prestige, sex, money, landing a job, sex, professional misconduct, gossip, sex. …” In an email sent on Wednesday, after he received a copy of Ms. Wu’s paper, Professor Borjas said his views had not changed.

Ah yes. It’s always so refreshing to throw off those shackles of political correctness and go back to calling women sluts and bitches. Thank you, Professor Borjas.

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