Well this is a nauseating display – the White House press secretary echoing the mob boss language of Donald Trump to accuse the FBI of “ambushing” Michael Flynn and saying “Look, we know Michael Cohen to be a liar…”

Judge Sullivan just made Mike Flynn take back, under oath, the core of his last court filing — which argued maybe he’s not that guilty because the FBI was mean to him. https://t.co/FfmtaqnYlb

— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) December 18, 2018

Good. I found that “But the FBI agents TRICKED me into lying to them” dreck from Flynn intensely annoying, especially in light of “LOCK HER UP.”

The judge is the same judge who said “Turn that plane around,” I learned via Twitter.

Also, Flynn.

Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser, got a harsh warning from a federal judge on Tuesday that he could face prison for lying to federal investigators about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition and his role lobbying for Turkey.

At Mr. Flynn’s sentencing hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan called Mr. Flynn’s crimes “a very serious offense” and said he was not hiding his “disgust” at what Mr. Flynn had done.

“All along you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security adviser,” the judge told Mr. Flynn. “Arguably that undermines everything that this flag over here stands for. Arguably you sold your country out.”

And not even arguably, he doesn’t get to pretend he just had no idea what the rules are.

During the sentencing hearing, Judge Sullivan questioned Mr. Flynn and his lawyer about their earlier suggestion that F.B.I. agents might have tricked Mr. Flynn by failing to inform him before they interviewed him nearly two years ago that lying to them would constitute a federal crime.

Mr. Flynn told the court that he was not challenging the circumstances of the interview and that he knew lying to the F.B.I. was a crime.

If someone in his job with his job history doesn’t know that…something is very fishy.

Prosecutors dismissed the claims that Mr. Flynn had been tricked as a poor excuse, saying that as a high-ranking White House official and the former director of an intelligence agency, he was well aware that misleading federal authorities was a felony offense.

This is what I’m saying. It’s a bad excuse and it’s absurd.

Don’t worry, it’s just kink, just BDSM, just “rough sex.” Don’t kink-shame the nice man.

A multi-millionaire who left his injured and bleeding partner to die after “rough sex” has been jailed for three years and eight months.

Seeing as how she died, “rough sex” seems just a tad euphemistic.

Natalie Connolly had suffered more than 40 separate injuries, the court heard.

Broadhurst, 40, told a 999 operator he found his partner “dead as a doughnut” at their home in Kinver, Staffordshire, in December 2016.

At least he kept his sense of humor.

Ms Connolly was pronounced dead on 18 December 2016 after Broadhurst called paramedics to their rented home. She died from acute alcohol intoxication and blunt force injuries.

In mitigation, defence Stephen Vullo QC, said Broadhurst, of Wolverley, knew his partner was bleeding but did not think she would come to any harm.

Sure; blunt force trauma never harmed anyone.

He mad.

Russia isn’t messing around with the disinformation campaign.

Our report, announced by the committee on Monday, concludes that Russia was able to masquerade successfully as a collection of American media entities, managing fake personas and developing communities of hundreds of thousands, building influence over a period of years and using it to manipulate and exploit existing political and societal divisions.

…

In official statements to Congress, tech executives have said that they found it beyond their capabilities to assess whether Russia created content intended to discourage anyone from voting. We have determined that Russia did create such content. It propagated lies about voting rules and processes, attempted to steer voters toward third-party candidates[,] and created stories that advocated not voting.

I wonder how much of trans activism is shaped by Russian efforts.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on There must be reprisals.

Questioning their claims is not questioning their existence.

But refuting their claims to womanhood, allowing questions to even be asked, is tantamount to saying the Emperor is naked. The charade ends, the parade is over and those who praised the elegance and refinement of His Majesty’s raiment are shown to be a frauds and liars The little boy in the story who did not get the memo to bow and scrape and oooh and aaah is not to blame for the monarch’s nudity or embarassment. He only pointed out the truth as he saw it, the facts on the ground. Trans extremists’ claim to womanhood disappears in a puff of logic if their claim to it is not unquestioningly accepted and affirmed. To even question the assertion shows its weakness and dependence upon bluff and intimidation. Hackneyed formulae and magical thinking will only take you so far in the face of embarrassing, unyielding facts on the ground. Without some sort of reprisal, punishment or penalty, those who are silenced by fear rather than agreement may peel away from compliance with the demand for obedience to the asserted truth, as their going along with the demand in the first place was not out of any heartfelt loyalty or assent. While in the thrall of intimidation, they may however fetishize and display their own, superior wokeness by pointing out the lack of enthusiasm in others. (Reminding me of the tale told of the spontaneous, enthusiastic, thunderous applause with which a speech of Stalin was always greeted. Starting to clap was a no-brainer. The problem arose once one’s hands became sore. Sore hands or no, nobody wanted to be the guy who stopped clapping first…)

It’s a much more extreme example, but the assassination of atheists in Bangladesh I think, also springs from a similar desire to remove from consideration completely any hint of doubt or questioning of unevidenced assertions of fact, in this case the existence of a particular god. In this case the secret being guarded at all costs is not that The Emperor has no clothes, but that there is no Emperor at all. Allowing the brazen expression of blasphemy to go unpunished is seen as a sign of weakness, and represents a chink in the armour that protects the whole empty construct. It then becomes a competition amongst True Believers to demonstrate the depth of zeal and fervour with which one deals with or eliminates the doubters, blasphemers and apostates, both as a demonstration of the solidity, strength and orthodoxy of their own belief as well as a warning to others to keep silent.

The same goes for the violent response to the cartoon depictions of Muhammad; being able to coerce others into accepting your beliefs and to impose your rules and proscriptions is an exercise in power and, for a short time at least, a method of attempting to create a reality out of nothing but sheer will (and threats or acts of violence). Getting everyone else to go along with it is the tricky part, requiring silence from those who would oppose or criticize. But fear doesn’t always work, or if it sometimes does, not forever.

Criticism is not violence. Speech is not genocide. Baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire are not rhetorical devices.Calling for the death of TERFs is not reasoned argument.

https://youtu.be/GaB5AVNg14c

H/t Sackbut

Another Elinor Lipman gem:

It rained all weekend—very SAD!
When I can’t golf, I’m boiling mad.
No Caesar salad; no parade.
Plus ICE removed my favorite maid.
Hate-tweeting while I watched TV,
…And wondered “Can I pardon me?”

— Elinor Lipman (@ElinorLipman) December 17, 2018

People; honestly.

A guy asked this question on Facebook (public post):

I usually run at night so don’t encounter many people. However, when I run during the day (as I did early this morning) I always find walkers to be inconsiderate. Runners coming in the opposite direction will usually move to the left. Walkers rarely do. Pairs of runners change position to free up the pavement. Pairs of walkers don’t – they expect me to get off the pavement.

Why would that be? I don’t think it’s a personality problem. I’m pretty sure that the normal variety of human kindness is present among the individuals I encounter. I am guessing it’s something about the activity, but can’t think what it might be. Any ideas?

I’ve always noticed that a lot of runners are entitled and oblivious like this but I haven’t seen it put down in writing before. “Any ideas?” forsooth. Yes, bozo: you are going faster, in a place that’s intended for people who are walking, so it’s on you to get out of the way and, indeed, ideally to slow down. It’s just physics. If you crash into a walker it’s the walker who is going to hit the sidewalk, not you, therefore you have to get out of the way. It’s not “inconsiderate” for walkers not to try to dodge runners; trying to dodge a runner is likely to be more dangerous – to the walker – than maintaining position. You could dodge only to find that the runner dodged too just in time to slam into you. The runner’s momentum fractures the walker’s skull or neck or arm or pelvis, not the other way around.

People. Especially runners, especially male ones.

UKIP guy is upset.

STOP THIS MADNESS! The Scottish Parliament has banned gingerbread men in case they cause offence, declaring they must be called 'gingerbread people' instead. https://t.co/qiaclO5uPN

— David Kurten (@davidkurten) December 16, 2018

Oh no! Without gingerbread men, who will impregnate the strawberry shortcake?

Still not getting it. Aaron Hughes says life is tough for trans and gender nonconforming students at Oxford, then moves on to the more entertaining part about blaming feminist women for the tough life problem.

In spite of its public commitments, Oxford has failed to protect trans people from harassment and discrimination. Its refusal to act when transphobic speakers are invited to talk in its colleges and faculties is damning. Indeed, its willingness to condone the invitation of people who deny the existence of trans people entirely undermines its commitment to trans inclusivity.

Notice the instant and unargued jump from “harassment and discrimination” to “transphobic speakers invited to talk in its colleges and faculties.” That’s a massive jump. We know from experience that people are often called “transphobic” who are not “transphobic” but skeptical of new and counterfactual dogmas laid down about what women are and what we are allowed to say. Is it likely that Oxford would invite someone to speak whose talk would consist simply of abuse of trans people? Hardly. Refusing to sign up to new and counterfactual and peremptory dogmas about what women are is not any kind of “phobic.” Inviting feminist women who don’t agree that anyone who “identifies as” a woman is a woman is not harassment and discrimination. Women have a large stake in beliefs about what women are, and we’re not harassing anyone by disagreeing that men can make themselves women simply by uttering the magic words.

Then there’s the second sentence. We don’t “deny the existence of trans people.” We know very well that trans people exist, not least because some of them never stop yelling at us. What we deny is their peculiar vision of the facts. We deny that men know more about being women than we do, for instance; we deny that we have to step aside and defer to men who say they are women; we deny that men who say they are women get to bully us and bully any institution that invites us to speak or write an essay or attend a meeting.

Next paragraph.

The language we use is shaped by, and shapes, the world we live in. When we give space to transphobic hate speech in our higher education institutions, we normalise violence against trans people.

But it isn’t “transphobic hate speech.” (Note the redundancy. “It’s hatey McHaterson hate speech!!”) It isn’t hatred, it’s argument over truth claims. It isn’t hate speech and it doesn’t “normalise violence against trans people.” That kind of rhetoric is a distasteful appropriation of the real struggles of people who face real exploitation and oppression.

If the university’s silence on the issue of guest speakers is unacceptable, its failure to act when academics within its own institutions endorse transphobic hate speech is indefensible. In recent times, several academics have publicly disputed the validity of trans identities, in particular those of trans women and transfeminine people. At the time of writing, none have been reprimanded by the university.

What is “transfeminine” and how is it different from trans women? At any rate, again: disputing claims about “identities” that contradict material realities is not phobic hate speech. If we buy into the idea that it is, what’s to prevent the next generation from having to agree that their friends are rabbits, cars, pharaohs, whales, daffodils? If we’re not allowed to maintain our ability to distinguish between truth and lies, how can we function at all?

Trans identities are not a subject of debate, academic or otherwise. That members of academic staff can question our existence without reprisal is an indictment of the university’s commitment to trans inclusivity.

Reprisal. The little shit wants actual reprisal now. What will it be? Thumbscrews? The rack? Whipping?

And then at the end there’s a shocker:

Aaron Hughes is a lecturer in French at the University of Oxford’s Balliol College

I thought he was a student, and a first year at that.