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.

The state of academic “gender” studies these days.

Very much looking forward to a lovely lazy Xmas break and then to cracking on with my article about why ‘sex’ (as in ‘biological’ not desire) is no longer applicable to contemporary feminist theory and activism.

— Sally Hines (@sally_hines) December 15, 2018

How about a little nostalgia trip back to 2002 courtesy of the NY Times:

Within weeks of the death of John J. Gotti and the indictment of his eldest brother, Peter, the new reputed chief of the Gambino crime family, federal prosecutors in Manhattan yesterday announced charges against 14 more people who they said were Gambino family members or associates.

The crimes listed in the indictments seemed familiar — murder, loan-sharking, extortion, robbery and bookmaking — and they served as a reminder, federal officials said, that the mob is not dead in the city, only trying to reshape itself in the face of constant pressure from law enforcement.

”Folks who think that organized crime is a thing of the past in New York are kidding themselves,” said James B. Comey, the United States attorney in Manhattan. ”These people are out there, and they are struggling to revive and to maintain these organized crime families.”

It must feel so bizarre to him to see the same kind of thing squatting in the White House.

The indictment also charged that members of the crime family played a role in the 1989 killing of Frederick Weiss, a businessman. The government previously attributed the killing to members of the New Jersey-based DeCavalcante crime family, which prosecutors said has long been associated with the Gambinos.

Mr. Comey alleged that John Gotti, who died on June 10 in a federal prison hospital in Springfield, Mo., had suspected that Mr. Weiss ”might be cooperating with the government,” and that members of both crime families ”killed Weiss as a favor to Gotti.”

Mr. Comey said Mr. Weiss was not, in fact, cooperating with the government.

”They didn’t require proof beyond a reasonable doubt or probable cause,” Kevin P. Donovan, the assistant director in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York office, said of the decision to kill Mr. Weiss.

They killed him, Mr. Donovan said, because ”they had a bad vibe.”

That too sounds very familiar.

Bumpy day up in there.

Never in the history of our Country has the “press” been more dishonest than it is today. Stories that should be good, are bad. Stories that should be bad, are horrible. Many stories, like with the REAL story on Russia, Clinton & the DNC, seldom get reported. Too bad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2018

Erm…what? I think I get the “should be good: are bad” polarity; I think he means stories that should be about how awesome Donald Trump is fail to say that and instead say that he is disappointing. But the “should be bad: are horrible” one? Mystifying. They should say Democrats are bad but instead say they’re horrible? That doesn’t seem like something Trump would frown on. He must have gotten confused. He meant to do a polarity thing: the ones that should be good are bad, the ones that should be bad are good. That’s a stupid polarity because he doesn’t mean bad/good so much as flattering/unflattering, but it would at least be possible to follow. But switching to bad—>horrible halfway through makes nonsense of the whole thing. Poor Donald. He doesn’t word.

The pathetic and dishonest Weekly Standard, run by failed prognosticator Bill Kristol (who, like many others, never had a clue), is flat broke and out of business. Too bad. May it rest in peace!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2018

Such dignity.

Wow, 19,000 Texts between Lisa Page and her lover, Peter S of the FBI, in charge of the Russia Hoax, were just reported as being wiped clean and gone. Such a big story that will never be covered by the Fake News. Witch Hunt!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2018

Says Mister Fuck Everything That Moves, Mister grab her by the pussy, Mister I moved on her like a bitch, Mister serial sexual assaulter.

Then a silence fell; I suppose he’s on the golf course.

What happened:

A 7-year-old Guatemalan girl who crossed the southern border into the United States illegally earlier this month died of dehydration and shock after being apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in New Mexico.

The girl and her father were part of a group of 163 people who surrendered to Border Patrol officers on the night of Dec. 6, south of Lordsburg, N.M., according to The Washington Post, which first reported the story.

It seems slightly stupid to say a girl of 7 crossed the border illegally. Children of 7 don’t have that kind of autonomy, and she was with her father.

Anyway. She died. She died of dehydration.

Eight hours after the girl and her father were taken into custody, she began having seizures and her body temperature was measured at 105.7 degrees by emergency medical technicians.

The girl “had not eaten or had any water for several days,” Post reporter Nick Miroff told NPR’s Morning Edition on Friday.

Now, this:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1073416128456728576

Susan Glasser notes that the Mueller investigation owns Trump’s attention.

Given the constant, repetitive nature of Trump’s “witch hunt” tweets, it might be tempting to ignore them. That would be a mistake. The chief executive’s attention is the most valuable resource of any Administration—what a President spends his time on reflects, more than anything else, an Administration’s true priorities. By those standards, the “witch hunt” is the overriding priority of the Trump White House, and it will be even more so in the new year, when the special counsel, Robert Mueller, moves toward a conclusion and a new, Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, with the power and the votes to subpoena and impeach Trump, takes office.

So, given the fact of Trump’s occupation of the White House, that’s a good thing. Time Trump spends tweeting “WITCH HUNT!!” and its cognates is time he doesn’t spend tearing up environmental laws or begging the North Koreans to stay in his hotels.

Largely overlooked in the daily flood of Trump-era news, a week ago, his former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, said in an interview that Trump had repeatedly pressed him to violate the law. “I’d have to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you wanna do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law, it violates treaty.’ He got really frustrated,” Tillerson said. “I think he grew tired of me being the guy who told him, ‘You can’t do that.’ ”

Trump’s insults in response drew attention away from the substance, but that won’t last.

Tillerson’s allegation was more than just another bout of Trump-era name-calling between a former Secretary of State who once called his boss a “fucking moron” and the President who fired him by tweet. Imagine Tillerson before Congress come January, testifying under oath and live on television, about which laws Trump told him to break.

Oh yes; imagine that. How interesting it will be.

Adam Schiff and Jeffrey Toobin talked over burgers in downtown Burbank the other day. Schiff says it’s about The Monayyy.

Schiff went on, “At the end of the day, what should concern us most is anything that can have a continuing impact on the foreign policy and national-security policy of the United States, and, if the Russians were laundering money for the Trump Organization, that would be totally compromising.” Schiff hypothesizes that Trump went beyond using his campaign and the Presidency as a vehicle for advancing his business interests, speculating that he may have shaped policy with an eye to expanding his fortune. “There’s a whole constellation of issues where that is essentially the center of gravity,” Schiff said. “Obviously, that issue is implicated in efforts to build Trump Tower in Moscow. It’s implicated in the money that Trump is bragging he was getting from the Saudis. And why shouldn’t he love the Saudis? He said he was making so much money from them.” As the Washington Post has reported, Trump has sold a superyacht and a hotel to a Saudi prince, a $4.5-million apartment near the United Nations to the Saudi government, and many other apartments to Saudi nationals, and, since Trump became President, his hotels in New York and Chicago have seen significant increases in bookings from Saudi visitors. In a break with the Republican congressional leadership, Trump refuses to take action against Saudi Arabia, notwithstanding substantial evidence that Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince and the putative head of state, directed the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who lived in the United States.

It’s indisputable that Trump has made money off the Saudis; it’s in dispute whether or not that had any effect on his policy decisions.

Schiff also pointed out that Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, met with the C.E.O. of a state-owned Russian bank in December, 2016, and that, the following month, Erik Prince, an informal adviser to the Trump campaign, met with the leader of a Russian sovereign-wealth fund in the Seychelles, an East African archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean. “The American people have a right to know that their President is working on their behalf, not his family’s financial interests,” Schiff said. “Right now, I don’t think any of us can have the confidence that that’s the case.” All of these subjects, Schiff averred, were fair game for investigation by the committee that he will soon chair.

He goes from a staff of eleven to one of twenty-five; he says they’ve been deluged with resumes. Unlike Trump (I said that part).

The Republican coup in Wisconsin is complete.

Scott Walker, the outgoing Republican governor of Wisconsin, on Friday signed into law measures that diminish the power of his Democratic successor and expand the authority of Republican lawmakers who teamed up with him over the last eight years to move the state firmly to the right.

Those Republican lawmakers? They’re still in the majority only because Wisconsin is so gerrymandered in favor of Republicans. The vote for Dems was much larger.

Mr. Walker signed the measures over the objections of the incoming governor and despite vehement protest in the State Capitol as Republican lawmakers rushed the bills through in a hastily-called session last week. Tony Evers, the Democrat who beat Mr. Walker in the November election, has suggested he may file suit over the changes.

Walker is a “screw the underlings” Republican.

Mr. Walker, a former legislator and county executive who then was little known outside of the Milwaukee area, won a crucial advantage when he became governor in 2011: Voters not only flipped the governor’s seat to Republican, but also both chambers of the Legislature.

Results came immediately. Within weeks, Mr. Walker announced the plan that would define his tenure and make him a national name. He wanted to shrink collective bargaining rights for most public sector workers in a state with deep roots in the labor movement.

Outside Mr. Walker’s Capitol office, protesters marched and drummed and chanted fury at what they saw as an effort to weaken unions and diminish Democrats. But Mr. Walker pushed through the measure, survived a recall election and went on to guide Wisconsin on a conservative path, adopting a concealed carry law, expanding private school vouchers, enacting so-called right-to-work legislation, passing voter identification rules and setting work rules for Medicaid recipients.

More guns; more private schools and thus worse public schools; weaker unions; voter suppression; no health insurance for the poor. What a glorious vision, huh?

To Mr. Walker’s supporters, the bills Mr. Walker acted on Friday were pragmatic ways to shore up Republican policies and establish reasonable checks on the incoming Democrats. Signing the bills would secure his legacy, they say, not sully it.

Excuse me, one party is not supposed to put any “checks” on a rival party. That’s not how this is supposed to work.

The LA Review of Books has An Open Letter from Queer Studies Scholars. It is not an intelligent or persuasive letter.

To Whom It May Concern,

We write to respond to Christopher Reed and Christopher Castiglia’s unfortunate letter regarding Grace Lavery’s essay on using appropriate pronouns in the classroom context. While we debated taking up the many points of Professor Castiglia and Professor Reed’s very long essay, we feel that the best response is a simple reiteration of the final lines of Professor Lavery’s essay:

Deadnaming and misgendering are not acceptable scholarly practices, and they are not covered by the principle of academic freedom.

They “feel” (not think) that is the best response? And they call themselves scholars?

“Deadnaming” and “misgendering” are not straightforwardly anything, including practices or scholarly practices, because the words are jargon, and quite recently coined jargon at that. They are jargon and they are not even scholarly jargon but rather political jargon, and politics of a very peculiar kind. It’s fundamentally meaningless to announce that “deadnaming” and “misgendering” are not acceptable scholarly practices, which makes it very odd to call it “the best response.”

And even if the two jargon words were perfectly cromulent words, the sentence that contains them would remain simply an abrupt and unargued assertion. It’s downright weird to see people who claim to be scholars calling an abrupt and unargued assertion “the best response.” It isn’t.

And then there’s the fact that the assertion is not even true. Scholarship takes no position on the made-up crimes of “deadnaming” and “misgendering” because scholarship has better things to do.

After that fatuous claim they do go on to make a token effort to present something resembling an argument, but the result is not compelling.

We reject the idea that misgendering is an exercise of academic freedom. As teachers and scholars, we take very seriously the responsibility to challenge our students intellectually, but that responsibility in no way translates into the capacity to selectively refute their dignity and right to self-definition.

Once again that’s not scholarly anything, it’s hackneyed and basically meaningless political jargon. What does “refute their dignity” even mean? It should at the very least be something like “refute their claims to dignity,” but even then it would be feeble, because it’s not self-evident that anyone’s dignity is dependent on other people’s tactful acceptance of counterfactual personal claims. You could argue that it’s the other way around: that tactful acceptance of counterfactual personal claims treats the claimant like a child who has to be humored, which is not as dignified as all that. And then, what “right to self-definition”? Again: that’s not a real thing, and certainly not a real scholarly thing. There is no such thing as a broad, general, binding right to define ourselves. I can “define myself” as a Supreme Court Justice if I like, but it won’t get me a seat on the bench or even the courtesy of being called Justice.

That is not academic freedom; it is a form of self-serving aggression worthy of Title IX intervention on the part of the institution.

What? Self-serving? How is it self-serving? Step one, say women are women; step two, face barrage of hostility; step three, ???; step 4, profit!? It’s not self-serving, it’s resistance to being ordered to believe lies. Is it aggression though? No, it is not aggression. Is it a Title IX crime? Nope not that either.

If this shit is scholarship give me ignorance.

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1073329533347016705

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1073330088677003265

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1073330540546220032

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1073331035633418240

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1073331546004672513

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1073332967169114112

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1073333800459894784

https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1073331240638537728

H/t Screechy Monkey

Maddow argued yesterday that the AMI confession puts the three miniTrumps in the hot seat.