Guest post: Instruments of social control

Nov 26th, 2018 12:42 pm | By

Originally a comment by Freemage on There are wheels that have been squeaking for a lot longer.

Religion is an instrument of societal control, but the New Atheist dream that a world without religion would immediately cast off the old chains has been largely and soundly debunked, primarily by the actions and rhetoric of the New Atheists, themselves. Undermining religious conservatives, in particular, does deal with one stumbling block, but it helps to remember there are progressive religionists, too (Quakers, for instance, tend to be a decade or two on the right side of historical changes), who can be counted upon as allies in fights against oppression, at least so long as their atheist counterparts don’t kick things off with, “You’re dumb. Help us.”

I do wonder how much of the extreme trans-woman rhetoric (and yes, it does seem to largely be confined to the transwoman side, with the standard caveats about humans being capable of anything accounting for the handful of transmen extremists) represents the larger body of transwomen, particularly among those who actually seek GRS. I’ve known a small number of transwomen over the years (possibly more, as the ones I KNOW were trans were the ones who transitioned after I’d met them, and I’ve seen enough of them post-transition to realize that I’m not particularly good at telling the difference on sight), and literally none of them have ever spouted off the sorts of nonsense and hateful rhetoric Ophelia regularly quotes here. Instead, they were generally inclined to keep to themselves and were way too busy navigating the assorted difficulties of life to deal with this sort of thing.

The bit that blows my mind is the extreme trans alliance with the ‘non-binary’ movement. The latter absolutely SHOULD be a feminist-adjacent cause, but got co-opted by the trans extremists somehow, even though they always seem to have opposing agendas, to my understanding. To feminist ideology, there’s little difference between ‘non-binary’ and ‘breathing’–a truly ‘binary man’ would be more like a Chuck Norris meme come to life; I’m not even sure I could imagine a genuinely ‘binary woman’, since the definition of femininity is almost always rigged to make sure that no human being could fit all the requirements (because that makes it easier to point out how any given woman is a ‘failure’ to meet the contradictory requirements). Sure, there’s a bit of special snowflake-ism to calling yourself non-binary, but that seems like it could be a window to getting the person to realize that this is the natural human condition, and that the gender roles they’re rejecting shouldn’t be forced on anyone.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments


The utterly sensible argument

Nov 26th, 2018 11:07 am | By

The logic of it.

By the same token, men have always been present everywhere. And? Does it follow that women have nothing to fear from men? Hardly. It’s not a vanishingly rare occurrence for men to use their superior size and strength to get violent with women. Even if you think it’s uncomplicatedly true that trans women are women, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that some men will pretend to be trans women in order to assault women. It doesn’t even rule out the possibility that some men could consider themselves trans women while not actually being trans women. (What? What does that mean? Isn’t saying it the same as being it? Well that’s the issue, isn’t it. What, exactly, is the difference between saying it and being it? If it really is just a matter of saying, why can’t people just say it for the moment and then unsay it 30 seconds later? How do we know they mean it? How do we know they’re not just having a laugh? How do we know they’re not being sarcastic? How do we know it’s not a ploy? How do we know anything? When trans is both a profound and intense inner [lived] experience and a simple matter of self-declaration, what is it at all?)

Sally Hines might as well have said men have always been married to women therefore women have nothing to fear from marriage to men. Most women don’t, of course, but some do, and the men who are going to turn violent don’t come with labels saying so.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 12 comments


Yesterday in London

Nov 26th, 2018 10:25 am | By

Deutsche Welle reports on the One Law For All conference this past weekend:

Should Shariah, the Islamic religious law, be blamed for the injustices faced by Muslim women and children or its rigid implementation? Can Shariah be adapted to the needs of secularism? Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and their political use that resulted in Asia Bibi’s death sentence prompted the discussion at a conference on Shariah, segregation and secularism in London on November 25.

…

The conference also featured Saif ul Mulook, Bibi’s lawyer, who fled Pakistan to the Netherlands soon after the court overturned his client’s death sentence, which had kept her in prison for nearly a decade.

Mulook praised the Pakistani constitution for its “secular credentials” and cited its Article 25 that guarantees equality to all citizens. He also spoke about his childhood when Christians and Muslims lived peacefully together in Pakistan.

“Small groups of mullahs (Islamic clerics) gained prominence after General Zia-ul-Haq [a military dictator who ruled Pakistan in the 1980s] and the US intervened in Afghanistan, a peaceful country at the time,” Mulook told the audience, as he was given a standing ovation by the attendees for his long struggle to get justice for Bibi.

The conference participants urged the British government to grant asylum to Bibi on humanitarian grounds. They also urged authorities to abolish all laws that are against the spirit of freedom of conscience and expression.

The participants of the international conference, organized by Maryam Namazie, marked the 10th anniversary of the One Law for All Campaign, which campaigns for equality irrespective of background, beliefs and religions. They demanded “one law for all’ in opposition to those in Europe who are calling for more autonomy for the arbitration of religious courts and religious judges, especially over matters related to family law, inheritance, divorce, child custody and domestic violence.

In her speech, Yasmin Rehman, a women’s rights campaigner, criticized British authorities for the “mess” they have created by categorizing minority communities “between good and bad migrants.”

Rehman alleged that the British government tends to support any organization that speaks against Muslim radicalization without analyzing its credentials.

The rights activist argued that authorities pander to the demands of right-wing Muslim organizations, giving them legitimacy by allowing Shariah courts to have authority in divorce cases, adding that these measures are tantamount to creating parallel legal systems in the country.

Conference organizers shared Rehman’s views, saying that often the victims of parallel legal regimes in the UK are the most vulnerable people, such as women, children and minority communities.

“We must acknowledge equal rights for all and stop dividing people into communities. We must all abide by human rights laws that are man-made and are subject to change, of course,” said Fariborz Pooya.

But the UK government doesn’t agree.

In February, a report submitted to the British parliament recommended regulation of Shariah courts in the country. It was, however, rejected by the government.

Gita Sahgal, director of the Center for Secular Space organization, accused the British government of legitimizing a parallel legal system in the UK by allowing a dual divorce procedure — one civil and one religious — for British Muslims.

Sahgal explained that the interpretation of Shariah laws is different in Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries. In Muslim-minority countries, Muslim organizations campaign for “cultural conservatism” and a more rigid form of Shariah law. Shariah, she said, has undergone a reformation over a period of time, depending on the political views of the Muslims organizing themselves in different societies or as different communities.

The thing about religious law is that it’s religious, which means it can’t be discussed and analyzed and criticized in purely secular terms, that is to say, in purely this-world terms. There’s always the sacred/fictional element, which takes it out of human hands.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
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This way to the gas, kids

Nov 26th, 2018 9:25 am | By

A day that will live in infamy.

A little girl from Honduras stares into the camera, her young features contorted in anguish. She’s barefoot, dusty, and clad only in a diaper and T-shirt. And she’s just had to run from clouds of choking tear gas fired across the border by U.S. agents.

A second photograph, which also circulated widely and rapidly on social media, shows an equally anguished woman frantically trying to drag the same child and a second toddler away from the gas as it spreads.

Tear gas – shot at people who were seeking asylum from violence in their home countries. Yes, I understand that no country can simply invite in all people who are fleeing violence in their home countries because that would be billions of people, but there’s plenty of space between that extreme and gassing people seeking asylum.

The Post continues:

The three were part of a much larger group, perhaps 70 or 80 men, women and children, pictured in a wider-angle photo fleeing the tear gas. Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon shot the images, which provoked outrage and seemed at odds with President Trump’s portrayal of the caravan migrants as “criminals” and “gang members.”

Trump officials said that authorities had to respond with force after hundreds of migrants rushed the border near Tijuana on Sunday, some of them throwing “projectiles” at Customs and Border Protection personnel.

No, actually, they didn’t “have to.” Trump told them to, because he’s a murderous racist. It’s pretty much as crude and simple as it looks.

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Guest post: There are wheels that have been squeaking for a lot longer

Nov 25th, 2018 4:25 pm | By

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Questions are rarely settled without debate.

Is it just me, or have certain tennets of trans ideology met with more rapid acceptance than one might expect? I know I’m noticing the effects of my own aging on my perception of time (incipient curmudgeonly relativistic time dilation), but things seem to have moved very quickly. The squeaky wheel may get the grease, but there are wheels that have been squeaking for a lot longer (say WOMEN, for example) that have not gotten their timely share of “lubrication.” To further mix metaphors, the extreme trans activists come across as queue jumping dogs in the manger, preventing women from retaining (or gaining in the first place) rights they’ve been demanding for ever.

I’m surprised at the number of governmental and business bodies that have accepted/swallowed/caved in to trans ideologies demands without much in the way of question or debate. I can’t imagine it’s strictly out of the goodness of their hearts, or wanting to appear to do the right thing, because many of these same governments and businesses have been glacially slow or downright shitty at that sort of empathic response in the past. I’m not sure that all these institutions could learn to be so responsive to pressure and demands that quickly by simply learning from past mistakes. I can see some elements on the Left vying to be the mostest, bestest and wokest tof rans allies, but not so much government and business. What’s behind this slight, unexpected, change of gears in the workings of power? Are trans rights a way of undercutting feminism that these non-Left institutions have latched onto, just like New Atheism used women’s rights as a cudgel against Islam (and to a lesser degree Christianity) but quickly forgot about them domestically and within its own organizations once their rhetorical value had been spent against foreign, brown theists? Just curious…

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 20 comments


Children were screaming and coughing

Nov 25th, 2018 3:55 pm | By

The AP reports:

12:15 p.m.

Central American migrants, mostly men, appear to be trying to breach the border crossing between Tijuana and California.

U.S. Border Patrol helicopters flew low overhead, while U.S. agents held vigil on foot beyond the wire fence. The Border Patrol office in San Diego said via Twitter that pedestrian crossings have been suspended at the San Ysidro port of entry at both the East and West facilities.

Trump meanwhile was running his mouth. Of course he was.

The AP 15 minutes later:

Migrants approaching the U.S. border from Mexico have been enveloped with tear gas after a few tried to breach the fence separating the two countries.

U.S. agents shot the gas, according to an Associated Press reporter on the scene. Children were screaming and coughing in the mayhem.

On the U.S. side of the fence, shoppers streamed in and out of an outlet mall.

And Trump played a round of golf.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments


State of play

Nov 25th, 2018 12:45 pm | By

The Guardian says Mueller has been amazingly speedy.

Anne Milgram, a law professor at New York University and a former prosecutor and attorney general of New Jersey, said Mueller and his 17 lawyers had done “a terrific job”.

“Months have gone by – people think it’s a long time – it is not in criminal justice,” she said. “He has moved incredibly quickly, got a lot of cooperation agreements, charges, done an extraordinary job of running down Russian hacking of the election.”

Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor for the northern district of California, said: “Complex charges against nearly three dozen people [and] organizations in less than two years is unheard of. Federal investigations may go on for three or four years before charges are brought against a few defendants. Also despite nearly daily false attacks from the president and his allies, the entire team has just kept its head down and done their work.”

The Guardian also says Trump is cornered.

Trump is approaching the midway point in his presidency and, some argue, a point of no return. The recent midterm elections left him wounded, House Democrats are said to be aiming a “subpoena cannon” at every aspect of his life and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation appears to be nearing its endgame.

“There’s no doubt we’re entering new territory and Donald Trump is in big trouble,” said Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “The election results, no matter what he says, were devastating to him. The coalition he put together is clearly strained and he seems incapable of creating consensus.”

Ya think?

the president has been acting like a man cornered. The catalogue is too long to list in full but here are some of the lowlights:

  • Trump fired Jeff Sessions and hired Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general, in what many see as a threat to the special counsel.
  • He tried to ban a CNN correspondent from the White House but lost in court.
  • He skipped a visit to a military cemetery in France.
  • He criticised the admiral who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
  • He floated bizarre theories for the wildfires in California, twice referred to the destroyed city of Paradise as “Pleasure” and revelled in ignorance of climate change.
  • He referred to the Democrat Adam Schiff as “Adam Schitt”.
  • He issued a bewildering statement (633 words with eight exclamation marks) questioning the CIA’s reported conclusion that Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
  • His daughter Ivanka was caught using a personal email account for government business.
  • He scolded the ninth circuit court of appeals, earning a rare rebuke from the chief justice of the supreme court.
  • It was reported that he wanted the justice department to prosecute Hillary Clinton and former FBI director James Comey.
  • He authorised troops on the US-Mexico border to use “lethal force”, despite concerns their presence is a political stunt.

None of it’s new but it’s nice to have a handy list.

Trump’s inability to stay silent suggests he has learned nothing from his election drubbing. Other presidents have suffered similar fates in the midterms, only to bounce back and win re-election. But they have done so by making changes and showing humility; when Trump was asked by Fox News to rank himself in the pantheon of great presidents, he awarded himself an A+; when he was asked by a reporter what he was grateful for on Thanksgiving, he talked about himself.

Well, he’s an extreme narcissist. Narcissists don’t do self-correction, let alone humility or apology.

Rick Tyler, a political analyst and Republican consultant, said: “Donald Trump seems like he’s worried about two things. First, he’s clearly worried about the Mueller report. If it was purely a question of ego and whether Russia helped him get elected, this is an overreaction. There’s something else going on.

“Second, if you analyse Saudi Arabia and the Khashoggi incident, what Trump says makes no sense. Saudi Arabia is not going to cancel contracts and only has a negligible impact on the cost of oil and gas. Yet Trump promoted the awful cover story. He’s hiding something. There’s something there. He’s not protecting the crown prince; he’s protecting himself.”

Third, there’s that lawsuit against the Trump Foundation.

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Questions are rarely settled without debate

Nov 25th, 2018 11:55 am | By

Kenan Malik points out that discussion is more productive than silencing:

On perhaps no issue has the question of what can or cannot be debated been more sharply contested than that of transgenderism. How should society, and the law, look upon people who were born male but see themselves as female? Trying to answer that question has led to bitter confrontations between trans activists, determined to secure full rights for trans people, and “gender critical” feminists worried that the notion of what it is to be a woman is being transformed to the detriment of women’s rights.

The thing is, those two items don’t have to be in tension, and they shouldn’t be. Gender critical feminists don’t want to deny trans people full rights. It hasn’t generally been considered a “right” to be able to impose one’s own personal “identity” on the rest of the world. That still isn’t considered a “right” except when it comes to a gender that differs from a sex. It’s a new and peculiar “right,” this right to be validated as the gender that doesn’t match your sex. It’s becoming apparent as time goes on that such a right does in fact conflict with women’s struggle to obtain equal rights with men. If affirmative action for women (hire more women, invite more women to speak, give awards to women) starts applying to men who identify as women…that’s a tension.

Woman’s Place is a feminist group dedicated to defending the idea of women-only spaces. Its meetings have been disrupted by protesters and banned by local councils as “providing a platform for hate speech”. When another feminist group, Liverpool ReSisters, put up stickers proclaiming “Women don’t have penises” on Anthony Gormley statues on Crosby beach, they were investigated by the police for possible hate crimes and condemned by the city’s mayor, Joe Anderson, for their “hateful” actions.

The Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy recently tweeted “men aren’t women” and asked: “What is the difference between a man and a trans woman?” Twitter shut down her account for “violating our rules against hateful conduct” and forced her to delete her tweets.

The issue is not whether Stock or Murphy or the ReSisters are right in their views. I agree with some of their arguments, disagree with others. The issue, rather, is whether it is valid for them to raise the issues they do or whether the very act of doing so constitutes “hatred”.

There are, obviously, ways of talking about trans people (and any category of people) that do constitute hatred, but it doesn’t follow and it isn’t the case that all discussion of what we mean by “gender” and whether or not anyone’s identity can be treated as binding on everyone else constitutes hatred.

To suggest that the kinds of questions posed by Stock or Murphy should not be asked is to suggest, contra Joubert, that it is better to settle questions than debate them. The trouble is, questions are rarely settled without debate. Stock and Murphy raise certain issues not because they are bigots but because of the realities facing women in society. Whatever one thinks of their arguments, these realities will not disappear simply by labelling critical feminists “hatemongers”.

Is there a formula that debate plus time equals settled? There isn’t literally but there can be in practice, to some extent. There can be ratchets in what is still debatable and what isn’t, although strong enough pressure (in the form of Trumps and Bannons and the like) can break even the ratchets – but the ratchets don’t drop into place overnight. I would like it if it were not seen as debatable whether or not women get to work at Google, but we’re not there yet. It’s way too early in the process for any dogma on “gender identity” to be settled.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 17 comments


Solidarity, bro

Nov 25th, 2018 6:22 am | By

This is a strange one.

Impressive biceps for women.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 1 Comment »


Make the women stop talking

Nov 24th, 2018 4:33 pm | By

Twitter has now permanently banned Meghan Murphy. For what? For having an Unapproved View on sex and gender. What next? Banning, say, Walter Shaub and Norm Eisen for being critical of Trump? Banning Human Rights Watch for reporting on violations of human rights? Banning scientists for talking about global warming?

Why is it Twitter’s job to enforce orthodoxy on trans dogma? Why is that Twitter’s job when it’s not Twitter’s job to do anything about years-long harassment campaigns against women?

So, we need to make her thoughts even more widely available on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/K_IngalaSmith/status/1066239395009835008

https://twitter.com/Ginger1383/status/1066392765104218112

https://twitter.com/renarde/status/1066350086597292032

https://twitter.com/LesleySemmens/status/1066481457655439365

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 13 comments


Postpone the water testing

Nov 24th, 2018 1:07 pm | By

There was a horrendous E. coli outbreak last year.

The culprit turned out to be E. coli, a powerful pathogen that had contaminated romaine lettuce grown in Yuma, Arizona, and distributed nationwide. At least 210 people in 36 states were sickened. Five died and 27 suffered kidney failure. The same strain of E. coli that sickened them was detected in a Yuma canal used to irrigate some crops.

For more than a decade, it’s been clear that there’s a gaping hole in American food safety: Growers aren’t required to test their irrigation water for pathogens such as E. coli. As a result, contaminated water can end up on fruits and vegetables.

After several high-profile disease outbreaks linked to food, Congress in 2011 ordered a fix, and produce growers this year would have begun testing their water under rules crafted by the Obama administration’s Food and Drug Administration.

Would have. Note the conditional. Would have, but didn’t.

But six months before people were sickened by the contaminated romaine, President Donald Trump’s FDA – responding to pressure from the farm industry and Trump’s order to eliminate regulations – shelved the water-testing rules for at least four years.

Eliminate regulations!! All of them!!! Including the ones that would keep people from eating E. coli on their lettuce and dying!!!! Preserve our god-given right to eat shit-contaminated lettuce.

Despite this deadly outbreak, the FDA has shown no sign of reconsidering its plan to postpone the rules. The agency also is considering major changes, such as allowing some produce growers to test less frequently or find alternatives to water testing to ensure the safety of their crops.

The FDA’s lack of urgency dumbfounds food safety scientists.

Oh well – maybe the wildfires or the floods will kill us first.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments


Waive all the things

Nov 24th, 2018 12:03 pm | By

I missed this last August. I was alerted to it just now by Walter Shaub.

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1066406575647195137

Waiver? thought I. What waiver? So I looked it up.

Oh. That waiver.

It is “in the public interest” for the White House’s top communicator to be excused from federal ethics laws so he can meet with Fox News, according to President Donald Trump’s top lawyer.

Bill Shine, Trump’s newly minted communications director, and Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economist, who worked at CNBC before his White House post, have both been excused from provisions of the law which seeks to prevent administration officials from advancing the financial interests of relatives or former employers.

So, administration officials, go ahead and advance the financial interests of former employers.

“The Administration has an interest in your interacting with Covered Organizations such as Fox News,” wrote White House counsel Don McGahn in a July 13 memo granting an ethics waivers to Shine, a former Fox executive. “[T]he need for your services outweighs the concern that a reasonable person may question the integrity of the White House Office’s programs and operations.”

Kudlow, a former CNBC host, received a similar waiver allowing him to communicate with former colleagues.

In other words, we want you to do these unethical corrupt things for us, so we’re giving you a waiver from the rule that says you can’t do these unethical corrupt things for us. Slick.

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The future has arrived

Nov 24th, 2018 11:42 am | By

This year’s climate report will be reality for the next climate report.

More and more of the predicted impacts of global warming are now becoming a reality.

For instance, the 2014 assessment forecast that coastal cities would see more flooding in the coming years as sea levels rose. That’s no longer theoretical: Scientists have now documented a record number of “nuisance flooding” events during high tides in cities like Miami and Charleston, S.C.

“High tide flooding is now posing daily risks to businesses, neighborhoods, infrastructure, transportation, and ecosystems in the Southeast,” the report says.

Can they all move to Oklahoma? Would that work?

The United States military has long taken climate change seriously, both for its potential impacts on troops and infrastructure around the world and for its potential to cause political instability in other countries.

Hmm. Isn’t that unpatriotic, unTrumpian, anti-MAGA? Shouldn’t the military be ignoring climate change on the grounds that it’s Fake News?

The previous assessment warned that few states and cities were taking steps to adapt to the impacts of climate change. That’s slowly changing, the new report finds. More and more communities are taking measures such as preserving wetlands along the coasts to act as buffers against storms.

But outside of a few places in Louisiana and Alaska, few coastal communities are rethinking their development patterns in order to avoid the impacts from rising seas and severe weather that the report says are surely coming.

Not building new houses and condo buildings at the edge of the rising sea would seem to be quite a basic step, but apparently it’s beyond us.

The report warns that the country is particularly unprepared for the upheavals that will come as rising sea levels swamp coastal cities: “The potential need for millions of people and billions of dollars of coastal infrastructure to be relocated in the future creates challenging legal, financial, and equity issues that have not yet been addressed.”

And, at this rate, never will be.

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The Mississippi legislature is gaslighting

Nov 24th, 2018 11:04 am | By

A federal judge in Mississippi struck down the state’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks.

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, in Jackson, wrote a sharply worded rebuke of the law, calling it a deliberate attempt by the state to ask the newly conservative-majority Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established a woman’s legal right to abortion.

At one point, he said the Mississippi legislature’s “professed interest in ‘women’s health’ is pure gaslighting.”

“The State chose to pass a law it knew was unconstitutional to endorse a decades-long campaign, fueled by national interest groups, to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Reeves wrote in his ruling. “With the recent changes in the membership of the Supreme Court, it may be that the State believes divine providence covered the Capitol when it passed this legislation. Time will tell.”

We know what the Supreme Court is going to do.

In his conclusion, Reeves wrote about how he, as a man, could not imagine “the anxiety and turmoil” a woman might endure when deciding whether to get an abortion.

“The fact that men, myself included, are determining how women may choose to manage their reproductive health is a sad irony not lost on the Court,” Reeves wrote.

Women? Are we allowed to say that?

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A lumpy pink dope bellowing

Nov 24th, 2018 10:20 am | By

David Roth on Trump’s pre-helicopter shtick is a feast of word-deployment:

The wheedling honk of Trump’s voice and the uneasy tilt of his standing-on-a-hoverboard-for-the-first-time posture are constants, as is his customary air of triumphal huffiness…

It’s worthless, of course. Reporters shout something at Trump about a thing he said or did or his response to someone’s else response to something, and then he shouts that he did it because he felt like it or actually didn’t do it at all, or that the criticism of what he did is offensive and illegitimate, or that the question itself is. If he’s asked a question by a woman, he gets extra spicy….

This is more or less what Trump has always thought the news should be like: people with microphones clamoring for his opinion and asking him about himself. For decades the man has dreamed of reporters calling out “please, sir, what’s the latest on your personal feuds” or “sir, how did you achieve this amazing success?” while he delivers flirty winking answers. That this is not the way it goes now that he’s president clearly causes him great frustration. Watch these pissy helicopter-adjacent scrums and you may see a lumpy pink dope bellowing “we’re looking into that very strongly” in response to questions he transparently can’t answer and dispensing whatever thudding speculative idiocy he thinks will get him to the next question…

…Trump is nearly as ubiquitous in the culture as he has always believed he should be; the one deeply held belief that has been evident throughout his whole faithless disgrace of a life is people should be talking about Donald Trump more, on television, and he has just about seen that part through. All Trump wants, all he has ever wanted, is to be able to keep doing and taking and saying whatever he wants whenever he wants. He ran for president for this reason and this reason only.

One small but key additon: to be able to keep doing and taking and saying whatever he wants whenever he wants while millions watch. He’s not content to do all this talking just to himself, or to a captive audience of his wife or porn star or lawyer.

His politics, to the extent that they’ve ever been legible, have always been off-the-rack big city tabloid bullshit—crudely racist exterminate the brutes/back the blue authoritarianism in the background and ruthless petty rich person squabbling in the front. His actions since becoming president have been those of a dim, cruel child playacting at being a powerful man…

It’s all that good; you should read every word.

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To appease white supremacists

Nov 23rd, 2018 5:30 pm | By

Hillary Clinton says the way to stop xenophobia is to be more xenophobic.

Europe must get a handle on immigration to combat a growing threat from rightwing populists, Hillary Clinton has said, calling on the continent’s leaders to send out a stronger signal showing they are “not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support”.

Definitely. Combat that threat from rightwing populists by being a rightwing populist. Totally makes sense.

Clinton urged forces opposed to rightwing populism in Europe and the US not to neglect the concerns about race and identity issues that she says were behind her losing key votes in 2016. She accused Trump of exploiting the issue in the election contest – and in office.

And she doesn’t want to exploit it, she just wants to…what? Appropriate it? Take it over and do it right: genteelly, apologetically, with gravitas?

“The use of immigrants as a political device and as a symbol of government gone wrong, of attacks on one’s heritage, one’s identity, one’s national unity has been very much exploited by the current administration here,” she said.

“There are solutions to migration that do not require clamping down on the press, on your political opponents and trying to suborn the judiciary, or seeking financial and political help from Russia to support your political parties and movements.”

Say “go back” with a pleasant smile.

https://twitter.com/B_Ehrenreich/status/1065988267982708738

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He mocked the science of climate change

Nov 23rd, 2018 4:29 pm | By

The Times on that climate change report:

The report, which was mandated by Congress and made public by the White House, is notable not only for the precision of its calculations and bluntness of its conclusions, but also because its findings are directly at odds with President Trump’s agenda of environmental deregulation, which he asserts will spur economic growth.

Mr. Trump has taken aggressive steps to allow more planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks, and has vowed to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, under which nearly every country in the world pledged to cut carbon emissions. Just this week, he mocked the science of climate change because of a cold snap in the Northeast, tweeting, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?”

But in direct language, the 1,656-page assessment lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and environment, including record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South. Going forward, American exports and supply chains could be disrupted, agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast, the report finds.

The report is issued every four years, as required by law.

The previous report, issued in May 2014, concluded with nearly as much scientific certainty, but not as much precision on the economic costs, that the tangible impacts of climate change had already started to cause damage across the country. It cited increasing water scarcity in dry regions, torrential downpours in wet regions and more severe heat waves and wildfires.

The results of the 2014 report helped inform the Obama administration as it wrote a set of landmark climate change regulations. The following year, the E.P.A. finalized President Barack Obama’s signature climate change policy, known as the Clean Power Plan, which aimed to slash planet-warming emissions from coal-fired power plants. At the end of the 2015, Mr. Obama played a lead role in brokering the Paris Agreement.

He didn’t do it because he’s some touchy-feely hippy, you know. He did it because it’s already bad and it’s going to get horrendous, so a responsible president ought to work hard to mitigate it.

But in 2016, Republicans in general and Mr. Trump in particular campaigned against those regulations. In rallies before cheering coal miners, Mr. Trump vowed to end what he called Mr. Obama’s “war on coal” and to withdraw from the Paris deal. Since winning the election, his administration has move decisively to roll back environmental regulations.

Make America a dust bowl again.

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One cold snap will not stop it

Nov 23rd, 2018 11:42 am | By

A new report on climate change – released by the Trump administration on a day when apparently 93% of the population is shopping. Hoping we’ll ignore it much?

The report says it’s going to be bad. Really bad.

The costs of climate change could reach hundreds of billions of dollars annually, according to the report. The Southeast alone will probably lose over a half a billion labor hours by 2100 due to extreme heat.

Farmers will face extremely tough times. The quality and quantity of their crops will decline across the country due to higher temperatures, drought and flooding. In parts of the Midwest, farms will be able to produce less than 75% of the corn they produce today, and the southern part of the region could lose more than 25% of its soybean yield.

Heat stress could cause average dairy production to fall between 0.60% and 1.35% over the next 12 years — having already cost the industry $1.2 billion from heat stress in 2010.

Shellfish, killed off by ocean acidification. People, killed by heat. More mosquito- and tickborne diseases like Zika, dengue and chikungunya; more West Nile virus. More wildfires. Less safe water. Rising sea levels, flooding and storm surges. More blackouts and power failures.

Sea levels have already gone up 7 to 8 inches since 1900. Almost half that rise has been since 1993, a rate of rise greater than during any century in the past 2,800 years. Some countries are already seeing land underwater.

Don’t let the sales drown this out.

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There are rules that govern private foundations

Nov 23rd, 2018 11:25 am | By

News so new it’s not reported yet except on Twitter:

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Changing minds

Nov 23rd, 2018 11:05 am | By

Katha Pollitt asks some pointed questions about the beliefs of others.

For almost three years now, reporters have been begging tired farmers and miners eating their pancakes at Josie’s Diner in Smallville, Nebraska, to say they’ve seen the light. They never do. White evangelical women sneaking away from the Republican Party make for a good story—but they didn’t stop Ted Cruz from getting 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in Texas.

After Trump took the White House, and even after political scientists and pollsters figured out that many Trump supporters were not out-of-work Rust Belters but just your basic well-off Republicans, there was an orgy of self-criticism among Democrats and progressives. Somehow, those voters were our fault; we had neglected them, disrespected them, not felt their pain.

Democrats and progressives tend to be masochistic that way. Republicans and conservatives don’t, so much (except when it comes to the fetus), because of The Invisible Hand. The Hand does everything for the best, so compassion is not just a waste of energy, it’s also a slope down to socialism and economic armageddon.

Another version of this idea is to call on progressive white women to convert other white women who support Trump. Nobody calls on white men to convert white men, because everyone assumes that’s impossible, but for some reason, white women who hate abortion and taxes and Obamacare, who want to “build the wall” and “lock her up,” are supposed to be pliable—and it’s the duty of liberal white women to expiate their own racism by bringing them around.

Some suggestions about what the some reason might be? Women are all Mommy, supposed to take care of everything. Women are seen as the sex whose duty it is to succor everyone and be Most Enlightened. Women are also seen as the sex that can be told what to do. This of course also does much to explain why there is so much ranting and raving about “TERFs” when there is no equivalent ranting and raving about the male equivalent (which is so neglected it doesn’t even have an acronym). Women are compassionate Mommy, and women are also to blame for everything that goes wrong.

The assumption is that we have the right ideas; we just haven’t been conveying them persuasively enough to win the other side over. But let me ask a question: When was the last time someone persuaded you to change your worldview? I have written this column for over 20 years, and I doubt I’ve brought more than a handful of people to my way of thinking.

It depends on what kind of point of view we mean, though. Big general category, like left v right, the last time was more or less never, but there are smaller, more particular subcategories, on which I can change my view (worldview probably doesn’t apply) at a moment’s notice. Left v right is what Katha’s talking about here, but at the same time, changes in smaller particulars can add up to shifts even there. Several famous lifelong Republicans have stopped identifying as such thanks to Trump – James Comey and Richard Painter, for two, and there are others. There are also people like David Frum and Bill Kristol who remain Republicans and conservatives (I think) but exercise much of their punditry on explaining what’s wrong about Trump.

So why is it so hard to believe that white women who voted for Trump are mostly as fixed in their views as you are? They voted for him for dozens of reasons: to fit in with their family and community, to preserve or gain status, to piss off the libtards, to ally with their menfolk, to keep MS-13 from killing their children, to bring back jobs stolen by Mexico and China, to keep taxes low and black children out of their schools, or because it’s what Jesus wants. You may think their beliefs are bigoted and ill-informed and illogical—which they are. You may marvel that women who think the polite and scandal-free Barack Obama is the Antichrist can believe that foul-mouthed, abusive Donald Trump is God’s instrument, like King David. What you are not going to do is make them see it differently by reminding them that at least 15 women have accused Trump of a range of sexual offenses.

It may be impossible to change their minds, but it could be possible to get explanations, I think, and I wouldn’t mind getting some explanations, because even after all this time I still don’t get it.

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