Witness intimidation

May 12th, 2017 6:07 pm | By

The past few hours in Trump. The Times starts with the Twitter threat at Comey.

Mr. Trump chose not to clarify when asked later in the day by Fox News if there were tapes of conversations. “That I can’t talk about. I won’t talk about it,” he said. “All I want is for Comey to be honest.”

He lies every time he opens his mouth, and he’s telling other people to be honest.

Democrats were incredulous. “For a president who baselessly accused his predecessor of illegally wiretapping him, that Mr. Trump would suggest that he, himself, may have engaged in such conduct is staggering,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrats on the judiciary and oversight committees, sent a letter to the White House demanding copies of any recordings if they exist. The letter noted that “it is a crime to intimidate or threaten any potential witness with the intent to influence, delay or prevent their official testimony.”

It’s a crime the sitting president just committed in public. What will it be tomorrow? “We know where your kids go to school”? “Hope you have good life insurance”? “Keep your mouth shut or I’ll have you killed”?

[Spicer] denied that the president was threatening Mr. Comey. “That’s not a threat,” Mr. Spicer said. “He simply stated a fact. The tweet speaks for itself. I’m moving on.”

Of course it’s a threat, Spicey. It is not true that Trump “simply stated a fact.” The wording: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Saying somebody “better” something is not stating a fact, it’s issuing a warning or a threat. If I say “You better shut up” that’s not stating a fact.

Allies and former employees of Mr. Trump have long said that he taped some of his own phone calls, as well as meetings in Trump Tower. During the campaign, Mr. Trump’s aides told reporters that they feared their offices were bugged and that they were careful about what they said.

But the implicit threat to Mr. Comey was ripped from a familiar playbook that Mr. Trump relied on during the campaign to silence critics or dissent.

He threatened on Twitter to tell stories about Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the hosts of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, after they criticized him. He threatened to air unspecified dirty laundry about the wealthy Ricketts family as it financed efforts against him. And competing with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas for the Republican nomination, he threatened to “spill the beans on your wife!”

Oh god. I didn’t even know that. He is so loathsome.

This is unbearable. We knew it would be, that November night, and it is.

In this case, however, the warning came in the context of an F.B.I. investigation. Samuel W. Buell, a Duke University law professor and former federal prosecutor who led the Enron task force, said Mr. Trump’s attempt on Twitter to quiet Mr. Comey could be viewed as an effort to intimidate a witness to any future investigation into whether the firing amounted to obstruction of justice.

“If this were an actual criminal investigation — in other words, if there were a prosecutor and a defense lawyer in the picture — this would draw a severe phone call to counsel warning that the defendant is at serious risk of indictment if he continues to speak to witnesses,” Mr. Buell said. “Thus, this is also definitive evidence that Trump is not listening to counsel and perhaps not even talking to counsel. Unprecedented in the modern presidency.”

And also that he’s trying to intimidate a witness.

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Why someone is okay with your kids eating crap

May 12th, 2017 5:49 pm | By

Michelle Obama is resisting.

A fiery Michelle Obama vigorously defended the healthy eating initiative that was her biggest legacy as First Lady on Friday, telling a public health summit in Washington D.C. that something was “wrong” with an administration that did not want to give consumers nutrition information or teach children to eat healthily.

“We gotta make sure we don’t let anybody take us back,” Obama said. “This is where you really have to look at motives, you know. You have to stop and think, why don’t you want our kids to have good food at school? What is wrong with you? And why is that a partisan issue? Why would that be political? What is going on?”

I’ll take a guess. Freedom? Our precious Murikan freedom to let children eat whatever crap the marketers want to shove at them? Our determination not to let Faceless Bureaucrats in Warshington [let alone Michelle Obama] force children to eat healthy foods at school?

“Take me out of the equation — like me or don’t like me,” Obama added. “But think about why someone is okay with your kids eating crap. Why would you celebrate that? Why would you sit idly and be okay with that? Because here’s the secret: If someone is doing that, they don’t care about your kid.”

The comments were Obama’s first public remarks on the Trump administration’s assault on nutrition policy, which has already seen the delay of rules meant to reduce sodium and refined grains in school lunches and provide calorie counts on restaurant menus. The former First Lady championed many of those programs.

It’s our Divine Right to fill children with salt. We can pickle them if we want to! We have freedom!

The past four months have seen the food industry seize onto President Trump’s anti-regulatory agenda, arguing for the delay or suspension of rules that Mrs. Obama encouraged. In recent weeks, the National Association of Convenience Stores, the National Grocers Association and the American Bakers Association have all cited the Trump administration’s regulatory rollback as reason to delay the menu-labelling rules and new nutrition labels.

Freeeeee-eeeeeedom.

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Guest post: Reading Whipping Girl 3

May 12th, 2017 5:29 pm | By

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen

Still on Julia Serano’s Trans Woman Manifesto from her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Last time, you may remember, we looked at Serano’s demand that “[N]o qualifications should be placed on the term “trans woman”, and her definition of cissexism. Now let’s take a look at a neologism she seems to have invented: oppositional sexism, which she contrasts with traditional sexism.

While often different in practice, cissexism, transphobia, and homophobia are all rooted in oppositional sexism, which is the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires. Oppositional sexists attempt to punish or dismiss those of us who fall outside of gender or sexual norms because our existence threatens the idea that women and men are “opposite” sexes….

In addition to the rigid, mutually exclusive gender categories established by oppositional sexism, the other requirement for maintaining a male-centered gender hierarchy is to enforce traditional sexism – the belief that maleness and masculinity are superior to femaleness and femininity. Traditional and oppositional sexism work hand in hand to ensure that those who are masculine have power over those who are feminine, and that only those born male will be seen as authentically masculine. For the purposes of this manifesto, the word misogyny will be used to describe this tendency to dismiss and deride femaleness and femininity.

I’m going to skip right over Serano’s confident declaration that the notion that female and male are rigid categories with nonoverlapping sets of attributes is somehow not part and parcel of “traditional” sexism, aka sexism. What interests me here is how Serano partners maleness with masculinity and femaleness with femininity. Serano does this because she wants feminism to be about feminine people as well as females.

Feminists since Simone de Beauvoir have insisted that femininity is an artificial construct that needs to be disassociated from femaleness. They’ve acknowledged that the qualities designated as “feminine” are human qualities that are neither inherent to womanhood, or absent in men. But Serano doesn’t want to jettison femininity, because a big part of her project is to reclaim it. Femininity, per Serano – I’m skipping ahead a bit here – is a real thing, and though it doesn’t always show up in biological women – aka people who were assigned female at birth – it should be respected on a par with its converse, masculinity.
I submit that there are several problems here. One is that femininity is indissolubly associated with femaleness – it’s right there in the word – and as long as biological (“natal”, “Assigned Male at Birth”) males insist that as trans women, they ARE women—and not just women, but FEMALES—the two aren’t going to be decoupled anytime soon.

Another is that you can’t talk about challenging “oppositional” anything and hang on to the notions of masculinity and femininity, because those two things are by their nature oppositional—at least, I’m damned if I can see how one can exist without the other. Masculinity and femininity exist only in relation to each other. And – and this is important – they’re not just oppositional, they’re unequal – not in some absolute or moral sense, I think Serano is right to oppose that sort of thinking – but as strategies for living in the world, one tends to be more functional than the other. One cultivates strength, the other doesn’t; one is active, the other is passive; one leads, the other follows. No human being really is such a walking stereotype as to manifest only one of these –inities all the time, of course, but as a way of being in the world, experiencing oneself more as subject than object, strength, and a disinclination to lean on or blindly follow others, really is superior to its opposite. “Feminine” qualities are the qualities of people who are sheltered and dominated by others. (And objectified: being decorative is an essential part of femininity.)

Now, “benevolent sexism” has been a thing since forever, and femininity has at times been granted its charms—charms seen as complementary to masculinity. Sometimes feminine qualities have even been considered superior to masculine ones in some ways, but the “ways,” when not concerned with supposed sexual purity, mostly involved qualities that made women unsuited for earning their own money. The Victorian Angel in the House was morally superior to ambitious, money-grubbing, adventurous men—as long as she stayed in her (dependent) sphere and remained “feminine.”

It should go without saying that femininity is at least to some extent historically class-based – peasant women did not have the leisure or the means to pursue femininity – but apparently it doesn’t, because Serano doesn’t mention it. Evil ol’ Second Wave feminism – the kind that tackled “traditional sexism”-discussed this quite a lot, but for all their sniping at “white feminism,” I’ve yet to read a trans activist of Serano’s school who has noticed that femininity has always been attributed to middle and upper class, privileged women.

Serano pushes her neologisms and partners “maleness” with “masculinity” and “femaleness” to “femininity” for one reason: she wants to center trans women in feminism (and promote her ideas about gender). Notice that, for her, sexism is not about keeping men in power over women, it is about “[Ensuring] that those who are masculine have power over those who are feminine, and that only those born male will be seen as authentically masculine.”

When Serano insists that “female” and “male” are not categories each possessing “a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, [etc.]” I agree. But Serano wants to retain notions of femininity and masculinity—her entire book is pro-femininity. How femininity and masculinity can exist without being mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, she doesn’t say. I suspect she’d say, well, nobody is completely, or always, one or the other, and I’d agree—but then, where does that leave the notion of “transgender”?

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Rectifications

May 12th, 2017 11:33 am | By

I was hoping the dogpile had ended, but it hasn’t.

Brian Leiter has a brief post about the role of Lisa Guenther.

Lisa Guenther is the Vanderbilt philosophy professor and former member of Rebecca Tuvel’s dissertation [committee?] who not only was an early signatory of the defamatory “Open Letter” but also offered several public facebook explanations for her conduct.

So I decided to look up her several Facebook explanations.

Depressing shit.

April 30:

Robin James on the deep reckoning and accountability demanded of those of us who do work in philosophy — especially white feminist philosophers like myself, because we should know better than to keep using the master’s tools over and over and over again —

“Rephrasing something I said in a comment elsewhere: Hypatia is not a bad apple here–it’s symptomatic of deeper and more fundamental issues in the profession, in the institutional practice of ‘philosophy’ as such. The journal and the article’s author are doing “Philosophy” perfectly. The white supremacy, racism, and transmisognoir are embedded in the project of ‘philosophy’ itself; how many scholars have *already* said this?

Except that there was no white supremacism or racism or “transmisognoir.”

Also April 30:

Essential reading for anyone who is reeling from Hypatia’s publication of an article on transracialism, and trying to figure out what accountability means in the wake of this act of epistemic injustice. [Then a paragraph by Rachel McKinnon]

People are “reeling” – over this “act of epistemic injustice.”

May 1, linking to the Hypatia apology:

This is what accountability looks like: “Working through conflicts, owning mistakes, and finding a way forward is part of the crucial, difficult work that feminism does. As members of Hypatia’s editorial board we are taking this opportunity to make Hypatia more deeply committed to the highest quality of feminist scholarship, pluralism, and respect. The words expressed here cannot change the harm caused by the fact of the article’s publication, but we hope they convey the depth and sincerity of our commitment to make necessary changes to move forward and do better.”

There was no harm caused by the fact of the article’s publication.

Also May 1:

Via Meena Krishnamurthy: “One of the central criticism of the piece by Tuvel on the infamous Dolezal case is that it failed to engage with much of the relevant literature by POC and transgender people.”

Then a call for help drawing up a list of relevant literature. This post is innocuous in itself, but as part of a relentless series, not so much.

Also May 1:

This is what a collective demand for accountability looks like:

With a link to that disgusting Hypatia “apology.”

May 2, one I posted about at the time:

This article, like the post at the Daily Nous, goes through the arguments of Rebecca Tuvel’s article, “In Defense of Transracialism,” to argue that they’re not so bad after all: no outrageous claims, no offensive slurs, nothing but reasonable arguments. But this is precisely the problem: it’s what Charles Mills critiques as “ideal theory,” which attempts (in the words of author Jesse Singal) to “pull up one level from the real world and force people to grapple with principles and claims on their own merits, rather than — in the case of Dolezal — baser instincts like disgust and outrage.”

But ideal theory is not the only alternative to irrational “baser instincts.” What ideal theory abstracts from–and this is the reason why Mills argues that ideal theory is ideology– is the network of power relations that shape particular historical contexts and meanings.

THIS is the fundamental problem with Tuvel’s article, and with all of the defenses I have read so far: It “toy[s] around” (Singal’s words again) with a few arguments about issues that deeply and viscerally affect the lives of people whose social location is radically different from her own, with no evidence in the article of an awareness of the context, power dynamics, or stakes of these issues for trans people and people of color. This is why it should not have been published in Hypatia, and why the demand for a retraction is not simply the irrational whim of an “angry” mob, but a critique of white feminist ideal theory as transphobic and anti-black ideology.

Full disclosure: I know Rebecca Tuvel, I was on her dissertation committee, I don’t think she intended to do harm by writing this article. But intentions do not determine or reduce impact. The point is not to avoid ever saying anything “wrong” or problematic. The point is to commit to accountability — both as actors and as bystanders. This is what all of us are called upon to do in this moment.

She accuses Tuvel (somewhat indirectly) of outrageous claims and offensive slurs, then says “I don’t think she intended to do harm by writing this article.” Oh really.

May 3:

The problem is not Angry Mob vs. Vulnerable Untenured Professor. The problem is white feminism. By white feminism, I do not mean feminism that happens to be practiced by white people. I mean feminism that is invested in whiteness as power and property, and that is willing to further the interests of white women at the expense of other marginalized and oppressed groups. I mean feminism as the collective self-promotion and self-protection of the most privileged women. Feminism that would rather strategically ally itself with cis hetero anti-black patriarchy than struggle to figure out what it means to become an effective ally and accomplice of black (and) trans people. THAT is the issue here, and it’s not just an issue for one or two people, it’s an issue for all of us.

Also May 3:

YES to this post by Kristie Dotson — “Calling the righteous indignation against Tuvel’s objectifying and shoddy article a “witch hunt” is quite Trump-y. In fact, so much of the defenses and responses are Trump-y. Should you be allowed to say anything and introduce any range of “alternative facts” because you have free speech? Should you not be held accountable when your position is underdeveloped about issues that impacts people’s lives? Should you be able to speak about a class of people you are not part of in derogatory terms and claim ignorance as an excuse? Or that they are too touchy and should grow thicker skin? Should you by pass the criticisms with excuses or just double down on your right to objectify anyone you so chose because of your “good will” and PhD-privilege? Should you participate in playing a role, yet again, in securing white and cis-gendered privilege at the sake of everyone else’s well-being? Careful folks. Because this stuff is starting to get #unforgivable.”

May 4:

What SHOULD accountability look like in the wake of what some people are calling the Hypatia Affair? Some suggestions I’ve heard so far: a community accountability process; the development of professional norms for philosophical engagement with issues that affect marginalized communities; changing or clarifying the editorial review process; changing the composition of the editorial board, so that there are fewer cis het able-bodied white women on the board and more trans, queer, and disabled people of color. This is an incomplete list. Please add to it, and/or critically discuss the possibilities I’ve listed here. I have not identified the people who came up with these ideas but if you’d like to self-identify, please do.

I have an idea! Choose one white feminist every week as a target for this kind of Correction. Be sure of course she is young and untenured, and that she hasn’t actually done anything wrong. Spend the week tearing her to shreds. The Perfect World will ensue in no time.

Also May 4: a link to someone else’s long long long post on the chosen target.

May 5:

Over the past few days, I have posted a few thoughts about accountability. A close friend (and a few strangers) have challenged me to account for gaps and failures in my own scholarship as a feminist philosopher, and for my responsibilities as a mentor to past and current graduate students.

So she does a paragraph about her own omissions and then has the fucking gall to say this:

I still stand behind the book, but it has many flaws, gaps, and silences that I would want to address if I were writing it now, and that I would probably critique in a peer review process. I’m thankful for criticism of the book, even when it’s painful or difficult to hear, and even though there’s nothing I can do to un-write the book.

But I have never had to contend with personal attacks or insults about my work or calls for retraction, and I don’t want to underestimate the very different kind of pain that this inflicts on a person. And I want to express my admiration for those who have been supporting Rebecca Tuvel as a person throughout the past week. I want to apologize to her personally for any pain I caused by signing the open letter requesting retraction, especially given that I was a member of her dissertation committee. I did not sign the letter lightly, and I do not consider the call for retraction a personal attack. The letter was addressed to Hypatia as a journal, and I continue to see it as a demand for accountability, made in a very intense, fraught moment, in an effort to stand in solidarity _with_ and _as_ black (and) trans feminist thinkers whose scholarship was marginalized in this article, but not only in this article.

So in the same moment that we condemn personal attacks, I think it’s absolutely vital for us, as a community of feminist philosophers, not to conflate personal attacks with substantive critique, and not to silence black and trans critics of Tuvel’s article by dismissing the critical response as a mob of haters who didn’t even read the article. Structural inequalities in power and authority compound vulnerability. White feminists can and have deployed our own vulnerability as a weapon against others whose position is more precarious than our own. I say “we” here because I want to be clear that this is something I am deeply implicated in, and also because I want to participate in what will no doubt be a long and fraught process of abolishing white feminism and committing to a practice of feminist philosophy that is creative, responsible, and liberatory.

What a nightmare.

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Two fireworks emojis

May 12th, 2017 9:47 am | By

The Post on Trump’s tantrum and what followed from it.

Rosenstein threatened to resign after the narrative emerging from the White House on Tuesday evening cast him as a prime mover of the decision to fire Comey and that the president acted only on his recommendation, said the person close to the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Now he doesn’t have to, because Trump said it was his decision – leaving all his press people looking like liars, but whatevs.

“He wasn’t doing a good job,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “Very simple. He wasn’t doing a good job.”

But the private accounts of more than 30 officials at the White House, the Justice Department, the FBI and on Capitol Hill, as well as Trump confidants and other senior Republicans, paint a conflicting narrative centered on the president’s brewing personal animus toward Comey. Many of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to candidly discuss internal deliberations.

Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped.

Which is pretty amazing. That claim is something that Trump simply made up; it’s very delusional to expect the FBI director to support a made-up claim, especially one like that – a claim that the former president committed a felony. Imagine the legal difficulties Comey could get in by supporting that claim, even assuming he wanted to.

Trump was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists.

The known actions that led to Comey’s dismissal raise as many questions as answers. Why was Sessions involved in discussions about the fate of the man leading the FBI’s Russia investigation, after having recused himself from the probe because he had falsely denied under oath his own past communications with the Russian ambassador?

Why had Trump discussed the Russia probe with the FBI director three times, as he claimed in his letter dismissing Comey, which could have been a violation of Justice Department policies that ongoing investigations generally are not to be discussed with White House officials?

And how much was the timing of Trump’s decision shaped by events spiraling out of his control — such as Monday’s testimony about Russian interference by former acting attorney general Sally Yates, or the fact that Comey last week requested more resources from the Justice Department to expand the FBI’s Russia probe?

And will he get away with it, and will it work? Will he succeed in shutting down the investigation?

In the weeks leading up to Comey’s firing, Trump administration officials had repeatedly urged the FBI to more aggressively pursue leak investigations, according to people familiar with the discussions. Administration officials sometimes sought to push the FBI to prioritize leak probes over the Russia interference case, and at other times urged the bureau to investigate disclosures of information that was not classified or highly sensitive and therefore did not constitute crimes, these people said.

Over time, administration officials grew increasingly dissatisfied with the FBI’s actions on that front. Comey’s appearances at congressional hearings caused even more tension between the White House and FBI, as Trump administration officials were angered that the director’s statements increased, rather than diminished, public attention on the Russia probe, officials said.

It’s not a kind of thing that should be played down. It’s important.

In his Tuesday letter dismissing Comey, Trump wrote: “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” People familiar with the matter said that statement is not accurate, although they would not say how it was inaccurate.

I’ll make a guess: Comey didn’t say it, and anyway it’s not true.

Within the Justice Department and the FBI, the firing of Comey has left raw anger, and some fear, according to multiple officials. Thomas O’Connor, the president of the FBI Agents Association, called Comey’s firing “a gut punch. We didn’t see it coming, and we don’t think Director Comey did anything that would lead to this.’’

Many employees said they were furious about the firing, saying the circumstances of his dismissal did more damage to the FBI’s independence than anything Comey did in his three-plus years in the job.

One intelligence official who works on Russian espionage matters said they were more determined than ever to pursue such cases. Another said Comey’s firing and the subsequent comments from the White House are attacks that won’t soon be forgotten. Trump had “essentially declared war on a lot of people at the FBI,” one official said. “I think there will be a concerted effort to respond over time in kind.”

There are times when an administration should declare war on the FBI. When the FBI investigates and suppresses lawful dissent, it should be pulled back. But this? This isn’t that.

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This Russia thing with Trump and Russia

May 12th, 2017 9:05 am | By

The Post explains how Trump pulled the rug out from all the people who had been saying he fired Comey because the Deputy AG sent him this overwhelming memo and he leaped up and said “Fire him right now!” It never sounded very plausible, and the part about Clinton’s emails sounded even less plausible, but they stuck to it – until Trump stuck his lips out at Lester Holt and told a completely different story.

President Trump threatened Friday morning to end White House press briefings, arguing that “it is not possible” for his staff to speak with “perfect accuracy” to the American public.

Trump’s comments come after his description of his decision to fire FBI Director James B. Comey in an NBC News interview Thursday flatly contradicted the accounts provided earlier by White House officials, including Vice President Pence, exposing their explanations as misleading and in some cases false.

And now he’s all petulant that the news media are reporting it. He wants his incoherence and impulsiveness and incompetence to be a SECRET.

The explanations for Comey’s firing from the Trump White House have shifted repeatedly since the move was announced late Tuesday afternoon, undermining the credibility of Pence as well as White House press secretary Sean Spicer, principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway.

Initially, Trump’s aides said the president acted simply at the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. After meeting with Trump, Rosenstein wrote a memorandum detailing what he considered to be mistakes in Comey’s handling of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state.

…

All along, Trump’s spokesmen insisted that his decision was not shaped in any way by his growing fury with the Russia controversy, including the FBI investigation overseen by Comey into Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election and whether there had been any coordination with Trump associates.

But then he went and said it did. On tv. In an interview.

Then on Thursday, Trump told NBC anchor Lester Holt that the decision to fire Comey was his alone and that he would have made it “regardless” of what Rosenstein recommended. Furthermore, Trump told Holt that he had been thinking of “this Russia thing with Trump” when he arrived at his decision to remove the FBI director.

“In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story; it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won,'” Trump said.

He says it at 1:20 on this clip. He does a little vignette of himself talking to himself – it’s hard to describe how smug and self-admiring it is. He’s the kind of guy you want to escape from if he corners you at a party.

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James Comey better hope

May 12th, 2017 8:45 am | By

Trump has been erupting on Twitter again. He’s still descending. Bottom not yet in sight.

The last item yesterday was this clownish exclamation:

That guy next to him is the enforcer. He has the piss-the-bed tapes strapped to his leg.

Today is all Comey-Russia-press jabber.

“Again,” he says, as if repetition=truth.

This is the head of state, daily attacking the free press.

Grammar got away from him there. Also notice that he thinks he’s exceptionally busy. No, Donnie, that’s not it. It’s a big job.

Not to mention that many of the “things happening” are his own self-made disasters.

Don’t threaten us, Donnie.

Now he’s threatening the guy he just fired for no valid reason.

Big lie. Big big lie.

Quick, send Jared or Eric to collect the family cut.

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Trump begged Comey to cuddle him

May 12th, 2017 5:39 am | By

So Trump invited Comey over for dinner this one time. Comey didn’t want to go but didn’t think he could say no, so he went. It was a week after the inauguration.

As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies. The president then turned the conversation to whether Mr. Comey would pledge his loyalty to him.

Sly. That wasn’t the two of them making small talk. It was Trump boring on about his Crowd Size and Comey swallowing the urge to tell him to grow up.

Then Trump made a wholly inappropriate demand for “loyalty,” as if Comey were his personal assistant.

Mr. Comey declined to make that pledge. Instead, Mr. Comey has recounted to others, he told Mr. Trump that he would always be honest with him, but that he was not “reliable” in the conventional political sense.

And in that job he’s not supposed to be “reliable” in that sense.

The White House says this account is not correct.

The White House puts out whatever lies Trump tells it to put out…and then watches as Trump contradicts the lies hours later.

Mr. Trump, in an interview on Thursday with NBC, described a far different dinner conversation with Mr. Comey in which the director asked to have the meeting and the question of loyalty never came up. It was not clear whether he was talking about the same meal, but they are believed to have had only one dinner together.

Trump is a fabulist. He makes shit up. You can’t trust a single word he says.

A businessman and reality television star who never served in public office, Mr. Trump may not have understood that by tradition, F.B.I. directors are not supposed to be political loyalists, which is why Congress in the 1970s passed a law giving them 10-year terms to make them independent of the president.

Mr. Comey described details of his refusal to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump to several people close to him on the condition that they not discuss it publicly while he was F.B.I. director. But now that Mr. Comey has been fired, they felt free to discuss it on the condition of anonymity.

A White House spokeswoman on Thursday disputed the description of the dinner by Mr. Comey’s associates.

“We don’t believe this to be an accurate account,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary. “The integrity of our law enforcement agencies and their leadership is of the utmost importance to President Trump. He would never even suggest the expectation of personal loyalty, only loyalty to our country and its great people.”

Oh come on. You can’t possibly expect us to believe that. Trump who puts his ravenous enraged ego on parade on Twitter every day? He would demand loyalty from anyone and everyone.

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The broad, well-established, interdisciplinary scholarly fields

May 11th, 2017 4:58 pm | By

But wait, there’s more. One of the people who signed the letter attacking Rebecca Tuvel – one of the “colleagues” who signed it – wrote a piece for the CHE saying why the signers were right to sign it.

As one of the many scholars involved in writing the open letter calling on Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy to retract the essay “In Defense of Transracialism,” by Rebecca Tuvel, I am compelled to come forward and attempt to reclaim a narrative spinning increasingly out of control.

Five words in the bullying starts – she has to make clear that it was many scholars. (I’m not sure they are all genuine scholars; I think some are adherents rather than scholars, adherents of a political view as opposed to scholars in a discipline.) Many scholars; we all hate you – it might as well be the playground.

And she’s not “compelled,” and nobody stole anything so there’s nothing to “reclaim,” and it’s not a “narrative,” it’s arguments. And it’s not out of control, it’s just not what the “many scholars” had in mind.

Many of us became involved at the request of black and/or trans scholars who feel completely demoralized by Tuvel’s article and the failure of peer review that it represents. Speaking for myself, I signed and circulated the letter because I know, firsthand, of the damage this kind of scholarship does to marginalized groups, especially black and trans scholars, in philosophy.

Tuvel’s article is not a reason to feel “completely demoralized.” That’s more bullying language. It would be fair if she had written a vituperative attack on black and/or trans scholars or people, but she didn’t do anything like that. Saying her article does “damage” is just more of the same bullying rhetoric. It is not reasonable.

Tuvel received substantive critical feedback at conferences from scholars in critical race theory and trans studies. We do not understand how this failed to shape the review process and can only assume that such scholars were not selected as peer reviewers.

Why should they have been? Tuvel wasn’t writing critical theory or trans studies, she was writing philosophy.

[T]he article’s publication signals an arrogant disregard for the broad, well-established, interdisciplinary scholarly fields of both critical race theory and trans studies.

But philosophers are allowed to write about philosophy. They’re not required to write about other fields. Also I have my doubts about the “well-established” bit.

While feminist philosophy should imply a critique of the field of philosophy itself, the open letter to Hypatia wasn’t aimed at the discipline over all. None of us ever expected it to circulate so widely, to garner so many signatures, or to become the object of news stories.

No, you wanted to bully Tuvel in private with nobody watching.

[T]he lightning-fast vituperative response by scholars who would never consider publishing in Hypatia (and who may not respect feminist philosophy) is suspect, to say the least. We authors of the open letter, and the associate editors of Hypatia, are accused of poor reasoning, poor scholarship, and lack of integrity. In other words, the overwhelmingly sexist, male, and white discipline has, once again, called out the feminists as irrational, hysterical, and immoral. To say that we’re engaging in a “witch hunt” couldn’t be more paradoxical when we, the feminist philosophers, have long been treated like the witches of the discipline.

But what about the feminist philosophers and other feminists who think the open letter is horrible? What about the feminists who think the treatment of Tuvel has been unbelievably shitty?

I signed the open letter as part of a continuing effort to make feminist philosophy something other than a damaged, dutiful daughter to the deeply troubled discipline of philosophy. I also signed it as part of continuing efforts to change philosophy’s practices. After all, the methodological insularity evidenced in Tuvel’s article and its publication effectively render ignored and disrespected black, trans, and other minority scholars who work in these fields doubly marginalized. The inequalities perpetuated are both conceptual and practical.

What about the business school? What about geology? What about chemical engineering?

The first comment is useful:

“The fundamental problem with Tuvel’s article isn’t her ability to construct a rational argument but rather the omission of any sustained engagement with the well-developed, interdisciplinary scholarship on race and gender, particularly by black and trans scholars.”

This seems to be a major point of disagreement among those who oppose the call for retraction and those who support it. I fall into the former category, and I do not think she had any obligation to ‘engage’ with the fields you mentioned. Hers was an analytic paper and is no different from other work, even on similar topics, in the field. Philosophers need to have the freedom to choose what method and framework they’re going to work within. Her method is a — though not the only — legitimate one, and this witch hunt (yes that’s what it is) is an attempt to violate her right to choose to use it.

It’s not voting or real estate or schools; it doesn’t have to be representative.

There are many excellent comments at Brian Leiter’s too. Such as:

Chris Surprenant said…

The two points that this article raises as defenses–the number of straight, white males in philosophy and that Tuvel supposedly didn’t cite the appropriate literature–both seem like distractions and are otherwise irrelevant. What was done by the associate editors, letter-writers, and letter-signers was egregious, professional misconduct.

Winnubst’s response is entirely tone deaf to the reasons why there was such a quick backlash from many members of our community on all sides of the spectrum: What was done not only violated clear professional norms, but it also violated norms of decency and kindness that we should show to other people, especially other people who are especially vulnerable in our discipline (untenured, female, etc.).

Oh but decency and kindness aren’t “well-developed, interdisciplinary scholarship on race and gender” so they don’t count.

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Rat shan’t visit party

May 11th, 2017 4:18 pm | By

So all last weekend Donald was fuming about Comey’s “mild nausea” at the possibility that his blather about Clinton’s emails might have affected the election – yet today, always resilient, always willing to think the whole world adores him, he was planning to visit the FBI to give them a nice morale boost…until he found out that they don’t love him all that much. He’s not a quick study, is he.

The White House has abandoned the idea of President Trump visiting FBI headquarters after being told he would not be greeted warmly, administration officials told NBC News.

Amid the continuing fallout over his decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, Trump was considering an appearance at the FBI’s J Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington, DC. The White House publicly floated the idea as recently as Thursday morning.

Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked by a reporter whether such a visit was imminent, replied, I believe that it’s very likely that takes place sometime in the next few days.”

But that idea was dropped later Thursday, administration officials said, after the FBI told the White House the optics would not be good. FBI officials made clear that the president would not draw many smiles and cheers, having just unceremoniously sacked a very popular director.

Here’s the thing, Donnie. You’re an asshole. You’re the biggest asshole many of us have ever seen. You’re horrible in almost every way there is to be horrible. A few people must have told you this by now. You don’t seem to take it in.

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Donald doesn’t know what he doesn’t know

May 11th, 2017 3:34 pm | By

Today in an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News Trump called Comey a showboat.

Yes that’s right. Trump called Comey a showboat.

Trump called Comey a showboat.

He also said he asked Comey whether he was under investigation.

“Sir, sir, please sir, am I under investigation?”

He says Comey told him he wasn’t. Yeah right. He also said Obama spied on him in his jammies at Schlump Tower, so what he says happened isn’t worth a dog’s fart.

“I actually asked him” if I were under investigation, Trump said, noting that he spoke with Comey once over dinner and twice by phone.

“I said, if it’s possible would you let me know, ‘Am I under investigation?’ He said, ‘You are not under investigation.'”

“I know I’m not under investigation,” Trump told Holt during the 31-minute White House interview.

It would be highly unusual for someone who might be the focus of an FBI probe to ask whether he was under investigation and to be directly told by the FBI director that he was not.

Unusual, inappropriate, unethical, a dereliction of duty, a firing offense…the list is long.

The president also reiterated his claim that he had been planning to fire Comey even before he received Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s recommendation to do so.

“He’s a showboat, he’s grandstander, the FBI has been in turmoil,” Trump said of Comey in his wide-ranging interview with Holt. “You know that, I know that. Everybody knows that. You take a look at the FBI a year ago, it was in virtual turmoil, less than a year ago. It hasn’t recovered from that.”

Oh Donald. Look at yourself. Look. Turmoil, thy name is Donaldus Reginae.

Trump also insisted there was no “collusion between me and my campaign and the Russians.”

“Also, the Russians did not affect the vote,” he said.

Stupid, stupid man. He doesn’t know that. He can’t know that.

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Oh, are they Russian?

May 11th, 2017 11:29 am | By

Yesterday the traitorous lying thief in the White House held a meeting with his Russian buddies and kept the press out. He kept the press out. He really does think he’s a dictator and can do any damn thing he wants to, and that we are his peons.

When President Trump met with top Russian officials in the Oval Office on Wednesday, White House officials barred reporters from witnessing the moment. They apparently preferred to block coverage of the awkwardly timed visit as questions swirled about whether the president had dismissed his F.B.I. director in part to squelch the investigation into possible ties between his campaign and Moscow.

They prefer lots of things that are in their interest but not ours; they shouldn’t be allowed to put their preferences into action.

But the Russians, who have a largely state-run media, brought their own press contingent in the form of an official photographer. They quickly filled the vacuum with their own pictures of the meeting with Mr. Trump, Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Sergey I. Kislyak, Moscow’s ambassador to the United States.

The Russian press? More than welcome. Ours? Get out.

Within minutes of the meeting, the Foreign Ministry had posted photographs on Twitter of Mr. Trump and Mr. Lavrov smiling and shaking hands. The Russian embassy posted images of the president grinning and gripping hands with the ambassador. Tass, Russia’s official news agency, released more photographs of the three men laughing together in the Oval Office.

The White House released nothing.

I for one welcome our new Russian overlords.

Mr. Trump’s session with Mr. Lavrov was listed on his schedule as “Closed Press,” meaning the news media would not have a chance to photograph or otherwise document the meeting. “Our official photographer and their official photographer were present — that’s it,” a White House aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity, lacking authorization to describe the ground rules.

The difference, of course, is that while official White House photographers have broad access to the president, their presence is not considered a substitute for that of independent news media, which routinely request and secure access to official presidential movements and meetings so they can obtain their own images and produce their own reports. In Russia, where the independent news media are severely limited, there is no such regular press access to government officials apart from state-controlled organizations.

Trump wants to do things the way the Russians do.

Former White House officials were left to wonder about the security implications of having allowed a Russian photographer unfettered access to the American president’s office.

Colin H. Kahl, the former national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., took to Twitter to pose what he called a “deadly serious” question: “Was it a good idea to let a Russian gov photographer & all their equipment into the Oval Office?”

David S. Cohen, the former deputy director of the C.I.A. during the Obama administration, responded: “No, it was not.”

The Post explores that question further.

A photographer for a Russian state-owned news agency was allowed into the Oval Office on Wednesday during President Trump’s meeting with Russian diplomats, a level of access that was criticized by former U.S. intelligence officials as a potential security breach.

The officials cited the danger that a listening device or other surveillance equipment could have been brought into the Oval Office while hidden in cameras or other electronics.

The White House says don’t worry, somebody patted them down first.

The White House played down the danger, saying that the photographer and his equipment were subjected to a security screening before he and it entered the White House grounds. The Russian “had to go through the same screening as a member of the U.S. press going through the main gate to the [White House] briefing room,” a senior administration official said.

But the Russian press isn’t exactly the same as the US press, is it. Here’s why: Russia is a hostile foreign power. It doesn’t love us. It really really doesn’t. It doesn’t love Trump either, it’s using him. The media present was state-owned, not independent.

The administration official also said the White House had been misled about the role of the Russian photographer. Russian officials had described the individual as Lavrov’s official photographer without disclosing that he also worked for Tass.

“We were not informed by the Russians that their official photographer was dual-hatted and would be releasing the photographs on the state news agency,” the administration official said.

Oh god. How can they be that stupid? “We were not informed by the Russians” – of course you weren’t! “We will be bringing state media personnel to take pictures and plant listening devices” – you were expecting them to say that?

White House officials said they were surprised to see photos posted online showing Trump not only with Lavrov but also smiling and shaking hands with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

That was supposed to be their little secret, god damn it.

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A pointed rebuke

May 11th, 2017 10:37 am | By

Awkward for Donald: the acting director of the FBI says Donald’s claim that the agents didn’t love Comey any more is Not True. So much of what Donald says is Not True.

McCabe is testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee right now.

Mr. McCabe rejected the White House’s assertion that Mr. Comey had lost the backing of rank-and-file F.B.I. agents, a pointed rebuke of what had been one of the president’s main defenses for the move.

“Director Comey enjoyed broad support within the F.B.I. and still does to this day,” Mr. McCabe said at the hearing.

“The vast majority of F.B.I. employees enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey,” he added.

But but but but the president said…

Mr. McCabe also said that the Justice Department’s investigation into whether any Trump associates colluded with Russia in the presidential election was “highly significant,” another direct contradiction of the White House.

A day earlier, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, trying to parry accusations that Mr. Comey’s firing was related to the Russia inquiry, called it “probably one of the smallest things that they’ve got going on their plate” at the F.B.I.

Yeah, it would be, wouldn’t it. A hostile foreign power interfering in a presidential election? Pfff, small potatoes; nobody cares about that.

Mr. McCabe was also adamant that the firing of Mr. Comey had not affected the investigation.

“The work of the men and women of the F.B.I. continues despite any changes in circumstances,” he said in response to a question from Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. “There has been no effort to impede our investigation to date. Simply put, you cannot stop the men and women of the F.B.I. from doing the right thing.”

It’s comforting to remember that Deep Throat was the Deputy Director of the FBI.

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Voter suppression time

May 11th, 2017 10:22 am | By

The Times reports:

President Trump plans to name Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has pressed for aggressive measures to crack down on undocumented immigrants, to a long-promised commission to investigate voting fraud in the United States, a White House official said Thursday.

The commission is the official follow-through on Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that several million “illegals” voted for his Democratic rival and robbed him of a victory in the national popular vote.

An unsubstantiated claim of that kind is more properly called a lie, especially when it’s made with malice by a sitting president. Trump just makes shit up, and since he’s not six years old and not talking about pixies in the garden, that is lying.

Mr. Kobach, who has championed the strictest voter identification laws in the country, will be the vice chairman of the commission, which is to be led by Vice President Mike Pence and is expected to include about a dozen others, including state officials from both political parties, the official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to detail an announcement expected later Thursday.

We know how this will go. They will cook the books and use the books as a reason to make voting ever more difficult. The more difficult it is to vote, the fewer disadvantaged people are able to vote, because of the disadvantages. If voting takes place in few locations and during working hours and with burdensome requirements for layers of identification, then fewer poor people will be able to vote. They’re basically doing everything they can to make sure most people who vote Democratic can’t vote.

Mr. Kobach has been the driving force behind a Kansas law requiring new voters to produce a passport, a birth certificate or naturalization papers as proof of citizenship or be denied the ability to cast ballots. He worked last year to disqualify the state and local votes of thousands of people who did not meet the criteria. He has advocated the proof-of-citizenship requirement at the federal level as well, citing rampant voter fraud without producing proof of a widespread problem.

“Kris Kobach being named to run a commission on ‘voter integrity’ is like naming Bernie Madoff to run a commission on financial crimes,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice Education Fund. “He has dedicated his professional career to trying to deny people of color the vote and to trying to drive millions of immigrants out of the country.”

…

Civil rights groups also reacted with alarm to the impending creation of the task force, arguing that Mr. Trump’s own comments about illegal voting by immigrants suggested that his intent was to work to restrict the voting rights of minorities.

Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called the commission “a thinly veiled voter suppression task force,” adding that it was “designed to impugn the integrity of African-American and Latino participation in the political process.”

If they would only learn to vote Republican Trump would be more understanding.

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can we get this person fired

May 11th, 2017 9:35 am | By
can we get this person fired

Commenter helterskelter alerted us to a Facebook post by Zoé Samudzi on April 28 vehemently dispraising Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article and suggesting a letter.

It turns out it’s a public post, so we can all read it.

zoe

who’s on the editorial board over at hypatia? i honestly want to talk about this absolutely disgusting and harmful legitimization of “transracial” identity beyond adoption. what kind of garbage de-raced and probably trans-exclusionary gender studies professor wants to pretend that socially constructed identities use the same logics and are interchangeable? is gender suddenly inheritable the same way race is?

who wanna put together some kind of letter because i refuse to allow this garbage to gain traction. if anyone has institutional access and wouldn’t mind sending me copy so i can read it and properly put forth a response, i’d deeply appreciate it.

The first comment is

Lol author’s name is Becky!

But they soon get down to business.

Capture

Alexis Shotwell It’s really messed up. I’m on the editorial board of Hypatia, and surprised that this one didn’t come to me for review, given my work. I’m working up a response/intervention with a few folks now, too.
Like · 11 · April 28 at 3:02pm

Mimi Thi Nguyen Alexis, I’m also part of a loose group –including Aren (a mutual FB friend!)– writing a response. Should we coordinate? Ideas for best strategies?
Like · 1 · April 30 at 1:03pm · Edited

Zoé Samudzi i’m not a part of anything, but would love to be 👀
Like · 3 · April 30 at 1:14pm

Alexis Shotwell I think the letter we’ve been working on is about to be done! I’ll post it here when I get the okay from the others
Like · 5 · April 30 at 2:47pm

Someone else offers to connect Samudzi – or everyone reading, it’s not clear which – with people at the university where Tuvel teaches.

Tallyn Owens If you want to get in touch with anyone at Rhodes, shoot me a message and I’ll be happy to help.
Like · April 28 at 12:45pm

Then someone posts what is apparently a list of her courses:

Capture

There’s a lot more ugliness after that. A colleague at Rhodes chimes in. Someone suggests a demand that she pay reparations.

Capture

The final comment is “can we get this person fired” [sic]

So that, I think, clarified Samudzi’s role in all this. She was part of the inspiration for the open letter, and she did her bit to work people into a rage at Rebecca Tuvel the person. (She told me on Twitter that her “critique” of the article wasn’t personal at all. I think this pretty effectively demolishes that claim.)

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An enraged president stewing

May 10th, 2017 5:25 pm | By

The Times has the inside scoop on how it all went down inside Trump’s brain psychotic rage organ and the surrounding buildings.

The countdown to President Trump’s dismissal of James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, began last weekend with an enraged president stewing over Mr. Comey’s testimony to Congress last week, when he admitted to being “slightly nauseous” about doing anything to get Mr. Trump elected.

Mr. Trump, according to people close to the president, had been openly talking about firing Mr. Comey for at least a week. Despite the objections from some of his aides about the optics and the lack of an obvious successor, the grumbling evolved into a tentative plan as he angrily watched the Sunday news shows at his Bedminster, N.J., golf resort.

I guess he thinks of underlings as more or less janitors, who are there to please him and if they stop doing that they gotta go.

By Monday, capping off months of festering grievances, Mr. Trump told people around him that he wanted Mr. Comey gone, repeatedly questioning Mr. Comey’s fitness for the job and telling aides there was “something wrong” with him, several people familiar with the discussions said.

I bet I know what’s wrong with him! He doesn’t kiss Trump’s bum enough.

At first, Mr. Trump, who is fond of vetting his decisions with a wide circle of staff members, advisers and friends, kept his thinking to a small circle, venting his anger to Vice President Mike Pence; the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II; and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who all told him they generally backed dismissing Mr. Comey.

Another early sounding board was Keith Schiller, Mr. Trump’s longtime director of security and now a member of the White House staff, who would later be tasked with delivering the manila envelope containing Mr. Comey’s letter of dismissal to F.B.I. Headquarters, an indication of just how personal the matter was to the president.

Wise counselors all, I’m sure.

Bannon advised delay, saying there would be less of a backlash if he waited. (Why would that be? More time would merely be more time for Trump to act like an unhinged greedy lunatic, so how would that help?) Anyway Trump was having none of it.

Mr. Trump was adamant, denouncing Mr. Comey’s conduct in both the Clinton and Russia investigations, and left aides on Monday with the impression that he planned to take action the next day.

He’s decisive! He’s bold! He’s strong! He’s resolute.

Ok he’s petulant and stubborn. Whatever.

Early Tuesday, he made his final decision, keeping many aides, including the president’s communications team and network of surrogates, in the dark until news of the firing leaked out late in the afternoon.

Ah that’s sweet. “Surprise!!” It must be fabulous working for him.

Mr. Trump explained the firing by citing Mr. Comey’s handling of the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server — a justification that was rich in irony, White House officials acknowledged, considering that as recently as two weeks ago, the president appeared at a rally where he was serenaded with chants of “Lock her up!”

I wouldn’t call it irony, exactly. Shameless lying? Cynical brutality? Abusing our intelligence?

On Wednesday, the president and his staff had widened their criticism of Mr. Comey’s conduct on the Clinton inquiry to include a wider denunciation of his performance. “He wasn’t doing a good job,” Mr. Trump said, before entering a meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, early Wednesday. “Very simply, he was not doing a good job.”

How would he know? He has no idea what a good job is. He thinks it’s making money by whatever means come most readily to hand.

Yet even in his letter to Mr. Comey, the president mentioned the Russia inquiry, writing that “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.”

Jeffrey Toobin is emphatic on how utterly inappropriate that was if it happened. He’s also quite sure it didn’t happen as described. He’s also emphatic on how inappropriate it is for Trump to say it, whether it’s true or not.

And that reflected, White House aides said, what they conceded had been his obsession over the investigation Mr. Trump believes is threatening his larger agenda.

The hostility toward Mr. Comey in the West Wing in recent weeks was palpable, aides said, with advisers describing an almost ritualistic need to criticize the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation to assuage an anxious and angry president.

And that angry, anxious, obsessive president has access to the nukes.

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Please sir, can I have some more?

May 10th, 2017 3:53 pm | By

They just wanted to slow the investigation down a little, that’s all.

Days before he was fired, James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in resources for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election, according to four congressional officials, including Senator Richard J. Durbin.

Mr. Comey made his appeal to Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who also wrote the Justice Department’s memo that was used to justify the firing of Mr. Comey this week, the officials said.

“I’m told that as soon as Rosenstein arrived, there was a request for additional resources for the investigation and that a few days afterwards, he was sacked,” said Mr. Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois. “I think the Comey operation was breathing down the neck of the Trump campaign and their operatives, and this was an effort to slow down the investigation.”

Of course they shouldn’t be making any effort to slow down the investigation…

The timing of Mr. Comey’s request is not clear-cut evidence that his firing was related to the Russia investigation. But it is certain to fuel bipartisan criticism that President Trump appeared to be meddling in an investigation that had the potential to damage his presidency.

Noooooooo, why would anybody think that.

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Ideological alignment dressed up as intellectual expertise

May 10th, 2017 11:53 am | By

At Quillette, Oliver Traldi on the Rebecca Tuvel uproar.

The letter he refers to is the open letter explaining how Tuvel was wrong wrong wrong.

The letter’s most important point is hidden in the first complaint: that Tuvel “uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields.” In the Daily Nous comments, academics in these subfields struggled to identify precisely which arguments Tuvel failed to cite or address, or where her thinking might have gone wrong on a more than superficial level. Indeed, many philosophers of both gender and race have come out against retraction. But “the relevant subfields” are not really the academic studies of gender and race. They are the political interests and values associated with a certain conception of those topics. The real complaint is that anyone who publishes in a journal like Hypatia, itself a blatantly activist organ, ought to share those politics. In turn, the necessary politics are built in to the “vocabulary and frameworks” used by the academics. This is ideological alignment dressed up as intellectual expertise.

That is exactly what I’ve been chewing over all along. I’ve been trying to figure out in what sense these fundamentally (and obviously) political ideas are “subfields” in philosophy. I’ve been trying to figure out in what sense they’re academic, and what “peer review” can mean in connection with them, and why other academics are trying to punish another academic for getting them “wrong.”

Tuvel was criticized for not citing enough black or transgender scholars. Such a complaint could be leveled at virtually any philosophy paper. But Tuvel’s critics think it is especially relevant here, because they believe black and transgender scholars would have alerted her to the problematic elements of her work. In her response, however, Tuvel cited both Julia Serrano and Adolph Reed, Jr., who seem to share her methods or contentions; and black and transgender philosophers alike have come out in support of Tuvel in the face of the mob. We are back at a standard paradox of identity politics: its most fervent practitioners often seem most trapped in the delusion that marginalized groups are homogeneous.

That too. It was drearily obvious that the issue wasn’t quantity, it was viewpoint. She didn’t cite “enough black or transgender scholars” saying the approved thing.

Rather, it is Tuvel’s critics who don’t seem to know the feminist literature. Trans-exclusionary positions are actually quite popular among the reigning generation of feminist philosophers, who often hew to Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum that “gender is the social meaning of sex.” Sally Haslanger, the most notorious feminist metaphysician and a leader of several online mobs in her own right, gives an account of gender that both explicitly analogizes it to race and seems to have trans-exclusionary implications. (Tuvel adapts her theory in one part of the paper.) One wonders why the purported opponents of power would attack a young assistant professor at a small school in Tennessee rather than the most prominent writer in the field and a fixture on the faculty at MIT.

By which he means one doesn’t wonder at all, one realizes they are bullies and chickenshits.

In the same way, Tuvel was criticized for not focusing on “lived experience”—the idea being that testimony from the lived experience of black and transgender people would have spurred her to a different conclusion. Guenther similarly but not equivalently talks of Tuvel’s commitment to “ideal theory” rather than “the network of power relations that shape particular historical contexts and meanings.” But to someone who hasn’t rejected out of hand the possibility of transracialism, Tuvel will seem exquisitely attuned to a certain kind of lived experience: the transracial experience. She writes about this experience with great empathy and imagination, but her opponents offer it only ridicule and opprobrium. What then could we say about the reactions of Guenther and others? Well, we might say, for example, that they are themselves unknowingly agents of a network of power relations which we might call cisracial privilege, and that their critiques here serve not only to mock and deride transracial individuals but to marginalize, silence, and erase transracial narrative and experience. The fervency of the reaction we might call evidence of cisracial fragility. For example.

But we had better not be untenured academics if we do.

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Roger Stone is delighted

May 10th, 2017 10:07 am | By

Politico reports that Trump has been increasingly furious about the way Russia keeps upstaging him, so Rosenstein’s memo was an excellent excuse to give Comey the hook. Apparently he thought that if Comey went away everyone would forget all about Russia.

Trump had grown angry with the Russia investigation — particularly Comey admitting in front of the Senate that the FBI was investigating his campaign — and that the FBI director wouldn’t support his claims that President Barack Obama had tapped his phones in Trump Tower.

And yet his claims were simply made up, out of the thin dry air of his own brain. It’s fatuous to expect the FBI director to support one’s personal fantasies.

But the fallout seemed to take the White House by surprise. Trump made a round of calls around 5 p.m., asking for support from senators. White House officials believed it would be a “win-win” because Republicans and Democrats alike have problems with the FBI director, one person briefed on their deliberations said.

Instead, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told him he was making a big mistake — and Trump seemed “taken aback,” according to a person familiar with the call.

…

Trump received letters from Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, calling for Comey’s dismissal, on Tuesday, a spokesman said. The president then decided to fire the FBI director based on the recommendations and moved quickly. The spokesman said Trump did not ask for the letters in advance, and that White House officials had no idea they were coming.

But several other people familiar with the events said Trump had talked about the firing for more than a week, and the letters were written to give him [a] rationale to fire Comey.

He thinks he has absolute power. He can’t absorb information that would convince him otherwise.

While shock dominated much of the FBI and the White House, the mood was more elated at Roger Stone’s house in Florida. Several Stone allies and friends said Stone, who has been frequently mentioned in the investigation, encouraged the president to fire Comey in conversations in recent weeks.

On Twitter, Stone signaled praise for the move by posting an image of Trump from The Apprentice saying, “You’re fired.”

Stone declined to comment Tuesday night but said he was enjoying a fine cigar.

Sweet.

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Very simply he was not doing a good job

May 10th, 2017 9:29 am | By

Now he’s called in Kissinger in hopes that that will make him look not-lunatic.

In his first in-person statement to the press since he fired now-former FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump did not mince words.

“Very simply he was not doing a good job,” Mr. Trump told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan Wednesday during a meeting with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

If it’s so simply that he was not doing a good job, why did it take so long to fire him? If it’s so simply, why didn’t Trump fire him as soon as he took office? If it’s true that he was not doing a good job, why was Trump apparently unaware of it until yesterday? If it’s true that he was not doing a good job, why did Trump heap him with praise during the campaign?

Before this, the president had met privately with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Brennan was the pool reporter.

Mr. Trump added that the firing did not affect his meeting with Lavrov  — the highest-ranking Russian official Mr. Trump has met with face-to-face — in any way.

How would he know? I don’t suppose Lavrov told him “Thank you, Mr President, for making it so clear to the entire world what a hopeless incompetent buffoon you are,” but we can be confident that’s what he was thinking.

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