Gulalai Ismail a couple of hours ago:

No sane mind should defend blasphemy law onwards, after seeing the implication of making blasphemy a punishable crime no one should ever suggest that their feelings are more worthy than human life. This brutal murder would have never happened if we had taught our children it’s totally okay if someone say something blasphemous, don’t feel hurt with it, it says nothing about your religion or Faith. Engage with them in dialogue and if they don’t listen to you – move on! Your Prophet’s respect won’t be at stake, your religion won’t be at stake with someone doing blasphemy.

I wish more believers listened to fellow believers like Gulalai.

Why the March for Science?

Because an unprecedented attack on science, scientists and evidence-based policymaking is underway in the US federal government.

Nowhere is the attack more ferocious than on the issue of global warming, where the Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the modest but important policies put in place by President Obama. First among them is the Obama administration’s signature Clean Power Plan, the nation’s first-ever limit on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, which Trump has vowed to repeal.He has also pledged to “reopen” (which could well mean “weaken”) hard-won vehicle fuel economy standards that have already begun lowering carbon emissions and oil consumption. Meanwhile, in a tragic example of wilful blindness, Trump has abolished a rule requiring federal agencies to consider how large federal projects affect climate change and how climate impacts, such as sea level rises and drought, might affect the long-term viability of the projects themselves. This is akin to erecting a building on a fault zone without considering earthquakes.

Well Trump doesn’t care: he’ll be dead before the worst happens. Doesn’t he care about his children and their children though? No, he doesn’t.

There is nothing subtle about Trump’s antipathy to science. As a candidate, he dismissed decades of established scientific evidence by calling global warming a “hoax” and he has displayed an unprecedented disregard for facts and evidence throughout his brief presidency, even on matters as trivial as the size of the crowd at his inauguration.

What he has goes beyond antipathy to science. It’s antipathy to thinking in general – antipathy to anything that’s not acting on first impulses no matter how bad or stupid they may be. His first impulses, that is – he doesn’t give a shit about anyone else’s.

The anti-science approach extends far beyond climate science. In one of Pruitt’s first official acts, for example, he overruled the recommendation of his own agency’s scientists, based on years of meticulous research, to ban a pesticide shown to cause nerve damage, one that poses a clear risk to children, farmworkers and rural drinking water supplies. What’s more, Trump hasn’t even yet followed in the time-honoured tradition of appointing a presidential science adviser. His proposed budget cuts government science across the board, reducing vital research and data gathering on topics such as sustainable farming methods, weather prediction, the fate and transport of air pollutants and clean energy technologies.

In short he has contempt for knowledge of all kinds. Where other people have knowledge he has a taste for big shiny things, so he devoted his life to building and selling them. He’s such a dedicated solipsist that he can’t grasp the fact that other people have genuine useful knowledge.

Congress is using a radical tool called the Congressional Review Act to eliminate numerous public safeguards that took years to develop and is actively working to pass bills that make it harder for federal agencies to issue science-based safeguards for public health and safety. One bill, for example, would prevent academic scientists – but not industry-funded scientists – on federal advisory boards from weighing in on scientific issues within their expertise.

Get the disinterested science out and keep the industry-funded science in. Awesome.

The swamp is rising.

H/t Omar

Gail Dines wonders why the outrage of what was done to David Dao is so obvious while the outrage of what’s done to women in porn is so obscure.

People saw the video, put themselves in Dao’s place, and came to the very sensible conclusion that what they were watching was a level of callous brutality that is unacceptable in a civil society. Andrea Dworkin would not have found our empathy strange because, despite her sadness and anger at the cruelty in the world, she always had faith in the ability for people to do the right thing.

What is strange, however, is that there is no public outcry over porn. You can type “porn” into Google and in 10 seconds come up with images that are so violent, so brutal, so dehumanizing that they take your breath away. You can see people being raped, tortured, strangled, beaten, electrocuted, and physically destroyed to the point that many must be thinking to themselves: “Just kill me.”

Why no outrage? Why no demands for the companies who produce this brutality to apologize? Because these people are women, and when women are brutalized in the name of sex, the violence is rendered invisible. As long as it is semen, not blood, dripping from her mouth (and usually from every other orifice as well), and she is saying “just fuck me” as she is grimacing, crying, and sometimes screaming in pain, it seems, as Dworkin pointed out, people require an explanation as to why this particular brutality is not acceptable.

If that’s considered sexually arousing…why isn’t the video of David Dao being passed around as porn?

Today’s mainstream internet porn — now a multi-billion, not multi-million dollar industry —  makes the porn I saw in the 1980s look almost soft-core. The level of violence that women on the porn set endure today is akin to what has euphemistically been called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” If it was happening to men, it would be seen for what it is, and we would be asking: How is this possible? How has a global industry built on the torture of human beings been branded as “sex positive,” “empowering,” and “harmless fantasy?”

The answer of course, is that a woman is not viewed as a full human being. She is, as Simone de Beauvoir said, “sex… absolute sex, no less.” And indeed, no more. This is why, when we see pictures of men being brutalized, we see the brutality; when we see pictures of women in porn being brutalized, the culture sees sex.

I’ve never understood this. I don’t suppose I ever will.

I was chatting with latsot on Twitter about worrying or weird or cryptic song lyrics and mentioned Emmylou Harris’s “If You Were a Bluebird” as the most random song lyrics of my acquaintance. So then I decided I needed to revisit them to see, and yes, they’re still that random.

If you were a bluebird you’d be a sad one.
I’d give you a true word
But you’ve already had one.

If you were a bluebird,
You’d be crying
You’d be flying home.

The way Emmylou sings it, it seems to mean something…but then when you think about the words with your brain, you see that there is no something that the words mean. You’ve already had one? You’d be flying home? Wut?

If you were a raindrop,
You’d shine like a rainbow

And if you were a train stop,
The conductor would sing low

Well that’s just rhyme-seeking. What rhymes with raindrop.

If you were a raindrop,
You’d be falling
You’d be calling home

If you were a raindrop you’d be calling home? Come on now. Why would a raindrop be calling home? What would it say if home answered?

If you were a hotel
Honey, you’d be a grand one,
But if you hit a slow spell,
Do you think you could stand one

Well I guess it would depend on the last quarterly report and – wait, how did we get from bluebird to hotel?

Weirdly, it’s a great song – but the lyrics always make me laugh.

Foreign Policy on the death of modern Turkey:

The new country called Turkey, quite unlike the Ottoman Empire, was structured along modern lines. It was to be administered by executive and legislative branches, as well as a Council of Ministers composed of elected representatives of the parliament. What had once been the authority of the sultan, who ruled alone with political and ecclesiastic legitimacy, was placed in the hands of legislators who represented the sovereignty of the people.

The yes vote represents a rejection of all that.

The AKP and supporters of the “yes” vote argue that the criticism of the constitutional amendments was unfair. They point out that the changes do not undermine a popularly elected parliament and president as well as an independent (at least formally) judiciary. This is all true, but it is also an exceedingly narrow description of the political system that Erdogan envisions. Rather, the powers that would be afforded to the executive presidency are vast, including the ability to appoint judges without input from parliament, issue decrees with the force of law, and dissolve parliament. The president would also have the sole prerogative over all senior appointments in the bureaucracy and exercise exclusive control of the armed forces. The amendments obviate the need for the post of prime minister, which would be abolished. The Grand National Assembly does retain some oversight and legislative powers, but if the president and the majority are from the same political party, the power of the presidency will be unconstrained. With massive imbalances and virtually no checks on the head of state, who will now also be the head of government, the constitutional amendments render the Law on Fundamental Organization and all subsequent efforts to emulate the organizational principles of a modern state moot. It turns out that Erdogan, who would wield power not vested in Turkish leaders since the sultans, is actually a neo-Ottoman.

Which is not surprising. Authoritarianisms go together: theocracy and authoritarian government make a natural pairing. It doesn’t always work that way, of course – there have been plenty of secular authoritarians. But the idea behind both is the same: one all-powerful boss is better than a diverse crowd of voices arguing.

Caroline Criado-Perez has some thoughts on Fearless Girl versus Raging Bull, and whether or not artists get to have a veto on artistic responses to their work.

She knows something about statues and women, especially in the UK. The upshot: there are very few statues of women, especially of women on their own; most of the ones there are represent mythical or royal women; this matters.

I will admit to not having counted all the statues in the US, but given the recent news that every statue in statue-filled Sofia is of a man; given there are more statues of animals in Edinburgh than of women; given in New York’s Central Park there are 22 statues of men and none of women other than fictional characters like Alice in Wonderland; given that women make up less than 30% of speaking roles in Hollywood films; given US congress is 80% male; and, finally, given, you know, just general patriarchy, there is no reason to think the US is a feminist statue Utopia.

Hahahaha that’s for sure. The US is not a feminist anything Utopia.

The vast majority of female statues are of nude sexualised women in the role of adoring muse to male brains (I mean, come on, half naked Euterpe is literally weeping over a male HEAD). The representation of a defiant, clothed, non-sexualised female in a prominent work of art is still vanishingly rare — and is therefore a radical act no matter who commissioned it and what the artistic intent was.

Now about that artistic intent.

Like many other men, Di Modica may not realise that rampant male-dominated capitalism already is a symbol of patriarchal oppression, already is an aggressive threat to women and girls all around the world, but that doesn’t make it any less the case. Here in the UK, women have repeatedly been found to bear the major brunt of the austerity policies that have been considered necessary to wipe up the mess to the global economy caused by these very same bankers. Last year, the UN charged Switzerland with failing its obligations under the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), specifically because of their laissez-faire banking policies, of which Wall Street bankers make such great use. I’m not going to go into a full-on lecture on feminist economics here, but if you’re interested, read anything by Nancy Folbre and you can’t go wrong. But to be clear: rampant unchecked capitalism is a symbol of patriarchal oppression whether Di Modica likes it or not. Fearless Girl does not therefore change the meaning to Charging Bull. She makes it explicit. And for that, I love her.

Di Modica wanted to represent “the strength and power of the American people”. I don’t want to be pedantic here, but to do this, he chose a bull. A male cow. Di Modica chose to represent the American people with an animal that is perhaps above all others considered a byword for male sexual aggression. And my god the balls on that thing. I think we can be fairly certain how Di Modica visualises power and strength — the phrase “grow a pair” comes to mind. Let’s be clear: this statue never represented the strength and power of American people. It represented the strength and power of American men.

And in all fairness this is a thing – this business of thinking “the people”=men and men=”the people.” Of thinking a charging bull can stand for “the [anything] people.” This business of forgetting that women exist.

Di Modica chose to represent the strength and power of the American people with an intensely male and sexually aggressive symbol. Now he doesn’t like that Fearless Girl is, essentially, calling him out on it. Well. Welcome to the 21st century, Mr Di Modica. You’re going to be seeing an awful lot more of this kind of thing.

Assuming no one puts a stop to it.

Seen on Facebook:

Spicey does Passover.

Hurriyet reports:

Some 51.3 percent of the more than 58 million Turkish voters said “yes” to the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) constitutional amendment package in a tight race to decide on whether to shift to an executive presidential system.

The gap between the two votes stood at around 1.3 million according to midnight figures by the state-run Anadolu Agency. The turnout exceeded 84 percent.

So there will be more Erdoğan, and more and more and more. He’ll never leave.

Authoritarians are on a roll.

The BBC’s Mark Lowen in Ankara:

They are rejoicing into the night here outside the headquarters of the governing AK party (AKP), confident in the victory claimed by President Erdogan.

He and his government say more than 51% of voters have backed the constitutional reform but the opposition has cried foul, claiming massive irregularities over invalid votes and vowing to challenge the result at the supreme electoral board.

Mr Erdogan said the clear victory needed to be respected. In a typically rabble-rousing speech, he proposed another referendum on reinstating the death penalty, which would end Turkey’s EU negotiations.

Let’s have more state killing; that’s always popular.

Nick Cohen looks at the hatred of the nationalist right for George Soros.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump ruled that Americans protesting against him were “professional” agitators. Roger Stone, who has worked for the filthy wing of the right since Nixon’s day, followed up by announcing he had discovered the agitators were “paid for” by none other than Soros.

Now it is commonplace for right-wing Americans to say that only Soros’s corrupt influence can explain why their fellow citizens take to the streets. A typically sly report in the Washington Times said one in three Trump voters believed Soros paid protesters to join the women’s march on Trump’s inauguration day.

One in three Trump voters believe a panoply of absurd things. Most of them appear to believe it’s possible to live in a small Appalachian town and have a wide range of job opportunities, in defiance of the obvious fact that small towns by definition don’t have a wide range of job opportunities, because they’re small towns. But hey, this is Murrika, people can believe whatever they like, and you’re not allowed to tell them they’re wrong.

It’s not just Putin who goes for Soros. Macedonia’s former autocratic prime minister, Nikola Gruevski, has called for a “de-Sorosisation” of society, as the country’s right uses every trick it can think of, including the threat of street violence by “patriotic associations”, to stop the opposition taking power.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s self-proclaimed illiberal democracy is threatening the Soros-funded Central European University. Its president, the former Canadian Liberal party leader and former Observer columnist Michael Ignatieff, is bewildered. He protests that he is running a university, not an opposition political party that might take Orbán’s power away.

I could go on. Romania’s socialist elite imitates Trump and claims Soros pays citizens to take to the streets to demonstrate against corruption. The supposedly reputable financial analysts at Zero Hedge claim Soros “singlehandedly created the European refugee crisis”. Steve Bannon’s Breitbart says Soros’s funding of Black Lives Matter was part of an agenda to swing the US presidential election. The European far right claims he is trying to destroy Christian white Europe by importing Muslim refugees.

Why all this? Nationalism, aka xenophobia.

Billionaires shouldn’t be able to give money to politicians, Nick says, but the demonization of Soros isn’t about that.

Soros is the recipient of a hatred far beyond normal partisan rancour. The satanic influence attributed to the man who escaped the Holocaust as a child and resolved after the fall of the Berlin Wall to use his wealth to stop xenophobia returning to Europe isn’t normal. Not remotely so. It is one of the most striking signs of the crisis in conservatism, which is threatening free societies across what we used to call “the west”.

Most of Soros’s charitable efforts are not devoted to funding politicians, but values conservatives once claimed to believe in: transparency, free elections, free speech and a free press. Instead of upholding them, the dominant faction on the right has turned to a nationalism that treats opposition as treason. To learn about its antecedents, listen to the antisemitic echoes of the Nazi and communist eras in the vilification of Soros. They are so loud they deafen.

Orbán says he is against “the globalists and liberals, the power brokers sitting in their palaces with ivory towers” and “the swarm of media locusts”. Behind them all stands the “transnational empire of George Soros, with its international heavy artillery and huge sums of money”. March against Orbán in Budapest or Trump in Washington, DC, and you are a hireling of Soros’s cosmopolitan conspiracy.

Nope; just a cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism is a good thing, and xenophobia is a bad one.

Alt-right fake news impresario Mike Cernovich is threatening everyone in sight if anything bad happens to that wonderful guy Steve Bannon.

Cernovich made the claims that he’d release a series of “scoops” if Bannon is officially pushed out of the White House on an eleven-minute, self-recorded Periscope Thursday night.

“If they get rid of Bannon, you know what’s gonna happen? The motherlode. If Bannon is removed, there are gonna be divorces, because I know about the mistresses, the sugar babies, the drugs, the pill popping, the orgies. I know everything,” said Cernovich.

“If they go after Bannon, the mother of all stories is gonna drop, and we’re just gonna destroy marriages, relationships—it’s gonna get personal.”

Yes but sexism is over, women have all the rights and freedoms men have now, there is nothing left to object to or campaign for and anyone who thinks otherwise is just playing victim and a horrible tribal SJW and Regressive Leftist. Sexism is over.

Last fall, in the weeks after 21st Century Fox struck settlements with two women who said that Bill O’Reilly had sexually harassed them, the Fox News host went on morning television and offered a harsh assessment of women who had come forward with complaints about the network.

“Look, it’s open season,” he said, visibly irritated, when asked about a recently published book by Megyn Kelly, his colleague at the time. In the book, Ms. Kelly provided an account of being sexually harassed by Roger Ailes, the network’s former chairman. Later Mr. O’Reilly added, “Let’s whack the Fox News Channel. I’ve had enough of it. It’s a good place to work. All right?”

Yes indeed. Who do those bitches think they are, wanting to be treated as colleagues and not pussies there for the grabbing?

The comments set off a media firestorm and frustrated Ms. Kelly, who sent an email to Fox News executives complaining about his behavior and the chilling effect it could have on women at the company and beyond, according to four people with knowledge of the email who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

What a snowflake. Women just need to lean in and get on with it. You didn’t see Eleanor Roosevelt whining about chilling effects did you?!

So O’Reilly showed her: he went ahead and shouted at the women some more that very night.

Don’t undermine the company that pays you! Go to human resources – or leave! Because hey, it should totally be a secret that Fox is a hostile work environment for women.

That’s part of why she moved to NBC.

Ms. Kelly’s frustrations with Fox News intensified on the morning of Nov. 15, when Mr. O’Reilly appeared on “CBS This Morning” to promote “Give Please a Chance,” his new children’s book about manners. Norah O’Donnell, one of the show’s hosts, asked Mr. O’Reilly about Ms. Kelly’s book, which had been published that day and included sexual harassment accusations against Mr. Ailes. Mr. O’Reilly said he wasn’t “interested.”

“You’re not interested in sexual harassment?” Ms. O’Donnell asked.

“I am not interested in basically litigating something that is finished that makes my network look bad,” Mr. O’Reilly responded.

Shortly after hearing those comments, Ms. Kelly sent her email to Jack Abernethy and Bill Shine, who had recently been named the co-presidents of Fox News. In the email, Ms. Kelly said that Mr. O’Reilly’s comments on “CBS This Morning” were in bad form, according to the people with knowledge of the email who described its contents to The Times.

Ms. Kelly said that a man with Mr. O’Reilly’s history had no business publicly lecturing women inside or outside the company about sexual harassment, the people said. (In a highly publicized 2004 dispute, Mr. O’Reilly had settled sexual harassment allegations made by a young producer for about $9 million.)

Ms. Kelly added in the email that the push for blind loyalty was the reason the network had gotten into the mess with Mr. Ailes. Several people at the network became aware of the email.

Later that day, a producer on Ms. Kelly’s show learned that Mr. O’Reilly planned to revisit the issue during his show’s “Tip of the Day” segment, according to some of the people familiar with the episode. The producer called Mr. Shine, urging him to pull the segment, the people said.

That did not happen.

Bill O’Reilly’s a man. He’s not going to let some bitch tell him what to do.

Today in measles outbreaks:

Three in Hennepin County, Minnesota.

The Minnesota Department of Health is investigating three measles cases.

All three patients are toddlers from Hennepin County. State health officials say they haven’t figured out how the children contracted the disease and are trying to track down anyone who may have had contact with them.

Most people who get measles in the United States have contracted the disease while traveling abroad or from someone who has recently traveled overseas. That’s not the case for these children, said Kris Ehresmann, the state health department’s infectious disease director.

They had not been vaccinated.

Most people in Minnesota are vaccinated against measles. But the state health department said immunization rates among some communities have declined in recent years.

Stinchfield said that the current outbreak should serve as a warning to parents who decline to have their children immunized.

“People who have opted out of vaccinating need to catch up and get themselves vaccinated now,” she said.

Stinchfield said the consequences of measles are dire.

“We’ve had children at our hospital even as recently as 2011 who were in our intensive care unit, on a ventilator. It can get into your brain, it can get into your lungs, it can cause permanent brain damage,” she said. “There is no medical reason not to get MMR vaccine unless you have a severe immune deficiency.”

Fifteen in Nova Scotia.

An additional case of measles has been confirmed on the province’s south shore, requiring notification to parents and guardians of students at Hebbville Academy. The current outbreak of measles now has 15 confirmed cases; one other case was identified since last public release on April 4.

“We are currently investigating this particular measles case to determine how it is linked with the other cases of measles we’ve been managing the past few weeks,” said Dr. Ryan Sommers, medical officer of health. “The person in this case, a student, attends Hebbville Academy and we have notified parents/guardians, students and staff at the school.”

Dr. Sommers notes that due to the large number of potential exposures in the school environment, Public Health decided to host a vaccination clinic for students and staff whose vaccination for measles is not up to date.

“This clinic will ideally help us prevent additional cases of measles and ensure that those whose vaccinations weren’t up to date are covered. While we may see other cases due to this exposure, this vaccination clinic along with our investigation should greatly reduce those numbers.”

This is the current outbreak; there was another in January / February, with seven cases.

Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Earlier today, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed a second case of measles in a Michigan adult. The first case was discovered in late March.

The two individuals, who are not members of the same family or otherwise related, were both passengers on the same airline flight when the first individual was contagious, the agency said.

One of the infected individuals dined at two Ann Arbor restaurants on Thursday and Friday of last week…

Maybe all the people who ate there at those times are vaccinated. Maybe.

So we’re playing “Let’s Relive the Cuban Missile Crisis!” these days. I’d so much rather not.

China has warned that “conflict could break out at any moment” as tension over North Korea increases.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi said if war occurred there could be no winner.

I wonder if possibly it was a mistake to elect a narcissistic ignorant bully president at this particular moment.

Adding to Chinese unease, President Donald Trump said on Thursday that “the problem of North Korea” would be “taken care of”.

“If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.”

That was a tweet. It wasn’t something he said in a press release or an address to the nation or even at a press conference. It was a tweet. I wonder if possibly it’s not ideal for the president to be threatening wars on Twitter.

In an interview with the Associated Press, North Korea’s Deputy Foreign Minister Han Song Ryol accused the Trump administration of “becoming more vicious and more aggressive” in its policy towards the North.

An institute linked to the North Korean foreign ministry also warned that “thermo-nuclear war may break out any moment”.

Not something for North Korea to look forward to, I would think.

In Livonia, Michigan:

A Michigan doctor has been accused of performing genital cutting on two 7-year-old girls at a medical clinic, in a case that federal officials believe to be the first prosecution under a law banning the brutal practice.

The doctor, Jumana Nagarwala, 44, was arrested on Wednesday on charges that she performed the genital cutting at an unnamed medical clinic in Livonia, Mich.; transported minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity; and lied to federal agents.

“Cutting” aka mutilation.

One of the girls told investigators that she thought she and the other girl had gone to the doctor because “our tummies hurt.” The other said the cutting procedure was so painful that she screamed and could barely walk afterward.

Yeah I’ll bet it was painful. 7 years old.

“Dr. Nagarwala is alleged to have performed horrifying acts of brutality on the most vulnerable victims,” Kenneth A. Blanco, an acting assistant attorney general with the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a statement on Thursday. “The Department of Justice is committed to stopping female genital mutilation in this country, and will use the full power of the law to ensure that no girls suffer such physical and emotional abuse.”

She’s been placed on leave from a medical center named after Henry Ford.

The Michigan case is significant because it can help to raise awareness of an issue that often flies under the radar, said Shelby Quast of Equality Now, an international women’s rights advocacy organization.

She said people who might see evidence of genital cutting, such as teachers and health care providers, are not always aware of obligations to report it. “We need better information about exactly where they are,” Ms. Quast said of practitioners of genital cutting. “We know that this is a child abuse issue, and we know that we need to start training our child protection folks better.”

Slicing children’s genitals off: not ok.

Well that figures.

The new acting head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights once complained that she experienced discrimination because she is white.

As an undergraduate studying calculus at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, Candice Jackson “gravitated” toward a section of the class that provided students with extra help on challenging problems, she wrote in a student publication. Then she learned that the section was reserved for minority students.

“I am especially disappointed that the University encourages these and other discriminatory programs,” she wrote in the Stanford Review. “We need to allow each person to define his or her own achievements instead of assuming competence or incompetence based on race.”

I don’t see color! All lives matter! Stop talking about racism! By all means talk about racism but don’t obsess over it!

A longtime anti-Clinton activist and an outspoken conservative-turned-libertarian, she has denounced feminism and race-based preferences. She’s also written favorably about, and helped edit a book by, an economist who decried both compulsory education and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Jackson’s inexperience, along with speculation that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will roll back civil rights enforcement, lead some observers to wonder whether Jackson, like several other Trump administration appointees, lacks sympathy for the traditional mission of the office she’s been chosen to lead.

Ya think?

Jackson takes over an office that has been responsible for protecting students from racial, gender, disability and age discrimination for decades. Under the Obama administration, the office increased its caseload. It emphasized to colleges that they could give preferences to minorities and women to achieve diversity, and advised them to be more aggressive in investigating allegations of rape and sexual harassment on campus. Some of the guidance from the office provoked controversy, particularly among Republicans who have long called for the office to be scaled back.

It looks as if now they’ll get what they want.

In another article Jackson penned for the Review during her senior year, entitled “How I Survived Stanford Without Entering the Women’s Center,” she condemned feminism on campus.

“In today’s society, women have the same opportunities as men to advance their careers, raise families, and pursue their personal goals,” she wrote. “College women who insist on banding together by gender to fight for their rights are moving backwards, not forwards.”

Sure they do. There is no discrimination, no harassment, no failure to promote, no obstacle of any kind. Perfection has been achieved.