Cathy Young on Trump and DEI:

Trump’s DEI and affirmative action ban has received at least partially positive reviews not only from the MAGA right and the anti-woke commentariat but from liberal centrists like Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith (“an idea whose time has probably come”) and even some leftists who regard DEI as feelgood corporate flimflam.

These reactions reflect the fact that diversity programs in the workplace and on campus have come under intensive criticism in recent years, both for enforcing progressive groupthink and for substituting pseudo-progressive verbiage for meaningful change.

That’s an interesting point. Verbiage is such a convenient alternative to actually doing something. It’s also a necessary first step, but still – there is a lot of all talk and no action, aka all hat and no cattle, in political controversies. (I doubt that applies solely to the left.)

The New York Times, which the Trumpian right regards as the Pravda of the Democratic left, reported a year ago that many companies were backing away from more controversial DEI initiatives such as mandatory anti-bias trainings that can turn into hectoring and struggle sessions. More recently, the Times also ran a long investigative article on the polarizing and demoralizing effects of an aggressive DEI initiative at the University of Michigan.

Adds to reading list

Academic, writer, and podcaster John McWhorter, a longtime critic of the progressive antiracism model who has also been scathingly critical of Trump, told me by email, “With reluctance, I find myself agreeing with Trump on this one, including the idea that imposing it on the government will set a model/mood for the rest of the country including private institutions to follow.”

While McWhorter once believed that race and gender preferences in the corporate world (though not in academia) had value as a way to offset traditional biases, he now thinks that in practice, DEI amounts to lowering standards and overfocusing on skin color: “It’s the way it comes out too often to be ignored.” He also thinks that “general awareness of the value of looking beyond white men has settled in over the past thirty years enough that we need not fear that the end of DEI programs will return us to Mad Men.”

Ah, Mad Men. I only saw a few episodes of that, but I think I get the drift. Sometime last year I watched The Apartment for the first time in decades, and yeah – the race thing simply staggered me. It’s not a surprise in Gone With the Wind, but The Apartment is not 1939, it’s 1960.

What race thing? This: there are precisely two Black characters in the entire movie. The first one we see is a man crouching on the floor shining a white boss’s shoes while the boss has an important conversation. At the end of the chat the boss (Fred McMurray) throws a coin at the guy crouching on the floor. The second one we see is a janitor pushing a cart; a white-collar white guy who has just quit (Jack Lemmon) takes off his office-drudge fedora and puts it on the janitor’s head, yanking it down hard.

In short both appearances are absolutely cringe territory, and there are no others.

It’s a Billy Wilder film. Wilder of course fled the Nazis, and yet…

It was a salutary wake-up call, I guess.

Back to Cathy Young’s piece later.

H/t Sackbut

Oh really?

Anyone can’t. It isn’t possible.

Trump is going to California to turn the water on.

It will be Trump’s first presidential trip since his return to office, and it will be to a state with Democratic leaders he has repeatedly blamed for persistent blazes, arguing that wildlife protections have impeded access to water.

Speaking to reporters before departing the White House on Friday, Trump said the fires “could have been put out,” but “they still haven’t for whatever reason.”

“It would be fine if they turned the water on,” Trump said. 

Those California hippies are so silly, not turning the water on. Maybe they’re too stoned to find the tap.

Trump spent much of an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Wednesday railing against a response that he said makes the country look “helpless” and “weak.”

He suggested federal aid to California could be withheld over state efforts to protect the Delta smelt, a small fish that has become a fixation of Trump’s and even the subject of a Day One memorandum. The directive, which calls for “putting people over fish,” would upend the state’s water policy.

Trump has blamed water shortages in the Los Angeles region on policies meant to preserve the endangered fish, arguing more water needs to flow from Northern California to Southern California.

Very true, and more water needs to flow from the oceans to the deserts, because the oceans have way more than they need and the deserts have hardly any. Once we get that imbalance straightened out everything will be fine. You’ll have your golf condos stretching to the horizon north south east and west.

“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let the water run down,” he said in the Fox News interview.

Damn right. Let it burn.

At the university just a few miles from me the other evening:

Over 200 counter-protesters gathered Jan. 21 on King Lane Northeast outside Thomson Hall to rally against Turning Point USA (TPUSA) guest speaker Olivia Krolczyk.

TPUSA cancelled the scheduled event after unknown individuals pulled Thomson Hall’s fire alarm and threw noisemakers into the building’s entryway. After the building was evacuated and reentered, unknown organizers broke a window in the lecture hall and threw noisemakers into the lecture hall via the broken window. 

The police shut the whole thing down. This has been another evening of Protest Theater, please remember to take all your belongings with you as you leave the scene.

“The University of Washington is committed to free exchange of ideas and the principles of academic freedom, in accordance with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, including some whose views may be considered controversial,” UW spokesperson Victor Balta said in an email Jan. 22. 

…

Balta concluded that these disruptions may have been an attempt to access overly-dramatized content.  

“Informed discussion and debate are encouraged on our campus, however, it is clear that presenters and disruptors are, in some cases, seeking to antagonize one another in ways that provide dramatic content for their social media feeds,” Balta said in an email. “Tuesday’s scheduled speaker told the student newspaper that she was ‘excited‘ the event was shut down.”   

Or to put it another way, Team Fake Women Are Women took the bait.

H/t J.A.

Trump says Zelenskyy should have submitted.

President Donald Trump suggested in an interview that aired Thursday night that Ukraine should not have fought when Russia invaded it.

No he didn’t. He didn’t “suggest” it; he said it, entirely bluntly. Why does journalism do this? Why does it euphemize everything? Especially Trump? A big part of what makes Trump so loathsome is his pea-brained assertiveness. It’s not the job of reporters to dress that up as making “suggestions.”

“Zelenskyy was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal.”

Yeah. Same with Britain in 1940, am I right? It shouldn’t have done that. It should have surrendered to Hitler, so that the US could make a deal. That obviously would have been much better.

“I could have made that deal so easily, and Zelenskyy decided that ‘I want to fight,'” Trump said.

How odd of Zelenskyy not to prefer to let Trump team up with Putin to squash Ukraine.

The quoted assertion is from the trial of Axel Rudakubana.

And what’s the purpose of terrorizing women? Dominance.

Not so fast, Big Guy.

A federal judge said Thursday that President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship was “blatantly unconstitutional” and issued a temporary restraining order to block it.

Judge John Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee who sits in Seattle, granted the request by Washington Attorney General Nick Brown and three other Democratic-led states for the emergency order halting implementation of the policy for the next 14 days while there are more briefings in the legal challenge.

“I have been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case whether the question presented was as clear,” Coughenour said.

“Where were the lawyers” when the decision to sign the executive order was made, the judge asked. He said that it “boggled” his mind that a member of the bar would claim the order was constitutional.

Because, you see, it’s in the Constitution – the 14th Amendment to be exact. Pinhead can’t just waltz up and throw out bits of the Constitution he doesn’t like.

They’re going ahead with it.

Karla Sofía Gascón made Oscar history on Thursday, becoming the first openly trans actress to be nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as the title character in “Emilia Pérez.”

Awww isn’t that nice. He made history by stealing a best actress nomination from a woman. Women notoriously struggle to get any parts at all in movies, because most movies are 80 or 90 or 110% peopled by men, and now here’s this sweet guy taking a woman’s part and a woman’s nomination from an actual woman. He made part of the history of Misogyny in Hollywood; congratulations.

In the Netflix musical directed by Jacques Audiard, Gascón plays a cartel boss who tries to atone for her past after transitioning in secret. She previously received best-actress nominations from the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards for the role.

Oh sweet. Two more nominations stolen from women. Bitches might as well just retire from the business, amirite?

Disinformation experts blast Trump’s executive order on government censorship

One of President Donald Trump’s first actions as he returned to the Oval Office on Monday was signing an executive order aimed at “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship” of US citizens.

The order bans federal officials from any conduct that “would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen” and instructs the attorney general to investigate if the Biden administration engaged in efforts to censor Americans.

“Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate,” the order states.

Right-wing media figures and some Republicans in Congress have for years decried what they claim are efforts by Democrats and technology platforms to censor their speech online, especially around the Covid-19 pandemic and elections. The Supreme Court ruled last year the US government can contact social media companies about mis- and disinformation swirling on their platforms, handing the Biden administration a major victory.

Are lies protected free speech? Or are they just lies?

Is perjury a crime? Or is it just free speech?

Is libel a thing? Or is it just free speech the target doesn’t like?

Oh no we saw him with her and them today.

Ed Sheeran has hit back at [disputed] a report that claimed he attended a New Year’s Eve party at J.K. Rowling’s Scottish residence.

Denying a claim about oneself is not hitting, back or forward or any direction.

This isn’t just random, you know, this constant resort to claims of “hitting out at” and “hitting back at” and “gouging out the eyeballs of” in reference to people saying things. It’s of a piece with the frenzied rhetoric about putting trans people at risk by not endorsing every word any trans person says. Nobody is punching anybody; we are disputing claims. The two are not the same.

The “Shape Of You” singer took to his Instagram Stories last night (Jan. 21) to contest the original report by The Sun newspaper.

There you go. To contest. Not to hit back at; to contest. Skip the pretend violence in future. Metaphors are dangerous in journalism, especially when the journalists are hacks.

The story claimed that Sheeran was rumoured to have attended the event at Killiechassie House in Perth and Kinross, Scotland alongside other celebrities such as actor Daniel Craig and musicians U2 and The Pretenders.

Yo. The story was of a rumor. Level 2 from the beginning, see? When the story is about a rumor in the first place, it’s silly to pretend it’s about a fact.

Writing on his Instagram Stories, Sheeran responded to a post by broadcaster India Willoughby: “Respectfully, India Willoughby, and any other journalist who has reported both these stories, neither are true. I spent New Years with my friends and family”.

…

India Willoughby responded on X/Twitter writing: “Hi @edsheeran- this is great to hear. I used the word ‘reportedly’ about JK Rowling’s NYE party, because it was widely reported by UK and international media at the time. I also reached out directly to you in the first wk [sic] of Jan via Twitter to ask if the story was correct – but no reply. Delighted to hear you didn’t go!”

So India Willoughby is in charge of who goes where?

I did not know that.

Maximize the disruption.

Trump’s return to the White House is already having a big impact at the $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), with the new administration imposing a wide range of restrictions, including the abrupt cancellation of meetings including grant review panels. Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel.

The moves have generated extensive confusion and uncertainty at the nation’s largest research agency, which has become a target for Trump’s political allies. “The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating,” one senior NIH employee says.

Well, it’s only health. This would be bad if it were about something important, but health doesn’t matter.

The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in. But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.

I suppose we can see the thinking. It’s health and human services. What good is that to Trump? How does it make him richer? Plus also, Fauci.

Hiring is also affected. No staff vacancies can be filled; in fact, before Trump’s first day in office was over, NIH’s Office of Human Resources had rescinded existing job offers to anyone whose start date was slated for 8 February or later. It also pulled down currently posted job vacancies on USA Jobs. “Please note, these tasks had to be completed in under 90 minutes and we were unable to notify you in advance,” the 21 January email noted, asking NIH’s institutes and centers to pull down any job vacancies remaining on their own websites.

The various directives have shaken the vast community of extramural scientists NIH supports. “[We] have not seen anything concrete from NIH yet,” said one scientist at a major academic medical center. “But just like about everyone in science, we are worried and waiting.”

Listen, these health people are dangerous. You gotta use caution.

H/t What a Maroon

This is interesting.

Anyway. Only three days in. Bad moon rising.

Unbelievable.

Hannity: …people that were violent with police – why did they get a pardon?

Trump: Number of reasons, number one they were in there for three and a half years, a long time

Oh yes? And Trump pardons everyone who’s been in prison for 3.5 years? He has a rule that 3.5 years is a long time and definitely enough punishment? Trump doesn’t want to lock up people he dislikes and throw away the key?

On the contrary, Trump has a long long record of slavering to lock people up, starting with the Central Park Five. He loves to see bad things done to people he hates. 3.5 years is not objectively a long time for assaulting cops, it’s subjectively a long time to Donald Narcissist Trump.

Many in solitary confinement, treated [heightened emotion] like no one’s ever been treated – so badly – they were treated like the worst criminals in history

He says, poking his lips out as far as they will go. He says, as if attacking cops in an effort to invade the Capitol building and overturn the elected government were the equivalent of jaywalking.

And you know what they were there for? They were protesting the vote.

No, Captain Liar, they were trying to stop the certification of the vote in order to force Captain Liar into office. They weren’t protesting anything, they were trying to overturn an election and install a dictator.

Now the dictator is there legally.

This country is officially broken. It’s a failed state.

Because they knew the election was rigged and they were protesting the vote.

The election wasn’t rigged, they weren’t protesting.

Only a couple of days in and already I feel coated in filth.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Vacations for all.

The thing I think a lot of people miss, is if you look at Project 2025, the whole plan is for a crony government.

Sure we can argue about the social justice aspect of all of this, but we aren’t arguing between a merit based system and a DEI one.

We’re talking about Donald “Put his idiot son-in-law in charge of handling a pandemic” Trump here. Donald “Wants a drunken misogynist to run the military” Trump. Donald “Putting an antivax brain worm infested roadkill bear eater in change of health” Trump.

The only merit Trump appears to care about is loyalty to Trump.

What Trump is doing is eliminating the checks and balances that could get in the way of him stealing. Sure, it may mean that the best person isn’t getting the job, I honestly don’t know, but it is likely also getting in the way of Trump picking some of the worst.

Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Buzzing nonstop.

iknklast is partially right about “victims being losers”, but there is a bigger issue in play here.

These people were not losers, they were winners. Winners because they stood firm against a Trump inspired attempted coup. Winners because they put themselves on the line to protect Senators and staff from a violent insurrection.

And that, in Trump’s eyes, makes them traitors who must be punished, and as the law doesn’t currently allow him to punish them, he will let loose his dogs of war.

When America is no longer “The shining light on the hill” (if it ever was), don’t blame Trump and the GOP or those like ikinklast’s family members, put the blame squarely where it belongs on the lily livered weak kneed Democrats who put their own sinecures before country. They failed in their one job, to protect the Republic.

Biden could have, but chose not to, grant a Presidential Medal of Freedom to any of those brave souls, instead he chose to reward a Pope, a Transactivist, and a dead tech entrepreneur.

Why, he could have even followed the British Example when as a recognition of sacrifice during WW2, the George Cross was awarded to Malta, and for recognition of their standing between the Orange and the Green, it was awarded to the Royal Ulster Constabulary in 1999.

Trump doing the end DEI thing.

President Donald Trump has ordered that all US government staff working on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes be put on immediate paid administrative leave.

The White House confirmed that all federal DEI workers had to be put on leave by 17:00 EST (22:00 GMT) on Wednesday, before the offices and programmes in question were shut down.

The executive order requires federal hiring, promotions and performance reviews [to] “reward individual initiative” rather than “DEI-related factors”.

It revokes a 1965 executive order signed by former President Lyndon B Johnson that makes it illegal for federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of “race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin” in their hiring.

What???

Why do that? Why not just stick to the “color-blind” mantra?

But also though – did the order signed by Johnson really cite “gender identity”? I don’t believe that. It wasn’t a category then.

The order also requires the attorney general to submit, within 120 days, recommendations “to encourage the private sector” to end similar diversity efforts.

To bully the private sector, you mean.

Update: sure enough, the 1965 executive order did not mention genner idenniny, or sexual orientation either.

Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson on September 24, 1965, established requirements for non-discriminatory practices in hiring and employment on the part of U.S. government contractors. It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Ow, this is painful to read.

When inmates are released from federal prison, the Justice Department places a call to their victims, notifying them that the defendant who attacked them is now free. On Tuesday, the phones of U.S. Capitol Police and D.C. police officers were buzzing nonstop.

For Aquilino A. Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant, the automated calls began on Monday evening and continued into Tuesday morning after President Trump issued a sweeping legal reprieve to all of the nearly 1,600 defendants, including those convicted of violent crimes, in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Between 7:03 a.m. and 9:37 a.m., Mr. Gonell received nine calls from the Justice Department about the release of inmates.

Mr. Gonell, who was assaulted during the attack and retired because of the injuries he suffered, was as outraged and distraught as he was shortly after the violence.

How nice of Trump to pay exactly zero attention to the victims.

More than 150 police officers from the two agencies were injured during the assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob four years ago. Some were hit in the head with baseball bats, flagpoles and pipes. One lost consciousness after rioters used a metal barrier to push her down as they marched to the building.

Now many of those officers described themselves as struggling and depressed in response to Mr. Trump freeing their attackers.

I’m struggling and depressed right now too.

In the days and weeks after the riot, several police officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6 died, including Officer Brian D. Sicknick of the Capitol Police, who was attacked by the mob, suffered a stroke and died of natural causes on Jan. 7. Officers Jeffrey Smith of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department and Howard S. Liebengood of the Capitol Police died by suicide in the days after the violence.

…

Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader, sidestepped questions on Tuesday about whether Mr. Trump acted properly in pardoning the rioters.

“We’re looking at the future, not the past,” said Mr. Thune, who called the pardons “the president’s decision.” He added, “We know the presidential pardon authority was expanded in a massive way by President Biden, and obviously we knew all along President Trump can exercise it like most presidents have, and he did.”

“We’re looking at the future, not the past,” he says, and proceeds to whine about Biden.

Hmm. I find the huge man with the bullhorn not all that persuasive.

I also don’t understand why no one escorts him out of the room and either out of the building or to the jail.

Trump people are surprised to learn that he’s reckless and impulsive.

President Trump‘s sweeping pardons for 1,500 Jan. 6 criminals and defendants were a last-minute, rip-the-bandage-off decision to try to move past the issue quickly, White House advisers familiar with the Trump team’s discussions tell Axios.

Always a good plan. If you’re going to do something evil and outrageous, do the worst possible version of it so as to get it over with quickly. What could go wrong?

Eight days before the inauguration, Vice President-to-be JD Vance — channeling what he believed to be Trump’s thinking — said on “Fox News Sunday” that Jan. 6 convicts who assaulted police ought not get clemency: “If you committed violence that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

• Trump vacillated during an internal debate over targeted clemency vs. a blanket decision according to two insiders.
• But as Trump’s team wrestled with the issue, and planned a shock-and-awe batch of executive orders Day 1, “Trump just said: ‘F -k it: Release ’em all,'” an adviser familiar with the discussions said.

That’s the right way to solve all complicated problems. Just say “Fuck it, do the bad thing at top speed.”

Trump’s decision was a surprise to some Republicans in Congress, who grimaced at the appearance of the new president condoning violence against police officers.

The what? The what? The appearance?? Honey that wasn’t an appearance of condoning violence against cops, that was the thing itself. What the hell else would it be?

Trump orders all maps to name everything America.

President Trump signed an executive order on Monday requiring the federal government to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” on official maps – a change that could take months to enact and may or may not be immediately reflected on the digital maps Americans use daily.

“The Gulf of America – which has a beautiful ring,” Trump said at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago on January 7. “The Gulf of America, what a beautiful name and it’s appropriate.”

Unless, of course, you want to know where you are.

We could rename the Atlantic the America, and do the same to the Pacific, and then rename all the countries to the south and the east and the west and the north America. We could, but it would make travel and shipping and weather forecasting difficult.

Here’s the thing: we’re already in America, we know where it is; what we need to know about a large body of water to the south of us is where it is. Calling it the Gulf of Mexico is a big stonking clue, while calling it the Gulf of America just leaves us where we are.

It’s not dissing America (aka the US) to call the body of water between Florida and Mexico the Gulf of Mexico, it’s just a piece of information. It’s like a road sign. You don’t want all the road signs to say America, no matter how adorably patriotic that would be. You want the road signs to tell you where you are.

Capeesh?