Meanwhile, Trump is busy being his usual vomitous racist self.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/842154802058543105
Speak for yourself, Trump. We don’t thank Jackson for his service. We don’t honor his memory. We don’t build on his legacy. And we do not thank god for the US.
A federal judge in Hawaii issued a nationwide order Wednesday evening blocking President Trump’s ban on travel from parts of the Muslim world, dealing a political blow to the White House and signaling that proponents of the ban face a long and risky legal battle ahead.
The ruling was the second frustrating defeat for Mr. Trump’s travel ban, after a federal court in Seattle halted an earlier version of the executive order last month. Mr. Trump responded to that setback with fury, lashing out at the judiciary before ultimately abandoning the order.
Well, frustrating for Trump and his poisonous cronies, but not for anyone else.
The new improved ban was supposed to avoid legal challenges, but oops no that didn’t work out.
Democratic states and nonprofit groups that work with immigrants and refugees raced into court to attack the updated order, alleging that it was a thinly veiled version of the ban on Muslim migration that he had pledged to enact last year, as a presidential candidate.
Administration lawyers argued in multiple courts on Wednesday that the president was merely exercising his national security powers and that no element of the executive order, as written, could be construed as a religious test for travelers.
But in the lawsuit brought by Hawaii’s attorney general, Doug Chin, Judge Derrick K. Watson appeared skeptical of the government’s claim that past comments by Mr. Trump and his allies had no bearing on the case.
“Are you saying we close our eyes to the sequence of statements before this?” Judge Watson asked in a hearing Wednesday before he ruled against the administration.
Ahhh that’s interesting. So it turns out that all those dogwhistles and outright racist rants came back to bite him. That’s justice.
The lawsuits have also claimed that the order disrupts the functions of companies, charities, public universities and hospitals that have deep relationships overseas. In the Hawaii case, nearly five dozen technology companies, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Lyft and TripAdvisor, joined in a brief objecting to the travel ban.
Capitalism has its moments.
The judge’s order was not a ruling on the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s ban, and the administration has consistently expressed confidence that courts will ultimately affirm Mr. Trump’s power to issue the restrictions.
But the legal debate is likely to be a protracted and unusually personal fight for the administration, touching Mr. Trump and a number of his key aides directly and raising the prospect that their public comments and private communications will be scrutinized extensively.
Multiple lawsuits challenging the travel ban have extensively cited Mr. Trump’s comments during the presidential campaign. He first proposed to bar all Muslims from entering the United States, and then offered an alternative plan to ban travel from a number of Muslim countries, which he described as a politically acceptable way of achieving the same goal.
The lawsuits also cited Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who advises Mr. Trump, who said he had been asked to help craft a Muslim ban that would pass legal muster.
And they highlighted comments by Stephen Miller, an adviser to the president, who cast the changes to Mr. Trump’s first travel ban as mere technical adjustments aimed at ushering the same policy past the review of a court.
I find this deeply satisfying. They’ve cut the ground out from under their own feet. They’ve botched their own plans by being such evil shits.
Bob Ferguson, the Washington attorney general, has indicated that in an extended legal fight, his office could seek depositions from administration officials and request documents that would expose the full process by which Trump aides crafted the ban.
Proud to be an immigrant to Washington state.
At any rate, whatever the shady or ludicrous reasons for that Palm Beach real estate deal, at least we know the house itself was vulgar as fuck.
The story begins in March 2001, when health care tycoon Abraham Gosman, who had moved from Massachusetts to Palm Beach a few years earlier and reinvented himself as a philanthropist, declared bankruptcy. That financial catastrophe would eventually result in tax fraud convictions for Gosman and his wife.
One of the casualties of the bankruptcy was the 62,000-square-foot mansion Gosman had built and dubbed Maison de l’Amitie, the House of Friendship. A showcase for his charity events just a mile north of the vaunted Breakers hotel, it included a ballroom with a capacity of hundreds, an art gallery, underground parking for scores of cars and a 100-foot swimming pool. It was nested among a slew of outbuildings, including a barn, guest houses and a tennis cottage.
A what? What the fuck is a tennis cottage? What, people go live there when they feel like playing tennis? They play tennis inside the cottage? They need a whole cottage to change into their tennis outfits? The kid who picks up the balls lives there?
The Gosmans managed to hold on to it for a couple of years, but by 2004 it had been seized by the bankruptcy court and put on the auction block. There were several bidders, hoping to scoop up a plutocratic property at a dollar-store price, but Trump — a real estate mogul still more than a decade distant from political ambitions — pounced, grabbing the house for $41.35 million.
“He bought it strictly as an investment to flip,” said Carol Digges, the Palm Beach realestate agent who would eventually resell the house for Trump. “He never intended to live there.”
And he didn’t. After doing some renovation on the house, Trump put it back on the market in 2006 at price that made even jaded Palm Beach eyeballs pop: $125 million. Jose Lambiet, the publisher and columnist of local news source Gossip Extra, was one of a few reporters Trump invited to tour the house in an attempt to drum up buyers. He was even more astonished by the price after he looked around.
“I’d been in the house before, at one of Gosman’s charity parties, and Trump had hardly changed anything, just put on a couple of coats of paint,” Lambiet said. “Even that — well, he told us the fixtures in one of the bathrooms were gold, but as he walked away, I scratched a faucet with my fingernails and it was just gold-covered paint.”
Isn’t that just SO TRUMP? Thinking people want gold faucets in the first place? Then saying they’re gold when they’re just painted goldy color? Not to mention charging $53 million and change for a couple of coats of paint and fake-gold faucets?
Lambiet has visited many homes of wealthy owners with more money than taste, but he considered the Maison de l’Amitie in a class by itself. “It was just terrible looking, really gaudy,” he said. “Nothing fit together — it was sort of haphazard inside.
“There was a room with a floor made of cobblestones, and in the corner was a real wood oven for pizzas. It looked like an old Italian pizza place. Who does that in their house? … I thought, he’s never gonna sell this. And he didn’t, the house stayed on the market for a couple of years.”
I just hope there’s a built-in espresso machine in the tennis cottage, that’s all I can say.
George Packer in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago:
Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution allows for the removal of a President who can no longer discharge his duties but is unable or unwilling to say so. It empowers the Vice-President, along with “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide,” to declare the President unfit and to install the Vice-President as Acting President. Section 4 has never been invoked. In 1987, when Ronald Reagan appointed Howard Baker to be his new chief of staff, the members of the outgoing chief’s team warned their replacements that Reagan’s mental ineptitude might require them to attempt the removal of the President under Section 4. Baker and his staff, at their first official meeting with Reagan, watched him carefully for signs of incapacity—but the President, apparently cheered by the arrival of newcomers, was alert and lively, and he served out the rest of his second term.
Yiiiiiiiiikes I didn’t know that.
Trump is “alert and lively” – but he’s “alert” to wrong things and he’s lively in wrong and terrible ways. Apathy and lassitude are not the only forms of mental incapacity.
As Packer goes on to say:
After a month in office, Donald Trump has already proved himself unable to discharge his duties. The disability isn’t laziness or inattention. It expresses itself in paranoid rants, non-stop feuds carried out in public, and impulsive acts that can only damage his government and himself. Last week, at a White House press conference, the President behaved like the unhinged leader of an unstable and barely democratic republic. He rambled for nearly an hour and a half, on script and off; he flung insults at reporters; he announced that he was having fun; and he congratulated himself so many times and in such preposterous terms (“this Administration is running like a fine-tuned machine”) that the White House press corps could only stare in amazement.
He’s slightly manic most of the time. In someone with the faults and deficits he has, that’s not a plus.
It won’t get better. The notion that, at some point, Trump would start behaving “Presidential” was always a fantasy that has the truth backward: the pressure of the Presidency is making him worse. He’s insulated by sycophants and by family members, and he can still ride a long way on his popular following. Though the surge of civic opposition, the independence of the courts, and the reinvigoration of the press are heartening, the only real leverage over Trump lies in the hands of Republicans. But Section 4 won’t be invoked. Vice-President Mike Pence is not going to face the truth in the private back room of a Washington restaurant with Secretaries Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, and Wilbur Ross, or in the offices of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Republican leaders have opted instead for unconstrained power.
It’s their big chance to destroy the environment, make poor people even poorer, make sure health insurance will never be universal and tax-funded, make it harder for minorities to vote, and end public funding of arts and humanities endowments.
One of the things Rachel Maddow talked about in the segment leading up to the 1040 reveal was the fact that Trump sold a house to a Russian oligarch for way more than it was worth, so what’s that about.
So today I googled for more, and got a Washington Post piece from five days ago.
The front-page centerpiece of Friday’s Palm Beach Post, billed as an “exclusive,” begins with a provocative question: “Why did a Russian oligarch pay now-President Donald Trump $95 million for his Palm Beach mansion?”
The piece offers no clear answer and, despite being a captivating read filled with several new details, it revisits a curious real estate transaction that has previously been probed by the New York Times, CNN and Politico, among others.
$95 million is a LOT of money for one house, even if it is a mansion.
Trump paid $41.35 million for the seaside estate in 2004 and sold it in 2008 for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a fertilizer magnate and majority owner of the AS Monaco soccer team.
There was a real estate bubble between 2004 and 2008…but it was deflating in 2008, and it was never so expanded that it could explain a profit of $43 $53 million in four years unless the seller added a few extra houses. $95 million was a record price and before that, the Post says, Trump was struggling to sell it at all.
(Maison de L’Amitie, as the estate is known, languished on the market for two years before fetching what was, at the time, believed to be the highest price ever for a home in the United States.) Rybolovlev, who has never lived in the 62,000-square-foot house, has claimed at various times that it is a corporate investment, an asset for his family trust or perhaps a 6.2-acre playground for his equestrian-loving daughter.
None of that is an explanation for paying a vastly inflated price.
Since Rybolovlev can’t get his story straight, and he keeps bumping into Trump at airports, is it possible that the answer to the Palm Beach Post’s question about the oligarch’s motive is that he was trying to curry favor with the future president?
If so, Rybolovlev had tremendous political foresight. An alternative explanation is that he was just moving money in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Elena, who in a 2009 lawsuit accused him of “secreting and transferring assets in order to avoid his obligations,” according to the Palm Beach Post.
That still doesn’t make any sense. If you overpay for a house in order to withhold the money from someone else, the money is still lost to you, because you overpaid. Why not buy art works, or multiple houses, or startups, or any number of things that wouldn’t be just donating $43 $53 million to Donnie from Queens?
Unless donating $43 $53 million to Donnie from Queens is exactly what you intended to do.
A new bronze statue had New Yorkers stopped in their tracks Tuesday as a “Fearless Girl” statue was strategically placed in front of Wall Street’s iconic bull.
The statue shows a young girl standing straight with her head held high as she stares down the bucking bull that has become synonymous with Wall Street and big business.
The statue was installed by State Street Global Advisors, a branch of Boston-based State Street Corporation, to send a powerful message about gender equality in the workplace.
The defiant girl was placed in the financial epicenter of the Big Apple to encourage more companies to add more women in leadership roles and in the male-dominated Wall Street.
I think the iconography of the bull is revolting, and not really made less so by adding a child for the bull to trample, but anyway. There are always worse things.
Almost as if out of central casting, some Wall Street finance broseph appeared and started humping the statue while his gross date rape-y friends laughed and cheered him on. He pretended to have sex with the image of a little girl. Douchebags like this are why we need feminism.
The message is: if a female is out in public, she’s there to be fucked. That’s all she’s for. Female=a thing men are supposed to fuck.
You can grab her by the pussy.
Today in TwitterDonnie:
Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, "went to his mailbox" and found my tax returns? @NBCNews FAKE NEWS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
Can you imagine what the outcry would be if @SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
Wut?
Looking forward to a big rally in Nashville, Tennessee, tonight. Big crowd of great people expected. Will be fun!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
Ah yes, his favorite thing: adoring attention from a visible crowd of people. He misses the campaign. He would do that all day every day if he could.
It’s so healthy for the country, too, whipping up crowds of white people into frothing hatred of Other races and everyone on the left.
Someone leaked Trump’s 2005 tax return, minus all the informative attachments, yesterday. I think it was Trump who leaked it, since a hostile party would have included the informative attachments.
President Trump paid $38 million in federal taxes in 2005 on income of $153 million and reported a $105 million write-down in business losses, according to a copy of his tax return first revealed Tuesday night.
Trump paid an effective tax rate of 24 percent and saved millions of dollars in additional taxes by claiming the losses, according to the document, the first two pages of which were obtained by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston and first reported by DC Report, a nonprofit news site he runs, and on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
…
The document offers a rare snapshot of Trump’s personal finances, considering he has refused to disclose his tax returns to the public. The White House issued a statement chastising MSNBC for reporting on Trump’s taxes — “totally illegal,” read the statement — but also confirming top-line numbers from the return and defending Trump.
Still, Trump tweeted early Wednesday that the report was “FAKE NEWS” and asked: “Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, ‘went to his mailbox’ and found my tax returns?”
That’s so Trump. He’d never heard of the reporter, so he assumes that no one else has either. Pulitzer shmulitzer, am I right?
The newly revealed pages from his 2005 return do not detail his financial ties, but they do seem to disprove the theory that some Democrats advanced in last year’s campaign that Trump avoided paying any federal income taxes during that period.
That’s another reason I think he’s the one who leaked the page. (It’s one page really, one page with two sides.)
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s oldest son, tweeted, “Thank you Rachel Maddow for proving to your #Trump hating followers how successful @realDonaldTrump is& that he paid $40mm in taxes! #Taxes”
See? He leaked it himself. Another reason to think so: a new pretext for shouting at the press.
Ah Saudi Arabia.
They have invented a thing they call a girls’ council, which is apparently a place for men to show off their fashion sense.
See, it says Girls Council right there on the sign, so we can’t blame a faulty translation. There’s the Girls’ Council, and there are all the men, looking manly.
The male-dominated photos have been circulating widely on social media, after the meeting took place on Saturday.
It has been compared to another viral hit – an image of US President Donald Trump, surrounded by men, signing an abortion policy in January.
It’s a proud tradition, men deciding what women can and can’t do. Trump can barely write his own name, but he gets to tell us what we can and can’t do.
The owners of a popular wine bar in DC are suing Trump and his DC hotel.
Mr. Pitts and Ms. Gross claim that the Trump International Hotel, in the Old Post Office building in Washington, and the restaurants within enjoy an illegal advantage in the city’s restaurant market because of their association with Mr. Trump and that Cork has suffered as a result.
“We’re used to a lot of competition — it makes you better, faster, stronger — but the competition that’s coming from the hotel is not fair,” Ms. Gross said.
The wine bar, which serves more than 50 varieties by the glass, has hosted events for a variety of groups, including White House officials, members of Congress, the World Bank, Naral Pro-Choice America and the Sierra Club, according to the couple.
But Cork is losing business to the Trump hotel, which they say — as others have suggested — may be attracting diplomats and politicians looking to curry favor with Mr. Trump.
We’ve heard from diplomats and politicians saying they are doing just that, so it’s not a very far-fetched claim.
Ms. Gross and Mr. Pitts are not seeking monetary damages. But the suit, filed in District of Columbia Superior Court, offers a few improbable ways to resolve the issue: The hotel can stop operating; Mr. Trump and his family can fully divest from the business; or Mr. Trump can resign from office.
It shouldn’t be all that improbable. He shouldn’t be carrying on the way he is, and someone should be able to make him stop.
The pair is represented by a team of lawyers who are working for free. That team, led by the law offices of Mark S. Zaid and the Veritas Law Firm, includes the George Washington University Law School professors Alan B. Morrison, who co-founded and led a public interest group with Ralph Nader, and Steven L. Schooner.
Mr. Schooner, who specializes in government procurement law, has repeatedly warned that Mr. Trump may be in violation of the lease his company signed with the federal government for the post office building.
One clause of the lease, in particular, states that no elected official may benefit from the lease. The clause’s presence, the couple’s lawyers argue, supports Cork’s claim of unfair competition.
It’s a clause in the lease, but apparently that’s still a “far-fetched” reason to make him stop.
China has cleared the way for Trump to provide pimping services there.
China has granted preliminary approval for 38 new Trump trademarks, paving the way for President Donald Trump and his family to develop a host of branded businesses from hotels to insurance to bodyguard and concierge services, public documents show.
Trump’s lawyers in China applied for the marks in April 2016, as Trump railed against China at campaign rallies, accusing it of currency manipulation and stealing US jobs. Critics maintain that Trump’s swelling portfolio of China trademarks raises serious conflict of interest questions.
Oh, sure, but nobody who can do anything about them will do anything about them.
If President Trump receives any special treatment in securing trademark rights, it would violate the U.S. Constitution, which bans public servants from accepting anything of value from foreign governments unless approved by Congress, ethics lawyers from across the political spectrum say. Concerns about potential conflicts of interest are particularly sharp in China, where the courts and bureaucracy are designed to reflect the will of the ruling Communist Party.
Dan Plane, a director at Simone IP Services, a Hong Kong intellectual property consultancy, said he had never seen so many applications approved so quickly. “For all these marks to sail through so quickly and cleanly, with no similar marks, no identical marks, no issues with specifications – boy, it’s weird,” he said.
Well they just want to maintain good relations with the US head of state. Oh wait – you mean that’s the conflict of interest right there. That sounds like the special treatment in securing trademark rights that he’s not allowed to get unless Congress approves it.
The trademarks are for businesses including branded spas, massage parlors, golf clubs, hotels, insurance, finance and real estate companies, retail shops, restaurants, bars, and private bodyguard and escort services.
Nothing undignified or sleazy there, no indeed.
The racists are, of course, feeling emboldened.
Senior Republican congressman Steve King has sparked a backlash on social media after tweeting his support for the Dutch anti-Islam politician, Geert Wilders.
“Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny,” Mr King wrote on Twitter.
“We can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies,” he added.
That’s a pretty choice of phrase, isn’t it? “Somebody else’s babies.” It’s so tidily othering. We are we, and those other people we don’t like are “somebody else.” Who, exactly? Oh, you know. Them. Not-us.
Anthony Zurcher dares to call it white nationalism.
Congressman Steve King has a history of walking on the edge of white nationalist rhetoric, and on Sunday afternoon he once again hit the hornet’s nest, perhaps in his most direct manner yet.
The outrage from Democratic politicians and commentators across the political spectrum was quick, ferocious and entirely expected. The bluntness of Mr King’s message, the talk of “our destiny” and “other people’s babies”, ensured a vigorous response.
Of greater interest will be how Republican officeholders handle the controversy. So far they have remained silent. That may be increasingly difficult, as this is yet another indication of the growing bonds between the Trump wing of the Republican Party and white nationalist movements in Europe.
In spite of Trump’s warm admiration of his dear friend Frederick Douglass.
Mr King’s comments in support of Mr Wilders on Sunday led to accusations that he was “openly peddling white nationalism”.
His post was retweeted by the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, with the words “sanity reigns supreme”.
Mr Duke later tweeted: “God bless Steve King.”
God is a huge fan of racists. Huge.
The Times reports from the hall of mirrors where it gets to correct the lies of Trump and Trump’s people about what the Times has reported in the past that Trump and Trump’s people are citing as justification for Trump’s lies about Obama’s dastardly wire tapps [sic] of Trump Tower.
Two senior White House officials suggested on Monday that President Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama had tapped his telephone was not meant to be taken literally, arguing that Mr. Trump had been referring more broadly to a variety of surveillance efforts during the 2016 campaign when he made the incendiary accusation.
“He doesn’t really think that President Obama went up and tapped his phone personally,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary.
In fact, Mr. Spicer said, when Mr. Trump charged in a Twitter post last weekend that Mr. Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower,” he was referring generally to surveillance activities during the 2016 race — not to an actual telephone wiretap.
“The president was very clear in his tweet that it was, you know, ‘wiretapping,’” Mr. Spicer said, using his fingers to make a gesture suggesting quotation marks. “That spans a whole host of surveillance types of options.”
Hahaha yeah sure Spicey, the president was “very clear” that he wasn’t saying what he was saying. It’s always “very clear” what he means by those random quotation marks he sticks in for unfathomable reasons in apparently arbitrary places. It’s not at all that he has the bad habit shared by many semi-literate people of using quotation marks whose meaning is undetectable. Some people use “them” sort of like pepper “or” hot sauce, to add a bit “of” flavor. It’s not true – it’s a lie – that Trump was “very clear” that the quotation marks on “wiretapping” meant “not really wiretapping.” In fact such a reading would render the tweets gibberish, since they were all about his outrage at that very wiretapping. If he really meant “wiretapping”…then what was the outrage about?
No, Spicey, that won’t fly.
The remarks were the first time the White House sought to explain the accusation Mr. Trump made in a series of posts on Twitter saying Mr. Obama “was tapping my phones” and calling the former president a “bad (or sick) guy.”
The explanations came as the Justice Department asked the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, who had given a Monday deadline to produce proof of Mr. Trump’s claim, for more time “to determine what if any responsive documents exist.”
How much time? A little under eight years, perhaps?
Then there were Kellyanne Conway’s exciting new claims about spy microwave ovens and stuff.
The unusual and shifting explanations from Mr. Spicer and Ms. Conway reflected the contortions that members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle have employed to explain the president’s explosive accusation, which he has yet to address personally. Neither Mr. Trump nor anyone at the White House has presented any evidence for the claim, instead asking Congress to investigate it as part of its inquiry into Russia’s interference in the presidential election.
Both the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee have requested that the Department of Justice provide evidence it may have for Mr. Trump’s charge, but Mr. Spicer said on Monday that the president had not instructed the department to furnish any.
He suggested that Mr. Trump had relied on multiple news reports, including in The New York Times, to make his charge.
And there we enter the Hall of Mirrors, where the Times gets to explain that the Times never said what Spicey implied.
“It is interesting how many news outlets reported that this activity was taking place during the 2016 election cycle, and now are wondering where the proof is,” Mr. Spicer said.
The Times and other news outlets have reported extensively on surveillance in the United States during the 2016 presidential campaign, particularly related to Russia’s efforts to influence the election. But The Times has never reported that intelligence or law-enforcement officials were themselves spying on Mr. Trump. What The Times and other news organizations have reported is that American intelligence agencies have communication intercepts that officials believe show contacts between associates of Mr. Trump and Russian officials during the campaign.
Still, several far-right websites, including Infowars, which traffics in conspiracy theories and whose eccentric operator, Alex Jones, has interviewed Mr. Trump, have erroneously asserted that The Times and others had reported that the president was under surveillance.
In a story dated March 6, Infowars cited a Jan. 19 article in The Times detailing how American law enforcement and intelligence agencies were examining intercepted communications as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and Trump associates.
“Flashback: NYT admits wiretaps used against Trump,” the headline read. The story noted that The Times “didn’t specifically mention that Trump himself, or Trump Tower, was bugged,” but the caveat has not stopped Mr. Trump’s supporters from insisting that The Times was a source for the president’s tweet.
Of course, there’s a sense in which that can be perfectly true. Trump is thick as a plank, so he could easily have misunderstood something he read, or believed something Alex Jones said, and in that way “sincerely” derived his story from the Times reporting.
The chain could go like this:
The Times reports on surveillance in the United States during the 2016 presidential campaign–>Alex Jones translates that to “the Times reports on wiretaps on Trump by the Obama administration”–>Trump translates that to “the Times reports that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.”
Trump is the one with the nuclear codes.
Here’s another:
H/t Stewart
Oh good lord.
At Pink News one Josh Jackman explains what women are.
There seems to be an epidemic of otherwise intelligent, respectful, feminist people suddenly blurting out that trans women “aren’t real women.”
*grits teeth*
One, he mentions two people (and things Germaine Greer said years ago); two is not an epidemic. Two, it’s neither stupid nor disrespectful nor unfeminist to say that trans women are not women in every sense of the word. Three, nobody “blurted out” anything; two women made reasoned arguments.
After that, Josh Jackman (I don’t dare say “he” lest I be accused of misgendering…them) gets down to the hard work of explaining why it’s wrong to say that trans women are not women in every sense of the word.
It’s really very simple.
No-one switches gender.
Being misgendered and living in the wrong body is not a privilege.
Trans women are women. Trans women are women.
That’s it. That’s the substance, from start to finish. All that’s left is a smartass list of things that aren’t women, illustrated with photos. A can of paint, a guitar, Corsica – hahaha laydeez, do you feel stupid enough yet?
And in conclusion, and in big letters:
Also, anyone who self-defines as a woman. Got it?
No, I don’t got it, because I consider it bullshit. I consider it magical thinking and eyes-tight-shut denial. It doesn’t apply across the board, so why should it apply to “a woman”? It’s not true that anyone who self-defines as a crocodile is a crocodile. It’s not true that anyone who self-defines as a Russian is a Russian. It’s not true that anyone who self-defines as Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Making a simple-minded simplistic crude claim like that a matter of mandatory belief on pain of noisy social media bullying and shunning is a ridiculous way to carry on. It shouldn’t be treated as a crime to say that starting out male makes a difference and that there are some differences between the experiences of trans women and those of women. There shouldn’t be a mandatory dogma on the subject.
Glosswitch as always summed it up beautifully:
This is one of the nastiest pieces of anti-feminist bullshit I've ever read https://t.co/UBC4VOxOdN
— Glosswitch (@glosswitch) March 13, 2017
Male writer gleefully mocks feminists for wanting to define the terms on which millions of women and girls die every year.
— Glosswitch (@glosswitch) March 13, 2017
"Why, don't they know? Anyone who says they're a woman is one!" Blissfully ignoring the billions who are conscripts, not volunteers.
— Glosswitch (@glosswitch) March 13, 2017
Stop ignoring the conscripts.
Now Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s daring to say that she thinks trans women are trans women has become a news item. I guess it’s shocking when women say things like “trans women are trans women.”
The LA Times tendentiously headlines:
Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie angers transgender community
And the Motoons “provoked the Muslim community” and Charlie Hebdo “sparked outrage” and on and on it goes.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian novelist and outspoken feminist, drew criticism from transgender activists after suggesting that the experiences of transgender women are different from women whose gender was assigned female at birth.
Which is ridiculous, because of course the two sets of experiences are different. In other contexts that’s seen as the whole point.
The Washington Post is slightly less accusatory, but only slightly.
Women’s issues are different from trans women’s issues, feminist author says, sparking criticism
Her comments propelled her to the center of a nuanced, long-running gender identity debate between some feminists and transgender rights activists. The dilemma is based on the belief that most trans women were born assigned to the male gender and were raised male until they decided to transition. As a result, some feminists argue, transgender women spent a fraction — or large part — of their early lives experiencing male privilege.
Which many trans women agree is true.
In response to Adichie’s comments, Julia Serano, author of “Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity,” called out non-transgender women who feel the “audacity” to comment on the experiences of transgender women without having personally lived them.
Meanwhile, Serano has previously written that before her transition, “nothing could have truly prepared” her for what male privilege would entail.
“I underestimated just how frustrating, infuriating and hurtful it would feel to have strangers regularly hurl cat calls and sexual innuendos at me, or to have men speak down to me, talk over me, and sometimes even practically put on baby-talk voices when addressing me,” she said.
Well that’s our point exactly. She underestimated just how frustrating, infuriating and hurtful it would feel to have strangers regularly hurl cat calls and sexual innuendos at her or talk down to or over her – which is another way of saying that she experienced male privilege. Not living through years of cat calls and being talked down to is what we mean when we talk about the different experiences. I do not see why we can’t just agree on that and move on.
Michael Safi reports from Delhi:
As India’s raucous spring festival of Holi approached this year, a memo circulated among two women’s dormitories at the University of Delhi.
Undergraduate women would be locked inside the student halls from 9pm on Sunday until 6pm on Monday, it read – well after most Indians had finished smearing each other in dye, dancing or drinking from cups of bhang lassi, a milky cannabis-based concoction.
The decision of the hostels highlights a darker side to one of India’s most joyous festivals: as inhibitions decrease, many women say the street harassment endemic to Delhi life also surges.
And naturally the solution to that is to imprison the women. Literally imprison them for 21 hours. Literally imprison them during a festival that they might actually want to participate in (without being harassed or beaten up or raped, oddly enough).
“It’s a very sexualised thing. You get touched or hit on your buttocks or your breasts,” said Devangana Kalita, an activist and researcher at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
“There’s a particular targeting of women’s genital parts,” added Shristi Satyawati, who on Saturday tried to lodge a police case against a group of young men who pelted her with water balloons “on my breasts and bum”.
The police said they can’t do anything – it’s Holi.
Delhi police announced they had posted around 25,000 officers around the city to prevent hooliganism during the festivities.
Nonetheless, Delhi University’s two female dormitories were locked up for the day, along with several others across the city, to the chagrin of women’s and student’s groups.
“The men can remain free and roam about, but the women who are the supposed victims need to stay – it’s atrocious,” Naqvi said.
It’s lose-lose for women, isn’t it. They can have the burqa, or imprisonment, or sexual assault – those are the choices. Men can do whatever they like.
Rumblings have been growing against the tight curfews on women studying in Delhi’s student hostels and grew louder last week, when India’s minister for women, Maneka Gandhi tried to defend the restrictions.
“When you are 16 or 17 you are hormonally very challenged,” she said. “So to protect you against your own hormonal outbursts, perhaps a [boundary] is drawn.”
Pinjra Tod, a student group fighting against discriminatory rules for women’s hostels versus the men’s accommodation, said in a statement: “The rise in sexual violence and harassment that women experience around Holi is barely addressed. Instead, women are once again locked up for their ‘own safety’ with arbitrary restrictions.”
Oh well. I’m sure someone remembered to bring them food and water.
Donnie from Queens showing his usual dazzling self-awareness and insight.
It is amazing how rude much of the media is to my very hard working representatives. Be nice, you will do much better!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2017
Ah yes, he’s such an expert at avoiding rudeness. He’s so good at being nice. Du wut he sez, nott wut he duz.
Poor Angela Merkel. She has to go visit Trump on Tuesday. Yuck. I hope he doesn’t try to hold her hand.
German officials say the detail-oriented Merkel, 62, has been preparing assiduously for her trip to Washington.
She has watched Trump’s speeches and [pored] over his interviews, including a lengthy Q&A with Playboy magazine from 1990 in which he floats many of the controversial ideas he is now trying to implement as president, they say.
Members of her entourage have also analyzed Trump’s encounters with other leaders – including Britain’s Theresa May, Japan’s Shinzo Abe and Canada’s Justin Trudeau – and have had exchanges with some of their counterparts on how to handle the unpredictable former reality-TV star, the officials added.
“We have to be prepared for the fact that he does not like to listen for long, that he prefers clear positions and does not want to delve into details,” said one senior German official.
Sigh. In other words, they have to be prepared for the fact that he’s a giant stupid baby, who refuses to do the most basic tasks that the job requires. He has no attention span, he’s lazy, and he wants everything made simple and easy as if it were a toddler’s dinner cut up into itty bitty bites. It’s so shaming.
One of the biggest concerns in the chancellor’s camp before the visit is the potential for surprises.
Japan’s Abe had an awkward 19-second handshake with Trump, while May was criticized in some sections of the British media for holding hands with Trump during a stroll at the White House, apparently after he reached out to steady himself.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Trump last month, he and his team spent the day before running through endless scenarios, lines of questioning and role-plays to ensure they were prepared for any scenario.
But in the end, they were still taken aback when Trump spoke off the cuff at their news conference on the sensitive issues of settlements and a future Palestinian state.
In other words he has no idea how to behave, and no inclination to find out, so he’s almost certain to do something inappropriate and embarrassing, or rather, many such things.
