See @michelleisawolf, this is how you tell a non-offensive joke that everyone likes. pic.twitter.com/JCQ3ii1h7H

— Samantha Bee (@realsambee) April 30, 2018

(Am I obsessed? Yes, kind of. I’m horrified at all this respectability-clutching about a comic who tells acidic jokes about the liars who work for the liar in chief. I’m horrified that much of it is coming from journalists.)

Arwa Mahdawi on why Michelle Wolf has nothing to apologize to Sarah Sanders for:

Wolf was referencing Sanders’ well-documented history of defending Trump’s brazen lies. Earlier this month for example, Sanders defended Trump’s racist claims that women from Central America are raped at “levels that nobody has ever seen before”. She also justified Trump’s entirely unfounded claims that “millions and millions” of illegal votes are cast in America’s elections by saying that the president “strongly feels” that is the case. Sanders lectures the press about accuracy but spends her days helping Trump fuel racism and hate with shameless lies. Sanders, in brief, is a morally bankrupt person and Wolf was holding her to account.

What I keep saying. She’s not an innocent bystander, and she’s not some oppressed flunky taking the punches Trump ran away from. She’s a conspicuous part of Trump’s evil administration, which can’t be separated from his constant barrage of insult on Twitter. She’s tied to that. She doesn’t get to feign outrage over an insult to her eyeshadow.

If anything, the likes of Haberman, Brzezinski and Mitchell owe America an apology. They’re all incredibly smart women with extremely important jobs. They’re supposed to be holding power to account, not sucking up to it. Rushing to defend Sanders under a veil of faux-feminism is beneath all of them.

What’s more, urging Wolf to apologize for what should have been an uncontroversial joke sends an incredibly dangerous message. It suggests that it’s not OK to criticize the president and his people. And it lends credence to Trump’s repeated claims that the mainstream media is out to get him.

If only they were.

Jacki Lyden has a nicely blistering post on the hypocritical shunning of Michelle Wolf:

Michelle Wolf did get it just right and the journalists uncomfortable with that maybe should find another line of work. The White House Correspondents dinner is an archaic, queasy and unseemly spectacle that seems to underscore how inbred the relationship between the press and the politicos can be. It’s ID (the comedian) meets EGO (the journalists) meets SUPER EGO (the Administration). Any administration. Journalism shouldn’t be about swanning around the power-makers in public. (I could be wrong, but I think the New York Times no longer attends this thing.) Wolf was as crude as she needed to be in a crude time, and she spoke more truths about the current administration than most do, but I still think the dinner is dumb.

She’s not wrong. The Times has repeatedly mentioned that it stopped attending in 2008.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a terrible bald-faced liar working for a terrible bald-faced liar, and once again, carried Trump’s water (since he didn’t have the nerve to go) and while comedians are some of the most vulgar people on the planet, they’re paid to be– the president is not. The point is, this administration has put lies on a nuclear rocket launcher and aimed it at Democracy, so if Michelle Wolf wants to go after that, and journalists don’t, who’s doing the heavy lifting here in terms of defending the first amendment?

Not Sarah Sanders, we know that much.

The White House Scribblers Association issued a pompous “statement” saying don’t do it to us, do it to her.

#WHCA Statement to Members on Annual Dinner pic.twitter.com/8DKoHNxpNi

— WHCA (@whca) April 30, 2018

Everybody, including news outlets, is passing around a screenshot instead of just quoting the statement in full, which is a pain for people who can’t read screenshots. The bit where Wolf is thrown overboard is:

Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting and sponsorship winners, not to divide people. Unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of that mission.

Do it to her, do it to her, do it to her. We’re the good ones, we’re the nice ones, we would never dream of pointing out that Sarah Sanders is a bad-tempered hack who works for an evil lying bully who is ruining everything.

If “sex work” is just another job, then the state should be promoting it as such, right? Julie Bindel says Nah.

Now it would appear that the New Zealand immigration service has added “sex work” (as prostitution is increasingly described) to the list of “employment skills” for those wishing to migrate. According to information on Immigration NZ’s (INZ) website, prostitution appears on the “skilled employment” list, but not the “skill shortage” list. My research on the sex trade has taken me to a number of countries around the world, including New Zealand. Its sex trade was decriminalised in 2003, and has since been hailed by pro-prostitution campaigners as the gold standard model in regulating prostitution.

The promises from the government – that decriminalisation would result in less violence, regular inspections of brothels and no increase of the sex trade – have not materialised. The opposite has happened. Trafficking of women into New Zealand into legal and illegal brothels is a serious problem, and for every licensed brothel there are, on average, four times the number that operate illegally. Violent attacks on women in the brothels are as common as ever. “The men feel even more entitled when the law tells them it is OK to buy us,” says Sabrinna Valisce, who was prostituted in New Zealand brothels both before and after decriminalisation. Under legalisation, women are still murdered by pimps and punters.

…

Any government that allows the decriminalisation of pimping and sex-buying sends a message to its citizens that women are vessels for male sexual consumption. If prostitution is “work”, will states create training programmes for girls to perform the “best oral sex” for sex buyers? Instead of including prostitution as a so-called option in its immigration policies, New Zealand should investigate the harms, including sexual violence, that women in prostitution endure.

If prostitution is “sex work”, then by its own logic, rape is merely theft. The inside of a woman’s body should never be viewed as a workplace.

Or as a public utility that everyone needs and deserves “access” to.

Honestly, what a spectacle.

Prominent Washington journalists, meanwhile, took pains to defend Ms. Sanders — earning their own opprobrium from some liberals who asked why reporters were sticking up for an administration that routinely impugns their work.

Not just “liberals.” It’s not a purely left-right issue – as we’ve all pointed out a million times. Trump is a terrible human being, who does bad things to people right out in the open where we can see, all day every day. I don’t think so ill of Republicans as a whole that I think they all insult and belittle anyone who disagrees with them, but Trump does do that. Michelle Wolf is a fluffy bunny compared to Trump.

Andrea Mitchell, the NBC News correspondent, tweeted that an “apology is owed” to the press secretary. Her network colleague Mika Brzezinski wrote that “watching a wife and mother be humiliated on national television for her looks is deplorable.”

Several reporters who cover the White House approached Ms. Sanders in the Hilton ballroom to express sympathy in the immediate aftermath of Ms. Wolf’s monologue. Later, at a windswept after party hosted by NBC News, Ms. Sanders appeared in good spirits as reporters swarmed her. (She even took time to chastise one journalist for asking a question at a news conference that she disliked.)

And Maggie Haberman spoke from a very great height.

Ma’am, if you want to scroll through 3 years of Jake’s tweets or mine, you’ll find plenty about Trump’s language. Have a good Sunday. https://t.co/HkJ7gTlbV3

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 29, 2018

What a spectacle.

Apology is owed to @PressSec and others grossly insulted ny Michelle Wolf at White House Correspondents Assoc dinner which started with uplifting heartfelt speech by @margarettalev – comedian was worst since Imus insulted Clinton’s

— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) April 29, 2018

Apology is owed to @PressSec and others grossly insulted by Michelle Wolf at White House Correspondents Assoc dinner which started with uplifting heartfelt speech by @margarettalev – comedian was worst since Imus insulted Clintons

[typos fixed]

Has Andrea Mitchell ever tweeted that Trump owes apologies?

Has she ever said @PressSec owes apologies for lying to reporters day in and day out?

Asking for a few millions friends.

Catherine Bennett at the Guardian notes that fantasies of violence against women are not confined to “incels.” Reddit didn’t bother having a policy “to prohibit content that ‘encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people'” until last year.

Prior to that, content glorifying Rodger, alongside more stereotypical exhortations to violence, was presumably regarded as just the routine, woman-hating banter some men go in for, in private, and quite unlike the terrorist hate speech designed, in less respectable online communities, to conclude in murder.

At any rate, the relevant participants shortly reconvened in less censorious forums. “I want to murder a femoid,” a contributor shares on a notionally moderated site, whose signatories enjoy debating how they’d murder a woman, after drugging and raping her. One fancies this: “Take a surgical knife, cut open her abdominal area and remove the organs while she’s alive.”

That’s nothing new either; we’ve been seeing it for years.

To many social media users, neither the language nor the sentiments expressed in posts such as the one above, however far along the woman-hating continuum, are likely to look radically out of the ordinary.

Apart from anything, Jack the Ripper, who would now be the toast of angry celibates, had the disembowelling idea 130 years ago. And further demonstrating that misogynistic tropes are by no means the monopoly of resentful male virgins, curators at San Francisco library are currently staging an exhibition featuring a display of dissident-silencing weaponry (axes and bats) and other hate-advertising artefacts.

Photographs of one vitrine, featuring a red bespattered T-shirt reading: “I punch terfs!” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists/women who disagree with me), may have struck a chord with anyone following the current UK debate about the government’s self-ID proposals. To date, threats, from one side, which echo, inescapably, some of those in the pro-Rodger playbook (“die in a fire terf scum”) have yet to generate comparably widespread concern, even after a woman was punched. Her assailant had earlier expressed the wish to “fuck up some terfs”.

Pointing out that threats from the more belligerent trans activists “have yet to generate comparably widespread concern” is the understatement of the decade. The reality is that they get a complete pass, while the woke foke go right on chastising women they call “TERFs” and transphobes.

To agree to use the lads’ pet terminology, is, moreover, to suggest that something distinguishes them from legions of other threatening men expressing a similar wish to control, punish or just silence women and, critically, in similar language. Such as, to non-compliant sexual targets, “choke on my dick”. A glance at Twitter confirms how generously such abuse has been accommodated, even as the repetitive insults and threats indicate gendered hostility to women in general.

If sexism does not explain how rapidly the language employed against dissenting women (including some trans women) in the UK self-ID debate, degenerated, in some quarters, into generic-sounding obscenities (eg, to unco-operative lesbians, “choke on my ladydick”), perhaps it’s because social media has for so long facilitated the delusion that hate speech, as applied to women, is simply part of the landscape.

But why is hate speech aimed at women seen as simply part of the landscape while hate speech aimed at other despised groups is seen as an emergency? Why are there so many weird exceptions of that kind carved out for women? Is it just because women are not a literal minority, because everyone knows lots of women, everyone was born of a woman, everyone had women in authority over them as children? I don’t know. I don’t know, but I’m deeply weary of it.

In other words, this thread:

https://twitter.com/originalspin/status/990615883012689920

https://twitter.com/originalspin/status/990619787783946240

https://twitter.com/originalspin/status/990621240858525697

https://twitter.com/originalspin/status/990621859858169857

Good grief. The comedian at the White House reporters’ dinner last night said some words about Sarah Huckabee Sanders – who lies to those reporters every day for her dishonest bullying fraud of a boss – and people are shocked.

It is an American press tradition that goes back decades: the US president endures a friendly ribbing in front of an audience of journalists, all in the name of charity.

It’s a “tradition” I wasn’t even aware of until a day back in the 90s when I went to a bookstore reading by Christopher Hitchens of No One Left to Lie To. It was the day after that year’s dinner, which he had attended before taking the red eye to Seattle. He was indeed red of eye, and told us frankly he was feeling “pretty seedy” – and he was scathing about the “tradition” of that dinner. The reasons are (or should be) obvious: it’s way too cozy and cuddly for the relationship between power and the press. He was not wrong.

But with Donald Trump skipping the White House Correspondents’ Dinner for the second year running, the honour of attending this year went to his press secretary, Sarah Sanders.

Sanders said the president had encouraged his staff to attend, and that she thought it was “important for us to be here”.

After enduring biting mockery from comedian Michelle Wolf, she looked as though she might be regretting the choice.

Oh, gee, really? That’s so sad. Of course, she works for a guy who dishes out biting mockery from a position of more power than any of his victims have, so maybe that makes it kind of fair to make “biting” jokes about her job performance? Especially given that it really wasn’t all that “biting”? At all?

In a ‘roast’ that drew both laughs and gasps, Wolf started by saying: “We are graced with Sarah’s presence tonight. I have to say I’m a little star struck.”

…

“I love you as Aunt Lydia in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’,” Wolf told Sanders.

Mean, perhaps, but also fair. I think Sanders’s perpetual scowl is a wretchedly bad look for a press secretary – amateurish, hostile, belligerent – of a piece with Trump’s constant authoritarian attacks on the legitimate news media. That stuff isn’t trivial and it isn’t amusing and it isn’t about Sanders’s appearance; it’s a branch of a relentless attack on the free press. Yes, we do get to push back against it.

Maggie Haberman, White House correspondent for the New York Times (which stopped attending the event in 2008), questioned Wolf’s attack on the press secretary’s appearance.

I didn’t know the Times had stopped attending. Seems wise; see Hitchens above. But Haberman’s tweet…

That @PressSec sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out, on national television, was impressive.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 29, 2018

That @PressSec sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out, on national television, was impressive.

Oh come on. PressSec works for the guy who calls Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas,” Chuck Todd “sleepy eyes,” Charles Schumer “Cryin’ Chuck,” and on and on. She works for a “president” who insults people on Twitter every day…not to mention the fact that there was no “intense criticism of her physical appearance”: there was a joke about “the perfect smokey eye.” That’s it. Haberman confirmed that’s what she meant:

The jokes I watched/heard about her eye makeup weren’t making fun of her appearance? What were they?

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 29, 2018

The jokes I watched/heard about her eye makeup weren’t making fun of her appearance? What were they?

One, not jokes plural, but one joke; two – a joke about perfect makeup is not making fun of her [immutable] appearance. It’s partly a joke about her presentation, but it’s not an insulting one. I do dislike attacks on people’s looks, and that can include presentation, but I don’t think a reference to perfect eye makeup counts as that.

But either way, being impressed that Sanders didn’t walk out is simply pathetic coming from a journalist. Jim Acosta has it right.

My problem with last night’s dinner is not that we had a comedian who told some nasty jokes. It’s that we did not really address the nearly constant attacks on the press from the president. The dinner should change with the times so we send a strong message to the world. #WHCD

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) April 29, 2018

My problem with last night’s dinner is not that we had a comedian who told some nasty jokes. It’s that we did not really address the nearly constant attacks on the press from the president. The dinner should change with the times so we send a strong message to the world. #WHCD

Talk about the elephant in the room…

And then there’s this guy, via David Futrelle at We Hunted the Mammoth:

People make is sound as if the “Incel Rebellion” is a laughing matter and that people don’t understand problem.

The incels are not the problem, but rather they are a symptom that something is very wrong in our society — and unless their legitimate grievances are addressed this could very soon spiral out of control just like what happened in Iraq, Libya and Syria when their respective governments refused to address and deal with the legitimate grievances a portion of their popolation had.

Calling the Incels a bunch of virgins and “frustrated losers with communication skills equal to that of an autistic potato” is oversimplifying the problem yes they are all that but why are they frustrated virgins?

The real issue is that with the advancement of makeup, healthy at any size bullshit, feminism and through social engineering a lot of women have become detached from reality. The reason these Incels arn’t getting laid is because women with a sexual market value equal to theirs use makeup to go from a 3/10 – 7/10 (false marketing in my opinion and should be a punishable offense) to fuck with men above their league.

Ohhhhhhhh of course, that’s it. How could we have been so blind.

But wait a second – if that’s the problem, why don’t men just do the same thing? Slather on the makeup and be an incel no more. Really gob it on; women love that.

So I propose that rather than making Incels look bad we look at the reasons they’ve become this way and what steps we can take to deconflict and reverse things because, let’s be real calling them names, labeling them a terrorist organization etc isn’t going to make the problem go away.

There are several ways I propose we do this:

1) Women are no longer allowed to wear makeup, ie falsely advertise their beauty and hence stop them from banging guys above their league.

2) Women are only allowed to date men with equal sexual market value to them. State-mandated tests should be made and everyone get a sexual-market value card ranging from 1/10 to 10/10, like an ID card.

And the tests would be designed by…drum roll please…

Jordan Peterson? James Damore? Robin Hanson?

Many people are disputing Robin Hanson. He repeats the same weird nonsense.

https://twitter.com/lemon_lymann/status/990205725422088193

The same way poor people have less access to yachts and private jets.

— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) April 28, 2018

Questioner: Barring disability, how do incels have less access to sex than anyone else?

Hanson: The same way poor people have less access to yachts and private jets.

Er, no. Sex with others is not the same kind of thing as yachts and private jets. Sex with others is with others; it requires a willing (or willing-if-paid) human being. “Access” to it isn’t like access to the local gym or access to banking services or access to the third floor. Talking of “access” to sex is a deliberately crude way to characterize an interaction between people. It’s like a bad joke from The Big Bang Theory – some friend of Sheldon’s on a first date requesting “access to sex” in exchange for dinner.

"Redistribution" means "change the distribution". A great many who have commented can't imagine any policy options to change the distribution of sex access other than rape and slavery, and so accuse me of advocating such things. But a great many other policy options exist.

— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) April 28, 2018

“Redistribution” means “change the distribution”. A great many who have commented can’t imagine any policy options to change the distribution of sex access other than rape and slavery, and so accuse me of advocating such things. But a great many other policy options exist.

Well, no doubt it’s possible to generate a great many words that look like policy options, but the reality is that unless we’re talking about extreme authoritarianism, it’s not possible to have “policy options” to change the “distribution” of sex. It’s not possible because it’s so undesirable.

This again. Reward the rich and punish the poor.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson proposed far-reaching changes to federal housing subsidies Wednesday, tripling rent for the poorest households and making it easier for housing authorities to impose work requirements.

Carson’s proposals, and other initiatives aimed at low-income Americans receiving federal assistance, amount to a comprehensive effort by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress to restrict access to the safety net and reduce the levels of assistance for those who do qualify.

In other words, to punish the poor.

The initiative unveiled by Carson Wednesday would raise the rent for tenants in subsidized housing to 35 percent of gross income (or 35 percent of their earnings working 15 hours a week at the federal minimum wage), up from the current standard of 30 percent of adjusted income. About half of the 4.7 million families receiving housing benefits would be affected, HUD officials said.

The cap on rent for the poorest families would rise to about $150 a month — three times higher than the existing $50 ceiling. About 712,000 households would see their monthly rents rise to $150, the officials said.

“There is one inescapable imperative driving this reform effort,” Carson said in a call with reporters. “The current system isn’t working very well. Doing nothing is not an option.”

It’s not working very well because there is nowhere near enough of it, and most poor people are at the mercy of the “free market,” which means high rents or bad housing or both.

After failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2017, the Trump administration has started allowing states to impose work requirements on residents enrolled in Medicaid — a first in the history of the 53-year health care program.

Three states — Kentucky, Indiana, and Arkansas — have enacted Medicaid work requirements. Seven additional states have applied to do the same.

Kentucky says the changes will lead 95,000 people to lose Medicaid coverage over the next five years.

And I guess Kentucky sees that as a win?

The Trump administration also gave states permission to impose much higher premium payments and kick people off Medicaid for failing to pay. The Obama administration had permitted more limited versions of these policies for states during the expansion of Medicaid, but Trump officials approved changes aimed solely at reducing enrollment.

I hear they’re creating a new agency, the Screw the Poor Department. Rumor has it that Joe Arpaio will be the STP secretary.

#kidsMW A heart-breaking moment from an SS picture of Hungarian Jews at #Auschwitz II-Birkenau in May 1944. A little child found a flower in the grass and is giving or showing it to an older boy. All the people in this picture were gassed moments later #MuseumWeek pic.twitter.com/FkKFORleS9

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) April 27, 2018

Oh good, an “interesting” thought experiment. Robin Hanson, an economist, looks at envy and redistribution:

Incels obsess over their own unattractiveness – dividing the world into alphas and betas, with betas just your average, frustrated idiot dude, and omegas, as the incels often call themselves, the lowest of the low, scorned by everyone – they then use that self-acceptance as an insulation.

Basically, their virginity is a discrimination or apartheid issue, and only a state-distributed girlfriend programme, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice. … Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer, uploaded a video to YouTube about his “retribution” against attractive women who wouldn’t sleep with him (and the attractive men they would sleep with) before killing six people in 2014.  (more)

One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met. As with income inequality, most folks concerned about sex inequality might explicitly reject violence as a method, at least for now, and yet still be encouraged privately when the possibility of violence helps move others to support their policies. (Sex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in compensation.)

I think his point is to mock or discredit the idea of income redistribution more than to praise or credit the idea of “sex redistribution,” but all the same the wording is…let’s say questionable. Income is not sentient; sex partners are. He’s obviously talking about one or more partner-sex, because there can’t be much masturbation inequality and if there were redistribution wouldn’t help. He’s talking about sex with another or others but he doesn’t say so, with the result that the wording makes it look as if “sex” is just something like potatoes or laptops or shoes, that can be redistributed via rail road or air – a commodity. Possibly that was his point, but I doubt it.

Back at the beginning of the week…

https://twitter.com/kjwinston11/status/988569276750618624

Kimberly covered the non-religious beat at RNS and we talked several times. There was a lot of shock-horror at this (including from me); now it is explained: Columbia Journalism Review reports:

EARLY IN THE MORNING on Monday, April 23, members and followers of the “God beat” awoke to upsetting news. “I am no longer at @RNS, and that’s about all I can say,” tweeted Jerome Socolovsky, until then the editor in chief of Religion News Service. “It was an honor to lead such a dazzling news team.”

His departure—later revealed to be a firing—seemed to come out of nowhere. But current and former staff members say it has, in fact, been a long time coming: the culmination of months of tension between Socolovsky and RNS Publisher Tom Gallagher, whom many believe has taken control over the newsroom.

“Jerome has seen the slow erosion of his duties as editor in chief at RNS since Mr. Gallagher was hired,” says Kimberly Winston, a contract reporter who covered atheism, secularism, and humanism for RNS. She resigned on Monday in protest. “I feel like journalism is a calling, and they crossed a line,” Winston tells CJR. “If you cross a line, it’s more than personal. It’s my calling. I just felt that I had to go.”

RNS was founded in 1934.

In 2011, it was bought by the Religion News Foundation, a non-profit educational and charitable arm of Religion News Association, a 501(c)6 trade association. All of the organizations—the service, the foundation, and the association—are based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism…

“The country’s awash in religious media but there’s nothing else like RNS,” says Laurie Goodstein, a national religion correspondent for The New York Times. “It’s the AP of religion news, it’s a daily report covering news about all religious faiths without promoting any religion in particular.”

Notice that covering news is a very different thing from promoting anything.

Publisher Tom Gallagher, who is also president and CEO of the Religion News Foundation, was hired in 2016. Gallagher, an attorney and former Goldman Sachs vice president, was a columnist at the National Catholic Reporter from 2007 to 2016. Before that, he worked as an administrator for Mother Teresa’s religious order, Missionaries of Charity, where he helped create a New York State not-for-profit organization, the Mother Teresa of Calcutta Center. He also assisted the cause of her canonization by “investigating a potential miracle attributable to Mother Teresa,” according to his LinkedIn profile.

Well. Just off the top of my head, that seems like a worrying background for the publisher at a news organization. It’s very much in the promotional field as opposed to the reporting one.

Staffers were worried about his lack of experience, but Winston says they hoped his business experience would be useful to the org.

Socolovsky says he wasn’t given a reason for his firing until nearly a week later, when he met with board members and they said the decision was based on his disagreements with Gallagher. “Tom and I had serious differences over the editorial vision for RNS,” Socolovsky tells CJR. “He challenged the accuracy of a fact in a recent story we published and I stood by the reporter who wrote it.”

Possibly this fact:

In April, Gallagher sent a note to all staff members about an RNS story covering a protest at a talk given by Reverend James Martin. In it, he said he had been contacted by the Archdiocese of Chicago, which disputed the number of protesters reported in the piece. Staff members said they felt uncomfortable with what they viewed as the publisher interjecting in the editorial process on behalf of a religious organization.

Gallagher tells CJR that when he emailed Socolovsky and Markoe about the story, Socolovsky responded that the reporter was on vacation, that he trusted her, and that “she did a good job.”

“It’s terribly alarming that any editor would have such a cavalier response to a disputed fact in his staff’s reporting, without any effort to review,” Gallagher says. “Accuracy is our most cherished value. This is Journalism 101. If the top editor is dismissive of requests for corrections or clarifications, then RNS might as well shut down.”

Hmm. Another way of looking at it would be that if the publisher lets the Archdiocese tell the editor and reporters what to say, then RNS might as well shut down. It’s not as if the Catholic church has no history of trying to shape news coverage in its favor, or indeed of stonewalling and lying. The Catholic church is not a disinterested party.

On several occasions, staff members expressed concern over the possible perception that Gallagher favors Catholic-leaning coverage, something they worry could impact the publication’s reputation as nonsectarian.

What I said. He did PR work for “Mother Teresa.”

The publication’s history as a secular, independent, and nonsectarian source of religion news is exactly what staff members worry about losing. Religion reporters outside of RNS hold the same fears.

“That’s why RNS is so vital and so delicate,” says Goodstein, the New York Times religion reporter. “Because to do what they do requires immense journalistic experience and judgment. To cover religion news without fear or favor, impartially. My fear now is that that could be at risk.”

“For this to happen to RNS is a big deal to a number of people beyond our official subscribers, because we’re kind of the last ones standing that serve medium and small publications,” says Winston. “If our editorial independence goes down, that’s a big loss.”

Yes it is.

Zoe Williams has some thoughts on “incels”:

Some of the fault, in their eyes, is with attractive men who have sex with too many women – “We need to do something about the polygamy problem,” said the Incelcast, an astonishing three-hour podcast about the Toronto attack – but, of course, the main problem is women themselves, who become foes as people, but also as a political entity. There is a lot of discussion about how best to punish them, with mass rape fantasies and threads on how to follow women without getting arrested, just for the thrill of having them notice you. Feminism is held responsible for a dude who can’t get laid, and birth control is said to have caused “women to date only Chads. It causes all sorts of negative social ramifications”.

It’s always women’s fault, one way or another. Women are Mommy, who got it wrong at some point for sure, if only because she did most of the work. Women are Cunt-havers, who unfairly deny access to the Ego while sluttishly granting it to OtherPeople. Women are Bitches, who piss us off one way or another. Women are hags, who dare to exist without being sexually appealing. Women are whores, who need no introduction. Women are TERFs, who are legitimate targets of every kind of violence.

They borrow a lot of language from the equality/civil rights agenda – society “treats single men like trash, and it has to stop. The people in power, women, can change this, but they refuse to. They have blood on their hands,” read one post the morning after the Toronto attack. Basically, their virginity is a discrimination or apartheid issue, and only a state-distributed girlfriend programme, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice. Yet at the same time, they hate victims, snowflakes, liberals, those who campaign for any actual equality.

Well the state-distributed girlfriend programme is what makes that not a contradiction: no genuine anti-discrimination or anti-apartheid movement would promote a program of state-distributed human beings, because the word for that is “slavery.” People are not things to be distributed; it’s a pretty simple concept. Women are human beings, not sexual opportunities for men.

The US health care “system” is chaotic but there’s one thing we can say: it’s the worst of its kind.

The U.S. health care system has been subject to heated debate over the past decade, but one thing that has remained consistent is the level of performance, which has been ranked as the worst among industrialized nations for the fifth time, according to the 2014 Commonwealth Fund survey 2014. The U.K. ranked best with Switzerland following a close second.

Isn’t that impressive? Go us.

The Commonwealth Fund report compares the U.S. with 10 other nations: France, Australia, Germany, Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the U.K. were all judged to be superior based on various factors. These include quality of care, access to doctors and equity throughout the country.

Although the U.S. has the most expensive health care system in the world, the nation ranks lowest in terms of “efficiency, equity and outcomes,” according to the report. One of the most piercing revelations is that the high rate of expenditure for insurance is not commensurate to the satisfaction of patients or quality of service. High out-of-pocket costs and gaps in coverage “undermine efforts in the U.S. to improve care coordination,” the report summarized.

Gee, who could have foreseen that.