Let’s just stop talking about women, mkay? Can we do that now finally at last? It’s so excluding.

I don’t want to be difficult, but I’m just not sure that the word “woman” can hold all of the political weight that we need it to in 2018. Organizing solely around 'womanhood' is also organizing solely around the gender binary #InternationalWomensDay https://t.co/PV1OAUHMyL

— Jacob Tobia (@JacobTobia) March 8, 2018

Yeah and organizing around anti-racism excludes white people. Organizing to protect immigrants’ rights excludes people who were here all along. Anti-poverty campaigns exclude rich people. Organizing workers excludes bosses. Won’t somebody please think of the bosses?

I look around a room full of Women’s March supporters and I wonder to myself, “Do they understand me as a woman? Do they really get how much I belong here? Or do they just think that I’m some sort of cute ally? #InternationalWomensDay

— Jacob Tobia (@JacobTobia) March 8, 2018

I look around a room full of women and I wonder why they’re not focusing on me.

I look around a room full of celebs proclaiming time’s up and I wonder if they really see me in their movement. #InternationalWomensDay

— Jacob Tobia (@JacobTobia) March 8, 2018

I look around and wonder why they’re not looking at me.

I listen to @Oprah talking about “every woman who chooses to say, ‘Me too.’ And every man who chooses to listen” and I wonder: What does she mean by “woman” and “man”? How does she understand those terms? What do they mean to her? #InternationalWomensDay

— Jacob Tobia (@JacobTobia) March 8, 2018

I listen to Oprah and I wonder why she’s not talking about me.

So for fuck’s sake let’s finally stop talking about women, OKAY?

I want to propose what I think is an elegant solution. What if, instead of mobilizing solely around “Women,” we mobilize around “Women and Femmes.” It sorta does the trick, no? #InternationalWomensDay

— Jacob Tobia (@JacobTobia) March 8, 2018

That’s a step on the way to talking about me instead of those stupid boring women.

By the way it’s not Jacob Tobia’s solution. Jacob Tobia is late on the scene. Sincere Kirabo treated it as established way back in October 2016:

Huh. It turns out that Women in Secularism isn’t about women. It’s about “women and femmes.” I have no real idea what that’s supposed to mean, since it obviously doesn’t mean femme lesbians, because they are of course women so there’d be no need for an “and.”

At least, it’s about that according to Sincere Kirabo, who attended the one last weekend. It’s not about that according to CFI, which holds the conference, but hey what do they know.

This past weekend, my colleague Jessica Xiao and I had the honor of attending the Center For Inquiry’s Women In Secularism 4(WIS).

The honor? Attending isn’t an honor. That sounds like having the honor to ride the bus or see a movie. Buying a ticket to something doesn’t confer honor.

Anyway – on to the femmes.

This conference brought together a diverse lineup of speakers—including American Humanist Association President Rebecca Hale—to address both the progress and challenges uniquely related to the lives of women and femmes.

I didn’t understand then and I still don’t understand why Sincere Kirabo thought it was up to him to claim that Women in Secularism was really Women and Femmes in Secularism, but anyway, he was there well before Jacob Tobias’s “elegant” solution.

By adding "and femmes," we'll no longer have to worry about being misconstrued as trans-exclusive. We'll acknowledge by default that womanhood and femininity live on a spectrum of bodies, shapes, genitals, and people. #InternationalWomensDay

— Jacob Tobia (@JacobTobia) March 8, 2018

We’ll take women’s movement away from them while pretending we’re doing it to be more “inclusive.” It’s only women who are stupid enough and accommodating enough and kind enough to let this be done to them…which is why they need to organize, but we’re taking that away from them, so, score!

So say it loud and say it proud: HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN AND FEMMES' DAY Y'ALL! #womenandfemmes #InternationalWomensDay

— Jacob Tobia (@JacobTobia) March 8, 2018

Next year we’ll drop the “WOMEN” part.

Breaking news from the Beeb:

A former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia, Theresa May has told MPs.

The prime minister said the government had concluded it was “highly likely” that Russia was responsible for the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury on 4 March.

She’s summoned the Russian ambassador to talk it over.

My first thought was: stupid of them to use an agent with their fingerprints on it. My second thought was: oh wait, no it isn’t, because they’re sending a message. We will get you.

Shashi Tharoor points out that the Hollywood Churchill was first the mass murderer Churchill.

During World War II, Churchill declared himself in favor of “terror bombing.” He wrote that he wanted “absolutely devastating, exterminating attacks by very heavy bombers.” Horrors such as the firebombing of Dresden were the result.

In the fight for Irish independence, Churchill, in his capacity as secretary of state for war and air, was one of the few British officials in favor of bombing Irish protesters, suggesting in 1920 that airplanes should use “machine-gun fire or bombs” to scatter them.

Like what the fascists carried out in Guernica, but decades earlier. The fact that Churchill liked the idea doesn’t mean it happened, and I don’t think it did, though there was plenty of violence without that – but the fact that Churchill was keen is of interest.

Dealing with unrest in Mesopotamia in 1921, as secretary of state for the colonies, Churchill acted as a war criminal: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the uncivilised tribes; it would spread a lively terror.” He ordered large-scale bombing of Mesopotamia, with an entire village wiped out in 45 minutes.

In Afghanistan, Churchill declared that the Pashtuns “needed to recognise the superiority of [the British] race” and that “all who resist will be killed without quarter.” He wrote: “We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. … Every tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once.”

In Kenya, Churchill either directed or was complicit in policies involving the forced relocation of local people from the fertile highlands to make way for white colonial settlers and the forcing of more than 150,000 people into concentration camps. Rape, castration, lit cigarettes on tender spots, and electric shocks were all used by the British authorities to torture Kenyans under Churchill’s rule.

But the principal victims of Winston Churchill were the Indians — “a beastly people with a beastly religion,” as he charmingly called them. He wanted to use chemical weapons in India but was shot down by his cabinet colleagues, whom he criticized for their “squeamishness,” declaring that “the objections of the India Office to the use of gas against natives are unreasonable.”

Figuratively shot down that is, which is not what he had in mind for the Indians.

This isn’t one of those “yes but things were different then” situations. Churchill was way out there even for 1920 or 1940. (Also, we don’t give Roosevelt the “different times” excuse for the internments; he was wrong and he had plenty of people telling him he was wrong.)

In such matters, Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their times. Even his own secretary of state for India, Leopold Amery, confessed that he could see very little difference between Churchill’s attitude and Adolf Hitler’s.

Thanks to Churchill, some 4 million Bengalis starved to death in a 1943 famine. Churchill ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. When reminded of the suffering of his Indian victims, his response was that the famine was their own fault, he said, for “breeding like rabbits.”

Not just a cute old geezer with a cigar and and a gift for rhetoric.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

Lawrence Krauss has resurfaced on Twitter; his fans are rushing to give him support and air hugs.

Back to tweets. Trigger warning: Some tweets may offend.

— Lawrence M. Krauss (@LKrauss1) March 10, 2018

Jerry Coyne was doubtful at first but looked into it.

I didn’t find the specifics of most allegations fully convincing, yet the fact that there were so many of them that resembled each other meant that they could not be ignored. As I’ve said, the more independent claims there are against a person, and the more they paint a consistent pattern of behavior, the greater the likelihood that the accused is guilty.

After that article appeared, I did some digging on my own, and came up with three cases that have convinced me that Krauss engaged in sexual predation of both a physical nature (groping) and of a verbal nature (offensive and harassing comments). The allegations that convinced me are not public, but the accusers are sufficiently credible that I believe their claims to be true. Further, these claims buttress the general allegation of sexual misbehavior made in BuzzFeed. In my view, then, Krauss had a propensity to engage in sexual misconduct. I therefore disassociate myself from the man. He has, of course, denied every allegation in the BuzzFeed article, but the cases that pushed me to write this post aren’t in that piece. But to me these other cases make it likely that at least some of the allegations in BuzzFeed are true.

Oddly enough, that’s also how the BuzzFeed reporters saw it, which is why they reported on the story. There were a lot of allegations, independent of each other, describing a pattern.

Sam Harris tells a bunch of lies about BuzzFeed.

I’m transcribing the worst bits so I’ll be updating to add more.

At 1:30:

BuzzFeed is, on the continuum of journalistic integrity and unscrupulousness, somewhere toward the unscrupulous side…Salon, Alternet – these are not websites that are especially assiduous in how they fact check.

At 2:24

There were a couple of people cited in the article who I know to be totally unethical and one is probably a psychopath; these are people who’ve made it their full-time job to destroy reputations of prominent atheists. So there are reasons to be cautious in accepting this BuzzFeed piece.

Parenthetical – I hate listening to him. His voice sounds so dead. He sounds so empty of affect. He creeps me out. I don’t think that’s entirely irrelevant to all this – I think his lack of affect is connected to his total inability (unless its refusal) to see things from the women’s point of view. He talks and seems to think like a robot; it’s creepy.

That’s rude, but not half as rude as he was about BuzzFeed.

Interestingly, however, he then goes on to say that though he felt there was good reason to be cautious about the BuzzFeed story, still, where there’s smoke there’s fire, but on the other hand he didn’t think he and Matt should be expected to pronounce on the subject on stage 24 hours later, but on the other other hand his decision not to share the stage with Lawrence that night “was based on a sense that there’s very likely some truth in it, and that it would be bad for me and Matt to be onstage, accepting his blanket denials, and then pretending to move on to other topics.” What’s interesting about that is that it’s not what he said at the time. At all.

That bit ends at 3:40.

Update: Matt Dillahunty says he won’t be working with Krauss in future.

Update: more from the podcast:

4:05 Generically, BuzzFeed is terrible. There were certainly signs of bad faith in the article.

BuzzFeed is not terrible. BuzzFeed broke the story on the Steele dossier, remember? Sam Harris is just throwing mud…the way he claims women are throwing mud when they say Krauss is handsy and obnoxious.

4:25 The fact that there’s this much chatter about how he’s behaved is certainly a cause for concern.

He just can’t help himself, can he. Chatter. Would he have said that if it had been men reporting something men care about? No. It’s stupid women, who can’t talk without chattering.

But then he does admit that he’s heard from people who don’t want to go public but do confirm that this is how Krauss behaves, so he can’t defend him. He can first throw shit at BuzzFeed and express contempt for women, but he can’t defend Krauss.

What he can do, though, is inform us that there are gradations. Oh thank fuck he told us; we had no idea.

At 5:25 he announces that if you’re not going to make the distinctions then it’s very hard to take the allegations seriously.

Then he says again he can’t defend Lawrence but – BUT – BUT – we must be careful, it’s so easy to destroy people’s reputations. He means men’s, not people’s. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about women’s reputations, or BuzzFeed reporters’ reputations when they’re reporting on sexual harassment.

One more update: he goes on to explain that there are gradations, as if we didn’t know that. At 8:00:

It stretches all the way to cases where had the guy been desirable to the woman his behavior would have totally passed as flattery and successful flirting…but because he was undesirable it was viewed as unwanted attention and in some cases is being classes as a kind of assault, or a kind of harassment.

In other words, women have the audacity to have preferences.

One more.

Courtlin Arrington. This is the name of the girl who died yesterday. Shot to death in school. Barely any media coverage. She was going to be a nurse. pic.twitter.com/2AKaBLJofJ

— breakthewheel (@2breakthewheel) March 8, 2018

The Washington Post yesterday:

Arrington, a high school senior, had been accepted to college and planned to become a nurse. She is the 20th person to be gunned down on a U.S. high school campus this year. The episode at Huffman High is the third fatal school shooting this year.

The shooting happened Wednesday as classes let out at the school, exactly three weeks after 17 people were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla. Another school shooting, at a Kentucky high school, killed two students and left 12 other people wounded in January. Students in Florida mourned for Arrington on Twitter and shared their condolences with Huffman High students, knowing all too well the grief of losing a classmate to a school shooting.

This can’t keep happening. This girl is my age, and now, she will never realize her dreams. This is why we scream “never again” till our lungs burn with rage. https://t.co/dezjB3KdHL

— nikkiiiii (@nikhitaaan) March 8, 2018

Belinda Luscombe interviewed Jordan Peterson for TIME. One thing they talked about was Peterson’s view that Disney’s Frozen is propaganda, as opposed to for instance Sleeping Beauty, which instead is Archetype. Luscombe asks him why he calls Frozen “deeply propagandistic.”

It attempted to write a modern fable that was a counter-narrative to a classic story like, let’s say, Sleeping Beauty — but with no understanding whatsoever of the underlying archetypal dynamics. You could say that Sleeping Beauty was raised out of her unconsciousness via a delivering male. Another way of reading the story is that unconsciousness requires active consciousness as an antidote. And the unconsciousness is symbolized in that particular story by femininity and active consciousness by masculinity. I could hardly sit through Frozen. There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

Awesome. So a story that paints women as unconsciousness and men as active consciousness – note the active, which reminds us that women are passive as well as comatose – is not propaganda at all, it’s Underlying Archetypal Dynamics, while rejecting that not very flattering portrait of women is the subjugation of art to propaganda. How convenient.

She asks him if it’s more propagandistic than say The Little Mermaid, he says the old movies are based on folktales that go back 13,000 years.

Aren’t we allowed to make up new stories? 

Not for political reasons.

Oh? Who made up that rule?

God, what a yutz. No, we have to take all folktales as they are, no questioning allowed, no parody allowed, no improvement allowed, no counter-stories allowed, because the only “political reasons” permitted are the ones that are already in place.

What could go wrong?

https://twitter.com/ZJemptv/status/972134578411499522

A few things that could go wrong occur to me.

https://twitter.com/ZJemptv/status/972134968490160128

Yes, that’s one – children taking serious drugs with no adult participation.

Two years in prison for taking a scarf off her head.

An Iranian woman who publicly removed her veil to protest against a mandatory hijab law has been sentenced to two years in prison, prosecutors say.

The woman, who has not been officially named, was found guilty of “encouraging moral corruption”, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi said.

Because a woman who refuses to wear a heavy scarf covering her hair and ears and neck is “encouraging moral corruption.” Women’s hair must be all but radioactive.

The Guardian has more:

More than 30 Iranian women have been arrested since the end of December for publically removing their veils in defiance of the law.

Most have been released, but many are being prosecuted.

Women showing their hair in public in Iran are usually sentenced to far shorter terms of two months or less, and fined $25.

Oh a mere two months imprisonment for not wearing a scarf. How liberal.

Iranian law, in place since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, stipulates that all women, Iranian or foreign, Muslim or non-Muslim, must be fully veiled in public at all times.

But the zeal of the country’s morality police has declined in the past two decades, and a growing number of Iranian women in Tehran and other large cities often wear loose veils that reveal their hair.

In some areas of the capital, women are regularly seen driving cars with veils draped over their shoulders.

Dolatabadi said he would no longer accept such behaviour, and had ordered the impound of vehicles driven by socially rebellious women.

The prosecutor said some “tolerance” was possible when it came to women who wear the veil loosely, “but we must act with force against people who deliberately question the rules on the Islamic veil”, according to Mizan Online.

No freedom of or from religion for them.

The Guardian reports:

The investigation into the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal has widened, as police sealed off the graves of his wife, Liudmila, and son, Alexander, and confirmed that a total of 21 people had been treated as a result of the incident.

The police officer who was exposed to the nerve agent used on the Skripals, named on Thursday as DS Nick Bailey, remained in a serious but stable condition.

…

Forensics officers began a major search for evidence at Skripal’s semi-detached house. They also cordoned off the graves in Salisbury cemetery where Liudmila and Alexander Skripal were interred in adjacent plots, and sealed off a garage and recovery service elsewhere in the city.

I wouldn’t want to be living in the other half of that semi.

Experts at the government’s laboratory at Porton Down have identified the poison used but are keeping shtum.

The use of a nerve toxin, usually only held in state military stockpiles, is being seen as a key indicator of possible Kremlin involvement. On Thursday, the Russian embassy in London sent a sarcastic tweet, saying of Skripal: “He was actually a British spy, working for MI6.”

Moscow has repeatedly denied it has anything to do with the attack, the same line used when the FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in 2006 with a radioactive cup of tea. A public inquiry a decade later ruled the Kremlin had ordered the hit.

I’m starting to think the Russian government is not a very benevolent outfit.

The Salisbury attack left Skripal and his daughter in a comatose condition last Sunday afternoon, on a bench in the Maltings shopping centre.

Detectives will be seeking to establish how the toxin was delivered – and, crucially, where. One source suggested that Bailey was exposed to the nerve agent from inside Skripal’s house and not in the city centre, as was previously thought.

It is understood that the cordon at the cemetery is in place primarily to keep media away from the graves of Liudmila Skripal, who died of cancer in 2012 aged 59, and Alexander Skripal, who died in March last year in St Petersburg, aged 43.

There was no sign of activity taking place on the site, but the family’s run of ominous bad luck is likely to prompt police to examine whether Liudmila and Alexander may have been victims of foul play.

Trump is wishing he had some of that stuff, whatever it is.

Trump fans.

Here are some Trump supporters threatening to burn down a woman’s bookstore. Because, deplorable. pic.twitter.com/687HE3MVDo

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) March 9, 2018