Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Andrew Gilligan has a big story in the Times today – big as in both important and information-rich (aka long).

A charity dealing with abuse survivors and promoting gay sexual health faces claims of sexual misconduct in the first recent charity sex scandal where the alleged victims are in the UK.

Leeds city council said it has referred two complaints about the Yorkshire-based organisation Men who Enjoy Sex With Men — Action in the Community (Yorkshire Mesmac) to police.

The Charity Commission also said it was in “ongoing engagement” with Mesmac, which has received more than £5m from councils, government and the police. The commission said it had “serious concern” after one of Mesmac’s former trustees was jailed for child sex offences committed during his time in post, including paying a boy, 15, for sex.

Brian Mynott, a Yorkshire-based therapist who works with abused young men, said he had spoken to a further three people, all victims of child abuse, who claimed to have been sexually harassed or asked for sex by Mesmac staff when they went to the charity for help. “They told me it was a pick-up joint and they did not want anything to do with it,” he said.

The kicker? This isn’t just employees breaking the rules – this is Mesmac policy.

The Sunday Times revealed in October that Mesmac explicitly allowed its staff to have sex with people they met through work, many of them young and vulnerable. In its official policy the charity stated that “sexual relationships are acceptable with service users initially met during work time”, although it added that intercourse “would be inappropriate if the service user has entered into a 1-2-1 or ongoing support relationship with the worker” and that sex with children was not allowed.

Mesmac dropped the policy after it was exposed but insisted that it had “never been made aware” of any case where a staff member had had sex with a client. However, The Sunday Times has established that in 2009 Mesmac’s then chairman, Brendon Fletcher, its treasurer, Paul Tidd, and another trustee, Richard Watts, had resigned in protest at the sex-with-clients policy and Mesmac managers’ refusal to change it.

The priests at least pretended it wasn’t policy.

Trump threw a fundraiser in the party room at Mar-a-Lago yesterday. There he whined and complained about the fact that Hillary Clinton hasn’t been “investigated” since the election while for some mysterious and baffling reason he has.

In the closed-door remarks, a recording of which was obtained by CNN, Trump also praised China’s President Xi Jinping for recently consolidating power and extending his potential tenure, musing he wouldn’t mind making such a maneuver himself.

“He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”

Haha, hoho, funny joke. He should take over all the comedy work.

He’s been in a bad mood lately.

Morale at the White House has dropped to new lows, and Trump himself has seethed at the negative headlines.

On Saturday, among donors gathered in the grand ballroom named for himself at Mar-a-Lago, Trump pondered the happiness of his former rival, wondering aloud whether she was enjoying life after the campaign.

“Is Hillary a happy person? Do you think she’s happy?” he said. “When she goes home at night, does she say, ‘What a great life?’ I don’t think so. You never know. I hope she’s happy.”

That’s not much to build his life on – hoping Hillary Clinton is as miserable as he is. Do we think she is? Nope.

Farrakhan gave another anti-Semitic speech last weekend.

Minister Louis Farrakhan engaged in a series of anti-Semitic remarks on Sunday.

Farrakhan has led the black nationalist group Nation of Islam since 1977 and is known for hyperbolic hate speech aimed at the Jewish community.

During the speech in Chicago, Farrakhan made several anti-Semitic comments, including, “the powerful Jews are my enemy.”

“White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through,” he later said.

Yeah that’s no good. Whatever you think of Israel, that’s no good.

Women’s March co-chair Tamika Mallory was in attendance, CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out on Twitter after she shared an image from the event on Instagram.

Mallory has posted on social media about Farrakhan in the past — on February 21, 2016, she posted an image of him from a stage at the Joe Louis Arena with the caption: “The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan just stepped to the mic for #SD16DET… I’m super ready for this message! #JUSTICEORELSE #ForTheLoveOfFlint.”

No good.

Katha Pollitt comments:

So Tamika Mallory, one of the four Women’s March leaders, goes to Farrakhan’s rally the other day, where he rambles on about how the Jews run the world and invented trans people and also pot that feminizes black men. She posts happy photos of the event, which Carmen Perez gives a thumbs up to. Questioned about this on twitter, she doubles down with some weird words about leaders who have the same enemies as Jesus.

Why is it so hard to say, yes, Farrakhan is a bigot and I dissociate myself from him? Obama did it. Instead, she doubled down. You can’t represent a mass movement if you’re going to be so divisive.

No good, no good, double-plus ungood.

Of Liberal Intent on Facebook:

Starting Thursday, March 1, 2018, Of Liberal Intent will host a new feature called Women’s Writes. For the duration of Women’s History Month, there will be a new post every day related to women and feminism. The author, Robin Buckallew, has declared the intent to write something every day for Women’s History Month every year until women everywhere have the same rights, opportunities, pay, and respect as men all over the world are able to command. The management of this site hope she lives a very long time…

Works posted there will be works of short fiction, essays, or excerpts from longer works. Please check in regularly to see any and all of the updates in this dynamic new area. This new section will continue to host the works of this author throughout the year, and will host the once a day posts every March until…well, unfortunately, the way it looks, probably until the end of the author’s life, even though she is still young(ish).

Posts will be uploaded at Women’s-Writes and shared on this page.

-The Management™

March 1

First post of new feature, Women’s Writes. A new post will appear every day of Women’s History Month.
Today, March 1, is the first day of Women’s History Month 2018, and I am posting my first piece. It was a singularly crazy day, following a singularly crazy week, and so I had to keep it a bit short, but if you start off the first day by breaking your vow, I have learned you will not succeed. So I opted for a haiku.
#WomensHistoryMonth

https://ofliberalintent.com/womens-writes/works/

Read, and cheer her on!

Interesting times.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is assembling a case for criminal charges against Russians who carried out the hacking and leaking of private information designed to hurt Democrats in the 2016 election, multiple current and former government officials familiar with the matter tell NBC News.

Much like the indictment Mueller filed last month charging a different group of Russians in a social media trolling and illegal-ad-buying scheme, the possible new charges are expected to rely heavily on secret intelligence gathered by the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), several of the officials say.

Well we didn’t think he was going to get it all from the Post and MSNBC.

He’s had the goods for a long time but there is strategy to consider.

The sources say the possible new indictment — or more than one, if that’s how Mueller’s office decides to proceed — would delve into the details of, and the people behind, the Russian intelligence operation that used hackers to penetrate computer networks and steal emails of both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

Remember those days? Hammering the Democrats, and leaving the Republicans entirely alone. Guess what: it worked.

In July 2016 the FBI began a counterintelligence investigation into how the Russians carried out the operation and whether any Americans, including members of the Trump campaign, were involved. Mueller took over the probe in May 2017. His office has filed more than 100 criminal charges against 19 people and three companies, securing guilty pleas and cooperation agreements from three members of the Trump campaign.

All together now: WITCH HUNT!

Pro Publica shares a construction industry group’s power point on how wonderful the Trump administration is for The Bosses, even if it is run like a bad family business.

Following the descriptions of the administration’s dysfunction, the PowerPoint pivots to describing what it characterized as major successes in the construction industry’s “regulatory roll back” agenda since Trump entered office. “With President Trump in office, there are many Obama administration executive orders, rules, and other requirements in AGC’s crosshairs,” it says.

The group touts major victories in the form of repealed or delayed environmental and labor regulations:

A quick guide to the shorthand:

The “blacklisting” rule refers to President Obama’s “Fair Pay, Safe Workplaces” executive order that required companies bidding on federal contracts to disclose labor law violations. That rule has been repealed by the Trump administration.

The so-called Volks rule increased the ability of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to enforce requirements that employers keep records of injuries and illnesses. That rule has also been eliminated.

The silica regulation lowers the permissible exposure limit of silica dust that construction workers can be exposed to on the job. According to OSHA, inhaling silica can cause cancer and other fatal diseases. That regulation’s implementation was delayed but has since gone into effect.

The “GHG” rule is a Department of Transportation greenhouse gas regulation aimed at getting data on emissions from vehicles traveling on federally funded highways. The Trump administration initially delayed the rule’s implementation and has since started the process of repealing it entirely.

They’re corrupt and autocratic and incompetent, but by god they’re getting rid of all those pesky worker safety and environmental protection rules. More $$ for The Bosses!

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The social world is every bit as real as a booster rocket.

It’s interesting that critical thinking is often held (especially among movement skeptics) to be more closely associated with “hard” subjects like the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering than supposedly “soft” subjects like linguistics, psychology, philosophy etc. As someone with one leg in each camp*, I can definitely say that the former has been more useful in terms of employment. But in terms of critical thinking, I have to say that the most important lessons I have learned in my life – whether at school or from books – have come from “soft” fields like psychology, including things like heuristics and biases, cognitive dissonance and rationalization, motivated reasoning and wishful thinking, the fallibility of perception and memory, cognitive illusions, conformity and groupthink, willful blindness, the human tendency to find meaningful patterns and connections in random chaos etc.

But probably the most underrated lesson – both from studying linguistics and communication, and from working for years as a (technical) translator – has been to make me hyper-aware of the arbitrary link between words and meanings, between signs/symbols and the things/concepts/ideas they point to, between names and things named etc. As others have pointed out (I was thinking of posting this comment in the comments section of this post), words don’t mean anything in themselves, but get their meanings from us. If, by some historical accident, what we call “fish” had been called “bird” and vice versa, this would be no more or less “correct” than our current way of using the same words.

But of course this doesn’t prevent people from thinking and acting as if words were inherently meaningful. Now, I don’t believe in (a strong version of) the Whorfian hypothesis** (the idea that our native language forces us see reality in certain ways while making other ways of thinking practically unthinkable), but I do think language affects thoughts in more subtle ways. For one thing, it seems to me like people often fall into the trap of assuming that things that are called the same are the same, or different version of the same kind of stuff, or at least related in more than name only. This is why sophisticated theologians are so eager to get unbelievers to apply the word “God” (Why “God” specifically? Why not “Ogd” or “Dog”?) to something that exists (Life, the Universe, and Everything etc.)***. Never mind that this “something” has nothing to do with what most people associate with “God”: As long as something called “God” exists, then “theism” is right, and “atheism” is wrong, and from there it’s a free-for-all. The same thing goes for “free will”. The difference between “free will compatibilists” and “free will incompatibilists” isn’t that the former believe in something the latter don’t believe in, since the “free will” accepted by the former has nothing to do with the “free will” rejected by the latter (the counter-causal kind). To bring up compatibilist free will at all in a discussion about counter-causal free will is therefore just a red herring and changing the subject. The only thing that makes it seem relevant to the topic is the expression “free will” itself.

And as we have seen the same goes for pretty much every word in the vocabulary of gender apologists. This is why I keep making distinctions like “women₁” (people with innate physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers) vs. “women₂” (people who think or feel some unspecified way about themselves) or point directly to the definition rather than use the word “woman” itself. Getting gender apologists to do the same would be illuminating indeed…

Words and labels can also create an illusion of understanding where there is only confusion. I quite like the answer that Neil deGrasse Tyson once gave when asked if he identified as a secular humanist (or something similar). I don’t remember the exact wording, but in essence his answer went something like this: “If I tell you I’m a secular humanist, you are going to think you already know a lot more about my actual views than you do. If you are truly interested in knowing where I stand, you’re going to have to stick around for the long version. And if you don’t have time for that, then no real understanding is going to be conveyed by me just giving you a label.” The same thing goes for “feminism”. Saying that “feminism” is a movement that fights for the equality of women doesn’t get us very far when we cannot even agree on what it means to be a “woman” (woman₁ or woman₂?) or what is meant by “equality” (making our various group identities irrelevant with respect to how people are treated, or making sure everybody is treated the way that’s appropriate to their particular group identity?).

Or language can create an illusion of sharp divisions where really what we have is a continuum. One example might be creationists’ insistence that there are no transitional fossils between Homo and Australopithecus. After all every such fossil ever discovered was called either one or the other of these names, so clearly they must be sharply divided. When astronomers were debating whether or not Pluto should still count as a planet, what they were discussing were not objective facts about Pluto, only what would henceforth be meant by the word “planet”.

Another linguistic trick, much favored by religious apologists, is the use of double negatives to evade the burden of proof. Nobody wants to be the one holding unjustified beliefs, so apologists of every kind have made an art form of re-framing belief in supernatural woo as a “lack of atheism”, “absence of philosophical materialism” etc. Instead of being blinded by the syntax, we need to look at who is actually attempting to add something to our ontology. We know – as well as it’s possible to “know” anything – that the physical, material universe exists. To me “atheism”, “philosophical materialism” etc. are just different names for refusing to add something more to the picture of reality painted by science without a minimum of justification. Any such addition has to earn its place, or Occam’s razor takes care of it. Thus expressions like “lack of atheism” or “absence of philosophical materialism” boil down to little more than an absence of an absence of (certain subsets of) unjustified beliefs.

_____________________________________________

* I have a Bachelor’s degree in media studies and (the equicvalent of) a Master’s degree in germanistics. Shockingly, this turned out not to be every employer’s dream, which is why I went and got myself a second Bachelor’s degree in renewable energy engineering.

** Popularized in George Orwell’s 1984 and more recently in the movie Arrival.

*** I once defined “sophisticated theology” as the art of saying “It doesn’t matter what you believe in as long as you call it ‘God’” in as many words as possible”

Brave heroes of art:

The organisers of a music festival in northern France have defied pressure to cancel a performance by a once-idolised French musician who has served a jail term for beating his girlfriend to death.

More than 65,000 people have signed a petition demanding that Bertrand Cantat, former frontman of Noir Desir, be removed from the programme of the Papillons de Nuit festival, which takes place in May in the Normandy town of Saint-Laurent-de-Cuves.

“By putting Bertrand Cantat in the spotlight you are normalising violence against women and even condoning it,” claims the petition on the Change.org website, started by a “citizen feminist”.

The organisers of the festival, which drew 68,000 rock fans in 2017, have rejected the call, saying in a statement: “We consider that our only criteria should be artistic.”

Because art exists in a sealed-off vacuum and has no impact on the larger world, is that it? But the problem there is, it doesn’t.

In a profile on the festival website, Cantat, 53, is described as “having lost nothing of his brooding nature, rage and critical thinking”.

The brooding nature and rage of a guy who beat a woman to death, and the critical thinking that failed to clue him in that he shouldn’t do that.

Cantat, whose group enjoyed cult status in France in the 1990s, killed Marie Trintignant in a hotel room while on tour in Lithuania in 2003. Trintignant, an actor, died following severe brain damage after Cantat beat her during a fight.

The killing sent shockwaves through France, where Cantat was known as a champion of social causes.

Oh well, she was only a woman.

Ok this is funny. I was reading Kevin Liptak at CNN on the tanking  morale in the White House, enriched by this gem of a sentence –

Inside the White House, aides identify the scandal involving Rob Porter, the staff secretary who departed after being accused of domestic abuse allegations, as the impetus for the latest devolvement in esteem.

There’s the goodbye of Hope Hicks, the brawl with Sessions, the hot blushing shame of Ben Carson’s taste in dining room furniture, the plan to “turn the page”…

Trump is encouraging his team to develop policy announcements that could help distract from the ongoing ruckus. On Thursday he was eager to announce protectionist measures to buffer the US steel and aluminum industries from foreign imports — fulfilling a key campaign promise on which he’s fixated over the past year.

Seconds before I reached that paragraph a red banner breaking news headline popped up at the top of the page – saying the Dow has dropped 500 points after Trump’s announcement of tariffs on steel.

Oops.