A man with an assault rifle

Oct 28th, 2016 7:57 am | By

Peter Walker posted this yesterday evening. He later said in a comment that he’d love the photo to be on the front page of every newspaper in the country, so share it widely if you’re so inclined.

To all my Harney County friends, and friends of Harney County: I feel gut-punched, like you probably do. Here’s a photo I took at the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on January 12. A USFWS vehicle is blocking the entrance and a man with an assault rifle is on guard. I had to ask for permission to enter. How can this not have impeded FWS employees from doing their job???? Here’s my promise to Harney County: regardless of the Bundys there will be a book that tells what happened. The agony these people inflicted on a wonderful community will NOT be lost to history. Love you guys.

Look at that guy with the gun. He looks like an official, like a cop or a military guard. He’s not: he’s a civilian with an assault rifle blocking entry to a federal, publicly owned wildlife refuge. But hey, no conspiracy to impede anyone here – it was all totally spontaneous moment to moment. And I’m Marie of Romania.

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Not guilty

Oct 27th, 2016 5:13 pm | By

This day really has been a package of horrors.

The Bundys and their friends have all been acquitted.

Ammon and Ryan Bundy and five of their followers, charged in the armed takeover of a federally owned Oregon wildlife sanctuary in January, were acquitted Thursday of federal conspiracy and weapons charges.

The verdict brings to a close a case that gripped the nation earlier this year with its public debate about government powers, public lands and constitutional rights.

And sends a message to all white right-wing fanatics that they can probably grab a national park or wildlife refuge and get away with it, if they go in heavily armed enough. It sends a message to all non-white people that we are one fucked up country.

This makes me sick.

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A new study shows

Oct 27th, 2016 1:06 pm | By

By way of a shout-out to blasphemy and a fuck you to the SPLC – the new Jesus and Mo:

feel

Patreon is here.

 

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There was no ‘Terror List’

Oct 27th, 2016 12:22 pm | By

Maajid linked to this on Facebook, in response to the SPLC’S bullshit about a “terror list:”

Setting the record straight:

In light of a number of recent accusations that have been levelled at Quilliam and our track record, we felt it was necessary to set the record straight with regards to our work. The below is a breakdown of common accusations that are directed at us with clear responses beneath.

Accusation – Quilliam produced a McCarthyite secret ‘Terror List’ that smeared ordinary Muslim groups and individuals as extremist and gave it to the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OCST).

Response – This accusation repeated here by the Guardian is simply false. There was no ‘Terror List’. We produced a briefing document entitled ‘Preventing Terrorism: where next for Britain?’, that we sent to all government departments and not just the OSCT. This document set out reforms we felt were necessary to the Government’s counter-terrorism strategy. The Government’s strategy was eventually reformed almost exactly as we had advised. The document was sent in private so as to not play out the debate about reforming the Government’s counter-extremism strategy in the press. However, the copy we sent to the OSCT was eventually leaked by a civil servant.

The main body of the document reviewed Government departments involved in the counter-extremism agenda and made policy suggestions. The document also had an appendix entitled ‘The British Muslim Scene’, which detailed the affiliations and backgrounds of a number of prominent British Muslim organisations, including their external influences. In no way was it a ‘Terror List’, nor was any of the categorisation incorrect. Furthermore, Quilliam has never advocated a ban on these organisations (Quilliam has even defended the right to remain legal in the UK for more extreme groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, see here where Quilliam’s Chairman is quoted by the Prime Minister in Parliament as supportive evidence for why Hizb ut-Tahrir should not be banned), rather we advocated a policy of challenging these groups. We call this our doctrine of legal tolerance coupled with “civic intolerance”, as first argued in our testimony before the US here. Hence the list was the exact opposite of a McCarthyite list, arguing that these groups should remain legal but challenged in civic debate. The full and rather sensible report that generated this false accusation is available to view here.

There’s more, but that one spoke directly to the SPLC accusation.

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Bad move SPLC

Oct 27th, 2016 11:18 am | By

Another one of those mornings that starts with a horror in my news stream – the Southern Poverty Law Center branding Maajid Nawaz an “anti-Muslim extremist” in a new report/field guide. They also include Ayaan Hirsi Ali under that hateful umbrella, but it’s the inclusion of Maajid that dumbfounds me the most, seeing as how he is in fact a Muslim and is most explicitly and centrally anti-extremist.

In short, this pisses me off, big time. It pisses me off because it’s grossly inaccurate, and unfair to Maajid. It pisses me off because as he points out it puts a target on him. It pisses me off because the SPLC has done heroic, brave work in the past. It pisses me off because I have many liberal Muslim friends who also campaign against Islamist extremism. It pisses me off because the left really needs to get it straight: Islamism is not a left-wing ally, it’s a deeply right-wing, reactionary, anti-human rights, theocratic movement, and people who campaign against Islamism are not anti-Muslim and not extremist. Islamism is not our friend, and its enemies are not (all) our enemies. There are of course plenty of right-wing (and some theocratic) enemies of Islamism, but I do think if the SPLC tries it can manage to tell the difference between liberal anti-Islamists and reactionary anti-Islamists. Maajid is one of the former, not the latter.

To the press release:

In response to the high levels of anti-Muslim extremists regularly provided a platform in the media and in the public eye, the Southern Poverty Law Center has partnered with Media Matters for America, ReThink Media and the Center for New Community to provide a resource on anti-Muslim public figures for reporters and media professionals.

Maajid is not anti-Muslim. It’s outrageous that the SPLC included him under that description.

The newly released Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists contains profiles of 15 prominent anti-Muslim extremists, many of whom are associated with organizations identified by the SPLC as hate groups.

And many of whom are not, and are not anti-Muslim either, so how about not lumping them all in together?

“We wrote this manual because Muslims in America continue to be vilified by a network of anti-Muslim extremists spreading baseless and damaging lies and we think the media can play a role in helping to stop it,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But that doesn’t describe Maajid. It’s disgusting that you include him under that description.

A shocking number of anti-Muslim, self-described “experts” are seen regularly in the media, where they spread falsehoods that too often go uncontested. Their rhetoric has toxic consequences, from promoting xenophobia, to poisoning democratic debate, to inspiring hate violence.

Doesn’t apply to Maajid.

“We hope journalists will use this guide to learn more about these extremists and the damage they cause to society and either deny them a public platform altogether or be better prepared to publicly challenge their hateful rhetoric and misinformation,” Beirich said. “The public really should know who these extremists are and the damaging impact they have with a platform to spread hate and bigotry.”

Doesn’t apply to Maajid.

Now the report itself:

Executive Summary

Ever since the Al Qaeda massacre of Sept. 11, 2001, American Muslims have been under attack. They have been vilified as murderers, accused of conspiring to take over the United States and impose Shariah religious law, described as enemies of women, and subjected to hundreds of violent hate crime attacks. A major party presidential nominee has even suggested that America ban Muslim immigrants.

Fueling this hatred has been the propaganda, the vast majority of it completely baseless, produced and popularized by a network of anti-Muslim extremists and their enablers. These men and women have shamelessly exploited terrorist attacks and the Syrian refugee crisis, among other things, to demonize the entire Islamic faith.

But not Maajid. Maajid is definitely not in the business of demonizing “the entire Islamic faith.” I don’t like it that they include Ayaan Hirsi Ali in this list either, but at least it is the case that she’s no longer a Muslim. But Maajid is a Muslim, and he’s one of a number of campaigning liberal Muslim activists, and he does not belong in this report.

Sadly, a shocking number of these extremists are seen regularly on television news programs and quoted in the pages of our leading newspapers. There, they routinely espouse a wide range of utter falsehoods, all designed to make Muslims appear as bloodthirsty terrorists or people intent on undermining American constitutional freedoms. More often than not, these claims go uncontested.

So the SPLC tries to rectify that by publishing an utter falsehood about Maajid? Maajid does not espouse a wide range of utter falsehoods, all designed to make Muslims appear as bloodthirsty terrorists or people intent on undermining American constitutional freedoms. (Notice, in particular, the provincialism – Maajid is a British Muslim, not an American one, so he wouldn’t be blathering about undermining American constitutional freedoms even if he were as the SPLC describes him, which he isn’t.) That’s a strikingly venomous falsehood to tell about someone apparently included on a list out of sheer ignorance or misinformation.

A coalition of four research and civil rights groups — the Southern Poverty Law Center, Media Matters for America, the Center for New Community and ReThink Media — banded together to prepare this manual. Our hope is that journalists and others will use it as a guide to effectively counter these extremists and their damaging misinformation. These propagandists are far outside of the political mainstream, and their rhetoric has toxic consequences — from poisoning democratic debate to inspiring hate-based violence.

Not true of Maajid. A reckless, dangerous, terrible lie to tell about him.

The Columbia Journalism Review has said as much, pointing out that misinformation and falsehoods in media “may pollute democratic discourse, make it more difficult for citizens to cast informed votes, and limit their ability to participate meaningfully in public debate.”

Ah no. No you don’t. The CJR said that about misinformation and falsehoods in media, not about this list of people. It’s very sneaky and dishonest to try to slip that one past us.

What follows are profiles of 15 anti-Muslim extremists who are frequently cited in public discourse. These spokespeople were selected on the basis of their presence in national and local media and for the pernicious brand of extremism and hate they espouse against Muslim communities and the Islamic faith.

Therefore it was a mistake to include Maajid (and, I would say, Ayaan). It was an appalling, reckless, dangerous mistake. Shame on the SPLC.

What they say about Maajid:

Maajid Nawaz is a British activist and part of the “ex-radical” circuit of former Islamists who use that experience to savage Islam. His story, which has been told repeatedly in the British and American press and in testimony to legislators as well, sounds compelling enough — Nawaz says he grew up being attacked by neo-Nazi skinheads in the United Kingdom, spent almost four years in an Egyptian prison after joining a supposedly nonviolent Islamist group, but had a change of heart while imprisoned and then returned to England to work against the radicalization of Muslims. But major elements of his story have been disputed by former friends, members of his family, fellow jihadists and journalists, and the evidence suggests that Nawaz is far more interested in self-promotion and money than in any particular ideological dispute.

Even if that’s true, what does it have to do with this report? Even if it’s true, it doesn’t even demonstrate that he doesn’t care about the ideological dispute at all. It’s entirely possible – and we see it all the time – for people to be both: interested in their particular view of an ideological dispute, and even more interested in their own reputation and fortune. It’s possible for activists to be more interested in their dinner when they’re hungry, but that doesn’t make them indifferent to or dishonest about their political commitments.

He told several different versions of his story, emphasizing that he was deradicalized while in Egypt — even though he in fact continued his Islamist agitation for months after returning. After starting the Quilliam Foundation, which he describes as an anti-extremism think tank, Nawaz sent a secret list to a top British security official that accused “peaceful Muslim groups, politicians, a television channel and a Scotland Yard unit of sharing the ideology of terrorists,” according to The Guardian.

Here they betray either lack of understanding or cynical dishonesty about how this stuff works. “Peaceful” Muslim groups can still be radically reactionary, theocratic, anti-women’s rights, homophobic, anti-democratic, anti-secular, and thus generally ideologically supportive of the belief system of the violent groups and individuals. They can be and some are. The Muslim Council of Britain includes a lot of groups of that type under its umbrella, and it’s pretty theocratic itself. It’s not simply obvious that Maajid’s list was mistaken on the facts.

His Quilliam Foundation received more than 1.25 million pounds from the British government, but the government eventually decided to stop funding it.

So what?

One of Nawaz’s biggest purported coups was getting anti-Muslim extremist Tommy Robinson to quit as head of the violence-prone English Defence League, trumpeting his departure at a press conference. But Robinson later said Quilliam had paid him some 8,000 British pounds to allow Nawaz to take credit for what he already planned to do. Shortly afterward, Robinson returned to anti-Muslim agitation with other groups.

Again, so what? Not a particularly glorious incident, certainly, but very far from showing that Maajid is what this stinking report calls him.

Then they quote him a few times:

In the list sent to a top British security official in 2010, headlined “Preventing Terrorism: Where Next for Britain?” Quilliam wrote, “The ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that of violent Islamists; they disagree only on tactics.” An official with Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit told The Guardian that “[t]he list demonises a whole range of groups that in my experience have made valuable contributions to counter-terrorism.”

And?

Maajid is not wrong to say that the  ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that of violent Islamists. That’s rather the point. Islam is not Islamism, and Islamism is not a benign idea – it’s a malevolently theocratic idea: the dictatorship of god, which in practice means the dictatorship of clerics – see Iran and Saudi Arabia.

In a Nov. 16, 2013, op-ed in the Daily Mail, Nawaz called for criminalizing the wearing of the veil, or niqab, in many public places, saying: “It is not only reasonable, but our duty to insist individuals remove the veil when they enter identity-sensitive environments such as banks, airports, courts and schools.”

And?

It’s debatable, but it’s hardly outrageous. The niqab covers the whole face apart from the eyes. It’s not obviously wrong to say it shouldn’t be allowed in certain sensitive situations.

According to a Jan. 24, 2014, report in The Guardian, Nawaz tweeted out a cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad — despite the fact that many Muslims see it as blasphemous to draw Muhammad. He said that he wanted “to carve out a space to be heard without constantly fearing the blasphemy charge.”

Now they’re close to the bone. The cartoonist is a friend of mine. It makes me hulk out with rage when ostensible liberals claim that cartoons are “blasphemous” and must be stopped. What business is it of the SPLC’s that Maajid tweeted a Jesus and Mo??? Why do they report that as if it were some sort of crime? Do they want Jesus and Mo shut down? Do they approve of blasphemy laws? What is wrong with them?

Final item, which they include under “IN HIS OWN WORDS” even though it’s not:

Nawaz, who had described himself as a “feminist,” was “filmed repeatedly trying to touch a naked lap dancer,” according to an April 10, 2015, report in the Daily Mail. The paper apparently got the security film from the owner of a strip club who was incensed by Nawaz’s claims to be a religious Muslim.

Again: what on earth does that have to do with the SPLC? How does it demonstrate that he’s an anti-Muslim extremist, which is their claim?

There. I’ve used up my allowance of rage for the week, and I need to breathe.

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A little room in your womb for Jesus

Oct 26th, 2016 3:54 pm | By

Samantha Bee on that whole thing where Catholic bishops tell women to die rather than get an abortion. It’s brilliant.

H/t Jen Phillips

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A clampdown on increasingly varied uses for ashes

Oct 26th, 2016 3:16 pm | By

Ah, the Vatican, and god-botherers in general, inventing ridiculous intrusive rules based on their reality-defying beliefs, and then trying to insist that everyone obey them. Like the Vatican saying omg no you may not scatter someone’s ashes or fling them off the top of a building or put them on your bookshelf next to Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell. Why mayn’t I? Well because it gets death all wrong. The Vatican is the authority on death, as any fule kno. Death isn’t where you stop being alive and begin to decompose, it’s the gateway to eternal life dootdeedoo.

Strict new Vatican guidelines forbid a list of increasingly popular means of commemorating loved ones – from scattering ashes at sea to having them turned into jewellery or put in a locket – dismissing them as New Age practices and “pantheism”.

A formal instruction, approved by Pope Francis, even forbids Catholics [to keep] ashes in an urn at home, other than in “grave and exceptional cases”.

As if it’s any of their damn business. If people find it comforting to keep ashes at home, who is the Vatican to tell them not to? Mean bastards with stupid wrong ideas, that’s who.

The document issued by the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) claims many modern cremation practices increasingly reflect non-Christian ideas about “fusion with Mother Nature”.

In other words they’re a little closer to reality than Christian ideas are. There is no Mother Nature, but our bodies are material and part of nature, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is just talking the usual old nonsense.

For centuries the Catholic Church forbade cremation altogether, primarily because of the teaching that Christians will be raised from the grave ahead of the Day of Judgment.

The ban was finally lifted in 1963 in a landmark Vatican document which accepted that there were often pressing social and sanitary needs for cremation but urged Catholics to choose burial wherever possible.

That’s the ticket: split the difference! Baby Jesus can still raise a few cremated people, but if there are too many of them, Baby Jesus will simply not be able to get to them all before it’s time to feed the dog, so choose burial whenever possible. That all makes sense and hangs together.

The new guidance accepts cremation in principle but signals a clampdown on increasingly varied uses for ashes, insisting instead that they should only be kept in a “sacred place”, such as a cemetery.

“[The Church] cannot … condone attitudes or permit rites that involve erroneous ideas about death, such as considering death as the definitive annihilation of the person, or the moment of fusion with Mother Nature or the universe, or as a stage in the cycle of regeneration, or as the definitive liberation from the ‘prison’ of the body,” it argues.

Oh yes, it’s “erroneous” to consider death as the termination of the person, while it’s 100% accurate to consider death a ticket to Daddy God’s best parlor.

It goes on: “In order that every appearance of pantheism, naturalism or nihilism be avoided, it is not permitted to scatter the ashes of the faithful departed in the air, on land, at sea or in some other way, nor may they be preserved in mementos, pieces of jewellery or other objects.”

It then adds that if someone has asked for their ashes to be scattered “for reasons contrary to the Christian faith” then “a Christian funeral must be denied to that person”.

Mean bastards they are.

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If

Oct 26th, 2016 12:30 pm | By

Uh oh. Rachel Maddow could be in for some shunning.

New rule:

If you don’t have a vagina, you don’t get to make laws regulating them.

 

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Men do not have a fundamental right to use female bodies

Oct 26th, 2016 11:20 am | By

Glosswitch on the World Health Organisation’s new definition of infertility:

A woman’s desire to control her reproductive destiny will always be in direct opposition to patriarchy’s desire to exploit female bodies as a reproductive resource. The social institutions that develop to support the latter – such as marriage – may change, but the exploitation can remain in place.

To put it another way, marriage is not the only way to exploit female bodies as a reproductive resource. We live in modern times! We are liberated! Women can simply be rented now!

This is why all feminists – and indeed anyone serious about tackling patriarchy at the root – should be deeply concerned about the World Health Organisation’s new definition of infertility. Whereas up until now infertility has been defined solely in medical terms (as the failure to achieve pregnancy after 12 months of unprotected sex), a revised definition will give each individual “a right to reproduce”.

…

I am all in favour of different family structures. I’m especially in favour of those that undermine an age-old institution set up to allow men to claim ownership of women’s reproductive labour and offspring.

I am less enthusiastic about preserving a man’s “right” to reproductive labour regardless of whether or not he has a female partner. The safeguarding of such a right marks not so much an end to patriarchy as the introduction of a new, improved, pick ‘n’ mix, no-strings-attached version.

Good for him, not so good for her.

In order to exercise his “right” to reproduce, a man requires the cooperation – or failing that, forced labour – of a female person for the duration of nine months. He requires her to take serious health risks, endure permanent physical side-effects and then to supress any bond she may have developed with the growing foetus. A woman requires none of these things from a sperm donor.

In short there’s a radical asymmetry, and it’s both bizarre and horrifying that the WHO seems to be ignoring it. (“Seems to be” because as several people pointed out when I posted about this, we don’t yet have much to go on, and The Telegraph is…well, The Telegraph.)

Men do not have a fundamental right to use female bodies, neither for reproduction nor for sex. A man who wants children but has no available partner is no more “infertile” than a man who wants sex but has no available partner is “sexually deprived”.

The WHO’s new definition is symptomatic of men’s ongoing refusal to recognise female boundaries. Our bodies are our own, not a resource to be put at men’s disposal. Until all those who claim to be opposed to patriarchal exploitation recognise this, progress towards gender-based equality will be very one-sided indeed.

[Checks watch; settles in to wait.]

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The Green Man

Oct 26th, 2016 10:49 am | By

The BBC reports on a pleasing interlude in the well-forested state of Maine:

A man in America has been arrested for obstructing traffic after crossing the road dressed as a tree.

Asher Woodworth, from the US state of Maine, covered himself in branches and walked really slowly across a street.

Ok so he slowed traffic a little, but he probably brightened up a lot of people’s day in the process.

You can see people grinning in the video – including one of the cops. Day brightened.

Frankly I hope it catches on. Beats scary clowns any day.

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This will help rile up the base

Oct 25th, 2016 6:06 pm | By

Obama is reminding the Republicans that he warned them.

On the stump, Obama now regularly links Trump’s candidacy, and the bind he’s created for down-ballot Republicans, to a greater theory about the way the right has practiced politics throughout his presidency.

“For years,” Obama said in Las Vegas, “Republican politicians and the far-right media outlets have pumped up all kinds of crazy stuff about me, about Hillary, about Harry [Reid]. They said I wasn’t born here. They said climate change is a hoax. They said that I was going to take everybody’s guns away.”

Obama went on:

[T]here are a lot of politicians who knew better. There are a lot of senators who knew better. But they went along with these stories because they figured, you know what, this will help rile up the base, it will give us an excuse to obstruct what [they’re] trying to do, we won’t be able to appoint judges, we’ll gum up the works, we’ll create gridlock, it will give us a political advantage. So they just stood by and said nothing. And their base began to actually believe this crazy stuff.

So Donald Trump did not start this. Donald Trump didn’t start it. He just did what he always did, which is slap his name on it, take credit for it, and promote it. That’s what he does. And so now when suddenly it’s not working, and people are saying, wow, this guy is kind of out of line, all of a sudden, these Republican politicians who were okay with all this crazy stuff up to a point, suddenly they’re all walking away. “Oh, this is too much.” … Well, what took you so long? What the heck?

The reality-based community. Ron Suskind, The New York Times magazine, October 2004.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The senior adviser was Karl Rove.

Obama’s hope is that the public responds to his barnstorming by defeating Trump in a landslide and taking down as many of his enablers as possible along with him. That may be the only way for the Republicans who survive 2016 to internalize the message that the politics of backlash they’ve practiced aren’t just dangerous, but contrary to their own interests. They’ve been blinding themselves to this same argument for years, after all. Now it will cost some of them their jobs, in an election they could have won, and Obama’s “I told you so” will be the door hitting them on the way out.

Mind you, if the reason they lie so much is because they know the truth wouldn’t appeal to the voters…they’re not very likely to stop lying so much.

H/t G Felis

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Guest post: The party where facts don’t matter

Oct 25th, 2016 2:04 pm | By

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Trump and framing.

Here’s my armchair theorizing about the rise of Trump:

1. Republicans became the party that refuses to compromise. Explaining why is probably a whole separate argument itself, but here are a few contributors. (a) The tyranny of 40% — hard-core conservatives don’t have an actual majority among the population as a whole, but they can control the Republican Party, and they make up enough of the public that they don’t think they need non-conservative allies. In part they’re right: they vote in higher numbers (especially in midterms), and aren’t “wasting” their votes by being concentrated in urban areas. (Progressives, by contrast, have generally learned to accept that they need to do business with squishy left-center moderates if they want to get something done.); (b) They’ve promoted an ideology that strong leaders don’t ever ever compromise, they just stand firm and wait for their opponents to capitulate. Some of them really believed that Obama would give up his signature piece of legislation (Obamacare) if faced with a government shutdown, while others just promoted that idea for personal gain (hi, Ted Cruz!), but it’s stuck; (c) their increasingly dramatic rhetoric makes it hard to compromise: it’s one thing to cut a deal with a president who is just another American who happens to be more liberal than you care for, but cutting a deal with a president who is a socialist Muslim atheist communist tyrant bent on destroying the country is practically treason. So everything in the Republican race became a competition to see who could outflank the others — “you say you want to close the borders? Well, I want to build a wall! And make Mexico pay for it! Beat that!”

2. Republicans became the party where facts don’t matter. Global warming is a liberal hoax! Tax cuts totally do reduce the deficit! Obamacare is failing! Ignore the crime statistics, you know in your gut that the country is more dangerous. Ignore the unemployment statistics, they’re rigged. The media are all liberals, experts are lying, data is faked. How can, say, Jeb Bush show that Trump’s tax plan doesn’t add up, when Jeb Bush’s plan doesn’t, either? Who cares what the factcheckers at the NY Times and WaPo say about Trump, given that we know they’re lying liberal media stooges?

3. Since facts don’t matter, it’s about appealing to the emotions of Republicans. And Trump won that game, “bigly,” because he recognized that restraint and dignity and looking “presidential” are secondary, if not counterproductive, to showing that you share their anger. Sure, all 17 candidates are anti-immigrant, but I called them rapists and murderers! They all say Hillary’s a crook, but I’m the one threatening to lock her up! They whine about the liberal media, but I’m going to sue the fuckers!

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Trump and framing

Oct 25th, 2016 9:32 am | By

George Lakoff on Trump last July:

Donald J. Trump has managed to become the Republican nominee for president, Why? How? There are various theories: People are angry and he speaks to their anger. People don’t think much of Congress and want a non-politician. Both may be true. But why? What are the details? And Why Trump?

He gives an extended answer that he says is based on his research…but his sample of the theories above is too short: he leaves out the simple fact of Trump’s celebrity, which is surely much too important to leave out. An unknown guy from East Jesus, Oklahoma who did exactly what Trump did would not, I think, have had the success Trump had.

Lakoff explains Trump’s success with his story about the nation as a family.

In the 1900’s, as part of my research in the cognitive and brain sciences, I undertook to answer a question in my field: How do the various policy positions of conservatives and progressives hang together? Take conservatism: What does being against abortion have to do with being for owning guns? What does owning guns have to do with denying the reality of global warming? How does being anti-government fit with wanting a stronger military? How can you be pro-life and for the death penalty? Progressives have the opposite views. How do their views hang together?

The answer came from a realization that we tend to understand the nation metaphorically in family terms: We have founding fathers. We send our sons and daughters to war. We have homeland security. The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative).

Meh. I’m sure that’s true to some extent, but I’m not the least bit convinced it’s the Key to All Mythologies, and I dislike the way Lakoff always presents it as if it is. His “realization” is his interpretation, and I don’t think it explains as much as he seems to think it does.

And then Trump…What the hell kind of father figure is he?!! He brags about never playing any active part at all in rearing his own children. He cheated on all his wives. He abuses women and brags about it. (To be fair, Lakoff wrote the above long before the Access Hollywood tape appeared.) He’s rude and pugnacious and unpleasant and hostile to women – he’s hardly a Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks type. The Strict Father is not supposed to be a greedy violent rapey asshole. So, no, I don’t find Trump convincing in the part.

Lakoff is interesting but not, to me, very convincing…which is amusing in a way, since he “frames” himself as an expert on how to be convincing.

H/t Dave Ricks

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He is the son of Fred Trump, not an orangutan

Oct 24th, 2016 5:26 pm | By

Oh look, a detailed examination of Trump’s SLAPP suits, sweetly titled Donald J. Trump Is A Libel Bully But Also A Libel Loser. The author is Susan E. Seager.

Donald J. Trump is a libel bully. Like most bullies, he’s also a loser, to borrow from Trump’s vocabulary.

Trump and his companies have been involved in a mind-boggling 4,000 lawsuits over the last 30 years and sent countless threatening cease-and-desist letters to journalists and critics.[1]

But the GOP presidential nominee and his companies have never won a single speech-related case filed in a public court.

He had all the fun of bullying people though.

This article examines seven speech-related cases brought by Trump and his companies, which include four dismissals on the merits, two voluntary withdrawals, and one lone victory in an arbitration won by default. Media defense lawyers would do well to remind Trump of his sorry record in speech-related cases filed in public courts when responding to bullying libel cease-and-desist letters.

Or they could just say we look forward to discussing it with you in court.

Trump filed his first and crankiest libel lawsuit in 1984 against the Chicago Tribune and the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, Paul Gapp. Trump filed his libel lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York.[3] Trump claimed he suffered $500 million in damages.[4]

Gapp, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1979, dared to publish a “Design” column in the Sunday Tribune Magazine on August 12, 1984 ridiculing Trump’s proposal to build the tallest building in the world: a 150-story, nearly 2,000-foot tall skyscraper on a landfill at the southeast end of Manhattan.[5]

Gapp wrote that Trump’s planned office tower was “one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city” and a kind of “Guinness Book of World Records architecture.” Gapp’s column said the “only remotely appealing aspect” of Trump’s planned office tower was that it would “not be done in the Fence Post Style of the 1970s.” The architect critic slammed the already-built Trump Tower as a “skyscraper offering condos, office space and a kitschy shopping atrium of blinding flamboyance.” Gapp wrote that Trump’s claim that the 150-story skyscraper would architecturally balance the two World Trade Center towers on the opposite side of lower Manhattan was mere “eyewash.”[6]

Gapp also gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal, telling a reporter that Trump’s plan was “aesthetically lousy” and complaining that the central part of Chicago “has already been loused up by giant-ism.”

Trump filed a libel lawsuit in New York, claiming that Gapp’s criticisms in the Tribune and the Journal were false and defamatory.

From the description his criticisms sound like criticism, which is legal.

(Oh – it’s just occurred to me. I wonder if that’s why Michael Nugent has been defending Trump – maybe he feels rapport with a guy who likes to sue people for defamation because they criticized him in public.)

The Tribune and Gapp filed a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss on the grounds that Gapp’s statements and the artist’s rendering were protected opinions, and U.S. District Judge Edward Weinfeld agreed, granting the motion to dismiss.[8]

 

Judge Weinfeld gave Trump a lesson in the First Amendment and politics: “Men in public life … must accept as an incident of their service harsh criticism, ofttimes unfair and unjustified – at times false and defamatory – and this is particularly so when their activities or performance may … stir deep controversy” …. “De gustibus non est disputandum, there is no disputing about tastes.”[9]

Judge Weinfeld, then 84, reaffirmed the First Amendment rule that “[e]xpressions of one’s opinion of another, however unreasonable, or vituperative, since they cannot be subjected to the test of truth or falsity, cannot be held libelous and are entitled to absolute immunity from liability under the First Amendment.”[10]

Judge Weinfeld explained that opinions expressed in the form of “rhetorical hyperbole,” “rigorous epithets,” and “the most pejorative of terms” are protected from liability, so long as the opinions do not veer to into factual accusations, such as accusing someone of a crime, unethical conduct, or the lack of professional integrity in a manner that would be proved true or false.[11]

Then there’s the one where Trump sued a writer for saying he wasn’t a billionaire. There’s a hilarious sample of his testimony:

Q: Now Mr. Trump, have you always been completely truthful in your public statements about your net worth of properties?

A: I try.

Q: Have you ever been not truthful?

A: My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and feelings, even my own feelings but I try.

Q: Let me just understand that a little bit. Let’s talk about that for a second. You said that the net worth goes up and down based on your own feelings?

A: Yes ….[29]

Then there’s one he filed against Bill Maher for saying he was fathered by an orang utan…

It’s a treasure-trove.

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Nice guys

Oct 24th, 2016 4:19 pm | By

Surprise surprise – Julian Assange and Donald Trump have things in common – and not just the predilection for sexual assault.

Julian Assange isn’t a Russia spy, but he is taking revenge on Hillary Clinton, and “if an anonymous or pseudonymous group came offering anti-Clinton leaks, they’d have found a host happy not to ask too many awkward questions,” James Ball, who worked with WikiLeaks when it made its biggest splash, in 2010, writes at BuzzFeed News.

Anti-Clinton animus isn’t the only thing driving Assange in 2016, after four years of self-imposed exile in a tiny apartment in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Ball writes: Assange thinks himself “the equal of a world leader,” and the leak of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails “is his shot at reclaiming the world stage, and settling a score with Hillary Clinton as he does so.” Yes, Donald Trump, the main beneficiary of this hack, is now praising WikiLeaks, as are many of his supporters, while Assange has lost many fans on the liberal left, Ball says, but “neither Assange nor WikiLeaks (and the two are virtually one and the same thing) have changed — the world they operate in has.”

I’ve never admired Assange.

Trump and Assange have quite a bit in common, Ball says: Like Trump, “Assange is a gifted public speaker with a talent for playing the media, struggling with an inability to scale up and professionalize his operation, to take advice, a man whose mission was often left on a backburner in his efforts to demonize his opponents.” Neither seems bothered by Russia’s authoritarianism. And then there’s Trump and Assange’s insistence on getting everyone to sign nondisclosure agreements — the thing Ball says led to his estrangement with Assange:

Those working at WikiLeaks — a radical transparency organization based on the idea that all power must be accountable — were asked to sign a sweeping nondisclosure agreement covering all conversations, conduct, and material, with Assange having sole power over disclosure. The penalty for noncompliance was £12 million. I refused to sign the document, which was sprung on me on what was supposed to be a short trip to a country house used by WikiLeaks…Given how remote the house was, there was no prospect of leaving. I stayed the night, only to be woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign. It was two hours later before I could get Assange off the bed.

The stuffed giraffe is a nice touch.

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Your innate, invisible gender identity

Oct 24th, 2016 9:57 am | By
Your innate, invisible gender identity

When beliefs about “gender” topple into full-on woo bullshit.

It’s a reply to a comment at the Huffington Post (which provides a link to the comment but not the reply, go figure):

capture

Vanessa Sheridan ·

Director of Transgender Relations and Community Engagement at Center on Halsted

With respect, I would suggest that how the world relates to you has nothing to do with your femininity. Femininity comes from within, not from without. How others may or may not perceive you has nothing to do with your innate, invisible gender identity. That identity is self-determined (at least in an emotionally healthy person), and external forces are simply that: external and, for the most part, extraneous. Oh, it’s nice when other people validate and affirm your femininity, to be sure, but other people don’t deserve to be allowed to determine it for you. Your femininity is a direct result of an innate and very personal awareness. The influence of others in this regard is only relevant to the degree that you permit it to be. Speaking only for myself, no one but me gets to determine the extent of my femininity. What other people think about it is irrelevant–because it’s my life, my body, and my identity, not theirs.

No. That’s completely wrong. It’s nonsensical.

How the world relates to you has everything to do with your gender, because gender is social. It’s not a magical inner feeling, it’s the hierarchy that frames women as subordinate to men. There is no such thing as “innate, invisible gender identity” – you might as well talk about fairies and goblins. Gender is not self-determined, because it is, again, social. It’s imposed. It would be lovely to be able to say the imposition is external and therefore extraneous and have it be true, but it isn’t true: women are socially constructed as the subordinate inferior sex, and that’s why we’re still arguing about it after all this time.

This is the politics of idiots, in the Greek sense – a private person who lacked the skills to participate in public life aka politics – the affairs of the polis. Claiming that gender is just a thought in the gender-haver’s head, independent of other people, is idiotic in that solipsistic way.

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Trump’s vocabulary exercise

Oct 24th, 2016 8:32 am | By

The Times has compiled a massive collection of Trump’s Twitter insults of various people and institutions. Each item is a link. That’s a lot of work!

Let’s look at the list under Elizabeth Warren:

“Sad to watch”
“bombed last night!”
“Pocahontas”
“Pocahontas”
“wanted V.P. slot so badly but wasn’t chosen because she has done nothing in the Senate”
“Pocahontas”
“a very weak Senator”

“Goofy”
“Pocahontas”
“Goofy”
“the least productive Senator in the U.S. Senate”
“Goofy”
“goofy”
“one of the least productive senators”
“Very racist!”
“Goofy”
“has a nasty mouth”
“one of the least productive U.S. Senators”
“Goofy”
“All talk, no action!”
“Total hypocrite!”
“lowlife!”
“Goofy”
“she doesn’t have a clue”
“If it were up to goofy Elizabeth Warren, we’d have no jobs in America”
“goofy”
“failed Senator”
“gets nothing done”
“lied”
“Our Native American Senator”
“goofy couldn’t care less about the American worker”
“does nothing to help!”
“using the woman’s card”
“didn’t have the guts to run for POTUS”
“Goofy”
“phony Native American heritage”
“didn’t have the guts to run for POTUS”
“Goofy”
“phony Native American heritage”
“has done nothing!”
“one of the least effective Senators in the entire U.S. Senate”
“Goofy”
“All talk, no action — maybe her Native American name?”
“Does nothing”
“weak and ineffective”
“Goofy”
“phony Native American heritage”
“Goofy”
“has a career that is totally based on a lie”
“Hillary Clinton’s flunky”
“Goofy”
“goofy”
“a fraud!”
“goofy”
Then there’s the Times itself:
“just write whatever they want to write, making up sources along the way!”
“don’t even call us anymore”
“failing”
“failing”
“failing”
“irresponsible intent”
“failing”
“Really disgusting”
“a laughingstock rag!”
“willing to say anything”
“has gone nuts”
“failing”
“failing”
“seriously failing”
“only writes dishonest hits!”
“no longer a credible source”
“at the back of the pack”
“has not reported properly”
“failing”
“a dying newspaper”
“gets worse and worse by the day”
“failing”
“failing”
“Their reporting is fiction”
“failing”
“Very dishonest!”
“newspaper of fiction”
“failing”
“a joke”
“failing”
“failing”
“These people are sick!”
“a total lie”
“failing”
“failing”
“So totally dishonest!”
“Very dishonest!”
“failing”
“failing”
“failing”
“Very sad!”
“Every article is unfair and biased”
“will always take a good story about me and make it bad”
“Failing”
“a disgusting fraud”
“has become a joke!”
“false, malicious & libelous”
“failing”
“failing”
“totally dishonest”
“failing”
“a fraud!”
“failing”
“so dishonest”
“totally dishonest”
“DISHONEST!”
“failing”
“Wow, I have had so many calls from high ranking people laughing at the stupidity of the failing @nytimes piece”
“failing”
“Everyone is laughing at the @nytimes for the lame hit piece they did on me and women”
“A joke!”
“wrote yet another hit piece on me”
“failing”
“has lost its way!”
“Always trying to belittle”
“the most inaccurate coverage constantly”
“bad”
“Becoming irrelevant!”
“a seriously failing paper”
“covers me so inaccurately”
“failing”
“Really bad people!”
“never even call to fact check”
“They knowingly write lies”
“truly one of the worst newspapers”
“failing”
“failing”
“allows dishonest writers to totally fabricate stories”
“failing”
“change your false story”
“boring articles”
“should focus on fair and balanced reporting”
“SAD!”
“big help will be needed fast”
“incompetent”
“made all bad decisions over the last decade”
“dopes”
“poorly run and managed”
“should be focused on good reporting and the papers financial survival”
“failing”
He’s a credit to us all.

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Convicted felon and mean asshole

Oct 24th, 2016 7:42 am | By

More from the Moral Vacuity Files – Dinesh D’Souza on Twitter:

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Erratic, empty, cruel, intolerant, and corrupt

Oct 24th, 2016 7:26 am | By

The New Yorker has a lo-o-o-ng editorial endorsing Clinton and dis-endorsing Trump. Some highlights:

…the Democratic nominee has ended up playing a sometimes secondary role in a squalid American epic. If she is elected, she will have weathered a prolonged battle against a trash-talking, burn-it-to-the-ground demagogue. Unfortunately, the drama is not likely to end soon. The aftereffects of this campaign may befoul our civic life for some time to come.

…

If the prospect of a female President represents a departure in the history of American politics, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, the real-estate mogul and Republican nominee, does, too—a chilling one. He is manifestly unqualified and unfit for office. Trained in the arts of real-estate promotion and reality television, he exhibits scant interest in or familiarity with policy. He favors conspiracy theory and fantasy, deriving his knowledge from the darker recesses of the Internet and “the shows.” He has never held office or otherwise served his country, never acceded to the authority of competing visions and democratic resolutions.

And, I would add, with all that, he considers himself good enough for the job. That error in judgment all by itself should be enough to disqualify him. It’s peak Dunning-Kruger, and you don’t want that in someone with power.

Worse still, he does not accept the authority of constitutional republicanism—its norms, its faiths and practices, its explicit rules and implicit understandings. That much is clear from his statements about targeting press freedoms, infringing on an independent judiciary, banning Muslim immigration, deporting undocumented immigrants without a fair hearing, reviving the practice of torture, and, in the third and final debate, his refusal to say that he will accept the outcome of the election. Trump has even threatened to prosecute and imprison his opponent. The American demagogues from the past century who most closely resemble him—Father Coughlin and Senator Joseph McCarthy among them—were dangers to the republic, but they never captured the Presidential nomination of a major political party.

The comparison to Father Coughlin pleases me. I’ve made it too.

Trump really does represent something singular. The prospect of such a President—erratic, empty, cruel, intolerant, and corrupt—represents a form of national emergency.

Empty and cruel – well-chosen words.

It is not merely narcissism that leads him to speak about grabbing women’s genitals or to endorse the “Lock Her Up!” chants directed at his opponent. It is his temperamental authoritarianism—a trait echoed in his admiration of Vladimir Putin.

…

The combination of free-form opportunism, heroic self-regard, blithe contempt for expertise, and an airy sense of infallibility has contributed to Trump’s profound estrangement from the truth.

They write well at that place.

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All worked up on adrenaline

Oct 23rd, 2016 5:12 pm | By

Rebecca Solnit shared a discouraging story of random misogynist aggression from Mary Diaz:

Driving through the back roads this morning I was enjoying the energy of this pack of road bikers in front of me taking up 2/3 of the lane. Until one of them yelled into my open window “You fucking stupid cunt!” I was driving slow as I passed on the left and there were at least 30 men in this group – wasn’t sure how to navigate around them so I’d slowed down as I passed. A mile or so later I pulled over when I realized his comment had left me shaking. Then there they were pulled up across the street stopping for a break…

So she went over to talk to the leader about the random misogynist aggression.

The pack leader interjected “aww come on hon…don’t get emotional…didn’t mean anything by it… just a bunch of guys…all worked up on adrenaline….wasn’t personal…” And there it was my anger and it was clear and sharp. I pointed at him and said “YOU do not call me ‘hon.’ YOU do not tell me not to be emotional. You think you’re allowed to get emotional and verbally assault a stranger and then deny them the right to react?” He stammered dumbly but I kept going not quite as shaky “Whoever said that…you hurt me. I want you to know that your words had an impact.” I felt completely ridiculous right then but he tried once again muttering about guys and their egos and getting caught up in the intensity (of the ride)…competition and anyway it was just a joke…

Nope, calling a woman “You fucking stupid cunt!” out of the blue is not a joke. Between friends it could be, but between total strangers passing on a road it could not. She told him that and some more and went back to her car.

As I pulled out one of the men peddled up grabbing my open window and looked me all the way in the eyes. “It was me…who said it. I’m sorry. Thank you for slowing down…I get worked up sometimes. I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.” And he was. So I said thank you awkwardly and drove away.

What I find so discouraging about that is the utter randomness and lack of motivation. People on my wall are saying he was angry, but that’s not in the story – they’re reading it in. In the story he simply shouted it at her for no reason. Maybe he was tired and hitting a wall, so he called a random passing woman a fucking stupid cunt. Or maybe it was something else in his head, but whatever it was is not in the story. All we have in the story is a man exploding with misogynist loathing at a total stranger for no reason. That kind of thing makes me think we’re all doomed. Melting glaciers, and misogyny that will never die.

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