Guest post by George Felis, from a discussion on the “right to insult people” issue elsewhere.

In addition to the obvious smug stupidity here, there’s a subtler level of plain old ignorance: Very few people understand what a “right” is. The word “right” does not necessarily always mean a civil right, legal right, or constitutional right. For one person to have a “right” simply means that some other person or persons has an obligation to do or refrain from doing something that affects that person. For example, children have a right to the love and care of their parents because their parents have a moral obligation to love and care for any children they create. Rights can be personal (an obligation owed by a particular person or persons) or universal (an obligation owed by everyone).

Since everyone has a moral obligation to refrain from heaping insults and abuse on people who have done nothing to deserve it — and, more generally, an obligation to refrain from inflicting any kind of undeserved harm on anyone — people do in fact have a moral right not to be insulted. I suppose someone might disagree with this very modest moral principle, but the principle is so transparently obvious and so widely shared that the burden of proof ought to fall on someone who rejects the principle rather than those who accept it.

Furthermore, whenever someone violates this obvious moral principle without offering any justification whatsoever for doing so, they have clearly done something objectionable and wrong. And if you do something obviously wrong (without being able to offer any justification, or indeed without even trying), your behavior deserves some sort of censure or punishment. Therefore, someone who called you an asshole for heaping abuse and insults on undeserving people would not be violating the principle that you one shouldn’t heap abuse and insults on undeserving people — because you would be deserving rather than undeserving.

Therefore, Milo Yiannopoulos and all his sycophantic man-boy cronies who attacked Leslie Jones for the horrible “offense” of being a successful black woman in a popular film are all worthless assholes. (Incidentally, the whole purpose of a sphincter is to keep defecation inside rather than letting it spill out into the world anywhere and everywhere, so calling these feces-spewing goons “worthless assholes” is descriptively accurate as well as richly deserved.)
Q.E.D. ;-)

Erdoğan’s purges continue.

[T]he Turkish government crackdown widened on Tuesday to include the education sector and government departments.

Turkish media announced that:

• 15,200 teachers and other education staff had been sacked
• 1,577 university deans were ordered to resign
• 8,777 interior ministry workers were dismissed
• 1,500 staff in the finance ministry had been fired
• 257 people working in the prime minister’s office were sacked

Turkey’s media regulation body on Tuesday also revoked the licences of 24 radio and TV channels accused of links to Mr Gulen.

The news came on top of the arrests of more than 6,000 military personal and the sackings of nearly 9,000 police officers. About 3,000 judges have also been suspended.

The removal of thousands of officials has alarmed international observers, with the UN urging Turkey to uphold the rule of law and defend human rights.

Reichstag fire.

This is scary. When I say Trump is scary I’m not being hyperbolic or metaphorical, I mean scary. Getting people killed scary. Stirring up the fascist beast scary.

One of his advisers has said Clinton should be shot for treason.

A New Hampshire state representative who advises Donald Trump on veterans’ issues called Tuesday for Hillary Clinton to be “put in the firing line and shot for treason” for her handling of the Benghazi terror attack.

Appearing on WRKO radio from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, state Representative Al Baldasaro, a Londonderry Republican, called the presumptive Democratic nominee “a piece of garbage.”

…

“She is a disgrace . . . for the lies that she told those mothers about their children that got killed over there in Benghazi,” Baldasaro said of Clinton. “She dropped the ball on over 400 e-mails requesting backup security. Something’s wrong there.”

“This whole thing disgusts me,” Baldasaro said. “Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”

This is Trump world. It’s a bad world.

A Clinton campaign spokeswoman pointed to Trump in response to Baldasaro’s remarks, saying in a statement that the nominee’s “overtaking of the Republican Party — and his constant escalation of outrageous rhetoric — is in danger of mainstreaming the kind of hatred that has long been relegated to the fringes of American politics where it belongs.”

“This week at the Republican convention, we’ve seen the clearest embodiment yet of this dangerous phenomenon,” she said.

I don’t want to live in a fascist America. I don’t want anyone to have to live there.

The moral bankruptcy de nos jours – a comment right here on my post about Milo Yiannopoulos’s permanent banishment from Twitter –

I’m indifferent. I know little about the tweets aimed at Jones, but I do know that no one has a ‘right’ not to be insulted or offended.

Emphasis added.

It could be the anthem of the Sadistic Callous Asshole brigade – no one has a ‘right’ not to be insulted or offended, therefore I can and will devote all my leisure time to insulting people on Twitter.

The lack of thought of it – the crudity – the emptiness. Yes, no kidding, there aren’t laws against being mean and rude. We know that. We know that treating people decently in everyday life isn’t a matter for legislators or the police. We know that. It’s entirely beside the point. Yes you have the legal right to say horrible wounding things to your best friend or spouse or child or sibling or parent – but that doesn’t matter. You have the legal right to be mean and insulting to wait staff, sales clerks, bus drivers, janitors – but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that you have the legal right. It’s a bad thing to do and you shouldn’t do it. Cruelty and sadism are bad and you shouldn’t engage in them. Deliberately hurting people is bad and you shouldn’t do it. Dani Mathers did an appalling thing by taking that picture and posting it online with a jeer, and it would be every bit as appalling even if there were no law against taking photos of naked people in locker rooms without permission. The law doesn’t cover everything that’s bad and wrong to do, so pointing out that you can insult people if you want to just lets the world know that you have the moral sense of a brick.

The existence of Twitter has taught us that the world is stuffed with people who are just ecstatic to be able to be sadistic to strangers in public with no consequences. Saying no one has a ‘right’ not to be insulted or offended just reiterates the problem. I’m sick to death of smug people telling the world that they’re not legally obliged to refrain from tormenting people.

Famous Twitter harasser Milo Yiannopoulos has finally been banned altogether from the social platform that made him internet-famous. It’s about time. The guy has built a career (however shoddy) on sadistically torturing people via Twitter.

Twitter has permanently banned a rightwing writer and notorious troll for his role in the online abuse of Leslie Jones over her role in the Ghostbusters reboot.

Milo Yiannopoulos, the technology editor for Breitbart.com, tweeted as @Nero. Before he was banned, he had more than 338,000 followers and called himself “the most fabulous supervillain on the internet” for his provocations online.

A known contrarian who likened rape culture to Harry Potter (“both fantasy”) and affectionately referred to Donald Trump as “daddy”, he emerged as a spokesman for the “alt-right” in the wake of the Gamergate movement.

“Contrarian” is a stupid word for what he does. Contrary to what? It’s not as if misogyny is an obscure or minority outlook. I suppose he’s “contrarian” in the sense that the “orthodox” view is that we shouldn’t bully strangers on social media for giggles.

Yiannopolous told Breitbart.com his suspension was “cowardly”, and evidence that Twitter was a “no-go zone for conservatives”.

“Like all acts of the totalitarian regressive left, this will blow up in their faces, netting me more adoring fans. We’re winning the culture war, and Twitter just shot themselves in the foot.

“This is the end for Twitter. Anyone who cares about free speech has been sent a clear message: you’re not welcome on Twitter.”

Blah blah blah blah. Mommy interfered with his free speech when she told him not to be rude to his classmates, people on the street, people in shops, people on the bus, dinner guests.

Here’s the thing, Milo: free speech is about public discourse and substantive disagreement and minority opinion. It is not an ironclad rule that everyone should be as rude as possible at all times in all situations and all media. It’s not a law that protects your right to harass people. Free speech doesn’t extend to harassment.

On Monday, Jones had started publicising some of the abuse she had received on the platform, much of it singling her out for being black and a woman.

After she made public pleas for Twitter to intervene, its chief executive, Jack Dorsey, asked her to make contact late on Monday night.

But she later appeared to quit the platform “with tears and a very sad heart”.

So Milo jeered at her for being a victim.

A spokesman for Twitter said in a statement that “permanent suspension” was one of a number of steps that had been taken to address the uptick in offending accounts since Jones began rallying against her abusers.

“People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter. But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.”

In theory they do, but in practice Twitter almost never enforces those rules. Milo is the exception, not the rule.

The statement also addressed criticisms that the platform does not go far enough to protect its users, particularly women and people of colour.

“We know many people believe we have not done enough to curb this type of behavior on Twitter. We agree. We are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to better allow us to identify and take faster action on abuse as it’s happening and prevent repeat offenders.”

Nowhere near enough. They get reports on people who harass nonstop for hours every day, and they reply saying “No problem here, sorry not sorry.”

A review of Twitter’s “hateful conduct policy” was under way and would prohibit more types of abusive behaviour as well as allow more forms of reporting, “with the goal of reducing the burden on the person being targeted”.

More details on those changes were due in the coming weeks, said the spokesman.

They’ve said that before. It didn’t happen.

Brighton Grammar expelled the two boys who set up the Instagram account to post pictures of much younger girls and label them “sluts.”

Police are investigating the social media account, which was created on Friday and featured photos of girls as young as 11 without their knowledge.

The school is reeling from the scandal, and reassuring parents and students that it will not tolerate “disrespectful behaviour on any social media”.

“Disrespectful” is not the right word. It’s much, much too mild. What those boys did is misogynist, and cruel, and damaging. We really need to not trivialize or minimize this kind of shit. We need to name it accurately.

The case was brought to the public’s attention after a concerned Melbourne mother wrote on Facebook that photos of her young daughter had been uploaded onto the vile Instagram account.

…

The mother told the ABC her daughter was walking with Grade 6 friends after school to meet her at an arranged pick up point when she was unwittingly snapped. They did not know about the post until seeing it online that night.

She said her family had been involved with Brighton Grammar for generations and she did not blame the school.

Instead, she blamed the boys’ parents, adding that misogyny was at the root of Australia’s domestic violence crisis.

There. She recognizes it for what it is; the school should be able to do the same.

“Shame on you for raising boys who have violated young girls … If this was isolated, perhaps I wouldn’t be as enraged as I am right now, but I hold those parents as responsible, as I do those boys.”

She said it was not a once-off event and she had screen shots of numerous offensive messages the same boys had sent to other girls in the past.

“Disrespectful” just doesn’t begin to cover it.

She “apologized.”

https://youtu.be/G8z2KC74n4o

At 19 seconds:

That photo was taken to be part of a personal conversation with a girlfriend

Stop right there. You don’t get to take naked photos of people without permission. PERIOD.

Also by saying that she yanked the rug out from under her claim that she’s “not that kind of person.” Please. That “personal conversation” with a “girlfriend” (she means friend) would not have been about how nice the other women at the gym are and what a good time she was having, it would have been about the horror of seeing women who don’t look like Danni Mathers. That’s the kind of person she is.

So the big question today is (not counting the one about will the US go down in flames in a few months or not) why did anyone think it was a good idea to fill out Melania Trump’s convention speech by plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s from 2008?

The disarray was evident as Mr. Trump’s campaign and senior Republicans offered conflicting explanations for the similarities in the speeches, with some officials conceding that the passages were lifted and demanding accountability, and others arguing that nothing untoward had occurred.

They aren’t similarities you know. They’re the same words.

Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, pushed back aggressively against accusations of plagiarism and even tried to go on the offensive.

Describing it as “a great speech,” Mr. Manafort said at a morning convention briefing that “obviously Michelle Obama feels very similar sentiments toward her family.”

And that’s why she copied Melania Trump’s speech eight years in advance.

Deflecting questions about the passages themselves, Mr. Manafort instead attacked Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, for what he said was an effort to draw attention to the matter.

“This is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, she seeks out to demean her and take her down,” Mr. Manafort said on CNN. “It’s not going to work against Melania Trump.”

Also, we lost the war because the Jews and the bankers stabbed us in the back!!

Here are the relevant passages:

Ms. Trump, Monday night:

From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily lives. That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to our son. And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.

Mrs. Obama, in her 2008 speech:

“Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them, and even if you don’t agree with them. And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them onto the next generation. Because we want our children — and all children in this nation — to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.”

There’s another thing about that – which is that “willingness to work for them” have rather different overtones coming from Melania Trump as opposed to Michelle Obama. Trump’s “achievements” are more the result of inheritance and cheating than they are of work. The Obamas? Not so much.

Guest post by Pieter Droogendijk

I have a rage. I’m not linking to anything, because the articles in question don’t deserve even one additional hit. But here’s the thing; there’s apparently an uproar on the internet about Rogue One, Star Wars, Ghost Busters, Mad Max, and a bunch of other crap. Here’s my take:

MORE FEMALE LEADS!

If it were up to me, every movie would have a lady protagonist. I don’t care if it “makes sense for the story;” it’s a story. Make it make sense. We have some catching up to do; men have led movies since the first one.

So another item from the Washington Post snagged my attention while I was reading the first one – sidebars work, kids! It snagged my attention so I read it, in horror.

A Playboy Playmate found this normal woman’s naked body gross. So she posted it online.

Because it’s important for the world at large to see and judge random people’s naked bodies.

Dani Mathers, Playboy’s 2015 Playmate of the Year, was at L.A. Fitness on Wednesday when the body of a fellow gym-goer offended her. The 29-year-old took to Snapchat to post the woman’s body — naked, on her story.

The caption: “If I can’t see unsee this then you can’t either.” It pictured Mathers, sporting weight-lifting gloves and a Nike tank top, covering her mouth in false-shock. What resulted was likely thousands looking at this woman’s nude body, fat-shamed by a blond Playmate, on Mathers’s public Snapchat.

Now it’s her turn to be shamed all over social media, so in a sense I shouldn’t join in by blogging about it…But I am anyway, because this kind of casual sadism interests me. It interests me partly, but only partly, because I’ve been subjected to a huge amount of it myself. Because of that I’ve learned that there are a surprisingly large number of people who are ostensibly adult, intelligent, in some sense thoughtful, who are perfectly comfortable doing this kind of thing. That is surprising to me, because it seems like being perfectly comfortable touching a red-hot stove burner.

What possessed her? What caused her to feel (rather than think) that her distaste for a stranger’s body justified her in taking a picture of it and publishing the picture online? What causes people to feel that way?

I suppose it’s partly to do with the relentless perfectionism of US media culture and porn culture, with the relentless exclusion from tv and movies of women who are too old too fat too plain too average too ordinary too flawed too not like a Playboy model. I suppose it’s partly to do with a culture that pretends women who are lawyers look like Julianna Margulies and women who are cops look like Mariska Hargitay. That perhaps partly explains the demented perfectionism, but it doesn’t explain the sadism.

That’s how it should work.

Shannon Sullivan was surprised, then angry.

Not two months after 2-year-old Lane Graves was dragged into a lake by an alligator at a Disney resort and killed, she found herself face-to-face with a sign that made her deeply uncomfortable.

The Disney College Program bills itself as a “life-changing,” “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity. Sullivan knew that she might lose her summer internship if she spoke out about this sign, but she couldn’t hold her tongue. She was willing to risk her spot in the program, one she quickly lost after she posted a photo of the sign to Twitter.

What did the sign say? “Alligators are friendly and cuddly, jump in the water and play with them!”? Not quite, but too close.

The sign read, in full:

If a Guest asks if we have gators in the water around Tom Sawyer’s Island (or any bodies of water), the correct and appropriate response is, “Not that we know of, but if we see one, we will call Pest Management to have it removed.” Please do not say we have seen them before. We do not want our Guests to be afraid while walking around Frontierland [part of Disney’s Magic Kingdom]. As a reminder, this is a serious matter. Please do not make jokes with our guests about this.

After the toddler was killed by the alligator. That’s the “correct” response how, exactly?

So Sullivan took a picture of the sign and posted it on Twitter, knowing it would probably get her fired. It did.

Her tryst with unemployment didn’t last long, though. That night, the Orlando Sentinel reached out to Disney with questions about the termination. The next morning, Magic Kingdom Vice President Dan Cockerell visited Sullivan himself to offer her internship back, which she accepted.

Disney removed the offending sign, claiming it was never authorized, the Associated Press reported.

The managers put up a lot of signs for day to day operational stuff, which don’t need approval from upper levels, and they considered this one such sign. I hope the upper levels at Disney have instructed managers to take safety more seriously than that now.

I have some experience of this, actually. I once worked at a zoo, which means I worked at a place where people could, if they tried hard enough, put themselves in danger from animals. Mostly that didn’t happen, but the potential was there.

At the time of Graves’s death, there were no signs warning visitors of dangerous animals. Three days after Graves’s death, the Walt Disney World Resort installed signs along the beachfront of its resorts that warn guests of alligators and snakes.

So Sullivan was right – and she got her job back.

Boy Scouts of America please note.

Via Muslim and Exmuslim Women for Secularism:

“Masculinity so fragile, a woman only needs to breathe to hurt it.” Artwork by Rahema Alam.

Boys at a private school in Melbourne set up an Instagram account last week in order to post photos of little girls and call them sluts.

Police are investigating an Instagram account which was set up by students at an exclusive private boys’ school to share photos of young girls without their knowledge.

The offensive account was created by two Year 11 boys at Brighton Grammar School and encouraged viewers to vote on the “slut of the year”.

“Offensive” isn’t the right word there. It’s misogynist and sexist and rapey.

A Melbourne mother who spoke out in disgust on her Facebook page after discovering that photos of her young daughter were uploaded onto the social media page, told Fairfax Media that she received a threatening phone call from from an “old boys’ club” parent on Sunday night.

The caller, who phoned on a blocked number, said the Instagram account “was just a group of young boys having fun”.

Having “fun” by violating the privacy of younger girls, by inviting people to call them “sluts,” by treating them as contemptible objects of sexual consumption, by expressing contempt for them themselves. That’s a deeply fucked up idea of “fun” and that parent should get in the sea.

One photo apparently showed a schoolgirl wearing bikini bottoms and a white singlet top and included a caption describing sex acts she would perform, the mother said. Another photo featured a group of grade six girls in their school uniforms as they walked to meet their parents after school.

“I am writing this as a mother of a girl that has not only been sexualised but violated within our small community,” the concerned mother wrote on a public Facebook post, which was shared hundreds of times before she made the post private on Sunday night.

What is this sick combination of sexual interest coupled with loathing and contempt?

The account – which was titled ys_academy_puspus – was set up by the students after school on Friday and deleted over the weekend after Brighton Grammar became aware of its existence. It is understood that YS stands for “young sluts”.

Maybe it will be the Facebook of tomorrow.

Right Wing Watch tells us about one of the people speaking at the Republican convention this week.

The Republican National Convention released a partial list today of the politicians, activists, C-list celebrities and Donald Trump family members who will be speaking at next week’s convention. What the speakers’ list lacks in establishment GOP leaders it makes up for in fringe activists. One name especially stands out: Sheriff David Clarke, the Milwaukee law enforcement officer who has made a name for himself hurling anti-Obama vitriol on Fox News and elsewhere while quietly cozying up to anti-government extremist groups.

Clarke, who is African American, has built a conservative following by enthusiastically bashing President Obama, his Justice Department, Hillary Clinton and the Black Lives Matter movement.

…

Clarke has been colorful in his condemnation of President Obama and Hillary Clinton for sympathizing with the Black Lives Matter movement, calling them “straight-up cop haters.” He called Obama a “heartless, soulless bastard” for speaking up about “goons” killed by police and said that the Obama administration’s attempts to address racial disparities in policing were a plot to “emasculate the police” in order to impose dictatorial control.” He accused the president of worsening racial divides in the country by pitting “whites against blacks” and “Hispanics against Americans.”

The sheriff is also happy to throw red meat to his conservative audience on a number of other topics. After the Supreme Court struck down state marriage equality bans, Clarke called for a “revolution” to “get this country back,” complete with “ pitchforks and torches ,” urging his audience to launch a standoff against the federal government the next time a bakery or the like is fined for refusing business to a same-sex couple.

Not all that surprising in a Trump ally, I suppose. But it gets worse.

While Clarke has no patience for African Americans who have deadly run-ins with the police, he has repeatedly associated himself with anti-government militia groups who have staged armed standoffs with federal government agents or who threaten to defy federal law. Earlier this year, when a group of armed activists took over a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, Clarke backed their cause, saying that the country had reached a “pitchforks and torches moment” that couldn’t be solved by an election.

In 2013, after he aired his ads discouraging citizens from relying on 911, Clarke accepted the “ Constitutional Sheriff of the Year” award from the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an anti-government group that promotes the idea that county sheriffs are the highest law enforcement officers in the country and thus have the power to defy federal laws that they believe are unconstitutional. In his acceptance speech , Clarke declared that “government” was the “common enemy” of the “patriots” in the room. In a radio interview that year, he said that “on an everyday basis, to me, federal government is a bigger threat” than terrorism.

Just this year, Clarke spoke at a fundraising event for the New York chapter of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government group aligned with the Constitutional Sheriffs that urges law enforcement officers and military personnel to defy laws they believe are unconstitutional and encourages its members to form militias ready to defy an out-of-control federal government.

That’s fucking scary. It’s fascism – and he’s speaking at the Republican convention.

Another day, another Allahu Akbar. Today’s location is Germany.

A police operation is underway in the German town of Heidingsfeld, part of the southern city of Würzburg, after a man launched an attack on a regional passenger train at around 9.15pm local time (1915 UTC) on Monday.

Three people were seriously injured and a fourth suffered light injuries. Another 14 are being treated for shock.

The suspect was a 17-year-old Afghan refugee.

The teenager reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” before launching the attack using a knife and axe. He was shot dead by police in Heidingsfeld as he attempted to flee the scene. His motive was not immediately clear.

If it’s true that he shouted “Allahu Akbar” then his motive is pretty clear.

I shouldn’t laugh, but…who could possibly help it?

What We Mean When We Say “Femme”: A Roundtable

Oh wow, don’t you just long to know what they mean when they say “femme”? I’m all agog, myself.

Femmes. We live in different places. We’re different ages. We have different gender identities. Some of us are people of color, some of us are white. In this representative sample, we are Autostraddle writers, or artists, or musicians, or educators, or all of these things. The only thing we have in common is that we’re queer and that, in our own deeply personal way, we breathe life into the word femme. But like so many other differences, we don’t agree on what the word femme means to us. This is the beauty of gender fluidity. We live in a world where it is totally possible to claim the same word as someone else and completely disagree on what the word means.

We are this Word, but we disagree on what the word means – yet all the same we know we are it. Isn’t life exciting? Isn’t having everything both ways a joy? Isn’t it fabulous to be fluid and rigid at the very same time? And by the way, don’t you just hate femmephobes?

In organizing this roundtable, I did have some questions in mind, like: what does the word femme mean to you, personally? How do you think the meaning of the word femme has changed in the past ten years? Do you tie your experience of femme to emotional labor, or care work? What are your femme roots? And do you lean on a queer femme aesthetic to signal your queerness, and if so, do you think this aesthetic has been co-opted? The answers revealed the exciting ways the queer world is living the word femme, right now, in this moment.

And are you totally self-obsessed, or mostly self-obsessed, or very self-obsessed indeed? The answers reveal the exciting ways self-obsession has completely replaced actual politics while nobody noticed.

Or did someone notice? Did Rudy notice?

None of the ways I describe femme are based on how someone looks. When I re-discovered femme, it was really linked to witchy things, and spirituality, and care work. Femme is connected to emotional labor and healing. It’s based on the energy you put into the world, the connection you make with people and the care you have for them. It’s allowing a particular kind of tenderness to be part of your identity. That might sound really woo-woo, but it’s true. It’s not just an aesthetic. Having something based on just aesthetics is really dangerous because it removes the politics from things.

Look around you, Rudy. It’s coming from inside the house.

The failed coup has been a gift to Erdoğan. Patrick Coburn at the Independent says he’s using it to get rid of what’s left of secularism in Turkey.

The number of people detained so far is at 6,000 including soldiers, and around 3,000 judges and legal officials who are unlikely to have been connected to the attempted military takeover.

Reichstag fire.

The failed coup is serving as an excuse for a massive round-up of members of the judiciary and army officers, far greater than anything seen in Turkey for years, and is presumably a bid to secure Erdogan’s grip on the Turkish state. So numerous are those detained that a sports stadium is being used to hold some of them, a development that has ominous similarities with mass arrests in South American coups in the last century. Some 140 out of 387 judges in the Court of Appeal have been detained along with 48 out of 156 from the Council of State.

It may be that Erdogan is using the coup to eliminate the most powerful officials seen as loyal to Turkey as a secular state.

Just possibly.

The NY Times on the Baton Rouge shooter.

As investigators worked, details about [Gavin] Long, 29, of Kansas City, Mo., began to emerge. Court records filed in Missouri showed that Mr. Long filed a name-change notice with the Jackson County recorder’s office, seeking to change his name to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra and saying he was a member of an indigenous tribe. A spokeswoman for the court said Mr. Long never filed a petition with the court, so the document was not legally binding.

Using that name, Mr. Long billed himself online as a self-help author and life coach who could help men become more “alpha.”

Like the gunman who killed five police officers more than a week ago in Dallas, Mr. Long had served abroad in the military.

Men who see themselves as “alpha,” and who see “alpha” maleness as a valuable thing, and who have spent time in the military.

Internet domain search tools show that Mr. Long registered a website called convoswithcosmo.club in April. Another website, registered privately, convoswithcosmo.com, is filled with blog posts and podcasts that match Mr. Long’s biography, including his stint in the military and educational career. The site promotes three self-help books and offers life coaching sessions for $119 an hour.

The podcasts, which began in April, are more focused toward helping men become more authoritative to impress women.

And to subordinate them. That’s what alpha males do, after all – no alpha male is going to be pussywhipped. Those are the only two choices: either the male dominates, or he’s pussywhipped. Equality isn’t a thing.