Guest post by Bruce Everett.

It’s a peculiar thing, watching people who slowly slide towards fascism without realizing it. Their fear of humiliation from mostly imaginary threats is a given, but what’s really striking is how a number of them – even the ones with university educations – have a propensity to call out really odd targets as being fascists, in a way totally divorced from the facts of 20th century history.

Left-wing unionists aren’t perfect, and some of them can be authoritarian and down right nasty. But even when they are authoritarian, they aren’t fascists – they can’t be.

Ditto with calling feminists “fascist”. Fascism has always, without exception, on one way or another, positioned women as second class citizens. Not every feminist can be perfect, and some aren’t very nice people, but all the same it’s ridiculous to associate their politics with fascism because fascism rejects feminism (either by stealth, implication or often explicitly).

So you get these people, who’re easily swayed by demagoguery and dire warnings of existential threat, and they get their backs up before a feminist, or a left-wing unionist, or any of the other textbook enemies of fascism, makes a criticism, explicit or otherwise.

Maybe it’s a bad album review. Maybe they’ve pointed to an politically inconvenient, well sourced and inductively strong fact about domestic violence or immigration statistics. Maybe they’ve opined that vigilante street patrols aren’t making anyone safer, and called people’s motives into question.

Whatever it is, it sticks in Whiny McWhinyPants’s craw, so Whiny whines “FASCIST!” before sitting down to cover Whiny’s chest in crumbs, all while mendacious pundits, YouTubers and crackpots tell Whiny that Whiny’s the victim, and that this other bunch of innocent people are responsible for Whiny’s embarrassment. That and maybe that someone needs to teach these people a brutal lesson in not embarrassing Virtuous People. [Insert dog whistle]

Reeves Wiedeman, who wrote a long profile of Simone Biles for the New Yorker, says how the tv coverage of women’s gymnastics is shit – it’s that it avoids explaining the technicalities to focus on drama instead, pretty much on the grounds that that’s what the laydeez want, because we’re stupid.

In defending its coverage of gymnastics and other Olympic sports, NBC often falls back on the fact that more women than men watch the Olympics, which the network believes should affect the way it covers the events. “They’re less interested in the result and more interested in the journey,” John Miller, NBC’s chief marketing officer for the Olympics, said last month, explaining the network’s coverage. “It’s sort of like the ultimate reality show and miniseries wrapped into one.”

Giggle giggle giggle.

Biles is perhaps the greatest gymnast of all time, and these Olympics may be the only time most Americans will get to see her perform. Might they want to know what makes her so good? There is, for instance, the fact that she requires fewer steps and less speed to get into the meat of tumbling runs, enabling her to fit more skills, and score more points, in her routines.

There you go. Yes, I would have liked to know that. I could see some of her amazingness just by looking, but I couldn’t see that. I could see that she was fitting in more skills, but not that she required fewer steps and less speed. Yes, I would have been interested.

The killer fact is in the final paragraph.

One of the factors preventing Americans from appreciating just how difficult it is to do what an Olympic gymnast does is the fact that competitors are expected to perform their routines without betraying any evidence of effort. Watching LeBron James drive into the lane, bounce off multiple defenders, and then rise above them seems so impressive in part because James grimaces along the way. Serena Williams growls with every shot. The effort is obvious. A gymnast, meanwhile, is expected to risk life and limb with a smile on her face. “You’re never supposed to show that it’s difficult,” O’Beirne said. She pointed out that there is no such requirement for male gymnasts. “You can trace that back to the eighteen-hundreds, when women wore corsets and they were supposed to act like they weren’t in horrible pain. Why can’t Nastia wear her bitch face?” When you’re dealing with perhaps the greatest gymnastics team of all time, explaining to Madeleine just how difficult it is to be as great as they are should be ratings fodder enough.

Good god. They’re not supposed to show the effort.

As a matter of fact I did notice Laurie Hernandez shifting from a smile to an effort-grimace during her tumbling runs. I was interested to see that, and watched for it. It didn’t mar her performance. Difficult things are difficult.

Max Bearak at the Washington Post on the dreadful situation in Baluchistan:

Baluchistan is a place that desperately needs lawyers.

Pakistan’s largest province by area, it is the home of a decades-old separatist insurgency, fueled by real grievances over neglect and lack of political representation. It is also increasingly the target of Sunni extremists, who bomb and kill its Shiite minorities. What leaders the province has are widely considered corrupt. Dozens of local journalists have been kidnapped in the past few years. It is nearly impossible for foreign reporters to enter Baluchistan. Lawyers are almost all that give the province a semblance of justice.

And now a large percentage of them have been slaughtered.

They were packed into an emergency room where the body of a slain colleague lay, riddled with gunshot wounds. A widely circulated video showed lawyers milling about the hospital before an enormous explosion. A Pakistani Taliban offshoot claimed the attack, as did the Islamic State, though analysts say the latter’s claim is dubious.

And it’s not as if it will be easy to replace them. If you were a lawyer would you want to move to Baluchistan?

The global response has been muted. Ban Ki-moon, Hillary Clinton and other international figures issued brief statements. Pakistan’s leaders did much the same. No officials have been held responsible for the security breakdown at what should have been a highly guarded scene. The website of Dawn, a Pakistani English-language newspaper, had only a day-old story and photo gallery about the attack on its homepage on Tuesday evening.

The response should not be muted.

Photo of lawyers killed in #QuettaAttack shared widely on Twitter.Many mourning a'generation of lawyers'#QuettaBlast pic.twitter.com/1rXPd42659

— shaimaa khalil BBC (@Shaimaakhalil) August 9, 2016

Inspire posted on Facebook:

Yesterday after the conviction of Tanveer Ahmed who murdered Asad Shah, Bradford Council of Mosques told BBC Newsnight that the Government should reintroduce blasphemy law in the UK as “faith communities have the right not to be offended.”

We at Inspire firmly disagree and would oppose any attempt to bring back any kind of blasphemy law. There is no right not to be offended. There is is however the right to free expression and freedom of religion.

And while we’re on the subject of more or less veiled or implied or ambiguous threats – Peter Walker shared this cuddly story about a guy who “monitored” cops at a Portland (Oregon) precinct for months, from a car that held enough weapons and ammunition to take down a platoon.

A 39-year-old man who police describe as a “self-proclaimed Constitutionalist” was arrested Sunday with a cache of weapons.

Officers first noticed Eric Eugene Crowl parked outside Portland Police Bureau’s East Precinct in April. He would reportedly sit in his gray Chevrolet Tahoe and film police officers as they entered and left the building during shift changes, police said.

He also had a police scanner in his car, according to PPB.

On April 22, an officer spoke over the police radio frequency to report that he had seen Crowl watching and filming officers over the past week. Crowl was pulled over during a traffic stop, and when officers asked him why he had been following police he responded by saying, “it was his right to do so and he was a ‘free man.’”

In a way, it is his right to do that, in some sense. (I don’t know if there are any laws against it or not.) Citizens have a moral right to monitor public officials. But…in other ways maybe not. Do they have a moral right to do that from a car full of loaded guns? No, I don’t think so.

On June 21, an officer with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force went to Crowl’s home on the 14700 block of SE Rhone Street. Crowl reportedly told the officer “his intention of videotaping and scanning the police was to hold law enforcement accountable.”

Crowl allegedly had a negative experience with PPB and Washington County Sheriff’s Office in the past and took it upon himself to weed out any “bad apples”.

Crowl told the JTTF investigator that “he did not mean to harm anyone or cause any problems to law enforcement who are doing their job accordingly,” records state.

The problem with that is that you can’t “hold law enforcement accountable” by filming cops going in and out of the precinct during shift changes. All that does is…well, threaten, frankly. The stuff the police need to be held accountable for doesn’t happen as cops go in and out for shift changes. This implies that it’s logistically quite difficult to hold police accountable by monitoring them in a useful way, and that’s true, because they’re work is reactive by nature, as opposed to scheduled. Parking outside the precinct with a camera isn’t going to work as a form of monitoring the police for examples of brutality or racial profiling or the like.

To put it another way: scary shit.

I’d forgotten this. Sarah Palin’s cross-hairs on political “enemies” – one of whom was Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head days later.

Two of the worst guys in the world have patched up their quarrel. Putin and Erdoğan are besties again.

What brought the two he-men back together?

[A]fter the 15 July coup attempt in Turkey, Mr Putin expressed support for Mr Erdogan. He did not criticise Mr Erdogan’s crackdown on political opponents and purge of alleged “plotters” in state institutions.

The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford says Russia is keen to capitalise on Turkey’s cooling relations with the West following the failed coup.

Mr Erdogan was angered by criticism from the EU and the US of the mass detentions of suspected plotters.

If people are giving you the stink-eye because of your brisk way with human rights, who ya gonna call? Not the same kind of bleeding heart human rights-lovers who are scowling at you, but a standup no bullshit fuck all this PC nonsense guy like Putin, that’s who.

It’s not all roses and chocolates though. They have their differences.

They back opposing sides in Syria. Turkey is furious at the scale of Russian air support for Syrian government forces, as Mr Erdogan reviles Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Russia has accused Turkey of backing Islamist anti-Assad groups, including some accused of “terrorism” in Russia.

Turkey is at war with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the PKK’s Syrian allies. Mr Erdogan has accused Russia of arming the PKK.

For centuries Russia and Turkey have been rivals for influence in the Caucasus and Black Sea region.

Turkey was also angered by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, accusing Moscow of violating the rights of Crimean Tatars. The Muslim Tatars have long had close ties to Turkey.

Russia annexed Crimea??! I thought that was Obama! Or Hillary! Or future-Hillary! Someone like that.

From the “what are they thinking?!” files –

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group classified as a terrorist group in Egypt, qualify for asylum in the UK if they are considered under threat of persecution. In its revised guidelines on the group, the UK Home Office said that asylum can be sought over “a fear of persecution or serious harm by the state because of the person’s actual or perceived involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The 22-page document Country Information and Guidance Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood, was updated this month. It said that in cases of high profile supporters of the group, including journalists, at risk of persecution, “a grant of asylum would be appropriate.”

Well don’t stop there. Grant asylum to the people who took over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge last winter too, because they’re being “persecuted” by the state right now, for breaking a whole bunch of laws.

Jim Wright has an eloquent denunciation of the lying ways of people like Michele Bachmann and outlets like The Daily Caller.

ou know, for somebody who loudly and routinely claims to be such a pious Christian, she sure missed the boat on that whole “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor…” rule.

First, The Daily Caller?

Seriously? The Daily Caller? You should be slapped upside the head repeatedly for using the The Daily Caller as any kind of reference. It’s true! I read it on The Daily Ca <SLAP!> No really it’s <SLAP!> But <SLAP! SLAP! SLAP! AND SHUT THE FUCK UP and SLAP! for good measure> The Daily Caller, Jesus H Christ.

That said, the article she references is just a bunch of random information cobbled together in no particular coherence supposedly describing how 31 ISIS terrorists have been arrested in the US in the last year — except none of the information provided actually supports the headline in any way. Which is pretty goddamned typical of The Daily Caller where the standard editorial technique is to post an inflammatory headline and smear dog shit in the space under it. And this works, because those who use The Daily Caller as a reference can’t actually read anyway.

The headline is: 31 Suspected ISIS Terrorists Have Been Arrested In The U.S. In The Past Year. Sure enough, the article doesn’t demonstrate that.

Jim Wright sums up:

This hysterical, frightened, hateful, bigoted, ignorant, delusional, backward, shameful, false, ridiculous mindset from lily white Christianist Americans is a FAR, FAR, FAR greater threat to liberty, freedom, and America than any immigrant.

Yes but they’re our threat to liberty, freedom, and America.

Gita Sahgal on the Home Office inquiry into Sharia courts:

Feminist campaigners from minority women’s organisations in Britain, backed by prominent women human rights advocates from all over the world, wrote an Open Letter to Theresa May, then Home Secretary, criticising the way she was intending to carry out a long-awaited review of sharia in Britain.  May was forced to defend ‘one law for all’ when she became Prime Minister.

An investigation shows that the concerns of campaigners such as myself were well-founded. The Home Office has established a panel which is fit for the purpose of a theological exercise rather than a human rights investigation. The appointment of a theologian to chair it and imams as advisors to the Review Panel, was a thoroughly bad sign as far as feminists were concerned.

Having imams as advisors is not unlike putting foxes in charge of the hen house, or bankers in charge of bank regulation. Imams have an interest.

If the Sharia Review Panel is examined as an outcome of counter-extremist measures, as well as the battle of the Church of England to create religious exemptions from secular law, then its composition makes perfect sense. That probably explains why the Home Office and the panel Chair, the theologian Mona Siddiqui, have remained unmoved as evidence of discrimination on the panel emerges.

They’re doing an inquiry that ensures a particular finding.

The One Law for All campaign looked into the backgrounds of the imams. One of them, Said Ali Abbas Razawi, has a disturbing tendency to talk about end times in apocalyptic and very sexist terms:

“Homosexuality will increase, zinaa [adultery] will increase in society; illegitimacy will increase in society. Men will look like women; women will look like men. What does that mean? What does that mean? That means men won’t be manly anymore….. Heralding the last days… they will be wearing clothes which are tight and will be see through. They will have clothes but they won’t have clothes on.”

It’s like putting Catholic priests in charge of investigating child abuse in the Catholic church. Guess what they will find!

Mona Siddiqui, Chair of the Reveiew Panel, told the Independent that imams are on the panel because they ‘have the ear of the community’; a remark that lead to such outrage, that we decided to call for a boycott of the inquiry.

But the same Imam. Said Ali Abbas Razawi, leads delegations to Iran, and attacks ISIS. His apocalyptic views on the end times are simply not alarming to officials dealing in counter-extremism. The dominant view of counter-extremist officials is that fundamentalists or what they like to call ‘non-violent extremists’ or sometimes ‘moderates’ are part of the solution.

It’s a very low bar. Just “not into blowing people up” is not good enough. Non-bombers who want to keep women subordinate are still a threat to women, even if the women do get to keep all their limbs.

The Home Office responds to all inquires by saying the imams are experts, yes really, experts, they know all about the theology, they’re experts. But that’s not the question.

The government has carefully restricted what the independent panel is supposed to do. Rather than examine the dangers of legal pluralism, as campaigners had suggested, it endorsed ‘sharia law’ as ‘a source of guidance to many Muslims, ‘and limited the panel to ‘assessing whether Sharia may be being misused, or exploited, in a way that may discriminate against certain groups, undermine shared values or cause social harms.’  The focus on group rights and social cohesion gives the game away. Harms to women are to be investigated, but only in the most limited way.

Because women’s rights aren’t among the group rights the Home Office is seeking to protect.

Then the Home Office added a judge who is a Christian theocrat to the panel.

Sir Mark Hedley is a former Judge of the family division. He is an active Christian in the Church of England, the Deputy Chair of the Clergy Discipline Commission, Deputy President of Tribunals and is associated with the Lawyers Christian Fellowship. His knowledge of ecclesiastical courts, and the values of a fundamentalist organisation makes him the closest thing to a sharia court judge that it is possible to find in the English judiciary.

…

Lawyers associated with the Fellowship vigorously oppose equality legislation. They vocally oppose the removal of religious privilege, and are vitriolic about ‘the homosexual lobby’. They have fought hard to exempt religious individuals or groups from complying with legislation on same sex marriage, adoption by single sex couples and other issues important to Christian fundamentalists. The National Secular Society accuses them of bullying tactics. Their recent campaigns have largely failed, but not before both Anglican and Catholic Churches threatened to withdraw their services from vulnerable individuals and teamed up with Muslim groups to try and defeat the proposals which they claimed would force them to ‘actively condone and promote homosexuality.’

Gita made extensive efforts to talk to the people in charge, and they brushed her off.

At the end of this back and forth, all the organisations which had called for the boycott received letters from the Sharia Review. There was no acknowledgement of any of the criticisms made. The campaigners were blandly asked to give evidence at the Review on August 9th, ‘As well as speaking to yourself, the review team are keen to hear from people with first hand experience of the application of Sharia law. ‘

Not a single mention was made of the Open Letter, the boycott, or any of the concerns raised.

As it stands, the Home Office and the Review Panel fail to meet the most basic standards on impartiality, equality impact and safeguarding. It is an exercise in sharia-compliance and a dangerous tool of the government’s counter-extremism strategy.

There won’t be a single chicken left.

On today’s list of horrors – a massive bombing at a government hospital in Quetta, Pakistan.

Police official Afzal Khan says several people were also wounded in Monday’s blast, which took place shortly after the body of a prominent lawyer killed in a shooting attack earlier in the day was brought to the hospital.

Khan says dozens of lawyers and journalists were present inside the hospital when the bomb went off. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Anwalullah Kakar, the government spokesman in southwestern Baluchistan province, says an investigation is underway.

It was also unknown who was behind the killing of the lawyer, Bilal Kasi, who was gunned down on his way to court earlier in the day.

About four hours later the Times updated:

Pakistani police say a suicide bomber carried out the attack at the government-run hospital in the southwestern city of Quetta that killed 53 people and wounded dozens.

Senior police officer Zahoor Ahmed Afridi says bomb disposal experts have informed him that remains of the attacker have been found at the scene after Monday’s bombing.

Ali Zafar, the top leader of Pakistan’s main lawyers’ association, denounced the bombing as “an attack on justice.” He said lawyers across the country will observe three days of mourning and will stay away from court appointments to express solidarity with those killed in the attack.

The current body count is 67 killed, 92 injured. Another update:

A breakaway faction of the Taliban in Pakistan has claimed responsibility for the suicide attack at a hospital in the southwestern city of Quetta which killed at least 64 people.

In a statement, Ahsanullah Ahsan, spokesman for Jamaat-ul-Ahrar militant group, also said their men killed Bilal Kasi, the president of Baluchistan Bar Association, and then targeted the mourners who had gathered at the government-run Civil Hospital. The group has been behind several acts of terrorism in Pakistan in recent years. The claim could not be independently verified.

God hates humans.

Speaking of the Republican party…Politico points out that there are fewer Republican women in Congress than there were ten years ago.

So far this year, Republicans have nominated women in just 26 of the 308 congressional districts that have held primaries. That’s a mere 8 percent—and it’s in line with the current makeup of the House Republican Conference, which is 91 percent male and 9 percent female.

Welllll, you know, Christina Hoff Sommers would say that’s because women prefer not to go into Congress, and you can’t mess with people’s preferences. It’s not at all structural or systemic or a result of the several thousand roadblocks there are in the way of women who seek public office. The way things are is exactly how they’re supposed to be, because they’re exactly how everyone intended them to be, so relax and go back to sleep now, after sending a large donation to the American Enterprise Institute.

During the past decade, that disparity has actually grown wider, as wave elections swept out a number of established Republican members of Congress (in 2006, 2008 and 2012), and swept in a lot of new ones (in 2010 and 2014). Since 2006, the proportion of women in the House GOP caucus has dropped from 11 percent to just 9 percent today. Although there are now 247 Republicans in the House, up from 229 a decade ago, there are fewer women: 22, down from 25.

Over the same period, Democratic women took advantage of these electoral shifts, replacing men from their party’s old boys’ network with women backed by EMILY’s List and other advocacy groups seeking to increase women’s representation in office. From 2006 to today, women grew from 21 percent of the House Democratic Caucus to 33 percent. And the party isn’t about to let anyone forget it: Their new class was on display in full force when the House’s Democratic women gathered on stage behind Nancy Pelosi during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

Women cominna getcha!

This growing disparity, with Democrats electing ever more women and Republicans ever fewer, repeats at every level of government: U.S. Senate, statewide offices, upper and lower state legislatures, and municipalities. (The Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University maintains useful records on this.) What that means is that there’s no sign the GOP’s current woman problem is going to get any better any time soon.

It’s almost as if the Republican party doesn’t really feel all that welcoming to women.

The decline of the Republican woman is a public relations disaster for the GOP.

It means that every time a male Republican officeholder or candidate puts his foot in his mouth about women—from former Congressman Todd “legitimate rape” Akin to Donald “blood coming out of her wherever” Trump—effectively the only Republicans who can rush to their defense are other men. Whenever Republican leaders gather to speak about welfare, abortion, the minimum wage or pay equity, they look like a bunch of men telling women what’s good for them.

Look like? Look like? They don’t look like, they are.

To be honest, though, I don’t consider this a problem, because I don’t think women should be Republicans; Republicans don’t look out for the interests of women. If the Republican party doesn’t want to fix that problem, that’s their tough luck.

One of the tributaries that flowed into the river of Nazi antisemitism – a pastoral letter by a senior German Polish cardinal read out in every Catholic church in the country in 1936 included this assertion:

It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free-thinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion. It is a fact that the Jewish influence on morality is pernicious and that their publishing houses disseminate pornography. It is a fact that Jews deceive, levy interest, and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical influence of the Jewish young people on Polish young people is a negative one.

Other than that…