The Independent has found a horror in London: Haredi Jews are trying to fundraise a million quid to try to stop divorcing parents taking their children with them out of the reactionary religion. The money is to pay the legal bills.
The Independent has seen flyers for a fundraising event in the Stamford Hill area of London that call for the community to back the bid, saying: “Rescue The Children Convention: We now need one million pounds and therefore the community is requested to join in with a minimum sum of £500.”
The flyers were accompanied by a letter of support from a local rabbi stating they wish to fight cases involving 17 children: “To our great pain, and our misfortune, our community finds itself in a terrible situation – 17 of our pure and holy children where one of the parents, God rescue them, have gone out into an evil culture, and want to drag their children after them.
“This is a decree of apostasy and this situation has motivated our rabbis who are in Israel… to come here in a personal capacity to increase prayer and to gather money for legal fees, and to achieve this a convention has been organised of prayer and also to collect money.”
Theocratic bullying and coercion at its most intrusive.
Campaigners and former community members have told The Independent the tactical funding of legal fees tears families apart by denying those wishing to leave the religion access to their children as a punishment for no longer believing in ultra-Orthodox Judaism.
They say the practice unfairly skews child custody battles in favour of the funded parent who remains in the faith groups, rather than enabling custody to be decided on the basis of the best interests of children.
Because it’s religion, which is about what’s good for the greedy god, not the struggling impaled humans.
An investigation by The Independent earlier this year found more than a 1,000 children in Charedi communities are attending illegal schools where secular knowledge is banned and they learn only religious texts, meaning they leave school with no qualifications and often unable to speak any English.
So it’s not “school” at all then. What they get is not education.
Imtiaz Shams, co-founder of Faith To Faithless an advocacy group for ex-religious people, told The Independent: “Faith to Faithless has come across many parents for whom leaving their faith has had huge consequences for their relationship with their children. Many have had to “go back into the closet” in terms of their lack of faith, even from their own children, simply to protect this bond.
“Leaving faith can put the financial and social weight of the whole religious community against the parent: it is part of the systematic prejudice faced by non-religious people from religious communities. Leaving the Ultra-Orthodox community can be particularly difficult as these parents can be isolated, may not know what their rights are or have the financial and emotional support required to fight these custody battles.”
All to feed a greedy god who sees us as snacks.
The New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi was on Fresh Air the other day. One of the things they talked about was the sex slavery of Yazidi girls and women.
GROSS: So the ISIS men who raped these women and used them as sex slaves, they believed that the Quran gave them justification to do it as long as the women didn’t get pregnant?
CALLIMACHI: Yes, yes. The Quran has about more than a dozen references to the phrase those your right hand possesses. And what scholars of Islam have explained to me is that phrase means a slave. And that phrase comes up in sections that deal with what are the licit forms of sexual intercourse that a man can have? So you can have sex with your wife. You can’t have sex with anybody else except those your right hand possesses, right? Now, what scholars explain to me is that even though the Quran lays out slavery as one of the licit forms of sex with a woman, what ISIS has done is, of course, taken it to a different level.
They’re not just saying that it’s licit. They’re saying that it’s holy. They’re saying that because it was, in their eyes, practiced by the Prophet, Muhammad it is, therefore, a sacred duty to rape these poor women. And some of the most heartbreaking interviews I did were with women who described how the fighters would pray before they raped them. They would then rape them. They would go and take a shower, and then they’d come back and pray again because, to them, the act of the rape was – I don’t know how else to put it – but almost like an act of communion.
GROSS: Leaves me speechless. And the women who you interviewed who were used as sex slaves…
CALLIMACHI: Yeah.
GROSS: …They were mostly Yazidi women, members of a religious minority who…
CALLIMACHI: Right.
GROSS: …ISIS basically practiced genocide on. I mean, they…
CALLIMACHI: Yes.
GROSS: Yeah.
CALLIMACHI: Yes.
GROSS: So these were women who were taken while other Yazidis were being just, like, wiped out.
CALLIMACHI: Right. The only women I’ve spoken to are Yazidi women. And it seems that ISIS singled out this particular ethnic group for this very crime. There have been a few anecdotal cases of Christian women being taken as sex slaves and a few anecdotal cases of Shia women being taken. And, of course, we know the terrible story of the American aid worker, Kayla Mueller, who was also taken in this manner. But those accounts are very much at the anecdotal level. There’s very few of them, whereas with the Yazidis, it was a systematic, planned-out orchestrated thing that they did. They showed up on Sinjar Mountain on August 3 and 4 of 2014 with empty trucks, specifically to fill them with women and to take them back to use them in this underground sex trade.
GROSS: And they’re still doing this? I mean, they’re still practicing…
CALLIMACHI: They’re still…
GROSS: They’re still, like, raping women and…
CALLIMACHI: Absolutely, absolutely. There’s about…
GROSS: …And holding them hostage…
CALLIMACHI: Yeah. There were…
GROSS: …And in slavery.
CALLIMACHI: Right. There were 5,000 – more than 5,000 Yazidi people that were taken by ISIS starting in August of 2014. And Yazidi community leaders and the U.N. say that there’s around 3,000 that are still in captivity. That includes women, children and a handful of men who were allowed to live.
But yes – and they – a lot of them have had, at some level, contact with their families because when you go to the camps in northern Iraq, a lot of the families are spending every ounce of their strength right now trying to come up with the ransoms to essentially pay the smugglers to get their girls out.
So they know that they’re alive. The girls will take the fighter’s cell phone and run off to the bathroom and make a quick phone call or hide his phone and wait for him to leave the house and then call. And so there’s contact. We know that they’re – we know that many of them are still alive. And it’s just absolutely gutting to think what’s happening to them.
It shows where religious thinking can get you – the idea that one man 14 centuries ago made a habit of enslaving Outsider women, therefore it’s a Holy Duty for Insider men now to do the same thing. There’s no need to think about what’s good or bad for the women in question, no need to think about their feelings, no need to wonder if it might be cruel to rape girls who have been kidnapped by an army of strange men. None of that. It’s just about what this one man did 14 centuries ago – all because he’s a “prophet,” and not just a prophet but the prophet – and that justifies the mass rape of Yazidi girls and women, it justifies the murder of Asad Shah, it justifies “marrying” little girls age 9.
It’s a bad bad way of thinking. If a god really does approve of that, that god is a bad bad god.
Sky News talks to Kate Smurthwaite about online abuse and harassment.
It would be nice if Sky News had not stuck the label “Thought Police” next to Kate’s name in the caption. It’s not “thought policing” to want to be free of abuse online.
https://youtu.be/ZME4L7FJ_qA
On Saturday Review yesterday they talked about a novel, The Summer That Melted Everything. One of the participants said it was quite good but there was a great deal too much of it, and added with much passion that Americans really need to learn to edit their novels and take out a lot. That resonated with me because I’m reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. I found it at a Little Free Library the other day, and was surprised 1. that it was so heavy and 2. that there was a huge heavy Donna Tartt I’d never heard of before. Now, having googled it, I’m surprised all over again about 2, because there was a huge fuss about it in 2013. Lots of mass media critical acclaim, and not quite so mass media critical not-acclaim.
My view is that it’s decidedly one of those novels that need a lot taken out. It’s fairly gripping, but in my case it requires a lot of dancing ahead to keep up the gripping quality. There’s just way too much of it for what there is. There are very long novels that need to be that long because there’s a lot going on. This isn’t that. There’s way too much moment by moment detail, that doesn’t add anything and isn’t all that amusing or beautiful or explanatory or anything else that would justify its presence. Cut cut cut.
And then – I’m finding it fairly gripping but it never occurred to me to think of it as a literary work of art. It’s not. The writing is ok but it’s nothing to make your hair stand on end – and there’s way too much of it, and when there’s way too much, quality becomes hard to discern among all the padding. It’s just the protagonist telling us stuff, often in way too much detail. His voice isn’t particularly distinctive or brilliant.
So it appears there was a to and fro about it back in 2013. Vanity Fair reported on the to and fro.
Michiko Kakutani, the chief New York Times book reviewer for 31 years (and herself a Pulitzer winner, in criticism), called it “a glorious Dickensian novel, a novel that pulls together all [Tartt’s] remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole. . . . It’s a work that shows us how many emotional octaves Ms. Tartt can now reach, how seamlessly she can combine the immediate and tactile with more wide-angled concerns.” According to best-selling phenomenon Stephen King, who reviewed it for The New York Times Book Review, “ ‘The Goldfinch’ is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind.”
Meh. No it isn’t. It’s interesting but overstuffed.
But, in the literary world, there are those who profess to be higher brows still than The New York Times—the secret rooms behind the first inner sanctum, consisting, in part, of The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, three institutions that are considered, at least among their readers, the last bastions of true discernment in a world where book sales are king and real book reviewing has all but vanished. The Goldfinch a “rapturous” symphony? Not so fast, they say.
Wait. First, nobody considers the Times highbrow. Second, few people consider the New Yorker highbrow. The New Yorker and the NYRB don’t go in the same category.
But on to the backlash:
“Its tone, language, and story belong in children’s literature,” wrote critic James Wood, in The New Yorker. He found a book stuffed with relentless, far-fetched plotting; cloying stock characters; and an overwrought message tacked on at the end as a plea for seriousness. “Tartt’s consoling message, blared in the book’s final pages, is that what will survive of us is great art, but this seems an anxious compensation, as if Tartt were unconsciously acknowledging that the 2013 ‘Goldfinch’ might not survive the way the 1654 ‘Goldfinch’ has.” Days after she was awarded the Pulitzer, Wood told Vanity Fair, “I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”
In The New York Review of Books, novelist and critic Francine Prose wrote that, for all the frequent descriptions of the book as “Dickensian,” Tartt demonstrates little of Dickens’s remarkable powers of description and graceful language. She culled both what she considered lazy clichés (“Theo’s high school friend Tom’s cigarette is ‘only the tip of the iceberg.’ … The bomb site is a ‘madhouse’ ”) and passages that were “bombastic, overwritten, marred by baffling turns of phrase.” “Reading The Goldfinch,” Prose concluded, “I found myself wondering, ‘Doesn’t anyone care how something is written anymore?’ ”
Exactly. The writing is only adequate. Dickens too was an overstuffer, but at the same time, he was a genius with the language. Stone cold genius. At his very frequent best he’s a hair-stand-on-ender. There’s nothing at all like that in Tartt’s book.
I find these controversies interesting.
Someone I don’t know commented on a Facebook thread about a New Yorker article that asks if God is transgender. The comment expresses a very familiar, conventional, and convenient religious idea, but it’s one that makes no sense, and is the source of endless horrors. It’s an idea that should be disputed more often than it is.
Is there no end to the arrogance of humanity? We are constantly making God on our own terms instead of His, which is really nothing more than deciding that we know best and really ought to be God.
There’s so much wrong with that claim. I could go on about it for hours. The most obvious item is that if we can’t use our own terms when it comes to “God” then what are we even talking about? Human terms are all humans have, so why are we talking about a “god” that has entirely different terms?
I asked it there and got an unenlightening reply:
Me: What else can we do? What other terms do we have access to?
Commenter X: His terms. A God we could fully comprehend or explain is too small to be true or be worshiped.
Uh huh. The standard answer, but so useless. In that case, what do we have to do with such a god at all? Why do we worship it? How do we know it merits worship? How do we know anything about it? What kind of ridiculous, bullying game is this in which we’re told to worship something we’re also told we can’t possibly understand?
So I said some of that:
But how can we? How can we do anything with terms that aren’t ours? What is it we’re worshiping if it’s radically separate from our terms?
Also, the problem with saying we mustn’t “make God on our own terms instead of His” is that that means we can’t second-guess any part of God-based morality. But what if it’s the wrong morality? How can we decide which morality to follow if we’re not allowed to “make God on our own terms instead of His”?
Commenter X: All great questions to ask. I believe the Bible is the Word of God, and I believe it answers a lot of those questions, but in order to understand it correctly, we need to know its context. We need to know about the dead sea scrolls, the talmud, the old covenant and the new. And most importantly, we need to believe in Jesus as Lord and pursue a relationship with Him. If we seek Him wholeheartedly, He is faithful to make Himself known.
The familiar cop-out.
But at that rate we can’t have any kind of secular morality at all, we just have to obey words from an old book, while arguing about which words and which book and which interpretation and yadda yadda.
It’s all a cheat. We have to be able to think critically about morality, using the only terms available to us, which are of course human terms. That is not arrogance – the real arrogance is pretending to know which god is the real one and that we have to obey it.
Nicholas Kristof points out the undeniable: Trump is moving the national culture – or mood or discourse or limit on what’s acceptable. There are a lot of things you can call it, but whatever it is, Trump is having an effect on it, and not in a good way.
This community of Forest Grove, near the farm where I grew up in western Oregon, has historically been a charming, friendly and welcoming community. But in the middle of a physics class at the high school one day this spring, a group of white students suddenly began jeering at their Latino classmates and chanting: “Build a wall! Build a wall!”
The same white students had earlier chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” Soon afterward, a student hung a homemade banner in the school reading, “Build a Wall,” prompting Latinos at area schools to stage a walkout.
That’s a story, not a study. We don’t really know what Forest Grove was like before this spring, we don’t know how those students were talking and behaving before that day in physics class, we don’t really know that all was Eden until Trump burst on the scene. But the Trump-wall theme does belong to Trump.
Trump only mildly distanced himself when an adviser suggested that Clinton should be executed by firing squad for treason, and his rallies have become toxic brews of hatred with shouts like “Hang the bitch!” The Times made a video of Trump fans at his rallies directing crude slurs not just at Hillary Clinton, but also at blacks, Latinos, Muslims and gay people.
We need not be apocalyptic about it. This is not Kristallnacht. But Trump’s harsh rhetoric tears away the veneer of civility and betrays our national motto of “e pluribus unum.” He has unleashed a beast and fed its hunger, and long after this campaign is over we will be struggling to corral it again.
Kristallnacht isn’t the right comparison, because that was November 1938, when Hitler had been in power for more than five years. The right comparison would be to something before 1933. Of course it’s not Kristallnacht, but it damn well is an openly racist and misogynist campaign, and we should be “apocalyptic” about it.
Here in the Forest Grove area, west of Portland, students of Mexican heritage at four high schools — most of them born in the United States — described to me how some local whites take cues from Trump.
“They say, ‘We’re going to deport your ass,’” said Melina McGlothen, 17, whose mother is Mexican. “I don’t want to say I hate them, but I hate their stupidity.”
Ana Sally Gonzalez, 17, said a school club had put up posters criticizing racism, and they were then marred by graffiti such as “Go back where you came from” and “Trump 2016.”
Trump is like the Twitter misogynists in that way. He models venomous racism and misogyny, and millions of others follow his lead. His poison is going to stay around long after the election, whether he loses or not.
The people of Manbij in Syria have been liberated from IS.
Ecstatic Syrian civilians have been shaving off their beards, burning their burqas, smoking and dancing in the streets after being freed from Isis.
The jubilant celebrations were seen in the Syrian city of Manbij on Friday, where militants have been driven out after months of fighting by US-backed rebel groups.
Families ran through rubble-strewn streets, past the ruins of buildings destroyed in air strikes, carrying their babies and belongings.
Men jubilantly had their beards cut off as women ripped off their veils and set them on fire in an act of rebellion after years living under Isis’ brutal interpretation of Sharia law.
https://twitter.com/todayinsyria/status/764397034979885056
From Ian Kershaw’s The Hitler Myth:
Even after the triumph of the 1930 election, many intelligent and informed observers of the German political scene felt that the Nazi party was bound sooner or later to collapse and break up into its component parts. Its social base was diffuse – that of an out and out protest party; it had no clear political programme to offer, only a contradictory amalgam of social revolutionary rhetoric and reactionary impulses; and not least it was heavily dependent on the personality cult surrounding the demagogue Hitler – seen as the mouthpiece of petty-bourgeois resentments, but ultimately a dilettante who, despite temporary success in the conditions of severe economic and political crisis, was bound in the end to succumb to the real power bastions and traditional ruling elites. [p 29]
Does that sound familiar? It sounded chillingly familiar to me when I read it this morning.
Trump’s campaign whatever Katie Pierson announced on CNN that “We weren’t even in Afghanistan at this time, Barack Obama went into Afghanistan, creating another problem…” The host stared in consternation, and as soon as he could asked her if she meant to say that, and she looked a bit worried but said yes anyway.
A sharp-eyed commenter pointed out that she’s wearing a necklace of bullets.
Um.
Aaaaaaaaand again:
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/764224201205116929
There are some…lively responses to that tweet.
Punished Venonat @hamsandcastle 18 hours ago
@JDrutman @nytimes Elon Musk gave her gillsLauren @lkroner 23 hours ago
@nytimes Oh thank goodness. For a moment there I thought Ledecky was going to get credit for her accomplishments not relative to a man.David Roy @david_roy 16 hours ago
@nytimes This is garbage. She just put on one of the very best performances in Olympics history, and you are angling a rando tech guy.summer of harbaugh @stefanielaine 15 hours ago
@david_roy @nytimes “Hmmm, a woman is historically great……let’s do a piece on the man responsible for her greatness”KELLY @MsFopra 17 hours ago Franklin, TN
@nytimes FFS Could you be more sexist. She’s not a project. Or an innovation. She’s a woman, an amazing athlete with a lot of talent. She worked her ass off to accomplish what she has. She deserves to be celebrated for her accomplishments.Wendy Lady @NerdRage42 16 hours ago
@nytimes oh wow. Now we’re automatons. This is unacceptable…and was seen by more than one set of editing eyes before posting. Shameful.Truth April Teale @TruthTeale 19 hours ago
@nytimes You know what he can’t do? Win gold medals for swimming. Seriously, what the everlasting fuck were you THINKING with this article?Meg @garlicmeg 11 hours ago
@nytimes Unbefuckinglievable NY Times. Let the woman own her own accomplishment. She is not a machine that was engineered by a man!Lauralu @mslauralu 19 hours ago
@nytimes one more time story must find a way to credit a man for a woman’s greatness. It’s 2016! Just. Stop.Jessica Smith @Echo6979 16 hours ago
@nytimes Um, she’s an athlete, not a robot, and this is an incredibly gross headline. Stop giving men credit for a woman’s accomplishments.
And much more.
KISSIMMEE, Fla. — About an hour before Donald J. Trump was set to address a large crowd here on Thursday, Brandon Partin, a Trump supporter, draped a Confederate flag over the front rail just to the right of the stage.
The campaign people and the cops got it taken down, but…that’s Trump’s electorate.
Evan Vucci/Associated Press
Yay, slavery. Cue the patriotic music.
Samia Shahid’s father and first husband have been arrested and appeared in court.
Her first husband, Choudhry Shakeel, has been arrested on suspicion of her murder while her father Mohammad has been held as an accessory to murder.
Both appeared in court in Pakistan and have been remanded for four days.
Her father. Her father (allegedly) helped the husband she was forced to marry to murder her. I can never get used to that.
Shaimaa Khalil, a BBC Pakistan Correspondent, reported from Jhelum:
The police car which brought them to the court was surrounded by journalists. I got as close as I could to them to see if they would comment but they did not.
The media were barred from entering the courtroom and the hearing could not have lasted more than two minutes with the judge remanding them in custody for four days while the investigation into Samia Shahid’s murder continues.
They could still sweep it under the rug.
Two NY Times reporters look behind the curtain at Trump Campaign World. It’s not a mellow scene.
Back in June family and friends sat him down and told him he had to get a grip.
He would have to stick to a teleprompter and end his freestyle digressions and insults, like his repeated attacks on a Hispanic federal judge. Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey argued that Mr. Trump had an effective message, if only he would deliver it.
What “effective message”?
Also, of course, “effective” isn’t the same thing as good or useful or productive or workable.
At any rate, he said ok, but it didn’t happen. He got worse instead of better.
Advisers who once hoped a Pygmalion-like transformation would refashion a crudely effective political showman into a plausible American president now increasingly concede that Mr. Trump may be beyond coaching. He has ignored their pleas and counsel as his poll numbers have dropped, boasting to friends about the size of his crowds and maintaining that he can read surveys better than the professionals.
A guy with big crowds has a correspondingly big penis. Scientific fact.
In private, Mr. Trump’s mood is often sullen and erratic, his associates say. He veers from barking at members of his staff to grumbling about how he was better off following his own instincts during the primaries and suggesting he should not have heeded their calls for change.
He broods about his souring relationship with the news media, calling Mr. Manafort several times a day to talk about specific stories. Occasionally, Mr. Trump blows off steam in bursts of boyish exuberance: At the end of a fund-raiser on Long Island last week, he playfully buzzed the crowd twice with his helicopter.
Then he playfully strafed them with his AK-47. Never say he can’t be a fun guy.
But in interviews with more than 20 Republicans who are close to Mr. Trump or in communication with his campaign, many of whom insisted on anonymity to avoid clashing with him, they described their nominee as exhausted, frustrated and still bewildered by fine points of the political process and why his incendiary approach seems to be sputtering.
Well no kidding. He’s stupid and ignorant and conceited, so he’s never going to be anything but bewildered by fine points of the political process, not to mention the fine points of policy.
They just can’t get it right, can they.
The San Jose Mercury News, this time. Headline:
Michael Phelps shares historic night with African American
Um. In other words, Simone Manuel won a gold medal in the 100m freestyle final, shared with Canadian Penny Oleksiak. (They touched the wall at the same instant.)
The headline was widely criticised on social media for omitting Manuel’s name completely – and yet at the same time including both parts of Phelps’s name.
Mercury News sportswriter Tim Kawakami wrote on Twitter: “Sorry to my tremendous co-workers, but I’ve never been as upset at a headline in my own publication as I was with that one.”
The Mercury News tweeted an apology shortly afterwards.
We get it, Phelps has name recognition and Manuel doesn’t, yet. He’s a celebrity and she isn’t. Fine, but if you’re going to mention her, then mention her.
More from Jim Wright on Facebook.
Yesterday, Miami, Florida. Trump interview. Subject: US Navy Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba:
Reporter: “Would you try to get the military commissions, the trial court there, to try U.S. citizens?”
To be clear, the reporter is asking the man who wants to be president of the United States, the man who claims he’s READ THE CONSTITUTION, if he as president would try United States citizens — UNITED STATES CITIZENS, civilians — in a military court.
Repeat, Trump was being asked if he would consider trying US civilians in a military court. That’s what he’s being asked. There is no ambiguity. The question is clear and specific: Should military courts have authority over US citizens?
That’s the question.
Now, as an American, if you don’t already know the correct answer, if you don’t immediately understand why trying a civilian under military authority is 1) unconstitutional, 2) illegal, and 3) unAmerican, then you need to get your ass back to school immediately. Don’t vote. Don’t say another word. Don’t. If that question doesn’t set off every warning bell in your head, then you are not qualified to be a citizen of this republic.
And what did Donald Trump answer?
What indeed.
Trump “Well, I know that they want to try them [American citizens accused of terrorism] in our regular court systems, and I don’t like that at all. I don’t like that at all. I would say they could be tried there [at Guantanamo Bay, under military authority]. That would be fine.”
That would be fine.
That would be fine.
If you can’t see why this man is utterly and completely unqualified to serve in ANY elected position in the United States of America let alone as President, if that answer alone doesn’t prove as much in your mind, then as I said above, you don’t meet the minimum requirements for citizenship.
CNN reports Trump’s breezy indifference to the Constitution and due process:
The Republican presidential nominee told the Miami Herald that he doesn’t “at all” like the idea of trying terrorist suspects in the civilian court system, even though US citizens are constitutionally entitled to due process. He added that he would be “fine” with trying US citizens in military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay, the US naval base that is also home to a military prison housing captured terror suspects.
…
President George W. Bush authorized the trial of non-citizens who engage or support acts of terrorism after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but a US citizen has never been tried in military courts under that order.
Most constitutional experts and several senior Republican senators — including Sen. John McCain — strongly opposed proposals to try Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers and a naturalized US citizen, in military court.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether Trump was concerned about infringing US citizens’ right to due process under the Constitution.
They were too busy frantically googling “due process” and “Constitution” and “military courts.”
Back to Jim Wright:
We have long since passed the point where Trump’s tendency to fascism can be ignored.
We have long since passed the point where the repeated, daily now, multiple warning signs can be dismissed as sarcasm, or jokes, or Trump just being Trump.
In the wreckage following WWII, people asked over and over, and continue to ask up to this very day: How could this have happened? How could you people, you Germans, how could you let that madman destroy your republic, destroy your nation, destroy your people, destroy your civilization? How? How is that possible? Why didn’t you DO SOMETHING?
And the answer was: We didn’t know. We thought he would make Germany great again. We thought he would make Germany for Germans, get rid of the undesirables. We thought he would rebuild our military, make it mighty again. We thought he would make the world fear us, respect us, acknowledge our superiority. He said he’d give us jobs, rebuild our infrastructure, make us all rich. We didn’t know. We didn’t know until it was too late!
Well, America, WE don’t have that excuse.
WE do know.
And you’re looking it. You’re looking at it every single goddamned day. You’re looking at the pinched ugly faces of racists and bigots and haters, the KKK and the Neo-Nazis, Homophobia, Transphobia, Islamophobia, Anti-Semites, violence and fear of every kind touted as American values, jingoism, military fetishism, America for Americans, walls, propaganda sold as truth despite its OBVIOUS AND PROVABLE falsehood, the cult of personality, the fear of the other, the suspicion that our neighbors and our government are plotting against us, the appeal to some supposed lost greatness, the nostalgia for the good old days of glory, and now the suggestion that civilians should be tried by military tribunal — free of the burden of law, the Constitution, appeal, and all the values we Americans hold most dear. The very ideals those like Trump would say make us “exceptional,” that is what we would deny others.
It’s the truth. He’s all too like Hitler, not in a hyperbolic or rhetorical sense, but literally. He doesn’t have to have a stupid little Chaplin-moustache and flattened hair to be all too like Hitler, all he has to do is keep talking monstrous Hitlerian shit the way he does. He’s got it down. Even the fucking mannerisms are similar – the screaming rages are similar.
Hell yes it can happen here.
The spirit of international hatred:
Egyptian judo fighter Islam El Shehaby was loudly booed at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics after his first-round loss to Israel’s fifth-ranked Or Sasson, when El Shehaby refused to shake Sasson’s hand, in a major breach of judo etiquette.
Sasson defeated El Shehaby with two throws for an automatic victory, with about a minute and a half remaining in the bout. Afterwards, El Shehaby lay flat on his back for a moment before standing to take his place before Sasson, in front of the referee.
When Sasson extended his hand, El Shehaby backed away, shaking his head. The referee then called El Shehaby back to the mat and obliged to him bow; El Shehaby gave a quick nod of his head. El Shehaby refused to comment afterward. Judo players typically bow or shake hands at the beginning and end of a match, as a sign of respect in the Japanese martial art.
Thank you, religion, for fostering this kind of hatred and anger.
El Shahaby had come under pressure from Islamist-leaning and nationalist voices in Egypt to withdraw entirely from the fight. On Thursday, Mataz Matar, a TV host in Al-Sharq Islamist-leaning network urged el-Shehaby to withdraw.
Maybe he felt forced to spurn the handshake. Goddam humans.
Let Clothes Be Clothes on Facebook:
We’re FOR choice, but not for this – why? Children’s feet are not meant to wear heels, wedges or platforms! All on sale in the F&F school range.
Heels can cause PERMANENT damage to feet, ligaments and posture… so it’s not prudish to say “I’m not ok with this.” When parents see big brands selling this it’s easy to normalise, it’s easy to think “it must be ok…”
Play shoes, occassionwear – becoming more acceptable – but school shoes? No. Tesco F&F could you imagine a boy wearing these? Yet acceptable for girls… please help END this – share if you agree, and help us raise awareness on this issue.
Well, little girls have to be trained to wear high heels, or else they might resist. And after all it’s not as if they need to run around and be active.
A British Tory MP with Trump-envy, perhaps – Philip Davies gave a talk at a men’s rights conference to explain what spoiled bitches women are.
Philip Davies, the Conservative MP for Shipley, delivered a 45-minute speech at the International Conference on Men’s Issues, organised by the Justice for Men and Boys party (J4MB).
Davies, who sits on the Commons justice committee, told the conference at the ExCel centre in London that Britain’s justice system was skewed in favour of women and discriminated against men.
He sounds nice.
Davies, a pro-Brexit campaigner who backed Andrea Leadsom for the Tory leadership, appeared alongside anti-feminist bloggers who have likened the activist Malala Yousafzai to Osama bin Laden and called single mothers “bona fide idiots”.
Thus demonstrating that they don’t know what “bona fide” means. (Hint: it’s not another word for “genuine” or “authentic.”)
J4MB is led and was founded by Mike Buchanan, a former business consultant who retired at 52 and launched campaigns such as the Anti-Feminism League and the Campaign for Merit in Business, which actively fights against initiatives to improve gender diversity in the boardroom.
After thanking Buchanan at the conference, Davies delivered a speech on “the justice gender gap”, arguing that the British justice system favoured women and discriminated against men.
“In this day and age the feminist zealots really do want women to have their cake and eat it,” he told the conference. “They fight for their version of equality on all the things that suit women – but are very quick to point out that women need special protections and treatment on other things.”
J4MB issues awards for “lying feminist of the month”, “toxic feminist of the month” and “whiny feminist of the month”, and promotes inflammatory articles on its website including a piece titled 13 reasons women lie about being raped.
Abusively misogynist, in short, like Paul Elam’s nasty outfit. It’s disconcerting to see an MP cozying up to them.
Davies has voted against equalities legislation, argued against equality targets in the workplace and once tabled a private member’s bill that would have repealed the Sex Discrimination Act 2002.
He once claimed that men struggled to be heard in parliament, a view for which he was publicly criticised by the Labour MP Jess Phillips.
Davies told the conference: “I don’t believe there’s an issue between men and women. The problem is being stirred up by those who can be described as militant feminists and the politically correct males who pander to this nonsense.
“It seems to me that this has led to an ‘equality but only when it suits’ agenda that applies to women. The drive for women to have so-called equality on all the things that suit the politically correct agenda but not other things that don’t is of increasing concern to me.
Trump envy.
Janet Bloomfield, a supporter ofWomen Against Feminism – a social media campaign featuring photos of women with pieces of paper listing reasons for rejecting feminism – also addressed the conference. She has called single mothers “bona fide idiots” who don’t care about their children’s wellbeing, and writes blogposts with titles such as “Why Don’t We Have a Dumb Fucking Whore Registry? Now That Would Be Justice”. She has dismissed the concept of “rape culture” as “a giant rape fantasy”.
So now, in a salute to his claim that “the feminist zealots really do want women to have their cake and eat it,” there’s a Facebook group of Feminists eating cake. It’s photos of women stuffing their faces with cake. WE WIN.
A senior lecturer convicted of beating a former student he was in a relationship with was allowed to continue teaching, despite the protests of his traumatised victim.
Dr Lee Salter, a media and communications lecturer at the University of Sussex, remains employed by the institution after being found guilty of assaulting Allison Smith, a 24-year-old student he met during an induction day at the university.
He was convicted on July 13th.
Ms Smith had been punched in the face, knocked out and stamped on, and said she had salt poured into her eyes and ears.
Pedagogy at its finest.
Dr Salter was charged on 20 June and, despite repeated complaints made to the university, was allowed to continue teaching as normal.
When The Independent contacted the university two weeks ago, a spokeswoman said Dr Salter remained an employee. The Independent understands that as such he could have been able to teach in the coming term.
It was only when The Independent continued to pose questions that a source involved in the trial said his employment status had “changed” in that he has now been suspended from teaching.
One imagines the administrative grumbling…”Oh all right then, if you’re going to make such a big fuss about it…”
During the 10-month period between his arrest and conviction, Dr Salter continued to teach, the university has admitted, while Ms Smith said she remained so traumatised she was afraid to leave the house.
This is despite regulations laid out on the university’s own website which say “staff and students are subject to disciplinary procedures that, amongst other things, proscribe violent behaviour”.
The policy reads: “The University will take disciplinary action in accordance with its procedures against anyone who behaves in a violent manner including, should it be necessary, the immediate exclusion of the perpetrator from the campus.
“The University may also seek injunctions to exclude the perpetrators of violence from University premises in order to protect staff and students from further violent incidents.”
Unless it’s violence against female persons? Is that it? Or violence committed by cool dudes who teach media and communications?
