Look up what happened to Eugene Debs

Oct 18th, 2016 11:42 am | By

Bernie Sanders urges us to keep in mind that change never happens overnight.

I would ask people to take a look at history and to understand that change never, ever, ever comes about in a short period of time. To take a look at the struggles of the civil rights movement, of the women’s movement, of the union movement, of the gay movement, of the environmental movement, and to understand that all of those movements took years and years and are still in play today.

“It’s not gonna happen overnight. You gotta put your shoulder to the wheel and keep going.”

In the campaign, what we did is show the American people that the ideas the establishment had thought were fringe were really not fringe—that millions of people want to transform this country. It’s not gonna happen overnight. The fight has got to continue. And if you are serious about politics, then you gotta put your shoulder to the wheel and keep going. Sometimes the choices that are in front of you are not great choices, but you do the best you can. And the day after the election, you continue the effort.

Anyone who thinks that Hillary Clinton will not be more sympathetic, more open to the ideas we have advocated than Donald Trump obviously knows very little. So the day after the election, we begin the effort of making Clinton the most progressive president that she can become. And the way we do that is by rallying millions of people….

Look up what happened to Eugene Debs. He spent his life working to build a socialist movement, only to see it destroyed. Then ten years later, FDR picked up half of what Debs was talking about.

Mind you, FDR was able to do that only because there was a massive depression, and capitalism needed to be saved from itself.

I can’t say I’m confident that Clinton will listen to progressives more than to bankers – but I agree that we should give it our best shot.



Go sit there with your friends

Oct 18th, 2016 11:00 am | By

Talking Points Memo on Trump and voter intimidation.

Civil rights  groups are already gearing up for an especially tense Election Day. Meanwhile, the federal government has been hobbled by a 2013 Supreme Court ruling in its ability to monitor elections in places with histories of voter intimidation. Of particular concern are states with loose open carry laws, where already, some armed Trump supporters have shown an interest in making their presence known at voting sites.

“The idea that people would be standing outside the polls with guns, or even inside the polls with guns, clearly has the potential to turn people away. There’s a long history of this,” said Deuel Ross, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which is very active in voting rights litigation.

And it’s what Trump actually wants to happen.

Trump has for months complained about the possibility of an election somehow “rigged” against him, but recently, the rhetoric has taken on a more ominous, and even racially-tinged tone, that specifically mentions voter fraud at the ballot box. Last week, he told a mostly white crowd in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, to “watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us.” He said at rally in Michigan late last month that his supporters, after they vote, should “pick some other place … and go sit there with your friends and make sure it’s on the up and up.”

He’s telling his fans to intimidate voters.

Bad times.

The Voting Rights Act includes a provision that prohibits any attempt to “intimidate, threaten, or coerce” a person trying to vote, and there’s a section of the federal criminal code banning voter intimidation as well. In theory, that could set up a confrontation between federal voter intimidation laws and state open-carry laws (federal law would generally trump state law). However, according to Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, federal laws are rarely ever used to address voter intimidation claims.

“There’s not just much of a history of the federal government using them,” Clarke said, adding that her group, which monitors elections to ensure all eligible voters can cast a ballot, is more reliant on state and local systems to address instances of voter intimidation.

The Shelby ruling has made it harder for the Feds to watch out for voter intimidation.

The DOJ interpreted the ruling to have also curtailed its ability deploy election observers to the 11 states previously covered by preclearance. This election, the DOJ will only have its elections monitoring program set up in five states — Alabama, Alaska, California, Louisiana, and New York — where federal court decisions have authorized it do so, Reuters reported this summer.

“That safeguard of having specially-trained individuals on behalf of the federal government inside the polls won’t be in place in many communities this November, creating a potentially toxic and vulnerable situation for some voters,” Clarke said.

Because the five conservative justices were wrong that the safeguards aren’t needed any more. So wrong.

It’s worth noting that the Republican National Committee has been under a three-decade-old consent decree — that the Supreme Court in 2013 refused to lift — barring it from engaging in any sort of “ballot security” efforts targeting minorities. The decree is the result of RNC activity decades ago — including the hiring of off-duty cops to patrol around election sites — that Democrats alleged amounted to voter intimidation.

At least one election law expert, UC-Irvine School of Law’s Rick Hasen, has argued that Trump may have violated the decree in his calls for vigilante poll watchers if one interpreted him to be an agent of the RNC. Clarke, meanwhile, called for the RNC case to serve as a guide for what can and cannot be done at the polls in November.

Bad times.



With a growing sense of alarm

Oct 18th, 2016 10:31 am | By

The Boston Globe a few days ago on Trump’s paranoia-stoking.

“It’s one big fix,’’ Trump said Friday afternoon in Greensboro, N.C. “This whole election is being rigged.’’

He saved some of his harshest criticism for the media, which he said is in league with Clinton to steal the election.

“The media is indeed sick, and it’s making our country sick, and we’re going to stop it,” he said.

Mainstream Republicans are watching these developments at the top of the ticket with a growing sense of alarm, calling Trump’s latest conspiracy theories of a rigged election irresponsible and dangerous. They also say the impact of voter fraud or errors on the outcome of elections is vastly overblown.

It surprises me a little that there is apparently no one grown-up and responsible who can reach him – who can sit him down and tell him to take a deep breath, think about something other than himself, and stop trying to burn everything down around him to avenge his defeat. You’d think there would be someone.

While voters have certainly questioned election outcomes, it is unprecedented for the nominee of a major party to do so, historians say.

“What’s really distinct is the candidate himself putting this out front and center as a consistent theme throughout the last part of the campaign, and doing it when there’s no evidence of anything,” said Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University presidential scholar.

Yeah well. Trump is probably the biggest egomaniac in the universe, so nearly everything about his “campaign” is unprecedented.

Trump has recently started encouraging his mostly white supporters to sign up online to be “election observers” to stop “Crooked Hillary from rigging this election.” He’s urging them to act as posses of poll watchers in “other” communities to ensure that things are “on the up and up.”

“Watch your polling booths,” he warned.

His supporters are heeding the call. “Trump said to watch your precincts. I’m going to go, for sure,” said Steve Webb, a 61-year-old carpenter from Fairfield, Ohio.

“I’ll look for . . . well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American,” he said. “I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”

That is illegal.

The Voting Rights Act includes a provision that prohibits any attempt to “intimidate, threaten, or coerce” a person trying to vote, and there’s a section of the federal criminal code banning voter intimidation as well.

It’s illegal to go right up behind them. It’s illegal to make them a little bit nervous.



He would “go right up behind them”

Oct 18th, 2016 10:11 am | By

The Times editorial board says Republicans should stop ignoring Trump’s lies about a “rigged” election.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, are the two most powerful Republicans in the country and should be willing to put the national interest above their own. Both know full well that there is no “rigging,” and yet between them they have managed one tepid response to Mr. Trump’s outrageous accusations: “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results,” Mr. Ryan’s spokeswoman said, “and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.”

This is like standing back while an arsonist pours gasoline all over your house, then expressing confidence that the fire department will get there in time.

Mr. Ryan and Mr. McConnell could hardly dishonor themselves more than they already have in this sordid election year, but their refusal to stand up to Mr. Trump’s pernicious lie may be their lowest moment yet.

But Ryan and McConnell aren’t even the worst.

Other high-profile Republicans have amplified Mr. Trump’s charges and further riled up his angry base. On Saturday, Senator Jeff Sessions, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee from Alabama, told a crowd at a Trump rally in New Hampshire that “they are attempting to rig this election.” On Sunday, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and now Mr. Trump’s race-baiting surrogate, told CNN that he would be a “moron” to believe that the voting in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia would be fair to Mr. Trump. “I have found very few situations where Republicans cheat,” Mr. Giuliani said. “They don’t control the inner cities the way Democrats do.”

Giuliani is being relentlessly disgusting.

Trump apologists claim that when he says the election is rigged, he is only referring to critical media coverage, but that’s demonstrably false. Either way, some of his supporters have swallowed his lies and are threatening to act as vigilante poll watchers on Election Day. One Trump supporter in Ohio told The Boston Globe that he would look for “Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American” and that he would “go right up behind them” and “make them a little bit nervous.”

Trump is the candidate of the bullies. That’s his core platform – bullying. Bullying women, bullying foreigners and immigrants, bullying brown people, bullying libbruls – bullying most of the population.



If that’s helping…

Oct 17th, 2016 5:14 pm | By

21 of the Chibok girls kidnapped into sex slavery by Boko Haram have been freed.

In an emotional ceremony in the capital Abuja, one of the girls said they had survived for 40 days without food and narrowly escaped death at least once.

It is unclear how the release was negotiated, but an official says talks are under way to free some more girls.

Of the 276 students kidnapped in April 2014, 197 are still missing.

197, two and a half years into their enslavement.

Many of the kidnapped students were Christian but had been forcibly converted to Islam during captivity.

Another girl said: “We never imagined that we would see this day but, with the help of God, we were able to come out of enslavement.”

But God could have freed all of the girls, as soon as they were kidnapped – or just prevented them from being kidnapped in the first place. I don’t see why God gets credit for such delayed, incomplete, grudging “help.” And what about the kidnappers, who doubtless credit God with helping them kidnap 276 girls to rape?

Not that I want to jeer at them for it, but I think it’s sad that the tyrant god gets thanked no matter what happens, and credited for helping when 197 girls are still out there.



Cut off

Oct 17th, 2016 4:17 pm | By

Ecuador has cut off Julian Assange’s internet. The poor guy. He’s had to hide out in Ecuador’s London embassy since June 2012 on account of how he didn’t feel like answering to a rape charge.

“We have activated the appropriate contingency plans,” added the Twitter message on Monday. People close to WikiLeaks say that Assange himself is the principal operator of the website’s Twitter feed.

Over the last two weeks, Democratic Party officials and U.S. government agencies have accused the Russian government, including the country’s “senior-most officials,” of pursuing a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations ahead of the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election.

WikiLeaks has been one of the most prominent internet outlets to post and promote hacked Democratic Party materials. While denying any connection with a Russian hacking campaign, Assange has refused to disclose WikiLeaks’ sources for hacked Democratic Party messages.

Assange is an egomaniacal weasel.



He never spoke to her

Oct 17th, 2016 11:42 am | By

The facts of the retrial and acquittal of Ched Evans don’t make it any easier to understand how it happened.

The appeal court judgment – which was made before the retrial, but can only now be reported – allowed new evidence from two witnesses who gave testimony about the complainant’s sexual preferences and the language she used during sex. It led to her being questioned in detail in open court about intimate details of her sex life.

Evans, who has played for Wales and Sheffield United and was a member of the Manchester City youth setup, spent two and a half years in prison after being convicted in 2012 of raping the young woman following a drunken night out in his home town of Rhyl, north Wales.

Following his conviction, a well-funded legal and PR campaign that included the offer of a £50,000 reward for information leading to his acquittal was launched by family and friends. The campaign eventually resulted in the case going to the court of appeal in London, where his conviction was quashed.

So it helps to be rich.

The woman told the jury she woke up naked in a hotel room in Rhyl, north Wales, in May 2011 with no memory of what had happened but fearing that her drinks had been spiked. Friends encouraged her to go to the police, and officers found out that the room in which she woke up had been booked and paid for by Evans. He was questioned, and both he and his friend and fellow footballer Clayton McDonald said they had consensual sex with the woman.

The prosecution said she could not possibly have consented, as she was too intoxicated. She has never alleged that Evans or McDonald raped her.

In court, Evans admitted that he lied to get the key for the hotel room and did not speak to the woman before, during or after sex. He left via a fire exit. It also emerged that Evans’s younger brother and another man were trying to film what was happening from outside the room.

He never spoke to her so how can the sex possibly have been consensual?

I feel sick.

Rachel Krys, co-director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, said: “We are very concerned at the precedent which might have been set. In addition to this, there are reports that the defence offered a ‘bounty’ for such testimony. This is extremely worrying. We will review the case in full and may contact the Crown Prosecution Service and the government about aspects of this case which raise concern.”

Polly Neate, chief executive of Women’s Aid, said: “There is a big risk that this case overall has a negative impact on reporting. Only this week CPS figures revealed a quarter of women are not pursuing cases. If you look at the surrounding maelstrom about this case, it’s easy to see why that is the case.

“A woman’s past sexual history bears no relevance on whether or not they have been a victim of rape. There is a need to challenge pervasive cultural assumptions that equate a woman’s former sexual history with her likelihood of being a victim of rape.”

Not feeling any less sick.

Updating to add – a friend on Facebook tells me the victim never even wanted to prosecute, and she was compelled to testify. Godalfuckingmighty.



His life

Oct 17th, 2016 11:10 am | By

Ched Evans put out a “statement” on his acquittal. It is, of course, disgusting.

In the early hours of 30th May 2011 an incident occurred in North Wales that was to change my life and the lives of others for ever. That incident did not involve the commission of a criminal offence and today I am overwhelmed with relief that the Jury agreed.

“An incident occurred” – by which he means his friends found a falling down drunk woman outside a kebab shop and brought her to a hotel room, where he fucked her. But it sounds so much nicer if you call it an incident and say it occurred.

Whilst my innocence has now been established, I wish to make it clear that I wholeheartedly apologise to anyone who might have been affected by the events of the night in question.

“Anyone”…who “might have” been…”affected”…by the “events”…

But does he apologize to the woman he fucked after she’d been “brought” to a hotel room by strangers who found her falling down drunk outside?

Following yesterday’s decision at Cardiff crown court I want to stress that I absolutely disassociate myself from anyone who names on any forum the woman in this case. Or makes any offensive comments about her.

Oh, well, that’s all right then. As long as he’s not associated with it, that’s what counts.



He called some men

Oct 17th, 2016 10:47 am | By

The Independent on the Ched Evans retrial.

A former solicitor general has condemned the way the Ched Evans rape trial was conducted.

Vera Baird told the BBC details of the woman’s sexual past should not have been heard in court and the case could discourage people who are sexually assaulted from reporting it to police.

The 27-year-old footballer was cleared on Friday of raping a woman in a hotel room in 2011, only after her sexual history was scrutinised before a jury. Evans was initially found guilty of the rape in 2012.

And you think that might deter women from reporting rape? Just a little?

While he was in prison, Evans’ family and friends offered £50,000 for information that might clear his name and hired private investigators to help free him.

The new evidence concerned two other men who claimed they had sex with the woman around the same time as the alleged rape and who described their encounters as similar to Evans’ account of what happened.

Defence lawyers have been banned from cross-examining alleged rape victims in court about their sexual behaviour or history since 1999, but the Court of Appeal said Evans’ case was exceptional.

Because hey, the guy is a footballer. You can’t be putting them in the slammer, not on the word of some slut.

Lady Justice Hallett ruled it was a “rare case” in which it would be appropriate to allow “forensic examination” of the woman’s sexual behaviour.

“Lady Justice”??? Are men called “Gentleman Justice”? No. So why “Lady Justice”?* Anyway – it was a “rare case” because the accused was a footballer.

Ms Baird, the Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner who played a large role in changing the law in the nineties, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The only difference between a clear conviction of Mr Evans in 2012 and the absolute refusal of him having any leave to appeal at that time, and his acquittal now, is that he has called some men to throw discredit on [the woman’s] sexual reputation.

“That, I think, is pouring prejudice in, which is exactly what used to happen before the law in 1999 stopped the admission of previous sexual history in order to show consent.”

It’s enraging.

At the retrial the jury was told about Evans’s fun night out with the lads, including another footballer, Clayton McDonald.

The men first saw the woman in the early hours of the morning, falling over drunk outside a kebab shop, the court head.

Mr McDonald took her back to the Premier Inn nearby, where Evans had booked a room, text messaging him from the taxi to tell him he had “got a bird”.

They spotted her falling over drunk so they grabbed her and took her to a hotel room. They found a vagina lying around in the street, so naturally they took it to a hotel room so they could put their dicks in it.

Evans insisted he then had consensual sex with the woman before getting up and leaving via a fire exit door when he suddenly realised he was cheating on his girlfriend.

In 2012, a court ruled the woman had not been able to give consent, but on Friday a jury decided unanimously that Evans was not guilty.

Because the fact that she’d had sex before made her consent irrelevant?

And after the verdict, Twitter bullies made the victim’s identity public.

The woman who accused Ched Evans of raping her has been forced to change her name at least five times since 2011, after receiving hundreds of death threats.

Legally, she has the right to lifelong anonymity as a complainant in a sex attack, but has been repeatedly hunted down and exposed by Twitter trolls.

After Evan’s first trial, her name was tweeted by his supporters and then retweeted more than 6,000 times.

Since then, her new identities have been uncovered twice more, forcing her to adopt a new name and move to a new location each time.

Her father has said his daughter has been “living her life on the run” since the incident in 2011.

Oh well, she’s only a woman.

Update: My mistake – high court judges are “Lord Justice” if men so “Lady Justice” if women. Disregard.



It became so commonplace that she stopped noticing it

Oct 17th, 2016 9:54 am | By

More bro culture and its hostility to women, from Gemma Clarke.

Football has a problem with women. It was there every day, in every training ground, every stadium and every press box I entered. The five years I spent working as a football journalist were so steadily and fiercely degrading, they very nearly destroyed me.

A good day meant being belittled, having my knowledge questioned, or my attire, or being complimented on the quality of the pastries at half-time because I stood too close to the catering table. A bad day meant being harassed, phoning a player for an interview to be told he was naked and intending to discuss a very different kind of performance.

I could try and recount all the times I was pressed up against or lunged at or spoken to or about with unbridled vulgarity but, after a while, it became so commonplace that I stopped noticing it. And therein lies the problem.

It’s appalling and it’s utterly commonplace. This isn’t right. It should not be routine and normal for women to be treated as contemptible underlings rudely keeping their own genitals out of the hands of the real human beings, men.

This is a world where normal rules appear not to apply, as the Ched Evans case demonstrates. In the regimented world of football, freedom is what happens in dark nightclubs and dim hotel rooms: freedom from coupledom, from fatherhood, from accountability.

Freedom for men, in short. Men only. Not women.

Locker-room banter is boardroom banter is press box banter is standard banter in every corner and corridor of every institution in the football world. Locker rooms should not be safe spaces in which sexism and misogyny are free to exist. Discrimination of any form should be challenged.

It should. That’s a big job. We may be some time.



One of the ways boys become men

Oct 17th, 2016 8:42 am | By

Peggy Orenstein looks at Trump the pussy-grabber as one bead in the necklace of temporary outrage.

In each case, by the time it’s over, we turn away from the broader implications toward a more comforting narrative: The perpetrators are exceptions, monsters whom we can isolate, eliminate and occasionally even prosecute.

Certainly, such behavior is not representative of men, not by a long shot. Yet neither is it entirely atypical. Sexual coercion, in one form or another, is as American as that baseball metaphor — a metaphor that sees girls’ limits as a challenge boys should overcome.

And this isn’t anything new. Those struggles in the back seats of cars have been a staple of movies and sitcoms since…well maybe since movies began. And before that it wasn’t the back seat of a car, but it was The Seducer.

Orenstein has been talking to boys about their attitudes to sexuality lately. What she learned is not surprising but it’s depressing as fuck.

One 19-year-old in Northern California, for instance, told me he’d spent the summer working at a bicycle shop. The all-guy staff whiled away their days talking in what he described as “incredibly degrading ways” about girls. At the printable end of the spectrum, they referred to the cafe down the street, which was entirely staffed by young women, as “the Bitches.” As in, “Hey, you want to go grab coffee from the Bitches?”

Funny thing – last night when channel-surfing I watched a few minutes of Philadelphia, including the scene in court where Tom Hanks explains why he never told the partners at his law firm that he was gay. There’s a flashback to the scene he describes: a row of naked men with towels over their groins lounging at an athletic club, telling jokes. The first joke we hear is: “What do you call a woman with ESP and PMS?” “What?” “A bitch that knows everything.” Roars of manly laughter.

That wasn’t even the point – the point was the next joke, the homophobic one.

[A]ccording to Michael Kimmel, the author of “Guyland” and a sociologist at Stony Brook University, silence in the face of cruelty or sexism “is one of the ways boys become men.”

That’s what Deborah Cameron said in her post on Trump – talking about women that way is a bonding exercise for men.

Trump should not be the end of the conversation, Orenstein points out.

“Don’t sexually assault women” (or, for that matter, “Don’t get a girl pregnant”) is an awfully low bar for acceptable behavior. It does little to address the complexity of boys’ lives, the presumption of their always-down-for-it sexuality, the threat of being called a “pussy” if you won’t grab one, the collusion that comes with keeping quiet. Boys need continuing, serious guidance about sexual ethics, reciprocity, respect. Rather than silence or swagger, they need models of masculinity that are not grounded in domination or aggression.

They do, but…

…but I can’t feel much confidence that would do any good, because guidance is all very well but they will still always end up with each other, rolling their eyes at the grown ups and showing how cool they are by rejecting all that pussy-whipped “guidance.”



Her people thought she was both crazy and a liar

Oct 16th, 2016 4:17 pm | By

Rebecca Solnit again.

So Trump’s position is “I boast about sexually assaulting women, but when women confirm that is true, they are liars, because I was just lying all those times, and you must believe I am telling the truth, because whatever is convenient for me to say in this very moment weighs much more than what they say with witnesses, confirmation, etc., just as I weigh much more than the people I assault.”

I wrote about Bill Cosby and Donald Trump and the way women’s credibility is assaulted if they speak up about being assaulted, before the revelations about their crimes, because it’s the same old same old nearly every woman knows:
The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf — that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be. The daughter of the king of Troy, Cassandra was cursed with the gift of accurate prophecies no one heeded; her people thought she was both crazy and a liar and, in some accounts, locked her up before Agamemnon turned her into a concubine who was casually slain along with him.

I have been thinking of Cassandra as we sail through the choppy waters of the gender wars, because credibility is such a foundational power in those wars and because women are so often accused of being categorically lacking in this department.

Like all those women confirming what he himself said, indeed boasted, of his own free will.

We are still in an era of battles over who will be granted the right to speak and the right to be believed, and pressure comes from both directions. From the “men’s rights” movement and a lot of popular misinformation comes the baseless notion that there is an epidemic of groundless accusations of sexual assault. The implication that women as a category are unreliable and that false rape charges are the real issue is used to silence individual women and to avoid discussing sexual violence, and to make out men as the principal victims. The framework is reminiscent of that attached to voter fraud, a crime so rare in the United States that it appears to have had no significant impact on election outcomes in a very long time. Nevertheless, claims by conservatives that such fraud is widespread have in recent years been used to disenfranchise the kinds of people — poor, non-white, students — likely to vote against them.

I’m not arguing here that women and children don’t lie. Men, women, and children lie, but the latter two are not disproportionately prone to doing so, and men — a category that includes used-car salesmen, Baron Münchhausen, and Richard Nixon — are not possessed of special veracity. I am arguing that we should be clear that this old framework of feminine mendacity and murky-mindedness is still routinely trotted out, and we should learn to recognize it for what it is.

A friend of mine who works in sexual-harassment prevention training at a major university reports that when she gave a presentation at the business school on her campus, one of the older male professors asked, “Why would we start an investigation based on only one woman’s report?” She has dozens of stories like this, and others about women — students, employees, professors, researchers — struggling to be believed, especially when they testify against high-status offenders.

This summer, antediluvian columnist George Will claimed that there is only a “supposed campus epidemic of rape,” and that when universities or feminists or liberals “make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.” Young women replied by creating the Twitter hashtag #survivorprivilege, posting remarks such as “I didn’t realize it was a privilege to live with PTSD, severe anxiety & depression” and “#ShouldIBeQuiet because when i spoke out everyone said it was a lie?” Will’s column hardly even constitutes a twist on the old idea that women are naturally unreliable, that there’s nothing to see in all these rape charges, and that we should just move along.

I think I begin to see the pattern.



Textbook

Oct 16th, 2016 11:11 am | By

Rebecca Solnit did a public Facebook post about the second debate as a display of domestic violence behavior. There are roughly a million comments on it, expressing how reminiscent Trump is of every abuser people have ever known.

I realized it was like watching a domestic-violence relationship for 90 minutes. He endeavored to humiliate and shame her sexually, menace and intimidate her physically, silence her by talking over her, discrediting her, upstaging her, invading her space repeatedly, and putting his rage on display. Men use rage to instill fear. I’ve talked to people who wondered if he was going to physically assault her, and he certainly loomed as if he might, while he ran through his crazy bunchy-faced scowling, glowering, sulking expressions. I mean, I know it’s fair to criticize your opponent but this was something else. It is our collective nightmare, and it’s hard to stop watching.

It’s true. I mostly listened, and watched only intermittently, but yes his relentless glowering along with his shouting and interrupting did remind me of shouty domineering men I’ve known and clashed with. It’s a definite genre, and I hate it.

One comment was by Melissa Jeltsen, who wrote on the subject at the Huffington Post in September. I blogged about it then, but now in the wake of the second debate, and Trump’s ever more threatening behavior since, it merits a revisit.

Title: Trump Is Triggering Domestic Violence Survivors With Textbook Abusive Behavior

Subhead: He lies. He bullies. He threatens. And he’s one step away from the presidency.

We as a people – Americans – are in the process of telling the world that we love bullies.

Karla Fischer, a professor at University of Illinois College of Law, pointed to another common trait of abusers which Trump shares: Making themselves out to be the victim.

“Sometimes when perpetrators file protective orders against their victims, they say everything they have done to her, but claim she did it to him,” Fischer  explained. “And then there’s the rationalizing: ‘I only did it because I was [drunk etc.],’ the outright denials of wrongdoing even when caught.”

Trump follows this pattern to the word. When he is accused of causing harm, he often makes himself out to be the one who has been wronged.

He’s doing it now, this very minute, on Twitter – projecting so hard he could beam a movie to Mars.

Kimberly Brusk, a domestic violence survivor in Atlanta, said she spent half of her most recent therapy session discussing Trump and how he is reminiscent of her ex.

“He lies about things he just said. He can’t win an argument with [Clinton] fairly so he tries to hurt her,” she said. “When he’s talking I can feel my heart racing.”

Kate Ranta, a domestic violence survivor who was shot by her estranged husband in 2012, said the most triggering moment for her was when Trump “joked” about someone assassinating Clinton.

“Domestic violence survivors have a unique experience when it comes to Trump because we’ve fallen victim to men like him,” she said.

Jennifer Tetefsky, who cofounded an advocacy organization for domestic violence survivors to tell their own stories, said she’s had to go off the grid because Trump was triggering her PTSD. She can no longer watch TV.

Yet he’s a hero to millions.



Trump advisers say they hope to turn off young people in particular

Oct 16th, 2016 10:19 am | By

The disgust only deepens.

Donald Trump keeps peddling the notion the vote may be rigged. It’s unclear whether he understands the potential damage of his words, or simply doesn’t care.

Oh please, it’s very clear that he’s doing it because he wants to. He’s a narcissist, and what he wants is all that counts.

Trump’s claim, made without evidence, undercuts the essence of American democracy, the idea that U.S. elections are free and fair, with the vanquished peacefully stepping aside for the victor. His repeated assertions are sowing suspicion among his most ardent supporters, raising the possibility that millions of people may not accept the results on Nov. 8 if Trump loses.

It’s no skin off his nose. If he loses he can just go back to being the rich asshole. He can destroy the place with no consequences to himself – and he’s bent on doing just that. But the rest of us have to live with a delegitimized president.

As Trump’s campaign careens from crisis to crisis, he’s broadened his unfounded allegations that Clinton, her backers and the media are conspiring to steal the election. He’s accused Clinton of meeting with global financial powers to “plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty” and argued his opponent shouldn’t have even been allowed to seek the White House.

“Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted and should be in jail,” Trump tweeted on Saturday. “Instead she is running for president in what looks like a rigged election.”

My eyes bugged out when I read that, so I took a look at Trump’s Twitter. It’s a horrible sight.

Talk about projection.

The poison is coming from inside the house.

Back to Julie Pace’s article:

Trump’s motivations for stoking these sentiments seem clear.

One of his last hopes of winning the election is to suppress turnout by making these final weeks so repulsive to voters that some just stay home. Trump advisers privately say they hope to turn off young people in particular. This group leans Democratic but doesn’t have a long history of voting and is already skeptical of Clinton.

Emphasis added. They actually say that!

Republicans have already experienced the paralyzing effect of Trump stirring up questions about a president’s legitimacy. He spent years challenging President Barack Obama’s citizenship, deepening some GOP voters’ insistence that the party block the Democrat at every turn.

Jim Manley, a former adviser to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., recalled the skepticism some Republicans had about Obama. “I’m afraid a President Clinton is going to start off with far too many people raising similar questions,” he said.

Lying liars ruin everything.



Not altogether dead, but…

Oct 16th, 2016 8:41 am | By

The Great Barrier Reef is not dead, yet. It’s in trouble but not dead. So far.

Perhaps you have read its obituary by writer Rowan Jacobsen on the website Outside Online.

No, but I saw some headlines, probably inspired by that, so I hit the googles.

“For those of us in the business of studying and understanding what coral resilience means, the article very much misses the mark,” said Kim Cobb, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “It’s not too late for the Great Barrier Reef, and people who think that have a really profound misconception about what we know and don’t know about coral resilience.”

Cobb spoke to the LA Times about the state of the world’s largest reef system, and why there is reason for both concern and hope.

The Great Barrier Reef had a massive bleaching event, but coral reefs can recover from those. (The trouble is, they can recover from them if the water temperature cools, and that doesn’t seem to be the trend…but maybe Cobb will tell us something hopeful.)

Coral is an animal, and the animal exists in symbiosis with photosynthetic algae. The algae provides food for the coral in exchange for a great home. But when the water gets too warm, the algae become chemically destructive to the coral.

When that happens, the coral convulses and spits out puffs of algae to protect itself. That removes all the color from the coral tissue which is transparent, allowing you to see right through to the underlying skeleton. So you are not necessarily seeing dead coral, you’re really just seeing clear coral without its algae.

But that’s still worrying because algae is the food source, so if it’s gone too long the coral will starve to death.

But, if the water temperature comes back down, it will welcome the algae back. The key is that the water temperature change has to be relatively quick.

Ice cubes?

It was El Niño events that turned the temperature up for nine months, which is a long time to starve.

Has the Great Barrier Reef been through anything like this before?

It has had very severe bleaching events associated with large El Ninos like we had last year, but the problem is we are seeing baseline ocean temperatures getting warmer every year. When you pile a strong El Nino on top of this ever warming trend, you get more extreme and more prolonged bleaching episodes.

That’s what I was thinking – the rising baseline temperatures. So then we get to the part where she explains why it doesn’t mean total coral death, and it’s not all that optimistic.

So how can you remain hopeful about the fate of Great Barrier Reef and other reefs in the Pacific?

I work on a research site in the Christmas Islands that is literally smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and which was much more devastated than the Great Barrier Reef. It was worse off than any reef in the world with up to 85% mortality. But even in the face of that whole-scale destruction, we saw individual corals that were still alive, looking like nothing had happened.

I cling to that. I know from my own site that there is a lot more resilience baked into the system then we can hope to understand right now and that out of the rubble will come a reef that may not look exactly like it looked before, but may be better adapted for future temperature change.

Or not.



It could also be lots of other people

Oct 16th, 2016 8:21 am | By

People who work in intelligence in the US – career experts, civil servants as opposed to politicians – are disturbed that Trump refuses to accept their finding that Russia stole files from the Democratic National Committee computers in an effort to influence the U.S. election.

The former officials, who have served presidents in both parties, say they were bewildered when Trump cast doubt on Russia’s role after receiving a classified briefing on the subject and again after an unusually blunt statement from U.S. agencies saying they were “confident” that Moscow had orchestrated the attacks.

“It defies logic,” retired Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency, said of Trump’s pronouncements.

Trump has assured supporters that, if elected, he would surround himself with experts on defense and foreign affairs, where he has little experience. But when it comes to Russia, he has made it clear that he is not listening to intelligence officials, the former officials said.

Trump doesn’t have “little experience” in defense and foreign affairs. He has none. Zero. He’s a real estate developer – what would he know about defense and foreign affairs?

In the first debate, after intelligence and congressional officials were quoted saying that Russia almost certainly broke into the DNC computers, Trump said: “I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?”

It’s all just opinion, innit. It’s guesswork, it’s hunches, it’s looking thoughtfully out the window and coming up with something. There’s no reason for Trump to pay any attention to senior intelligence officials because they don’t know any more about it than he does, since it’s all just opinion.

In the second debate, he said “Maybe there is no hacking,” despite having been told in a briefing that government officials were certain Russia hacked the DNC.

Former acting CIA director John MacLaughlin said all previous candidates took the briefings to heart.

“In my experience, candidates have taken into the account the information they have received and modulated their comments,” he said. Trump, on the other hand, “is playing politics. He’s trying to diminish the impression people have that [a Russian hack of the DNC] somehow helps his cause.”

I for one look forward to Putin’s influence in US affairs.



Goodman had the audacity to commit this journalism

Oct 16th, 2016 7:51 am | By

In news of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and freedom of protest, and freedom of the press –

This Monday afternoon, as the sun hits its peak over Mandan, North Dakota, the award-winning journalist, and host of Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman will walk into the Morton County–Mandan Combined Law Enforcement and Corrections Center and turn herself in to the local authorities. Her crime: good, unflinching journalism.

Goodman had the audacity to commit this journalism on September 3, when she was in North Dakota covering what she calls “the standoff at Standing Rock”: the months-long protests by thousands of Native Americans against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The $3.8 billion oil pipeline is slated to carry barrel after barrel of Bakken crude through sacred sites and burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, and tribe members fear it could pollute the Missouri River, the source not only of their water but of millions of others’, should the pipe ever rupture.

Goodman went there to report when all the major news media had totally ignored the subject.

Clutching a large microphone, she captured the scene as hundreds of protesters tried desperately to stop a crew of bulldozers from tearing up the earth—the earth, they said, that belongs to nobody—only to be confronted by a force of private security contractors wielding attack dogs and pepper spray.

“People have gone through the fence, men, women, and children,” Goodman reported, her voice taut, then rising, louder and more intense. “The bulldozers are still going, and they’re yelling at the men in hard hats. One man in a hard hat threw one of the protesters down…!”

She continued reporting as the security contractors attacked the protesters.

“Why are you letting the dog go after the protesters?” Goodman could be heard shouting at a security contractor as a woman screamed in the background. “It’s covered in blood!”

Within hours of the attack, Democracy Now! had turned its footage into a seven-minute video that it released as a web exclusive. Three days later, Goodman followed up with an extensive report—“Dakota Access Pipeline Co. Attacks Native Americans with Dogs and Pepper Spray”—that she broadcast live on her show. The video quickly went viral, pinging across Twitter and Facebook (where it was viewed more than 14 million times) and landing, ultimately, on the same big news stations that, until that moment, hadn’t bothered to cover the protests: CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, NPR.

It was a few days later that the Obama administration put a temporary halt on the project.

Yet, on September 8, Goodman received the news that Morton County, North Dakota, had issued a warrant for her arrest. The charge: riot, a misdemeanor punishable by jail time and a fine.

She’s a journalist, and she was there reporting. There’s good evidence for that, such as the video and extensive report mentioned above.

When asked to explain the grounds for arresting a working journalist, Erickson told the Grand Forks Herald that he did not, in fact, consider Goodman a journalist. “She’s a protester, basically,” Erickson told the newspaper. “Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions.” And in The Bismarck Tribune he later added, “I think she put together a piece to influence the world on her agenda, basically. That’s fine, but it doesn’t immunize her from the laws of her state.”

It’s worth pausing here for a moment to contemplate the full and chilling absurdity of this statement: According to Erickson, a woman who appeared at a protest carrying a microphone emblazoned with the name Democracy Now! and trailing a video crew; who can be heard in the resulting video report identifying herself to a security guard as a reporter; and who then broadcast the video on the daily news program she has hosted for 20 years is not actually a journalist.

By that logic, Lizzy Ratner points out, Ida Tarbell and I. F. Stone weren’t journalists…which is a reductio ad absurdum, because they decidedly were journalists.

So far, North Dakota is refusing to drop the charges.



It is still happening all around us

Oct 15th, 2016 5:45 pm | By

Remember what I said about seeing women as the same kind of thing as a hamburger when you’re hungry? Dave Holmes at Esquire has the same thought.

Twenty years ago he saw a woman get sexually assaulted on the subway. She was on her way to work at the Fashion Cafe, wearing its uniform of tight T shirt with the logo and a miniskirt.

Here’s where my memory snaps into high-definition: The train approached the Rockefeller Center stop, and she moved toward the exit. A man, seated in the spot nearest the doors, looked her up and down. And then, as the doors opened, he got underneath her skirt and grabbed a handful of her.

It was not a pat, nor a goose, nor a pinch. He got all the way in there, for a full second. It was a grab that had steps to it. Movements. He seemed to know what he was doing, how to maximize that second. He had been here before.

So had she. I saw it in her face: This again. She swatted his hand away with her book, and joined the flow of people off the train. I saw her shoulders tense up as she walked away to start her shift.

What I remember most vividly was the look on the man’s face. Through this entire thing—this entire sexual assault—he looked utterly satisfied. He looked like a hungry bro in a fast-food commercial, about to take a big, well-deserved chomp out of that Carl’s Jr. half-pounder. He looked like he was about to take something that was his. Something he had earned. It was the worst smile I had ever seen, and I can still see it.

Because hey – there she is, wearing that thing that leaves her crotch just hanging there like fruit, ready for him to grab. Why would he not grab it? It’s public property isn’t it? Telling him not to grab it would be like telling him not to walk on the sidewalk. It’s there, it’s public, it’s available.

It is still happening all around us; we hear a man boast about the right to touch any woman’s body any way he wants to, because he has more money than she does and is on television, and we dismiss it as just the way men talk. We hear the stories of actual women who back his own boasts up, and we diminish their seriousness, because, well, there is rap music, so, you know.

For the love of God, some of us—even actual elected officials—continue to support the man’s candidacy for the President of the United States of America.

Women of the world, we have failed you. We have thoroughly, unfailingly, systemically failed you.

The question now, before we even begin to address forgiveness, is: Can we stop?

Some of you? Yes. More than that?

Well, I won’t say it.



Stirring it up

Oct 15th, 2016 5:29 pm | By

And then there’s the whole fomenting a fascist uprising problem. Jamelle Bouie points out that he’s been mouthing off about “a rigged election” and “voter fraud” for months.

Trump first told his supporters of this conspiracy theory at an Ohio rally in August and followed up the claim in an interview with Sean Hannity: “I’m telling you, Nov. 8, we’d better be careful because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.” This was in line with comments from his surrogates, like longtime adviser Roger Stone, who told Breitbart that Trump would begin to talk “constantly” about voter fraud. “He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud.’ ” Stone continued: “‘If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.'” The implication is clear: If Trump loses, he should foment this “civil disobedience.” And he should start preparing his supporters for it now. He seems to be doing just that.

It’s quite extraordinary, this claim that the only way Trump can lose the election is if there is voter fraud – that it’s impossible that most people reject him because he’s a malevolent piece of shit.

Now that he’s behind, Trump has returned to questioning the legitimacy of the election. More critically, the idea that he would respect the results of the election, full stop, ignores the hatred that’s come to characterize Trump’s campaign, the violence he’s condoned against protesters and other vocal opponents, the virulent prejudice he’s brought to mainstream politics, and the apocalypticism of his message, where he stands as the final hope for an embattled minority of resentful whites. These rhetorical time bombs, in other words, could be the catalyst for actual intimidation and violence, before and after Election Day. And if that violence and intimidation strikes, it will be against the chief targets of Trump’s campaign: people of color.

A friend of mine saw a bunch of Trump protesters marching around in a circle today. They were all armed.

Trump’s anti-democratic conspiracy mongering is unprecedented in modern elections. And we can begin to guess at the consequences of this rhetoric. Angry people, stirred by demagoguery and convinced they’ve been robbed of their rightful power, are a real threat to the already-frayed fabric of our democracy. Donald Trump thinks the election is rigged. He says we need to watch “areas.” Despite what he said at the debate, he’s also said that, should he lose, he doesn’t know that he will concede: “We’re going to have to see. We’re going to see what happens. We’re going to have to see.”

And if he doesn’t? If he loses and pushes his base to reject the outcome? Then we could see protests, we could see mobs — we could even see violence, all directed against the people supposedly stealing the election. It wouldn’t be the first time.

It’s worrying.



Dignity

Oct 15th, 2016 4:37 pm | By

The Beeb has a story titled US election 2016: Presidential race goes down the drain. I haven’t read it yet, I just wanted to share their thoughtful choice of photo to illustrate it:

Donald Trump speaks at a rally in North Carolina.