A pretty incident by the side of the road in South Carolina.

A tow truck driver refused to a help a customer stranded on Interstate 26 in Asheville on Monday.

“Something came over me, I think the Lord came to me, and he just said get in the truck and leave,” said Ken Shupe of Shupee Max Towing in Traveler’s Rest, S.C.. “And when I got in my truck, you know, I was so proud, because I felt like I finally drew a line in the sand and stood up for what I believed.”

Huh. It takes some hard thinking to come up with a reason for leaving someone stranded on a freeway that could make a person proud. It was Bernie Madoff?

The customer was in an accident, and Shupe arrived in about an hour to tow her home.

He arrived after about an hour and began the process of towing the vehicle.

“He goes around back and comes back and says ‘I can’t tow you.’ My first instinct was there must be something wrong with the car,” McWade told News 13 on Wednesday. “And he says, ‘No, you’re a Bernie supporter.’ And I was like wait, really? And he says, ‘Yes ma’am,’ and just walks away.”

Oh.

No, I don’t think that’s something to be proud of. I wouldn’t think that if she were a Trump supporter, either. Bad behavior is bad behavior.

Shupe claims he did it because he has had two customers who were Sanders supporters who argued with him over his bill.

McWade, 25, has psoriatic arthritis, fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and early-stage Crohns, which she said made sitting on the side of the road without a restroom nearby”terrifying”. She is legally disabled and says the handicapped placard was hanging on her mirror when Shupe arrived.

She also says the family mechanic informed Shupe that she was disabled.

After waiting more than an hour and a half, McWade was towed by another company.

Shupe says he did not know that McWade was disabled.

“Had she been disabled, would I have towed her car? No ma’am. I would have pulled forward and sat there with her to make sure she was OK until another wrecker service showed up to get her home safely, but I still would not have towed her car,” said Shupe. “I stand by my decision, and I would do it again today if the opportunity presented itself.”

That’s a nasty guy.

Originally a comment by Freemage on This toxic cloud is called.

The odd thing is, to me, that this would be easier to take seriously if it didn’t try to be quite so dramatic about the situation, and it might fit in a site called Everyday Feminism if it made some effort to actually tie it back to women specifically.

The constant push for fictional characters to end up in monogamous relationships with their ‘one true love’ is annoying to folks who have no desire for such a relationship; this annoyance rises to the level of a micro-aggression when it’s accompanied by ‘proof’ in the narrative that anyone who claims to be happy alone (say, because their career is too important to them, or because they genuinely have no such attractions) is somehow completely deluded and just needs to meet the right Special Someone in order to learn true happiness.

It’s also trivially easy to prove that this microaggression (like a great many in the media) is directed principally at women; male leads can be focused on their jobs, with either a string of casual hook-ups or simply no romance at all, and it usually doesn’t so much as get pointed out that that’s what they are doing. From there, it’s certainly simple to point out how this plays into a greater narrative that teaches that men are ‘complete’ human beings in their own right, while women can only be made whole by the addition of a romantic relationship. Thus, one could make the case that killing this trope would, by and large, benefit women and advance feminism in one small way. It could thus fit quite well into, say, a course on sexism in media.

But this article doesn’t want to do any of that work; it just wants to point out the annoyance, and leave it as if that alone makes it the cause of a great crusade.

This is where the public ownership of women’s reproductive capacities gets you: a girl of 12 in Queensland had to jump through hoops for weeks to get the abortion she wanted all along. If she hadn’t jumped correctly apparently they would have said no – and a girl of 12 would have been forced to push out a baby she didn’t want to push out.

A 12-year-old Australian girl with a history of suicide attempts was forced to seek a judge’s approval to end an unwanted pregnancy under strict abortion laws.

The girl gained a Queensland supreme court order allowing her to have an abortion after a month dealing with a string of medical, mental health and child safety professionals, who all found her decision as being in her best interests.

Which implies that they could have found the opposite: that being forced to push out a baby against her will would be in her best interests. How could that ever be in her best interests? So that she learns early and thoroughly that she has no rights, because she’s a female? Is it in girls’ best interests to get that over with quickly, so that they won’t bruise themselves in the struggle?

A psychiatrist and her parents held concerns that Q was at real risk of further self-harm or suicidal behaviour if forced to carry a child to birth. McMeekin was satisfied Q had independently arrived at her decision to end her pregnancy, a conviction she held for more than a month while having consultations with a general practitioner, a social worker, two obstetricians and a psychiatrist.

“She has no wish to be a mother,” McMeekin said. “Unsurprisingly, she feels that she is not fitted for that task.”

However, McMeekin said her consent alone did not make the abortion lawful under Queensland’s criminal code, which required it to be “authorised or justified by law”.

Why should suicide and self-harm be the standard? Why shouldn’t just not wanting to be reason enough?

McMeekin said an obstetrician advising Q said the “risks of continuing the pregnancy (some of which were potentially life threatening) ‘far outweigh’ the risks involved in terminating”.

“He also commented that there were psycho-social implications of having a child at the age of 12, with a ‘lifelong burden, which is likely to affect mental health’,” the judge said.

The child safety department, which had earlier involvement with the family, also supported the abortion.

That applies to all women and girls, of course. Pregnancy is more risky than early abortion, and having a child definitely adds to the work load. It’s just more so for a child of 12.

Larissa Waters, a federal Greens senator, said the striking out of Queensland’s “archaic, harmful laws that treat abortion as a crime in some circumstances… is long overdue”.

“I warmly welcome Mr Pyne moving to update the law so that it is in line with modern values that trust and empower women to make decisions about their own bodies,” she said.

“Nearly a third of women will seek an abortion over their lifetime and they must not be made to feel like criminals for making their own decisions about their own bodies.”

Just as if women were human beings.

From the abstract of an article in Contraception Journal, What women seek from a pregnancy resource center:

Twenty-nine states enable taxpayer funding to go to pregnancy resource centers (PRCs, often called crisis pregnancy centers), which are usually antiabortion organizations that aim to dissuade women from abortion. Some abortion rights advocates have called for the elimination of PRCs. However, we know little about why women visit PRCs.

We analyzed deidentified intake survey data from first-time clients to a secular, all-options PRC located in Indiana between July and December 2015 on their reason(s) for seeking services, material resources provided and content of any peer counseling…

Clients went there mostly for free diapers and baby clothes.

Conclusion

PRC clients largely sought parenting, not pregnancy, resources. The underutilization of pregnancy-options counseling and high demand for parenting materials and services point to unmet needs among caregivers of young children, particularly for diapers. Our findings are limited in their generalizability to typical PRCs, which are conservative Christian and antiabortion. Nonetheless, our results suggest the need to rethink the allocation of resources toward funding or eliminating PRCs solely for the purpose of influencing women’s decisions about abortion.

Implications

Understanding the services women who go to PRCs seek (i.e. diapers and parenting support) can help women’s health advocates better meet those needs, notably in contexts that are nonjudgmental about women’s pregnancy decisions.

That’s the abstract of the actual study. Now for the news article about the study at Rewire, written by Nicole Knight Shine:

Study: Pregnant People Seek Diapers, Not Abortion Counseling

Clients most commonly sought diapers and baby clothes, the study said, with only four clients out of 273 asking about abortion services.

…

The fact that so few clients discussed abortion surprised the researchers, said co-author Katrina Kimport in a phone interview Thursday with Rewire.

…

Typically run by religious groups, CPCs often masquerade as reproductive health clinics with the primary goal of dissuading “abortion-minded” pregnant people.

…

Kimport noted that the work underscores that pregnant people are not making abortion decisions at these centers. Instead, as authors of the report indicate, pregnant people arrive at their decisions by conferring privately with family and friends.

The Rewire story on the study doesn’t use the word “women” once. Not once. The actual study uses it repeatedly, but the journalist reporting on the study does not use it once, and puts the phrase “pregnant people” into the mouth of one of the authors.

Women are being erased.

What, a couple of you asked on my latest post about Everyday Feminism, does this have to do with feminism, and why can’t they talk about feminism? It’s because they’re too InterSectional to talk about feminism, but I thought I might as well find their About page to see how they explain it themselves.

Everyday Feminism is an educational platform for personal and social liberation. Our mission is to help people dismantle everyday violence, discrimination, and marginalization through applied intersectional feminism and to create a world where self-determination and loving communities are social norms through compassionate activism.

There it is right there – they’re intersectional, so that’s why they talk about everything but feminism more than they talk about feminism.

Notice that there’s something missing – they forgot to say everyday violence, discrimination, and marginalization against/of whom? They forgot to say – or they intentionally didn’t say, because they want to dismantle violence, discrimination, and marginalization against/of everyone – but in that case why do they call it Everyday Feminism? Why not call it Everyday Social Justice or Everyday Human Rights or Everyday Equality or Everyday Progressivism?

Then notice again the absence of women from the world where self-determination and loving communities are social norms – notice that the goal is generic as opposed to particular. That’s ok, but then why call it feminism?

They go on to spell it out.

Through our online magazine, we work to amplify and accelerate the progressive cultural shifts taking place across the US and the world. Our unique focus on helping people apply intersectional feminism and compassionate activism to their real everyday lives has deeply resonated with people around world.

We aim to shift our culture to end the everyday violence, discrimination, and marginalization that people face due to their gender, sexual orientation, race, class, size, ability, and other social differences.

Gender plus all the other things. So then they shouldn’t be calling it feminism, because that’s not feminism. Feminism is of course compatible with other branches of activism, but that doesn’t mean it’s the same thing.

I wonder if a major reason they talk so much about activism that has nothing to do with feminism is because they’re afraid of being called transphobic. It’s the hot new thing, calling feminists transphobic for talking about FGM, so next it will be calling feminists transphobic for talking about women, and maybe Everyday Notfeminism wanted to get out ahead of the curve.

I suspect that is a big part of why they’re so all over the place and so squeamish about talking about women.

What a pathetic place we’ve reached.

Adam Lee has some thoughts on Maryam Namazie’s encounter with Sam Harris on his podcast a few weeks ago.

While I agree with Harris on some things, I’ve often criticized his views on Islam – especially his indefensible beliefs about profiling – and I was hoping she’d give him a dose of perspective.

She offered him a dose of perspective, but he’s way too convinced that he already knows everything to listen to other people, especially not women. In short, he rejected her offer. For two hours he rejected it.

I got the impression that Namazie was treating it as a debate, whereas Harris didn’t think of it that way. However, his insistence on “correcting” some allegedly wrong ideas she held made it inevitable that there’d be sharp exchanges, and he was unaccountably surprised when she didn’t immediately concede his points just because he insisted she was mistaken.

That’s so Sam Harris. He’s so imperturbably confident in his own correctness that he seems incapable of listening.

Harris was very invested in getting Namazie to retract some of the critiques she’s made of his ideas, but she was having none of it. He seemed confident that if he just explained himself clearly enough, she’d be certain to come around and agree that he was right, and he was befuddled when she wouldn’t go along. It seems totally outside his sphere of possibility that two atheists might have a genuine difference of views about how to defeat radical Islam, or that ex-Muslims might find his approach unworkable or even counterproductive. He accused her of “starting these fights unnecessarily” (30:30), as if his stance was the default from which all atheist activism should begin – an immensely condescending attitude.

And all too typical of him.

Honestly I think we’d all be better off if Sam Harris had never had that first best-seller. Far too many atheists make a cult of him, and as a cult figure he’s a terrible influence – humorless, charmless, rude, and vastly conceited.

A great many bro-atheists used to admire Maryam and now think she’s just another one of those awful SJW people, because she dared to continue to disagree with Sam Harris even after he told her not to.

Speaking of identity – some of my friends have been trying to pin down exactly what “gender identity” is supposed to mean: whether there is a universally accepted, objective meaning for the term, and whether it makes any sense.

One elucidation that was offered is from Planned Parenthood, and it sounded odd, so I took a look.

PP elucidates on its Gender/Gender Identity page.

What Is Gender? What Is Gender Identity?

Each person has a sex, a gender, and a gender identity. These are all aspects of your sexuality. They are all about who you are, and they are all different, but related.

Sex is biological. It includes our genetic makeup, our hormones, and our body parts, especially our sex and reproductive organs.

Gender refers to society’s expectations about how we should think and act as girls and boys, and women and men. It is our biological, social, and legal status as women and men.

Gender identity is how we feel about and express our gender and gender roles — clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. It is a feeling that we have as early as age two or three.

Those last two don’t make any sense in combination. They say two opposing things.

The first says, correctly, that gender is imposed on us from the outside: it’s society’s expectations about how we should think and act as female or male.

The second says, nonsensically, that gender identity is how we feel about and express society’s expectations about how we should think and act as female or male. Is it?! Isn’t it more how we do or don’t comply with society’s expectations about how we should think and act as female or male?

I don’t emote about society’s expectations about how I should think and act as female; I tell them to go fuck themselves. Is my “gender identity” therefore “go fuck yourselves”?

This is bullshit. They’re trying to have it both ways. They’re trying to combine two things that don’t combine. On the one hand yes gender is imposed on us, but on the other hand now that it’s been imposed on us let’s pretend it’s a big fun package and spend the rest of our lives playing with it.

I suppose they fell into this trap because they didn’t dare point out that society’s expectations about how we should think and act as female or male are systematically unequal; that females are supposed to think and act as submissive and subordinate to males; that males are supposed to think and act as dominant and superior to females. Oops. If they’d included that part, maybe they wouldn’t have talked the absurd bullshit about how we feel about and express our gender and gender roles — clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. But then that might have gotten them into trouble.

Everyday Feminism is such good comic value.

One of its new roads on the Great Map of Intersections is aromantic, “an orientation comprised of a complete lack of romantic interest, behaviors, and relationships.”

Aromanticitude of course has its corresponding Enemy.

The truth is that we’ve all been living under a cloud – choking on it – and hardly anyone else seems to notice it. It’s insidious, and it’s made a complete mockery of friendship and other forms of intimacy outside of romantic entanglements.

It’s so bad that even in the non-monogamous community, aros (a shorter name for aromantic people) are looked at strangely.

This toxic cloud is called amatonormativity – and it’s terribly harmful.

Called by whom? According to whom? That’s one of EF’s best jokes, the way people who write for it always assume their claims are just obviously authoritative and decisive.

Amatonormativity is, essentially, “the assumption that a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans, in that it is a universally shared goal, and that such a relationship is normative, in the sense that it should be aimed at in preference to other relationship types,” according to Elizabeth Brake.

Oh good, an attribution. But why the assumption that because Elizabeth Brake said it, it therefore is true? Because it’s Everyday Feminism, that’s why.

Ironically, I have some sympathy with the ideas behind this, but the way they’re expressed makes it hard not to laugh.

The vast majority of information for non-monogamous populations is still heavily couple-centric, hetero- and cisnormative, ableist, and virtually completely romantically oriented.

Heteronormative, cisnormative, and amatonormative. No wonder Everyday Feminism has to do something about it. (And where does actual feminism come in? Don’t be silly, that’s so last century.)

4. Amatonormativity Leaves Aros, Asexuals, and Others More Vulnerable

I happen to be asexual, autistic, aromantic, and kinky – as well as left-handed. All of this leaves my brain wired extremely differently to most.

Asexual and kinky?

Ok that’s enough comedy for today.

Girls, puberty, bodies – what could possibly go wrong? Jan Hoffman at the New York Times reports on one thing:

So why aren’t more teenage girls out on the playing fields?

Research shows that girls tend to start dropping out of sports and skipping gym classes around the onset of puberty, a sharp decline not mirrored by adolescent boys.

A recent study in The Journal of Adolescent Health found a surprisingly common reason: developing breasts, and girls’ attitudes about them.

Is it surprisingly? Not if you are a girl or a woman, and you know what it’s like to develop breasts.

In a survey of 2,089 English schoolgirls ages 11 to 18, nearly three-quarters listed at least one breast-related concern regarding exercise and sports. They thought their breasts were too big or too small, too bouncy or bound too tightly in an ill-fitting bra. Beginning with feeling mortified about undressing in the locker room, they were also self-consciously reluctant to exercise and move with abandon.

Two globes bouncing around on your chest while you run and jump? Who wouldn’t want that?

“We make assumptions about what we think we know, so it’s important to be able to say that as cup size increases, physical activity decreases for a lot of girls,” Dr. Sharonda Alston Taylor, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, who focuses on adolescent obesity.

What to do? Better support, first of all.

Joanna Scurr, the lead author of the study and a professor of biomechanics at the University of Portsmouth in England, said the breast itself had little internal support, so when a girl’s body moved, the breast moved independently, and the movement increased with breast size. In up to 72 percent of exercising women, she said, that movement was a cause of breast pain or discomfort.

Yet while sports and physical education programs frequently recommend protective gear for boys, like cups, athletic supporters and compression shorts, comparable lists for young women rarely include a mandatory or even recommended sports bra.

…

When researchers asked the girls how they would prefer to receive breast information — via a website, an app, a leaflet or a private session with a nurse — the overwhelming majority replied that they wanted a girls-only session with a female teacher.

A girls-only session with a female teacher? I don’t think that’s allowed any more.

What’s the difference between identifying as and being?

I’m not sure I know, myself. I don’t think I use the verb “identify as” very much. I guess I would use it if there were some kind of ambiguity or doubt or complication? Like, someone who grew up in the US but moved to the UK or vice versa – I could make sense of people saying, in that context, “I identify as [American/British] now because it’s been long enough” or alternatively “I still identify as [British/American] because it seems to be ineradicable.”

So “identify as” implies a certain level of will, of choice, of change or adoption or declaration, or else of failure to accomplish it. Yes? Whereas being doesn’t, by itself, although of course you can be things by choice – a fan, a practitioner, an adherent. But if you say “I’m a socialist” there’s no point in saying “I identify as a socialist” because the choice is already present in the word “socialist.”

There’s a little min-trend to complain about identity politics at the moment, so one might as well try to figure out what people mean by it. I did that several years ago while reading Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence and Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity, but I’m not sure the conversation is talking about the same kind of identity now.

One thing I think we all know pretty well: there are some things we can’t “identify as” without also being them. I don’t get to “identify as” Sioux or Zulu or Japanese, because I’m not any of those things and it’s appropriation to pretend I am. Ontology determines what we can “identify as”…except when it doesn’t. The exact nature of the rules that determine that is somewhat opaque.

Glosswitch has some thoughts on women as empty space.

Writing for Glamour magazine, Juno Dawson defends the right of trans women not to have to talk about their genitals: “This isn’t a coquettish fan dance where I’m trying to tease and conceal, it’s just that by not talking about my genitals, you might have to listen to what’s on my mind.” Fair enough, although somewhat naïve when one considers that for female people, assumptions made on the basis of our genitals have been a reason why people haven’t listened to what’s on our minds since the day we were born. This isn’t just a case of mindless objectification; it’s a process of sex class categorisation, and it’s one we cannot avoid unless we can really, truly convince people that we are not members of the potential gestator class. For us, what is “in our pants” is not a subject of morbid curiosity; it is the void that makes us exploitable, expendable and less than human. And either way, it doesn’t really matter whether people can see what is in our pants as long as they can still see our tits.

I admire the understatement of “somewhat naïve” when really it’s breathtakingly so. Guess what it’s like for women! It’s like being seen as people with no minds at all. It’s endlessly bizarre watching people who didn’t grow up being seen as female explaining to the world that women have minds. We already know that. We’ve known it for a long time. We’ve been explaining it to the world for a long time. It’s too bad you weren’t paying attention – but then nobody does pay attention to women.

I cannot help but feel the rawest anger at all the new ways invented to make women hate their own flesh and feel as though they do not belong. We are told that the narrative of the female body must not be exclusive, but we then create one that leaves women with nowhere to go. Our bodies are the only homes we have and here we are, suffocating beneath meanings that we can only control with the help of the surgeon’s knife.

We have brilliant stories to tell, too. We shouldn’t have to peel off our own flesh to prove we’re not empty inside.

I guess I should count myself lucky, spending most of my adult life thinking the world was finally really listening to women. It was nice while it lasted.

More from Orwell, As I Please – this time from June 9 1944, just three days after the invasion started but he doesn’t mention it. (Nothing surprising in that, there was plenty of mention of it elsewhere.)

A phrase much used in political circles in this country is ‘playing into the hands of’. It is a sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths. When you are told that by saying this, that or the other you are ‘playing into the hands of some sinister enemy, you know that it is your duty to shut up immediately.

For example, if you say anything damaging about British imperialism, you are playing into the hands of Dr Goebbels. If you criticize Stalin you are playing into the hands of the Tablet and the Daily Telegraph. If you criticize Chiang Kai-Shek you are playing into the hands of Wang Ching-Wei — and so on, indefinitely.

That’s the Orwell who was so good at seeing through ploys for shutting people up. That’s one of them. In a way that’s the subject of Jacques Rousseau’s piece about Ntokozo Qwabe and the server – the way the justifiable disgust at Qwabe could get out of control and end up “playing into the hands of” racists – as it is doing. Jacques says there’s a Facebook page devoted to “Don’t serve Ntokozo Qwabe” and it’s full of racist comments, surprise surprise.

Objectively this charge is often true. It is always difficult to attack one party to a dispute without temporarily helping the other. Some of Gandhi’s remarks have been very useful to the Japanese. The extreme Tories will seize on anything anti-Russian, and don’t necessarily mind if it comes from Trotskyist instead of right-wing sources. The American imperialists, advancing to the attack behind a smoke-screen of novelists, are always on the look-out for any disreputable detail about the British Empire. And if you write anything truthful about the London slums, you are liable to hear it repeated on the Nazi radio a week later. But what, then, are you expected to do? Pretend there are no slums?

What indeed? It’s very often a quandary. I run into it a lot when blogging.

Everyone who has ever had anything to do with publicity or propaganda can think of occasions when he was urged to tell lies about some vitally important matter, because to tell the truth would give ammunition to the enemy. During the Spanish Civil War, for instance, the dissensions on the Government side were never properly thrashed out in the left-wing press, although they involved fundamental points of principle. To discuss the struggle between the Communists and the Anarchists, you were told, would simply give the Daily Mail the chance to say that the Reds were all murdering one another. The only result was that the left-wing cause as a whole was weakened. The Daily Mail may have missed a few horror stories because people held their tongues, but some all-important lessons were not learned, and we are suffering from the fact to this day.

Well said – and at the same time, nothing is gained by referring to the Germans as “the Huns.” It’s not an easy thing, to reconcile those, but we have to.

Maureen alerted me to Sian Cain’s Guardian article about Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal.

William and Dorothy Wordsworth moved to Grasmere in 1799, living in Dove Cottage until 1808. Dorothy’s journals document their quiet existence: daily walks, afternoons with mutton pies, William’s headaches. The siblings composed poems and letters as they walked through miles of hills and thickets; on occasion visited by friends like Walter Scott, Thomas de Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In a 1797 letter, Coleridge described Dorothy’s taste as “a perfect electrometer — it bends, protrudes, and draws in at subtlest beauties and most recondite faults.” Consider her description of daffodils near Gowbarrow Park:

I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew about the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake.

Molly Worthen objects to the substitution of “I feel” for “I think.” She’s not just picking a nit.

The imperfect data that linguists have collected indicates that “I feel like” became more common toward the end of the last century. In North American English, it seems to have become a synonym for “I think” or “I believe” only in the last decade or so. Languages constantly evolve, and curmudgeons like me are always taking umbrage at some new idiom. But make no mistake: “I feel like” is not a harmless tic. George Orwell put the point simply: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” The phrase says a great deal about our muddled ideas about reason, emotion and argument — a muddle that has political consequences.

Damn right. “I think” is something you can argue with. “I feel” not so much.

Yet here is the paradox: “I feel like” masquerades as a humble conversational offering, an invitation to share your feelings, too — but the phrase is an absolutist trump card. It halts argument in its tracks.

When people cite feelings or personal experience, “you can’t really refute them with logic, because that would imply they didn’t have that experience, or their experience is less valid,” Ms. Chai told me.

And for another reason, which is that they have already admitted it’s “just” a feeling, and only a bully would try to argue with a feeling. As Worthen says, it seems humble but actually blocks disagreement. Neat trick.

The problem here is not the open discussion of emotions. Ancient philosophers ranging from Confucius to the Greek Stoics acknowledged the role that emotion plays in human reasoning. In the 1990s, after many years of studying patients with brain damage, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio put forward a hypothesis that is now widely accepted: In a healthy brain, emotional input is a crucial part of reasoning and decision making.

So when I called Dr. Damasio, who teaches at the University of Southern California, I worried that he might strike down my humanistic observations with unflinching scientific objectivity. He didn’t — he hates the phrase as much as I do. He called it “bad usage” and “a sign of laziness in thinking,” not because it acknowledges the presence of emotion, but because it is an imprecise hedge that conceals more than it reveals. “It doesn’t follow that because you have doubts, or because something is tempered by a gut feeling, that you cannot make those distinctions as clear as possible,” he said.

But we feel as if it follows, so…loop loop loop.

This is what is most disturbing about “I feel like”: The phrase cripples our range of expression and flattens the complex role that emotions do play in our reasoning. It turns emotion into a cudgel that smashes the distinction — and even in our relativistic age, there remains a distinction — between evidence out in the world and internal sentiments known only to each of us.

Yes it does, and this (as you’re probably tired of hearing by now) is one of the reasons I’m not convinced by some claims popular with some trans activists – because of the way claims about internal feelings are treated as both sacrosanct and dispositive. Internal sentiments known only to each of us are inherently unreliable and incommunicable (the latter by definition). Internal sentiments known only to each of us are no basis at all for demanding “belief” from other people.

If our students have any hope of solving the problems for which trigger warnings and safe spaces are mere Band-Aids, they must reject this woolly way of speaking their minds. “Cultivating the art of conversation goes a long way toward correcting these things,” Dr. Lasch-Quinn said. “Instead of caricaturing someone who says ‘I feel like,’ we can say, what does it mean to say that instead of ‘I think?’ ”

We can, yes, but we should prepare to get a lot of shit in response. We’re expected to comply, not to think and not to ask.

Jacques Rousseau – who pointed out that story about Ntokozo Qwabe’s gloating triumph over a restaurant server to me – has some inconvenient observations on the reaction to Qwabe’s gloat.

First, what that reaction was:

Sihle Ngobese (SN) visited the restaurant, found the waitress – Ashleigh Shultz (AS) – and gave her the tip that the RMF table could (and should, unless they received terrible service) have given her, were it not for the fact that they objectified this woman as a placeholder for white oppression, despite knowing nothing about her, her politics, or her financial circumstances. (Something they of course should have been aware of is the likelihood that, as a waitress, she and some hypothetical intersectional movement might well find some common ground on the issue of class and privilege.)

…

Roman Cabanac and Jonathan Witt (who host the Renegade Report podcast on CliffCentral) started a Twitter crowdfunding campaign that ended up generating R44 778 in donations for the waitress in question. (Another crowdfunding effort also sprung up, generating an additional R15 000+.) [EDIT: Twitter user @GarethKourie points out that this second campaign has reached $5000, so, more like R70 000, meaning that AS has now been tipped around R115 000.]

Later on, we find out that the waitress has a mother who has cancer. This information was however not available at the time the campaigns started, so should be irrelevant to any analysis of whether the campaigns were appropriate or not – they were not generated to raise money for cancer treatment, but to offset her experience of abuse by RMF, and to demonstrate a moral counterweight to the callousness of NQ and his dinner companions.

I think you can sense where he’s heading – this kind of thing can turn into a version of the lottery, so it’s as well if the goods and bads of it are sorted out. Jacques doesn’t think they are.

Both of those goals could, in my view, have been achieved without creating the impression of a couple of (literally) white knights charging in to protect one of their own against the (literally) dark forces of RMF. And, creating that impression simply lends credence to one of the legitimate concerns of the RMF movement, namely that white South Africans (and people, in general) are far too unaware and unconcerned about the fate of black people compared to the fate of other whites.

And what could do a better job of demonstrating that than a windfall for a white worker stiffed by a black customer?

It’s of course true that it should, in theory, be possible to separate these issues from race, and to simply regard this as an act of generosity. But to think that people will (or even should) do so now in the political landscape that is South Africa is either naive or wilfull denialism. To refuse to countenance any criticism on this topic – as the Renegade Report hosts have done in their Twitter responses – is difficult to read as anything other than a commitment to making a point, rather than being humanitarians, even if the outcome of their commitment is a plus for humanitarianism, on balance.

That seems right to me. I think the point was worth making, but as Jacques says, it could have been made without the winning-the-lottery aspect.

This waitress is relatively undeserving of this gift compared to so many other people. The gesture can’t help but appear to be motivated less by generosity than by a vindictive “sticking to to NQ”, showing how much of a better person “we” (the donors) are.

And, as I said on Twitter, you’ll find that (or at least I find, and I eat out too many times every week) black waitstaff are routinely treated rudely, and (I imagine) tipped less generously than white ones, assuming that the level of expressed respect correlates with the level of financial support offered as tip. My claim is not that “if you can’t help everybody, you should help nobody” or something of that sort. Of course we are forced to pick our causes.

My point is that helping this one is a strike against the “fascist” RMF (as they have been described by at least one of the Renegade Report hosts), masquerading as charity, and that the optics of this case are exceedingly poor, serving to reinforce negative racial stereotypes.

It doesn’t help the argument to assert that some of the donors are black, or that this sort of argument is of the “social justice warrior” variety. The latter is a vacuous slur that completely escapes the force of argument in the sense that even if it’s true (and it is) that some folk concerned with social justice are knee-jerk thoughtless reactionaries, not all of them are. Arguments need to be addressed on their merits, not with cliches.

In short, it’s complicated, and a big windfall for the server isn’t necessarily the best response. It occurs to me to compare Kate Smurthwaite’s response to the nasty people who procured all the tickets to her Goldsmith’s show and then didn’t go, leaving her to perform for seven people – she requested donations to a charity for refugees, which got a windfall of several thousand pounds.

Read the whole post, because it’s excellent.

“Activism” gone wrong.

Cape Town – A controversial “Rhodes Must Fall” activist sparked an intense race row on social media this week after he posted about how he and other patrons at an Observatory restaurant confronted a white waitress.

Ntokozo Qwabe, who late last year made news for driving a campaign to remove a Cecil John Rhodes statue at Oxford University in the UK, said his friends returned a bill to the waitress saying: “WE WILL GIVE TIP WHEN YOU RETURN THE LAND.”

She cried.

Wow. Brilliant. Withhold pay from someone serving food in a restaurant – that will teach the colonialists! Those people who serve food in restaurants have had all the power and money for far too long, and it’s about time someone took the struggle to them.

Another source has the Facebook post in which Qwabe boasted about this feat of punching down up.

LOL wow unable to stop smiling because something so black, wonderful & LIT just happened! And of course, the catalyst was a radical non-binary trans black activist – Wandile Dlamini – from the Rhodes Must Fall movement. Because trans activists have BEEN the ultimate blessers of this decolonial struggle!

To cut the long story short, we are out at Obz Cafe with the said activist, and the time for the bill comes. Our waitress is a white woman. I ask the said activist what the going rate for tips/gratuity is in these shores. They look at me very reluctantly and they say ‘give me the slip, I’ll sort that out’. I give them the slip.

They take a pen & slip in a note where the gratuity/tip amount is supposed to be entered. The note reads in bold: “WE WILL GIVE TIP WHEN YOU RETURN THE LAND”. The waitress comes to us with a card machine for the bill to be sorted out. She sees the note & starts shaking. She leaves us & bursts into typical white tears (like why are you crying when all we’ve done is make a kind request? lol!). Anyways, so this white woman goes to her colleagues who are furious. She exits to cry at the back & a white male colleague of hers reluctantly comes out to address us & to annoy us more with his own white tears telling us that he finds our act “racist”.