Originally a comment by Artymorty on Empowering the bullies.

I think the block feature is an absolute necessity to prevent harassment.

It’s true that mass-blocking tools were bad: the promotion of block-lists to true believers to get them to isolate themselves from dissenting views was a move straight out of the Scientology playbook. But I don’t think that problem — which appears to have largely abated anyway; I don’t hear about mass block-lists anymore — merits getting rid of the block feature altogether.

Very often we have to be able to block specific accounts from replying to our posts, because they harass us. It’s true that people can create sockpuppet accounts to circumvent blocks, but very often harassers want to reply under their real identities, with their main accounts that have amassed large followings, not under anonymous accounts with few followers.

Not all accounts are equal — some have vastly more reach than others — and we need to be able to block the accounts that have amassed large followings and use them for targeted harassment.

Muting isn’t good enough either. If someone’s following you around the internet and bringing along a gang to shout lies about you every time you speak, it’s not enough that you personally tune them out, because everyone else will see the lies.

Also, blocking harassers is a way to prevent them noticing when you speak. Once blocked, they would have to create a sockpuppet account and seek you out specifically in order to be notified when you tweet. Without that block feature, your speech could just show up in their twitter feed — an open invitation for them to harass you.

I can’t see how getting rid of the block feature will be anything but a disaster for victims of harassment.

Yes, we do want someone who knows how to utter a coherent sentence, whether to us or to Putin or to Zelensky. That’s one reason we don’t want Trump.

Word is he’s gonna snub the debate and have a chat with Tucker Carlson instead.

Musk tells us he is getting rid of the block feature. Auschwitz Museum tells him why that’s a terrible idea.

The whole reply:

Failing to address the antisemitic and Holocaust denial comments that appear under our posts commemorating the victims of Auschwitz would be a disservice to their memory.

We’ve chosen to block users who promote denial and hatred. This decision stems from our deep dedication to our mission. We need a secure space to do this.

Engaging in discussions with people and accounts that seek to abuse the memory of victims of Auschwitz is against the values we believe in. These individuals do not seek discourse; they aim to inflict pain. In this context, blocking is a necessary step to ensure that these harmful voices don’t persist in their repetitive attacks on memory.

In today’s digital age, social media platforms shoulder significant moral responsibility. They should actively counter hate speech and halt its normalization.

A platform that disregards the need to defend the memory of the victims demonstrates a disregard for creating a respectful and empathetic online environment.

Blocking users isn’t a mere action; it’s a practical measure. Often, reporting accounts that spread hostility remains an unanswered call. Blocking provides a way to protect the memory of people who suffered and were murdered in Auschwitz.

And this applies across the board. Muting just hides responses from the original account; blocking prevents the responses from appearing at all. Musk is throwing open the door to abusers and bullies and verbal sadists.

We’re the creationists???

Talking to people who know that men are not women is like talking to creationists.

So we’re the ones engaged in magical thinking? We’re the ones who deny reality? We’re the ones who believe in the power of thought to change physical givens? We’re the ones who value faith and submission and compliance more than truth and evidence?

We’re the ones who believe what we’re told to believe as opposed to what it’s reasonable to believe? We’re the ones who conform? We’re the ones who let The Community tell us what we’re allowed to think?

We’re the ones who put fantasy ahead of reality – who let fantasy contradict reality? We’re the ones who believe in miracles? We’re the ones who think the body is mere dross and the soul is everything? We’re the mind-body dualists?

What a shambles.

Hahahaha nothing to do with being a woman.

Even Republicans are saying Trump is lying.

Former President Donald Trump now says he won’t be holding a news conference next week to unveil what he claims is new “evidence” of fraud in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election — even though no fraud has ever been substantiated — citing the advice of lawyers as he prepares to face trial in two criminal cases that stem from his election lies.

No compelling evidence of the wide-scale fraud Trump alleges has emerged in the two-and-a-half years since the election in Georgia or elsewhere, despite Trump’s baseless claims. Republican officials in the state have long said he lost fairly and three recounts there confirmed President Joe Biden’s win.

“Rather than releasing the Report on the Rigged & Stolen Georgia 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings as we fight to dismiss this disgraceful Indictment,” Trump wrote on his social media site Thursday in announcing his reversal.

He should get that on a sweatshirt – Irrefutable & Overwhelming.

Trump’s renewed attacks on the integrity of Georgia’s vote this week drew swift criticism from state’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, whom Trump had tried to lobby as part of his efforts to overturn his loss in the battleground state.

“The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward – under oath – and prove anything in a court of law,” Kemp wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump had tried to pressure to unilaterally overturn the results of the election and who is now challenging Trump for the Republican nomination, echoed that message.

Nobody believes him. His crackpot army doesn’t so much believe him as want to burn everything down.

Trump cancels himself.

Note that that’s all one sentence – one long, tangled, inelegant, confusing, direction-changing, clumsy sentence. Man woman person camera tv.

Investigating:

Officials in the US state of Georgia are investigating online threats made against members of the grand jury that indicted Donald Trump on Monday. Personal information, including the addresses and photos of the jurors, were shared on right-wing platforms. Fulton County Sheriff’s Office said it was aware of the threats, and was trying to track down those behind them.

The names of the jurors were published in the indictment, a routine practice in Georgia. But after their identities emerged in that document, supporters of former President Trump seemingly compiled further information available online and posted photographs and addresses to forums, including the social media site Telegram…

Officials said that along with jurors’ personal information, threats against them were also shared. Police say the threats could amount to jury intimidation.

Ya think?

More on the Yellowknife evacuations:

This is Canada’s worst-ever wildfire season with more than 1,000 active fires burning across the country, including 265 in the Northwest Territories. Experts say climate change has exacerbated the wildfire problem.

Drought has been a contributing factor to the number and intensity of this year’s fires, officials say, with high temperatures exacerbating the situation. Much of Canada has seen abnormally dry conditions.

Shane Thompson, the territorial environment minister, said the evacuation order had been issued late Wednesday to give people time to get out before the weather turned bad.

“The urgency is, fire changes drastically … the conditions are in our favor right now, but that will change on Saturday,” he told the CBC.

In total, about 65% of the Territories population of 46,000 people would be evacuated, he said.

There’s only one two-lane road out of Yellowknife to Alberta.

So far about 134,000 square km (52,000 square miles) of land in Canada have been scorched, more than six times a 10-year average. Nearly 200,000 people have been forced to evacuate at some point this season.

“The territories have never seen anything like this before in terms of wildfire … it’s an unimaginable situation for so many,” Mike Westwick, the territories’ fire information officer, told the CBC.

See…we were thinking this would happen to future people, who don’t matter, because they don’t exist [yet].

Oh shut up bro.

There’s no such thing as “cis” female pals, much less feminist ones. Women are in no need of a prefix or adjective to indicate that we are women, because the word “women” already does that. “Cis” is superfluous. It’s there to trick us into thinking there are two kinds of women, the female kind and the male kind. There aren’t. There is only the one.

It’s perfectly possible to “support trans people” without insisting that men can be women.

If empathy is a good thing why not have some for women? There are a hell of a lot more women than there are men who call themselves women, so why all the exaggerated concern for a few confused men at the expense of billions of women?

Farking hell.

The purported names and addresses of members of the grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and 18 of his co-defendants on state racketeering charges this week have been posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC News has learned.

NBC isn’t naming the website for obvious reasons.

The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment. District Attorney Fani Willis faced racist threats ahead of the return of the indictment, and additional security measures were put in place, with some employees being allowed to work from home.

The grand jurors’ purported addresses were spotted by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan research group founded by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator and staffer for the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.

“It’s becoming all too commonplace to see everyday citizens performing necessary functions for our democracy being targeted with violent threats by Trump-supporting extremists,” Jones said. “The lack of political leadership on the right to denounce these threats — which serve to inspire real-world political violence — is shameful.”

Not to mention the lack of Trump saying don’t do that…coupled with the abundance of Trump encouraging threats and naming and all the rest of the poisonous brew.

“These jurors have signed their death warrant by falsely indicting President Trump,” a post on a pro-Trump forum read in response to a post including the names of jurors, which was viewed by NBC News.

Welcome to the Mafia.

There are norms, and there are laws. Trump likes to smash both.

The Trump presidency generated an enormous amount of discussion about “norms”—the unwritten rules of American political life that everyone tacitly agrees to and that keep democracy functioning. Many of these norms had been somewhat invisible until Trump began shattering them, by doing things like profiting from his business during his time in office or demanding that the Justice Department investigate his political enemies.

But what makes a norm a norm is, at least in part, the fact that it’s not necessarily a legal obligation. When Trump bulldozed through these collective agreements about how politicians and particularly presidents should behave, in many cases there was no obvious means by which to punish him, legally speaking, or hold him back. Much of the public learned for the first time that many things they believed had been required by law—such as the expectation that presidential candidates release their tax returns—were essentially just gentlemen’s agreements. Trump’s actions raised this question so frequently that The Washington Post launched a podcast titled, simply, Can He Do That? Often, the Post’s reporters discovered, the answer was “yes.”

I’m definitely part of that public who kept thinking he was breaking at least rules, if not laws, and finding out otherwise.

Among the many norms that have long held up American democracy is the shared belief that political candidates should accept the outcome of a free and fair election. And if, after the 2020 election, Trump had confined his discontent to grousing on Twitter about supposed fraud, that would have violated this norm but, in all likelihood, not have been illegal. Yet according to both Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Trump’s actions moved from destructively poor sportsmanship to outright illegality when he began actively scheming to hold on to power. “The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won,” the Smith indictment states.

He may have had a legal right to lie about the election, but I still say he had no moral right to do that.

But Trump “also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”

Sometimes, then, the answer to the question Can he do that? is actually “no,” at least not legally. Consider, for example, Smith’s decision to charge Trump under Title 18, Section 241, of the U.S. Code, a civil-rights statute first passed during Reconstruction to empower the federal government to combat white-supremacist attacks on Black Americans. Courts have since interpreted the law as prohibiting efforts to interfere with both the process of voting and the accurate counting of the vote.

I bet Trump has no idea what Reconstruction was.

State law adds to this landscape, too. Repeatedly throughout his presidency, Trump arguably violated his own oath of office and encouraged others to violate theirs. At the federal level, the oath isn’t judicially enforceable; the president’s adherence to it can’t be investigated by a prosecutor or charged by a grand jury. It is, once again, a reflection of a normative commitment to carrying out the duties of the office in the public interest. Georgia, though, criminalizes the violation of an oath by a “public officer” in the state. And the Fulton County indictment charges Trump with soliciting Georgia officials—whom he pressured to overturn the state’s election results—to violate their oaths.

That Trump has been charged with these crimes doesn’t mean he’ll be convicted. And securing accountability for his wrongdoing is a much larger project than criminal law, whether at the state or federal level, can carry out on its own. After all, Trump will be busy campaigning for the presidency at the same time as prosecutors are hoping to bring these cases to trial—and even following a conviction, voters could still decide to grant him a second term. But the indictments are a signal that the foundation of American democracy rests on more than norms alone. These prosecutors aren’t criminalizing politics. They’re criminalizing, well, actual crimes—ones that Trump and his allies are alleged to have committed.

A bold move.

His what?

Former President Donald Trump’s promised press conference to refute the allegations in the indictment handed up by the Fulton County DA’s Office is now very much in doubt, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.

He wants to blather about the indictment in a press conference? Is there any limit to his stupidity?

Sources tell ABC News that Trump’s legal advisors have told him that holding such a press conference with dubious claims of voter fraud will only complicate his legal problems and some of his attorneys have advised him to cancel it.

Trump announced the planned press conference with a social media post shortly after he and 18 co-defendants were indicted late Monday in Georgia. He said he would present, “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia.”

Georgia’s Republican governor responded to that with his own social media post declaring, “The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward – under oath – and prove anything in a court of law.”

Yes but he won’t be under oath so he’s free to tell any lies he wants and he’s stupid enough to do it. In public.

How we live now:

Yellowknife residents have been ordered to begin evacuating the city immediately as wildfires approach, N.W.T. officials said Wednesday evening.

While the city is not in immediate danger, Environment Minister Shane Thompson said a “phased approach” to evacuating will allow citizens to get out safely by car or by plane.

People most at risk go now, the rest have until noon tomorrow.

“The fire now represents a real threat to the city,” Thompson said at a news conference Wednesday evening, adding it could reach the outskirts of the city by the weekend. The fire was about 17 kilometres from the city on Wednesday, he said.

…

Thompson said Wednesday that the highway from Yellowknife to Alberta is safe to drive. People are being urged to fill up their vehicles before leaving Yellowknife, but he said the Department of Infrastructure will have a tanker full of gas along the route, and tow trucks will also be out in force.

“At Big River [Service Centre], they have informed us they have a lot of gas available and they will have other gas brought in Friday,” said Thompson. Pilot vehicles will also be on the highway to escort evacuees through smoky areas in the fire zone.

“The window of opportunity right now is going to allow us to evacuate everybody safely,” Thompson said, adding, “we need you to do it now,” because the fire threatens both air and road access.

Does that sound terrifying enough yet?

People who cannot leave by road, and residents who are immunocompromised or have other conditions that put them at higher risk, are asked to register for evacuation flights. Air evacuations are scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. Thursday. 

Air evacuees are being advised to go to Sir John Franklin High School in Yellowknife, with standard carry-on baggage only, after 10 a.m. Thursday. Pets will be allowed on commercial carriers, but must be crated. On military aircraft, pets should be crated if possible. 

I’m not sure we all fully understood that global warming would be quite this literal.

H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on WHO snake oil.

A small logical, and ethical, point: The claim that most Western countries are ‘the least racist countries there has (sic) ever been, anywhere’, whether it is true or not (I happen to think it largely true), does not entail that no racism occurs in them, nor that instances of racism should be ignored. And we might remember that the existence of these ‘least racist’ societies has depended upon people struggling to achieve fairness & justice. I wonder on which side certain commentators would have been on fifty, a hundred, or 150 years ago? I wonder also why, say, the Windrush business in the UK, or Republican efforts to suppress the Black vote in many parts of the USA do not interest them. We do not live in a fantasy world, a perfected present where the ill consequences of slavery have somehow been magically expunged. There is a complacency, a refusal to face realities, in the view that we do live in such a fantasy present.

I also think that certain commentators should broaden their acquaintance, not necessarily personally, but at least with what animates the American & British extreme right as well as the self-righteous & Chomskyian left. The complacency and hypocrisy of certain British acquaintances of mine, who suppose that once the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire were ended, that was that and we should congratulate ourselves on our humanity, whereas those dreadful Americans – just look at them! They forget that their slaves were on islands thousands of miles away (out of sight and happily out of mind – so long as the money kept coming in) and did not form a large population within their own shores. They consider it bad taste to be presented with the facts of slavery, what it did for the British economy, and its continuing effects.

I find this debate, if you can call it that, infantile and ridiculous. It consists in reducing things to sentimental ‘woke’ lefties on one side, and complacent fools, virulent racists and the type of people who would no doubt be happy to be on the faculty of Prager University, if it existed, on the other. When a debate is reduced to this level, it becomes a face scowling at itself in a mirror. Why is it so difficult to recognise what happened in history, a history that does not magically stop at some (never specified) point and works in our changing present? Moral cowardice? Complacency? A desire not to be upset in any way?

One may certainly dislike Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ (I do), though its title certainly points to something (a craven distaste for recognising realities), but there are other books that certainly do put their fingers on realities:

Isabel Wilkerson: ‘Caste’

Eric Williamson: Capitalism & Slavery

Sathhnam Sanghara: Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

Vincent Brown: Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Padraic X. Scanlan: How Slavery Built Modern Britain

I recommend them all to those who want to get away from the sterilities of the present debate.

How disgusting.

An Israeli journalist reported being pressured to change seats on an international flight on Tuesday, complaining that she was told by airline staff that any flight delays caused by ultra-Orthodox men attempting to enforce gender segregation would be her fault.

In a tweet, Neria Kraus, a U.S.-based correspondent for Channel 13 News, wrote that she had been asked to move by ultra-Orthodox men and alleged that she received no assistance after she turned to the Delta Air Lines flight crew for help.

Burying the lede. Why wasn’t the important bit in the first paragraph? Male religious fanatics tried to force a woman out of her seat because they think women are too filthy and whorey to sit next to.

In recent years, male ultra-Orthodox passengers on flights to and from Israel have increasingly refused to sit next to women, with travelers reporting clusters of ultra-Orthodox men approaching female passengers prior to take-off and requesting to switch seats.

Because god hates women. Men like that should be banned by the airlines.

There is no problem sitting next to a woman on public transportation according to Jewish law, asserted Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll, co-founder of the Orthodox feminist group Chochmat Nashim, complaining that “we in the religious community have allowed this by erasing women. When we erase women’s images, we get used to the idea that women aren’t there, and then we expect women not to be there in person.”

And that women are sinister, and dangerous, and filthy, and harlots, and all the rest of it. If sitting next to a woman is too difficult for men then they should stay home.

Elements of the ultra-Orthodox community have long tried to erase images of women from the public sphere through vandalism and by blurring their faces in news coverage.

Don’t call it a “community.” That’s a hooray word. Call it something not-hooray – sect, cult, gang, mafia.

The latest incident involving Kraus happened only a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that “Israel is a free country in which no one will restrict who can use public transportation, and no one will dictate where she or he will sit.”

He was responded to a series of incidents where women were asked to move to the back seats on buses or avoid using public transportation.

The back of the bus – or just get off the bus altogether. Unfuckingbelievable.

Guest post by Jonathan Gallant

Here is a thought experiment about academia.  Let us imagine that, about 40 years ago, a few academic operators had invented a newish subject called “Critical Chemical Studies”.   The focus of this subject would not be actual chemicals, but rather the language used in writing or talking about  Chemistry:  catalogues of the frequency of words like element, molecule, valence,  bond,  reaction, intermediate, rate, etc. etc.; and then endless gabble about the philosophical implications of the words’ spelling,  font type, sound, pronunciation, association, and usage.

    Before long, journals would be established to publish disquisitions in this vein.  The scholars of Critical Chemical Studies would not need laboratories, beakers, or spectrophotometers, for they would not do experiments; they would not produce things like nanosensors or new kinds of batteries or drug tests.   Instead, they would produce a steady stream of publications about chemical words in their parochial journals, and these publications would refer to each other, thus mimicking in a formal way a behavior of their academic colleagues who did actual Chemistry with chemicals.   Some of the scholars would then extend their logomachy to general propositions; for example the thesis that the lengths of terms like “coordination complex” and “dissociation constant” defined the general structure of the university, of human society, and of the universe.  Conjectures of this kind would be routinely referred to as “Theory”, thus imitating a status like that of the atomic theory and the kinetic theory of gases.   As a result of this mimicry and these “Theory” exercises, scholars of Critical Chem Studies would rise through the ranks into committees which made decisions about employment, departments, and curriculum in academe;  and in time they would also ascend into administration.    

   They might next get it into their heads that the University should endorse specific political doctrines, particularly ones focussed on certain favorite words— such as “Dilution”, “Equilibrium”, and “Ionization“.    These magic words and their acronym, repeated in innumerable notices, memoranda, statements, and edicts, would establish a new, conventional monoculture in the groves of academe.   A  new bureaucracy would be set up to make sure that everyone in the groves demonstrated fealty to the three magic words in all their teaching, research, writing, correspondence, reading, recreation, thoughts, and dreams—or at least said they did. 

Talk about an own goal.

FGM he says? FGM??????? GM is what trans ideology DOES to its believers. Trans ideology does “espouse” gender mutilation, along with breast removal and puberty blocking and related horrors. Of all things to choose to illustrate “You wouldn’t talk that way about _____” he chose genital mutilation. Think, man, think.

Interesting. Prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers in an opinion piece at CNN:

RICO also carries sentencing benefits. A conviction under Georgia’s RICO law would carry a mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years, and most of the other 40 charges in the indictment likewise involve mandatory minimum sentences of one year.

None of the other charged cases include a mandatory minimum, upping the stakes for a Georgia conviction not only for Trump, but his co-conspirators, who will be deciding in the coming weeks and months whether they want to take a plea deal that might help them avoid this consequence by allowing them to plead to a count without mandatory minimum penalties.

Here’s hoping they all abandon him, every last one of them.