And the replies are taking this completely seriously.

Right, because rules to avoid contagion during a pandemic are exactly the same as Nazi genocide.

Good old reliable BBC.

Graham adds: it’s not real, it’s chat gpt. Which is a good joke in itself, real or not.

About the Kennedy Hazard:

Even among the chaos generated by Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks, one stands out for the extensive suffering and lasting institutional damage it may cause: his choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department.

Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30 percent of infants in some U.S. cities never made it to their first birthday.

But that’s 124 years ago. Nobody has a personal memory of it. There are probably some people who have sorrowful memories of parents who never got over an infant death (or two or more) but none who held the dying baby themselves.

The danger isn’t merely that Kennedy — who has almost no experience in government or large-scale administration, and who has shown a sometimes breathtakingly loose connection to the truth — would be incompetent or misleading. At the helm of a department with over 80,000 employees and a $3 trillion budget, one that oversees key agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, he would have control over the nation’s medicines, food safety, vaccines and medical research. With that power he could inflict significant harm to the public health system — and to the public trust that would be needed to rebuild it once he’s gone.

And the trouble is, he’s like Trump in being supremely convinced of his own sagacity. Two stupid ignorant men who think they know better than those pesky nerds who actually studied disease and disease control.

Outside of the medical community, few people still know about all the diseases whose safe and effective vaccines he is lying about, so let me remind you about one of them: diphtheria. Once known as “the strangling angel of children,” it causes its young victims to slowly and painfully suffocate, turn blue and gasp as a thick film fills their throat. They lie dying for many agonizing days. The disease has been all but wiped out, but in Spain a few years ago, it cost the life of an unvaccinated boy of 6. His distraught antivax parents promptly vaccinated their surviving child.

Kennedy doesn’t mention those gruesome realities. The core of his method is to mislead and confuse with selective citations that overlook key, even overwhelming evidence. He has falsely suggested that AIDS isn’t caused by H.I.V. With no evidence, he once mused that Covid was deliberately made to target Black and Caucasian people, while ensuring that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” 

So naturally Trump put him in charge of public health. If it ain’t broke, smash it to pieces.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany Room.

We are all familiar with attempts to classify ideologies and political systems in terms of different axes, or dimensions, or coordinate systems (individualist vs. collectivist, egalitarian vs. hierarchical, libertarian vs. authoritarian, universalist vs. identitarian etc.). There is a tendency to lump one’s political rivals together by selectively emphasizing the axes along which their positions happen to coincide to the exclusion of all the others. There is also a tendency to distance oneself from groups one does not like to be associated with by selectively emphasizing the differences and ignoring the similarities. E.g. back in my movement atheist days accomodationists often accused “militants” like myself of being “just like the fundamentalists” (“just as dogmatic”, “just as intolerant of opposing views” etc.), and from a certain point of view they were right: Even if hard-line atheists and religious fundamentalists disagreed on pretty much all the specific answers, not to mention how those answers were derived in the first place, at least they both agreed that the answer mattered, and to the accomodationists that was exactly the problem. Accomodationists and moderate believers also disagreed on the specific answers, but shared the same indifference to truth and reason, as well as the same commitment to bland, indifferent centrism and bothsiderism.

I’m increasingly inclined to think that the main battle of our time is not between “the Left” and “the Right”, but between those, whether Left or Right, who still respect facts and logic and care about classical liberal values (universal rights, individual liberty, free expression, academic freedom, basic democratic rules of the game etc.) and those who don’t. As I keep saying, Trumpism and wokeism are both post-truth ideologies. As much as the woke crowd hate Trump (i.e. not nearly as much as they hate the “wrong kind” of leftists!), they absolutely love what he has done to factual discourse. For all their mutual antagonism, Trump-supporters and wokesters both want to live in a world in which sound volume and endless repetitions trump (no pun intended) facts and the biggest bully, capable of mobilizing the biggest mob, has a blank check to take whatever he wants and destroy anyone who gets in his way.

We keep talking about the political “Left” vs. the political “Right” as if it were obvious what we are talking about, when, in fact, these are umbrella terms, each covering a vast range of very different, and even mutually hostile, movements, ideologies, political systems etc. Talking in terms of “Left” vs. “Right” makes it sound like the people on the “Left” are all on the same side against everyone on the “Right”, when in fact a person on the moderate center-Left who believes in liberal values almost certainly has more in common with someone on the moderate center-Right who also believes in liberal values than either of them does with Fascists, Communists, Trump-supporters, or wokesters.

To me the defining feature of “leftism” is that “leftists” tend to “side with the underdog” as they see it (in practice, of course, seeing it that way in the first place may require acceptance of some extremely dubious truth claims, academic theories, ideological doctrines etc., but still…). They tend to see the world as inherently unjust and unfair, i.e. as a place where certain groups, simply by accident of birth, start out at a major disadvantage while others get an almost insurmountable head start. Furthermore, this inherent injustice perpetuates itself from one generation to the next, leaving the disadvantaged groups perpetually last in line. Breaking out of this vicious cycle is going to require active political interventions, from gradual reform to armed revolution.

For most of my life, “leftists” tended to be the ones who were trying to get away from boxes and labels and different standards of treatment for different groups of people (judging people by the “content of their character” rather then the color of their skin etc.). As (iirc) Nick Cohen once pointed out, women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals etc. were not asking for special treatment: What they were objecting to was precisely the fact that they were given special treatment. That’s what “discrimination” means! Woke identity politics, by contrast, is all about boxes and labels and treating people differently according to group identity.

Despite efforts to equate wokeism with “cultural Marxism”, Marxists believed in objective truth and claimed it for themselves. To the woke any appeal to “objective truth”, as well as “evidence”, “logic” etc. is just a naked exercise of power to force oppressed groups into accepting the self-serving narratives of their oppressors. Marxists were mainly concerned with class, the one axis of privilege and marginalization that the woke don’t care about at all. As many others have pointed out, “Marxism” without any consideration of class is rather like a doughnut after you have removed everything except the hole: Pretty much indistinguishable from nothing. Both Marxists and wokesters invoked a concept of “false consciousness”, but according to Marxism the oppressed (i.e. the working class) were blind to their own oppression, and therefore needed the Communist Party to do their thinking for them. According to wokeism it’s the oppressor classes themselves who are blind to their own privilege etc. etc.

The people on the “Right”, on the other hand, tend to see themselves as siding with “the deserving”. Fiscal conservatives and libertarians interpret “the deserving” in meritocratic terms (the hard working, the competent, the achievers etc.). The “American Dream” was all about being “self-made” and making it to the top through personal effort without outside help. Indeed, the greatest heroes were the ones who managed to overcome great obstacles and opposition and prove everybody else wrong (“I did it my way” etc.). Fiscal conservatives and libertarians also tend to see the world as inherently just and fair. Or, if there is anything unfair about it, it’s mainly unfair to the deserving who keep getting held back by burdensome regulations while having the fruit of their accomplishments confiscated and redistributed to the undeserving (the lazy, the incompetent, the bums). By contrast cultural conservatives, religious fundamentalists, fascists etc. see their own group as more deserving than all others by virtue of their superior ancestry, ethnicity, culture, religion etc. Everyone else is considered undeserving by virtue of who they are, rather than anything they’ve ever done.

There is a tendency among leftists to portray Trumpism as simply the logical consequence of what “conservatives” have been up to all along, when, in fact, the betrayal of the idea of meritocracy in favor of a system that favors personal loyalty to the leader over accomplishment is almost certainly more offensive to the old-school conservatives than to leftists who think there is no such thing as “meritocracy” anyway: Just unearned privilege perpetuating itself from one generation to the next. Traditional conservatives also tended to emphasize values like character, integrity, and personal responsibility (far more than Leftists who are more sympathetic to blaming the “system” for personal shortcomings), whereas fascists emphasize brute force and the ability to bend the world to one’s will, and dismiss any appeal to such fake “values” as “slave morality” rooted in resentment, envy and the need to discredit what one is too weak to do oneself (cf. Nietzsche). The same disdain for “do-gooders” and the same amoral commitment to winning by any means necessary is obvious in kleptocrats like Trump and Putin. The sentiment is admirably captured in this quote from the gangster movie Goodfellas:

For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean, they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again.

This is not the inevitable implication of favoring lower taxes, more privatization, and less government spending.

Gee. It’s only taken them ten or fifteen years.

But the realities of human biology raise legitimate questions about any notion that trans women should always and everywhere be treated exactly like cisgender women.

YA THINK??????????

Jesus fucking christ we’ve only been saying that at the top of our lungs for literally years only to be branded terfs and transphobes and cuntbitchwhores. Why did it take the Washington Post bigwigs all this time to discover what we’ve been shouting at them since forever?

After his party’s election defeat on Nov. 5, Rep. Seth Moulton (Massachusetts) offered some blunt advice: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. … I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Mr. Moulton’s remarks sparked an immediate backlash within his own political camp. His campaign manager quit. A state legislator accused him of “scapegoating transgender youth.” A city council member in Salem, Massachusetts, called for him to resign. The Bay State’s governor, Maura Healey, opined that Mr. Moulton was “playing politics with people.”

Guess what, Governor: the people who insist that men must be allowed to compete against girls aka run over them on a playing field are also “playing politics with people” only the politics they’re playing are ruthlessly unfair to women and girls.

Even Tufts University briefly got in on the act when David Art, chair of the political science department, reportedly called Mr. Moulton’s office and told him not to contact the university to recruit interns in the future.

Tough shit for any political science students who might have wanted to intern with Rep. Moulton, yeah?

Trans women’s participation in sports raises thorny questions about fairness — but that should not preclude Mr. Moulton from speaking his mind. Trans people deserve to be treated with dignity, and the law should protect them from discrimination in areas such as employment and housing. But the realities of human biology raise legitimate questions about any notion that trans women should always and everywhere be treated exactly like cisgender women.

As we’ve been saying. And saying. And saying.

…unless the data show that transitioning can fully erase the effects of male puberty, the country will also need a frank and open debate about the trade-offs between inclusion on the one hand and safety and fairness on the other. And yet too often, efforts have been made to avoid or prevent discussion of those trade-offs by labeling debate inherently transphobic. This is not how a healthy democracy makes decisions.

By labeling debate inherently transphobic and by labeling women who debate monsters, bitches, transphobes, cunts, Karens, evil cruel arrogant sadistic right-wing pieces of shit. That is not how a healthy democracy or a healthy left wing makes decisions.

The Guardian is on the case.

Daily Telegraph readers have woken up this week to successive front-page headlines alleging a grave threat to free speech, triggered by a star columnist’s “Kafkaesque” encounter with police. The rightwing broadsheet described how Essex police had told Allison Pearson on her doorstep last weekend that she was under investigation for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a tweet last year.

The Telegraph and Pearson say they are unaware which post caused two officers to knock on her door at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday.

But the Guardian thinks it has found the tweet in question.

Note the peculiar wording though – the tweet that “caused two officers to knock on her door at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday.” No it didn’t. It didn’t bodily pick them up and hurl them at her front door. It prompted them maybe, or motivated them, but it didn’t cause them to pay her a surprise visit early on a weekend morning.

There’s a lot of that kind of thing in the piece, because of course there is. Manipulative wording is essential for manipulative journalism.

It is a retweet by Pearson of a photograph posted several months ago amid heightened tensions over the policing of Gaza protests. It shows a group of people of colour posing with a flag on a British street, flanked by three police officers. The photograph angered Pearson, who wrote a tweet condemning the Metropolitan police: “How dare they. Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel on Saturday police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.”

That’s harsh, certainly, but is it police level harsh? In the context of all the harshness on the subject that’s all over TwitterX?

The Guardian says the photo is actually of a Manchester protest so the police are not from the London force.

The implication that the Muslims pictured are antisemitic and supporting Hamas is undermined by the green and maroon flag they are holding. The flag is used by supporters of the Pakistani political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). It also, rather clearly, has the word “Pakistan” written on it.

A reasonable point, but is it a point the police need to make? By terrorizing someone early on a weekend morning?

The person who complained to the police is not Muslim nor one of those pictured. They are a former public servant with training in criminal law. They wish to stay anonymous, fearing reprisals, especially from far-right elements, but told the Guardian the post by Pearson was “racist and inflammatory” – which she denies.

It may have been, but is it really the job of the police to knock on the doors of people over arguably racist and inflammatory tweets? Are there no intermediate steps?

The row has led Essex police to report the Telegraph to a media standards body, claiming some of its reporting has been false. The force has also set up a “gold group”, used by police to deal with a critical incident.

There! That’s an intermediate step right there.

How many “gold groups” do the police set up when a woman reports a rape? Any? Any at all?

The Telegraph and Pearson castigated police and said the visit was an affront to free speech and freedom of the press. Their disbelief was shared by senior lawyers, the former Telegraph journalist Boris Johnson and other leading Conservatives, as well as Elon Musk.

Yeah yeah yeah, but I despise Boris Johnson and especially Elon Musk, but I too think the police action is grotesque.

The complainant first went to a different force, in April, which passed it on. Essex police initially did not wish to investigate, but then reviewed their decision and decided they should.

The complainant said: “As a former public servant, I was concerned about the tweet that Pearson put out last year so much so that I reported it to the police … I have no political affiliation and will call out racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia when I see it.”

Oh will you, you’ll call it out will you. Well come and get me, because I despise Islam. If you wonder why, start with three words: women in Afghanistan.

“This is not a debate about free speech; this is about a journalist who tweeted something false during the height of the tensions in London following the 7 October atrocities.

“She could have tweeted an apology stating she was wrong. She didn’t.”

But it’s not a police matter when someone fails to apologize.

H/t Dave Ricks

The Telegraph on the grotesque bullying of Maya Forstater by the police:

Ms Forstater was investigated for 15 months by Scotland Yard after a complaint that her June 2023 post about a transgender GP was allegedly a malicious communication.

I don’t believe she was actually investigated for 15 months. I think she was just made to twist in the wind for 15 months. I really don’t think Scotland Yard spent 15 months “investigating” a single tweet.

Police contacted her two months after the post on X in June 2023 to say she was being invited to a voluntary interview to give her side of the events.

Despite asking a series of questions about the details of the allegation, she was told only that it related to a post “targeted” at a member of the transgender community. The officer said they could not divulge any more because the “victim” was susceptible to further comments.

She was warned that if she failed to attend the police interview voluntarily, she would be marked as “wanted” on the Met Police’s system for which she would eventually be arrested.

So attending the police interview is not “voluntary” at all. You can’t claim the interview is voluntary and say not attending the interview will lead to being arrested.

Her experience prompted her to contact [Allison] Pearson after reading about her case. Pearson was told on Remembrance Sunday by Essex police that she was under investigation for allegedly inciting racial hatred in a tweet a year ago.

“When I read the article describing her experience as Kafkaesque, it is exactly what my experience was,” said Ms Forstater. “From the start, the officer was saying there’s a victim and I was being told I had committed a crime but was not told what the tweet was.

How is that even legal?

Tyranny via the CPS:

The process is the punishment indeed. Rape is largely ignored, but by god a single tweet by some rebellious bitch of a woman must be punished by 15 months of police harassment.

The party of more disease won.

President-elect Trump says he’s going to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild on health.” That has many pediatricians nervous, because of RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine rhetoric. When another vaccine skeptic, Joseph Ladapo, became surgeon general in Florida, some doctors there say vaccine hesitancy got worse.

“It’s because people in power, like our surgeon general, as an example, are pushing this anti-vax message,” says Dr. Jeffrey Goldhagen, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida College of Medicine and president of the International Society for Social Pediatrics and Child Health.

Vaccine hesitancy has been growing in Florida. The routine childhood vaccination rate for kindergartners is now at 90.6%. That’s the lowest rate in more than a decade — and it’s well below the threshold needed for herd immunity against highly contagious diseases like measles.

Whatever. It’s worth spreading dangerous diseases in order to stick it to the libs.

When a measles outbreak occurs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises parents to keep unvaccinated children at home after exposure, to stop the disease from spreading. But Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s advice was quite different: He told parents of unvaccinated children that it was up to them to decide whether to send their children to school or keep them home.

Freedom. Freedom freedom freedom.

Ladapo has become a frequent target of critics who say his stances on vaccines go against established science. Last year, the CDC and FDA sent Ladapo a letter reprimanding him for spreading misinformation about COVID vaccines and fueling vaccine hesitancy. Now, Ladapo has been mentioned as a possible candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. So has RFK Jr.

Yes, because freedom, and also because medical science is for libs while guesswork and unreasonable optimism are for the good people.

It just gets nutser and nutser.

Three police forces called in to probe Allison Pearson tweet

Three of Britain’s biggest police forces were involved in the investigation into a Telegraph journalist’s social media post.

Allison Pearson, an award-winning writer, is being investigated by Essex Police for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a social media post last November.

The force has refused to tell her any details about which post on X, formerly Twitter, is being investigated, or who made the complaint against her.

How do they get to refuse to tell her what they’re investigating?

Two police officers called at her home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was under investigation and invited her to a voluntary interview. She was told, however, that the officers were not allowed to disclose the specific focus of the inquiry.

It gets worse with every iteration. “WAKE UP!! We’re here to tell you you’re under investigation and invite you to our place for a chat but we’re not going to tell you a damn thing about why you’re under investigation so yaboosucks can we eat your breakfast now?”

The Telegraph understands that the post was reported to the Metropolitan Police as a potential breach of the Malicious Communications Act in November last year. The case was then passed to Sussex Police, which marked it as a possible non-crime hate incident (NCHI) as well as a potential malicious communication.

Did none of them stop to ask what are we doing here, why are we freaking out over a single tweet, don’t we have anything more important to do?

I’m trying to catch up on the Essex case, but I have to interrupt myself for a minute to deal with one bit of incoherent drool. “CA” is a manager at the theatre in question.

Sarah: “There was a man in these toilets who refused to leave and shouted in my face “I AM A WOMAN”. This is a safeguarding issue and I want to complain.” CA: “It is not possible, or appropriate, for us to police the gender identity of those who access the toilets.. we want everyone to feel comfortable and use the toilets appropriate for them and for their circumstances.”

Me: NO YOU DON’T.

You don’t you don’t you don’t. Why do you say you do when you know you don’t?

That’s the whole fucking point.

Sarah was exiting the women’s room when a man came barging in and she told him he was in the wrong toilet. CA the manager here is trying to make him “feel comfortable” at the expense of the woman in the women’s room and of all other women who might want to use that women’s room at that time. She’s just lying when she says the theatre wants everyone to feel comfortable.

They need to stop getting away with that “We juss wann evereebuddy to be happeee” shit. It’s not true, they don’t mean it, it’s an insulting lie. Stamp on it whenever you see it.

If it’s a non-crime why are you banging on my door on a Sunday morning?

A Telegraph journalist is facing a “Kafkaesque” investigation for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a social media post last year.

Allison Pearson, an award-winning writer, has described how two police officers called at her home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was being investigated over the post on X, formerly Twitter, from a year ago.

Oh come on. Two cops. Unexpected. 9 fucking 40 in the morning on a weekend. Over a tweet from a year ago. Why on earth could that not have been a phone call or email or just plain mail? Even if the tweet deserved investigating, which I doubt.

When Pearson asked what she had allegedly said in the tweet, the officer said he was not allowed to disclose it.

Then what the hell did he and his colleague bang on the door for?

However, at this time last year, she was frequently tweeting about the October 7 attacks on Israel and controversial pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of London.

The officer also refused to reveal the accuser’s name. Pearson recalled: “‘It’s not the accuser,’ the PC said, looking down at his notes. ‘They’re called the victim.’”

Unless they’re women, of course. Women are always the perps.

Last year, Suella Braverman, then the home secretary, raised the threshold for police recording non-crime hate incidents over a perceived threat that laws posed to freedom of expression.

It was amended following a Court of Appeal ruling in favour of Harry Miller, a former police officer, who successfully challenged the previous national policy for forces to record gender-critical views as non-crime hate incidents.

Judges said the policy had had a “chilling” effect on his freedom of speech.

Under the change, officers are only allowed to record a non-crime hate incidents if the incident is “clearly motivated by intentional hostility” and where there is a “real risk of escalation causing significant harm or a criminal offence”.

And who decides when the criteria are met? The police, of course.

Um………..man up?

Being inclooosive is all very well, but you can’t be inclooosive of everything all the time for the simple reason that sometimes you need to be specific. Specificity requires exclusion.

A trustee and PR director of Britain’s oldest breastfeeding charity has resigned after it introduced an inclusivity policy that allowed men to attend support groups.

This is one of those times. Breastfeeding is inherently “exclusionary” in the blunt factual sense that men can’t do it. It’s not that spiteful bitchy women decided to make it exclusionary, it’s that men can’t breastfeed.

Given the fact that men can’t do it, what can possibly be the point of being inclooosive of men in breastfeeding support groups? What can a man’s motive for attending be other than creepy prurient intrusion? Why do women have to be inclooosive of leering men in breastfeeding support groups?

Miriam Main is leaving La Leche League GB (LLLGB) after a diktat from the global organisation elicited fears that volunteers would have to give advice to transgender women.

Directors at the charity’s British arm have already requested that the Charity Commission intervene over the inclusivity policy, which permits biological males to seek support from the organisation.

Main resigned on Monday, saying that she refused to help biological men “perform a poor imitation of breastfeeding”, which she said put babies’ safety at risk.

Documents produced by LLLGB on transgender and non-binary parents stated that it “supports everyone who wants to breastfeed or chestfeed in reaching their goals”. It said: “We do not discriminate based on sex, gender or gender identity.”

There again – just as with exclooosion, sometimes you have to “discriminate.” Men can’t breastfeed, end of story. The demand to be allowed to “chestfeed” a chemical soup to an infant is trump-level disgusting.

Zion Tankard, executive director of La Leche League International, said: “We respect Marian’s decision regarding La Leche League International. Her contributions and legacy are highly valued as a founder. We will continue to uphold the values of empathy and understanding that are central to La Leche League.”

If “empathy” here means encouraging men to feed infants a chemical soup, then it’s an empathy too far.

The Justice Department is a tad irked by the Matt Gaetz nomination.

Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general has Justice Department veterans petrified and warning of a crisis in the department marked by chaos and revenge.

…

“There’s no conceivable justification for nominating somebody this smarmy and this offensive for a position of such significance in this democracy other than to have a puppet and somebody who, as Gaetz has demonstrated, will do anything Trump asks,” said Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House lawyer.

[Aside: I do wish Americans would stop using the word “smarmy” without bothering to know what it means.]

In the weeks leading up to the election and days since, Gaetz had not been seen as a contender for attorney general. The choice suggests that Trump may have passed over some of the conventional-wisdom candidates, like Utah Sen. Mike Lee (a former federal prosecutor and a Supreme Court clerk) and business-friendly former regulator Jay Clayton.

Well obviously he passed over everyone who isn’t Matt Gaetz.

“If there were any people left who were sort of holding on to the idea that it’ll basically be like Trump’s first term, where the people who are really in charge of the department are more or less these sort of old guard Republican stalwarts … they’ve now been disabused of that notion,” former federal prosecutor Jonathan Kravis said. “Because even if it’s not Matt Gaetz, even if he doesn’t get confirmed, it’s going to be someone else like him.”

One former Trump DOJ official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, called the Gaetz nomination “fucking appalling.”

“The attorney general should not be a provocateur,” the former official added. “The problem with a person like that is he derives too much enjoyment from chaos and burning the place down, and those just would be the last traits you’d want in someone in charge of federal law enforcement.”

It’s going to be all burning the place down all the time.

Um…

What I wonder is what reason Dawkins has to think Musk has the welfare of the world at heart.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That’s an old saying, i.e. there’s no one author. Anyway is it true?

I don’t know. The most obvious answer is that it depends. Is the enemy of your enemy otherwise a fine upstanding person? Then by all means make friends with her. Is the enemy of your enemy a bad person who has never done a kind or generous thing in his life and is intent on destroying as much of the world as he can before he stops having a pulse? Then no, he’s not your friend, no matter how profoundly he hates your enemy.

There are some gc feminists who should be paying more attention to that distinction.

The AP reports:

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz [has] resigned from Congress, ending an ethics probe into allegations of sex trafficking, sexual misconduct and drug use, after President-elect Donald Trump nominated him for attorney general.

…

Gaetz submitted his resignation from Congress, effective immediately, launching an eight-week clock to fill his seat, Johnson said, possibly in time for the start of the new Congress on Jan. 3. It also ends a long-running ethics investigation into the Florida congressman.

Johnson framed the stunning move by Gaetz to resign early and before confirmation as a way to help the majority fill his vacancy much [faster] than if he were to wait until his Senate confirmation as attorney general.

Nothing like an Attorney General who was under investigation for perving on a child among other vomitous activities.

How bizarre.

Of what now?

Human sexual dimorphism.

It’s a thing.

Men can’t get pregnant. Women can’t swim faster than “Lia” Thomas.

Public Notice on Trump’s swift move to demand the powers of a dictator:

But the process of staffing up every new administration has slowed to a crawl because Republicans spent the last 25 years weaponizing Senate procedure to obstruct Democrats. Democrats have certainly returned fire, but no one has done more to ratchet up the temperature — and the gridlock — than Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he crowed back in 2010. And one of the ways McConnell ensured that Obama couldn’t enact his agenda, despite having a majority in the House for his first two years and in the Senate for six, was to filibuster literally everything, including Obama’s executive branch nominations.

…

It’s not difficult to see why Trump would like to avoid putting his preferred appointees through the wringer of confirmation, even after McConnell did him a solid and changed the rules in 2019 to cut debate time for lower-level nominees from 30 hours down to just two.

The last time around, Trump’s appointees took quite a beating from congressional Democrats, most notably Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who stammered through an interrogation by his former colleague, then-Sen. Kamala Harris. And Sessions was, on paper at least, a rational choice for the office. This time Trump is threatening to make shitposter Kash Patel head of the FBI. Even assuming Patel could get confirmed, Democrats would surely take advantage of confirmation hearings to draw attention to his promise to weaponize law enforcement to attack the media and embark on a revenge tour against everyone who ever tried to bring Trump to justice.

…

In short, Trump is demanding, as the price of his support, that the incoming Senate majority leader promise to let him skip checks and balances and stack his administration with every unconfirmable ghoul he can find.

Naturally he’s got a whole cadre of Republican spinmeisters willing to dress up this naked extortion and gross assault on the separation of powers as a measured response to Democratic obstruction. Former White House Counsel Don McGahn took to the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page on Monday to tut-tut that “recess appointments are a tradition worth restoring, and Mr. Trump deserves to have the power that all his predecessors had.” This ignores the reality that Biden’s confirmations also took forever, and no president has ever had the power to simply staff his entire administration without the bother of confirmation hearings.

…

So now Trump is currently naming a cadre of offensively unqualified sycophants to staff every government agency, safe in the knowledge that his congressional allies will roll over and cede their constitutional authority to him and three Supreme Court justices will execute an about face and discover that recess appointments are very cool and very legal after all.

In short: no checks, no balances.