News from the MidAmerica branch of Unitarian Universalistism:

UUMA/UUA Neurodiversity Skill Up Series: Rev. Leela Sinha

Rev. Leela Sinha (ze/zim/zir) is a brown, queer, genderqueer, entrepreneurial community minister with a theology of pleasure and a habit of transformative mischief. In zir work, ze offers leadership coaching, training, and keynotes, working with leaders and organizations to develop and delight in the power and intensity we have, and to use that power for good.

Wait a second. Who is this “we”? Did anyone ask what our pronouns are? And by “our” of course I mean “fm”.

Ze has been a UU all zir life, and lives and works in the Bay Area. Check out zir’s work with zir Sinha Intensive/Expansive Framework, work supporting teams and individuals working together, and podcast The Intensives Institute. We’re excited to welcome Leela because zir’s framework of supporting individuals and teams in embracing their strengths and working together even with different brains does not depend on medical diagnosis.

I think the real reason they’re excited is because of the fun and danger of keeping track of all those specialty pronouns. Do you know the difference between zir and zir’s? Because I gotta tellya, I sure don’t.

Also…brown?

A euphemism too many:

Police Scotland has used the term “minor-attracted people” to describe paedophiles in a major report despite warnings it normalises child abuse.

It is a literal translation, but the overtones are very different, which is surely the point. Why would it be necessary or useful to come up with a less judgey label for sexual abuse of children? There’s no push to euphemise the words for other crimes is there? No calls to rename murder “premature involuntary termination”? Why euphemise sexual abuse of children?

The term MAP is contentious because child abusers are trying to escape the stigma attached to paedophilia and maintain they should be regarded as a niche group alongside the LGBT community.

The “LGBT community” has too many niche groups as it is, thanks very much. It has so many it’s no longer a “community” – the T and the LG are very prone to clash and argue and fight.

Kenny McAskill, Scotland’s former justice secretary, said using euphemisms for paedophiles simply “masks the reality and their danger”.

The argument is that attraction by itself isn’t abuse, but we all know from having been alive for more than five minutes that people’s ability to keep attraction separate from acting on the attraction is as feeble as dandelion fluff.

Maggie Mellon, an independent social work consultant, said the term MAP risked “the danger of normalising and therefore perhaps decriminalising a serious offence”.

She added: “There should be diagnostic and treatment options for those who present a risk to children but the police are not a therapeutic service – they should be devoting their resources to closing down porn sites that feature children and abuse of women and upping their detection and conviction rates for those promoting child abuse.”

Well put. Way too many institutions have decided they’re therapeutic services when that’s not their job at all. Some distinctions are necessary.

Not just a social media influencer any more.

Social media influencer Andrew Tate has been arrested in Romania on suspicion of human trafficking, rape and forming an organised crime group, prosecutors have confirmed.

Now that’s the big time.

The 36-year-old British-American and his brother Tristan were arrested on Thursday evening and are being detained for 24 hours alongside two Romanian suspects, prosecutors in the country said.

“The four suspects… appear to have created an organised crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialised websites for a cost,” prosecutors said.

Imagine being a person who would do that – what can it be like? It would be very up close and personal so what can it be like to be that dead inside?

Tate, a former kickboxer, was banned from Twitter in 2017 for his misogynistic views and hate speech but reinstated last month.

Good work, Elon. Platform the rapists!

Tate first rose to fame in 2016 for being removed from the reality TV show Big Brother after a video appeared to show him attacking a woman with a belt – he claimed the clip was edited.

He has suggested rape victims “bear some responsibility” for being attacked and has described women as “property” belonging to men.

It’s almost impossible not to see that kind of thing as deliberate provocation, exaggerating for effect, baiting the feminists, all that – but clearly it can be all too literal.

As a result, concerns have been raised about his influence on young people, particularly young men.

Oh no I’m sure he’s a very benign, healthy influence. Women get away with too much, it’s time to teach us a lesson.

Elon Musk is saving Twitter from going broke by not paying the rent. That should work.

Over the past few weeks, Twitter had stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and services, and Mr. Musk had told his subordinates to renegotiate those agreements or simply end them. The company has stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction, two people familiar with the matter said. Janitorial and security services have been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.

Don’t pay the rent; don’t buy toilet paper. The future looks bright!

Those cuts may be yielding consequences. On Wednesday, users around the world reported service interruptions with Twitter. Some were logged out, while others encountered error messages while visiting the website.

All that and no toilet paper.

Mr. Musk’s erratic and hands-on style has thrown off a number of workers, as he often interrupts meetings seemingly at random, talking for long stretches and asking some top leaders to be sounding boards for his ideas, two people familiar with his management of Twitter said.

Erratic, hands-on and narcissistic – people who talk for long stretches are the worst.

[T]he training process for new employees has been significantly reduced, cutting to 90 minutes what was once three days of orientation that included information on compliance with privacy and security agreements with global regulators, three people said.

Yes, from three days to 90 minutes is indeed significant. 90 minutes is barely enough to show the new employees where to store their toilet paper stash.

But

H/t GW

I should check out Greta Thunberg’s Twitter more often. She retweets urgent news items.

David Folkenflik at NPR in September 2020:

Now comes the claim that you can’t expect to literally believe the words that come out of Carlson’s mouth. And that assertion is not coming from Carlson’s critics. It’s being made by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York and by Fox News’s own lawyers in defending Carlson against accusations of slander. It worked, by the way.

Just read U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil’s opinion, leaning heavily on the arguments of Fox’s lawyers: The “‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’ “

And yet he’s not a performer on Saturday Night Live, he’s a performer on Fox News. I think news programs are generally expected to refrain from “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary” – aka lying.

Vyskocil, an appointee of President Trump’s, added, “Whether the Court frames Mr. Carlson’s statements as ‘exaggeration,’ ‘non-literal commentary,’ or simply bloviating for his audience, the conclusion remains the same — the statements are not actionable.”

So if you’re a really shameless and blatant liar, you get to slander people with impunity, even though the medium of your shameless blatant lying is a factual one.

H/t James Garnett

Took his “anti-feminism” a little too far did he?

Anti-feminist social media personality Andrew Tate ‘arrested’ in Romania on human trafficking charges

The self-styled misogynist internet celebrity Andrew Tate has reportedly been arrested in Romania…British-American Tate, 36, has amassed a huge following of young men via Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

Training young men to hate women more than they already do for fun and profit; it’s almost as good as charging women $5k and a fancy dinner for the privilege of being shamed.

Former Big Brother contestant Tate has almost 3.5 million Twitter followers. He recently got into a social media spat with climate activist Greta Thunberg. After [his] bragging about the carbon emissions of his supercars, Thunberg replied that Tate had “small dick energy”.

The punch line is how he (reportedly) got arrested. He did a short video rant about her and…

Oopsy.

Updating to add: the “reportedly” bit is being widely corrected. It seems the police already knew he was in Romania, the pizza box simply indicated he was at home.

That unpleasant JJ Wells guy who was so merrily abusing JK Rowling and Fred Sargeant yesterday may have taken it a little too far for his own good.

Yes let’s.

One subject of one of Helen Lewis’s new gurus podcast is the “race2dinner” pair Regina Jackson and Saira Rao. Remember them? I did a post on them in May 2021. They’re the ones who charge five THOUSAND dollars for you to make or order in a fancy dinner with you (a white woman) and your white women friends where they (Jackson and Rao) tell you how racist you are. Peak social justice, and a nice little earner!

So they’re still doing it, which means there are still rich white women willing to spend five THOUSAND dollars for this treat.

It’s not that I think there’s no such thing as racism, or that white people shouldn’t confront it, or that white people shouldn’t be urged to examine their own dear selves for racism. It’s that, for one thing, it’s weird to single out white women as if women had all the power in this scenario, and that for another you could do far more useful anti-racist things with that five THOUSAND dollars than give it to a pair of snotty grifters.

The charmers just wrote an article for TIME three weeks ago. The blurb is not entirely forthcoming.

Rao and Jackson are the founders of Race2Dinner, a program that initiates and empowers radically honest conversations about race and oppression. Deconstructing Karen, the documentary about Regina Jackson and Saira Rao’s work, is out now. They are the authors of White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better

Notice something missing? TIME forgot to say that their program empowers radically honest conversations about race and oppression among white women. It forgot to say that they single out women for their interrogation and hostility, as if women were the dominant sex.

It also forgot to say that they charge $5K for these dinners (and that the white women pay for the dinners).

You’ll be amazed to learn that Jackson and Rao do the same thing themselves.

In 2019, we decided to host anti-racism events in white women’s dining rooms for one specific reason: To turn the age-old adage, “it’s rude to talk about politics at the dinner table” on its head.

This is what we’ve learned—if you don’t talk about racism, you can’t dismantle it. But it isn’t just over the dinner table that this “niceness” rules.

They do mention the “white women” angle but then they drop it, instead of explaining why they single out white women for their missionary work.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, you were eager, frenzied even, to do this work. 

Wrong word. “Frenzied” doesn’t mean “very eager.” The right word would be “desperate”…but maybe they wanted to avoid that one because of the stupid insulting “desperate housewives” franchise. They are of course intimately related to that franchise, but I doubt they want anyone to notice.

A mere two years later, not only is that excitement for anti-racism work gone, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, into a verifiable whitelash against anti-racism work.

If white womanhood is a house, your need to be perfect is the foundation.

But white womanhood isn’t a house, so what’s your point? Why just women???

Being perfect is the key to your happiness, to your success, to your very existence.

Citation?

Perfect hair. Perfect clothes. Perfect grades. Perfect nails. Perfect weddings. Perfect bodies. Perfect adoring and supportive wife and mother. Perfect employee and colleague.

This is an extract from their book. It’s embarrassing.

I’ve been listening to this; it’s brilliant. I expect to listen to it all over again and maybe a third time.

It’s still 1962. Nothing has changed. White men still assault Black teenage boys for using the “whites only” pool.

A violent attack by a group of white men on two Black teenagers at a resort pool in South Africa on Christmas Day has sparked widespread outrage, reviving images from the ugly days of apartheid and serving as a stinging reminder of the country’s unresolved racial tensions.

We get that a lot here, too. Ahmaud Arbery was murdered for running in a “white neighborhood.”

Cellphone footage of the assault — which the teenagers said started when they were told the pool was for “white people only” — spread widely on social media. It showed scenes that could have been from decades ago, when apartheid-era laws restricted South Africa’s Black majority from using public facilities designated for white people.

A video clip shows one man delivering an open-hand slap to the face of one Black teenager, another graying white man casually holding a cigarette as he tugs the hair of the other Black youth, and one of the men wrapping the taller youth in a head lock and pulling him into the pool, seemingly trying to submerge the teenager’s head underwater.

The boys are brothers and they and their parents were staying at the resort hotel, so they were just as entitled to use the pool as the pasty men.

On Wednesday, the police announced they had arrested and charged three white men: Johan Nel, 33, and Jan Stephanus van der Westhuizen, 47, who appeared in court on assault charges; and a third suspect, 48, whose name was not released and who is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday on a charge of attempted murder. None of the suspects or their lawyers could immediately be reached for comment.

I suppose the third is the one who tried to drown the kid.

Originally a comment by Freemage on In our religion-deferential country.

This is the kind of thing that first started me questioning my faith. Not the existence of these assholes–I was world-wise enough to know full well that people are people, no matter what granfaloon they belong to. But it was the awful, deadening silence of the mainstream churches when confronted by the undeniable evil of, say, Westboro Baptist Church. Sure, if you mentioned WBC to a practicing Catholic or Methodist, they’d insist that the former didn’t speak for them, and were out of bounds.

But they are never willing to actively do anything about it. Imagine a world where one of those anodyne interfaith councils came out with specific condemnation for Christian Nationalists and their churches for perverting Christian teachings (sure, it’d require cherry picking the text, but that’s nothing new in and of itself). Where all the ‘mainstream’ Christian churches worked together to make sure that any planned rally or march was surrounded and outnumbered by people rebutting their claims to Biblical inspiration. Where they organize a massive boycott of FOX and other outlets pushing the Nat-C narrative. Where they all use those Sunday sermons to make a joint statement to a captive audience of why these scum make Baby Jesus cry.

Meanwhile, in the real world, it took a bunch of motorcycle-riding veterans to call out and undercut the WBC’s hate campaign. I’m sure most of the Patriot Riders identify as Christians, but they were speaking as vets. It forced me to confront the fact that faith doesn’t move mountains–people do, and they do it without help from a divine source. From there, it wasn’t much of a leap to realize that “God” wasn’t running anything, it’s always been just us.

The FFRF says don’t gloss over the Christian Nationalist aspect of Trump’s attempted coup.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation regrets that the recently released Jan. 6 House select committee report fails to pinpoint the Christian nationalist motivations behind the Capitol attack.

The committee’s official findings do not adequately illustrate the true nature of the insurrection and its participants, asserts the national state/church watchdog. The rioters, white supremacist Nick Fuentes primary among them, frequently engaged in Christian rituals before and during the assault. The “Jericho Marches,” in which rioters walked around the Capitol in the days prior praying for the results of the election to be overturned and calling for “spiritual warfare,” the chanting of “Christ is king,” banners containing biblical messages and crosses carried by the insurrectionists show strong evidence of Christian nationalism. More prayers at the “Save America” rally organized by Trump before the putsch, prayers and even exorcisms inside the Capitol during the insurrection, as well as the strong Christian nationalist ties by public officials associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement likewise demonstrate its pervasiveness.

But…you know…this is America. There are things we don’t dare say.

“While it’s not surprising in our religion-deferential country that the Christian nationalist underpinnings of the Jan. 6 insurrection were considered too hot to handle by the committee, it’s very disappointing,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Only mentioning Christian nationalism once, and not addressing the problem directly, opens the door for further violence to come.”

Religion-deferential and guns-deferential – what could go wrong?

Now that is solidarity.

Shabnam Nasimi is a former Policy Advisor to the Minister for Afghan Resettlement and the Minister for Refugees.

There are some very bad people in that movement.

Fred is Fred Sargeant and James is James Garvey.

Some bad bad bad people.

Updating to add:

Guy who enslaved women in porn arrested:

The founder of San Diego-based website GirlsDoPorn.com, who had been on the lam for the past three years while facing federal sex trafficking charges, was arrested this week in Spain, the FBI announced Friday.

Michael James Pratt, 40, was arrested Wednesday by Spanish National Police in Madrid, according to a statement from the FBI. Pratt will be held there pending extradition to San Diego.

He was on the FBI ten most wanted list.

The New Zealand native is charged in a 19-count indictment for allegedly running the now-defunct website. Charges against him include sex trafficking, production of child pornography, sex trafficking of a minor, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.

Prosecutors allege he and other GirlsDoPorn employees coerced hundreds of women to appear in pornographic videos under false pretenses, with most of the videos filmed in San Diego.

Oh but surely all women want to appear in porn videos – why would anyone bother to coerce them? We’re all sex-positive now.

Prosecutors allege the website’s owners and operators lured unsuspecting young women, and at least one underage girl, with advertisements for clothed modeling gigs. When it was revealed that the job involved filming adult videos, the victims were led to believe the videos they appeared in would be distributed only to private customers living outside of the country, rather than proliferated online, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

…

If the women ever changed their minds about filming or completing the scenes, the defendants threatened to sue them, cancel their flights home or post footage that had already been filmed online, federal prosecutors said.

Oh well, they’re probably all Karens.

Free enterprise, free speech, freedom of the press, all labored and brought forth…Fox News. Next up could be President Tucker Carlson.

Tucker Carlson, as the most-watched host of the most-watched cable news network, holds rare influence over not just Republican supporters, but politicians, too. This year Carlson has been unafraid to wield that power, across issues including war, subjugation of continents and testosterone.

That’s what we want to see – another “personality” dragging the world toward a deeper abyss.

On 22 February, Vladimir Putin’s forces were massed on the Ukraine border. As people in the eastern European country braced themselves for war, and as the Russian leader was widely condemned by the international community, Carlson used his Fox News show to launch a spirited defense of the Russian president.

Yeah, Putin! That’s what the world needs more of! Ruthless cynical valueless Strongmen!

“Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” Carlson said. “These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is: ‘No.’ Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that.”

Knock-down argument. The list of things Putin did do is in that famous bottom drawer in the basement under the stack of refrigerators.

As Russian troops poured into the Ukraine, Russian news media picked up clips of Carlson’s defenses of Putin to sell the conflict to Russian citizens, including footage from Carlson’s Tuesday show, during which he poured scorn on international efforts to de-escalate the brewing war.

“Democrats in Washington have told you it’s your patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a mandate. Anything less than hatred for Putin is treason,” Carlson had said.

He was every bit as scorching about the mandate to hate Obama, right? Right?

[I]n the months since the conflict began, as Kremlin-backed Russian media have amplified Carlson’s coverage “dozens of times”, Carlson’s apparent sympathy towards Putin hasn’t waned. In December the Fox News host declared Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to be a “dictator” and “a dangerous authoritarian”.

So unlike the great and glorious Donald Trump, right?

This guy is a psychiatrist, an assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at The University of California San Francisco.

I guess I’m a man then. Short hair, gender-noncommittal T shirts or turtlenecks instead of strappy sundresses, no necklace, no earrings, no lipstick, no perm – zap, I’m a guy.

This adult academic psychiatrist is obsessed with the dopy meaningless cartoon.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Varying beliefs.

Hamline was the first University in Minnesota, founded by the Methodists. They currently emphasize interfaith (including those with no faith) co-existence. When I was thinking of Law School I was seriously contemplating pushing for attending their Mitchell Law School since they place a high value on using the Law as a tool to fight The Man. My son graduated from a charter school sponsored by Hamline, and they emphasized intellectual freedom in education.

So, this comes as a surprise, in one sense, but then when I think about it? Perhaps not so much? I see that so many liberal institutions have taken on fear of offense as a measure of intellectual freedom, that offending would make one “not feel like they belong.”

Note: I don’t think that political correctness, like anything else, has a liberal or conservative origin. Yes, it was mostly liberals who policed language to get people to stop calling Vietnamese-Americans “gooks,” to stop calling Chinese-Americans “chinks,” to stop calling black Americans “niggers,” and so on. But in the 1990’s there was also a push from conservatives claiming that their students felt excluded and uncomfortable in their classes because all the dang perfessers were liberal, and besides real Americans don’t need hyphens. Christians claimed they are persecuted in education by teaching evolution and attempted to get teachers and professors fired for “bias.”

Administrators and Deans probably feel like they are walking some sort of tightrope, and in a culture of zero tolerance don’t want to take any chances. Would terrorists on motorcycles go on a rampage at Hamline like they did at Charlie Hebdo? It’s very unlikely in Minnesota, but in a polite society we don’t want to offend anyone and take chances. Integration into a pluralistic society is a fraught journey, and there is give-and-take.

The taxi drivers Eava mentioned were refusing to provide services from the airport for people who had wine or liquor in their luggage due to the prohibition against drinking. They were also refusing to pick up fares for people with service dogs. The airport sued them for discrimination specified in the ADA act. They lost, and the Imams decreed that they must live in two worlds, the secular world and the Muslim world. It also extended to cashiers at Target Grocery stores who were refusing to scan ham or bacon for their customers.

The prohibition against depictions of the Prophet (PBUH) comes from the commandment against idol worship. I think it’s very strange, myself, because on the one side it elevates Muhammad to godhood, but then they also say there is no god but allah. I often think that the priestly class intentionally makes religion more difficult to live with, makes it impossible not to Sin, so that adherents are constantly calling on priests for forgiveness. Mo money! but also a creation of submission for forgiveness. Religion doesn’t set people free, it calls submission freedom. Jewish scholars will admit this outright, with all the devices that strict Jews setup in their homes to make sure they don’t do any work on the Sabbath. “We do these things as service to G*d because they are hard.”