Professional philosophy of the highest order.

Jason Stan continues to cover himself with glory.

Jason has met only “pro trans” feminists, therefore Jane Clare Jones doesn’t speak for all women. (Mind you, she’s never claimed to speak for all women, and Stanley’s sneaky insinuation that she does say that is…sneaky.) It’s not a very powerful argument. Jon Pike puts it more bluntly.

What did our not at all lazy philosopher do? Debate the complex issues? No…

Another philosopher:

That’s what I was railing about a couple of days ago – all that wild, reckless name-calling of feminist women, as if we were a gang of Proud Boys or similar.

I’m sure people will be admiring that tweet 200 years from now.

Boola boola.

Obama deals with the “Oh no identity politics ew ew we’re all individuals and only individuals matter” trope a lot more briskly than I did.

Steve Phillips at the Guardian makes an important point:

The last time the United States failed to properly punish insurrectionists, they went on to form the Ku Klux Klan, unleash a reign of murderous domestic terrorism, and re-establish formal white supremacy in much of the country for more than 100 years. As the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack begins televised hearings this week, the lessons from the post-civil war period offer an ominous warning for this moment and where we go from here.

It’s true. The insurrectionists weren’t much punished and the victims were not even slightly compensated, and the results were and are horrific.

In 1860, many people believed that America should be a white nation where Black people could be bought and sold and held in slavery. The civil war began when many of the people who held that view refused to accept the results of that year’s presidential election. They first plotted to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln (five years later, they would succeed). Then they seceded from the Union, and shortly thereafter started shooting and killing people who disagreed with them.

…

Mere months after the ostensible end of the civil war in April 1865, half a dozen southern young white Confederate war veterans gathered in Pulaski, Tennessee, in December 1865 to discuss what to do with their lives, and they decided to form a new organization called the Ku Klux Klan. The first Grand Wizard of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest, was a Confederate general who had been pardoned by Johnson. In less than one year, Forrest would go on to orchestrate “336 cases of murder or assault with intent to kill on freedmen across the state [of Georgia] from January 1 through November 15 of 1868”.

The Proud Boys and the rest of them are of that type.

…the enemies of democracy in the Republican party have only become emboldened, like their Confederate counterparts of the last century. Just as happened in the years after the civil war when the prospect of large-scale Black voting threatened white power and privilege, the defenders of white nationalism have engaged in a legislative orgy of passing pro-white public policies. From trying to erase evidence of racism and white supremacy from public school instruction to laws making it increasingly difficult for people of color to cast ballots. As journalist Ron Brownstein has warned, “The two-pronged fight captures how aggressively Republicans are moving to entrench their current advantages in red states, even as many areas grow significantly more racially and culturally diverse. Voting laws are intended to reconfigure the composition of today’s electorate; the teaching bans aim to shape the attitudes of tomorrow’s.”

And it looks as if they’re going to win.

I guess preening Yale philosophers don’t have to know anything about history.

It didn’t matter whether or not women were “supportive of” lynching, whatever that means. Nobody asked them. Nobody cared. Women had no power. It’s grotesque to talk about them as if they had just as much power to “be supportive of” lynching as men had. Women could have favored communist revolution or fascist counter-revolution or a takeover by Martians, it would have made no difference to anything.

World’s most conceited philosophy academic continues his campaign to malign feminist women.

One guy retweets something=”this alliance.”

(Who’s Jerry Dunleavy? I’ve never heard of him. Google tells me he’s a reporter for the Washington Examiner. Somehow that’s feminists’ fault?)

And that’s why he’s a Yale professor of philosophy and you’re not.

Feminists like chocolate and so does the far right!!!

Trump’s thug children revealed to be thugs.

Ivanka did a whispery heavily made-up little video saying she was aware that Trump had lost the election. Did she do anything about it? Of course not. Did she keep pretending to be a Government Person, and riding on the Big Plane? Of course.

Next was Mr. Kushner. In his video he was pressed by Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chairwoman, about whether he was aware that the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, had been threatening to resign because Mr. Trump was making increasingly outlandish efforts to stay in power.

“Like I said,” said Mr. Kushner, who was rarely heard from in public during his father-in-law’s presidency, “my interest at that time was on trying to get as many” presidential pardons finished as possible.

Not in preventing his criminal daddy-in-law from stealing the election. Interesting priorities. Also, what right does he have to meddle with presidential pardons?

Mr. Kushner repeatedly inserted himself into the pardons process, prompting complaints from legal experts and some of his colleagues. He added that he knew that Mr. Cipollone and “the team were always saying, ‘Oh we are going to resign, we are not going to be there if this happens, if that happens.’ So I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”

Ahhhhh there speaks the tiny privileged mind of a rich twerp who will commit any crime for more money. Noticing that a coup is in progress is “whining.” He would have a point if he were saying “the team” did nothing to stop Trump, but that’s not what he’s saying at all. He’s saying he doesn’t care about Trump’s treason and he doesn’t care what anyone said about it at the time.

Ms. Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, sounding grim, spoke to the hearing room after the video ended. “Whining,” she said. “There’s a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the constitution. As our founding fathers recognized, democracy is fragile. The people in positions of public trust are duty bound to defend it, to step forward when action is required. In our country, we don’t swear an oath to an individual or a political party.”

Except when it’s Trump and his trumplings.

And he could be back in about 18 months.

The Daily Beast has more on the Post ructions, which is good, because I don’t much want to go digging through days of tweets.

The seemingly unending dramatics began late last week when political reporter Dave Weigel retweeted a sexist post about bisexual women. He later apologized but not before Sonmez publicly called him out along with the paper’s management, writing, “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!”

Fellow Post reporter Jose A. Del Real then publicly accused Sonmez on Saturday of “repeated and targeted public harassment of a colleague,” which led to several tweets worth of beefing between the pair until Del Real blocked her Sunday.

It all sounds a bit high school, but then so does a lot of Twitter.

On Tuesday, Buzbee sent out yet another company-wide memo, stating that the paper does “not tolerate colleagues attacking colleagues” and promising to enforce the paper’s social media and workplace harassment policies. The memo came hours after Sonmez published a 30-tweet thread alleging editors took a years-long approach of preferential treatment for higher-profile reporters and their social media presence.

That seems kind of silly. Of course higher-profile reporters are going to get some preferential treatment – because they’re higher profile! High profile is what the bosses want, so they’re going to reward it. They shouldn’t get preferential treatment in areas where the rules are clear and apply to all, but other than that, deal. Stars get star treatment; surprise surprise.

Sonmez, meanwhile, continued to tweet, highlighting critical posts from Del Real (who had not responded to Sonmez after Saturday) as a mockery of Buzbee‘s claim to a “collegial workplace.”

Veteran Post reporter Lisa Rein then stepped in to publicly plead with Sonmez: “Please stop.”

That same afternoon, several high-profile Washington Post reporters, including Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker, tweeted about how “proud” they are to work at the newspaper.

That kumbaya moment prompted Sonmez to post a lengthy tread on Thursday noting how “the reporters who issued synchronized tweets this week downplaying the Post’s workplace issues have a few things in common.” She added that they are “All white” and “They are among the ‘stars’ who ‘get away with murder’ on social media.”

See above. Stars are stars; what do you expect?

So that went well.

Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for The Washington Post who in recent days has been at the center of a debate over the organization’s social media policies and the culture of the newsroom, was fired on Thursday…

In an emailed termination letter, which was viewed by The New York Times, Ms. Sonmez was told that The Post was ending her employment, effective immediately, “for misconduct that includes insubordination, maligning your co-workers online, and violating The Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.”

I added that comma after “your co-workers online” – the Oxford comma, the one the NYT style guide forbids. That comma is often needed, and that sentence is one such place. It’s three items, not two, and you need the comma to make that unambiguous. I hate style guides and I hate “rules” that ignore style and readers.

Back to the excellent gossip.

The email also said Ms. Sonmez’s “public attempts to question the motives of your co-journalists” undermined The Post’s reputation

Yes it’s not actually the best idea ever to attack people you work with on Twitter. Who knew?

“We cannot allow you to continue to work as a journalist representing The Washington Post,” the letter said.

Plus, we don’t want to.

Her name is actually Felicia. The “Bye Felicias” are going to inundate us.

In the past week, she has been at the center of a public firestorm over the newsroom’s culture.

Dave Weigel etc etc.

In the following days, Ms. Sonmez wrote a series of posts on Twitter about the newsroom culture at The Post and what she said was the uneven way its social media policy was applied to different reporters. At times she jousted with fellow journalists at The Post on Twitter.

I can see wanting to do that. Boy can I see it. But actually doing it? Well, you’d better be prepared to lose that job.

Sally Buzbee, the executive editor of The Post, subsequently wrote two memos to the newsroom asking for colleagues not to attack each other on social media.

Do it behind the scenes, peeps, not on Twitter where everybody can see you and laugh.

But Bye Felicia didn’t listen so Bye Felicia is out.

Vanity Fair on ructions at the Washington Post:

On Tuesday afternoon, Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey tweeted that he was “proud” to work at the paper, a place “filled with many terrific people who are smart and collegial.”

And a lot of other familiar names followed suit.

The public outpouring of Post pride—which I’m told political reporters were urging one another to take part in—followed executive editor Sally Buzbee’s memo reiterating workplace policies and promoting collegiality among staff. The memo dropped following a few days at the Post that have been, as one reporter described it, a “clusterfuck.” Dave Weigel, a national political correspondent, is, as of Monday, suspended without pay for the next month after retweeting a sexist tweet last week, which he then promptly unshared and apologized for after a colleague called him out both on the company Slack and publicly. Hours after news of Weigel’s suspension broke Monday, that colleague, political reporter Felicia Sonmez, was urging the paper to take action against a different colleague, Jose Del Real, who on Saturday took aim at Sonmez for “the cruelty you regularly unleash against colleagues.” (He made this point after commending Sonmez for “your bravery in sharing your story,” adding, “I support your fight against retribution for doing so.”)

Let’s everybody work from home forever, ok?