Dahlia Lithwick tells us the Charlottesville defendants are pretending it was all a joke.

The federal civil trial of the 20 alleged organizers of Charlottesville’s 2017 Unite the Right rally features a grab bag of white supremacists, some of whom are representing themselves in court. This has meant that from the first day of opening arguments, we’ve heard white supremacist Chris Cantwell, the “Crying Nazi,” hold himself out as a purveyor of a podcast “product” (sign up now!), cite Mein Kampf, and use the N-word. He’s described himself as a “professional entertainer,” “talented,” and “good-looking.” As part of his opening statement Cantwell told the jury he’d dabbled in stand-up comedy, then read out the URL for his website, urging the jury that, “I hope you can all become diehard fans, and together we can save the country.”

…

Cantwell, who is currently incarcerated for an unrelated extortion incident, would watch Tucker Carlson’s show with a group of fellow white supremacist prison inmates to prepare for trial, according to BuzzFeed News. Indeed, a central component of the white supremacist end game here lies not in prevailing at trial, but in using the trial to feel famous and to become more so.

Both can be true of course. I’m sure they’re enjoying their notoriety and chance to show off and so on, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real white supremacists. Lots of racists and women-haters and gay-bashers think they’re funny.

One of the tricks for getting famous is to be entertaining. Another is to be funny. Defendant Matthew Heimbach, founder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party, certainly knows the drill—in one court exchange, he cheerfully described the alt-right leader Richard Spencer as “bougie,” saying, “I kind of always viewed you as a bit of a dandy,” to which Spencer retorted, “Did you ever see me wear boat shoes?” Good fun all around. Cantwell at one point asked Heimbach to tell his “favorite Holocaust joke.” He asked Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, one of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses on the symbols of antisemitism, if it was ever OK to tell Holocaust jokes.

That sounds familiar, oddly enough. It sounds like those strange people at the “slyme pit”; they fancied themselves comedians.

These joking little exchanges are all part of the “we were only kidding” defense, already deeply entrenched in the alt-right, as is the “we were just trying to trigger the liberal snowflakes” defense. 

Yes, that’s what I mean. It sounds very slime pit, very Twitter troll, very bros just wanna have fun.

Even Boris Johnson’s people are pushing the Stonewall line.

A group of Boris Johnson’s most senior advisers are allowing government policy on trans rights to be dictated by Stonewall, a former aide to the prime minister has warned.

It seems that Stonewall are viewed as The Experts when in fact they’re The Quacks.

Nikki da Costa, who stood down as Johnson’s director of legislative affairs in August, claimed the prime minister was being presented with “skewed” advice by a powerful lobby in No 10 that was undermining women’s rights.

Maybe that’s the appeal.

She alleged this extended to deciding what Johnson saw in his red boxes and refusing to arrange meetings with people who would present opposing views. She added it was having a “chilling” effect on some staff who risked being seen as “difficult” by the most senior political officials.

…

Da Costa claimed the prime minister was only getting the view of Stonewall on the clash between sex-based rights and those based on gender identity. “The PM is not receiving the range of opinions on the debate around gender identity that he should,” she said.

…

Da Costa cited the government consultation on banning conversion therapy that could potentially make it a criminal offence for therapists to try to help patients with gender dysphoria to feel comfortable in their birth sex.

The consultation period was halved from the normal 12-week period to six weeks, which Da Costa said was “driven” by a desire “to get a good news story” in time for next year’s government-backed LGBTQ equality conference.

“The fear is that if we don’t get this right then therapists, doing perfectly legitimate work, particularly supporting vulnerable children, could find themselves in court accused of coercing someone into not undergoing gender alignment surgery. There’s no reason why the government can’t take a few more weeks, even a couple months to get this right.”

Especially when getting it wrong could mean hundreds or thousands of teenagers permanently ruining their own lives.

Law and order! Respect for authority! Duty!

No not that kind.

Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows did not appear for a deposition on Friday in front of the House select committee investigating January 6, sources familiar with the investigation tell CNN, setting up a potential showdown that could lead to the panel beginning a criminal referral process against him.

Committee staffers had been prepared to go forward with the interview and waited in a room on Capitol Hill with a stenographer, but started to file out of the room nine minutes after the deadline passed.

Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, and Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, said in a statement on Friday that Meadows’ actions force the panel to consider criminal contempt of Congress, but they stopped short of saying that is the path they will officially pursue.

Why just consider it? Why not do it?

A federal appeals court rescues our precious freedom to spread lethal diseases.

A federal appeals court has kept its block in place against a federal mandate that all large employers require their workers to get vaccinated against the coronavirus or submit to weekly testing starting in January, declaring that the rule “grossly exceeds” the authority of the occupational safety agency that issued it.

Because it’s not occupational safety to be able to go to work without risking death by Covid? Sounds like occupational safety to me. Working with assholes can be very unsafe indeed.

“From economic uncertainty to workplace strife, the mere specter of the mandate has contributed to untold economic upheaval in recent months,” Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt wrote.

He added: “Of course, the principles at stake when it comes to the mandate are not reducible to dollars and cents. The public interest is also served by maintaining our constitutional structure and maintaining the liberty of individuals to make intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions — even, or perhaps particularly, when those decisions frustrate government officials.”

What’s so “intensely personal” about it? Yes, it’s a needle in the personal arm, but lots of things impinge on our bodies and we don’t think of them as “intensely personal.” Our feet make contact with the sidewalk; we breathe the public air along with everyone else; we go into buildings that contain other people. It’s not particularly “personal” that I can see, and it’s definitely not exclusively personal. That’s the whole point: it’s about everyone. We protect others as well as ourselves by getting it, and they do the same. The protection is mutual. It’s a public and reciprocal matter much more than it’s a personal one.

Maybe he means it’s “intensely personal” because it rests on a belief – a wrong, stupid, unreasonable belief. Hey, that sounds like religion! Religion is “intensely personal” (as well as very public and as mandatory as we can make it), so refusing to get vaccinated must be too. You can’t make me get vaccinated because I have an intensely personal wrong belief about vaccinations, so there.

In a filing asking the Fifth Circuit to withdraw its stay this week, the Justice Department argued that requiring large employers to force their workers to get vaccinated or submit to weekly testing was well within the authority granted by Congress to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. It also said blocking the mandate would have dire consequences.

Keeping the mandate from coming into effect “would likely cost dozens or even hundreds of lives per day, in addition to large numbers of hospitalizations, other serious health effects and tremendous costs,” the Justice Department said in its filing. “That is a confluence of harms of the highest order.”

Meh, said the three Republican judges. We don’t care.

This response to Tatchell prompted me to read Dr Em on forced teaming.

Why are ideologies antithetical to each other being presented as natural allies? Feminism argues that gender is a mechanism of a system of oppression, that gender consists of socially constructed sexist stereotypes which are then used to exploit women. [For instance] [t]he notion that because one is female one naturally wants to care and clean, one by nature of one’s female sex is submissive, polite. LGB rights rest on the idea that same-sex attraction is real and normal and should be afforded the same rights and respect as heterosexuality.

Transgenderism/transsexualism, in contrast, claims gender – women’s oppression and sexist stereotypes – are innate, or sometimes that the body has to be altered to conform because of oppression discomfort disorder. Gender dysphoria claims that the person is wrong, not the cultural sexism, exploitation or oppression. It avows ‘change the person, not the system’!

And so, the two are at odds. They don’t make a team. Feminism can’t be [fully or literally] “inclusive” of trans ideology because trans ideology is antithetical to feminism. That’s not a form of phobia, it’s just clarity about rival ideologies or activisms.

Neither feminism nor LGB rights are comfortable bed fellows with the men’s rights activism which emerged in the late sixties and early seventies in the form of transgenderism/transsexualism. This deliberate coupling of opposing ideologies is an example of wide-scale forced teaming.

Of what? Tell us more.

Forced teaming is a term employed by those who work on abuse, grooming and predation. It was originally coined by Gavin De Becker in his work The Gift of Fear and is also used as a concept regarding criminal activity such as con-artists and romantic scamming. The predator will create the idea that there is a shared goal, or an attitude of we are all in this together, we are allies, in order to disarm, gain trust and manipulate his target. The social contract that most people have been educated or raised in – that we should try not to offend others, be polite, be accommodating – makes forced teaming incredibly difficult to resist. In general, we don’t want to be rude and say ‘actually, your problems or goals are different to mine and so no, we should not work together’ or ‘no, I don’t feel comfortable with this’.

Except of course when we do. Forced teaming with Trumpists is pretty damn easy to say no to. But trans ideology has had a lot of success at branding itself as the latest wave of progressive improvement, and thus in the same broad category as anti-racist ideology and feminist ideology and anti-homophobic ideology. But it doesn’t belong there.

Forced teaming, when applied to movements, can be as large as many men claiming feminism should work towards their goals not women’s, or that the LGB should work towards heterosexual entitlement.

And sure enough, here we are!

Forced teaming is behind the dictate of inclusiveness. It is by this way that manipulative males gain access and can control and change the goals of movements. It is how individual males have entered formerly women’s groups and formerly LGB pressure groups and can both watch what is being said and direct the narrative.

So when we hear “inclusiveness” we should be thinking “forced teaming.” Very useful. Thank you Dr Em.

That’s a lot of wrong and dishonest in one tweet.

Kathleen Stock’s views are not “trans critical.” They can be called gender critical, though I don’t know if she calls them that or not, but “trans critical” is wrong, and wrong in a harmful and probably malicious way. (I doubt that Tatchell is unaware of the label “gender critical”.) In this context the word “trans” names people, while “gender” names an ideology. Tatchell is manipulating us to think Stock is Mean to a set of people as opposed to having a philosophical view on a new and contested ideology. He’s portraying her as bullying people when what she’s doing is dissenting from some ideas.

But that “SOME on BOTH sides” is even more brazen. Utterly utterly false. We’re not the ones who fantasize aloud on Twitter about doing violence to Them. We don’t rave about stabbing burning choking shooting trans people, but there are way too many “trans activists” who do all that and worse in their campaign to silence the people they call “terfs.”

It’s interesting that he “stands with trans people” AND supports “protection for women.” Notice a difference? On the one hand his friends, his people, the ones he stands with, on the other hand, some weakling weirdos who need “protection” and he’s ok with letting them have it. I for one don’t want Peter Tatchell’s grudging “protection,” I want him to fuck off out of our way and let us defend out rights without any insulting Both Sides patronage from him.

And no, not unity and solidarity with people who are appropriating our rights and freedoms and literal identities. No. We don’t tell Peter Tatchell to have unity and solidarity with theocratic and authoritarian homophobes, and he doesn’t get to tell us to have them with trans bullies. His cutesie photo of “diverse” teenagers isn’t going to change that, either.

WHAT THE FUCK??????????

Not like the yellow star! The end point of the yellow star was the Auschwitz gas chambers! Not being refused entry to Safeway but Zyklon B dropped into a sealed room full of people. Not comparable!

Bannon indicted.

Stephen K. Bannon, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s top aides early in his presidency, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Friday on two counts of contempt of Congress, the Justice Department said.

Mr. Bannon, 67, had refused last month to comply with subpoenas for information issued by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The House voted last month to hold Mr. Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress after he refused to testify or provide documents sought by the committee, a position taken by a number of former aides to Mr. Trump.

They refuse because they consider themselves a rival government in temporary exile.

Mr. Trump had directed his former aides and advisers to invoke immunity and refrain from turning over documents that might be protected under executive privilege.

Is there an “executive privilege” to overthrow the legitimate government?

While many of those who received subpoenas have sought to work to some degree with the committee, Mr. Bannon claimed that his conversations with Mr. Trump were covered by executive privilege, even though he has been a private citizen since 2017. He said he would not comply with the committee’s requests.

Each count of contempt of Congress carries a minimum of 30 days and a maximum of one year in jail, as well as a fine of $100 to $1,000.

In other words not much.

It’s been pouring rain here so the flood warnings are out. They’re a kind of poetry, thanks to the beautiful names in this bit of the world.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on The rough sex defence.

So, I haven’t delved into this very far, but my impression from the article and twiliter’s comments is that there are two separate legal issues here: the victim’s consent, and the killer’s intent.

Consent is an affirmative defense to some crimes. To give a trivial example: you can’t convict a boxer for assault and battery because he punched his opponent during a match. There have always been some acts to which the law deems that consent is not applicable. It would appear that the Domestic Abuse Act clarifies that “a person cannot consent to the infliction of serious harm or, by extension, to their own death, for the purposes of obtaining sexual gratification”

But that is a separate issue from the question of intent. Most crimes have some sort of intent (mens rea) requirement, whether it’s negligence, recklessness, or intent, and you can break some of those categories down further (gross negligence, general vs. specific intent). That’s why, e.g., murder is different from manslaughter which is different from negligent homicide.

It sounds like technically this was not an issue of meeting the elements of the offense, but the exercise of discretion in sentencing, but either way, the court is considering the issue of intent. It would appear that the Domestic Abuse Act disallows a “consent” defense based on “rough sex,” but that doesn’t mean that a defendant can’t dispute the issue of intent by saying “I didn’t intend to kill her or even injure her, I only intended to engage in rough sex.”

You could probably make a good argument for having a rule that punishes all deaths from “rough sex” as homicide or manslaughter, something analogous to the felony-murder rule — basically, this kind of thing is so dangerous that if you want to engage in it, you’re deemed to have intended all the consequences that might result. But that does run counter to the modern trend; the felony-murder rule has been abolished or limited in many places.

But then, this may not be a problem with the law at all, but rather with the “fact-finding” — courts may be a little too willing to believe that these deaths are accidents.

Billy Bragg admits it’s all about being trendy.

Billy Bragg has changed the lyrics of his hit song “Sexuality” in support of transgender rights.

In the original version of the song, Bragg sings: “And just because you’re gay I won’t turn you away/If you stick around I’m sure that we can find some common-ground” in support of gay rights. But, in recent live performances of the song, he has changed “gay” to “they” in support of transgender people.

Ooh, bold step. “Just because you’re they” – that’s a fine use of language right there.

Explaining why he chose to change the lyrics, Bragg wrote on Twitter: “Times changed. Anyone born since the song was released would wonder why it’s a big deal to find common ground with a gay man. The front line now is trans rights.”

And by “front line” he means “fashion.”

Gay men are kind of yawn now, and as for lesbians – could anyone be more boring and pointless? To men? No, so let’s just ignore them entirely and chase the fashion instead.

Bragg also criticised women who did not support trans rights, stating: “TBH it breaks my heart to see people who claim to be feminists siding with people who would deprive them of their rights in a moment.”

We don’t “claim” to be feminists. Billy Bragg doesn’t get to tell us we’re not feminists.

Women’s bodies are public property chapter eleventy billion:

When a 21-year-old Native American woman from Oklahoma was convicted of manslaughter after having a miscarriage, people were outraged. But she was not alone.

You remember this story from a few weeks ago.

Brittney Poolaw was just about four months pregnant when she lost her baby in the hospital in January 2020.

This October, she was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for the first-degree manslaughter of her unborn son.

As if the four month old fetus inside her were an independent person she killed.

Yet Poolaw’s story is just the tip of the iceberg, according to Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of the National Advocates of Pregnant Women (NAPW), a pro-choice advocacy group.

Huh. The W word. It’s not NAPP but NAPW. I wonder how much pressure they’re under to change that.

The organisation is helping with Poolaw’s appeal, and has been tracking arrests and cases of “forcible intervention” against pregnant women in the US.

…

The recent explosion of criminal cases is part of a “uniquely American phenomenon” at the crossroads of America’s ‘War on Drugs’ and the personhood movement, said Ms Sussman.

That is, the movement to convince everyone that a pregnancy is a person. It’s a bit like the trans movement in the reliance on magical invisible Personyness that everyone has to defer to and protect.

… several US states have passed laws making it more difficult to obtain an abortion. While people oppose abortion for different reasons, often moral or religious, one part of the argument has come to focus on the notion of personhood.

“The concept of personhood is actually quite simple,” said Sarah Quale, president of Personhood Alliance Education, a pro-life organisation.

“Personhood declares that humans are human and that our equality is based on our humanness. Nothing changes the scientific fact that we are biologically human from the very beginning until the very end. Therefore, as humans, we deserve equal protection under the law because we possess inherent, natural rights.”

Yes but what is “the very beginning”? A fertilized egg isn’t a person. It’s a human fertilized egg, but that’s not a person. If one sat next to you on the bus you wouldn’t ask it to put its mask on.

The personhood movement has helped push forward laws that go beyond regulating access to abortion, to extend rights and protections to the foetus as if it were a born citizen of the state.

Which if the state is Texas or North Dakota isn’t such a treat as it may sound.

JoMo says fear not, brands will save you.

Consumer brands know what the future holds. That’s some top-class epistemology right there.

Ben Hunte is angry at the BBC. (He used to be “BBC LGBT Correspondent” according to his profile, and now works at Vice.)

But what does he mean LGBTQ employees? Does he mean several have quit as in a coupla lesbians a coupla gay men a couple bi people a coupla trans a coupla queer? Or does he mean several trans people? It would be useful to know, but the LGBTQ formula prevents us from knowing.

What about women? Does Tim Davie worry about them at all?

It was consensual manslaughter.

A man jailed for choking a woman to death during sex will not have his prison sentence increased, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

Sam Pybus, 32, was jailed for four years and eight months after admitting the manslaughter of Sophie Moss, 33, at her home in Darlington on 7 February. Attorney General Suella Braverman said the sentence was unduly lenient and referred it to the Court of Appeal.

But three judges said nah, it’s all good. He was drunk, you see.

Pybus, who was married, had told police he and Ms Moss had been in a casual relationship for three years and that she encouraged him to strangle her during consensual sex.

Ah those sweet carefree casual relationships where the man casually strangles the woman during sex.

Or as Julie puts it…

It’s all about impartiality.

The BBC retreated from Stonewall’s divisive Diversity Champions scheme because it needs to be “squeaky clean” on impartiality, an executive said.

He and Emma Barnett had a long conversation about it: he kept pressing a distinction between Stonewall’s advice on employer policy and making everyone feel included, and editorial decisions about content.

Fair enough, but as he said it over and over I kept wondering how much the BBC worried about making women feel included. I wondered, and still wonder, what it did about the imbalance between hand-wringing concern over about 400 trans employees and, I’m guessing, a rather larger number of women employees. I wondered and still wonder why he got such an anxious tone when he insisted on the inclusion bit, and why at the BBC as at so many institutions the worry about trans feelings seems so massively out of proportion to the worry about women’s feelings. I wonder why it seems as if women are so last century, and so thoroughly Included and not disadvantaged or overlooked or treated differently in any way, compared to the emergency status of trans people.

It was just a few years ago that there was that big uproar about the massive pay gaps between women and men at the BBC. Where was all the anguish about inclusion then? Why didn’t that scratch everyone’s conscience until the blood ran? Why are women seen as both old news and completely without any disadvantage compared to other people, like for instance men?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. I’d quite like to.

Critics say that the initiative acts as a lobbying vehicle. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that Stonewall has, for example, instructed public bodies to remove gendered words such as “mother” from their human resources policies.

Yes and this matters, you see, and it matters particularly because women are not part of the privileged demographic who don’t have to worry about words. If you start erasing women from the language you’re not going forward, you’re going backward. It’s not like changing “men” to “people” in news stories when in fact people really is what you mean – it’s the obverse of that. It’s not progress, it’s regress. Women still get overlooked in a way that men don’t, so Stonewall busily erasing us isn’t just partiality, it’s also bad for women.

Talfan Davies acknowledged that retreating from Diversity Champions had led to “some real tension and discomfort internally”. Tim Davie, the director-general, and Fran Unsworth, director of news, are expected to try to reduce the tension by addressing members of BBC Pride, a network for LGBT staff, yesterday morning. “The key thing is to engage with those staff groups to discuss our thinking and our reasoning and to listen to their responses,” Talfan Davies said.

Yes but what about women? It’s not only LGBT staff who have a stake in this, it’s also women. What about engaging with women? What about listening to women’s responses? Why does nearly everyone think the concerns of trans people are vastly more urgent and profound than those of women? Why does nearly everyone think (or pretend to think out of terror) that when there is any conflict between the two it must be trans people who get their way?

Emma Barnett, the Woman’s Hour presenter, pressed Talfan Davies on specific issues that BBC journalists may face when reporting on gender identity stories. She asked if it would be offensive for a sports reporter to describe a trans woman, competing in a female category at the Olympics, as a “biological male”. Talfan Davies said that a discussion would be had prior to broadcast and it would be right to consider what is “appropriate and sensitive”.

Why sensitive? Why is there never talk about being sensitive to women’s concerns? Why is all the sensitivity and handholding reserved for trans people, while women are expected to suck it up and do what they’re told?

Also this happened today – a ruling that Mermaids can’t share documents with the Good Law Project (aka Jolyon Maugham), because of the obvious risk that he’ll blab everything on Twitter. Mermaids and Maugham are trying to get the LGB Alliance’s charitable status taken away.

Let’s look at the Pregnant People bit.

Emma Barnett: There are guests who come on this show who talk about “pregnant people.” What should I do, live in the moment – should I get them to clarify themselves because only biological women can be pregnant?

Long, telling pause

Rhodri Talfan Davies: Well, “pregnant people” isn’t inaccurate, it’s clearly one way of framing the statement

Me, interrupting: Now wait just a damn minute. Accuracy isn’t the only relevant quality here, and anyway it could be called inaccurate in some senses. It’s not the usual, familiar, standard, unsurprising way of saying it. Don’t go pretending not to know that. And because it’s not the standard way of saying it, and because the BBC is a news organization (and news organizations mostly don’t say things in eccentric ways), and because it drops the word that refers to the subordinated (and childbearing) half of humanity, and because it pisses off a hell of a lot of women, it is a highly tendentious “way of framing it.” His tone of voice is all “as you know perfectly well, why are you even mentioning this” but he’s the one who is pretending not to know what he does know perfectly well. The BBC doesn’t normally say “people” when it means “women” because in general that would be inaccurate from a reporting point of view.

And this move to erase women whenever the word “pregnant” appears is beyond inaccurate, it’s intensely insulting and misogynist. So don’t give us that “one way of framing” shit.

Emma Barnett comes back with yes but I’m asking you, as representing the BBC, what is the BBC’s line on that?

Davies: Forgive me, you’re asking me, in an instant, on a live radio programme, to make complex –

All of which I tell you so that you’ll understand this commentary.

The stations of the cross.

I wonder how Asexual Visibility Day is celebrated.

Whoaaaa the ground is shifting.