The right-wing Supreme Court approves voting restrictions.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday made it easier for states to enact voting restrictions, endorsing Republican-backed measures in Arizona that a lower court had decided disproportionately burdened Black, Latino and Native American voters and handing a defeat to Democrats who had challenged the policies.

So, that’s it, that’s the ballgame. We’re fucked. Republicans can now pass all kinds of laws that make it harder for poor people, working people, immigrant people, brown people to vote, thus expanding and consolidating their power from this moment on. We are fucked.

The Arizona ruling clarified the limits of the Voting Rights Act and how courts may analyze claims of voting discrimination.

The “mere fact there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote,” Alito said.

The Republican worldview in a nutshell.

The Arizona legal battle concerned a specific provision called Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that bans voting policies or practices that result in racial discrimination. Section 2 has been the main tool used to show that voting curbs discriminate against minorities since the Supreme Court in 2013 gutted another section of the statute that determined which states with a history of racial discrimination needed federal approval to change voting laws.

Davin Rosborough of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project said the decision “adopts a standard for proving violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that is unduly cramped and at odds with the law’s intent of eradicating all voting practices that are racially discriminatory in their effects on voting opportunity, whether blunt or subtle.”

We’re fucked.

Hello hello yes please do walk all over me, it’s what I’m here for, can I do anything else for you?

A retiree in Suffolk has made history as the first transgender woman to star on the front cover of the Women’s Institute magazine.

A man has “made history” as the first man to star on the front cover of the Women’s Institute magazine. It’s extremely history-making for men to appear on the front covers of magazines.

WI member Petra Wenham, 74, has spoken to WI Life – the publication for the group’s members – after she was asked to discuss her work as as a speaker and activist for a Suffolk chapter of the branch, Cake and Revolution.

Never mind about the women of the WI, they’re boring, let’s hear about the men of the WI.

As well as sharing cake and conversations with her friends, Ms Wenham tours other WIs to bust myths and misinformation about transgender people.

The 74-year-old added: “I’ve given my trans awareness talk to six WI groups this year alone. It’s been wonderful to have this opportunity to cut through the negativity a lot of the transgender community face.”

It’s been wonderful to have this opportunity to make the WI focus on men who say they are women.

Melissa Green, General Secretary of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI), said:“We were delighted to interview Petra in the latest issue of WI Life. The work she does as a speaker and activist is so inspiring, educating other members and the wider community on the issues that trans people face today.

“At a time when the transgender community are experiencing prejudice and exclusion, it is so important that trans voices are heard and amplified in the WI and society.

“We want to make it clear that not only are trans women welcome to join the WI, but they are celebrated and truly enrich our membership and our values as a bold and inclusive organisation for women.”

But it’s not an organisation for women if it includes men. The virtue of being “inclusive” depends on what it is you’re including. If you’re making a women’s organization no longer a women’s organization by “including” men (and then paying them lots of attention and letting them take over the conversation) then you’re no longer being “inclusive” of women.

You can’t do everything. It isn’t possible. You can’t both be an organization of and for women, and be “inclusive” of men.

Another victory in the war on Karens:

Bill Cosby is being released from prison after the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania vacated his 2018 conviction on sexual assault charges and judgment of sentence. Victoria Valentino, one of Cosby’s accusers, told CNN she was “stunned” by the court’s decision.

Valentino said she had recently received a letter stating that Cosby’s parole was preemptively denied due to a lack of remorse and a refusal to participate in programs for abusers.

She said that when she first heard about Cosby’s release she was “shocked.” Valentino said her phone was bombarded with messages from media, loved ones and survivors.

“For this to come out of left field is — it’s a gut punch,” Valentino said. “There’s no other way to describe it.”

Valentino said the decision sends Cosby’s accusers “back to square one.”

Serves them right. They’re Karens.

Andrea Constand and her attorneys said today’s opinion to vacate Bill Cosby’s conviction is disappointing and could discourage others survivors of sexual assault from coming forward.

“Today’s majority decision regarding Bill Cosby is not only disappointing but of concern in that it may discourage those who seek justice for sexual assault in the criminal justice system from reporting or participating in the prosecution of the assailant or may force a victim to choose between filing either a criminal or civil action,” the statement said.

Just because they can’t possibly win and the whole process is humiliating? That’s no reason. Karens.

Laurie Penny tries to rehabilitate herself.

That’s good, isn’t it? She accuses us of bad faith while in the same breath claiming we want to “make the case for excluding minority groups.” Way to have the discussion in good faith. No, Comrade, we don’t want to make the case for excluding minority groups. That’s not accurate or fair.

I tell you what, I don’t have good heuristics for figuring out what the hell Laurie Penny is trying to say.

I do grasp her meaning in the second tweet though, and that one is just wrong. It’s not a general and universal truth that no request that a particular group or person be accommodated is ever a demand that other, potentially conflicting needs be sidelined. Sometimes a request for accommodation is a demand that other, potentially conflicting needs be sidelined. That can happen. It can happen, and it does happen, and it has been happening in all these demands – and they are demands, not requests – that trans women be “validated” and “included” in anything and everything belonging to women.

The rest of the thread is just blither and handwaving. She’s really not very sharp.

If it doesn’t convince anyone the first 500 times, try again.

The dishonesty battles with the stupidity for first prize.

As always, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s anxious adherence to the rules or genuine delusional belief – in fact it’s impossible to tell just as it’s impossible to tell if any given naked man in a women’s changing room genuinely believes he’s a woman or is just taking advantage of the bizarro-world new rules.

Also she’s wrong about the homophobia. It wasn’t about thinking lesbians and gays would be raping people, it was about thinking same-sex love and attraction are weird and ooky. That’s all. It was just irrational squick, picked up from the culture because it had always been that way.

And she doesn’t matter because…………….?

But it’s not “cracking down.” It’s not punishment, it’s not deprivation, it’s not torture, it’s not imprisonment. It’s just barring male people from spaces where women are vulnerable. That’s all; that’s it.

Men’s desire to be “validated” as women should not be seen as more important and pressing than women’s need to be safe from predatory behavior by men. Men who really do think of themselves as women should be able to understand that in a heartbeat. If they don’t, and they refuse even to try, then in what sense are they women? For what reason should we sympathize with their desire to be accepted as women? Why should we prioritize men who put their own desires ahead of our needs? Why are men encouraged to put their wants first while women are ordered to put our needs last? What could be more patriarchal and unjust than that?

Matt Taiibi has a hilarious piece on a new book by Robin DiAngelo.

Nice Racism, the booklike product released this week by the “Vanilla Ice of Antiracism,” Robin DiAngelo, begins with an anecdote from the author’s past.

I just have to interrupt to say how much I love “booklike product.”

She’s in college, gone out to a dinner party with her partner, where she discovers the other couple is, gasp, black. “I was excited and felt an immediate need to let them know I was not racist,” she explains, adding: “I proceeded to spend the evening telling them how racist my family was. I shared every racist joke, story, and comment I could remember my family ever making…”

Ah the origin story. She was a jackass therefore she gets to patronize the rest of us from now until forever.

No shit, the reader thinks. Instead of trying to amp down her racial anxiety out of basic decency, this author fed hers steroids and protein shakes, growing it to brontosaurus size before dressing it in neon diapers and parading it across America for years in a juggernaut of cringe that’s already secured a place as one of the great carnival grifts of all time. Nice Racism, the rare book that’s unreadable and morally disgusting but somehow also important, is the latest stop on the tour.

Another love-object – “the rare book that’s unreadable and morally disgusting but somehow also important.”

Reading DiAngelo is like being strapped to an ice floe in a vast ocean while someone applies metronome hammer-strikes to the the same spot on your temporal bone over and over. You hear ideas repeated ten, twenty, a hundred times, losing track of which story is which. Are we at the workshop where Eva denies she’s a racist because she grew up in Germany, or the one where Bob and Sue deny they’re racist by claiming they think of themselves as individuals, or the one where the owning-class white woman erupts because no one will validate her claim that she’s not racist, because she’s from Canada?

She’s good comedy-fodder, if nothing else.

You’ve probably seen the Wi Spa video.

LA Magazine does not approve of the woman who doesn’t want a naked man in the women’s section with her.

Mineral salt massages and hydro-dermabrasion facials weren’t enough to calm the nerves of some patrons at Wi Spa over the weekend. The tony Koreatown health club became the scene of a showdown over nudity in gendered spaces after a customer confronted spa staff about a trans woman with male genitals being allowed to disrobe in the spa’s female section. The ruckus was caught on camera and quickly went viral on Twitter on Sunday, fueling a furious online debate—with threats of a boycott against the spa—about the rights of trans people to use women’s spaces versus the rights of cisgender females to not be exposed to male anatomy.

What “rights of trans people to use women’s spaces”? There are no such rights. The only people who have the right to use women’s spaces are women. That’s what “women’s spaces” means.

“So, it’s OK for a man to go into the women’s section, show his penis around the other women, young little girls—underage—in your spa? Wi Spa condones that, is that what you’re saying?” the woman filming the video can be heard saying to a masked spa worker. When the employee attempts to answer, saying something about “sexual orientation,” the customer, who seems to deny the existence of trans people, loses it even more. “What orientation?” she nearly shouts. “I see a dick! It lets me know he’s a man. He’s a man. He is a man. He is not no female.” Another customer is shown in video demanding a refund. “This is our first time, and then this shit happens, and we’re not coming back,” she says.

She “seems to deny the existence of trans people” LA Mag says primly. No, she does deny that a man gets to intrude into a women’s space, that’s all.

In a statement to Los Angeles about this weekend’s incident, Wi Spa points to California Civil Code 51 (b), which makes discriminating against trans and other gender non-conforming people in business establishments illegal in the state. “Like many other metropolitan areas, Los Angeles contains a transgender population, some of whom enjoy visiting a spa,” the statement goes on. “Wi Spa strives to meet the needs of all its customers.”

Which of course is just plain impossible if they let naked men intrude on the women’s spaces. California Civil Code 51 (b) is a sour joke and a reversal of women’s rights.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Manhattan district attorney’s office is expected to charge the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer with tax-related crimes on Thursday, people familiar with the matter said, which would mark the first criminal charges against the former president’s company since prosecutors began investigating it three years ago.

Another twig added to the haystack of sleaze that is Trumpworld.

How disgusting it is that this filthy man spent four years telling us what to do.

Word is Trump won’t be charged; Weisselberg has refused to be turned.

This one is about not paying taxes on fringe benefits, which sounds laughably trivial given what we know about Trump, but little acorns, you know.

The tax-related investigation is part of a broader criminal probe into whether the Trump Organization and its officers overvalued and undervalued its assets on loan, tax and insurance documents for financial gain, prosecutors have said. The criminal probe, led by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and civil probe, by the New York attorney general, have looked at financial dealing around some of the same properties, including Mr. Trump’s Seven Springs estate, in Westchester, N.Y., and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, the Journal has reported.

Here’s hoping.

How do they know he identifies as a man?

A group of customers at a cafe in the Aegean district of Soma rescued a woman from a male attacker identified only as T.Ç. who broke a glass on her head and battered her, local agencies reported on June 29.

Video footage showed T.Ç. sitting across from his wife at a cafe before getting up, walking over to her side of the table with a glass and breaking it on her head, and attacking her with a knife he picked up off the table. 

The security footage shows customers run to the woman’s rescue and batter the man in an attempt to fend him off of the woman.

It shows a woman getting there first, and being thrown to the floor by the man.

T.Ç. is seen escaping the people around in the security footage as male customers are seen watching the perpetrator batter the customers who tried to stop him. 

One male customer is seen picking up his coffee cup instead of stopping T.Ç.

Stopping violent men is women’s job.

I read Glosswitch’s take on Laurie Penny’s fatuous claims this morning (this morning my time, Hellfire West Coast time) but got too entangled with LP’s nonsense to point it out here. Let this be a lesson to you: if you can read either Laurie Penny or Glosswitch, don’t choose Laurie Penny.

Glosswitch starts with the “I’d advise her not to stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude” tweet. The issue is not penises, she assures us.

The issue – highlighted in another of [the] well-known feminist’s tweets today, in which she told feminists who think biological sex is politically salient “your feminism is bad and you should feel bad” – is making other women feel ashamed of their feelings, their fears, their boundaries, their entire inner lives.

This is not about trans people. It is not about questioning the authenticity of someone’s self-perception. It is not about gender identity, or genitalia, or  “being one’s true self”. It is about the absolute patriarchal basics: power, shame, blame and control. It is about rape culture, domestic abuse, coercive control. It’s about all the things certain feminists claim to want to stop, then go on to reinforce.

Like, you know, men intruding on spaces for women, and ignoring women’s discomfort or fear, and getting their sexual jollies from that discomfort and fear. Those patriarchal basics.

When you recommend shaming a young woman for any potential discomfort  – when you insinuate that it is somehow voyeuristic, rude, obsessive not to want to be in close proximity to the naked male bodies of strangers – you are doing what abusive men have always done to women and girls: shaming them into feeling their distress is their fault.

I bet you anything Laurie Penny had no idea she was doing that when she did it. You can kind of see what she thought she was doing – being funny, being clever, turning things around so that she comes out funny and clever and the woman talking about her teenage daughter comes out timid and “sex-negative” and boring as well as transphobic. She thought she was being hip. It didn’t occur to her that she was being just another “Stop fighting, bitch, or I’ll break your fucking jaw.”

If only women felt nothing – or, failing that, if only they could resolve never to acknowledge or express their own pain – then we might see an end to all the struggles. Come on, girls. Just give in.

Don’t cry; your tears are manipulative, deceptive, the weaponisation of toxic femininity against people more vulnerable than you. Don’t speak; don’t be a Karen complaining to the manager, exploiting your experience of trauma to prop up carceral norms. Don’t acknowledge distress at the things that are done to and taken from your body; it’s all just penetration, just gestation, just meat, just nothing at all.

It’s just a guy getting naked next to you, smirking at you, watching you flinch.

I see women absorbing these lessons, believing there might be virtue, some ill-defined liberation, in following these heartless rules, never putting themselves first, but never putting other women first, either. Vying to be the best at not feeling anything, condemning those who foolishly slip up. It is so cruel, and so rooted in active dislike for women as people.

It’s all that good. Read the whole thing.

The same failure throughout.

No, what’s utterly disingenuous is to ignore the (surely blindingly obvious) fact that no one knows who is a guy who identifies as a woman getting changed in a changing room and who is a flasher. No one knows who is which and no one knows how to find out. If you were a flasher wouldn’t you be in those changing rooms like a shot, unable to believe your luck?

But we don’t know whether the man changing his clothes is a sex criminal or not. We can’t tell. It’s not that he automatically is, it’s that we have no way of knowing.

She can’t really be this stupid can she?

But, no, we really don’t know that. How could we?

But even if we assume that’s true (and crystal clear, and easy to understand, and universally acknowledged), how does anyone know who is which?

This is surely a very basic question, and it seems to be one that no trans “ally” will answer. It sure as hell seems that Laurie Penny will never answer it.

Just to clarify, nobody can tell who is which.

It’s not? What did she say?

Well, ok, she didn’t say “she’s rude for staring,” she said “I’d advise her not to stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude.” It’s not the identical wording, true, but the meaning? The meaning is the same. I think Laurie Penny is the one who is being “silly” here.

Putative feminist puts her putative feminism to work standing up for men again.

If your claim to feminism includes telling feminist women not to focus on women but instead to focus on men who claim to be women, your feminism is moronic and you should feel like a damn fool.

But instead, putative feminist feels confident and clever enough to keep right on telling feminist women to focus on men who claim to be women.

Ahhhh that’s nice isn’t it? It’s not the man’s fault for getting naked in a women’s changing room, it’s the teenage girl’s fault for perceiving that a man is next to her and naked. The man has every right to get his dick out, the girl has no right to notice that he’s done so. He’s not intruding and perving, she is.

But how does anyone know who is which?

The determined stupidity is hard to believe. The determined transfer of feminism from women to men who call themselves women is enraging.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on 408 times on Fox News.

I confess to finding, Nullius, little to grow exercised about in the link you provide to ‘Critical Theory’. It speaks of The Frankfurt School, Kant, and of a liberal thinker like Habermas. It also refers to Karl Marx’s polemical assertion in ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ that ‘The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ I would say two things: first, thought about political and social structures has, pace Marx, never been a view taken studiously from the outside, as though thinkers about these matters were dispassionately studying, say, an ant colony. Read Plato, read Aristotle, Confucius, Lao-tse, Kautilya, Sir Thomas Moore, Locke, Hume, Burke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu (who had such an influence on the founding fathers of the USA), Karl Popper… Political thought is not a natural science, to be compared with physics or chemistry, and it never has been. This is not to say that techniques derived from the sciences and from mathematics (statistical analysis, say) are not useful in what are called the political & social sciences – Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’ comes to mind, as does Mark Moffett’s ‘The Human Swarm’, in which some interesting and enlightening comparisons are made between animal (including insect) societies and human societies. Nor to say that political thinkers such as the ones you appear to dislike renounce objectivity. The fact is that when one is talking about politics or social structures one is necessarily implicated in them, which is not to say that all works of political thought are or should be mere calls to arms, nor to say that their calls for change or calls for maintaining the status quo are not grounded in an understanding of reality.

The second matter is that one can learn from works of political thought with which one profoundly disagrees. I disagree with Marx, while appreciating many of his insights, just as I disagree with Hegel, against whom Marx wrote, again while appreciating, and being stimulated by, some of his insights. I have also read works by that nasty old Nazi, Carl Schmitt, in which I find, though I loathe Schmitt’s politics, many things of interest (as did that very good liberal historian Reinhart Kosselleck); and so with Michael Oakeshott and other conservative thinkers whose work I have read with interest.

And a third thing is this: it seems to me to be a complete exaggeration to assert that thinkers like Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno et al were not seeking understanding as well as change. Had their calls for change not been grounded in some sort of understanding of what their societies and what the politics of their time were like, nobody would have listened to them and we should not bother to read them still now.

Yes, Virginia, this could be the new normal, and yes it is scary.

The dangerous heat wave enveloping the Pacific Northwest is shattering weather records by such large margins that it is making even climate scientists uneasy.

You mean especially. Not even, but especially.

Infrastructure, including heating and cooling, is built according to expectations of a “normal” climate. Human-caused climate change is quickly redefining that normal, while dramatically raising the likelihood of events that simply have no precedent.

All the air conditioners are running practically nonstop. Does that put a strain on the electricity grid? Gee, I wonder.

“Because of the fact that climate change has made heatwaves like this much more likely and intense, we might very well reach the tipping point of what our infrastructure and other societal systems are able to deal with,” Friederike Otto, of the University of Oxford, told Axios.

Roads are buckling here too, some so badly that they have to be closed.

“If our decision makers do not take this heat wave as a harbinger of things to come and act quickly to adopt the climate change policies we all know are needed, I fear for the future of humanity,” Jean Flemma, an oceans policy expert living in Portland, told Axios on Sunday.

Sure sure but meanwhile lets panic about Critical Race Theory some more.

Judd Legum on that critical theory that everyone’s talking about.

Between now and November 2022, you will be hearing a lot about Critical Race Theory (CRT). On Saturday night, former President Trump bashed CRT during his first rally since leaving the White House. Last week, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the “END CRT Act.” In the first two weeks of June, CRT was mentioned 408 times on Fox News. 

Andrew Sullivan is obsessed with it.

It’s all because Republicans see it (see their distortions of it) as election magic.

Trump, Cruz, Bannon, and many other Republicans say that CRT is an insidious force that is being imposed in schools, corporations, and the government. This is how Cruz describes CRT in his new bill. 

By teaching that certain individuals, by virtue of inherent characteristics, are inherently flawed, critical race theory contradicts the basic principle upon which the United States was founded that all men and women are created equal.

This is a false description of CRT. (It is also an inaccurate historical description of the Declaration of Independence, which states “all men are created equal.” And it was referring only to white men.) 

So what’s a not-false description?

Critical Race Theory emerged from a group of legal scholars trying to answer a question: Why, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created formal legal equality between racial groups, does substantive racial inequality persist?

Let’s explore how this works with a concrete example. The United States has the largest prison population in the world. But Black Americans are incarcerated at far greater rates than whites. As of 2018, the latest data available, Blacks represented 12% of the general population and 33% of the prison population. Conversely, whites represent 63% of the general population and 30% of the prison population. 

I bet we can think of reasons before reading further. There’s more surveillance of black people, more stop and frisk, more arresting. There are different sentencing patterns. There are differences in who can get better lawyers. Stuff like that.

One explanation could be that Black Americans commit more crime. The data, however, does not fully support such a conclusion. About a quarter of the prison population is serving time for drug crimes and “[b]lack and white Americans sell and use drugs at similar rates.” Nevertheless, Blacks are 2.7 times more likely to be arrested, and more than 6 times more likely to be incarcerated, for drug-related offenses than whites. 

CRT scholars look at these statistics as evidence of structural racism. Specifically, they seek to identify “laws, policies, and procedures that function to produce racial inequality.”

And that’s not a wicked thing to do.

I think that’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Law should be more impartial than that, yeah?

The purpose of CRT is to understand the structural causes of racial inequality — large and small — in order to dismantle them and create a fairer society. CRT scholars use similar analysis to explain how the law creates racial inequality in health, education, and other areas. 

Is there a good reason we shouldn’t do that?

It’s not being taught in schools.

Anyone with a basic understanding of CRT understands that it is not being taught in K-12 schools. The reason is simple: The concepts underlying CRT are generally beyond the scope of undergraduate education, much less elementary school students. A website set up by CRT critics to document “the negative impact Critical Race Training has on education” does not even cover K-12 curriculum because it’s “more difficult to track.”

And then there’s the “downstream” claim.

Some critics of CRT acknowledge that CRT itself is not being taught in schools but students are being taught concepts derived from CRT. Pundit Andrew Sullivan, for example, says that students are being taught “a whole new epistemology that is directly downstream of academic critical theory.” For example, Sullivan claims, schools are teaching “white kids to internalize their complicity in evil.” 

Oh “downstream of”…but that could mean anything. Go far enough downstream and you can end up in a different country altogether. Go downstream on the Mississippi and the landscape changes a lot.

CRT, by contrast, is about how structures — not individuals — create racial inequality and injustice.

This is what I keep saying. It’s not about individual psychology, and it’s not the same as the annoying HR “trainings” a lot of people are exposed to.

CRT scholars reject the idea that inequalities between races can be explained through genetics…But CRT scholars also reject the idea that you can fix these inequalities by ignoring race. 

Too nuanced for the Andrew Sullivans of the world, I guess.

God the confident Do What I Say of them!

And it’s Laura’s business what Lizzie retweets why? I don’t care if they’re sisters, I don’t care if they’re married, I don’t care if they’ve been best friends since infancy – nobody gets to micromanage what other people say in public that way.

Ok there are some exceptions, employers can if it’s work-related, I think, and similar items, but just “You may not do that because I disapprove,” no. No and fuck off, no in thunder.

“Do you want to reconsider?”

The gall of them.

Imaging having to work around people like that.

Updating to add – she’s another Impactful Ivanka!

Looping in AND thought leaders – I think that’s BINGO.

So it looks as if Princess Ivanka may have perjured herself.

The Trump family has trouble with depositions. In 2007 testimony, Donald Trump was repeatedly shown to be a liar. In February, Donald Trump Jr. was deposed in the Trump inauguration scandal lawsuit, and on several key points, under oath, he provided false testimony. A review of documents filed in that case and other material obtained by Mother Jones shows that Ivanka Trump also testified inaccurately during her deposition in this lawsuit. 

“Testified inaccurately” meaning “perjured herself.”

The inauguration probe was launched last year by Karl Racine, the attorney general of Washington, DC. He has alleged that Trump’s inauguration committee misused charitable funds to enrich the Trump family. As Racine put it, the lawsuit maintains “that the Inaugural Committee, a nonprofit corporation, coordinated with the Trump family to grossly overpay for event space in the Trump International Hotel… The Committee also improperly used non-profit funds to throw a private party [at the Trump Hotel] for the Trump family costing several hundred thousand dollars.”

That’s so Trump, isn’t it. “Hey this is a fabulous opportunity – just charge them 10 times the going rate, they won’t mind and we get to keep it.”

During a December 1 deposition—in which she swore to tell the truth—Ivanka Trump, the eldest daughter of Donald Trump who was an executive at the Trump Organization before becoming a White House adviser to her father, was asked if she had any “involvement in the process of planning the inauguration.” She replied, “I really didn’t have an involvement.” Ivanka testified that if her “opinion was solicited” regarding an inauguration event, she “would give feedback to my father or to anyone who asked my perspective or opinion.” And that was as far as her participation went.

She’s got the pseudo-intelligent jargon down – if anyone “solicited her opinion” she would “give feedback” on her “perspective.”

Anyway it’s not true, there are documents that show she was directly involved.

On November 29, 2016, Rick Gates, then the deputy chairman of the Presidential Inauguration Committee (known as the PIC), emailed her the current schedule of inauguration events. He noted that Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a lead producer working with the PIC, “is going to call you to discuss some additional ideas she has about some other events that we would like to see if you would be willing to do based on our meetings.” Ivanka replied to Gates and Winston Wolkoff, “Great. I am looping in my assistant Suzie who can coordinate a time for us to connect.” 

Snerk. She can’t talk normally for a second. “Looping in” “coordinate a time for us to connect” – ooooh isn’t she grown-up and businessy.

And perjured.

There was another email, and another Business Speak reply.

“As mentioned, my interest in hosting [the dinner or reception for women entrepreneurs] depends on the quality and theme of the event. ” She added, “I would love to bring together an incredible group of female entrepreneurs and thought leaders and integrate young girls in the programing. If we can make it an impactful event, I would love to do it.”

Thought leaders! Impactful event! Hahahahahachoke god she’s a nightmare.

There’s an even better one in an image of her email:

“Maybe after you are aligned on an impactful idea we could meet again as a collective?”

Yeah and they should call themselves The Impactful Collective.

I don’t even care about the perjury any more, I think she should be locked up for her abuse of the language.

What we’re talking about when we talk about freedom of expression:

What is it to “dissociate” from people “vigorously”? Does he mean he punches people before shouting “It’s all over between us!”?

I wonder because if not, what he’s talking about isn’t what I would consider a sanction. Jolyon Maugham turning his back on us isn’t the horror he seems to think it is.

Meanwhile, of course, he’s pushing the big lie, as he always does – equating the defense of women’s rights and boundaries with “transphobia.”

Women have to be able to refuse to share or live or pee with men if they need to because women are not always safe from men. It’s that simple. Women need to be able to keep those boundaries because we’re not always safe from men, and we can’t know in advance which men we don’t know are safe and which are dangerous. Our safety is not Jolyon Maugham’s to brush off, and our defense of it is not his to call “transphobia.”

What does he mean “trans people are literally dying because they can’t get healthcare”? Not that they can’t get treatment for diseases, presumably, because that’s not true. So does he mean they can’t get cross-sex hormones or amputations to fit their purported gender and are killing themselves as a result? That claim would be both reckless and silly.

It seems like such a silly teenagery thing for an adult barrister with some fame to be saying. “You bitches are making trans people kill themselves!!1” Oh come on.

Trans people can’t get a word in edgewise? Really???

The meaningless piety-language again. What does he mean “traduce a minority”?

There are after all plenty of “minorities” who should be traduced – rapists, murderers, tyrants, cheats, bullies, frauds, anti-vaxxers, hustlers. The word “minority” is value-neutral.

In short he’s a manipulative bully as well as the other kinds. He uses slippery, dishonest wording to defend his fatuous ideology, and it makes me want to traduce him.

I wrote an unoptimistic column for The Freethinker. I think about the paradox a lot.

Humans are so clever in some ways. We came up with poetry, music, airplanes, the Mars Rover – but at the same time we’re too stupid to stop sawing off the branch we’re sitting on.

Stupid as a species, that is. It’s not really because individuals are stupid that we can’t stop the march to the cliff, it’s because individuals are individuals. It feels futile to try to do anything about the approaching doom when everyone else is still merrily building apartment towers and driving cars and burning down the Amazon rain forest. What’s the point?

So we’ll keep on drilling for oil and flying around the world for business meetings and building houses in flood plains and wildfire zones until the last condo disappears under the waves.

If we could just get all 7 billion of us together in a room…