Huh. It turns out there are drawbacks to basing your defense on an obvious lie. What drawbacks are those? The lawyers who refuse to take your case.

With mere hours left before a deadline for Donald Trump to officially answer the impeachment charge against him, the former president was still scrambling to assemble a legal defense, announcing that he had hired two new lawyers after a five-person team abruptly quit their roles.

Trump has until noon on Tuesday to reply to a charge of incitement of insurrection, for encouraging the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January in which five people died. His trial in the Senate is scheduled to begin on 9 February.

Let’s pause for a second to remind ourselves that he got those five people killed, along with the two cops who committed suicide afterwards. The rest of us would feel pretty consumed with horror if we had gotten seven people killed by doing a criminal thing to further our own self-interest. I’m betting Trump hasn’t wasted a second on the thought.

The unveiling of Trump’s new legal pairing – one a Fox News commentator and former counsel to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the other a former county prosecutor who opposed charging Bill Cosby with sexual assault – fueled concerns the provisional return to normalcy since Joe Biden’s inauguration is about to be upended.

I don’t think two worthless lawyers who work for Trump are going to be able to upend much. I’m a lot more worried about Greene and Boebert than about Trump’s mobster lawyers.

The trial could be particularly dangerous, legal scholars said, if Trump builds his case around his lie that the November election was stolen and Senate Republicans effectively endorse that lie, in unprecedented numbers, by voting to acquit.

Multiple reports suggested Trump jettisoned his previous legal team because they were unwilling to recite the election fraud lie. Trump’s new lawyers, David Schoen and Bruce Castor, did not indicate what defense they had planned.

Well they’ve barely had time to comb their hair, let alone plan a defense.

Schoen is an eager media presence whose past clients include Roger Stone, convicted for lying to Congress in the Russia investigation but pardoned by Trump. The attorney also told the Discovery channel Epstein had asked him to take over the defense of his case before the convicted sex trafficker killed himself in prison in August 2019.

“I don’t believe he took his own life,” Schoen said, demonstrating an ease with the conspiratorial thinking that has fed Trump’s election lies and taken over the Republican base.

In other words he’s an absurd hack. Who else would take Trump’s case?

It’s all for show anyway; the Republicans are determined to let him off.

“The ‘crisis’ over Trump’s legal team quitting assumes that the substance of the impeachment case will sway Senate Republicans,” the Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer tweeted. “Most already have their answer. Trump could offer no defense or he can go on the floor to read lines from the Joker movie – they would still vote to acquit.”

On the other hand it seems the lawyers have to be somewhat careful.

Any lawyer who repeats Trump’s fraud claim before Congress would risk legal sanction, analysts said, noting that in the midst of Trump’s attempts to get ballots thrown out, not even the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani would make certain claims about election fraud before an actual judge.

Interesting.

Another military takeover:

Myanmar’s military has seized power after detaining Aung San Suu Kyi and other democratically elected leaders. Communications are limited, troops are patrolling the streets and a one-year state of emergency has been declared.

…

The army’s move follows a landslide election win for Ms Suu Kyi’s party in November. She has urged her supporters to “protest against the coup”. In a letter written in preparation for her impending detention, she said the military’s actions would put the country back under a dictatorship.

The military has already announced replacements for a number of ministers.

They gave civilian government nine whole years.

Too feminist, apparently.

With allies like these…

He’s “tolerated” this woman he calls a rude name because he thinks she might be of use to him, but now the time has come for him to denounce her in public, because he just can’t deny himself the fun a moment longer.

Women are so horrible. He’s so sick of seeing them “use” the abuse they have suffered, when they could be talking about him.

What a good thing he’s here to set us straight about what feminism is.

So true. Feminism is not about oppression of women, because that would be BO-ring. Feminism is not about “wallowing” in our victimhood because we need to be mopping the brows of all the suffering men, instead. How dare we use our victimhood as a weapon against…urm…well, against Mark Green when all he wants is one of the stupid bitches to offer to be his agent, for free.

The guy in the antlers wants to testify in Trump’s trial. I’m sure that would be a big help.

The lawyer for an Arizona man who took part in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol while sporting face paint, no shirt and a furry hat with horns is offering to have his client testify at former President Donald Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial.

Lawyer Albert Watkins said he hasn’t spoken to any member in the Senate since announcing his offer to have Jacob Chansley testify at Trump’s trial, which is scheduled to begin the week of Feb. 8. Watkins said it’s important for senators to hear the voice of someone who was incited by Trump.

Watkins said his client was previously “horrendously smitten” by Trump but now feels let down after Trump’s refusal to grant Chansley and others who participated in the insurrection a pardon. “He felt like he was betrayed by the president,” Watkins said.

Don’t want your lo-o-o-o-o-ove any more

Don’t want your ki-i-i-i-i-isses, that’s for shore.

In successfully seeking his detention until trial, prosecutors said Chansley went into the Capitol carrying a U.S. flag attached to a wooden pole topped with a spear, ignored an officer’s commands to leave, went into the Senate chamber and wrote a threatening note to then-Vice President Mike Pence.

But all entirely on Trump’s orders so isn’t that a rock-solid exculpation?

Not something to celebrate.

Single men, adopt by all means. Deliberately set out to take an infant from its mother so that you can have it for yourself, no.

I’m depressed to see what comes up when I google “single dad by choice via surrogacy” – part of the headline in Amy’s tweet.

The Observer’s architecture critic does a little swerve into medical critic in response to the Tavistock ruling:

To be transgender is not a lifestyle choice. It is not a fad or a craze. It is not easy, but requires courage and commitment. It is a part of who you are, like being gay, and, as such, denial of it can be annihilating. Denial of the medical treatments that can help trans people can also be devastating.

Well that’s a bold first paragraph. How does he know? How does he know that to be transgender is never a lifestyle choice? How can he tell? How can he reconcile that claim with the endlessly-repeated mantra “people are who they say they are”? How can he possibly know that’s true when the rules of the game are that simple assertion is all that’s required?

The rules of the game make it possible for people to choose it as a lifestyle, so how can he know that no people are doing exactly that?

How can he know, for instance, that no male people are exploiting the assertion-only criterion to enable them to compete against women in sport? What would be different about for instance Rachel McKinnon aka Veronica Ivy if he were doing it to win competitions rather than because it is “part of who he is”? How can anyone be confident that he’s not doing exactly that?

I offer these views as the father of a trans man, which has caused me to see and reflect on these issues more than I would otherwise have done.

And yet still not enough.

If you are a trans adolescent, you may find puberty unbearable, as your body changes in ways that you don’t want.

If you are a female adolescent, you may find puberty unbearable, as your body changes in ways that you don’t want. Girls have to deal with a lot as puberty gets going. Adolescent boys are all too likely to see adolescent girls as targets, for harassment, abuse, “flirtation” that’s actually more of a veil for sexual aggression, and outright assault. Puberty can be disconcerting for boys too but they do gain a lot of strength and muscle definition and voice resonance – a lot of markers of Power and Dominance – that girls don’t. Boys get a consolation prize and girls not so much.

Then he gives a rosy and incomplete picture of the joy of puberty blockers, then he minimizes the harm.

Blockers are largely reversible, though according to the NHS, some of the the side-effects are unknown. If you later decide that transition is not for you, your body will continue to develop the characteristics of your natal sex.

Good medical advice for an architecture critic.

The high court case was brought by Keira Bell, a woman who had believed herself to be a trans boy, and at the age of 16 was prescribed puberty blockers by the Tavistock clinic in London…

Wait wait wait what? She believed herself to be a trans boy? You mean she was wrong? How is that possible? If it’s not a lifestyle choice, how can it be possible to be wrong about it? If it’s a belief, how can you tell it’s not a lifestyle choice?

[T]he court paid minimal attention to the consequences for trans people of puberty unhindered by blockers. It thought it more important to protect transgender children from blockers, which are reversible, than from the effects of unwanted puberty, which in many ways are not. Doing nothing is not a neutral option and can be harmful, a point that the court did little to acknowledge.

But blockers are not reversible. They are stoppable, but not reversible.

It’s true, in a way, that either course is doing something, and neither is neutral – “in a way” because the whole idea of fiddling with one’s sex in order to attempt a simulacrum of the other one is relatively new and, I think, tragically futile. At any rate even if we agree that there is a fork in the road at puberty and children age 12 or so can decide which kind to have, it’s still not true that they’re equally ok or safe or likely to be the best thing for the customer’s next 60 or 70 years.

Well said.

Remember Lauren Boebert’s insulting tweet to David Hogg?

She got a lot of heat for it. No doubt she will transform the heat into energy for her vampire evil.

Boebert faced widespread outrage and calls to resign following her tweet. Many pointed out her role in promoting baseless election fraud rhetoric that incited supporters of former President Donald Trump to storm the U.S. Capitol.

That incited supporters of Trump to smash their way into the Capitol in order to “execute” selected Democrats and install Trump as absolute ruler. This wasn’t a group of over-excited college kids, it was a mob of heavily armed adults intent on violent insurrection in aid of a lawless conscienceless wannabe dictator.

Hogg attributed his non-reactionary stance during the incident to Greene’s mentions of her gun ownership and concealed carry permit.

“Sorry I was a little more worried about [Marjorie Taylor Greene] not shooting my friends and staff with her concealed gun she was threatening us with than responding to your evil twin,” the gun violence survivor said. “It’s a little thing called deescalation you probably haven’t heard of it.”

If she has heard of it she thinks it’s for pussies.

Democrat Jason Crow, who represents Colorado’s 6th district, tweeted: “In my experience, those who haven’t experienced the trauma of mass shootings usually talk the toughest. But the tough talk and bullying of survivors is the ultimate sign of weakness.”

Well, it’s the ultimate sign of moral and intellectual weakness. Physically speaking I’m sure Boebert is very muscular, but as a human she might as well be a pool of spit.

A pro-gun Trump supporter, Boebert kicked off her career in Congress by allegedly setting off a Capitol metal detector and refusing to comply with police following the January 6 attack on the building.

The congresswoman, who owns a restaurant that permits staff to openly carry weapons, had previously announced her intention to carry a firearm in Congress.

Guns guns guns guns, force violence blood guts bang bang bang. Let’s just skip all this talk and reasoning and negotiation and analysis and just go all in on the violence.

Some uppity women responded to Edinburgh University’s “guidance” a couple of weeks ago.

We have become aware of an article on the University of Edinburgh’s official website in the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion section titled “What is transphobia?”. The article presents itself as an authoritative resource for students, and gives the impression that it is the settled, agreed position of the University. In fact it is a political piece, promoting highly contested ideological arguments as though they are undisputed facts. Many students and staff within the university do not share the views of the author and are concerned that one side of an ongoing public debate is being endorsed by the university.

Quite naturally, since it looks exactly as if the university is doing just that.

In a response to the Scotsman, the university stated:

“The web-page in question was designed as a resource to support students, inform discussion, and help promote a respectful, diverse and inclusive community.”

“Given the size of our community, it is inevitable that the ideas of different members will often and, quite naturally, conflict. We encourage members of our community to use their judgement and openly contest ideas that they oppose, and feel protected in doing so.”

I can’t believe that, said Alice.

Unfortunately, many students do not feel able to openly contest the opinions put forward within the article as a result of the intimidation targeted towards those who hold “gender critical” views.

Including violence, as they go on to say.

This document opens by providing a definition of transphobia: “Transphobia is the hatred, fear, disbelief, or mistrust of trans and gender non-conforming people.” This definition is broad, stretching so far as to encompass belief. What does “disbelief” mean in this context? In the university’s Trans Inclusion Policy, students and staff are advised to “Think of the person as being the gender that they want you to think of them as.” Could not thinking of a person as their desired gender be considered “disbelief” and therefore constitute transphobia? It’s worrying that a university is stating how individuals ought to think in official policy.

And where will it end? Will EU soon be telling students to “Think of the person as being the species that they want you to think of them as”? Will it soon be telling students to think of the person as the kind of object that they want you to think of them as, the kind of planet that they want you to think of them as, as the kind of bird that they want you to think of them as, as the kind of rock that they want you to think of them as? Is there any limit to this expectation? Is there any reasonable argument underpinning it? Why should we [pretend to] think of other people as something they manifestly are not? How can that possibly be a general rule? Chaos would ensue within seconds. If it’s not a general rule what kind of rule is it? Why do we have to play this game? Why is it expected of us? Why can’t we say no? Why are we being pushed and slammed and arm-twisted to play other people’s childish game?

Women are frequently demonised as transphobic for pointing out that in some instances there are conflicts of rights arising from the two pieces of legislation, and for asking for those conflicts to be explored and resolved. In “What is Transphobia?”, there is a similar attempt to paint women’s arguments as simply “dogwhistles” for bigotry. These “reasonable concerns” (concerns over the collective redefinition of your social and legal category tend to be reasonable) are described by the author as “a way to limit the rights of and marginalise trans and non-binary people”. Here, the “right” to self-declaration is presupposed, while women’s boundaries are portrayed as hostile and women’s right to speak on issues affecting them is dismissed.

Emphasis added. That’s exactly right, and I’m fed up to the back teeth with it.

H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?

The Scotsman reported on reaction to Edinburgh University’s publication of an amateurish tendentious article about “transphobia” as part of its official guidance on inclusion.

ForWomenScot posted: “We are deeply troubled to see this from @EdinburghUni. Female lecturers are routinely harassed & put in fear on campus for arguing for legal rights. However, the university have chosen to publish a deeply political piece, misrepresenting women’s concerns.”

Susan Smith, a spokeswoman for the group, said the article, which appears on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion section of the university’s website, was “hugely biased” and much of it was “a low-grade attempt at a smear campaign”.

The article treats the nonsensical doctrine that men can magically become women just by “feeling like women inside” as not a childish fantasy but settled fact. A university shouldn’t do that.

Ms Smith said: “One of the silliest things is this idea that safety and privacy for women are not compromised if you allow people to self-ID into women’s spaces. That’s clearly a nonsense and it shouldn’t even be a point of contention.”

That is, if you allow men to self-ID into women’s spaces. It has been made incredibly difficult to hang onto the language of reality.

A university spokesman said: “The University of Edinburgh is a safe place for difficult conversations. We are committed to defending freedom of speech and expression, as long as it is carried out within the law and in a respectful manner.

“The web-page in question was designed as a resource to support students, inform discussion, and help promote a respectful, diverse and inclusive community.”

How can it do any of that by posting what look like dispassionate factual explanations but are in fact the tenets of a new and ridiculous ideology? How can it do that by asserting that men are women if they identify as such?

“Given the size of our community, it is inevitable that the ideas of different members will often and, quite naturally, conflict. We encourage members of our community to use their judgement and openly contest ideas that they oppose, and feel protected in doing so.”

But the article in question asserted the claims of trans ideology as if they were simple facts, similar to saying Edinburgh is 47 miles from Glasgow. The claims of trans ideology are magical, and childish, and silly. Students aren’t going to “feel protected” in that situation, except maybe the trans ones.

I’d forgotten about Katie Hill.

Arwa Mahdawi points out that we’re probably stuck with Marjorie Greene:

What do you do with someone like Greene? Like Donald Trump she’s desperate for the limelight: giving her any kind of attention is giving her exactly what she wants. Not to mention, when you amplify her beliefs you risk spreading them. At the same time you can’t just ignore Greene. The woman is dangerous and should not be in Congress. On Wednesday, the Democratic California congressman Jimmy Gomez announced he was drafting a resolution to expel Greene from the House of Representatives, noting: “Her very presence in office represents a direct threat against the elected officials and staff who serve our government.”

Direct meaning literal, physical, blood spilled threat. She carries a gun and we can’t be confident that she wouldn’t open fire on her colleagues.

It’s unlikely that Gomez’s resolution to expel Greene from the House will be successful: expelling a democratically elected member of Congress is a rare step that sets an uncomfortable precedent. It would need the support of all the Democrats and about 70 Republicans to succeed. But Gomez’s resolution shouldn’t even be necessary: the Republican party ought to be forcing Greene to resign. If Greene [were] a Democrat who had endorsed political violence the Republicans would have demanded her resignation already. I mean, Katie Hill, a Democrat, was forced to resign after she was accused of having a relationship with a staffer and nude pictures of her were published online.

That’s what I’d forgotten – the forced resignation of Katie Hill.

Mind you she wasn’t literally forced, but her life was being made such hell that she felt forced. Nobody is making Marjorie Greene feel that way. On the one hand a Democrat’s ex-husband gives naked photos of her to the press; on the other hand a Republican abuses shooting victims and colleagues while bragging about how heavily armed she is.

Can we throw out “Karen” and replace it with “Marjorie”?

A solidarity too many.

Of course it’s vital that every child receive good health care, but good health care isn’t cutting off the breasts of teenage girls who say they feel like boys. Good health care is not putting such girls on puberty blockers. Good health care is not understanding the child’s needs exactly the way the child does, but rather understanding those needs the way an adult with medical training and experience does.

And what does it actually have to do with Amnesty anyway?

What is Amnesty UK?

We are Amnesty International UK. We work to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.

As a global movement of over seven million people, Amnesty International is the world’s largest grassroots human rights organisation.

We investigate and expose abuses, educate and mobilise the public, and help transform societies to create a safer, more just world. We received the Nobel Peace Prize for our life-saving work.

It’s a human rights organization.

Ok so is there a human right to get invasive surgery that includes amputation of healthy body parts? Is there a human right to lifelong cross-sex hormones? Is that the only relevant right? If you think those are rights, and unquestionable absolute rights at that, is there perhaps also a competing right to medical information and advice that’s not shaped by campaign groups like Stonewall and/or furious advocates on Twitter? Is it really a right to get medical interventions that are based on a new and eccentric and hotly disputed dogma about people who are in “the wrong body”? Really really? Are they sure they’ve thought about it carefully enough? Are they sure there can be no harm done? (They can’t be, really, when there are people like Keira Bell.)

There were a lot of regrets when the Recovered Memory craze fizzled out. My guess is that there will be a lot of regrets about this craze eventually. It’s sad about all the people who will be messed up before that happens.

Time to repair the court system.

President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats are vetting civil rights lawyers and public defenders to nominate as judges, embarking on a mission to shape the courts after Republicans overhauled them in the last four years, according to senior party officials and activists.

They’ve got two years, because the pattern is that Congress flips after one party collars everything. (It’s unfortunate that the Senate ignored that pattern in 2018.)

In addition to forming a new commission to study structural changes to the judiciary, the Biden White House has asked senators to recruit civil rights attorneys and defense lawyers for judgeships. Officials who work on the issue say they’ve seen an outpouring of interest and have begun holding sessions to offer information and advice on navigating the confirmation gauntlet.

“We’ll see the proof of this in President Biden’s first set of nominees. I expect they’re going to look very different than the kind of judges that Democratic presidents have put forward in the past,” said Chris Kang, co-founder of the progressive group Demand Justice and former deputy counsel in the Obama White House. “Their backgrounds will be radically different, overall, and that will make a huge difference in our courts.”

For decades, Republicans have prioritized the courts in elections to stir up their base. Democrats have all but ignored the issue on the campaign trail and are now playing catch-up after their voters watched in horror as former President Donald Trump and Republicans filled up more than one-fourth of the U.S. judiciary with predominantly young conservatives.

You have to wonder why Dems ignored the issue.

White House counsel Dana Remus told senators in a recent letter to recommend candidates for district court vacancies within 45 days of a vacancy, so they can “expeditiously” be considered.

“With respect to U.S. District Court positions, we are particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench, including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys, and those who represent Americans in every walk of life,” Remus wrote in the letter, which was obtained by NBC News.

That means fewer prosecutors and “big corporate lawyers,” who Whitehouse said tend to have a “high-speed lane” to the judiciary. He said plaintiff’s lawyers will get pushback from groups like the Chamber of Commerce, but praised Biden for seeking “professional diversity” along with demographic diversity.

This kind of thing is one reason I so often despair of the Democrats. Big corporate lawyers already have a friendly party, they don’t get to have both parties. I hate the way the Dems are always snuggling up to the rich and powerful instead of acting on behalf of the people who need more help.

Originally a comment by Arnaud on A couple of markers.

In 1957/1958, a flu pandemic (the Hong Kong flu) caused up to 3 million deaths worldwide, 100,000 in France alone. It circled the world in less than six months and caused untold misery. Like COVID19, most of the death occurred among older people (over 65) but, at a time when life expectancy was much lower than it is now, that didn’t shock that much, maybe. How to explain that the devastation was so quickly forgotten?

So quickly forgotten that when what was pretty much the same virus came back in 1968, the same mistakes were made, the same complacency prevailed and the same results were seen: a worldwide death toll of between 1 and 4 million.

Then, THAT pandemic was in its turn swiftly forgotten. I myself was born in 1970 and I must admit, I’d never heard of it until a couple of months ago. That’s two pandemics that the people experienced and didn’t care to remember.

So there is, definitely, a pattern of forgetting, of erasement of these events from our collective memories. It doesn’t have to be so, the memory can be kept alive: one of the reasons a lot of Asian countries did much better in fighting COVID was their own memories of SARS nearly 20 years but the effects can be perverse. While governments and people who lived through it in China, Hong Kong, Viet Nam remembered it vividly, the rest of the world, who never was affected much thanks to stringent security measures, dismissed it too easily as scaremongering. (The same thing happened with the 2K bug!)

I don’t know why this happens to be honest, this forgetting. You could say there is a certain fatalism, a tendency to accept epidemics as a fact of life but surely that cannot be entirely the case, how can you accept as a fact of life something you refuse to remember? Maybe because, as OB hints, there are no great stories, no great deeds and derring-dos or at least none that the entertainment industry care to commemorate?

As an aside, I remember the 1918 flu epidemic (not personally of course!) and so do a lot of people here in Europe. I cannot speak about the US but in my opinion this one left an imprint. Mind you, it was particularly awful.

Why are universities letting angry teenagers write their policies?

Naturally I was curious so I went to read it, and again found the familiar combination of aggressive ignorance and baseless assertion, rather than something composed by informed academics.

Then I went back a category, to the Learn More section of Edinburgh’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion whatever this is – instruction book, explanation, authoritative setting out of the facts – and found the all too predictable Forgotten Item indeed not there.

Nothing about women then? No need to worry about including women? Women not a subordinated set of people at all? Nobody hates women? Nobody disbelieves them? Nobody mistrusts them?

Why weren’t we told?

The Telegraph:

Psychiatrists fear that transgender children are being “coached” into giving rehearsed answers when trying to access puberty blockers, the Court of Appeal has heard.

Dr David Bell, a former governor at a gender identity NHS trust, expressed concern that children may be pressured by parents, friends or websites when trying to address feelings of gender dysphoria. 

How could children not be at least influenced by friends or websites or both when trying to address feelings of gender dysphoria in this climate? When the whole subject is so saturated with bullying and righteous fury and social pressure that would get juice out of a brick?

Dr Bell, who was a psychiatrist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust from 1996 until earlier this month, was granted permission on Friday by two senior judges to intervene in a landmark case examining whether transgender children can legally take puberty blockers.

He feels that he can speak more freely now because he’s retired from the Trust.

In legal papers lodged before the Court, Dr Bell is described as a “high profile whistleblower” after he published a report in August 2018 which “investigated serious concerns” raised by ten clinicians working at the Tavistock. 

The report found that the Tavistock’s gender identity clinic, GIDS, “is not fit for purpose” and some young patients “will live on with the damaging consequences.”

After the report he felt that the Trust victimized him, which is why he didn’t want to participate in the Keira Bell case. But he retired earlier this month, so…

He was afraid to talk, so maybe others there are afraid too.

Maybe all of them are. Maybe none of them believe the dogma but they’re all afraid of each other.

How did that happen? How did what should be a medical/psychiatric issue become so political and so coercive?

“There is evidence that staff members may be frightened of coming forwards,” the documents continued. “Dr Bell, a highly eminent psychiatrist who until recently occupied a senior position with the Appellant, is now free from his employment and able to describe the concerns, which he investigated in some detail.” 

Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Dingemans granted his application to intervene in the appeal, which will be heard over two days in April, while other groups, including the LGBT charity Stonewall, had their application denied. 

Good. That’s part of the answer to my question right there – Stonewall. Stonewall made what should be a medical/psychiatric issue so political and so coercive, along with Pink News and Twitter and a thousand blogs.

Another one.

No. This is such a beginner’s error. The words are “something we created” but the underlying reality is not. Calling the moon the moon is social, but that rocky roundish object is not. Naming is human and cultural, but not everything we name is a human artifact.

Only people who lived near it knew about what we now call the Grand Canyon until well into the 19th century, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

David Hogg isn’t the only Parkland survivor that Marjorie Greene harassed and abused.

Another student activist who was present that day said Greene’s behavior had been “scary” and had left her shaken. Linnea Stanton, a college student and March for Our Lives activist from Wisconsin, recalled that Greene had first confronted the students as they delivered letters to lawmakers inside a Senate office building.

“All of a sudden, this blonde woman was yelling, and someone was recording us with an iPhone,” Stanton said.

After the students started chanting to get the Capitol police to intervene, Greene left, but she waited for the group outside the building, where she continued to harass and film them once they exited, Stanton said.

Stanton said she had only learned on Wednesday that the woman who had harassed her group in 2019 was now an elected member of Congress. “It’s just kind of horrifying,” she said. “It’s bizarre to me that someone who can act like that towards another human being, much less towards a teenager who survived a mass shooting, is allowed to hold power.

Horrifying is exactly what it is. This isn’t just different politics, it isn’t policy versus policy, it isn’t meritocracy or safety net, it’s unashamed cruelty and malevolence versus basic minimal giving a shit about others. It’s horrifying that that’s where we’ve arrived.

Jonathan Freedland wonders why did the 1918 Flu disappear from the collective memory so swiftly?

Look around almost any British town or village and you will see a war memorial, usually first built to honour the fallen of 1914 to 1918. But scour this country and the rest of the world, and you will struggle to find more than a couple of markers for the event that, globally and at the time of the war’s end, took many more lives. The first world war killed some 17 million people, but the “Spanish” flu that struck in 1918 infected one in three people on the planet – a total of 500 million – leaving between 50 million and 100 million dead. The number of dead was so much greater and yet, as the leading historian of that pandemic, Laura Spinney, writes, “there is no cenotaph, no monument in London, Moscow or Washington DC” for any of them. The great writers of the age, the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, all but ignored the plague that had descended.

Think of all the war movies there are and then about the comparatively small number of flu movies. By comparatively small I mean zero.

Why is that? An explanation begins in the novelist Graham Swift’s conception of man as “the storytelling animal”. Wars offer a compelling, linear story. There are causes and consequences, battles, surrenders and treaties, all taking place in a defined space and time. Pandemics are not like that. They sprawl the entire globe. And the facts can take decades to emerge. For many years, the 1918-20 pandemic was thought to have cost 20 million lives. Only relatively recently has the truer, more deadly picture emerged.

Crucially, a pandemic lacks the essential ingredients of a story: clear heroes and villains with intent and motive. The Covid enemy is, despite our best efforts to anthropomorphise it, an invisible and faceless virus.

That’s only one kind of story though. Clear villains aren’t an essential ingredient of all stories. (There’s also the fact that bumbling or outright criminally negligent people at the top could step right up for those villain roles.) You’d think heroic nurses and doctors would make plenty of good story.

We are practised in the collective memory of war, but with pandemics we do something different. “We remember them individually, not collectively,” says Spinney. “Not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discrete, private tragedies.”

That’s what the precedent of 1918 suggests we’ll do this time, and yet I can’t help but hope that’s wrong. When this is over, I hope we take each other’s hands and remember this strange, dark period together – even if we spent so much of it apart, so much of it alone.

I think we’ll remember it, but whether we’ll pass the memory on or not – I have my doubts.