The Guardian reported a few days ago that Maajid Nawaz (who, from what I’ve seen, has been moving ever farther to the right lately) has been talking up trumpish conspiracy theories.

The prominent radio presenter and activist Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of a respected British anti-extremist thinktank and a one-time government adviser, has alarmed former admirers and academics with his interest in conspiracy theories about the lockdown and voter fraud in the US election on his Twitter account.

As an LBC radio host, he regularly takes provocative stances, but now a string of controversial and potentially harmful tweets is prompting further questions.

Followers were initially alarmed when Nawaz, who set up the Quilliam Foundation in 2008, inspired by his own move away from Islamic extremism, retweeted a “fascinating thread” in November last year on how the “myth” of a killer coronavirus pandemic had been spread. Nawaz adds he has no opinion on this claim.

No opinion on it but retweets it anyway, regardless of the harms of treating a lethal pandemic as a “myth.”

After the US presidential election, Nawaz tweeted a series of claims that fraud had taken place, questioning the credibility of the voting machines and reproducing some of the arguments put forward by Trump’s former legal cheerleader, Sidney Powell, whose claims proved so outlandish that she was eventually disavowed by the former president.

Following the attack on the US Capitol, Nawaz retweeted false claims that it was antifa, or anti-fascist groups, who orchestrated the raid, rather than Trump supporters.

…

Last week Nawaz also challenged Facebook to explain why it had marked one of his posts as false. He had drawn attention to allegations that America’s chief medical adviser to the president, Dr Anthony Fauci, had invested in the Wuhan laboratory suspected by some of leaking the virus into the human population. The wild allegations about Fauci – for which there is no evidence – were contained in a Fox News report from Steve Hilton, the British former public relations adviser to David Cameron.

If you’re promoting loony claims from Fox News, you’re not an anti-extremism campaigner any more.

Sunder Katwala, the director of the thinktank British Future, is one of those who has been attempting to hold Nawaz to account for spreading unproven theories and scare stories. He argued that the presenter poses more of a problem than conspiracists because of his LBC platform, the fact that he leads a counter-extremism thinktank and is also a prominent British convert from extremism. Katwala, a former general secretary of the leftwing Fabian Society, believes Nawaz’s public profile makes such references to “conspiratorial propaganda more worrying”.

“It has been alarming to witness this evolve from unusual misreadings of the US constitutional process into an interest in electoral fraud conspiracies,” said Katwala. “I cannot conceive of a benign explanation for participating in and spreading QAnon-inspired online conspiracies.”

A wacky sense of humor?

Well knock me down with a feather – a Washington Post cartoonist gets it.

I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not, until I scrolled down and saw that she’s blocking anyone who asks, so that’s a no. She actually means this.

It’s national women and girls in sports day, so she’s celebrating the “bravery” of men who beat women in sports by claiming to be women. Also their “strength,” which is kind of the issue.

This just in: women talk too much.

The president of the Tokyo Olympics has refused to resign after igniting a storm of criticism by saying that women do not belong on committees because they talk too much.

Yoshiro Mori, the 83-year-old former prime minister and president of the Tokyo 2020 organising committee, made the remarks at a meeting of the Japan Olympic Committee on Wednesday.

…

Speaking at an online JOC meeting about proposals to increase the number of female directors, Mr Mori said that in his experience at the Japan Rugby Football Union, women made meetings last too long.

“It takes twice as long. Women have a strong sense of rivalry. If one raises her hand to speak then all the others feel they have to do the same. So it ends up with everybody talking,” Mr Mori said in comments first reported by the Asahi newspaper.

People were annoyed. He held a press conference to say sorry but also he’s not going anywhere.

Mr Mori, who was prime minister for a year from 2000-01, has a long history of committing gaffes and making chauvinist remarks, including attacks on women who did not have children and athletes who failed to sing the national anthem loudly enough.

I know of a guy in Palm Beach he would really get along with.

Facebook targets pro-violence advertising to – naturally – the people most likely to use it.

As part of my research while working as a consulting producer on Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, I made many pro-Trump social media accounts. The accounts were a window into the Trump echo-chamber, where the unhinged threats and vitriol posted by radicalized users are chilling. Yet as shocking as the posts can be, they make perfect sense if you look at the ads that bombard those accounts.

Roughly four out of five ads shown to my pro-Trump profiles sell tactical gear clearly intended for combat. This is not a new thing – it has been going on since I started looking at these accounts in June 2019, and it was probably going on much longer than that.

You have to wonder why tactical gear intended for combat is a private market thing at all. Are there ads for nuclear weapons? Fighter jets? Tanks? Should war equipment really be a consumer item?

Despite not actually selling guns, the vast majority of the ads nevertheless display military-style weapons somewhere in their design. An automatic rifle slides into the tactical backpack. The body armor is worn by someone actively poised to shoot a semi-automatic weapon. A black T-shirt presents an image of a medieval crusader in full armor holding a contemporary handgun, accompanied by a biblical quote: “Blessed be the lord my rock who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”

Capitalism—>marketing the tools of war: fabulous!

Ad revenue is the lifeblood of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and ads from companies peddling military-style gear are key to creating the hateful communities we see online today. To change the violent online world Facebook has created for “Trump’s Army” will require changing the algorithms themselves, the basic architecture of Facebook’s advertising – a market that is projected to bring the company nearly $100bn in the coming year.

And Zuckerberg isn’t about to mess with that.

The ACLU is digging in.

But that’s not a “fact.” It’s an ideological construct, of a peculiarly fatuous kind, and it’s not true; it’s the opposite of a fact.

Nonsense.

Include trans people on sports teams by all means, just not male people on female teams, because it’s unfair.

USA Today reports:

A group of high-profile women athletes and women’s sports advocates is taking on the contentious issue of transgender girls and women in sports by proposing federal legislation to exempt girls’ and women’s competitive sports from President Joe Biden’s recent executive order that mandates blanket inclusion for all transgender female athletes.

In the Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation, signed on Inauguration Day, the Biden administration said that any school that receives federal funding must allow biological boys who self-identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face action from the federal government.

But the group of women’s sports leaders, including tennis legend Martina Navratilova, several Olympic gold medalists and five former presidents of the Women’s Sports Foundation, is asking Congress and the Biden administration to limit the participation of transgender girls and women who “have experienced all or part of male puberty (which is the scientific justification for separate sex sport),” while accommodating and honoring their sports participation in other ways. Options could include separate heats, additional events or divisions and/or the handicapping of results. 

Now why would they do that? Oh yes, the reason’s obvious, isn’t it.

“We fully support the Biden executive order, ending LGBT discrimination throughout society, including employment, banking, family law and public accommodations,” Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a Title IX attorney and one of the leaders of the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, told USA TODAY Sports in an exclusive interview. “Competitive sports, however, are akin to pregnancy and medical testing; these areas require a science-based approach to trans inclusion. Our aim has been on protecting the girls’ and women’s competitive categories, while crafting accommodations for trans athletes into sport wherever possible. 

“While the details of President Biden’s executive order remain fuzzy, asking women — no, requiring them — to give up their hard-won rights to compete and be recognized in elite sport, with equal opportunities, scholarships, prize money, publicity, honor and respect, does the cause of transgender inclusion no favors,” Hogshead-Makar said.

And even if it did do the cause of trans inclusion favors, it would still be outrageously unfair to women and girls, which ought to make it a non-starter.

While the controversy over transgender girls and women in sports is not new, the issue bubbled to the surface in the United States a few years ago when two transgender girls were allowed to compete in state track and field meets in Connecticut, winning a combined 15 girls’ state indoor and outdoor championship races from 2017-19…

Which is 15 wins they took away from girls, which is grossly unfair.

Why was NPR talking about “multiracial whiteness”? Because of a Washington Post think piece by Cristina Beltrán, who is an associate professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU.

The Trump administration’s anti-immigration, anti-civil rights stance has made it easy to classify the president’s loyalists as a homogenous mob of white nationalists. But take a look at the FBI’s posters showing people wanted in the insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol: Among the many White faces are a few that are clearly Latino or African American.

So! Rather than try to figure out how brown people manage to be fans of murderous bullies who despise brown people, we have to decide that that’s “whiteness.”

Yes, Trump’s voters — and his mob — are disproportionately White, but one of the more unsettling exit-poll data points of the 2020 election was that a quarter to a third of Latino voters voted to reelect Trump.

Ever heard of Cuba? Miami? Florida? It’s not news that there are a lot of very conservative Cubans or descendants of Cubans in Florida and that they are why Florida is all but impossible for Democrats to win. Latino doesn’t mean automatically on the left, to put it mildly.

The chairman of the neo-fascist Proud Boys is Enrique Tarrio, a Latino raised in Miami’s Little Havana who identifies as Afro-Cuban; when he arrived in Washington for the Jan. 6 march, he was arrested for allegedly burning a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a Black church the month before.

What are we to make of Tarrio — and, more broadly, of Latino voters inspired by Trump? And what are we to make of unmistakably White mob violence that also includes non-White participants? I call this phenomenon multiracial whiteness — the promise that they, too, can lay claim to the politics of aggression, exclusion and domination.

Why? Why do you call it that? You might as well call it rice pudding, or Vladivostok.

Rooted in America’s ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness, multiracial whiteness is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power and privilege — a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others. Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.

Of course, there are existing words that actually mean that, but no, let’s call it whiteness, because it sounds so insidery.

Multiracial whiteness offers citizens of every background the freedom to call Muslims terrorists, demand that undocumented immigrants be rounded up and deported, deride BLM as a movement of thugs and criminals, and accuse Democrats of being blood-drinking pedophiles.

…

America’s racial divide is not simply between Whites and non-Whites. Thinking in terms of multiracial whiteness helps us recognize that much of today’s political rift is a division between those who are drawn to and remain invested in a politics of whiteness and those who seek something better.

What? If the racial divide is not simply between Whites and non-Whites then why say it’s between whiteness and something better? Why not use a different word, that would make that paragraph less startlingly incoherent?

We witnessed this very divide in Georgia, when a significant segment of White voters broke with Georgia’s White majority, joining a multiracial coalition that sent Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the U.S. Senate, following the leadership of Black women whose organizing made that electoral victory possible.

And that’s because…whiteness.

No wonder Alison Phipps is on board.

It’s not just Alison Phipps – it’s a whole new item. “Whiteness” now means…you know…everything. All the bad things.

Oh yes, “multiracial whiteness.” That’s kind of like multisex karenness.

A clean sweep at the Pentagon:

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has dismissed every member of the Pentagon’s advisory boards in a sweeping move fueled by concern that the Trump administration had rushed through a series of last-minute appointments, defense officials said Tuesday.

Along with a concern that those appointments were highly likely to be stooges for him as opposed to people who ought to be on a Pentagon advisory board.

The move affects several hundred members of about 40 advisory boards, including dozens of people who had been named to the posts in the closing days of former President Donald Trump’s tenure.

Among those who were dismissed are highly partisan figures such as Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign manager; David Bossie, a former Trump deputy campaign manager; Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; and retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata. Instead of singling out Trump appointees, the move applies to all board members, including those appointed before Trump’s presidency.

…

The advisory boards, whose members are not paid, offer guidance to the Defense Department about policy, science, business and numerous other topics. To make way for new pro-Trump loyalists, the Trump White House in some cases removed longtime board members.

Meaning, probably, members with substantive knowledge to offer as opposed to unquestioning adoration of Trump.

“There is no question that the frenetic activity that occurred to the composition of so many boards, in just the period of November to January, deeply concerned the secretary and certainly helped to drive him to this decision,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters.

Another cunning plan foiled.

Very granola, very crunchy person turns trumpian insurrectionist:

Before the pandemic, Rachel Powell, a forty-year-old mother of eight from western Pennsylvania, sold cheese and yogurt at local farmers’ markets and used Facebook mostly to discuss yoga, organic food, and her children’s baseball games. But, last year, Powell began to post more frequently, embracing more extreme political views. Her interests grew to include conspiracy theories about covid-19 and the results of the Presidential election, filtered through such figures as Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the Infowars founder Alex Jones.

Some more time passes and she turns up at the January 6 insurrection.

Videos show her, wearing a pink hat and sunglasses, using a battering ram to smash a window and a bullhorn to issue orders. “People should probably coördinate together if you’re going to take this building,” she called out, leaning through a shattered window and addressing a group of rioters already inside. “We got another window to break to make in-and-out easy.”

The FBI is now looking for her.

“I was not part of a plot—organized, whatever,” Powell, who was speaking from an undisclosed location, told me. “I have no military background. . . . I’m a mom with eight kids. That’s it. I work. And I garden. And raise chickens. And sell cheese at a farmers’ market.” During the interview, she reviewed photographs and videos of the Bullhorn Lady, acknowledging that many of the images showed her, and offered detailed descriptions of the skirmishes they depicted.

Powell was born in Anaheim, California, and grew up on what she described as “the really bad side” of Fresno. She was raised by her mother, who worked at a local shop, and by her stepfather, a plumber. “It was rough, but she didn’t do without anything,” her mother, Deborah Lemons, who has had a strained relationship with Powell for the past several years, said. “She always had clothes. She always had food.” Lemons said that, when Powell was a child, she and her stepfather were the victims of a carjacking. Powell was held at gunpoint and her stepfather was kidnapped for several hours by their assailant. “Knowing what that feels like, I am just absolutely amazed that she would participate in something like this and not consider or have a lot of compassion for the people who were inside that building,” Lemons said, referring to the riot. “She well knows what it’s like to wonder if she’s gonna lose her life.”

Ideology can do strange things to people.

Three years ago, Powell separated from her husband. Since then, she has worked various part-time jobs to support her children, who range in age from four to their mid-twenties. She told me that she has a certification as a group fitness instructor, and has taken a course in alternative medicine. “She’s very granola, very crunchy,” a friend, who asked not to be identified, told me. “Does yoga, eats vegetarian, homeschools all their kids.”

And bashes out windows in the Capitol so that people can get inside to hunt down Democrats.

She wasn’t a fan of Trump’s in 2016, but the masks requirement changed everything.

Paula Keswick, who co-owns a local creamery that sold Powell cheese and yogurt, said that Powell was barred from working at some events after she refused to obey pandemic restrictions. “She was just adamant she was not going to wear a mask,” Keswick said. (Powell said that she now works part time at a local bookstore.) Last summer and fall, Powell said, she attended various protests, including anti-mask rallies. “If there was a protest in Harrisburg, I was there for almost all of them,” she told me. On July 4th, she drove for four hours to join members of several far-right groups, some of them armed, who gathered at the Gettysburg National Military Park, purportedly to protect Civil War monuments from desecration. At the rally, a man wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt was surrounded and aggressively questioned by about fifty demonstrators. In a video posted online, Powell is among the group…

Because masks, freedom, masks.

She told me that she did not share the racist views espoused by some on the far right. (In 2013, she tweeted, “what’s up, my niggas?” Powell defended the use of the N-word, saying, “My favorite book is ‘Gone with the Wind,’ and it uses that term freely.”)

GWtW is a hair-raisingly racist novel and movie, and did a lot to teach generations to be even more racist than they would have been anyway.

So she voted for Trump this time.

Concerns about mask requirements, which she called a “liberty issue,” were instrumental in her decision. She claimed that the risks of the coronavirus had been overstated by public-health officials, saying that she had not seen many deaths in her county. On November 5th, 2020, she wrote in a Facebook comment directed at a friend, “I won’t get a vaccine either. I hear what you’re saying about the whole world being in on the conspiracy as far as the corona virus goes.” On December 27th, she posted, “I’m unashamedly a ‘super spreader,’ ” attaching photographs of crowded, mask-free holiday and birthday parties. That day, she uploaded a video of a large maskless meal, during which several children said, “No masks,” and Powell could be heard saying, “The masks are total bullcrap. You guys just need to get out there and live. Get arrested—it’s fine.”

Have another bowl of granola.

One more visit with Alison Phipps.

“…the cultural power of white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears.”

It’s so…hit them don’t hit me. So chickenshit. So malicious. She’s lily-white herself and she’s climbing the academic ladder by heaping shit on white women. She makes scholarship look like a con game.

Hur hur radical feminists, they’re exactly like Brexiters and men’s rights activists, hur hur hur.

We’re all doomed.

Alison Phipps says we’re “stalking” her “profile,” which apparently means seeing one of her tweets. How very dare we.

Reading the Definition of Political Whiteness from Her Book does not, oddly enough, convince me that her way of deploying it is clever and enlightened.

Nope. Not convincing. Why “whiteness”? Why that word instead of another? Why not maleness or richness or powerfulness?

I haven’t read her book so I don’t know, but I suspect it’s because it sounds good. It sounds hip and knowing and like what the cool kids say. It’s sort of like jazz or blues or hip hop, ya know? But academic. Academicish.

So, does that help her make the case that we nasty “gender crits” are tainted by this evil whiteness thing, this interaction between supremacy and victimhood?

Well, not as far as I’m concerned, but no doubt the cool kids think it’s genius.

I thought Chase Strangio couldn’t get any worse. Silly me.

There’s a lot to fume at in that tweet, but I especially bristle at that “especially.” Why especially? Why women especially? WHY WOMEN ESPECIALLY?

Moira Donegan on AOC and what she told us:

On Monday night, after making several public allusions to the gravity of her experience, AOC used Instagram Live to describe her experience of the Capitol attack on 6 January. She spoke of hiding in her office as the mob breached the Capitol; she hid behind the door in a bathroom as she heard people ransacking the rooms outside. Someone came into the bathroom where she was hiding, their face on the other side of the door that she hid behind. At one point, a voice yelled, “Where is she? Where is she?” That turned out to be a Capitol police officer, but he did not identify himself; Ocasio-Cortez describes feeling ambivalent and uncertain about who he was and why he was really there.

Eventually, she escaped, and wound up barricaded in the office of Representative Katie Porter, of California, and later she moved to the office of Representative Ayanna Pressley, of Massachusetts. She spoke several times of how she feared the marauders could attack, with the intelligence she was receiving from security personnel mixing with her own anxious imagination. If she turned that corner down the hall, would an insurrectionist mob appear with guns? If bombs were found a block away, did that mean the building she was sitting in could explode? It’s clear from her account that at several points throughout the day, she thought she was going to die.

The description of these events on the broadcast – the terror and trauma AOC recounted, the frankness with which she detailed her mounting fears of bombs and guns – would already have been remarkable. But early in the broadcast, as she described her frustration over Republican calls to move on from the insurrection, she revealed something else: “I’m a survivor of sexual assault,” she said, the first time she has made that disclosure publicly. “The reason I say this and the reason I’m getting emotional in this moment is because these folks who tell us to move on, that it’s not a big deal, that we should forget what’s happened, or even telling us to apologize,” she said. “These are the tactics that abusers use.”

Which, I’m guessing, is not a coincidence, but a commonality. The same kind of people are drawn to today’s Republican party and to a habit of being abusive.

In recognizing the common rhetorical strategies used by both Republicans eager to minimize the attack and perpetrators of gender violence eager to avoid accountability for their treatment of women, AOC was echoing feminists who compared Donald Trump’s increasingly hostile and reckless behavior in the last two months of his term to a pattern common to domestic abusers, who are known to escalate their violence in the weeks immediately following their victim’s severing of the relationship.

I hadn’t thought of that before. It’s interesting. Not surprising, but interesting. Of course angry entitled violent abusive men get even more angry and violent and abusive when their victim escapes.

AOC is correct in her observation that the rhetorical strategies used by Republicans – to deny their own wrongdoing, attack the victims seeking accountability, and to pretend that the true wrongdoing has been committed against them – are the same strategies deployed by other tyrants, be they political or domestic, seeking to uphold other unjust and dangerous systems of power.

Because what else would they do? It’s not as if they can turn to reason and argument and persuasion and justice. They have to use the tools they know.

The question is answered: yes Trump’s new “legal team” is willing to repeat his lies.

Donald Trump’s legal team for his second impeachment trial has filed a 14-page brief defending his actions on January 6, when the then-president incited a violent insurrection at the US Capitol.

On January 6, Trump repeated his baseless claims that Joe Biden won the presidential election because of widespread fraud, and he encouraged his supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol as Congress certified Biden’s victory.

He encouraged them to do more than march to the Capitol.

“Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness,” he said. “You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”

The president’s legal team said in its brief, “Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false.”

Straight up lying.

Putin is still Putin.

A Moscow court has sentenced Alexei Navalny to two years and eight months in a prison colony in a landmark decision for Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on the country’s leading opposition figure.

Calling it a “crackdown” makes it sound legitimate. The right word would be “suppression.”

Navalny, who has accused the Russian president and his allies of stealing billions, was jailed for violating parole from a 2014 sentence for embezzlement in a case he has said was politically motivated.

…

After a judge read the verdict, subtracting the 10 months he had spent under house arrest from his original three-and-a-half-year sentence, Navalny and his wife Yulia stared at each other across the court room. She took off her mask, smiled, waved, and then shrugged. “Don’t be sad! Everything’s going to be alright!” he yelled to her. She declined to comment as she walked out of the courtroom, looking straight ahead.

…

Outside the courthouse, she stood next to Navalny’s two lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Vladimir Kobzev. They said they planned to appeal to the European Court on Human Rights. “You saw what happened in there,” Mikhailova said. “It was a horror, like always.”

Navalny’s team called for an urgent protest at Moscow’s Manezh Square by the Kremlin. As of 9.30pm, hundreds of riot police had begun detaining Navalny supporters.

Putin putining.

In a fiery speech from a Moscow city courtroom decorated with portraits of Cicero and Montesquieu ahead of the sentencing, Navalny had accused Putin of ordering his assassination with the poison novichok and said that the Russian leader’s “only method is killing people”.

The US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said Washington was “deeply concerned” and reiterated calls for Navalny’s unconditional and immediate release, saying it would coordinate with allies to hold Russia accountable.

At least our days of slobbering all over Putin are in the past.

Originally a comment by Vila Restal on The war on cis women.

As someone who works in the VAWG sector it’s interesting to note that the helpline number given at the end of the article is for Galop. Ostensibly for LBGT survivors, it’s focus is on male victims, and they’ve been given a lot of support and training by the women’s organisations.

You see women working in VAWG jobs do recognise that men can be victims – for example young gay men involved in the chemsex scene are vulnerable to abuse while under the influence of drugs and are reluctant to approach the police because of the illicit nature of the drugs involved. While male victims can’t be accommodated within the women’s sector, women have given freely of their time and expertise to help build up organisations supporting men.

And how has the male sector repaid those women? Every damn conference or training that the men’s sector are invited to ends up dominated by the Galop staff whose first and just about only contribution is ‘what about the trans women?’ and ‘why won’t you help trans women in the VAWG sector as TWAW?’ Every time they have a trans victim they make a point of trying to approach women’s organisations for assistance. Despite the fact that they have the expertise to deal with the trans woman – and often more financial support – they try and foist them on the women’s sector, or try and use the women’s sector for ancillary support such as legal advice. I believe it’s known as ‘forced teaming’ but there’s also gleeful pleasure in trying to make the Terfs deal with a traumatised TiM, and surrender their boundaries.

The willingness or otherwise of the organisation to take up a TiM’s case is then noted and the information fed back to the men’s rights / trans lobby so they know who to target – that would be Nia, Southall Black Sisters and the Centre for Women’s Justice, as singled out in the article.

I’d bet a week’s wages that a few of those anonymous women workers in the article are actually the men at Galop.

Sarah Ditum on the “be kind” bullshit:

Setting yourself up as an opponent of kindness would be extravagantly poor taste, especially now the hashtag #bekind is irrevocably associated with suicide prevention. This is unfortunate for me, because I am not a kind person; or at least, I don’t think of kindness as the quality I would like to be defined by or measured against in public life. I’m a critic, which makes it my job to say critical things.

That’s a crucial distinction. I make some effort not to be actively unkind, which I haven’t always been brilliant at, but like Sarah I don’t want that to be the thing that jumps out at you. (Fortunately it never will be.)

I’m a critic of sorts too, a self-appointed critic, and what I exercise my critic energy on is pretty much everything. Name something and I will critic it for you!

What kind of person do we want to hang out with? Someone who is self-consciously “kind” every minute, so that you start to feel like an invalid or a child? Or someone who has interesting shit to say?

I stacked the deck pretty well. That’s my incomplete kindness.

I think that paying attention to things — how they work, what they do, how people respond to them — is the highest sort of respect, even if sometimes you end up saying that the thing is flawed.

That sentence is why I wanted to do this post. Yes. Paying attention.

Kindness is more like basic equipment than a virtue. Sure you don’t want to be around people who needle you all the time, but you don’t want them damply holding your hand, either. Everybody paying attention is much better.