The ZAS conference is on Oppressive Speech, Societies & Norms. “Silencing, Speaking up & Free Speech” is one of the themes. The irony of organizing such a conference and then booting one of the speakers is conspicuous.

It reads to me as if it fits the theme of the workshop (which isn’t “scientific” in the first place – “oppressive” is not a scientific concept) perfectly.

ZAS elaborates on the theme:

Speech can be used to change societies in bad ways. It supports institutional oppression, establishes new oppressive norms, silences opponents, spreads disinformation and propagates feelings of hate. Online communities magnify the effects of individual speech acts. This workshop series, comprising five meetings, will dive into five different aspects of oppressive speech. We’ll look at social norms and institutions, silencing and free speech, social meaning, norm-shifting and disinformation. We’ll bring several tools and perspectives from linguistics, social modelling, and philosophy, including game theory, semantics/pragmatics and speech act theory. We’ll seek answers to how oppressive speech works and how to defend against it.

Unless we change our minds when we read the abstract, in which case all bets are off.

One for the “you couldn’t make it up” file.

The series is about oppressive speech, so they…oppress one of the speakers they invited to speak about oppressive speech.

The Parliament item happened yesterday. One day that, next day this. Life is funny.

ZAS Berlin “explained.”

Stinking coward rats.

Last week a Democratic state senator in Georgia, Elena Parent, went to a hearing organized by Republicans to tell lies about the election.

Trump attorneys, led by Rudy Giuliani, presented the hearing with a raft of conspiracy theories and baseless claims that tens of thousands of dead people and other ineligible individuals had voted.

The Republicans hadn’t warned Parent that the event would be attended by Giuliani, Trump’s henchman in his mission to undermine American democracy until this week when the former New York mayor came down with Covid-19. So she had no idea that a big crowd of far-right fanatics and the media outlets that feed them lies and falsehoods would also be in the chamber.

So she didn’t take steps to protect herself.

The bombardment began immediately. “The attacks came from all corners and on all platforms,” Parent told the Guardian. “They were in chat-boards, by email, in comments on my Facebook and Instagram pages, on the phone. They ran the gamut from basic insults to ‘We are watching you, you have kids, we are coming to your house.’”

In eight years as an elected politician in Georgia, she had never experienced anything like it. “It was surreal. I’m not someone who will ever be bullied or intimidated into being silent, but never have I had an issue on this scale.”

The bile spread far and wide. An elected official in Missouri accused her on Facebook of an act of treason “punishable by death”.

The worst part wasn’t the threats of sexual violence against her, or even the death threats; it was that her home address was plastered all over the internet. As a result, state police have stepped up patrols outside her home.

This is what Trump has done to us. It wasn’t all peaches and brandy before, but this is worse.

Parent has no doubt about the source of the overwhelming assault she has endured. “We have a president who does not care about American institutions or democracy. He has created a cult-like following and is exposing people like me across the country to danger because of his unfounded rhetoric on the election.”

What she fears most is that “cult-like” quality of Trump supporters. “That makes the entire experience more disturbing because you know there is no logic or sense of reality that will dissuade or deter these folks.”

If you marinate in Fox News, your brain gradually turns to soup.

Annals of Corruption:

Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., sold his Washington, D.C., home last year to a brokerage industry official whose organization is under the purview of a committee Perdue sits on. The deal was made off market, without the home being listed for sale publicly.

Though an appraisal provided to ProPublica by the buyer found that Perdue sold for slightly under market value, four local real estate experts disagreed, telling ProPublica that the almost $1.8 million sale price Perdue garnered seemed high. Their estimates of the premium ranged from a few thousand dollars to as much as about $140,000. A fifth expert said the price was squarely fair market value.

You have to ask yourself, why would Perdue sell the house to an official of an industry Perdue has governmental power over for under market value?

Real estate “market value” is tricky, as far as I understand it, because it’s about intangibles like what people are willing to pay and what other houses in the area might sell for (or might not) and whether the neighborhood is going up or down and yadda yadda – there’s a lot of guesswork and prediction and self-fulfilling prophecy.

So! There’s an easy solution for this quandary – don’t do an insider deal with someone you have government power over.

“Determining fair market value is always a gray area, unless the sales are done in a competitive open market,” said Craig Holman with the watchdog group Public Citizen. “Since the purchase and sale of this property by Sen. Perdue was not done on the open market, it raises serious suspicions as to whether the sale was in fact at fair market value.”

And questions about why it wasn’t done on the open market in the first place.

Perdue has faced multiple allegations that he has mixed his private financial interests with his official work. The most prolific stock trader in the Senate, he bought and sold shares in companies that the committees he sits on have jurisdiction over. Some of his trades came at fortunate times. Earlier this year, the Justice Department investigated him and other lawmakers for possible insider trading. Perdue denied the allegations. Prosecutors ultimately decided not to bring charges against him.

Now let’s talk about the curb appeal.

It turns out the warrant was fraudulent. Oops.

Earlier this week, state police in Florida conducted an armed raid of COVID data scientist Rebekah Jones’ home, seizing her electronic devices and pointing guns at her kids, in retaliation for the fact that she blew the whistle on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ COVID coverup.

DeSantis says he didn’t know about the raid. Everyone else says ha.

The state claimed that the raid was justified because Jones was suspected of hacking into an internal network to send a message to state employees about COVID. But now it turns out the message was simply sent to an email address that it had made publicly available. This means the warrant was fraudulently obtained, which in turn means a whole lot of people are in trouble.

This means one or more people in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lied to a judge in order to obtain a warrant. It means police were sent to carry out a fraudulently obtained warrant. It means Rebekah Jones has the mother of all civil suits, if she wants it. And it means the people who fraudulently obtained the warrant are in danger of going to prison.

Other than that…

The National Organization for Women doesn’t know what a woman is.

Transphobia is a feminist issue. Equal means equal. That includes equality for all women, not just a certain type of woman.Read more about #LGBTQIARights and our other core issues at now.org/issues

No, transphobia is not a feminist issue. Misogyny is a feminist issue, but transphobia is not. Yes, equal means equal, but feminism is still about equality for women and girls, not women and girls plus men and boys who say they are women and girls. Women are allowed to have our own campaign groups just as other people are. We don’t have to “share” any more than other groups do. We don’t have to change the subject to other people, because we get to talk about our own rights and struggles and needs, even though we’re women.

No and no. None of that is true.

There are two thousand comments on that post. They have a new one today, saying how terrible the dissenting comments on the December 4 post are.

Why did they express solidarity and support for their friends in the LGBTQIA+ community, in particular their transgender friends? Why not in particular their lesbian friends? Why does the National Organization for WOMEN pick out transgender people instead of women for their particular solidarity and support? Why are they changing the subject when they still call themselves the National Organization for WOMEN? Why do they not recoil from the very idea of doing this “think of everyone but yourselves” routine that women always get and men never do?

It’s enraging.

Yeah yeah. It’s the CITIES that are the problem. Let’s all secede to a farm and make America great again.

Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show Wednesday that the U.S. may be “trending toward secession.”

Or just trending away from Trump. One of those.

As Limbaugh talked about liberal cities like New York and San Francisco, he took up a question of whether “we can win the culture.”

By leaving cities like New York and San Francisco? No, because a lot of the culture comes from there. What you would win wouldn’t be the culture, it would be some desiccated fragment of it.

Not that everyone has to live there, obviously, but if you secede from all things liberal, educated, thoughtful, science-supporting, justice-seeking, cosmopolitan, secular, progressive…well what will you have left? Rush Limbaugh and Trump.

“I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?” Limbaugh asked.

Other than bodies, needs, thoughts, feelings, jobs, clothes, appetites, hopes, ideas, plans…?

The people who live in New York are not aliens and neither are the people who live in Wichita. We all have a lot in common. Get a grip.

In the segment, first flagged by Media Matters, he said, “A lot of bloggers have written extensively about how distant and separated and how much more separated our culture is becoming politically and that it can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way.”

That’s rich coming from a guy whose whole career has been hyping up this so-called separation. He’s one of the main creators of it, and this nonsense is just more of the same.

No let’s normalize calling misogynists “misogynists.”

The guy has 321 thousand followers.

The tweet has 16 thousand likes.

Twitter kicks women off Twitter for being critical of gender dogma, but not men for saying let’s call feminist women “cunts.” (He didn’t say feminist women but we know damn well that’s what he meant. He didn’t mean men.)

A son’s obituary:

Dr. Marvin James Farr, 81, of Scott City, Kansas, passed away Dec. 1, 2020, in isolation at Park Lane Nursing Home. He was preceded in death by more than 260,000 Americans infected with covid-19. He died in a room not his own, being cared for by people dressed in confusing and frightening ways. He died with covid-19, and his final days were harder, scarier and lonelier than necessary. He was not surrounded by friends and family.

Marvin was born May 23, 1939 to Jim and Dorothy Farr of Modoc, Kan. He was born into an America recovering from the Great Depression and about to face World War 2, times of loss and sacrifice difficult for most of us to imagine. Americans would be asked to ration essential supplies and send their children around the world to fight and die in wars of unfathomable destruction. He died in a world where many of his fellow Americans refuse to wear a piece of cloth on their face to protect one another.

Marvin was a farmer and a veterinarian. He graduated from Kansas State University in 1968. His careers filled his life with an understanding of the science of life: how to nurture it, how to sustain it, and the myriad ways that life can go wrong. As a young man he debated between studying mortuary or veterinary science. He chose life over death. The science that guided his professional life has been disparaged and abandoned by so many of the same people who depended on his knowledge to care for their animals and to raise their food.

Marvin was a religious man. He was a lay reader at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. He saw no conflict between the science of his professional life and the belief of his personal life, each enriched the other. From religion, he especially drew on lessons of forgiveness and care. Perhaps the most important comes from the Lord’s Prayer:

and forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us;

He would look after those who had harmed him the deepest, a sentiment echoed by the healthcare workers struggling to do their jobs as their own communities turn against them or make their jobs harder.

This has received a lot of press and social media attention. Courtney Farr (the son who wrote the obituary) has public posts on the subject on Facebook – you don’t have to be on Facebook to read them.

H/t Rob

Pakistan, Punjab – whatever, dude.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday seemed to confuse two separate issues when he reiterated the UK government’s stance that any dispute between India and Pakistan was for the two countries to settle bilaterally

Would have been an unremarkable thing to say, if that had been the question.

British Sikh Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, who has been leading a drive to keep the protests by the Indian farmers against the government’s agricultural reforms in the news in Britain, repeated one of his previous Twitter statements on the issue in the House of Commons during the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) session.

“Many constituents, especially those emanating from Punjab and other parts of India, and I were horrified to see footage of water cannons, teargas and brute force being used against peacefully protesting farmers. However, it was heart-warming to see those very farmers feeding those forces who had been ordered to beat or suppress them.What indomitable spirit and it takes a special kind of people to do that,” the Opposition lawmaker said.

“So, will the Prime Minister (Johnson) convey to the Indian Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) our heartfelt anxieties, our hopes for a speedy resolution to the current deadlock and does he agree that everyone has a fundamental right to peaceful protest,” he questioned Johnson.

So Johnson…talked about something else entirely.

“Our view is that of course we have serious concerns about what is happening between India and Pakistan but these are pre-eminently matters for those two governments to settle and I know that he appreciates that point,”said Johnson.

Dhesi, who looked visibly perplexed, was quick to take to social media once again as he posted the exchange on Twitter, adding: “But it might help if our PM actually knew what he was talking about!” The UK government has so far refused to be drawn into the ongoing protests in India, with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) saying the matter of handling protests was an internal one.

Given Britain’s history in that part of the world, and substantial population with roots in that part of the world, one would expect PMs to keep up with news there.

Giuliani continues to insist that refusing to wear a mask is a wise move.

Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer and a former mayor of New York City, was admitted to a Washington, D.C., hospital on Sunday, after traveling across the country in his futile attempt to overturn the election results. Giuliani did not wear a mask during meetings last week in Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia, exposing lawmakers and others to the virus.

During an interview with New York radio station 77 WABC, the hosts asked Giuliani if his views on the virus have changed, now that he is sick and in the hospital. They mentioned former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who contracted the virus after attending a super-spreader event at the White House; Christie later said it was “wrong” to be there without a mask.

“No,” Giuliani responded. “I have exactly the same view. You know, I’ve also been through cancer, a couple of other things — very serious, very serious, emergency knee operation. Things happen in life, and you have to go with them. You can’t overreact to them. Otherwise, you let the fear of illness drive your entire life.” Regarding face coverings, which provide protection to the wearer and those around them, Giuliani said he thinks “you can overdo the masks.”

In short, he doesn’t give a flying fuck about all the people he may have infected. Nice guy.

Giuliani revealed that he has received two of the same medications Trump took during his hospitalization for COVID-19: remdesivir and dexamethasone. One of the radio hosts told Giuliani the drugs are “not something that the normal American is going to be able to get, because it’s quite expensive.” Giuliani deflected, saying he “didn’t know that. I mean, they give it to us here at the hospital.”

Hello??? Hospitals are full? People who have COVID can’t get treatment because the hospitals are full? They’re told to stay home unless/until they’re having severe breathing difficulty, and they can’t always get in even then? We can’t just bounce up to the nearest hospital the instant we notice symptoms and get rushed into the Deluxe COVID Ward Just For Us? Because there isn’t one?

It’s not possible that Giuliani doesn’t know that. Not possible. For fuck’s sake New York was COVID central for weeks last spring, there were mass graves because cemeteries couldn’t handle all the dead.

He said his advice to people is “get early treatment,” falsely claiming that “the earlier you get treated for this, No. 1, you totally eliminate the chance of dying.”

WE CAN’T GET EARLY TREATMENT. He might as well advise people to give hospitals $1 billion to let us in early.

This week’s Jesus and Mo:

snerk

J and M on Patreon

Originally a comment by Timothy Harris on Call me them.

I feel as though the act of misgendering erases the person I have worked so long and hard to become.

How can you ‘become’ in this way? I am a bit long in the tooth now, but even in my mis-spent youth I should not have been able even to begin to think in these terms. All human beings are astonishingly complex, nobody really knows who, intrinsically, they are because your self is not something that exists in some pristine and well-locked little box inside you, and that might be changed by some effort of the will (who changes who?), but is in a state of constant flux & creation through your relationships with others, with society, and with the wider world, with things that are beyond your control.

I find in this sort of statement the long and unacknowledged reach of Christianity, with its insistence on willed belief, and the whole Western insistence on achieving things through force of ‘will’, a mostly meaningless concept whose existence and nature are assumed and never examined. What these people work ‘so hard and long to become’ is in fact a caricature, not a person.

SCOTUS says nah.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an effort to overturn the results of the presidential election in Pennsylvania, signaling the high court would not go along with President Trump’s unprecedented efforts to win another term despite a decisive defeat in the popular vote and Electoral College.

The lawsuit was brought by Republican Rep. Mike Kelly, who argued a 2019 state law authorizing universal mail-in voting is unconstitutional and that all ballots cast by mail in the general election in Pennsylvania should be thrown out.

But the law wasn’t unconstitutional until Trump lost.

Kelly, along with several others, filed the lawsuit on Nov. 21 and requested Pennsylvania either reject the more than 2.5 million ballots cast by mail or allow state lawmakers to select presidential electors. Republicans control Pennsylvania’s Legislature.

Yeah see November 21 is a little late, because it kind of suggests that it’s not the ballots cast by mail that are the problem, but the fact that Trump lost on November 3.

The state Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the lawsuit on Nov. 28, saying the GOP had waited too long to challenge the law. “Unsatisfied with the results of that wager, they would now flip over the table, scattering to the shadows the votes of millions of Pennsylvanians,” Justice David Wecht wrote. “It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters.”

You’re not allowed to flip over the table because you lost.

Oh by the way the law authorizing universal mail-in voting?

The law was passed in 2019 with widespread support from Pennsylvania Republicans, who control both chambers of the state’s Legislature.

I think that was Trump’s last hope. The ship has sailed.

Gilead? What’s that got to do with anything?

More appropriation, that’s what it’s got to do with. The Handmaid’s Tale is about a theocratic enslavement of women. It’s not about trans people or the state of being trans. There can be books about women. They don’t all have to be about men who say they feel like women.

Also, are trans parents people who don’t have any children but say they feel like parents?

I’ve been stalling on this one because I know it’s going to annoy me so intensely. Via guest, MK Fain’s exchange with Kaitlyn Tiffany while the latter was working on her “Radical Feminist Women Are Evil” piece for the Atlantic.

First of all, KT is deceptively polite for someone who’s going to talk the lying shit about Fain that she did talk. That’s what journalists do, but given the dishonesty and venom of KT’s article I think it’s unethical.

But what really gets up my nose is her insistence on how hateful the radical feminists are, given the vast quantity of revolting obscene misogynist garbage directed at gender critical women (and at opinionated women in general). I’ve never seen feminists say anything even close to the familiar “I hope your disgusting dried-up cunt bursts into flames you bitch cunt hag” singalong aimed at JK Rowling and the rest of us. I’m betting KT hasn’t either, since she didn’t mention having done so when MK asked.

For example:

K.Tiffany to M.K.Fain:

– I know we talked about this a little bit already, but how do you respond to Reddit banning r/GenderCritical for hate speech?

M.K.Fain to K.Tiffany:

3. I think Reddit banning r/GenderCritical for hate speech demonstrates that male-run, centralized, and proprietary platforms can not be trusted to have women’s best interest at heart, and that we must create our own solutions. It is also a symptom of wider misogyny in our society that women speaking up for their sex-based rights, the very rights our feminist foremothers fought for, is considered in any way “hateful”. This is made even more clear when compared to content that is allowed on Reddit, such as violent pornography.

Whoosh, went right past the recipient. She still portrays feminists as hateful and trans women as their victims.

Tiffany:

— I just want to dig in a little bit more on the last question from my previous email. Speaking to a trans scholar on the topic, she pointed out that trans-exclusionary feminism is also feminism that wants to eliminate trans women by stopping surgeries and therapies and recognition of their identity, etc. I understand that you don’t consider this hateful, but was hoping you might be able to explain that a little bit more. I don’t want to mischaracterize your beliefs. 

It’s not “elimination” to fail to agree that a man is a woman if he says so. The man is still there. The man is still at liberty to think of himself as a woman. The man has no right to try to compel women to endorse his conception of himself, especially when it’s a personal fantasy as opposed to reality.

Tiffany:

In my own recent experiences on Ovarit, I’ve seen quite a bit of what I would consider hate speech.

Interesting. Anything at all close to this sort of thing?

So that’s how that went.

This was supposed to be a vaccine summit.

Still lying about it and still constantly changing the subject to it.

More on that Florida police raid yesterday:

Florida law enforcement agents searched the home of former state data scientist Rebekah Jones on Monday, entering her house with weapons drawn as they carried out a warrant as part of an investigation into an unauthorized message that was sent on a state communications system. …

The Florida Department of Health is the agency that fired Jones in May, after she helped create the state’s COVID-19 dashboard.

Jones has said she lost her job after she refused requests to manipulate data to suggest Florida was ready to ease coronavirus restrictions. A spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at the time that she “exhibited a repeated course of insubordination during her time with the department.”

Fun fact: insubordination is defined as refusing to obey reasonable and lawful orders – not just any old orders. If her bosses told her to manipulate data that’s not reasonable or lawful.

The search warrant was authorized as investigators tried to learn who sent a chat message to a planning group on an emergency alert platform, urging people to speak out publicly about Florida’s coronavirus strategies.

Still not seeing why the weapons were drawn.

Jones posted a short video of the raid online Tuesday, showing several agents entering her home, carrying pistols and at least one rifle. In the footage, Jones tells them that her husband and two children are in the house.

…

As the agents enter, one points their weapon upstairs. Jones says the agents pointed a gun at her and at her children.

It’s not clear from the video whether agents pointed a gun at Jones’ family members. The top of stairs are not in view.

But if you’re pointing the gun at the top of the stairs…even if the children are not yet in the line of fire they could be at any second. It’s a fairly terrifying sight.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Rick Swearingen denies Jones’ assertion, issuing a statement about the raid that states, “At no time were weapons pointed at anyone in the home.”

They were just pointed at the top of the stairs where the remaining people in the home had just been ordered to come downstairs.

Jones says the raid and the seizure of her computer and other devices won’t stop her work in tracking and reporting COVID-19 data. And she urged state officials to focus on easing the pandemic’s horrible effects on Florida’s citizens.

“DeSantis needs to worry less about what I’m writing about, and more about the people who are sick and dying in his state,” Jones told CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “And doing this to me will not stop me from reporting the data.”