How interesting, another example of “No reasonable person would believe this/don’t take what we say seriously” from people committing public crimes against the public.
A senior Saudi official issued what was perceived to be a death threat against the independent United Nations investigator, Agnès Callamard, after her investigation into the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
In an interview with the Guardian, the outgoing special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings said that a UN colleague alerted her in January 2020 that a senior Saudi official had twice threatened in a meeting with other senior UN officials in Geneva that month to have Callamard “taken care of” if she was not reined in by the UN.
…
The Guardian independently corroborated Callamard’s account of the January 2020 episode.
The alleged threats were made, she said, at a “high-level” meeting between Geneva-based Saudi diplomats, visiting Saudi officials and UN officials in Geneva. During the exchange, Callamard was told, they criticised her work on the Khashoggi murder, registering their anger about her investigation and her conclusions. The Saudi officials also raised baseless allegations that she had received money from Qatar – a frequent refrain against critics of the Saudi government.
Callamard said one of the visiting senior Saudi officials is then alleged to have said that he had received phone calls from individuals who were prepared to “take care of her”.
When UN officials expressed alarm, other Saudis who were present sought to reassure them that the comment ought not to be taken seriously. The Saudi group then left the room but, Callamard was told, the visiting senior Saudi official stayed behind, and repeated the alleged threat to the remaining UN officials in the room.
But don’t take it seriously.
Ah so that’s how they’re going to play it – the “nobody could be stupid enough to believe the lies we told” defense. Bold move.
A key member of the legal team that sought to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump is defending herself against a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit by arguing that “no reasonable person” could have mistaken her wild claims about election fraud last November as statements of fact.
What were they statements of then? Not fact but…? Fill in the blank [______].
In a motion to dismiss a complaint by the large US-based voting machine company Dominion, lawyers for Sidney Powell argued that elaborate conspiracies she laid out on television and radio last November while simultaneously suing to overturn election results in four states constituted legally protected first amendment speech.
“No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” argued lawyers for Powell, a former federal prosecutor from Texas who caught Trump’s attention through her involvement in the defense of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Ok, so they were not truly statements of fact, so they were lies. She’s telling us she tried to help Trump steal the election by telling lies about the voting machines.
But wait, the audience murmurs, they could be mistakes rather than lies. Mere honest mistakes; anyone can make a mistake; mistakes aren’t lies.
True enough, but, there are times and situations and contexts where people are expected to take very good care not to make mistakes of that kind, and indeed there are situations where people have no right to make mistakes of that kind. The situation in which Sidney Powell said these things that no reasonable person would consider true was very much that kind of situation – it’s hard to think of a situation that would be more so. She said the things in order to overturn an election. The stakes don’t get a whole lot higher than that.
Also, if no reasonable person would believe the claims, then Sidney Powell must have not believed them herself. She’s not claiming to be a not-reasonable person, I assume? Could be wrong, but that’s my guess, what with being a lawyer and all. If they’re beyond belief to reasonable people, then they were beyond belief to her, so they weren’t mistakes, they were lies. Lies in pursuit of stealing an election.
Powell falsely stated on television and in legal briefs that Dominion machines ran on technology that could switch votes away from Trump, technology she said had been invented in Venezuela to help steal elections for the late Hugo Chávez.
Knowing, we’re now told, that she was lying. How interesting.
Interesting.
The lesbian share is tiny now in both charts.
2015 is the year I gave up trying to be quiet.
Seth Abramson says enough with the low-rank insurrectionists, what about the people with real power?
Thus far, over 320 Trumpists have been arrested for their actions on January 6, 2021, and the DOJ says that more than 100 additional arrests are coming. But what many of us are most anxiously awaiting is not more arrests of lower-middle-class and middle-class Donald Trump supporters—though the massive video archive published by ProPublica confirms that many of these richly deserve indictment and incarceration—but rather the as-yet unaccountable elites who orchestrated the events of January 6.
For instance, we’ve yet to see what sort of accountability, legal or professional, awaits politicians like Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), all of whom helped strategize and/or incite the events of January 6.
He names more people who should be answering questions, including Roger Stone and Alex Jones. (Roger Stone has a pardon, but maybe that doesn’t mean he can’t be interviewed? I should know, but I don’t.)
And of course America still waits eagerly for the first signs of justice for the Trumps themselves, along with their closest allies and advisers, a list of insurrection-adjacent figures that includes Trump himself, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Ivanka Trump, Trump Jr. girlfriend and Trump adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle, Katrina Pierson, Corey Lewandowski, Peter Navarro, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Lindell, Sidney Powell, and Michael Flynn. We know, by and large, what these men and women did on and before January 6; what we don’t know is why the FBI has apparently yet to speak with any of them or seize and search their electronic devices. We don’t know why we are told to cheer the arrests of Trumpist peons even as the powerful, wealthy, and/or influential people who guided their conduct are ignored by federal law enforcement.
I bet we can have a pretty good guess though.
It’s always always always about…not-you-but-me. Always about yes yes you have needs too, of course I get that, but
me me me me me me me me
Man tells woman “Yeah sad about your miscarriage but you still have to let me join you in the toilets.”
GLAAD has a list of the damned, which it laughably calls its “Accountability Project.”
The GLAAD Accountability Project catalogs anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and discriminatory actions of politicians, commentators, organization heads, religious leaders, and legal figures who have used their platforms, influence and power to spread misinformation and harm LGBTQ people.
The Project reveals these individuals’ own words and actions, to help all Americans evaluate whether to vote for them, or quote them, or support their point of view. As journalists, newsrooms and platforms write stories or book guests for interviews and segments, they can check the record, add context to stories, or help decide whether a person with this history should continue to be given unchallenged air time or ink. See the complete list of profiles in the dropdown menu to the right.
The complete list is looooooong.
Let’s see some examples. JK Rowling for instance; part of item 3 of the indictment:
—Doubled down on remarks and support for anti-trans researchers, during Pride month 2020 and as the world endured the historic pandemic, and the U.S. a national reckoning on racial injustice and police violence, in lengthy essay of inaccuracies about transgender people and identity, claiming that as “an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity” she has “deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.”
It’s not even literate, let alone thoughtful or reasonable. Are they letting the kids do all the writing?
On a less inflammatory subject – drone flies all but into an erupting volcano.
The ACLU yet again.
But at least some of that legislation, and perhaps all, is not “anti-trans” or criminalization, it’s just codification of the formerly well understood principle that boys can’t play on girls’ athletic teams.
The problem is built in: the special favors being demanded by trans “activists” are so damaging to female people that it wouldn’t work to state them clearly, so the ACLU has to screen them with layer upon layer of inaccurate description. It’s a pretty disgusting practice for what used to be a respected civil rights organization.
The link takes us to an appeal from last month full of the usual obfuscation:
Transgender athletes want to participate in school sports for the same reason as anybody else: to find a sense of belonging and social engagement, to be a part of a team, and to challenge themselves.
And for the potential monetary reward via a scholarship. It’s extremely dishonest for the ACLU to conceal that part. The ACLU naturally doesn’t want to come right out and say it’s campaigning for boys to be able to “win” scholarships intended for girls – but it does want to do exactly that.
But states and schools across the country are trying to exclude trans people from enjoying the benefits of sports on equal terms with their cisgender peers. Not only do these proposed laws discriminate against trans youth in ways that compromise their health, social and emotional development, and safety, they also raise a host of privacy concerns.
Look at how evasive that is. People who haven’t been following the issue are going to think this is about banning trans people from sport altogether, but of course it’s nothing of the kind.
Is there such a thing as Civil Liars?
Next weekend, a free screening of
wait for it
The Transvagina Diaries.
Yay! Nothing I want more than to watch a movie about homemade vaginas.
Isn’t that sweet, it’s “presented for National Women’s History Month – the story of men with fake vaginas. What’s that got to do with Women’s History Month? Well, not a god damn thing, but that’s the bliss of it. There is nothing more affirming than taking something meant for women and handing it over to men instead.
But it’s the holy holiday of Spring Break. You can’t expect people to obey rules about not spreading a lethal disease during Spring Break. That would be outright fascism, and also infallible proof of a Personality Disorder.
A state of emergency has been declared in the US city of Miami Beach over concerns large crowds gathering for spring break pose a coronavirus risk.
…
Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said thousands of tourists had brought “chaos and disorder” to the city.
“It feels like a rock concert, wall-to-wall people over blocks and blocks,” Mr Gelber told CNN. “If you’re coming here to go crazy, go somewhere else.”
No because this is the beach. It’s a human right to go to the beach for Spring Break.
On Sunday, the Miami Beach city commission voted to extend the curfew and other measures for up to three more weeks.
At an emergency meeting, Mayor Gelber told the commission South Beach had become “a tinder over the last couple of weeks”.
He said tourists had flooded into the city since Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called the state an “oasis of freedom” from coronavirus restrictions late last month.
Freedom freedom freedom, and beach. America. Big Macs. Freedom freedom.
This kind of thing is why the trans ideology is convincing to so many.
As a fashion-obsessed teenager, I dreamed of working for Vogue. What girl didn’t?
The girl who doesn’t give a shit about fashion and has other things to dream of, that’s what girl didn’t. My guess is there are more than two or three of them. Fashion really isn’t so enthralling that half the population dreams of spending her working life thinking about it.
This was in the 2000s, and smartphones weren’t everywhere yet, so we’d leaf through the latest copy hungrily at the back of the class. I loved the pictures, the clothes, even the adverts. But most of all I loved the masthead and the index. Who were these glamorous humans with lovely-sounding names and exotic job titles?
Definitely. I find mastheads so fascinating I just stop there.
Vogue went man-in-charge in the 1960s.
In a reshuffling of power, the art director, Alexander Liberman, was apparently offered the editorship of American Vogue. To this he replied: “I am a man. I have no intention of becoming that involved with fashion.” So instead they created the title of editorial director, which he took with gusto. It meant a woman got to be editor-in-chief but he controlled her.
During the 1980s, editor-in-chief Grace Mirabella was going bananas under this unusual arrangement. For one, Liberman was a fan of Penthouse and Playboy, and kept trying to insert overly sexual content into Vogue, much to Mirabella’s disgust. She also had no agency to choose her own staff, since Liberman decided who was hired or fired. This meant she could lose an invaluable ally at the drop of a hat, or be forced to work with someone who didn’t fit on her team.
She was never included in conversations on the direction of the magazine. When she wanted to run a story on breast cancer, Liberman said: “Vogue readers are more interested in fashion than breast cancer.” When she wanted to cover the pro-choice movement, Liberman said: “Nobody cares.” When she wanted to write about women entering the job market, he said: “Women are cheap labour and always will be.”
And nobody cares.
Catherine Bennett isn’t in the mood to be told to calm down.
Less than a day separated the arrest of a serving Metropolitan police officer on suspicion of Sarah Everard’s murder from the first suggestions that women calm down and put it in perspective…
A professor of criminology, Marian FitzGerald, thought it important to tell other women – twice – on the BBC, not to get “hysterical”. She was being interviewed by a senior man in an organisation which has evidently shared her reservations about women’s fallibility – were they worthy, even, of being paid the same as men? – and it duly went unchallenged.
The message, that women’s difficulties with the status quo can be just as troublesome as male offending behaviour, was seemingly reinforced by the BBC’s favourite troll, the ubiquitous ex-judge Jonathan Sumption. “Most profound cultural problems like this are not easily amenable to government action or legislation,” he claimed, on Any Questions? “It’s going to be a gradual process, I’m sorry but we’ve got to be realistic about this.” It was only to be expected: Sumption had previously levelled at female lawyers the same imputation of naivety. “It takes time. You’ve got to be patient.” Via such insights do the retired male beneficiaries of overwhelmingly unequal professions recommend themselves to Radio 4 producers.
Yes but you know how it is – women are just so annoying with our shrill demands and strident claims and hysterical reactions.
Just last week an off-duty police officer, Oliver Banfield, remained at liberty after his conviction for attacking a lone woman at night. He stays in his post. Shortly before, Javed Miah, who sexually assaulted a woman at night, running away when she used the SOS function on her phone, avoided jail because he was the “sole earner”. In February a chef who admitted kissing and touching a resisting colleague somehow convinced a magistrate that it was his Turkish culture. Men with an interest in terrorising vulnerable women may have been further reassured by the suspended sentence handed, at Kingston crown court last year, to an Uber driver who harassed and exposed himself for 20 minutes to a woman in his cab, where she was avoiding unsafe streets. Not that the recent five-year sentence for a man who murdered his wife, pleading lockdown distress, left much room for doubt about values still prevailing in parts of what is claimed – by men – to be an infinitely more enlightened system. Alleged equalities progress did not, for instance, prevent a professional tribunal deciding, in the case of a barrister turned upskirter, that it is possible to be both a member of the bar and a registered sex offender.
Yes but what is all that compared to an angry woman’s voice?
Sweet.
Updating to add James Dreyfus’s parody.
Fair Play for Women explains to the bosses what Stonewall really is:
Dear leaders of public sector organisations,
You think you are doing the right thing, appointing so-called LGBT representatives and inviting Stonewall, Gendered Intelligence and the like to write policy for you. It’s time to open your eyes. Your own people are doing the work of transactivists and you’ll be the one left carrying the can.
Because the problem is L and G and B are nowhere and it’s all about the T.
Stonewall is considered wrongly an expert rather than a lobby group with its own priorities and objectives
It’s an easy mistake to make. You need a transgender policy so you task your transgender equality manager to write one and they go to the transgender groups for expert advice. Job done.
Here’s England Rugby proudly stating how its transgender inclusion policy was developed in partnership with Stonewall – as if that’s some kind of quality assurance mark. It’s not. You’ve been hoodwinked by a rather clever lobby group into believing it’s ok to expose yourself to the risk of women getting their necks snapped in a scrum with a male opponent.
Not to mention exposing women to that risk.
No, see, this is one reason I won’t just close my eyes and “be kind.”
No. “Birth sex” and “actual sex” are not opposite, they’re the same thing, which can most easily be named with simply “sex.” Your sex is your sex is your sex. You can’t change it, any more than you can change your species. Some things you can change, some you can’t. Deal with it.
It’s not “ideology” to refuse to pretend that sex is optional and switchable. What’s ideology is to make up a whole new pretend-science in which sex is as optional and switchable as what shirt you put on.
It’s pretty rich for the bossy bratty ideologues of the trans religion to accuse the rest of us as “enforcing” anything – we don’t enforce the fact that sex is not optional, it’s just reality that does that.
Oh and also? Trans women shouldn’t be using women’s services, because trans women are not women.
Some people lie for Jesus, other people lie for boys can be girls.
No, that’s not what we’re talking about. It’s not “punishing” boys to say they can’t play on the girls’ teams, any more than it’s “punishing” boys to say they can’t punch girls in the face. They still have the outlets and joys available to their peers – including playing mixed-sex sports when that’s available.
The father on the Chris Hayes segment must have been raving, because no one is talking about not letting trans children live.
Liar.
A long thread by Steve Moses on joining the Green Party in 2009, and feeling confident that the Greens were on the right side of issues involving women and “the gay community” and that he could focus on issues he knew more about…until…
Aaaaaand…he can’t do it.
Rebecca Solnit on the habit of blaming women for “tempting” men:
The alleged murderer of eight people, six of whom were Asian American women, reportedly said that he was trying to “eliminate temptation”. It’s as if he thought others were responsible for his inner life, as though the horrific act of taking others’ lives rather than learning some form of self-control was appropriate. This aspect of a crime that was also horrifically racist reflects a culture in which men and the society at large blame women for men’s behavior and the things men do to women.
See, it’s superficial to think men are responsible for the things they do to women. You have to dig below the surface to discover that it’s women who lure men into rape or punching or murder.
Sometimes men are written out of the story altogether. Since the pandemic began there have been torrents of stories about how women’s careers have been crushed or they have left their jobs altogether because they’re doing the lioness’s share of domestic labor , especially child-rearing, in heterosexual households. In February of this year, NPR opened a story with the assertion that this work has “landed on the shoulders of women” as if that workload had fallen from the sky rather than been shoved there by spouses. I have yet to see an article about a man’s career that’s flourishing because he’s dumped on his wife, or focusing on how he’s shirking the work.
Well, NPR – they don’t want to be seen as feminists, do they. That would be ick.
Behind all this is a storytelling problem. The familiar narratives about murder, rape, domestic violence, harassment, unwanted pregnancy, poverty in single-female-parent households, and a host of other phenomena portray these things as somehow happening to women and write men out of the story altogether, absolve them of responsibility – or turn them into “she made him do it” narratives. Thus have we treated a lot of things that men do to women or men and women do together as women’s problems that women need to solve, either by being amazing and heroic and enduring beyond all reason, or by fixing men, or by magically choosing impossible lives beyond the reach of harm and inequality. Not only the housework and the childcare, but what men do becomes women’s work.
I suppose some of that – maybe most of it – is inevitable, in the sense that reporters can report on A Situation a lot more easily and safely than Who Did What to Whom.
Down the page she suddenly forgets what she’s talking about and lurches into saying “people” instead of “women.” I picture an invisible activist creeping up behind her and shouting “TERF!!”
When it comes to abortion, unwanted pregnancies are routinely portrayed as something irresponsible women got themselves into and that conservatives in the US and many other countries want to punish them for trying to get out of. (You get the impression from anti-abortion narratives that these women are both the Whore of Babylon when it comes to sexual activity and the Virgin Mary when it comes to conception.) Though people who want to be pregnant may get pregnant on their own, with a sperm bank or donor, unwanted pregnancies are pretty much 100% the result of sex involving someone who, to put it simply, put his sperm where it was likely to meet an egg in a uterus. Two people were involved, but too often only one will be recognized if the pregnancy ends in abortion.
Whoopsie! In one paragraph, too. She starts with women getting all the blame for pregnancy, then she swerves to people who want to be pregnant and two people being involved in a pregnancy. She literally ditches her own argument in the middle of a paragraph.
After that she sticks to the muddle.
Katha Pollitt noted in her 2015 book on abortion that 16% of women have experienced “reproductive coercion” in which a male partner uses threats or violence to override their reproductive choice…
And of course anti-abortion laws with rape exemptions require pregnant people to prove they were raped…
It’s astonishing. She kicks the legs out from under her own argument in the middle of the piece in which she makes it.
Four men described as leaders of the far-right Proud Boys group have been charged in the US Capitol riot, as an indictment ordered unsealed on Friday presents fresh evidence of how federal officials believe members planned and carried out a coordinated attack to stop Congress certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
…
The latest indictment suggests the Proud Boys deployed a much larger contingent in Washington, with more than 60 users “participating in” an encrypted messaging channel for group members created a day before.
The Proud Boys abandoned an earlier channel and created the new Boots on the Ground channel after police arrested the group’s leader, Enrique Tarrio, in Washington. Tarrio was arrested on 4 January and charged with vandalizing a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic Black church during a protest in December. He was ordered to stay out of the District of Columbia.
Proud boys putting boots on the ground in order to vandalize black churches. Don’t they sound nice.
Proud Boys members, who describe themselves as a politically incorrect men’s club for “western chauvinists”, have engaged in street fights with antifascist activists at rallies and protests. Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys in 2016, sued the Southern Poverty Law Center for labeling it as a hate group.
So we’ve got male dominance, western chauvinism, “political incorrectness,” street fighting, and…legal action against being called a hate group. If you call yourself all those things and boast of doing all those things, aren’t you just outright saying you’re a hate group? Street fights aren’t a sign of affection, are they?
