He heaps praise on the insurrectionists, he says “We love you, you’re special,” he repeats all the lies about the election. HE NEEDS TO BE REMOVED FROM OFFICE.

This is horrific. I’m dead serious that Trump needs to be locked up in some fashion right now. He needs at the very least to be locked away from being able to incite anything, phone taken away, no visitors, doors locked, end of story. No access to the nukes.

Um…

He’s a journalist, and it seems he’s locked in there with them.

Then he says there is shooting, there are guns drawn.

There’s a sound that could be a gunshot just as this clip ends:

His most recent tweet:

He’s actually done it.

The U.S. Capitol locked down Wednesday with lawmakers inside as violent clashes broke out between supporters of President Donald Trump and police.

An announcement was played inside the Capitol as lawmakers were meeting and expected to vote to affirm Joe Biden’s victory. Due to an “external security threat,” no one could enter or exit the Capitol complex, the recording said.

Both chambers abruptly went into recess.

…

Protesters tore down metal barricades at the bottom of the Capitol’s steps and were met by officers in riot gear. Some tried to push past the officers who held shields and officers could be seen firing pepper spray into the crowd to keep them back. Some in the crowd were shouting “traitors” as officers tried to keep them back.

Is “protesters” the right word there? Wouldn’t “rioters” be a better fit? What do they call it when BLM activists resist police violence in the streets? In the streets, please note, not on the Capitol steps.

The skirmishes came just shortly after Trump addressed thousands of his supporters, riling up the crowd with his baseless claims of election fraud at a rally near the White House on Wednesday ahead of Congress’ vote.

“We will not let them silence your voices,” Trump told the protesters, who had lined up before sunrise to get a prime position to hear the president.

He said quite a few other coup-inciting things.

Forgot to include these:

Invaluable Aaron Rupar records the attempted coup minute by minute.

He needs to be locked up. Now, this minute. He’s a threat to us all. He shouldn’t be free to go outside and do this. He NEEDS to be locked up.

Trump told his people to storm Congress and they’re doing it.

Oh about those laws being faithfully executed…

Trump’s fascists are storming Congress.

Capitol Police are ordering two House offices to be evacuated as hundreds of Trump supporters stormed barricades around the building.

Pence is disappointing The Loser. Sad!

Mike Pence has released a letter announcing that he will not attempt to block the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory today.

Citing his constitutional obligations, Pence writes that the vice-president does not have the “unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted”.

“Our Founders were deeply skeptical of concentrations of power and created a Republic based on separation of powers and checks and balances,” Pence said.

It would be nice if Pence had made that point before the last two weeks of Trump’s reign of terror.

Donald Trump has repeatedly pressured Pence to try to block Congress from finalizing Biden’s victory, even though there is no precedent for doing so.

The president said moments ago at the “March to Save America” rally in Washington, “Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our constitution.”

Funny thing, so is Trump, and he hasn’t been doing it. At all. He’s been counter-doing it. He’s supposed to see that the laws are faithfully executed, and instead he’s been smashing as many as he can.

Philosophy in action.

I’m not a philosopher, so I get to think it does have some bearing. I get to think that and I do think that: I think that the fact that people like Oseroff are doing things like checking to see whether specific individuals have signed an open letter bullying an individual woman colleague is in fact one reason to be very wary about signing that letter.

I think the fact that people like him – especially men like him – do this kind of crap is a sign that there’s something amiss with the whole thing – the issue, the activism, the movement, the campaign, the whatever it is.

The state of this.

Just look at that. Now they’re hunting around to check on WHAT COMMONISST FAGGOT TRAITOR TERF has failed to sign. They’re drawing up A List of People Who Need To Have Signed Because We Suspect Them and then checking the list name by name – have YOU signed the letter Condemning The Witch? And have you, and you, and you?

And, as many have pointed out, it’s pretty striking to see a philosophy academic call it “fussy” to think the facts claimed in the letter attacking a woman and a colleague should be accurate.

It’s knife-edge, but for now…Warnock won and Ossoff is claiming the win.

Democrat Jon Ossoff — who as of 9 a.m. ET Wednesday leads Republican David Perdue by about 16,000 votes in the Georgia runoff that could give Democrats control of the U.S. Senate — claimed victory Wednesday. The Associated Press, which NPR relies on for its results, has not yet called the contest.

Perdue hasn’t conceded.

Tentative celebrations.

A man redefining feminism for us, in such a way that it includes him and doesn’t include feminist women.

As if the social/historical realities had nothing to do with the physical (and, yes, anatomical) ones.

Always the same slogans where an argument should be, always the childish catastrophizing. It’s not cute when Trump does it, why would it be cute when trans activists do it?

I would love to know exactly how kylo knows she/he suffers violence “as a direct result of Stock’s arguments.” How would someone know that? I suppose the violence-source could shout Stock’s name while punching, but that seems pretty god damn unlikely, and short of that – what?

Nothing, which is why it’s wise to be careful about saying things like that, i.e. it’s wise to NOT SAY THEM. It’s stupid, it’s catastrophizing, it’s obviously not something a person could know. Saying it while claiming to be philosophy-backgrounded is a rooky error.

Also, no one is debating anyone’s existence. If there is a particular anyone, that anyone exists. No one is debating whether or not the person who composed that tweets. The debate is over description, and self-description, not existence.

Also no one is debating whether or not trans people are human beings.

There again – how does she/he know the macro- and micro-aggressions are a direct result of Stock’s work? Again I think it’s highly unlikely that anyone footnotes aggressions citing Stock as their source.

Also, speaking of micro-aggressions, there’s calling him “Nigel,” there’s the eye roll emoji, there’s the smirk emoji.

How not to persuade anyone of anything.

The Seattle National Weather Service people get great photos, on account of how their building is a few yards away from Lake Washington (which is the eastern boundary of Seattle).

Oh dear. As many people predicted but Trump apparently forgot to consider, he can’t go bopping off to Scotland for some golf because there’s a wee pandemic on.

US President Donald Trump — just like anyone from outside the country — would not be welcome in Scotland at the moment due to coronavirus-related restrictions, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Tuesday.

Sturgeon was asked during a news conference about unconfirmed Scottish media speculation that Trump could be planning a trip to one of his golf courses in Scotland around the time of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20.

The White House is very indignant over these tyrannical rumors.

“Anonymous sources who claim to know what the President is or is not considering have no idea. When President Trump has an announcement about his plans for January 20 he will let you know,” White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere told CNN on Tuesday of the Scottish media speculation.

But he might lie. We can’t just wait politely for Trump to tell us what’s what, because we know he lies, and conceals, and lies some more, and makes shit up. Given what Trump is and how he carries on, we do need the press to seek independent information about his doings and plans. It’s not wrong of the press to do that. It is wrong of Trump to tell such copious and wild lies.

On Monday, Sturgeon ordered most of Scotland into a harsh new lockdown for the rest of January, as Covid-19 cases and deaths spike across the United Kingdom. The order imposes a legal requirement on Scottish residents to stay at home except for essential purposes, including caring responsibilities, essential shopping, essential exercise and being part of an extended household.

Essential exercise is going for a brisk walk, not riding a golf cart around a course.

“I have no idea what Donald Trump’s travel plans are,” Sturgeon responded. “You’ll be glad to know I hope and expect … that the travel plan that he immediately has is to exit the White House. But beyond that I don’t know.”

“We are not allowing people to come into Scotland without an essential purpose right now. And that would apply to him just as it applies to anybody else,” she added.

“Coming to play golf is not what I would consider to be an essential purpose.”

Oh but the essential purpose is not the golf, it’s the avoiding arrest.

Misogynist philosophy bro strikes again.

Womanphobia on the other hand will be firmly ignored on pain of further punishment from Jonathan Ichikawa.

The Letter:

We are professional academic philosophers committed to the inclusion and acceptance of trans and gender non-conforming people, both in the public at large, and within philosophy in particular. We write to affirm our commitment to developing a more inclusive environment, disavowing the use of professional and cultural authority to further gendered oppression.

So we’re supposed to think that feminist women are “using professional and cultural authority to further gendered oppression.” Meaning what? Feminist women are bullying men? That’s what he’s saying?

Last week the UK’s Conservative government designated Kathleen Stock, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, and a prominent critic of trans-inclusive stances and policies, an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. This award was ostensibly given for services to higher education. Stock is best-known in recent years for her trans-exclusionary public and academic discourse on sex and gender, especially for opposition to the UK Gender Recognition Act and the importance of self-identification to establish gender identity, and for advocating that trans women should be excluded from places like women’s locker rooms or shelters. She used the occasion of her OBE award to post on Twitter, calling for UK universities to end their association with Stonewall, the prominent LGBTQ+ rights charity, describing its trans-inclusive stance as a threat to free speech.

This is such shabby dishonest manipulation, especially shabby coming from philosophers. The dishonesty is using “exclusion” to mean not counting men as women, and “inclusion” to mean counting men as women, and not just women but women who are vastly more oppressed and subordinated and subject to violence than actual women. That’s just a silly way to use the words – silly but also malicious and destructive. It’s exactly comparable to telling black people to “include” white people as black people if they demand it. That’s not a reasonable or fair way to define “inclusion.”

And then the “importance of self-identification to establish gender identity” bit – well sure it’s important to people who want to perpetrate the fraud, but the rest of us don’t have to cheer them on. The reality is that “self-identification” can’t “establish” that a man is a woman because that’s how he self-identifies. Again the claim is just silly, and also malicious and destructive and strikingly misogynist.

There’s more in the same familiar vein.

Interesting…

The murk surrounding Donald Trump’s likely whereabouts on his last day as president has thickened considerably with news that an official plane he has used in the past is due to fly to Scotland the day before Joe Biden’s inauguration.

…

Scotland’s Sunday Post has reported that Prestwick airport, near Trump’s Turnberry golf course resort, has been told to expect a US military Boeing 757 that has occasionally been used by Trump, on 19 January.

He’s more than stupid enough to think he’ll be able to order up the plane again a few days or weeks later. He’s also more than stupid enough to think rules about travel during the pandemic don’t apply to him.

O…..kay.

…the American people – regular people that are out there working every day, hard-working Americans – they’re getting trampled by a system that is rigged against them.

So it’s the Democrats who grind the faces of the poor, and the Republicans who have their interests at heart. (Mind you, the Democrats do very little more than Republicans to help working people, but that’s partly because they keep having to claw back a little of the ground Republicans have grabbed.)

The other day I saw a bit of the Mississippi Declaration of Secession, and stared with the usual surprise. The things people can convince themselves of: they surprise me.

Let’s see:

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

Does it leave you reeling? It did me.

Oh I see, only “the black race” can put up with being in the tropical sun. Ok well a few questions occur to me. One, what about all the members of the white race who lived there too? They weren’t all rich, they didn’t all own slaves, they couldn’t all stay inside when it was hot. How is it that they could put up with it?

Two, even if that were true and made sense, it most certainly doesn’t follow that therefore the answer is to force members of the black race to do backbreaking work from dawn to dusk FOR NO PAY and under threat of being whipped or worse. It doesn’t follow that the answer is to decide white people get to own black people and force them to do hard dangerous exhausting work for the profit of those white people.

Three, even if the products have become necessities of the world, it doesn’t follow that plantation-havers can’t provide them by paying workers a salary in the normal way.

It boils down to saying “We’re making a good thing (for us) out of this system of forcing other people to do our work and you can’t stop us.”