Guess who’s back!

President Donald Trump’s attempt to project a more serious tone about the coronavirus lasted for about a week.

On Tuesday, he resumed spreading misinformation about how to fight the virus and amplifying criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who said he’d keep his head down and do his job.

Social media platforms worked to remove multiple versions of a video promoted by Trump that included unproven claims about treating people who test positive for the virus, but only after more than 17 million people had seen one version of it.

What’s the point of being president if you can’t con millions of people into poisoning themselves with an off-label medication?

Trump retweeted a series of tweets advocating for the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to be used in COVID-19 patients, including a video of a doctor claiming to have successfully used the drug on hundreds of patients.

…

Trump also shared a post from the Twitter account for a podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, a former top White House adviser to Trump, accusing Fauci of misleading the public over hydroxychloroquine.

He’s helping, ok? You’ve got your medical people giving medical-type advice and then you’ve got your inspirational leader people giving wacko advice. Put the two together and you’ve got yourself a real fix!

Fauci had to go on “Good Morning America” to say trials have indicated Trump’s quack remedy doesn’t work for the virus.

Trump shared a tweet of a video that’s circulating on social media pushing misleading claims about hydroxychloroquine. Earlier in the pandemic, Trump advocated vigorously for hydroxychloroquine to be used as a treatment, or even a preventative, telling people, “What have you got to lose?”

Which is another sign of his cognitive poverty: if you think about it for even a second you can figure out what we’ve got to lose. It’s not good advice to tell people to chug random medications because “what have you got to lose?”

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube began scrubbing their sites of the video Monday because it includes misleading claims about hydroxychloroquine, and glosses over the dangers of taking it. But dozens of versions of the video remain live on their platforms, with conservative news outlets, groups and internet personalities sharing it on their pages, where users have viewed them millions of times.

…

Twitter also said it is working to remove the video. A tweet from the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., describing one version of the video as a “must watch!!!” Monday night was also taken down by the platform. Twitter put Trump Jr.’s account on a 12-hour timeout, meaning he cannot tweet or retweet during that period. He’s also required to delete the tweet before he will be reinstated. Twitter declined to say when the timeout began.

…

In the video, Dr. Stella Immanuel, a physician from Houston, Texas, promotes hydroxychloroquine as a sure-fire cure for the coronavirus. She claims to have successfully treated 350 people “and counting,” including some with underlying medical conditions.

Some with no heads, even.

Joy Reid is live-tweeting the Barr hearing. It’s as sinister as you’d expect.

Then Jim Jordan is yelling something, and she wonders why he’s always yelling.

Well you see when they do it it’s Law Norder.

What a prince.

Oh does he.

Awwww, ‘doreable indeed.

The Daily Mail (sorry) reviews Abigail Shrier’s book on the fad for girls to decide they are boys:

The picture that emerges is something much more complex than the familiar narrative of ‘born in the wrong body’. None of these girls appeared to be trans until their teenage years. Some are lesbians – but as one young woman explains to Shrier, being a lesbian is ‘just not very cool… it’s a porn category’, whereas being trans is celebrated. Others have eating disorders or issues with self-harm: for them, taking male hormones and having surgery to remove their breasts seems like another way to attack the body.

Lesbian is a porn category? Says it all, doesn’t it.

Shrier argues that this is being driven by social contagion. Trans identification spreads through schools, through friendship groups, through ‘influencer’ videos that offer a rose-tinted take on transition. But the medical pathway is not something to be taken lightly. Hormone treatments lead to lifelong infertility alongside other health problems. What’s euphemistically called ‘top surgery’ is actually an elective double mastectomy, while ‘bottom surgery’ to masculinise genitals is rarely undertaken and subject to heinous complications.

Not to mention all the rest of it. It just seems so much more trouble than simply being yourself without worrying about gender rules.

There was no clip when I first posted this, only the statement of fact. I wanted to see and hear how he said it – whether with a pretense of regret and mention of a full schedule, or not. Now I know. Look at how this evil pig said it.

Of course he won’t.

Right now:

Oh goody, another private “militia” is born.

The Utah Citizens’ Alarm is only a month old, and yet it already boasts 15,000-plus members.

The citizen militia’s recruits wear military fatigues and carry assault rifles. Their short-term goal, they say, is to act as a physical presence of intimidation to deter protesters from becoming violent and destroying the state of Utah. Their long-term goal: to arm and prepare the state of Utah against underground movements they believe will incite civil war.

But the physical presence of a “militia” wearing military fatigues and carrying assault rifles would not merely deter protesters from becoming violent and destroying Utah, it would deter them/us/me from protesting at all. If I saw a bunch of guys in fatigues carrying assault rifles at a protest I’d be out of there before I’d drawn another breath. I don’t see random self-appointed guys with guns as protective or safeguarding, I see them as a terrifying threat. I see the cops that way too, to a considerable extent (the guns have always made me nervous, my whole life), but at least I know they are answerable to higher ups and the organization and the courts. Volunteer cops carrying assault rifles, not so much.

The group was conceived in reaction to a Black Lives Matter protest against police brutality organized by different groups in Provo, Utah, on 29 June. That day, a white protester pulled out a gun and shot another white man, who was not protesting but driving his vehicle into the protest route. Two shots were fired, and one hit the driver in the arm. Protesters claim the shooting was in self-defence because the driver was hitting marchers; the police found this claim to be unsubstantiated.

When Casey Robertson, 47, watched a video of the incident, he felt outraged that this could happen in his “little town of Provo”.

…

Utah Citizens’ Alarm has since organized regular military-style trainings for its members. Robertson says he has been tipped off “by secret sources within the government and law enforcement” that underground organizations like antifa are being funded by Isis, and are using groups like BLM to wreak havoc in the community to destroy American cities and ideals. Even if none of these theories stand up to scrutiny, he is dead set on not letting it happen.

That is, he has been told a pack of lies by people who claim to be law enforcement, or he claims he has, but never mind that it’s a pack of lies, he is dead set on threatening protesters. Brilliant. Wonderful arrangement.

This already has a chilling effect on protests: organizers have begun cancelling protests out of fear of Utah Citizens’ Alarm coming and escalating the already heated emotions. So far, militia members remain unchallenged, using their second amendment rights to openly bear arms in public throughout the state.

What I’m saying. Of course it has a chilling effect.

Jason Stevens, of Utah’s American Civil Liberties Union, stressed the importance of the historical context in what happened in the civil rights movement of the 1960s when armed groups, militias, local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, white citizens councils, organizations both official and unofficial took it upon themselves to defend what they saw as their rights and property with violent and systemic intimidation and threats to African Americans and others in those areas.

Yes, that is important. Timothy McVeigh is another important item in this list. Heavily armed right-wing terrorizers have a long history in the US, and no, of course we don’t see them as there to “protect” us.

Additionally, lines between the second and first amendment are complicated, especially as open-carry laws in Utah make it legal for groups of heavily armed individuals to gather in places where the first amendment is being honored, such as protests.

“If the right to bear arms is overriding the right to free speech, that may be cause for concern,” said Dr RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah. “Our constitutional doctrine hasn’t yet had the chance to really tussle with the question of what the presence of guns does to a free speech event. Short of more overt threats of violence, we usually protect protesters with guns in the same ways we protect protesters without them. But if the express goal of the armed individuals is to intimidate people who might otherwise share their views, that’s especially troubling.”

I don’t bother with that purported distinctions. If there are random freelancers with guns on the scene, I’m not staying. I assume I’m far from the only person who sees it that way. Yes, guys with guns will shut down free speech. You can count on it.

Dan Froomkin points out that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to make the people at the NY Times very nervous.

So rather than report on how Ocasio-Cortez’s riveting, viral speech on the House floor on Thursday was a signal moment in the fight against abusive sexism, Times congressional reporters Luke Broadwater and Catie Edmondson filed a story full of sexist double standards and embraced the framing of her critics by casting her as a rule-breaker trying to “amplify her brand.”

Here’s her speech in case you need a refresher.

Then consider that the Times described the speech as “her most norm-shattering moment yet,” leading with the fact that “she took to the House floor to read into the Congressional Record a sexist vulgarity that Representative Ted Yoho, a Florida Republican, had used to refer to her.”

The point is not that it’s a vulgarity. The point is that it’s misogynist, and it’s meant to intimidate. Men don’t call women fucking bitches for the hell of it, they do it to express intimidating rage and hatred. Vulgarity is completely beside the point.

A critical “tell” in the Times’s coverage – something perhaps only fellow journalists would fully appreciate at first – was how the paper had previously avoided directly quoting Yoho’s particular words, but did so now:

“In front of reporters, Representative Yoho called me, and I quote: ‘A fucking bitch,’” she said, punching each syllable in the vulgarity.

You’d think the whole thing was her idea. It’s Yoho who said it; she was quoting him. It’s as if they decided to say she punched every syllable to make her sound like the aggressor. She did not in fact punch anything, nor did she call anyone insulting names.

In the first Times article on the matter, on Tuesday, Broadwater described Yoho’s words as “a pair of expletives” – noting that Ocasio-Cortez “sought to turn the insult to her advantage.”

Oh yes, what a whore she is, trying to make money from being called a fucking bitch by an adult man who works alongside her in Congress.

James Fallows, the renowned Atlantic national correspondent, asked in a tweet: “WHY should these words appear in a quote from AOC, at whom they were hatefully directed, rather than one from Rep. Yoho, who actually said them?”

Um…to make her look bad? To shame her? Am I close?

The Times reporters wrote that after her speech, “Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who excels at using her detractors to amplify her own political brand, invited a group of Democratic women in the House to come forward to express solidarity with her.”

The whore. How dare she invite a group of Democratic women colleagues to come forward to express solidarity with her? That’s so brand-amplifying. A decent modest woman would say nothing about it and pretend it never happened, and nice Mr. Yoho could get away without so much as a whispered rebuke. Maybe if they put her in a burqa they would feel less anxious?

Hamza Shaban, a business reporter for the Washington Post, called attention to the similarities between the Times’s framing of the story and the story’s own description, toward the end, of how Republicans have demonized Ocasio-Cortez.

She should just put up with it, like a nice prim quiet woman from 1955.

In fact, the double standards were everywhere. New York magazine writer Rebecca Traister, responding to Harris’s tweet, noted: “Women’s anger at male power abuse [is] regularly presented as path to self-advancement for the women. Voicing fury at systemic degradation is read as opportunistic. Whereas men’s abusive behavior rarely understood as fundamental to how they attained & maintain THEIR power. But it is!”

Read the whole thing.

H/t Tim Harris

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, ya know?

The Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton has called the enslavement of millions of African people “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”.

Cotton, widely seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2024, made the comment in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published on Sunday.

He was speaking in support of legislation he introduced on Thursday that aims to prohibit use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project, an initiative from the New York Times that reframes US history around August 1619 and the arrival of slave ships on American shores for the first time.

Well that’s certainly urgent at this time of a pandemic, massive job loss, people on the edge of being unable to pay their rents or mortgages, children unable to go to school, and oh by the way climate change hasn’t paused to wait for all this to go by.

“The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project … is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable,” Cotton told the Democrat-Gazette.

“I reject that root and branch. America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”

On the proposition, yes, but on the reality, obviously not. It’s easy to say noble things, but they count for less if you are at the same time paying for your luxuries out of the forced unpaid labor of other people.

In June, the Times was forced to issue a mea culpa after publishing an op-ed written by Cotton and entitled “Send in the troops”. The article, which drew widespread criticism, advocated for the deployment of the military to protests against police brutality toward black Americans.

Times publisher AG Sulzberger initially defended the decision, saying the paper was committed to representing “views from across the spectrum”.

Yeah? Like kill all the Jews for instance? Like invade a small impoverished country and torture most of its population to death and steal all its wealth? Views like that? Especially from serving US senators, who could actually attempt to put such “views” into action?

I’m thinking no, Sulzberger didn’t mean that. Let’s come up with a rule: the no-Cotton rule. Works for me.

What we now say when we mean “shut up, bitch.”

Updating: Oh look there’s more.

Very adult, very thoughtful, very progressive and feminist and reasonable and fair-minded.

Also the other David.

Than “Ok Karen” and an eyeroll. Yes, I think so too.

Updating 2:

Skepticism done well, yes indeed – you can’t get much better skepticism than “Ok, Karen” and an eyeroll emoji.

No, actually, we approve of violence against women.

Poland is to withdraw from a European treaty aimed at preventing violence against women, the country’s justice minister announced on Saturday.

Zbigniew Ziobro said the document, known as the Istanbul Convention, was “harmful” because it required schools to teach children about gender.

Meaning what? That there are two sexes? That one of the sexes is on average bigger and stronger than the other? That the stronger one has historically dominated the other one? That it takes one of each to make a baby? Aren’t they going to learn all that in any case?

He added that reforms introduced in the country in recent years provided sufficient protection for women.

Easy for him to say.

Mr Ziobro said the government would formally begin the process of withdrawing from the treaty, which was ratified in 2015, on Monday.

He argued that the convention violated the rights of parents and “contains elements of an ideological nature”.

The ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party and its coalition partners are closely aligned to the Catholic Church, and the government has promised to promote traditional family values.

Traditional family values like men dominating women? Like enforcing the dominance with violence? Those traditional family values?

Thousands of people, mostly women, took to the streets of the capital Warsaw on Friday to campaign against the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention.

“The aim is to legalise domestic violence,” Marta Lempart, an organiser of a march in the city, told Reuters news agency.

Trad fam vals, you know.

No comment necessary.

But St Bernards are supposed to rescue people in the mountains…

A mountain rescue team has said its members “didn’t need to think twice” when they were called to help a 121lb (55kg) St Bernard dog that had collapsed while descending England’s highest peak.

Sixteen volunteers from Wasdale mountain rescue team spent nearly five hours rescuing Daisy from Scafell Pike after receiving a call from Cumbria police.

Her back legs were hurting and she couldn’t keep going. (Descending a steep hill can be hella painful, more so than climbing.)

They sought advice from vets before beginning the rescue operation and were able to assess Daisy’s condition and administer pain relief before lifting her off the mountain on a stretcher. The team said: “After a little persuasion and a bit of arranging the stretcher to become dog-friendly, and of course plenty more treats, the 55kg Daisy very quickly settled down with her chin resting on the head guard, having realised that we were trying to help her.

She’ll be reet.

Speaking of men who treat women like underlings…

A nonpartisan Christian organisation that seeks to end hunger says it has asked for and received the resignation of Republican congressman Ted Yoho from its board of directors, following what it called his “verbal attack” on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

That’s especially interesting because what was Yoho abusing Ocasio-Cortez about? Her argument that an increase in crime is related to an increase in poverty – i.e. that poverty can lead to increased crime. Poverty is also very intimately linked to hunger. Ocasio-Cortez and this Christian organization are on Team End Poverty while Yoho is on Team Poverty Is the Fault of the Poor Person. It was never a good fit.

In a statement on Saturday, Bread for the World said its board met Friday with Yoho and sought his resignation “as an action that reaffirms our commitment to coming alongside women and people of colour, nationally and globally, as they continue to lead us to a more racially inclusive and equitable world”.

See what I mean? Not a good fit. Those words are not words a Republican would ever say.

“As a bipartisan Christian organization committed to alleviating hunger and poverty through sound public policies, Bread for the World upholds the values of respect, dignity, and compassion that Jesus calls us to when engaging decision makers from across the political spectrum,” the statement said.

“We believe that Rep. Ted Yoho’s recent actions and words as reported in the media are not reflective of the ethical standards expected of members of our Board of Directors.”

As Christian organizations go, this sounds like a decent one.

Jolyon Maugham QC says he would love to discuss it with a gender critical feminist, so a GC feminist says I’d love to discuss it with you Jolyon, so…

He says it.

Privately. For their privacy only. So we don’t know who they are or what they said or why his offer was “without success.” We don’t even know whether we should believe him or not. We do know he has carefully hidden the evidence and offered an explanation for the hiding of the evidence, one that seems a bit implausible on its face. If they’re high profile why would they be so bashful?

Jolyon? Anything?

Ah there he is at last.

So he will only discuss it with a select list of GC feminists, ones Kathleen Stock will know but he can’t name because [something something], on the basis of their shared belief in light as opposed to heat. So apparently he thinks Stock doesn’t belong to that category? But that’s absurd – she’s famous for being reasonable and fair and not shouty.

Maugham left it there, as far as I can tell (Twitter loves to hide the replies you’re looking for and show you the ones you aren’t). LetterWike stepped up.

Jolyon? Anything?

Just call her Bitch?

In Afghanistan, family members often force women to keep their name a secret from people outside the family, even doctors. Using a woman’s name in public is frowned upon and can be considered an insult. Many Afghan men are reluctant to say the names of their sisters, wives or mothers in public. Women are generally only referred to as the mother, daughter or sister of the eldest male in their family, and Afghan law dictates that only the father’s name should be recorded on a birth certificate.

Of course that’s not completely strange to us in the so much more progressive part of the world. Not many decades ago it was pretty normal to refer to a woman as Mrs Charles Dudeguy and leave it at that. It wasn’t taboo to know her first name, and informally it was ok to call her Jane Dudeguy, but it was quite possible to read a news story (for instance) that referred to a woman solely as Mrs Man’s Name.

But it’s even worse in Afghanistan. It’s as if societies compete to see which ones can most completely obliterate and conceal women. Here we’ve given up on the niqabs and no names approach, and instead we replace women with men who say they are women – they do it much better. (Except for the sex part. Since that’s by far the most important use for women, that’s a bit of a problem, but technology will probably come up with a fix soon.)

But some Afghan women are now campaigning to use their names freely, with the slogan “Where Is My Name?” The campaign began three years ago when Laleh Osmany realised she was fed up with women being denied what she thought was a “basic right”.

Well, yes, because if you’re only ever referred to as Man’s Possession you begin to wonder if you’re just an object, like a kettle.

Oh good, the tv machine is training kids in how to lecture medical staff.

The first clip is merely stupid and cloying, but the second is infuriating. The lecturing kid is what, 12? Maybe 13? And she’s lecturing two medically-trained adults as if they were puppies who had eaten the carpet. And they look grief-stricken and horrified, as if they’d torn the patients limbs off by mistake. Also the clip is teaching the world that it’s a fabulous righteous thing to do to give medical staff false information about patients, like for instance getting the sex wrong.

It’s as if everybody is trying to out-stupid Trump.

A play in three acts. WITS is Women In Technology & Science.

Act one:

Good choice. Caroline Criado-Perez is brilliant, as any fule kno.

Act two scene one:

In other words, don’t read this book that you chose, read some other book that someone else will choose from this list of names provided by me.

Act two scene two:

Act three:

Curtain.