Erdoğan says Macron is crazy for not being a fan of political Islam.

France has recalled its ambassador to Turkey for consultations after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insulted his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.

He said Mr Macron needed a mental health check for pledging to defend secular values and fight radical Islam.

Mr Macron has spoken out forcefully on these issues after a French teacher was murdered for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.

That is, for showing cartoons of Mo as part of a class on freedom of speech. The BBC should have included that instead of making it sound as if Paty showed the cartoons just for the hell of it.

Depictions of the Prophet Muhammad can cause serious offence to Muslims because Islamic tradition explicitly forbids images of Muhammad and Allah (God).

Islamic tradition can forbid what it likes but it’s not the boss of all of us. Paty was teaching a class in a school, not a madrassa; we are not required to obey Islamic tradition.

But state secularism – or laïcité – is central to France’s national identity. Curbing freedom of expression to protect the feelings of one particular community, the state says, undermines the country’s unity.

It’s not a “community,” it’s a religion. Calling it a “community” is manipulative.

Responding to Mr Macron’s campaign to defend such values – which began before the teacher was murdered – Mr Erdogan asked in a speech: “What’s the problem of the individual called Macron with Islam and with the Muslims?”

He added: “Macron needs treatment on a mental level. What else can be said to a head of state who does not understand freedom of belief and who behaves in this way to millions of people living in his country who are members of a different faith?”

Erdoğan is the one who is not understanding freedom of belief here. Freedom of belief includes not believing in any god, and it includes freedom of questioning, discussion, analysis, doubt, disbelief, non-belief.

Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books on William Barr’s passion for authoritarianism:

There is, however, a very strong connection between Donald Barr’s hard-line Catholicism and [his son] William Barr’s present position as the main (perhaps the sole) intellectual buttress of Trump’s presidency. That connection lies in the idea of authority. Authoritarian rule is a defining feature of hierarchical institutional Catholicism. The magisterium of the church flows from the pope, who, on matters of faith and morals, may create doctrines that are infallible and therefore unquestionable. These include the bans on contraception, divorce, abortion, homosexual sex, and same-sex marriage. As a devout Catholic with links to the powerful Opus Dei movement, which galvanized the successful reaction against the liberalizing currents within the church, Barr holds to these principles as both articles of religious faith and bulwarks of the social order. In this, he is a central figure in the ever-growing influence of right-wing Catholicism under Trump, demonstrated yet again in his nomination of Barrett to the Supreme Court.

It’s such a fundamentally stupid idea, too. Why should one person – male person, of course – have absolute authority of any kind? Especially universal authority of the type the Catholic church thinks it has?

Oh, you know, it’s because he speaks for god, and god makes sure he stays infallible, and blah blah blah. But none of that is true, and there’s no real reason to think it is true, there is only the fact that lotsa people believed it before so who are we to stop believing it now? Which is stupid, and not a real reason. Popes are just guys, elevated by other guys, and called infallible by their brotherhood of guys, who relieve the misery of celibacy by raping children. Barr’s beliefs are stupid and infantile.

Barr’s understanding of executive authority is no more a matter of constitutional reasoning than a zealous Catholic’s acceptance of papal infallibility is a result of cool biblical analysis. It is a matter of faith.

And faith is another form of absolute authority. There’s a pattern here.

What must be understood about Barr is that he is not a lawyer in the political arena. He is a political ideologue and operative who happens to function through the law.

…

His function in public life, as he has always understood it, is to provide legal justification for the untrammeled exercise of power by Republican presidents. And for all his air of gravity, Barr is utterly shameless in his pursuit of this calling. He is willing to lie to the American people and to flout the very principles he claims to uphold.

I guess the takeaway is that Barr is an absolutist Republican because Republicans are more reliably authoritarian than Democrats.

H/t Tim Harris

Hugh Schofield at the BBC wrote a piece last January on a tv confrontation in 1990 between a Paris literary dude who boasted of “seducing” young girls and a woman who pointed out it wasn’t something to boast of.

The footage can easily be found on the internet. In a jocular tone the programme’s respected presenter, Bernard Pivot, asks Matzneff (then aged 53) what it is like to be a serial “collector of young chicks”.

All bald-headed suaveness, Matzneff explains how he prefers school-age girls who have yet to be “hardened” by disillusionment over men. He says they come to him because he listens and takes them seriously.

The panel nods understandingly. A Catholic woman who is there to defend fidelity in marriage laughs, as if at a charmingly naughty child.

But then Pivot turns to a woman who has so far been silent, a Canadian writer called Denise Bombardier, and the atmosphere suddenly changes.

“I feel like I am living on a different planet,” says Bombardier coldly. And she launches into a devastating attack on her neighbour.

Does he not understand anything about the rights of children, she asks. Has it never occurred to him that these young girls may end up damaged?

But the intellectuals of Paris gave her a hard time, not him. Imagine my surprise.

She had been warned by her publisher that attacking Matzneff would not go down well – and so it proved.

In newspaper articles she was described as “frustrated” and a “bitch” (the French is even more obscene).

“So (Bombardier) has discovered that in the year 1990 girls of 15 make love to men who are 30 years older than they are! Well, big deal!” wrote one critic.

Ah yes, girls of 15 “make love” to men of 45 – aka men of 45 rape girls of 15. It’s all in your point of view, eh what?

But what interested me was the “how times have changed” bit.

It is a measure of the extraordinary rapidity of moral change in our times that none of this could conceivably happen today.

By no stretch of the imagination could a contemporary author write so blithely of his seduction of underage girls – and, in Matzneff’s case, of boys too.

And even if he did, there would certainly be no-one leaping to his defence, accusing his detractors – like they accused Bombardier 30 years ago – of reactionary neo-Puritanism and failing to understand the wellsprings of teenage sexuality.

Ohhhhhhh yes there would. There would be the “sex-positive” types who do in fact very much accuse critics of reactionary Puritanism, and there would be the likes of Peter Tatchell and NAMBLA.

There is moral change but there’s also a lot of two steps back.

That’s how to do it.

Protesters have disrupted church services across Poland in the latest show of discontent against a court’s near-total ban on abortion. The protesters staged sit-ins and held pro-abortion banners, interrupting Sunday Mass at some churches.

The protests are considered unusual in a country where the Roman Catholic church has great influence. They follow a ruling by Poland’s top court that ending the life of a deformed foetus is unconstitutional.

…

Poland’s abortion laws were already among the strictest in Europe, with an estimated 100,000 women seeking a termination abroad each year to get around the tight restrictions.

The Catholic church as an institution hates women, whatever some nuns and priests may think.

In a park in Krakow, black underwear was hung up on lines between trees, while in Lodz, there was a protest in front of the city’s cathedral, where people called for a separation of church and state. Critics of the Catholic Church argue that it exerts too much political influence over government policy in Poland.

It’s like that here in the US, too. The Catholic church exerts way too much influence, especially over women and their bodies and their rights.

“I’m here today because it annoys me that in a secular country the church decides for me what rights I have, what I can do and what I’m not allowed to do,” one 26-year-old protester, Julia Miotk, told Reuters news agency.

It is indeed annoying.

The Sydney Morning Herald tells us:

Four in ten young men do not consider punching and hitting to constitute domestic violence, a national survey has found.

The survey of 1074 adults for anti-violence campaign group White Ribbon found 42 per cent of men aged 18 to 34 did not consider “hitting, punching or restraining” another person to be “a type of domestic violence”.

Were they raised by wolves? In what world is punching not violence? Also in what world is it ok for men to hit women?

The research found older men were more likely to recognise domestic violence. The proportion of men who did not consider hitting and punching to be domestic violence dropped to less than a third of men aged 35 to 54, and just 3 per cent of those aged over 55. Nearly nine out of 10 men aged over 55 also agreed non-consensual sex was domestic violence.

You wouldn’t think it would take that long to learn.

Originally a comment by Omar on Here for you.

It is at times like this that I am reminded how improbable our individual lives are against the backdrop of human history and evolutionary biology.

My maternal great-grandmother Mary-Ann Connor was a refugee from the Irish potato ‘famine’ of the 1840s, when social arrangements in Ireland somehow resulted in the export of a large part of its agricultural produce. She went as a refugee to New Zealand, where by chance she met my great grandfather, who was a sailor.

Mary-Ann had eleven children in all, ten of whom died in infancy: probably of TB, which was raging at the time. My grandmother was the only survivor of those eleven children. The grief must have been paralysing.

Added to that, to produce any one of us blogging here today, at every generation the right sperm cell has to meet the right ovum, with infinitesimal chance of that happening, to produce this, the only reality we will ever have, and arguably, despite Trump etc., the best of all possible worlds.

In a word: no.

Join a man who is roleplaying a woman for a discussion of the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to the US Constitution to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex, in other words to remove women from second-class status. There are plenty of women who can discuss the rights of women, there is no need to turn to men who are roleplaying women instead of actual women. There is no need to do that, and it’s spitting in the faces of women to do that.

That’s all the more true since back when “Charlotte” Clymer was Charles Clymer he was pretty notorious as a male feminist who bullied women.

So who is Charles Clymer? Clymer, who self-identifies as a Feminist Leader, has a Women for Equality Facebook page (which now seems mostly defunct) where he’s been alleged to verbally attack women as well as accused of deleting women’s comments who disagree with him. In an article for the Huffington Post last year, Darlena Cunha reported that a former moderator of his page, Zoe Katherine, disagreed with him and then was threatened with being kicked out of the group. “If we did it privately we were guilt-tripped, or simply ignored,” Katherine explained.

One commenter on the page, Stephanie Kay, described her exchange with Clymer to be equally as dismissive, but explained that she got this cake-topper of a response from Clymer:

“Stephanie, I’m going to let you in on a little secret that, apparently, no one has had the guts to tell you up to this point in your life: having a vagina does not grant you magical powers of perception and nuance anymore than my penis magically blinds me from the horrors of the world.”

Ah you can see the embryonic trans woman right there, clear as day – a better woman than you mere vagina-having women will ever be.

 Clymer desperately wants to be in the feminist spotlight. Read through his Twitter feed and you’ll find what seems like a lovely person, an “army vet and feminist” who tweets about all of the right topics: Ferguson, making research count for women, about rape threat investigations. His Twitter profile is a black-and-white of a young Gloria Steinem and her cat. He is expressing to you, he is demanding that you understand: Charles Clymer is dedicated to the cause of feminism and you and your magical vagina are going to believe him, like it or not.

That was 2014. How things change.

They were what?

“A federal health agency halted a public-service coronavirus advertising campaign funded by $250 million in taxpayer money after it offered a special vaccine deal to an unusual set of essential workers: Santa Claus performers,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“As part of the plan, a top Trump administration official wanted the Santa performers to promote the benefits of a Covid-19 vaccination and, in exchange, offered them early vaccine access ahead of the general public, according to audio recordings. Those who perform as Mrs. Claus and elves also would have been included.”

They…you…what…

They can’t even do things in a non-criminal way when there’s no need for the criminality!

“Listen up, Santa dude – promote the vaccine or we’ll burn your house down – no, wait, wrong script – promote the vaccine and we’ll put you at the head of the line.”

“No need, Mister Ambassador, I’m happy to promote the vaccine.”

“Listen here, you, take the deal or we’ll burn your house down!”

The White House chief of staff is fine with all this coronavirus-defying:

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows defended Vice President Pence’s decision to continue traveling and campaigning despite his exposure to staff who have tested positive for COVID-19, saying Sunday that Pence is exempt from CDC guidelines because he is “essential personnel.”

But is campaigning essential activity?

Meadows told CNN that “we are not going to control the pandemic,” dismissing the notion that the appropriate COVID policy should be to “quarantine all of America.” Instead, Meadows argued, the focus should be on developing vaccines and therapeutics “to give Americans the relief that this is not a death sentence.”

And in the meantime it’s fine to infect people by the thousands.

MEADOWS: “We are not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas — “

JAKE TAPPER: “Why not get control of the pandemic?”

MEADOWS: “Because it is a contagious virus just like the flu.”

TAPPER: “But why not make efforts to contain it?”

MEADOWS: “Well we are making efforts to contain it.”

TAPPER: “By running all over the country and not wearing a mask? That’s what the vice president is doing.”

He’s essential activity!

So Pence’s staff is riddled with coronavirus.

At least five people in Vice President Mike Pence’s orbit have tested positive for coronavirus in recent days, including chief of staff Marc Short and outside adviser Marty Obst, a source familiar with the situation told CNN.

…

Despite the slew of coronavirus cases around him, Pence — who is the head of the White House’s coronavirus task force — is not quarantining, as per US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. Instead, he plans to continue traveling and campaigning in the final stretch to Election Day.

Because, you know, the hell with CDC guidelines, the hell with safety, the hell with everything except the self-interest of Trump and his dummy.

The developments raise new questions about safety protocols and transparency within the White House as the pandemic has killed more than 224,000 Americans.

Questions like: “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The news comes just over a week before Election Day amid a blitz of campaign stops for Pence, who leads the White House coronavirus task force, including the vice president’s trips to Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in the last week.

Pandemic or no pandemic! Skyrocketing rate of new infections or not! Winning is all!

“Today, Marc Short, Chief of Staff to the Vice President, tested positive for COVID-19, began quarantine and assisting in the contact tracing process,” Pence’s press secretary Devin O’Malley said in a statement Saturday. “Vice President Pence and Mrs. Pence both tested negative for COVID-19 today, and remain in good health.”

The statement continued, “While Vice President Pence is considered a close contact with Mr. Short, in consultation with the White House Medical Unit, the Vice President will maintain his schedule in accordance with the CDC guidelines for essential personnel.”

Uh huh. I’m sure the CDC guidelines say that campaigning for office is essential and well worth infecting thousands of people.

As President Donald Trump returned to Washington shortly after midnight from campaign appearances in Ohio, he said he had heard about Short’s diagnosis.

“He’s going to be fine. But he’s quarantining,” Trump said.

Typical Trump. He doesn’t know that Short is going to be fine; he has no way of knowing that. I’m so sick of people who claim to know things they can’t possibly know.

Short has been seen on the campaign trail actively eschewing the use of masks for months, including earlier this week traveling aboard Air Force Two. Neither Pence nor Short wore a mask on Pence’s trip on Thursday and Friday. As chief of staff to Pence, Short has been a key aide involved with the US coronavirus response. He has been reported to have advocated for an economy-first approach to the pandemic.

That is, a let-the-pandemic-rage approach to the pandemic. From the people in charge of the pandemic. Brilliant.

Short was a driving force against following the advice of the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on the pandemic, a source familiar with discussions inside the coronavirus task force told CNN. Short would routinely push back on Fauci during task force meetings, believing the doctor’s concerns about Covid-19 were overblown, the source said. That attitude was prevalent throughout much of the Pence team, according to the source.

Well it’s easy to see why they would think Fauci’s concerns were overblown, if they never ever looked at the numbers.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued guidance that says people should stay home for 14 days after having contact with a person who has Covid-19.

Yebbut they’re just civil servants, who should probably all be fired.

Despite Pence being in close contact with Short as recently as Friday, the vice president plans to continue campaigning. Late Saturday, the vice president’s office released his schedule for Sunday, which includes more travel and remarks at a campaign rally in North Carolina.

Remember: this is the guy in charge of the coronavirus task force. I guess that means in charge of making sure it doesn’t do anything.

This one really struck a nerve. Not in a good way.

Sands is here for you, but not so here that it will call you a mother instead of a “birthing parent” (or a father instead of a “non-birthing parent”).

The replies are genuinely painful to read.

Ok…

Commence piling on. If love, respect and humanity should be the bedrock of society then why are you calling people bitches? I know it’s hip and everything but what’s it got to do with love respect n humanity?

Also, how does “equality” come into it? What do “pronouns” have to do with equality?

In reality, nothing. In the jargon-world these two apparently inhabit, part of “equality” is bespoke pronouns and forcing everyone else to use those bespoke pronouns. How they get there, though, remains obscure.

And then from the Jason Michael tweet, what does treating other human beings with love, dignity and respect have to do with pronouns?

In reality, nothing. In the jargon-world these two apparently inhabit, it’s dignity and respect and even love to use bespoke third-person pronouns that don’t match the sex of the bespoke pronoun-haver. See? It’s a touch confusing and remote, isn’t it.

Also, by the way, why is it so often “love” that gets dragged in along with respect? I don’t recall feminism ever demanding “love” from the world at large. If anything feminism has always wanted a little less “love” (and a lot less groping) and more respect. Demanding “love” is bizarre, because social justice is social, not personal. Justice, equality, fairness, rights – none of those are about “love,” and they can’t possibly depend on them, because nobody can possibly “love” everyone, just because of a command or a principle or a movement. Love is a big step too far. We get to have rights and justice even if we’re not lovable; they’re not earned, they’re rights.

I wonder if this weird mission-creep is connected to the way trans-activism is so heavily tilted toward trans women. I wonder if it’s connected to the way trans women are necessarily self-conscious about being womany in a way that women mostly are not, because we just are women, whether we fit the stereotypes or not. I wonder if these trans women and their “allies” are thinking of women as all squishy and gooey and sentimental and thus in need of being told “we love you” all the time, and thus in trying to be womany themselves they beg us to “love” them, just as women normally do.

Except we don’t.

We don’t demand love, and we don’t answer to “bitches.”

Complicated, aren’t we.

Alarm bells:

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S newest executive order, signed without fanfare this week, could prove one of his most insidious.

The directive from the White House, issued late Wednesday, sounds technical: creating a new “Schedule F” within the “excepted service” of the federal government for employees in policymaking roles, and directing agencies to determine who qualifies. Its implications, however, are profound and alarming. It gives those in power the authority to fire more or less at will as many as tens of thousands of workers currently in the competitive civil service, from managers to lawyers to economists to, yes, scientists.

Wo. That’s a terrible plan. It dynamites the whole point of having a civil service (the hilarities of Yes Minister notwithstanding).

This week’s order is a major salvo in the president’s onslaught against the cadre of dedicated civil servants whom he calls the “deep state” — and who are really the greatest strength of the U.S. government.

The administration grounds its action in the need to rid itself of “poor performers.” Certainly, there’s room for reform to the cumbersome process required to remove those who fall short of standards. But this president’s criteria for determining satisfactory performance begin and end with personal loyalty. The White House admitted last winter to seeking to purge from payrolls those deemed insufficiently reliable — the “bad people,” in Mr. Trump’s words. The protections for career civil servants currently in place at least put some roadblocks on that path, hence this legally dubious plan to erase those protections with a touch of organizational sleight of hand. Not only will politically motivated firing become easier, but it will also be easier to hire those who meet Mr. Trump’s standards: obsequiousness and, more often than not, a lack of qualifications. With no competitive process in place, leaders can appoint whom they please — or rather, who pleases them.

Trump world everywhere. Let’s not do that.

We’re still doing it wrong.

The United States on Friday was approaching a record for the number of new daily coronavirus cases, as a new study warned that the pandemic is set to cause half a million American deaths by February.

…

This means that with cases surging in many states, particularly the upper midwest, what appears to be a third major peak of coronavirus infections in the US could lead to nearly 300,000 people dying in just the next four months.

Compared to over 200,000 in the last eight months – so that’s a huge leap.

The news came as Anthony Fauci, the top public health official on the White House coronavirus taskforce, said Donald Trump has not met with the taskforce “for several months” and the body itself meets less frequently than it did earlier in the pandemic, despite the fact that [the] outbreak is not yet under control.

Well, it’s nice that he’s feeling relaxed about it.

At a campaign rally late on Friday afternoon, Trump instead claimed without evidence that the US was entering the “final turn” of the outbreak.

The final turn into the abyss, that is.

No, bud, that’s not the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the fire in the furnace.

In fact the University of Washington warned that the situation will be even more disastrous if states continue to ease off on measures designed to restrict the spread of the virus, such as the shuttering of certain businesses and social distancing edicts. If states wind down such protections, the death toll could top 1 million people in America by 28 February, the UW study found.

Too bad we have a president who tells states to wind down those protections.

Speaking of the princess…she’s sharing Trump’s idiotic “cleanliness” interpretation of environmentalism.

“Pristine” ffs. It’s the comprehension of a resort-owner. There must be NO DIRT anywhere. We need CRYSTAL CLEAR WATER and PRISTINE OCEANS AND BEACHES.

The hell we do. Sterile environments are by definition hostile to life. Biology needs a lot of muck, and it generates a lot of muck. Princess Ivanka makes it sound as if we should bleach everything. (Ask the coral reefs how that’s working out.)

I cannot wait to see the back of these people.

Hahahahaha Princess Ivanka and Prince Jared are SUING, they are SUING I tell you.

I’m sure they’ll win that suit because how could anyone possibly back up the claim that Princess Barbie is indifferent to the sufferings of people harmed by her criminal murderous daddy?

For the first time ever I feel a twinge of gratitude toward Princess and Prince, for giving us this bit of amusement in dark times.

Why do they keep doing this?

This makes NO sense. Women are the ones subject to sexual violence and harassment and creeping (you know, cameras, peering over the partition, that stuff), not men. Women; not men. It shouldn’t be men who are given the toilets to themselves while women have to share them with men; that is backwards.

Plus the whole…”well we don’t want to push men around because they might punch us, so we’ll just dump it all on you, because if you punch us we can smash all your teeth in.” It’s called bullying; it’s called unfair; it’s called taking advantage.

I wish I’d heard that (or could currently find a recording of it):

Marina sent the perfect question:

Seriously. How can Kate Manne talk about something named “male entitlement” or “male privilege” if she doesn’t know who male people are? How does she know they’re not all trans women but just haven’t worked up the courage to say so yet?

Festival of Ideas blurbs the conversation:

Philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny. She ranges widely across the culture — from the Kavanaugh hearings and ‘Cat Person’ to Harvey Weinstein and Elizabeth Warren — to show how the idea that a privileged man is tacitly deemed to be owed something is a pervasive problem. Male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women’s pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are ‘unelectable’. The consequences for girls and women are often devastating.

Male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women’s pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are ‘unelectable’ not to mention the ease with which men can announce that they’re trans or non-binary and instantly shed all trace of privilege and instead become the victims of those monsters, women who don’t believe men can become women.

As Manne shows, toxic masculinity is not just the product of a few bad actors; we are all implicated, conditioned as we are by the currents of our time. She sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to be cared for, believed and valued.

Unless they’re TERFs. Or Karens. Or both.

Aw, Bibi won’t play.

Speaking to “Bibi” on the phone in the Oval Office earlier today, Trump tried to goad Netanyahu into attacking Joe Biden.

“Do you think Sleepy Joe could have made this deal, Bibi?” Trump asked Netanyahu, referring to Biden by an insulting nickname. “You think he would have made this deal? Somehow, I don’t think so.”

Very appropriate. Just what heads of state are supposed to do – try to draw other heads of state into insulting a rival for the office. “Bibi” will have to work with Biden if we succeed in putting a stake through Trump’s gut, but Donnie Two Scoops can’t be bothered with details like that when they’re about other people.

But Netanyahu did not go along with Trump’s attack, instead saying, “Well, Mr President, one thing I can tell you, is, um, uh, we appreciate the help for peace from anyone in America, and we appreciate what you have done enormously.”

Peter Tatchell’s determined indifference to the concerns of women – which he names accurately and claims to “sympathize and empathize with” – is breathtaking to see.