Zing

More on the Georgia lynching: from the Guardian Wednesday:

According to a police report obtained by the New York Times, Gregory McMichael, a former police officer and district attorney’s investigator, told investigators the incident began when he spotted Arbery from his front yard “hauling ass” down the street.

I.e. running, aka jogging. Running is a thing that people do. It’s a popular form of exercise. Furthermore, it seems to me, that kind of running looks quite different from running to escape a threat or the cops. Exercise running is systematic in a way that fleeing danger is not. You’d think it would be recognizable as such even to a former DA’s investigator.

But then it’s widely known that there’s a whole separate category of “while black” activities that automatically come under suspicion. Driving while black, walking while black, shopping while black, playing in a park while black – all draw special fear and suspicion from white people.

According to a letter obtained by the Times, the prosecutor in Brunswick argued there was not probable cause to arrest the McMichaels because they were legally carrying firearms, had a right to pursue a burglary suspect and use deadly force to protect themselves.

Wait just a fucking minute there. In what sense was Arbery a burglary suspect? Only in the nonsensical sense that McMichael “suspected” him – apparently because he saw him hauling ass jogging down the street. Arbery wasn’t a genuine burglary suspect, he was a suspect only in the jumping-to-conclusions mind of the ex-cop who got him killed. Outside the moss-infested mind of Gregory McMichael, Arbery was simply a young guy out running.

If it’s legal in Georgia to murder someone as long as you then explain that you “suspected” that someone of burglary, Georgia needs to fix that law yesterday.

ABC reports:

Two men have been arrested and charged with murder and aggravated assault for the February shooting of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34, were arrested on Thursday and will be booked into the Glynn County Jail.

Cellphone video showing the moment Arbery was killed has prompted national outrage since surfacing online this week, but his mother said she can’t bring herself to watch it.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be in a mental state where I can actually watch the video. I had others that watched it that shared what they saw and that just was enough,” Wanda Cooper-Jones told ABC News in an interview that aired Thursday on “Good Morning America.”

She shouldn’t watch it.

“I’m managing, it’s really hard,” Arbery’s mother told ABC News Thursday. “It’s really been hard.”

Updating to add: the two white men have been arrested.

Then there’s the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.

Georgia prosecutor has called for a grand jury investigation into the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man who was killed after being chased by two white men in February while out running in a residential neighborhood outside Brunswick, a city on the state’s southeast coast.

It’s unclear why those two white men have not been arrested to this point, unless it’s just as simple as “Well they are white men you see.”

Advocates have likewise expressed alarm over the way the shooting has been handled by police, and the lack of criminal charges thus far brought against his attackers. Anger erupted after a disturbing video emerged Tuesday on social media, appearing to show the violent, and seemingly unprovoked, circumstances surrounding Arbery’s death.

I haven’t watched the video. Can’t do it.

The police have had the video since February 23, the day of the murder, and have kept it to themselves.

Video footage captured by an unidentified witness in a vehicle being driven behind Arbery shows him as he jogs along a two-lane road on Feb. 23. Ahead, a white pickup truck is parked, with one man standing in the truck bed and another standing by the driver’s side.

Arbery is seen running toward the truck’s right side and he then veers in and out of the camera’s frame. A gunshot rings out. Arbery is then seen entering into a struggle with one man, who appears to hold a long gun. Another shot then rings out; Arbery was shot at least twice before he fell to the pavement.

An incident report from the Glynn County Police Department obtained by the New York Times identifies Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34, as two men who pursued Arbery, though they are not immediately identifiable in the video footage. The report includes a series of quotes from Gregory McMichael, who is identified as a witness.

And this is where the ears start to ring from sheer rage.

Gregory McMichael said he saw Arbery run by his front yard and alerted his son, according to the police report — he says they thought he resembled a suspect behind recent break-ins in the neighborhood. Both men then grabbed weapons and attempted to follow Arbery in their pickup truck.

STOP RIGHT THERE.

What.the.fuck.

People don’t get to grab their guns and go out to chase down people they “think” looks like somebody they “think” has been behind some local break-ins. End of story. This isn’t a movie from the 50s, this isn’t a tv show, this isn’t the OK Corral; random people are not deputized to chase people down and shoot them.

After a chase, the men pulled up beside Arbery and shouted at him to stop, McMichael claimed, and Travis McMichael got out of the vehicle with a shotgun. Gregory McMichael alleged that Arbery then attacked Travis and that the men began fighting over the weapon before any shots were fired— an assertion which appears to contradict the footage appearing to show Arbery only began grappling with a man after the first shot.

What the hell were they doing pulling up beside him (while carrying great big guns) and shouting at him to stop??? They’re not his bosses and they’re not the cops. We don’t need vigilante policing thank you very much.

According to a New York Times report, one of the prosecutors, George E. Barnhill, who had formerly been assigned to examine the case told police the men who chased Arbery were acting in accordance with Georgia’s self-defense and citizen arrest statutes.

So amateur policing is legal in Georgia? That’s insane. Stark raving mad.

Andrea Young, the executive director for the A.C.L.U. of Georgia, noted similarities between the circumstances of Arbery’s killing and the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin.

“The vigilante behavior that we saw in Brunswick is unacceptable in a civilized society,” Young said in a statement. “Ahmaud was killed three days before the anniversary of the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. Both incidents are a reminder that white supremacy has been a foundation for our country and leads repeatedly to the targeting and harming people of color, particularly African Americans.”

Indeed. It’s horrendous.

A dark day.

What’s the problem.

We’re toast.

And now filthy Barr’s filthy Justice Department has dropped the charges against filthy Michael Flynn, who confessed to them twice.

It’s almost as if they can’t make their case without lying and failing to define terms. Meredith Farkas at American Libraries Magazine:

In February, the controversial Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) booked a room at Seattle Public Library (SPL) for a public event. WoLF denies the existence of transgender individuals and portrays trans women as dangers to cis women.

One: anything can be called “controversial.” Farkas’s article is “controversial.” Feminism is “controversial.” Libraries are “controversial.” Two, WoLF does not “deny the existence of transgender individuals.” It denies that trans people can literally change their sex. Three, trans women are men, so of course they are potentially dangers to women. Four, there is no such thing as “cis” women, there are only women.

That’s just the first paragraph. It’s striking how feeble it is, and how heavily it relies on these infinitely-repeated untruths and fictitious labels to try to form an argument.

I take issue with the notion that libraries are ensuring all voices are heard when they let hate groups speak. Hate speech considered in a vacuum might look merely offensive, but when viewed in a historical context, that speech is inextricably linked with physical violence. Young men marching with torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us” are intentionally evoking the Holocaust, just as a burning cross on a lawn is meant to evoke lynching. These actions are designed to silence those targeted.

There is considerable truth in that. I do think the torches and chants were meant to invoke the Holocaust and to scare the bejeezus out of Jews and descendants of slaves and probably women too. But that very application makes it grotesquely wrong and malicious as applied to feminists arguing that only women can be women. There were no torches, no chants of “Jews will not replace us,” no crosses burning on lawns. Saying that men cannot literally become women is not any kind of hate speech and is in no way linked to violence.

Megan Boler, in her 2000 article “All Speech Is Not Free: The Ethics of ‘Affirmative Action Pedagogy,’” argues that we must apply “historicized ethics” to issues around free speech, recognizing the power imbalances in our society and the fact that “all persons do not have equal protection under the law.” In a world where marginalized people are less safe expressing themselves and their words are given less weight, the equality implied in the marketplace of ideas doesn’t exist. By being neutral, libraries are tacitly giving the privileged power to speak and allowing marginalized individuals to be silenced.

Oh look at what she’s assuming here – that men are the marginalized people who are less safe expressing themselves and whose words are given less weight. Women are the oppressor, the dominant class, the privileged, in her world, while men who say they are women are the oppressed, the subordinate, the marginalized. She apparently doesn’t even notice the absurdity.

The rest of her piece relies on that switch of places, so it’s simply nonsensical.

H/t southwest88

Bloomberg April 28:

Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that compels slaughterhouses to remain open, setting up a showdown between the giant companies that produce America’s meat and the unions and activists who want to protect workers in a pandemic.

Which is more important – the continued ability to eat far more meat than is either necessary or healthy, or the survival of people who work in meatpacking plants? Tough question, isn’t it.

Using the Defense Production Act, Trump is ordering plants to stay open as part of the critical infrastructure needed to keep people fed amid growing supply disruptions from the coronavirus outbreak. The government will provide additional protective gear for employees as well as guidance.

The government – state if not federal – will also make sure that workers who refuse to return to the plants will be denied unemployment benefits.

A handful of companies account for the majority of the nation’s meat, and as workers fell sick in March, plants initially continued to run. But pressure from local health officials and unions led to voluntary closures.

Companies have been pressing to reopen. The president himself has long agitated for Americans to return to work and restore an economy crippled by social distancing measures.

Because who cares if workers get sick? They’re probably all brown people, right?

Environmental Working Group called the order a potential death sentence. The United Food and Commercial Workers union said in a statement that if workers aren’t safe, the food supply won’t be either. At least 20 workers in meat and food processing have died, and 5,000 meatpacking workers have either tested positive for the virus or were forced to self-quarantine, according to UFCW.

Blah blah blah; shut up and give us our burgers.

Bloomberg yesterday:

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said he expects U.S. meatpacking plants to fully resume operations within a week to 10 days, during a meeting with President Donald Trump and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds.

…

More than half of workers at some American meat plants tested positive for coronavirus, which has slowed production even as some facilities reopen. While Smithfield Foods Inc. is restarting its giant Sioux Falls slaughterhouse on Thursday, it doesn’t expect to return to full operations until late May. Absenteeism is spiking at some plants as workers take leave out of fear of being infected.

…

Trump is prodding states to reopen their economies, even as cases and deaths continue to mount in the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, the world’s largest. Reynolds, a Republican, announced last week that certain businesses — including restaurants, malls and fitness centers in roughly three quarters of the state — could open with limited capacity. She also lifted restrictions on religious services statewide, as long as they follow social distancing guidelines.

Iowa is crucial to Trump’s re-election bid and the White House is paying close attention to the situation there.

And throwing other people’s lives away for the sake of his continued dictatorship.

I hope he is coughing a dry cough right now.

NBC has a slightly different account of what Trump & goons did about the CDC report on re-opening: NBC says they sent it back to the CDC requesting revisions, as opposed to shelving it. Maybe different unnamed officials are telling different reporters different things.

The White House sent back guidelines it received from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month on how businesses, schools and other organizations should reopen with a request for revisions, two administration officials said. The White House coronavirus task force, which is headed by Vice President Mike Pence, viewed the CDC’s advice as overly restrictive and in some cases thought it undercut the White House’s three-phase guidelines for opening up the country, released in mid April, the official said.

Yes but we don’t want Trump’s goons telling the CDC what to do on medical advice, we want the reverse of that. We want the CDC telling Trump & goons, because the CDC has knowledge and Trump & goons have self-interest.

“Issuing overly specific instructions — that CDC leadership never cleared — for how various types of businesses open up would be overly prescriptive and broad for the various circumstances states are experiencing throughout the country,” a task force official told NBC News, noting that the White House guidelines advise states to open up in safe and responsible ways based on their own data and response efforts.

“Guidance in rural Tennessee shouldn’t be the same guidance for urban New York City,” the official said. “For some of these reasons, the Task Force, who saw this after it was leaked, asked for certain revisions to be made to not only follow the phases in the Open Up America guidance, but work for all across America whether in rural areas or urban.”

Oh bullshit. Six feet are six feet whether you’re in New York or Montana. That’s just a transparent pretext for letting Republican governors put their state’s people at risk to please Trump.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was asked Thursday at her weekly news conference about the news regarding the CDC report. She said that the U.S. must have a “federal standard” for reopening because she said “viruses know no borders.”

“The way this has been handled is most unfortunate because, first of all, they had guidelines, which were weak but nonetheless guidelines, and then the president said you don’t even have to honor them, and then we find out now that there was a CDC report that had much more comprehensive guidelines and they buried it in the White House.”

Or sent it back demanding revisions.

Meanwhile Trump’s concern for everyone else’s health and safety continues to not exist. AP reports:

The Trump administration has shelved a document created by the nation’s top disease investigators with step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places during the still-raging coronavirus outbreak.

Nah, they said. Too much trouble, they said. Too protecty. We want to get all those proles back to work now, not baby them and pamper them and wrap them in cotton.

The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.

It was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day,” according to a CDC official. The official was not authorized to talk to reporters and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

The AP got a copy from another unnamed official.

Traditionally, it’s been the CDC’s role to give the public and local officials guidance and science-based information during public health crises. During this one, however, the CDC has not had a regular, pandemic-related news briefing in nearly two months…

The dearth of real-time, public information from the nation’s experts has struck many current and former government health officials as dangerous.

Probably because it is dangerous.

“CDC has always been the public health agency Americans turn to in a time of crisis,” said Dr. Howard Koh, a Harvard professor and former health official in the Obama administration during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009. “The standard in a crisis is to turn to them for the latest data and latest guidance and the latest press briefing. That has not occurred, and everyone sees that.”

Why has it not occurred? Has to be because Trump and his goons have prevented it from occurring.

The suppressed report contains detailed advice, some of which appears on the CDC website and other of which appears nowhere.

For example, the report suggested restaurants and bars should install sneeze guards at cash registers and avoid having buffets, salad bars and drink stations. Similar tips appear on the CDC’s site and a Food and Drug Administration page.

But the shelved report also said that as restaurants start seating diners again, they should space tables at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) apart and try to use phone app technology to alert a patron when their table is ready to avoid touching and use of buzzers. That’s not on the CDC’s site now.

Trump and his goons are deciding how much safety advice we get to see.

The good news is that states that ask the CDC for full advice will get it. The bad news is that states have to ask.

Oops.

One of President Donald Trump’s personal valets, who works in the West Wing serving the president his meals among other duties, has tested positive for coronavirus, the closest the virus is known to have come to the president, said a White House official.

But Trump has since tested negative, Hogan Gidley hastens to assure us.

The White House did not say when the person developed symptoms or when the president was last exposed to the individual, who[m] Gidley described as a military official. It can sometimes take several days for the virus to appear on a test once a person has been infected.

…

“This guy is close” to the president throughout the day in terms of proximity, said a second source familiar with the matter. A White House official said the president was “not happy” when he was informed of the development.

In other words he had a screaming fit.

Staffers who come into close contact with the president have said they are tested regularly for coronavirus, but very few aides have been seen wearing masks around the West Wing, including when Trump traveled recently to Phoenix where he said he only wore a mask for a brief period of time. Everyone entering the White House grounds has their temperature checked.

But checking temperature is not testing for the virus. Rachel Maddow made this point a couple of days ago while discussing the recklessness and worker-endangerment of Trump’s order to re-open meatpacking plants.

I hope Trump’s valet has a mild case and recovers well.

Oh of course they are. Trump and his goons are “questioning” the stats. Naturally.

President Trump has complained to advisers about the way coronavirus deaths are being calculated, suggesting the real numbers are actually lower — and a number of his senior aides share this view, according to sources with direct knowledge.

It’s actually about 30 deaths total, and a few hundred cases. Way less than the flu, and less than falling off the barn while taking a selfie.

A senior administration official said he expects the president to begin publicly questioning the death toll as it closes in on his predictions for the final death count and damages him politically.

In other words someone in Trump’s gang expects him to start lying about the death toll for his personal political gain.

Reality check: There is no evidence the death rate has been exaggerated, and experts believe coronavirus deaths in the U.S. are being undercounted — not overcounted.

And cases are being way undercounted because there’s so little testing.

The number of people dying over the past few weeks, in many parts of the country, is a lot higher than average, suggesting that the official count of coronavirus-related deaths is still missing tens of thousands of people.

But Trump is going to say there are tens of thousands too many as opposed to too few. Because he’s a lying thieving cheat.

No disgruntled people allowed.

Trump said Dr Rick Bright, the vaccine expert who has said he was demoted for refusing to promote hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment, is a “disgruntled guy.”

“I never met him, I know nothing about him, but he’s a disgruntled guy,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office.

If he never met him how can he know he’s a disgruntled guy?

“I never met him, I know nothing about him, but he’s a disgruntled guy,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “And I don’t think disgruntled people should be working for a certain administration.”

But everyone who works for Trump is disgruntled. They’re all disgruntled at Democrats, uppity women, uppity workers, uppity brown people, uppity journalists, uppity medical experts, uppity governors, uppity rivers and streams, uppity clean air…the list goes on longer than we have life spans to recite it in.

These are not peace-loving or genial or friendly people. These are angry racists and misogynists who want to be dominant. Disgruntlement is their Weltanschauung.

Bright filed a whistleblower complaint with the office of special counsel yesterday after he was removed from his post as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

…

He said he was moved to a smaller role after he “made clear that BARDA would only invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic in safe and scientifically vetted solutions and it would not succumb to the pressure of politics or cronyism.”

And Trump is disgruntled about it.

It’s a tough job but other people have to do it.

President Donald Trump fixed his course on reopening the nation for business, acknowledging that the move would cause more illness and death from the pandemic but insisting it’s a cost he’s willing to pay to get the economy back on track.

Because he’s confident that he won’t be the one paying it. (He has no reason to be confident of that, especially given the way he keeps gathering people around him with not a mask in sight, but he doesn’t bother with reasons.)

On his visit to a Phoenix Honeywell International Inc. factory producing medical masks, Trump encouraged Americans to think of themselves as “warriors” as they consider leaving their homes, a tacit acknowledgment of deep public reservations about reopening the country too soon. Twenty states have begun to reopen without first meeting criteria Trump himself outlined last month, including a sustained decline in the number of infections they’ve reported, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News.

We have to be “warriors” but there are no Nazis who can surrender.

Speaking separately in an ABC News interview broadcast on Tuesday evening, Trump said closing down the nation was “the biggest decision I’ve ever had to make.”

By which he means: check out how important I am.

“There’ll be more death,” he said. “The virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be back to normal.”

But it’s not going to “pass” – i.e. just disappear of its own accord. That’s just Trump’s verbal magic-summoning, and it won’t work.

Meanwhile he bounced around the factory wearing safety goggles but no mask.

Senior White House officials also did not don the masks, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend when social distancing isn’t possible. Factory workers, members of the press and other support staff did. Trump also lamented that he had to stand six feet apart from two supporters during his speech…

Masks are for pussies and socialists and Mexicans and people of Paris and other such LOSERS.

Here he is in the goggles and the no-mask, with the usual upper-body tilt to hide his gut, which causes his hands to dangle feebly in front of him.

Sigh.

Sounds good! But wait.

So it’s open to men, so bang goes yet another award intended for women.

One Texas boss is telling the workers: no masks allowed.

That’s what a back-of-the-house employee at a Hillstone Restaurant Group establishment in Dallas was told last week, as restaurants prepared to reopen at 25% capacity, according to CBS Dallas.

That employee, who did not want to be identified publicly, expressed discomfort and was told to think about it—and then was removed from the schedule, the employee told CBS Dallas’ Brooke Rogers.

If you’re not willing to die on the job, you’re fired.

The employee said management also told her that face masks don’t complement the restaurant group’s style or level of hospitality.

Oddly enough that’s true of pretty much all restaurants, as well as shops, bars, theaters, offices, schools – lots of workplaces. They’re usual and undisturbing in medical settings, dentists’ offices, many factories, farms, construction sites and the like. I’ve worn dust masks on the job plenty of times. The public areas of restaurants naturally tend not to be full of people with masks in normal times, but these aren’t normal times.

Infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Diana Cervantes called Hillstone’s decision concerning.

“It is really important to be able to wear those face coverings, especially if you can’t keep that six-foot social distancing, which of course when you go to a restaurant, that it very hard to maintain,” Cervantes, of UNT Health Science Center, said.

In fact impossible. There’s no way to put people’s food in front of them from six feet away.

She points to Governor Greg Abbott’s minimum standard health protocols for restaurants, which encourages social distancing first. But if that’s not feasible, it says measures such as face coverings should be rigorously practiced.

Which protects the customers as well as the workers, after all.

Hillstone management also points to the law, writing on its website: “Current orders do not require our staff or guests to wear face masks. If you are concerned about your safety in this respect, we hope you will join us a later date.”

Or how about never; never’s good for me.

Wut?

So…he wore one somewhere behind the scenes where no reporters could see him, but not in the plant he was there to visit.

I’m gonna call that a brazen lie, on the grounds that what the fuck would be the point of wearing it “backstage” and not wearing it in the plant where he could infect the workers or vice versa or both? Nothing. Nothing would be the point of that. He didn’t wear it “backstage” and the Honeywell chief didn’t tell him that. He just didn’t wear a mask, because he didn’t want to.

Trump is ok with it if lots more people die because he tries to “re-open” the economy.

President Donald Trump said in an exclusive interview with ABC “World News Tonight” Anchor and Managing Editor David Muir on Tuesday that “it’s possible there will be some” deaths as states roll back restrictions aimed at stopping the spread of the novel coronavirus, acknowledging that it was the choice the country faces to reopen and jumpstart the economy.

…

In addition to the president’s acknowledgement directly to Muir that it’s “possible there will be some” deaths as a cost of reopening the country, the president also acknowledged during his visit to Arizona that there will be some who are “affected badly” by the decision.

“Will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open and we have to get it open soon,” Trump said, directly acknowledging there will be a real, negative human cost in prioritizing an economic revival over a more cautious approach in favor of public health. But even as the president advocates for a return to normal economic business, the nation’s governors remain in control of decision-making for their respective states.

The president’s cost-benefit analysis is exemplified in his decision to move forward with disbanding the task force of medical experts in the weeks ahead, as he declares that “our country is now in the next stage of the battle.”

Except that it’s not. Nothing has changed. There is no effective treatment, there is no vaccine. This is not the next stage, this is the same stage – the one with a virus that we can neither prevent nor treat, that spreads with shocking ease, that kills some of its victims and leaves some with permanent damage to lungs and other useful bits. The only “next stage” here is the next stage in Trump’s stunted attention span.

Even as the president sought to prepare Americans that “more death” is ahead, he expressed optimism that the virus will go away, regardless of whether a vaccine is achieved.

“There’ll be more death, th[en] the virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be back to normal. But it’s been a rough process. There is no question about it,” Trump said.

That’s not “optimism,” it’s just making shit up. It’s just childish assertion. “It’s going to pass because I want it to, the end, by Donnie Trump age 4.”

The president’s optimistic outlook stands in contrast to the consensus of opinion among public health experts in warning that the virus will continue to pose a major risk until the time that there is effective treatment and vaccination.

It’s not an “optimistic outlook”; it’s heedless reckless lying for the sake of his own desire to hold rallies and win the next election.

Also, he’s still insisting that anyone who needs a test can get one. That’s not true. At all.

The president was dismissive of two new analyses that offered cautionary tales against a premature reopening, one from Johns Hopkins University that warned the daily death rate could nearly double by June and a model from the University of Washington model that warned the U.S. death toll could increase to nearly 135,000 by Aug. 4.

“These models have been so wrong from day one. Both on the low side and the upside. They’ve been so wrong, they’ve been so out of whack. And they keep making new models, new models and they’re wrong,” the president said.

Again: this is just Trump making shit up.

Urgent matters:

How can anyone be dim enough to think that because Jane Wellmeaning from Accounting signs herself “Jane Wellmeaning she/her” therefore the organization is “trans-inclusive”? What do the two even have to do with each other?

Nothing really; rather, it’s a shibboleth, a hoop to jump through, a symbol, a test, a genuflection, a self-advertisement, a blockade, a display of heightened sensitivity and (much as I hate to say it) virtue. Yes, it’s that stale trope virtue-signaling. It’s not a trope I love because it’s applied way too broadly and often, and in my view not always fairly. But this? It’s such a crappy and stupid idea in the first place, and so irrelevant to pretty much everything in the second place, that I don’t see what it can be other than virtue-signaling. Maybe it’s also meant to be signaling “inclusivity” and compassion and solidarity, but the more frantically the People of Pronoun signal with the Pronoun Flag the less able I am to take any of it seriously. On the one hand centuries of oppression, poverty, exploitation, and on the other hand…Delia here was assigned male at birth so please make her feel welcome.

Not to mention the plain absurdity of it. We might as well add our favorite conjunctions to our email signatures. Betty Benevolent, if/because/when. Putting your pronouns in an email signature makes no sense because people aren’t going to hit reply and say “Dear Her.” There’s no call for pronoun-identification in correspondence, because the subject doesn’t come up. Unsolicited irrelevant pointless information about The Self is not desirable in work correspondence, and applying social pressure to use them is just…I lack the words to say what it is.