Sad.

The epistemology is obviously a joke, but the allegiance underlying the joke is for real. His allegiance is to team men are women if they say they are, and his hostility is to team men are not women just because they say they are.

I would have thought that verification by “because I say so” would be anathema to scientists. I especially would have thought that when the issue is an obvious material fact which is being denied on the basis of an internal subjective mental state. That doesn’t work for other things – we can’t say “I am the Chrysler building” or “I am a humpback whale” or “I am the solar system” and expect to be believed, so why does it work for men who say they are women? Why does a scientist treat it as obviously and rock solidly true?

Granted “women” and “men” are squishier categories than those. It’s possible to masquerade as the other sex, and it may even be possible to fool people for a while. Several of Shakespeare’s plays are constructed around women (played by boys) masquerading as men, and women were not allowed to perform on stage in most cultures until quite recently. But actors play monarchs, murderers, extraterrestrials, all sorts of identities not their own; that doesn’t change the underlying realities. Burt Lahr was never in any danger of actually becoming a lion.

We can all pretend it’s true that men become women by saying the words, but feminists have been explaining why that would be the end of women’s rights so let’s not decide to do that. Apparently Phil Plait doesn’t give a shit, which is sad.

Trump is bragging about…New Zealand?

Donald Trump has called out New Zealand for its recent Covid-19 outbreak, saying the places the world hailed as a success story is now facing a “big surge” in cases.

“The places they were using to hold up now they’re having a big surge … they were holding up names of countries and now they’re saying ‘whoops!’.

“Do you see what’s happening in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it, it was like front-page news because they wanted to show me something,” the US president said at a campaign rally in Mankato, Minnesota.

That’s why they did it?

Of course the US has a lot more people. New Zealand has 4.8 million, the US has 328 million. The US would have to have around 600 new cases today to match New Zealand’s 9 but of course it has only…uh…42,000.

Overall 22 people have died from Covid-19 in New Zealand, compared with more than 170,000 in the US, the highest death toll in the world. It accounts for nearly 22% of deaths globally.

Yes but we have 66 times the population! 66 times 22 is…uh…1452.

The demonic shit is pushing ahead with his plan to destroy the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge. No matter how busy one is golfing and watching Fox News and tweeting sexist insults, there’s always time to destroy irreplaceable wilderness.

The Trump administration is pushing ahead with plans to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The first leases to drill for oil and gas in the area could be sold by the end of 2020, Interior Department Secretary David Bernhardt said as his agency formally announced its leasing program on Monday.

We need more oil so that people can sit in their cars with the engines running for hours playing with their phones. It’s a basic human right.

Environmental groups have pledged to sue to stop the move. They said that once drilling rights are sold, it will be harder for a future president to reverse course.

…

“The Trump administration never stops pushing to drill in the Arctic Refuge — and we will never stop suing them,” said Gina McCarthy, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “America has safeguarded the refuge for decades, and we will not allow the administration to strip that protection away now.”

…

Sierra Club lobbyist Athan Manuel has been fighting to keep rigs out of the refuge for more than 20 years. He said the Trump administration is rushing to get at least one company to bid on leases before the end of Trump’s term and the possible arrival of a new president who opposes drilling.

“I think they just want to ram this down people’s throats to show that they can still drill where they want to drill and still prop up the oil industry, even in the face of evidence of climate change,” he said.

Wilderness Society’s Alaska state director, Karlin Itchoak, said in a statement that the move by the Trump administration “ignores science and shortcuts the public process in an irresponsible rush to help oil companies secure leases on the coastal plain before the 2020 presidential election.”

They want to hurry up and break it while they can, in case the anti-breaking party wins.

Now Trump is promoting a poison to “treat” the virus.

President Donald Trump and Mike Lindell, the creator of MyPillow and an avowed supporter, participated in a July meeting at the White House regarding the use of oleandrin as a potential therapeutic for coronavirus, Lindell confirmed to CNN.

What other meetings are they having? Meetings regarding being run over by tanks as a potential therapeutic for coronavirus? Meetings regarding being sliced up by swords as a potential therapeutic for coronavirus? Meetings regarding jumping out of planes without a parachute as a potential therapeutic for coronavirus?

Oleandrin is an extract from the plant Nerium oleander. The raw oleander plant is highly toxic, and consumption of it can be fatal.

So let’s use the presidency to tell people to try it! To cure a deadly disease! Which everyone would like to see a cure for!

[Lindell] described the President’s response toward the extract as “enthusiastic.”

“He was enthusiastic, as he is on everything that’s going to help people,” he told CNN, adding that Trump wanted the Food and Drug Administration to “do its course.”

No, as he is on random things that random people mention to him and that he knows nothing about. Things that really are going to help people he’s not enthusiastic about at all.

Trump confirmed he’s “heard about” oleandrin when asked Monday on the White House South Lawn, but still seemed to be in an information-gathering phase.

Hahahahahaha is that what you call it.

Last week, Lindell was added to the board of Phoenix Biotechnology, which makes oleandrin, and received a financial stake in the company.

Well great, thank god Trump is getting his information from a disinterested observer.

“The reason I did that, I want this to get to the public so bad and I want to get it out there to help people,” he said.

As far as I can tell Lindell has no medical training. Wikipedia says his background is more in crack addiction.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Lindell was addicted to cocaine, crack cocaine, and alcohol, leading to foreclosure of his house, and his wife filing for divorce. Lindell stated that he achieved sobriety through prayer in 2009, and, since then, has been clean.

That’s nice but it’s no substitute for medical or pharmaceutical training. You need that before it’s of interest that you’re “enthusiastic” about a poisonous plant as treatment for a virus.

How poisonous is it though? Pretty damn poisonous.

While it’s a beautiful shrub, all parts of it are toxic to people and animals. Ingesting any part can cause serious symptoms or even death. Skin contact also can result in irritation, such as rashes and sores. Plus, even smoke from burning the plant is toxic. 

But hey, let’s get all excited and “enthusiastic” about popping it for covid or to prevent covid or just on general principles.

Sean Coughlan at the BBC explains now what:

The next part of the A-level U-turn jigsaw is that the government is allowing universities in England to add more places – to meet the extra demand from young people who have had their results upgraded.

…

To increase capacity, the government in England will lift the “student number controls” which would have capped places.

Which means universities can add more students but

But that still depends on it being possible – they will still need to have enough spare space, teaching staff and accommodation, along with the pressures of Covid-19 social distancing measures.

Which doesn’t just magically pop into being because it’s needed.

A later update (the BBC doesn’t provide links to each segment of live reporting, unlike the Guardian):

Queen Mary University of London said in a tweet it was “deeply sympathetic” to affected students, and that it would guarantee a place to any students who had originally missed but now met the terms of their offer.

An hour down the page there is a student who was sad about her lost place at Queen Mary:

“I’m relieved but quite frustrated at the same time. It’s too late,” says Zainab Ali, 18, from London.

…

She’s come to terms with the fact that she’s going to her second choice, the University of Westminster, instead – but still feels frustrated because she had “always wanted” to go to Queen Mary’s since being a child.

So it looks as if she’ll get to go after all (perhaps with overcrowding).

That’s a bit of good news for a change – or just the undoing of a bit of bad news, as so often, but we take what we can get. They’ve said “Sorry, we’ll reverse the whole thing, sorry” about the exams-evaluations-algorithm mess. I was reading a lot of desperately sad tweets yesterday by parents of kids at state schools who’d earned a place reading engineering at Cambridge and then had it snatched away by the algorithm.

Gavin Williamson and Ofqual have apologised to students and their parents, as they announced that all A-level and GCSE results in England will be based on teacher-assessed grades.

In a spectacular U-turn, the education secretary announced the government would scrap the controversial standardisation model drawn up by the exams regulator to award grades in lieu of exams.

Instead, both A-levels and GCSE results will revert to centre-assessed grades, which were submitted by schools earlier this summer.

There are winners and losers either way, but since the losers were heavily weighted toward students in state schools as opposed to posh schools, it seemed doubly or triply cruel.

The climbdown comes after days of turmoil triggered by the publication of A-level results last Thursday, when almost 40% of predicted results were downgraded, with some students marked down two or even three grades, which resulted in many losing university places.

…

Hundreds of pupils took to the streets of London, demonstrating outside the Department for Education to express their anger, while others took to the airwaves and social media to describe their sense of devastation. Lawyers had began to consider taking action on behalf of affected teenagers.

…

Ofqual argued that the algorithm was essential to ensure results were standardised across the country and in line with previous years, but hundreds of individual stories documenting disappointment and an overwhelming sense of injustice among those affected proved too much to ignore.

However hard they tried.

Graham Linehan hosts a scorching retort by Victoria Smith to Rebecca Solnit’s smug glib mess of a Guardian open letter, starting from an essay of Solnit’s about male violence.

On this, you are totally right. Male violence is a global outrage. Why, then, have you written a piece which dismisses women’s fears as “really weird”, writes off actual occurrences of male violence as “lurid what-ifs”, euphemistically characterises sexual assault as “unpleasantness”, tells women which male people they’re allowed to be wary of (the ones who aren’t your mates) and accuses women of “posing a threat” if they are insufficiently accommodating? Do you have any idea what you sound like?

But of course, Victoria goes on, Solnit would say she’s not talking about people who are male, she’s talking about this much more sophisticated thing “because “science has gotten smarter in the decades since [the 1970s] and we now know it’s a complex interplay of chromosomes, hormones, primary and secondary sexual characteristics and other stuff”” blah blah blah.

Let me be clear: even if you can bodge together a sort-of argument to defend it, it’s disgraceful to tell a subset of female rape victims that their experiences don’t constitute male violence, that, on the contrary, they don’t constitute experiences at all, just “lurid what-ifs”. Disgraceful, too, to suggest that domestic abuse victims who require female-only shelters just haven’t understood that “complexity and fluidity can be a blessing”. Truly, what was your thinking here? That if these women hadn’t spent drab childhoods in Nowheresville but had spent more time in “the loudest, proudest queer town around”, they wouldn’t have become such bigots? Are you sure it’s your superior open-mindedness, and not your privilege, that’s talking here? 

What I’m seeing here is not a challenge to patriarchal thought. On the contrary, you’re supporting its endless repackaging. Don’t you realise that those of us who grew up beneath the shadow of domestic abuse, however “traditional” its presentation, rarely thought this was what was happening to us? The patriarchy is always other people, hence the ease with which you tell other women which male people they’re permitted to fear (not your friends, just everyone else’s).

We always want to make exceptions for our friends, Victoria goes on, which is why Harvey Weinstein got away with it for so long.

You know perfectly well, as The Longest War shows, that in condemning male violence we do not condemn all male people. This does not mean that we should pick out subsets of the male sex class – priests, respectable family men, friends of Rebecca Solnit — and grant them a free pass.

Another such subset: men who say they are women, men who say they identify as women, men who say they have a woman’s brain in a man’s body, men who say they have the soul of a woman.

You do know better than this. You just don’t want to because it would cost you too much in terms of social standing amongst your peers, who’ll cheer as you point the finger at the easy targets – the far-right politicians, the Christian fundamentalists, the incels – but start screaming bigot the moment you question whether male socialisation and entitlement lurks amongst them, too. Honestly, you, me and every feminist on Earth could have a lovely communal rant about what an evil patriarch Trump is, but some of us will still have to go home to allies who beat the crap out of us, and to violence which you insist requires no definition, no political context, no words at all. This thinking – this strategic ignorance – is what patriarchy depends upon. Without it the whole thing would fall apart. 

A scorcher. Read the whole thing.

Remember when Trump gave Rush Limbaugh the “medal of freedom”? Obama gave it to John Lewis; Trump gave it to Limbaugh. So about Limbaugh –

RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): I have two stories about Kamala Harris. One’s from The Spectator, and one is — one of the — one of the oddball sports websites. The NBA has fired a freelance photographer because he insulted Kamala Harris. His name is Bill Baptist.

…

He’s ”a freelance photographer he’d been working for the NBA inside its bubble at the Disney World complex in Orlando” — as the NBA goes through its supposed season here. He’s an independent contractor, had the deal terminated by the league after he posted a “sexist Facebook post referencing Kamala Harris.

…

He posted an image that read ‘Joe and the Hoe,’” — h-o-e.

Aka ho, aka whore. Medal of freedom guy Limbaugh calls Kamala Harris a ho. This is hell, nor are we out of it.

Part two.

Then there is this from The Spectator: “Why It Should Matter to Women That Kamala Slept Her Way Up.” Whoa! You know what that’s about? That’s about Willie Brown.

…

“It’s no secret, but public knowledge that Kamala Harris slept her way up into California political life by being a very public escort and mattress for California Democrat kingmaker Willie Brown.”

Medal of freedom.

Iowa got clobbered a few days ago. Really clobbered. Nobody is paying attention.

On Monday, Iowa was leveled by what amounted to a level-two hurricane. But you wouldn’t know that from reading, listening to or watching the news.

…

Gusts of 112 mph were recorded in Linn County. As I drove through the town of Cedar Rapids on Monday, I saw billboards bent in half, whole buildings collapsed, trees smashed through roofs and windows. The scope and breadth of the disaster is still being calculated, but by some estimates, more than 10 million acres, or 43 percent, of the state’s soybean and corn crops have been damaged.

A quarter of a million Iowans are still without power. In Linn County, where I live, 79 percent of people are without power, still, three days after the disaster. Cell service is spotty, where it exists. The few gas stations and grocery stores with power only take cash. And good luck getting cash from your bank, which is most likely closed. Even if you have the money, lines snake around the gas stations, two hours long or more, and the grocery stores are chaos. A citywide curfew exists. You can see the Milky Way from the darkened downtown.

You know what all those days without power mean, right? A whole lot of spoiled food, and not much other food available.

My friend Ben Kaplan, a local photographer and videographer, described the situation this way: “There is no trash pickup. There are one hundred thousand fridges of rotting food. There are raccoons. There is no escape from the heat, except to run out of town to look for basic supplies in an air-conditioned car. Downtown, bricks and glass litter the sidewalks. Plate glass windows shattered during the storm. Many businesses have been physically destroyed. All restaurants lost all of their perishables. Factories are closed. Offices are closed. The economy — the whole thing — is stopped.” All of the destruction is compounded by complications from the pandemic, which make cleanup, charging stations and distributing meals all the more difficult.

And yet, unless you were living here, you wouldn’t know.

But hey, football.

Donny’s found a new doctor buddy.

President Donald Trump has found a new doctor for his coronavirus task force — and this time there’s no daylight between them.

It’s gonna disappear, like things that disappear. It’s because of testing that we have so many cases. They were all old anyway. You can fix it by injecting a little bleach. We’re doing GREAT. Let’s watch some football.

Trump last week announced that Dr. Scott Atlas, a frequent guest on Fox News Channel, has joined the White House as a pandemic adviser. Atlas, the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, has no expertise in public health or infectious diseases.

So what, he’s a DOCTOR.

But he has long been a critic of coronavirus lockdowns and has campaigned for kids to return to the classroom and for the return of college sports, just like Trump.

College sports! What could possibly be more important!?

“Scott is a very famous man who’s also very highly respected,” Trump told reporters as he introduced the addition. “He has many great ideas and he thinks what we’ve done is really good.”

This was the president talking? Not a five-year-old who wandered in from somewhere?

Atlas, the sole doctor to share the stage at Trump’s pandemic briefings this past week, has long questioned polices that have been embraced by public health experts both in the U.S. and abroad. He has called it a “good thing” for younger, healthy people to be exposed to the virus, while falsely claiming children are at near “zero risk.”

A good thing, hey? Even now that we know there’s little if any immunity? How is it a good thing then?

In an April op-ed in The Hill newspaper, Atlas bemoaned that lockdowns may have prevented the development of “natural herd immunity.”

That was April. Growing evidence is that there is no herd immunity. People have been getting the virus a second time.

Paul E. Peterson, director of the program on education policy and governance at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Hoover with Atlas, praised Atlas as “a really brilliant guy” with “a tremendous knowledge base” about the virus. Peterson said Atlas is someone who conducts ”the most rigorous and careful research before he comes to a conclusion.”

Some colleagues have found Atlas abrasive. But Peterson, who has written several op-eds with Atlas advocating the reopening of schools and who appeared with Atlas at a White House event this past week, praised Atlas as “delightful to work with” and stressed the value of Trump having input from people with a variety of backgrounds.

“If you get a variety of people from one perspective or one kind of training out there, that’s not desirable,” he said. “It’s extremely important to have diversity on the advisory board.”

Right. Some who say the pandemic is very serious and some who say it’s nothing and all we need is for more people to get infected.

Fabulous pairing.

They’re so confident, so dogmatic, so lecturey with the bullshit. The hand goes up and down, the vowels are crisp, the voice is shouty.

“This includes transgender women,” purple hoody with glasses tells us forcefully, “because they are women – being transgender does not eliminate, whatsoever, their identity as a woman.”

Well that’s us told!

But it’s bullshit. Purple hoody can gesture at us all she likes, she can over-enunciate her words all she likes, it doesn’t make the bullshit true. Yes being a transgender man does eliminate his “identity as a woman” – whatever that might be. A man is a man even if he fantasizes that he’s a woman every hour of every day. Nobody, nobody at all, is required to join him in his fantasy, or assure him that it’s true. And lesbians for damn sure don’t have to pretend that yer man really is a woman and that they would just love to have sex with him.

And then on comes orange hair and wo mama, she’s worse than purple hoody. She’s a nightmare.

“What we’re saying, is that your ‘preferences’ [finger hooks in the air here] are based in transphobic dogma that’s been spread by society for centuries.”

That sounds oddly familiar. It sounds oddly like “You don’t really prefer your own sex, you’re just confused/screwed-up/brainwashed by those confused screwed up kids you hang out with.” It sounds and is oddly and exactly like “you will let this man fuck you or else.” And it’s a woman saying it, and she’s saying it with all the venom of an angry Baptist preacher.

Via Morty.

From the Independent:

[warning – it’s gruesome]

A woman who fantasised about being blind claims to have arranged to have drain cleaner poured in her eyes to live the way she was “supposed to be born”, it has been reported.

Jewel Shuping, from North Carolina, said she was diagnosed with Body Integrity Identity Disorder, a psychological condition where healthy people believe they are meant to be disabled.

I would suggest wearing eye patches rather than pouring Drano into the eyes.

The 30-year-old’s desire to be blind reportedly began in early childhood. At the age of six she would spend hours staring at the sun after being told it could damage her eyes, she told Barcroft Media.

If that were true surely it would have worked. Hours??? Not credible.

BIID, a disorder coined by Dr Michael First, affects a small percentage of the population and is typically associated with the desire to have a specific body part amputated. Suffers often become envious of people who have the disability they crave.

A theory as to the disorder’s cause is that “the brain is not able to provide an accurate plan of the body” causing it to see the offending body part as “foreign and not actually part of the person, thus the desire to have it removed,” according to Biid.org.

Which does nothing to explain wanting to be blind, or thinking you want to be blind.

Trump’s brother died in the hospital yesterday. Trump played golf.

It’s getting to him today though.

Leo Igwe asks:

What will Islam/Muslims in Kano gain by executing a person who sang a song that was critical of Muhammad…….????

More:

From Vanguard

The Muslim Lawyers’ Association (MULAN), Kano State branch has on Saturday okayed the death sentence judgment against one Sharrif Yahaya for blaspheming the holy prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.).

This was also as it called on the Governor, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje to ensure strict compliance to the Judgement. The Muslim Lawyers’ in a statement signed by it Chairman, Muhammad Sani Garba Esq and made available to newsmen in the state. Garba said the judgment was the right thing as the convict deserves the death punishment.

…

“This is because the supreme court has decided in the case of Abubakar Shalla Vs State (2007) 12 MJSC at page 52-53 paragraph G-B that the position of the Law under Shariah is that any sane and adult Muslim, who insults, defames, or utter words or acts which are capable of bringing into disrepute, odium, contempt of the holy prophet (peace be upon him) such a person has committed a serious crime which is punishable by death.”

What did he do? He said some stuff.

The Prosecutor, Inspector Yargoje in a First Information Report, FIR said Sharif was charged to court for insulting religious Creed contrary to section 382 (6) of Kano State Shariah Penal Code Law 2000.

“That you, Sharrif Yahaya, resident of Sharif quarters, Kano on 28/02/2020 between the hours of 20:00hrs to 23:00hrs with the intention to hurt the feelings of Muslim faithful made a post via WhatsApp group named “Gidan Umma Abiha” some abusive and degrading audio statements in which you called Prophet Muhammad PBUH a theist (Mushrik) who propagate Shrik and whose position is lower than that of INYASS in the hereafter.”

Insulting religious Creed. Saying things about a guy who died 14 centuries ago. The death penalty for that.

Boar!

Boar!

Run!

The Indy has details:

Beachgoers in northern Germany were shocked by the sight of a wild boar approaching them from the Baltic Sea.

Well, you don’t expect it, do you. You expect humans, and maybe crabs, and an occasional otter, but not wild boars. The snout! The ears!

Footage from the scene shows the swine swimming for the shore with its snout and ears poking above the water.

It would make me rethink my leisure habits, for sure.

Wild boar are known to be able swimmers. There were reports last year of a herd of boar swimming several miles across the Malacca Strait from Indonesia to Malaysia and terrorising farmers upon arrival.

Be careful out there.

Not much surprise there.

The coronavirus pandemic has led to a marked deterioration in Americans’ mental health, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study made public on Thursday. That study, which surveyed 5,412 Americans, found that “40.9% of respondents reported at least one adverse mental or behavioral health condition.”

The only surprise is that the number is that low.

According to the new study, 31 percent of respondents were suffering from symptoms of anxiety or depression; 26 percent experienced symptoms of traumatic disorder; 13 percent were using drugs or alcohol more heavily, or for the first time, to cope with the pandemic; and 11 percent had seriously contemplated suicide.

Some are mourning a loss, some are dealing with unemployment, eviction, young children with no school to go to, older children with education plans disrupted, and on and on.

Significantly, more than 90 percent said they were not being treated for anxiety, depression or posttraumatic stress disorder before the pandemic struck, meaning that their symptoms arrived with the coronavirus and its attendant social disruptions.

As one would expect. It would be bizarre if 300 whatever million people met all this with unruffled equanimity.

Just how the nation will emerge from that pit remains unclear. Trump has promised a vaccine before the end of the year, but that time frame has been widely described as overly optimistic. Most experts believe that the current state of affairs will continue well into 2021.

So that’s awesome.

Listen, if you don’t believe that people can change sex, you can’t work for the police. It’s just that simple.

In emails seen by this newspaper, Norfolk ­Constabulary told a woman inquiring about a role in the force that the job “would not be ­suitable” for her ­because of her “gender critical” views.

After the candidate made clear that she did not think a person could ­physically transition to the opposite sex, another force in the South East said her views did not constitute “the behaviours expected” and an application “would be not successful”.

Belief that gender is as changeable as nationality or political party is mandatory now. You might be able to get a job cleaning toilets, but don’t bank on it.

The revelation came after a serving police officer of 16 years anonymously emailed internal recruitment teams at 26 forces that were advertising for ­future constables.

The female officer asked if her “gender critical” views would be “a barrier to my application?”

“I must point out that I am gender critical, which means that whilst I am firmly against abuse and discrimination to trans people, I do not believe you can change your biological sex,” she wrote.

She heard back from 14 forces, two of which told her the “Nope not you” thing.

After Norfolk Police advised that her views would “not be something we could ­uphold within the constabulary”, the woman challenged the response.

“My views on this topic do not mean I would act with intolerance or abuse, just as an atheist would be no less likely to be able to be respectful towards a person of religion,” she wrote. “If there were serving officers with these views (as I know that there are), would their ­employment be under threat?

A recruitment adviser invited her to hand over “details and any evidence” of officers who may share her views so they could be “investigated”.

And punished and fired and sent into exile.

Chief Constable Ian Hopkins, the ­National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for diversity and equality said: “The entire police service is bound by and must ­adhere to the Equality Act and the ­police Code of Ethics.”

The Equality Act says people are not allowed to believe that sex can’t be changed?

Trump tells us how he’ll steal the election.

Asshole.

Boats. There are boats.

This happened last week:

At KNKX, we value high-quality, factual information in our news programming and we aim to present an array of voices that reflect our region.

KNKX is an NPR station in Tacoma. It used to belong to Pacific Lutheran University but then

On November 12, 2015, Pacific Lutheran University announced its intention to sell the station to the University of Washington, owner of KUOW.^[4] The planned sale to UW triggered “public outcry” from KPLU’s listener base, who feared KPLU’s unique programming would be sacrificed if it became a sister station to KUOW. On November 23, the KPLU advisory board voted unanimously to oppose the sale.^[5] The board sought to negotiate with a community-based non-profit group, Friends of 88.5, to raise $7,000,000 to buy the radio station and its network of translators and rebroadcasters from the university, keeping it independent.

And they succeeded, which was kind of exciting. I preferred it to KUOW until I quit listening to NPR altogether. But now they’ve done this –

We turn to our regular commentators for their expertise and points-of-view when it comes to sports, food and the weather. But if a commentator, even on his own independent platform, delivers rhetoric that is offensive and inaccurate, we cannot support it.

By which they mean they immediately fire the commentator, and of course they are the ones who determine what is offensive.

This is the case today with Cliff Mass. His post on his personal blog compares recent events in Seattle to Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom carried out by Nazi Germany, and draws distorted, offensive parallels between protesters and Nazi Brownshirts. We abhor the comparison and find it sensationalized and misleading — it does not reflect who we are and what we stand for at KNKX.

The segment Weather with Cliff Mass will no longer air on KNKX.

Here’s the thing: Cliff Mass is really good at the commentator bit. He has an excellent radio voice, resonant without being pompous, and he explains what’s going on up in the air, and he’s interesting and gemütlich. And he says it’s KNKX who distorted.

Last week I wrote a blog post–Seattle, A City in Fear Can Be Restored–criticizing violent individuals who have brought repeated destruction to downtown Seattle and attacked and injured numerous people (including reporters and dozens of police officers).  I also criticized the irresponsible and reckless actions of members of the Seattle City Council, who allowed the violence to continue, tried to cripple and defund the Seattle Police Department, and who have persecuted Chief Carmen Best.

It’s tricky about protests, at least I find it tricky. It’s hard to know if reported violence is genuine protesters getting worked up and out of control, or just people taking advantage of protests to smash stuff and grab some goodies – or some of both. If I’d written about the protests (I didn’t, because of that tricky aspect – I didn’t know enough about what happened and didn’t feel confident about the reporting) I don’t think I would have compared them to Kristallnacht, but I also don’t think doing so is a reason to fire someone, especially someone so good at the job in question.

The next day I received a call from KNKX station manager Joey Cohn and program manager Matt Martinez, saying that I was being ejected from the station because of my blog post.  They were not open to discussion on the matter; I was off the air and my weather segment, one of the most popular segments on the station, was discontinued immediately.

That seems ridiculous to me. Ridiculous, unjust, destructive, stupid.

Their reason for my expulsion, provided in a statement released by the station, was both false and misleading.  For example, it stated that my blog “draws distorted, offensive parallels between protesters and Nazi Brownshirts.”  

This is totally false. I NEVER suggested that peaceful protestors are like brownshirts, I was ONLY talking about violent individuals. 

Criticizing violent protesters shouldn’t be a firing offense even if you disagree – which now that I type it looks so absurdly obvious I feel silly for having to type it.

Just to be completely clear I am a strong supporter of peaceful protests and assemblies.  It is an essential aspect of our democracy and protected in the U.S. Constitution.  Peaceful protests have played a critical role in many positive social movements, such as woman suffrage, ending the Vietnam war, and in promoting civil rights.  I have participated in peaceful protests myself.  But violence—destroying business and hurting people—is a different story.   It is not only illegal, and destructive, but it undermines civil society and democracy, and usually hurts the least advantaged among us the most.  That is what I was speaking out against.

It also undermines the protests themselves, and harms the cause for which they’re protesting. Violent protests aren’t good trouble, they’re the bad kind.

I made it clear to both Joey Cohn and Matt Martinez on the call that my remarks were limited to violent individuals and they still chose to send out the deceptive statement.  For the leadership of a major media group to do so is extraordinarily concerning and disappointing.

A major news media group. They’re a local NPR station.

I don’t know that I agree with Cliff Mass about everything; I probably don’t; but that’s not supposed to be the criterion, is it?

So I signed a petition.