Sometimes they do take my breath away. This is one of those times. The Miami Herald reports:

Immigration court staff nationwide were ordered by the Trump administration to take down all coronavirus posters from courtrooms and waiting areas.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which falls under the Department of Justice, told all judges and staff members in an email Monday that all coronavirus posters, which explain in English and Spanish how to prevent catching and spreading the virus, had to be removed immediately.

So that immigrants will have a better shot at catching the virus, I guess. Which is breathtaking even for them.

“This is just a reminder that immigration judges do not have the authority to post, or ask you to post, signage for their individual courtrooms or the waiting areas,” wrote Christopher A. Santoro, the country’s acting chief immigration judge in a mass email to immigration court administrators nationwide.

“Per our leadership, the CDC flyer is not authorized for posting in the immigration courts. If you see one (attached), please remove it. Thank you.”

And “authorization” is important in this context because? It’s worth ordering federal courts to take down posters with advice on how to avoid a growing epidemic because…what, exactly? Court house aesthetics are worth suffocating to death?

However on Tuesday morning— just four hours after the Miami Herald published this story—a Department of Justice spokesman contacted the Herald to say that the “the signs shouldn’t have been removed. It’s now being rectified.”

Officials declined to discuss why the email was sent in the first place, and who told the chief immigration judge to issue the directive.

I bet they did. It would be very hot-making to have to discuss the fact that the president and his tools are actively trying to spread COVID 19 among immigrants.

That “protest” outside the women’s meeting last night was even more vile than the contemporaneous tweets indicated.

It takes a little effort to puzzle out the image. It’s a guy in a hoody with a mask over his face, with a zipper where his mouth would be, and a pink-wrapped phallus.

More on the smoke bombers near Grenfell Tower trying to bully women out of speaking for women’s rights.

I haven’t found any non-Twitter reporting on this yet. I hope there will be some.

Smoke bombs. Near Grenfell Tower. Because women meet to defend women’s rights.

Wait wait wait hold the phone.

So Trump is going to have to be quarantined?

Thoughts and prayers, people, thoughts and prayers.

It’s the turn of the NY Times to run a think piece by a trans woman full of empty slogans and bereft of argument.

A contentious row began last month, when the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights announced itself with 12 pledges, which ranged from recognizing trans people’s oppression — at risk of hate crime and denied equal access to public services, health care, housing and employment — to supporting the expulsion of members who express transphobic views.

Some people had the gall to object, especially to the threat to expel members who commit a crime with no definition or examples offered.

To many, the sight of a center-left party failing to support trans rights without equivocation must be baffling — not least to American Democrats, whose party, divided in many ways, is firmly united in its support for trans and nonbinary people. But really, it’s no surprise. Transphobia, constantly amplified by the country’s mainstream media, is a respectable bigotry in Britain, shared by parts of the left as well as the right.

But, again, what are “trans rights”? What is “support for trans and nonbinary people”? What is “transphobia”?

Jacques does make a tiny stab at defining, so props for that.

There are two main types of British transphobia. One, employed most frequently but not exclusively by right-wing men, rejects outright the idea that gender might not be determined only by biological traits identifiable at birth.

Not a good definition though. The point is that sex is determined “by biological traits identifiable at birth.” Calling it “gender” confuses the issue. Of course it’s not determined at birth whether little Miracle will wear jeans or skirts, but that’s not where the disagreement lies.

The other type, from a so-called radical feminist tradition, argues that trans women’s requests for gender recognition are incompatible with cis women’s rights to single-sex spaces. At its core, such an argument is not at odds with the first type — both rely on the conceit that trans and nonbinary people should not determine their own gender identities — but it is this second strain that is often expressed on the British left, from the communist Morning Star to the liberal New Statesman and The Guardian.

It’s not a “conceit” that people can’t determine their own sex, it’s just a fact. People can’t determine their own ____ identities in a great many cases. It’s far more a conceit – in the sense of frivolous ornament – to insist that they can.

There follows a lot of complaining that Labour hasn’t been quite fanatical enough on the “trans rights” side of things, and telling Keir Starmer he has to pick a side. Remember, kids, trans people must always get what they want.

Laurie Penny is at it again.

Will you look at that. ” The question is ‘are trans women people?’” No it isn’t! Nobody says trans women are not people. Skeptics of trans dogma say trans women are men, and correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure men count as people.

Bingo.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on The patriarchy that oppresses us all.

I refuse to be defined by MY biology. That’s what more than a century of feminism has been fighting for.I will be defined by MY values, MY ambitions, the company I keep, the work I do, the mistakes I make, the entertainment I enjoy and the people who love me.

At least she appears to admit she has a ‘biology’, though she appears to prefer to be without it. One notices that it is first of all by ‘MY values, MY ambitions’ that she would be defined, and then by a few things that ‘I’ do or enjoy, and in last place by ‘the people who love me’, by which, one can only suppose, she means people who agree or, perhaps out of politeness or fear of getting an ear-full and being de-friended on Facebook, do not publicly disagree with her. Much like Donald Trump. What of those people who look on with disenchanted (which is not synonymous with ‘hostile’) eyes? One is not, first of all, defined by oneself. Even Lorna Slater lives in a social world, where, like it or not, you are constantly being judged by others (and judging others). Your ‘self’, your values, your ambitions, etc are not your inalienable property, existing in some vacuum that you can shape merely by assertion. One has the sense that that Lorna and those many others who behave like her are merely clamouring in the echo-chamber that consists in the remarkably solipsistic idea of the self that she entertains, an echo-chamber within which one feels all-powerful.

I hardly think that more than a century of feminism has been fighting for what Lorna Slater asserts it has been fighting for. But of course, stuck in the little echo-chamber of her self, she doesn’t have to take account of history or anything else beyond her own infantile assertions.

David Remnick on the horror of having Trump in charge during a potential epidemic:

Donald Trump is incapable of truth, heedless of science, and hostage to the demands of his insatiable ego.

Recall, since the start of the coronavirus crisis, the litany of bogus assurances, “hunches,” misinformation, magical thinking, drive-by political shootings, and self-stroking:

“We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

“By April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

“The Obama Administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be detrimental to what we’re doing . . . ”

“We’re going very substantially down, not up. . . . We have it so well under control. I mean, we really have done a very good job.”

“As of right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test [can have one], that’s the thing, and the tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect—the transcription was perfect.”

“They would like to have the people come off [the Grand Princess cruise ship, off the coast of California]. I would like to have the people stay. . . . Because I like the numbers being where they are.”

Physicians and public-health officials told me, as they have told many other journalists, that they are dispirited by the President’s public pronouncements, saying that he has added to the danger of the crisis by minimizing its scale and the need for rigorous precautions. Has there ever been a less serious President?

Voters in the past didn’t have the advantage of watching The Apprentice.

Public-health officials worry that the consequences of living with a President and a general disinformation universe that undermine facts and science could have increasingly dire consequences. He is serving no one well. When you see a Trump supporter at a rally telling a reporter for CNN that she doesn’t believe that coronavirus exists, that it is an invention of the political opposition, there are reasons for that thinking. And such disbelief in the facts might well lead such a person to inadvertently make bad decisions about her health and her family’s health.

We’re doomed.

What is wrong with these people?

As Congress worked to pass an $8.3 billion emergency funding to address the mounting coronavirus outbreak on Wednesday, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida wore a large gas mask on the House floor.

Gaetz posted an image of himself wearing the mask on Twitter Wednesday, later tweeting that he had ultimately decided to back the funding bill, but “didn’t feel good” about its cost.

Hurr hurr. Nothing funnier than a disease outbreak that kills people.

Just two days later, Florida announced that two people had died after contracting the virus, including one of Gaetz’s own constituents.

Whatsamatta, lost your sense of humor?

Philosopher Jennifer Saul jumps on the “bash Suzanne Moore train:

Suzanne Moore, a columnist at the Guardian, says she identifies as “a woman who won’t go down quietly.” But to many, she’s a trans-exclusionary radical feminist — a TERF. Some say TERF is a slur. It isn’t. But it is a misleading term for anti-trans activists like Moore.

So Suzanne Moore doesn’t get to identify as a woman who won’t go quietly, but men do get to identify as women. Moore is to be doubted and called names, but men who say they are women are to be shielded from those nasty women (like Moore for instance) at all costs. Meet the new feminism, the opposite of the old.

Over the past year, disputes between two groups of people, both calling themselves feminists, have erupted on the internet and off — and drawn considerable interest even outside feminism. These disputes concern the status of some of the most discriminated against and marginalized women: trans women.

But they’re not some of the most discriminated against and marginalized women, because they’re not women at all. However difficult their lives may be, however much bullying they face from gender-policing men, they are still men, and they don’t get to claim to be some of the most discriminated against and marginalized women. They don’t get to grab what we are and wrap themselves in it, any more than white people get to grab blackness and wrap ourselves in it. The categories are not up for grabs; they’re not there for the taking by anyone who feels like it.

I’m a scholar not only of feminism but also of language, and I currently work on the use of language to foment hatred. (I’ve also done a lot of work to try to improve things for women in philosophy.) Battles over terms like TERF and woman are central to my work.

I wonder if she works at all on the use of language about “TERFs” to foment hatred against women. From the rest of what she says here I’m guessing she doesn’t – I’m guessing it’s all about “TERFs” fomenting hatred.

So-called TERFs think the term is inaccurate too, but for a different reason: they insist that they’re not trans-exclusionary because they include trans men in the category of women. This is technically accurate on a very literal-minded understanding of what it is to be trans-exclusionary. However, including people against their will in a category that they reject is not what is normally meant by inclusion.

Oh. But it’s ok to call gender critical feminists “TERFs” even though it’s a category that we reject. How does that work exactly?

I hesitate to attach the label feminist to any view that is committed to worsening the situation of some of the most marginalized women.

But they’re not women. However marginalized they are, they’re not women. Also, gender critical feminists are not committed to worsening their situation – that’s a pretty disgusting accusation.

This crap isn’t philosophy, it’s just rhetoric, and sloppy abusive rhetoric at that.

Alex Massie at the Spectator wonders why so many people who work at the Guardian appear to hate journalism.

That is the first and most glaring conclusion to be drawn from the extraordinary letter signed by 338 Guardian and Observer employees lamenting the paper’s willingness to run a column written by the great Suzanne Moore earlier this week, in which Moore argued that “we have gone through the looking-glass and are being told that sex is a construct” and that “you either protect women’s rights as sex-based or you don’t protect them at all”.

The signatories to the letter sent to Kath Viner, the paper’s editor, deplore what they deem the Guardian’s “pattern of publishing transphobic content” though, vexingly, the letter itself provides no evidence of this alleged transphobia and instead merely assumes it.

What I keep saying. The “activists” merely assume everything, to the point where they think endless repetition of slogans is absolutely all that’s required.

 According to Buzzfeed News which received a copy of the complaint – as, doubtless, was intended all along – staff at the paper were “deeply distressed” by the resignation of a transgender employee earlier this week who had, allegedly, received or overheard what are described as “anti-trans comments” from “influential editorial staff”. No details of what these remarks may have been has been furnished by Buzzfeed.

Or anyone else. Details are never furnished by anyone.

Again, according to Buzzfeed’s account, this all followed what is described as “a series of pieces that pitted trans people against women and against women’s rights”. One editorial column even had the temerity to argue that trans rights are sometimes in “collision” with more orthodox interpretations of women’s rights.

Because they are, as Massie goes on to say. If there is no collision what are they protesting about?

The evident implication of the letter sent by the disappointed 338 is that the paper should cease publishing opinions with which some Guardian employees might disagree. A question arises, then: should the Guardian remain a newspaper at all? It is difficult to avoid the thought that 338 of its employees think it should not. As it is, many of them appear shocked by the discovery they have inadvertently wandered into a workplace in which they may discover a range of views. Perhaps they should reconsider their positions.

Check the help wanted adds under “freelance fanatics.”

Trump isn’t going to like this.

The government’s top infectious disease expert on Sunday said that the coronavirus outbreak is getting worse and warned elderly and sick people to think twice before traveling or circulating in crowds.

The remarks from Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, signaled a change in tone from health officials representing the Trump administration, making it clear that the outbreak is past the point where it can be prevented from spreading or easily tracked. That contrasted with the more measured language from some Trump officials including Vice President Mike Pence.

“Measured” is a flattering word for it. I would call it recklessly minimizing.

“If you get infected, the risk of getting into trouble is considerable, so it’s our responsibility to protect the vulnerable,” Fauci said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “When I say protect, I mean right now, not wait until things get worse, say ‘no large crowds, no long trips, and above all, don’t get on a cruise ship.'”

The cruise industry is going to take a wallop. I see 10 or more a week going in and out here from April through October. I bet that’s going to change.

Former Trump FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb predicted the coming weeks will “change the complexion in this country,” adding that lockdowns of certain states or cities “are going to need to happen” or health systems will get exhausted and fatalities will rise quickly.

What’s a lockdown? What does it mean to lock down a city or state? Telling people who can to stay home, I suppose, but I wonder what else. Seattle and environs will be first on the list.

The Associated Press reported late Saturday that the White House overruled a CDC warning that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines. Trump administration officials denied the report.

Trump administration officials lie a lot.

Current and former administration officials have said President Donald Trump’s eagerness to downplay bad news has undercut his own administration’s efforts to contain the outbreak.

No shit.

He’s still doing it, too.

I hope he catches it.

Even the UN.

Not in the other languages, mind – those other women get to keep their name. But Anglophone women? Nah, they’re too second wave and privileged and phobic.