Hmm.

Yes, that is striking, striking in being so very wrong. (That may be what Carlos Lozada meant; my disdain is for Biden, not him.)

Never before walked away from it? Is he kidding? Does he remember what “we” did to the people who were here first? The genocide, the mass expulsions, the theft, all that? Does he remember slavery?

Of course we’ve walked away from it before. We’ve failed to go anywhere near it at any time, before. We’re not unusual that way but the invasion and expropriation of the Americas are more recent and conspicuous than others, so we have less right to preen ourselves on being always sort of kind of pro-equality. As a country, we were not; that’s not our history. It’s just slush to say otherwise.

The UN reports:

Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has warned against complacency on women’s rights at an event marking the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration, a landmark agenda for the empowerment of women.

…

“Women’s rights are threatened and attacked” on many fronts, she warned, adding that there over this period there has been “a backlash and the resurgence of gender inequality narratives based on age-old discrimination”.

And the surgence of male appropriation of everything belonging to women including the word “women.”

However, for the UN human rights chief, women’s rights are not negotiable: “they cannot be an optional policy, subject to the changing winds of politics,” she warned. According to Ms. Bachelet, the women’s rights agenda must not be torn apart by the establishment of a hierarchy between what is acceptable and what is deemed “too sensitive”.

Or what is deemed too “transphobic” or too “cis” or too much about women as opposed to men who claim to be women.

Ms. Bachelet also welcomed the speech delivered to the Human Rights Council by UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday.

As part of his Call to Action for human rights, Mr. Guterres called on every country to “support policies and legislation that promote gender equality, to repeal discriminatory laws, to end violence against women and girls and to strive for equal representation and participation of women in all areas”.

In his speech, Mr. Guterres also worried about “setbacks to women’s rights, alarming levels of feminicide, attacks on women’s rights defenders, and the persistence of laws and policies that perpetuate submission and exclusion”.

“Violence against women and girls”, he said, “is the most widespread human rights violation”.

But we keep being told that trans people – especially trans women – are the most oppressed of all, and that it’s mostly women who oppress them.

First you have to know that Jo Grady is the General Secretary of the University and College Union aka UCU.

So this is the General Secretary of the UCU cheering on Lola Olufemi’s success at getting Oxford feminist historian Selina Todd barred from giving her scheduled talk at a feminist history event.

It’s enough to make you lose your lunch.

GENITAL

PREFERENCES

ARE

TRANSPHOBIC

As is everything else. Food preferences, weather preferences, dog preferences, book preferences, politics preferences – any kind of preference is transphobic, because.

You have been told.

Now see that you obey.

As usual, truth is the first victim. Jonathan Freedland at the Guardian:

The coronavirus crisis is a war against a disease, but it’s also the most serious battle yet in the war on truth. That much was clear from the start, as China moved to hush up the first outbreak and gag the doctor who had spotted it. It was a classic case of what we might call Chernobyl syndrome: the tendency of authoritarian systems to react to disaster by rushing to downplay or cover up the problem, focusing more on shifting blame than tackling the threat head on.

But this time it’s not just the openly, explicitly authoritarian states that are lying and hiding.

… this time, the familiar authoritarian v democratic contrast has become muddled. That’s because the current leader of the world’s most powerful democracy, the US, has the same instincts as the authoritarian rulers he so admires, and those instincts have coloured his response to coronavirus. The result is that what for many must have seemed an abstract concern – Donald Trump’s assault on facts, experts and science – is now a matter of life and death.

I don’t think many people thought of Trump’s assault on facts, experts and science as an “abstract concern.” It warps everything he does, including getting elected.

So while US medical officials have been at pains to brace Americans for the inevitability of coronavirus – a matter of when, not if – Trump and his outriders have worked hard to minimise the threat. On Thursday, Trump repeatedly referred to the figure of “15” cases in the US, when the actual figure was 60, and promised that that number would go down rather than up: “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Lying is so natural to him that he may not even know he’s doing it. He says what is useful to him, always, and truth doesn’t come into it. Very young children are like that, because human brains take a long time to develop, but most people are not like that once they mature.

One of the administration’s most influential propagandists – for whom Trump paused his state of the union address this month so that his wife, Melania, might garland him with America’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has been telling his vast audience that “the coronavirus is the common cold, folks”, and that it had been “overhyped” and “weaponised … to bring down Donald Trump”.

It’s hard to know what to say about that. Limbaugh isn’t Trump, Limbaugh knows he’s lying. Why would he tell dangerous lies about a growing epidemic to flatter Donald Trump? I don’t know. I can’t fathom it.

[Trump’s] first instinct is that of the Manhattan hustler-hotelier loudly assuring guests that the strong smell of burning coming from the ground floor is merely the chef trying out a new barbecue rather than a sign that the building is on fire. Crucial to that effort is talking loudly over the fire marshals, or even gagging them altogether.

You could see that when Trump spoke in the White House briefing room, brazenly contradicting the experts by his side. But it’s now become formal policy, with Trump’s insistence that all federal officials – including those with deep scientific expertise – are to say nothing that has not first been authorised by the White House.

Note the fate of Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. On Thursday he dared say that “we are dealing with a serious virus” with a higher mortality rate than regular flu. That was deemed insufficiently upbeat for the great leader. According to the New York Times, “Dr Fauci has told associates that the White House had instructed him not to say anything else without clearance.”

Well, a few thousand or million lives are a small price to pay for Donald Trump’s continued grip on power.

Trump has gutted the very agencies that the US will now desperately rely on. In 2018, he slashed health spending by $15bn, binning the Obama-era programmes and teams established for the express purpose of leading the US response to a pandemic. Among those cut: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – now in the frontline against coronavirus – which was forced to reduce by 80% its efforts to prevent global disease outbreak. The consequences are clear enough: only eight of the US’s 100 public-health labs are now even able to test for Covid-19.

But we saved money, so Amazon can pay less in taxes.

I’ll skip that one, thanks.

In local news…

One person in King County has died due to a novel coronavirus infection, Public Health – Seattle & King County officials announced Saturday morning. It is the first death attributed to the virus in the United States.

Two people connected to a Kirkland long-term care facility have tested positive, officials said Saturday afternoon. A resident in her 70s is in serious condition, and a health employee in her 40s is stable. The long-term facility in Kirkland has 108 residents and 180 employees, according to the CDC.

At the Kirkland facility, 27 residents and 25 employees have symptoms.

So that’s not good.

Kirkland is 11 miles from where I’m sitting.

All local cases announced Saturday were acquired through “community transmission” in the Seattle area, said Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, health officer for Public Health – Seattle & King County. That means none of the patients had traveled overseas.

Somebody tell Trump.

Gov. Jay Inslee has declared a state of emergency in response to the new cases. The proclamation allows state agencies to “use all resources necessary to prepare for and respond to the outbreak.” 

Okay then.

About those “people who were pulling out” – this is one:

Lola Olufemi believes that feminism is “a political methodology that we can use to make demands for our freedom and the freedom of others” – why others? Why can’t women advocate for our own freedom? And feminism isn’t a “political methodology,” whatever that would mean, and it isn’t about “making demands” and it’s far broader than demands for “freedom.” In short her feminism isn’t feminism.

Furthermore “woman” is not “an umbrella term under which we can gather.” It’s the word for the female half of the human species. It’s not any kind of “umbrella term,” any more than “man” is.

There’s a lot more dopy confused stale verbiage. She’s only young, it’s probably unfair to be too harsh with her, but she’s been destructive and wrong here.

Well, that’s one I haven’t seen before.

Filia has the short talk that Selina Todd would have given this morning if she hadn’t been abruptly pushed out at the last minute.

I am delighted to be here today. I owe my life to Ruskin College and my career to feminism. My parents met at Ruskin in 1967. My mum was one of 6 children who grew up in a working-class family in Leeds. She was the only girl. Here’s something she wrote recently about her childhood: ‘As a five- or six-year-old I had refused to touch my parents’ birthday present of a doll with a pram, sensing the restriction such a role-defined toy would place on me. My brothers would never have been offered such a present. I wanted a bike and after months of rejecting them, the doll and pram were sold and I got my bike. Action paid off.’

I grew up in a world very different from the one of her childhood. Thanks to the Women’s Liberation Movement, I had the right to equal pay and equal rights at work before I even got to school. When I started history at my coeducational comprehensive school in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the influence of feminism meant that the first history class we ever had was in women’s history. We were asked to go and interview the oldest woman we knew about her life. For me, women’s history and working-class history were never ‘marginal’, absolutely central to any understanding of who made change happen and how.

And they weren’t “exclusionary” either.

Today we continue to fight for those rights that the first Ruskin conference, and the movement it helped to create, campaigned for: the right to women’s refuges, women’s history teaching, equal pay and against male violence. At times it is easy to despair that this fight must continue. But history reminds us feminism never starts from a good place: it is borne from oppression. History also reminds us of the great victories that arose from that day at Ruskin fifty years ago. It is an honour to celebrate those feminists who made so many of our lives and achievements possible, and with whom we stand in sisterhood today.

The right to women’s refuges, in particular, is under attack not just from the right, not just from openly domineering men, but also from the woke left and from men who pretend to be women.

Selina Todd added a statement on the no-platforming:

I am shocked to have been no-platformed by this event, organised by Oxford International Women’s Festival and hosted at Exeter College. I was asked to participate in October 2019, and I explained to the organisers that some trans activists may object to my being there. I was then told that trans activists had already expressed hostility towards the event because they claimed second-wave feminism is inherently trans-exclusionary. However, the organisers decided that because I am a historian of feminism and working-class women, they would like to invite me, and were open to many different points of view being expressed at their event. I was delighted. I am deeply interested in the history of the WLM – my first academic article focused on it – and my parents met at Ruskin shortly before the first conference was held there. Participating had personal and scholarly significance. 

She warned them about the trans “activists” bullying, and they invited her anyway…then took it back hours before the event.

Between October 2019 and February 2020 I helped the organisers to get support from Oxford History Faculty – in the form of student helpers, facilitators and some funding – and to find media contacts. I was stunned to receive a phone call at 6pm on the evening before the conference telling me that I had been no-platformed. The organisers say this is because of pressure from trans activists and Feminist Fightback. I refute the allegation that I am transphobic, and I am disappointed that the organisers have refused to uphold our right to discuss women’s rights – one that the original organisers had to fight hard for.

I’m disappointed and very very very pissed off.

I’m now 14 minutes into the video.

The two women doing the explaining are getting increasingly frustrated that the audience won’t just say ok and settle down and keep their issues about Selina Todd’s exclusion for lunch and breaks, so that the event can proceed.

But the audience in turn is frustrated that the two women doing the explaining don’t seem to grasp the outrageousness of the last minute disinvitation of Selina Todd.

The “explanation” in part is that Todd wasn’t on a panel or giving a talk, she was simply doing a two-minute thank you for the history department. That’s all! Two minutes! A thank you! It doesn’t count! One of them actually says it’s not a no-platforming if it’s only two minutes. I think that schedule with the conspicuous whiteouts tells a different story.

The main part of the “explanation” is that “people were pulling out” – and they had to decide, on very short notice, which would be the least disruptive thing to do. It’s not always possible to make out exactly what members of the audience are shouting back, but I think the gist of it is that they made the wrong choice. You can make out the word “bullying” quite often.

One of the women – the one who isn’t Tracy – explains that Selina and her history department colleague John were both going to say a thank you from the history department so the people in charge decided instead of both let’s just have John do it. At that point some shouts from the audience remind them that it’s a women’s conference.

It’s just a mess. These two women who are among those putting on this women’s liberation event and they appear to have no clue that it’s not ok to let men bully them into disinviting a woman from a women’s liberation event. “We told her she’s welcome to attend,” they keep insisting.

So.

And she was and she did.

I’ve watched 7 minutes so far. It’s maddening to watch – maddening to see the women academics explaining to other women academics that they simply had to push Selina Todd aside because “people were pulling out.” Julie and others keep asking “But why were they pulling out, what explanation did they give?”

Julie is…magnificent, as always.

Yes, he really did say it. Here he is saying it.

CNN has more:

President Donald Trump is hoping for a “miracle” that will make the coronavirus disappear but tanking stock markets and signs the disease is stalking America are delivering their verdict on his scattershot management of the crisis.

…

“It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” Trump said at the White House Thursday as the virus marched across Asia and Europe after US officials said the US should brace for severe disruption to everyday life.

The President also warned that things could “get worse before it gets better,” but he added it could “maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.”

Yes but just “seeing what happens” is not going to cut it. There are things people have to do – like wearing protective gear around infected people. Miracle-awaiting passivity is not our only or best option.

There are also signs that the White House is more concerned with its political plight than the burgeoning crisis.

An order for public health officials to clear all television appearances with the White House meanwhile raised the question of whether Trump will prioritize science as the threat from coronavirus rises or his own political standing.

That right there? That’s the wrong kind of action. Preventing public health officials from informing us is not the way to go. Error, error, return to starting position.

As television news channels devoted wall-to-wall coverage to the coronavirus, government public health officials were nowhere to be seen. Sources told CNN that all media appearances have to now be cleared with Pence’s office. The move could deprive Americans of sober, science-based advice from some of the best public health experts in the world.

Could? Almost certainly will, unless someone reverses the order.

CNN has reported that Trump has been angered that government health experts have contradicted his attempts to downplay the threat from the virus by saying it is all but “inevitable” the US will be affected and there will be severe disruption.

The revelation will do little to quell suspicions that Trump is trying to suppress damaging information to pacify the markets and protect himself politically and gets to the fundamental issue of the administration’s squandering of public trust. His acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, acknowledged to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday that potential disruptions to everyday life, such as school closures and impacts on public transportation, are likely. But his advice to people worried about the market reaction to the outbreak was to “tell people to turn their televisions off for 24 hours.”

Yeah, that’s the ticket, don’t do anything, just stick your head in the sand for 24 hours – on the 25th hour everything will be fine again!

None of this inspires confidence.

The briefing, led by CDC Director Robert Redfield and NIH infectious disease specialist Tony Fauci, was called to update members [of Congress] on the state of the coronavirus’ spread.

Redfield stressed that the risk to Americans remained low. But Fauci was more blunt, according to one person in the room, telling lawmakers that they need to accept there will be many more cases in the United States.

Fauci said the coronavirus is “unlikely to disappear” any time in the near future, according to the person. The remarks contradicted Trump’s declaration Thursday night that the disease was “going to disappear” one day “like a miracle.”

Siiiiigh.

Fauci also emphatically denied reports that the White House is preventing him from speaking publicly about the virus. Vice President Mike Pence’s office had asked him to delay pre-scheduled television hits and seek renewed clearance to do the appearances in the wake of Pence’s appointment as response leader, he said.

How is that not preventing him from speaking publicly about the virus? Looks oddly like it to me.

Asked about an HHS whistleblower complaint alleging the department dispatched unprotected workers to aid coronavirus evacuees from China, the officials did not directly contradict the allegations, lawmakers said. But they insisted that they believed everyone was properly trained and protocols were followed.

That is really not the issue. Nobody cares what they “believed.” The issue is what they did, and didn’t do.

Robert Kadlec, the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response, emphasized that no response workers had gotten sick while receiving the evacuees. But Rep. Mark Takano (D-Wash.), who represents a district where one of the Air Force bases that received evacuees, said he found the administration’s response lacking.

Fucking hell, not getting the disease does not mean you’re not contagious! This is the problem with putting Trump’s caddies and burger-fetchers in charge of things like the national health.

We’re doomed.