Politics Live on the BBC today:

I’ve seen a couple of clips but I’m not sure I’ll be able to see the whole thing. I haven’t seen the bit where he says that so I can’t confirm that he did say it, but if he did…oy. He’s an MP.

From the Committee to Protect Journalists:

The New York City Police Department should drop all charges against photojournalist Amr Alfiky and provide a public explanation for his arrest, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Police arrested Alfiky, a photo editor at ABC news and a contributor to Reuters and The New York Times, at about 7 p.m. yesterday in New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood as he was filming the arrest on the street of another individual, according to the journalist’s friend, Mostafa Bassim, who captured Alfiky’s arrest on video and spoke with CPJ in a phone interview.

Police held Alfiky at Manhattan’s seventh precinct station for about 3.5 hours, where he was given access to a lawyer and was released after being charged with disorderly conduct, according to Bassim and a report by the New York Daily News, a local daily.

We know Trump considers journalism “disorderly conduct” but you’d hope New York cops would know better. (I know, probably a feeble hope.)

Officers confiscated Alfiky’s press credential, a card issued by the city’s police to grant journalists’ access to restricted spaces, during the arrest and have not returned it, Bassim said.

…

According to the New York Daily News, an NYPD spokesman said that Alfiky “refused to comply with repeated requests to step back” and did not identify himself as a journalist until after he was in custody. However, in Bassim’s video of the arrest, Alfiky can be heard repeatedly and loudly telling police officers that he is a journalist and offering to show his press credentials as the officers handcuffed him.

Sure enough – you can hear him saying it. Repeatedly.

He thinks he has “the absolute right” to interfere in criminal prosecutions. He thinks wrong. It would be nice if he knew the basics of this job he decided to pretend to do.

Also, “aberition.”

So much for law and order, which used to be a Republican lodestar.

The entire team prosecuting Roger Stone abruptly resigned from the criminal case on Tuesday after the Justice Department said it planned to reduce the recommended sentence for Stone, a longtime Trump associate.

The Justice Department on Tuesday said it was pulling back on its request to sentence Stone to seven to nine years in prison after President Donald Trump blasted the sentencing proposal as “a miscarriage of justice.”

…

After reports that a softer sentencing recommendation was imminent, lead prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky withdrew as a prosecutor in the case. A footnote in his court filing noted that “the undersigned attorney has resigned effective immediately.”

Zelinsky, who was a part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russian election interference, is not resigning from the Justice Department but is leaving the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office and returning to his old job with the U.S. attorney in Maryland.

Another prosecutor, Jonathan Kravis, also resigned — both from the case and as an assistant U.S. attorney. Kravis on Tuesday filed a notice with the judge saying he “no longer represents the government in this matter.” The other two prosecutors, Adam Jed and Michael Marando, also withdrew from the case.

Never mind, we’re still dealing out long prison sentences to black people and poor people.

Have YOU signed?

Labour leadership contender Rebecca Long-Bailey has signed up to a pledge to expel party members who have expressed “transphobic” views.

#ExpelMe.

It is part of a 12-point plan by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights.

The plan has also been backed by deputy leader hopeful Angela Rayner – but critics say it could lead to a “witch hunt” of party members.

It could and it will. You know it will.

The pledges include accepting that there is “no material conflict between trans rights and women’s rights” – and supporting the expulsion of Labour members who “express bigoted, transphobic views”.

The group states that “trans women are women, trans men are men”.

But they’re not and they’re not, which is why they’re called “trans.”

They also back the fight against what the group alleges are “transphobic organisations”, naming two in particular; Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance.

Woman’s Place UK, which says it campaigns to defend women’s “hard-won rights”, said it “absolutely refutes” claims their organisation is transphobic, describing the allegations as “scurrilous” and “defamatory”.

Yes but they’re just women, so what do they know.

What about women? Do women matter at all?

#ExpelMe is trending on Twitter. What’s it about?

There’s this:

Which we can read here.

Below find our founding statement and pledges for all Labour Party members who support trans rights to sign.

Meaning, I guess, if you don’t sign, you don’t support trans rights.

The Labour Campaign for Trans Rights has been founded by transgender and non-binary Labour members in order to advance trans liberation through the Labour Party. Trans people today are disproportionately affected by the evils of homelessness, unemployment, poverty and hate crime. We live under a Conservative government which restricts our rights and puts those with transphobic views in positions of power; whilst we are attacked relentlessly by a reactionary press.

Liberation from what, though?

Obviously no one should suffer homelessness, unemployment, poverty, or hate crime. But what’s this about restricting rights? What rights exactly?

As the party which stands for socialism, the Labour Party must play an active and crucial role in the fight for transgender liberation. Although Labour is the party which has worked hardest to advance LGBT+ rights, when considering the level of oppression trans people face, our commitment to trans liberation has often been equivocal or inadequate. There are still transphobes in our ranks, and we have often failed to act as transphobia has gained ground within our party. Now that trans people face the onslaught of a Conservative majority, this must change, and it is this campaign’s goal to create a Labour Party which stands firmly on the side of trans people.

That’s just more of the same, and it clarifies nothing. Liberation from what? What is transphobia? What does “standing firmly on the side of trans people” entail?

We firstly urge all allies and sympathetic Labour members to sign our founding pledges, and to encourage your comrades, and especially your representatives in the Labour movement, to do so as well. These pledges have been written to outline some of the actions required to rid the Labour Party of transphobia and to stand up for trans people.

Ok, finally we get to specifics.

1. Accept the material reality that trans people are oppressed and discriminated against in British society, facing a rising risk of hate crime, and difficulty accessing public services, healthcare, housing and employment.

I don’t know how true any of that is, but it’s not outlandish.

2. Believe that trans liberation must be an objective of the Labour Party, and that transphobia is antithetical to our collective aims.

Before I know what “liberation” we’re talking about and what “transphobia” is? No.

3. Commit to respecting trans people as their self-declared gender, and to ensure that the Labour Party is an inclusive environment for trans people.

Ah, there we go, finally something we can grasp.

And no, I’m not going to do that. It doesn’t matter, because I’m not in the UK and so not in the Labour Party, but if I were I wouldn’t. No. I’m not going to “commit” to respecting anybody as their self-declared anything. It’s much too general and sweeping an order to obey. No.

4. Accept that trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary people are non-binary.

No. They’re not, they’re not, and that doesn’t mean anything.

5. Accept that there is no material conflict between trans rights and women’s rights, and that all trans women are subject to misogyny and patriarchal oppression.

No, and fuck off.

6. Listen to trans comrades on issues of transphobia and transmisogyny, allowing trans people to lead the way on our own liberation.

I might, if I hadn’t been paying close attention for the past five or so years, but I have, so no.

7. Support the work of trans members and organisers within the Labour movement, including supporting motions on a local, regional and national level which are presented for the furthering of trans liberation.

See above.

8. Oppose transphobic motions which run contrary to our own party equalities policy, and support the NEC striking down such motions on this basis.

On whose say-so? What if we think they don’t run contrary to our own party equalities policy? So that’s another No.

9. Organise and fight against transphobic organisations such as Woman’s Place UK, LGB Alliance and other trans-exclusionist hate groups.

Oh hell no. Meanwhile – how about trans comrades listen to women more? There’s an idea.

10. Support the expulsion from the Labour Party of those who express bigoted, transphobic views.

Hence #ExpelMe.

Go on then.

11.Support reform of the Gender Recognition Act to improve transgender rights, as well as supporting policies which would improve trans people’s access to necessary healthcare, housing, and employment.

What rights? Improve them how? Better access to necessary healthcare, housing, and employment would be good for everyone, trans people included – included, not especially included, or singled out for extra.

12. Organise against and oppose any further transphobic policy from our own party or any other.

Clearly “transphobic” here just means not taking orders from entitled narcissists who want to kick feminists out of Labour.

So that’s why #ExpelMe is trending.

The gangsters are inside the house.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) has faced a bitter GOP backlash after casting the lone Republican vote for President Trump’s impeachment. There have been angry tweets and calls for the party to expel the man it once nominated to lead the country.

On Sunday, one influential conservative went so far as to say he could not be sure of Romney’s safety at a major right-wing gathering, alarming some of the Utah senator’s defenders and — in some critics’ eyes — crossing a line from outrage to threat.

Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference, made the controversial comments Sunday as he explained why Romney would be excluded from this year’s four-day event. Schlapp announced last month via tweet that the senator was “formally NOT invited,” as Romney took heat for breaking from staunch Republican support of the president to call for witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial.

The word for Republican support of Trump shouldn’t be “staunch.” That makes it sound admirable, like “loyal” and “dedicated” and “courageous.” I suggest mindless or slavish or shameful.

Schlapp has denied any threatening intent in his Sunday comments, tweeting that he has “no beef [with Romney’s] family” and hopes “they have happy healthy lives away from politics.”

Which is another barely-veiled threat.

The Republican National Committee blasted the lawmaker in an email last Wednesday under the subject line “Mitt Romney turns his back on Utah,” while Donald Trump Jr. declared on Twitter: “He’s now officially a member of the resistance & should be expelled” from the GOP.

And yet, back in 2016, many in that GOP knew he was rotten to the core.

Truth matters. Right matters.

He’s an anthropologist so he must know.

[Editing to add: Actually, after a bit of googling, I suspect he’s not an anthropologist but a guy with a BA in anthropology. Maybe he’s filling or playing or performing the role of anthropologist and therefore, according to him, he is one.]

Innnnteresting. I suppose this is a special anthropological use of the word “fill”? I suppose “filling” a role is not the same as playing a role? We’re to understand it as not-fictional, not-pretend, truthy-true?

Not exactly. He does seem to mean performance – the acting kind, not just the doing the job kind.

Ahhhh. All that’s required is consistency. That does make things simple. So we could all put on a lab coat and ask medical questions and write “Dr.” in front of our names, and we’d be filling the role of doctor, and thus we would actually be doctors.

Uh oh. Is he evading the question? I think he’s evading the question. I think he’s fleeing the interview.

And there you go. “Woman” isn’t a real, material category, it’s a set of stage directions.

Biden: let’s not.

Anna North at Vox elaborates:

The phrase immediately got attention, with many confused by Biden’s choice of words. As it turns out, “lying dog-faced pony soldier” is a phrase Biden has used before. He attributes it to John Wayne, though its actual provenance is somewhat unclear.

And whether it is John Wayne or not, why say it? When campaigning for the presidency? To a very young female voter? Don’t we have enough of that kind of thing already?

Biden has been criticized in the past for responding to questions — especially questions posed by women — in ways that seem condescending, as when he called moderator Lyz Lenz a “lovely person” after her question at a September LGBTQ rights forum. And the moment in New Hampshire was another reminder that while Biden’s responses may seem folksy or homespun to some, to others they’re a sign that he’s not always treating voters with the seriousness they deserve.

And whether they seem folksy or homespun to some or not, why say it? When campaigning for the presidency? To a very young female voter? Don’t we have enough of that kind of thing already?

Biden’s “Uncle Joe” persona (sometimes, less flatteringly, “Creepy Uncle Joe”) was the subject of jokes during the Obama years. But he’s not the vice president anymore, the older foil to a young commander in chief. Now, Biden is running to be the leader of the country, and young voters are less likely to brush it off when he answers their questions with strange movie references — at 77, he has to prove that he actually understands them and their concerns.

He also has to convince us that he actually will live another five years, which is a little tricky when you’re 77.

I just think it’s egomaniacal of him to be running when he’s such a bad candidate in so many ways. Haven’t we had enough of egomaniacs yet?

Er…Don…you missed the point.

We had a hell of a sunset here last night. This fella captured it (the second one).

NPR tells us:

The Justice Department’s door is open if President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, wants to pass along information from Ukraine connected with Joe Biden and his family, Attorney General William Barr said Monday.

Why? Why is the door open?

“As I did say to Senator Graham, we have to be very careful with respect to any information from the Ukraine,” Barr said. “There are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine, a lot of cross currents, and we can’t take anything we receive from Ukraine at face value.”

Seeing as how it might be coming not from Ukraine but from Putin’s bag of tricks. Good call.

Hilarity ensued.

If it is not up to him to determine who is or who is not part of his/their/our/your LGBTQ community does that mean he can’t say TERFs are not part of it? Or no?

The US is a major human rights violator.

Migrants, for instance, face extreme brutality here.

In the early morning of June 12, 2017, a group of eight Central American migrants decided to go on a hunger strike to protest conditions at the immigration detention center where they were being held in California.

When detainees arrive at the facility, they’re given a handbook that states explicitly, “Detention is NOT prison.” Immigration detention is where the government holds people while deciding whether to deport them, and most detainees have no criminal record. But this group said the conditions felt like those of a penitentiary.

And that would be a penitentiary that itself violates human rights.

The group complained that

The guards were discriminating against them, they lacked access to clean water, the bonds for their immigration cases were too expensive and they were receiving information only in English.

When detention officers ordered them to return to their beds for a routine population “count,” the eight men refused to move from tables in the facility’s day room until they could speak to a supervisor or an official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Surveillance footage shows what happened next.

Detention officers spent several minutes speaking to the detainees, telling them to return to their bunks. They waived a canister of pepper spray in front of them, then attempted to physically move the detainees.

The video shows the detainees trying to remain seated with their arms linked. But detention officers would later claim they were inciting a “rebellion” and “assaulting” staff.

Detention officers then sprayed pepper spray at the men at least three times and forcibly removed them from the tables.

As they visibly recoiled from the spray, some of the detainees were pushed into walls, pulled to the ground or dragged on the floor by guards.

Some were then put in hot showers, which made the effects of the pepper spray worse. (It’s not clear whether that was deliberate or a bungled attempt to wash it away.)

All eight detainees were then sent to “segregation” — ICE’s term for solitary confinement — for 10 days for “engaging in or inciting a group demonstration.”

It’s a for-profit company that runs the prison that isn’t supposed to be a prison.

As NPR reported in January, a previously confidential government inspection found that the facility was failing to meet many of the government’s own standards for solitary confinement, mental health treatment and medical care. The report also found that staff at Adelanto had retaliated against detainees.

Immigration attorneys and advocates say the conditions at Adelanto are emblematic of problems throughout an immigration detention system that has come to increasingly rely on firms like GEO to help enforce the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policy.

Major human rights violator, at the behest of our monstrous dictator.

Kenan Malik considers the “cultural appropriation” question.

“What insults my soul,” Zadie Smith has written, “is the idea… that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally.”

Both as novelist and essayist, Smith is one of the most subtle guides to the fraught terrain of culture and identity. The problem of “cultural appropriation” – writers and artists being called out for having stepped beyond their permitted cultural boundaries to explore themes about people who are not “fundamentally ‘like’ us” – is an issue that particularly troubles her. Too often these days, on opening a book or on viewing a painting, we are as likely to ask: “Did the author or painter have the cultural right to engage with that subject?” or: “Does he or she possess the right identity?” as: “Is it any good?”

There’s maybe a third track though, to do not with a cultural right or the right identity but sufficiency of knowledge. “Write what you know” has long been a commandment of writing schools and the like (along with “show don’t tell” which is also a questionable rule), and while it’s simplistic or just wrong in many ways (it rules out all fantasy and magic realism for a start), it’s not completely wrong.

It’s far from completely right though. “Literary” fiction now is far too full of people chatting over coffee plus descriptions of clothes and living rooms and too empty of most of life. Writing only about what you know [personally, from experience] equals writing about not much.

Back to Kenan.

So it is with the latest cultural firestorm over Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt, which tells the story of a mother and son, Lydia and Luca, forced to flee their home in Acapulco and join the migrant trail to America after their family is slaughtered by a drugs cartel. Cummins wants Americans to stop seeing migrants as a “faceless brown mass” and to bear witness to the “tragedy of our making on our southern border”.

The novel’s supporters have hailed it as a Great American Novel, even the new The Grapes of Wrath. Its detractors point to the fact that Cummins is non-Mexican and that this wasn’t a story that was hers to tell, which is why she gets it all wrong.

The thing is though, The Grapes of Wrath isn’t all that good. It’s powerful, and gripping, and of interest historically, but as a piece of writing it’s not great. I’ve never felt particularly confident about Steinbeck’s imagination of his Dust Bowl farmers.

But was it wrong for him to write it? Was he taking up space that could have been filled by a novel written by an actual Dust Bowl farmer? If so, were there any such novels written by Dust Bowl farmers? I have a feeling they were all too busy trying to survive to write a novel about their efforts to survive. Wasn’t it possibly a good thing that a novelist who had the time and resources to write a novel about those efforts did so?

Kenan says Cummins’s novel is pretty bad as a novel, but that’s not really the issue.

Most of the anger about the novel has been generated, though, not by how Cummins writes but by who she is. Not Mexican. Not migrant. White.

Cummins herself sets up her critics’ argument in an author’s note: “I worried that as a non-migrant and non-Mexican I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set almost entirely among migrants.” She “wished someone slightly browner than me would write it”.

But in the meantime is it actually wrong for her to write it?

What both sides seem to have forgotten is what fiction is for. Fiction, as Smith observed in the inaugural Philip Roth lecture in 2016, “is a way of asking… what if I was different than I am?” Today, though, she notes elsewhere: “The old – and never especially helpful – adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: stay in your lane.” To do so, Smith insists, is to deny the very possibility of fiction.

There you go. Zadie Smith and I are of one mind on this subject. “Write what you know” is hideously parochial at best, and “stay in your lane” is even more so.

… the context of the debate is a literary and artistic culture that increasingly does insist that people should stay in their lanes. “Where did the new orthodoxy arise that writers must only set stories within their own country of origin or nationality?” the writer Aminatta Forna has asked. In trying to constrain the imagination by identity, she points out, it’s not the privileged but those on the margins who most lose out. The “white male writer” is called simply “writer”; all other others have to be “hyphenated”, writing, in Nesrine Malik’s words, “as a”: as a woman, as a Muslim, as an immigrant.

Certainly, puncture the absurd hype around American Dirt as a novel that reveals the truth about the treatment of immigrants. Certainly, celebrate the Mexican and Latinx writers, from Luis Alberto Urrea to Valeria Luiselli (whose poetic, haunting Lost Children Archive has just been published in paperback), who have long explored the stories of migration with subtlety and power.

But let us not create gated cultures in which only those of the right identity have permission to use their imaginations. For, as novelist Kamila Shamsie tweeted (in response to another controversy over cultural appropriation): “ ‘You – other – are unimaginable’ is a far more problematic attitude than ‘You are imaginable’.” She might have added, “even if imagined badly”.

One exchange of views:

But was “woke people police boundaries” a fair précis of Kenan’s point? Hardly.

Aw, sad, Trump and Johnson aren’t besties any more.

Donald Trump’s previously close relationship with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson looks close to collapse, following new revelations that the president slammed down the phone on him.

Trump’s behaviour during last week’s call was described by officials as “apoplectic,” and Johnson has now reportedly shelved plans for an imminent visit to Washington.

So I guess there’s a downside to having an unstable bad-tempered moronic self-dealing hack as president?

[R]elations broke down following a series of high-profile threats from Trump and a series of pointed interventions against Trump by Johnson and senior members of his government.

What, because of a few threats? Losers.

Why did Trump get mad?

The call, which one source described to the Financial Times as “very difficult,” came after Johnson defied Trump and allowed Chinese telecoms company Huawei the rights to develop the UK’s 5G network.

Trump’s fury was triggered by Johnson backing Huawei despite multiple threats by Trump and his allies that the United States would withdraw security co-operation with the UK if the deal went ahead.

Hm. Trump’s fury was triggered by a failure to do his bidding. That sounds like him.

That’s remarkable.