In ordinary criminal trials, the jurors have to stay where they are and listen. They’re not allowed to just get up and wander off when they get bored.

Republican Senators not so much.

Despite making public assurances that he would fulfill their Constitutional obligations as impartial jurors in President Trump’s impeachment trial, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy joined a large number of GOP Senators in leaving the Senate Chambers for prolonged periods of time, while crucial evidence was introduced against the President.

I guess the thinking is that he doesn’t need to listen to the evidence because nothing is going to make him vote to remove Trump from office.

But you wouldn’t think he would want to advertise that in advance…except I guess you would, because the targeted consumer is Trump.

Last week, all one hundred United States Senators were sworn in as jurors by the Chief Justice for the United States Supreme Court. Senator Cassidy, taking this oath, swore that “in all matters appertaining to the trial of the impeachment” of the President, he would be impartial.

Which is to say he swore an oath to do something he had every intention of not doing.

Senator Cassidy made a statement in a press release in December, affirming that “the Senate will offer President Trump a fair process” and that he looked forward to “fairly judging the facts.” Yesterday he tweeted: “I intend to be a fair and impartial juror and consider the facts, not let partisan distractions get in the way.”

But also get up and leave while important evidence is being presented.

Newsweek noted that while the oaths of impartiality are not legally binding, the Senate could elect to impeach one of its own for violating the rules. The rules do not explicitly require the Senators to be seated during the trial, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) both told their camps they needed to be in attendance at all times – which Senator Cassidy failed to do.

Why? Performance, is my guess – performance of contempt for the process, contempt for the rules, contempt for the laws, contempt for everyone and everything that doesn’t help Donald Trump enrich himself and smash everything he doesn’t like.

Why that? I don’t know. I don’t understand the depth of cynicism here.

T he fact that Senator Cassidy and other lawmakers were absent during a crucial part of the trial was not ignored by legal blogs. Law & Crime remarked that one-third of all GOP Senators missed the same crucial evidence in the President’s trial. They also contrasted Senator Cassidy’s absence with his promises to “listen to both sides with an open mind.” Bradley Moss, a national security attorney, observed that, of all jurors in all trials, only in the Senate can “‘jurors’ get to stand up and walk out during the prosecution’s presentation of the case.”

Conservative pundit Bill Kristol likened the behavior of Senators like Cassidy to endorsing a mockery of a trial. “I grew up reading about show trials in authoritarian nations abroad,” Kristol said on Twitter.” “I didn’t expect to see one of our two major parties endorse a show trial here in the U.S. Capitol.”

But her emails.

Remember Selina Todd? She was told by students last year that there was going to be a campaign to have her sacked from her job being a professor of modern history at Oxford. More here and here and here.

Now she has to have a security detail.

Prof Selina Todd, a historian who specialises in the lives of women and the working class, said that she has now been provided with “routine security” to ensure she is not attacked.

The academic – who has been accused of being a “transphobe” for her involvement in women’s rights advocacy – was told by her students that she was potentially in danger.

“Two students came to see me and said they were very worried that threats had been made to me on email networks they were part of,” Prof Todd told The Telegraph.

Isn’t it funny how feminism has never been known for issuing threats against people who oppose feminism?

“The university investigated the threats and came back to me to say their intelligence on them is such that they are providing me security for all of my lecturers for the rest of this year. They said ‘you’re having two men in the rest of your lectures’.”

At her most recent undergraduate lecture, a handful of students arrived in trans activists T-shirts, who she believed had come to cause trouble.

She figures the burly guys standing in the back may have persuaded them to skip the trouble-causing.

Prof Todd said that transgender activists started making complaints about her on the basis that her teaching of feminist history was “transphobic”.

“My research suggests that women who posed as men  in the past were often lesbians seeking to protect themselves, or because they want to do jobs that were only available to men,” she said.

How dare women focus on women instead of on men who say they are women. Men matter, women do not.

Prof Todd said that the history faculty now receives “daily” complaints from activists calling for her to be sacked, which has left her feeling unnerved.

…

Prof Todd urged the university to take a stronger stance in disciplining students who are making threats and malicious complaints against her. 

Oh they couldn’t do that; that might look transphobic.

Earlier this week an Oxford college rowed back on its code of conduct for a transgender discussion following criticism that it was closing down free speech.

Merton College was accused of adopting a “draconian” stance over its plans to host a discussion about transgender issues which bans “language which denies the validity of trans identity”.

Do colleges ban language which denies the validity of pretend-astronaut identity? Do they ban language which denies the validity of pretend-movie star identity? Do they ban language which denies the validity of pretend-Nobel prize winner identity?

No. In other contexts people are expected to act like adults and not try to force their fantasies on other people. Sex is the one exception; that fantasy has to be humored, and permitted to threaten non-believers.

The Guardian Live is reporting on the impeachment.

Jerry Nadler talked about the history of impeachment:

[Andrew] Johnson, who took office after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, was the first president to be impeached but was narrowly acquitted by the Senate.

Johnson’s impeachment ostensibly centered on his violation of the Tenure of Office Act, a law that was later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

But Johnson’s impeachment was actually the culmination of the president’s bitter feud with Republican lawmakers, who accused Johnson of trying to nullify the Union’s victory in the Civil War by being lenient toward former Confederate leaders and opposing the expansion of political rights for former slaves.

Reconstruction failed, and former slaves continued to be lynched, arbitrarily imprisoned and thus re-enslaved, denied rights, confined to bad jobs, bad housing, and bad schools, for another damn century. This stuff matters.

Nadler quoted Dershowitz.

As Bill Clinton faced removal from office in 1998, Dershowitz said of the constitutional standard for impeachment, “It certainly doesn’t have to be a crime. If you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don’t need a technical crime.”

Oops.

He also had a gotcha moment for Lindsey Graham.

Nadler just played this 1999 clip of then-congressman Lindsey Graham, who served as an impeachment manager during Bill Clinton’s trial.

“What’s a high crime?” Graham said at the time. “How about if an important person hurts somebody of low means? It’s not very scholarly. But I think it’s the truth. I think that’s what they meant by high crimes. Doesn’t even have to be a crime.”

Oops.

Still not a good plan, guys.

Turkey’s ruling party has begun a second attempt at introducing a law to grant rapists amnesty as long as they marry their victim, four years after a similar bill sparked outrage at home and internationally.

Similarly, do they plan to introduce a law granting murderers amnesty as long as they dig up their victim and prop her/him up in a corner of the living room?

Also, is this “marriage” of which you speak at all consensual at all? Or is it just a matter of the man “marrying” his victim exactly the way he abused her in the first place? The second is much the more likely, don’t you think? How many people actually want to be married to the very person who abused them?

The legislation, which was first debated by parliament on 16 January, would give men suspended sentences for child sex offences if the two parties get married and the age difference between them is less than 10 years.

Opposition parties and women’s rights groups have been quick to point out that the bill in effect legitimises child marriage and statutory rape in a country where the legal age of consent is 18.

Almost as if that’s the point, isn’t it.

Fidan Ataselim, the general secretary of the activist group We Will Stop Femicide, said the new bill was an attempt by the government to erase evidence of Turkey’s growing epidemic of violence against girls and women.

The group, which has tracked gender-related violence and deaths since Turkish authorities stopped doing so in 2009, estimates that more than 2,600 women have been murdered in the last decade, and the number of killings has increased steadily each year.

Anything to do with the fact that Turkey has been steadily desecularizing during that time?

Writing in the Cumhuriyet newspaper, Dr Adem Sözüer, the head of Istanbul University’s criminal and criminal procedure law department, said the new bill was likely to increase rates of violence against women and children because it “legitimises the mentality that women are objects to possess or exist for sexual satisfaction”.

Just say no, women of Turkey.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The ACLU is telling whoppers.

How can the ACLU of all organizations declare that athletes should be segregated according to their stated “gender identity”? The ACLU aren’t declaring that all males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports — they are declaring that only males who state that they feel in possession of a feminine “gender identity” should be allowed to compete with females in sports. How can a legal civil rights organization take the stance that any kind of self-assessed, self-declared identity characteristic should be the sole basis by which we sort and segregate athletes in competitive sports? Why not some other self-declared identity characterisitic? Why not favourite colour? Introverts vs. Extroverts? Taylor Swift fans vs. Kanye fans? Even if you truly believe that people’s stated gender identities are sacrosanct and important and “valid” or whateverthefuck, how does that get you to the part where it’s a necessary civil right for athletes to be sorted and separated based on them? How is it a crucial component of the world’s civil rights that members of an Olympic volleyball team can be of mixed biological sex but absolutely must all share the same preferred pronouns? Because in order for women’s and men’s sports to continue to exist as separate categories, that is exactly what we’re demanding — uniform pronouns; mixed sexes and mixed everything else.

It’s stupid and backwards even from a trans rights perspective. If gender is nothing but a feeling inside one’s own head and is completely separate from someone’s biological body — which is all that trans activists scream about all day and all night: the body I was born into doesn’t define my gender, they say — shouldn’t the ACLU be arguing that an athlete’s gender identity is completely irrelevant to their sports career? Shouldn’t the ACLU be fighting to let male-bodied people with feminine-gender-identity-feelz compete proudly and without prejudice against any other male-bodied people, regardless of gender, on the basis that their gender identity has nothing whatsoever to do with the sexed body they happen to have been born in and happen to be using in the physical competition we call sports? After all, “the body I was born into doesn’t define my gender identity” is just another way of saying, “my gender identity isn’t defined by the body I was born into.” You don’t serve a volleyball or sprint 100 metres or throw a discus with your pronouns; you do it with your body.

Of course, the answer to that is obvious: trans activists are in active denial about the bodies they were born in. They claim that their genders are completely separate from their bodies, but all the physical surgeries and hormones give the lie to that: it’s not about freeing everyone’s gender expression from their sexed bodies (that’s feminism, thank you) and it never was: “trans rights” is about men pretending their male bodies are literally female when they plainly, factually aren’t, and guilt-tripping and bullying everyone else into playing along.

This is such a ludicrous, feeble exercise with such obviously negative ramifications — most evidently, to common folk outside of academic feminist circles, in the domain of sports — that I genuinely think it will rapidly collapse once the general public gets a clear, sober look at what trans activists are demanding. The fact that the ACLU has doubled down on it is certain to be a disaster for them very, very soon.

It’s incredible how short-sighted and self-destructive they’re being. I don’t know what’s worse: the foolishness of the eager young virtue signallers the ACLU has brought in at the bottom, or the cowardice of the older people at the top.

Busted.

Jessica Yaniv was arrested for the assault of a Canadian journalist on over the weekend. According to Keean Bexte, the journalist who was assaulted by Yaniv on camera outside of the B.C. courts on January 14, 2020, Yaniv spent time behind bars on the charge of assault. She may face up to five years for the assault.

That same day, Yaniv falsely accused TPM‘s own Amy Eileen Hamm of sexual assault while at the courtroom. Hamm is suing Yaniv for defamation.

I hope Hamm wins.

When reached for comment, Bexte said, “Yaniv has been ordered to cease all contact with me, both directly and indirectly. I can’t wait for the day when Yaniv is put away for the long haul. He is dangerous and unpredictable.”

I’m not a big fan of imprisonment but Yaniv needs to be prevented from doing more people harm.

You know who the bravest athlete in history is? I bet you don’t. Here, have a headline:

Fallon Fox is still the bravest athlete in history

Why? Because of the hatred.

In 2013, when Fallon Fox came out publicly as trans in professional mixed martial arts, she was the target of a torrent of hatred I have literally never seen targeting an LGBTQ athlete. While certainly some writers took thoughtful approaches to understanding this emerging dynamic of trans athletes in women’s sports, still many more, like Joe Rogan, were vicious for the sake of being vicious.

Wait a second though. Isn’t Fallon Fox a man? Doesn’t “Fallon Fox came out as trans” mean that Fallon Fox is a man who decided to “identify as” a woman so that he could compete against women instead of men? Does that really make him brave? Let alone the bravest ever?

Cyd Zeigler thinks so, or pretends to think so in this article:

Yet Fox stood strong and continued to push for, and earn, her right to compete. Except for one fateful match, she also won every time she stepped into the professional ring.

Well no shit, he’s a man, who stepped into the professional ring to beat up women. When he stepped into the professional ring to beat up Tamikka Brents, he broke her orbital bone and gave her a concussion. I’m not seeing the bravery.

When I wrote my book, Fair Play: How LGBT Athletes Are Claiming Their Rightful Place In Sports, the final chapter was titled, “Fallon Fox Is The Bravest Athlete In History.”

That remains true for me now, four years later.

Nothing for the bravery of Tamikka Brents?

Don’t be silly, there’s no such thing as bravery in women.

Trump was in Davos today, pretending to be a grownup again. “Don’t worry about climate change,” he said, on the basis of nothing.

“This is not a time for pessimism. This is a time for optimism. Fear and doubt is not a good thought process because this is a time for tremendous hope and joy and optimism and action,” Trump said in his opening address at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Did they let him write it himself? That’s gibberish, and childish.

“But to embrace the possibilities of tomorrow, we must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse,” he continued. “They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers. And I have them, and you have them, and we all have them. And they want to see us do badly, but we don’t let that happen.”

We can see exactly where he went off script. I have them, you have them, he has them, they have them, you have them, we have them, I have them. It’s galling that someone this mentally vacant is in a position to give these “speeches.”

“These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives. We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy, wreck our country or eradicate our liberty.”

Oh shut up. Climate change has nothing to do with “socialism” and vice versa.

The president also claimed that the U.S. is among the countries with “the cleanest air and drinking water on Earth”

Again – not the issue.

Trump’s remarks came shortly before a session titled “Averting a Climate Apocalypse” featuring teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, with whom Trump has publicly feuded.

No; whom Trump has repeatedly publicly maligned.

Fielding reporters’ questions after his speech, Trump said he thought it “was very well-received” and insisted that he is a “very big believer in the environment.”

“We, right now, are doing extremely well in the United States,” he said. “But what I want is the cleanest water, the cleanest air. And that’s what we’re going to have, and that’s what we have right now.”

The Guardian reports:

The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone “hacked” in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message that had apparently been sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, sources have told the Guardian.

It was a video file from MBS’s account sent to Bezos.

Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Guardian has no knowledge of what was taken from the phone or how it was used.

I’m sure it was all perfectly innocent and benign.

The disclosure is likely to raise difficult questions for the kingdom about the circumstances around how US tabloid the National Enquirer came to publish intimate details about Bezos’s private life – including text messages – nine months later.

It may also lead to renewed scrutiny about what the crown prince and his inner circle were doing in the months prior to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who was killed in October 2018 – five months after the alleged “hack” of the newspaper’s owner.

…

Saudi experts – dissidents and analysts – told the Guardian they believed Bezos was probably targeted because of his ownership of the Post and its coverage of Saudi Arabia. Khashoggi’s critical columns about Mohammed bin Salman and his campaign of repression against activists and intellectuals rankled the crown prince and his inner circle.

So, very naturally, he stole Bezos’s data and murdered Khashoggi. Just another day in the life.

Oh ACLU. You are so fucked up.

Nobody is trying to “keep trans youth out of sports.” The issue is BOYS who identify as trans competing against girls. Boys should compete with other boys whether they identify as trans or not. That’s the issue, as of course you know.

And women who say that – the way I just did – are “actually” fighting for women’s rights in sport, while you are trying to sabotage them.

Nobody is “cast out of the category of ‘woman'”; men are not in the category of “woman” in the first place.

You don’t get to tell women that we have to pretend that some men are women because they say they are. You don’t get to force us to deny what we know, you don’t get to force us to step aside, you don’t get to force us to shut up, you don’t get to tell us we’ve been displaced by the new and more exciting version of women that is performed by men.

What’s the source of that dopy statement? I found this one from last August in the Raleigh [North Carolina] News and Observer:

Advocates of transgender rights reject concerns about bathrooms and locker rooms.

“Instead, we recognize the harm to all women and girls that will flow from allowing some women and girls to be denied opportunities to participate and cast out of the category of ‘woman’ for failing to meet standards driven by stereotypes and fear,” they said in a statement

But…we were told it came from “groups that actually fight for women’s rights in sports.” That sounds like, you know, feminist groups. But the groups turn out to be those that advocate for transgender rights – which is not the same thing at all. In fact as we see from this very story, they can be in tension with women’s rights. So, in short, the ACLU flat-out lied in this particular tweet.

Originally a comment by Sastra on A T shirt that could cause trouble or offence.

When psychologically fragile people are encouraged to believe they have no control over their emotions and no capacity to become mentally confident and self-sufficient — and society is told that these fragile people are completely and utterly dependent on outside validation in order for them to function or indeed even continue to live — we end up with self-appointed Saviors. Someone has to step in to protect the vulnerable.

We then go from a Culture of Respect, in which self-worth is inherent and restraint and resilience are held up as ideals, to an Honor Culture mentality, in which worth is socially determined. The ability to revenge yourself against those who dishonor you is now the currency of status. If the first one could be said to have the motto “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words could never hurt me,” then the second one is a combination of “Them’s fightin’ words” and “I don’t get mad; I get even.”

It’s the only way I can make sense of a gay man bashing a gay woman for wearing a pro-gay t-shirt, and celebrating violence against her. He’s a Savior fighting for the honor of those whose sense of worth is external, for they have Been Offended, and in an Honor Culture there is no other recourse than swift, harsh retaliation.

The new gay-basher, so like the old gay-basher.

Huh. Man approves of a bar that throws a woman out into the January night without her jacket and keys because she is wearing a pro-lesbians and gays T shirt. I guess Man is a Christian fanatic, or maybe a some other religion fanatic? Or just a secular fanatic? But anyway someone who hates lesbians and gays and is happy to see them persecuted and ostracized.

Mind you he would probably tell us he has no objection to lesbians and gays he just doesn’t approve when they shove it in our noses, when they be lesbian and gay in public, when they flaunt their pervy slogans in our restaurants and bars.

But but wait, no, that can’t be it – his profile says he’s gay himself.

Scottish comedian, former journalist, ranter, moaner, gay, HIV positive – undetectable.

And yet he thinks LesbianGayBisexualAlliance is such an evil label that it justifies throwing a woman out of a gay bar?

We live in a confusing world.

Does it make sense to call it a “peaceful protest” – let alone “incredibly” peaceful – when many or most of the people protesting are conspicuously carrying guns?

No, it doesn’t. A large gathering of men carrying assault rifles is a threat, a visible calculated threat, aka terrorism.

Threats are not “peaceful” and guns are not not-threats.