Trump is – of course, of course, of course – doubling down on the cultural sites threat. Of course he is. Tell him it’s a war crime and he’ll tell you why he doesn’t care.
He’s with stupid
Jan 5th, 2020 3:19 pm | By Ophelia BensonPompeo is mad because people don’t think Trump is being awesome.
“I spent the last day and a half, two days, talking to partners in the region, sharing with them what we were doing, why we were doing it, seeking their assistance,” Pompeo told Fox News. “They’ve all been fantastic. And then talking to our partners in other places that haven’t been quite as good.
“Frankly, the Europeans haven’t been as helpful as I wish that they could be. The Brits, the French, the Germans all need to understand that what we did, what the Americans did, saved lives in Europe as well.”
Uh huh.
“Qassem Suleimani led and his IRGC [Revolutionary Guard] led assassination campaigns in Europe. This was a good thing for the entire world, and we are urging everyone in the world to get behind what the United States is trying to do to get the Islamic Republic of Iran to simply behave like a normal nation.”
Oddly enough though, blowing up Suleimani isn’t the way to get Iran to act normal. It’s not that the allies think Suleimani was awesome, it’s that they think making Iran act normal isn’t quite as simple as blowing up one of its top guys.
That’s his personal opinion
Jan 5th, 2020 11:22 am | By Ophelia BensonAdam Schiff makes an important point here. It may seem obvious to thinking adults, but sadly it’s not thinking adults who are running this shit show. Pompeo claims the hit will save lives, Jake Tapper says, and Schiff points out that that’s Pompeo’s personal opinion but the intelligence information doesn’t support it. He continues to cite intel as opposed to opinion. Opinions are easy, but they can be based on anything or nothing at all. Opinions can be the product of desire as opposed to intelligence (in all senses).
War crimes
Jan 5th, 2020 9:25 am | By Ophelia BensonTrump yesterday:
He’s promising to commit war crimes. He’s doing it on Twitter. The US president is saying on Twitter that he plans to commit war crimes.
President Donald Trump tweeted Saturday evening that if Iran attacks any American assets to avenge the killing of a top Iranian general, the U.S. has 52 targets across the Islamic Republic that “WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”
Some are “important to Iran & Iranian culture,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
That’s a war crime.
Iran’s earliest traces of human history reach as far back as 100,000 BC. Its historic monuments preserve the legacy of a civilization that has kept its Persian identity throughout the tides of foreign conquests, weaving in influences from Turkic, South Asian and Arab cultures, and the footprints of Alexander the Great and later Islam.
“Through MILLENNIA of history, barbarians have come and ravaged our cities, razed our monuments and burnt our libraries,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif tweeted in response Sunday. “Where are they now? We’re still here, & standing tall.”
Up to a point. The Islamic part of the ravaging and razing and burning is still there, as the Foreign Minister’s name reminds us. Islam involves a lot of ceremonial prostration, which is the official opposite of standing tall. That’s not relevant to Trump’s criminal threats, but it is part of the bigger picture. Trump is threatening war crimes but that doesn’t make the government of Iran the good guys. There are no good guys in this brawl.
But, that said, Trump’s carrying on is disgusting and contemptible.
Targeting cultural sites is a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention for the protection of cultural sites. The United Nations Security Council also passed unanimously a resolution in 2017 condemning the destruction of heritage sites. Attacks by the Islamic State group and other armed factions in Syria and Iraq prompted that vote.
Trump and Islamic State deserve each other.
Trump’s tweet also caused concern in Washington. One U.S. national security official said Trump’s threat to target Iranian cultural sites had caught many in his administration off-guard and prompted calls for others in his government, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to clarify the matter. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly to the issue, called such a clarification necessary to affirm that the U.S. military would not intentionally commit war crimes.
Oh what is this “caught many in his administration off-guard” shit? What, because they thought he was adult and cautious and reasonable? Because they didn’t realize he’s a reckless destructive mindless bully? Are they all drugged?
Iran is home to two dozen UNESCO World Heritage Sites, including Persepolis with its ancient ruins that date back to 518 BC, the 17th century grand mosque of Isfahan located in a teeming bazaar, and the Golestan Palace in the heart of Tehran, where the last shah to rule Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was crowned in 1967.
The country’s cultural sites reflect the expanse of Iran’s history: Geological and archaeological sites date back several thousand years, while 1,000-year-old sites reflect Iran’s contributions to the Golden Age of Islam. In Qom, the Feizeh Religious Science School and a shrine of a Shiite saint, Masoumeh, attract Muslim pilgrims from around the world, reinforcing Iran’s preeminent place among Shiite clerics, theologians and scholars.
Seek shelter as the fire approaches
Jan 4th, 2020 3:57 pm | By Ophelia BensonNew South Wales Rural Fire Service:
It is too late to leave, it is too late to leave, it is too late to leave.
That last is the most recent, 16 minutes ago.
Skies reddened and darkened
Jan 4th, 2020 3:38 pm | By Ophelia BensonStrong winds that have changed direction are hampering efforts by firefighters to contain bushfires in Australia’s south-east.
A southerly change with powerful gusts up to 80mph (128km/h) threatened to spread huge fires raging in New South Wales (NSW), officials said.
…
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the fires had created a “very volatile situation” and “we are yet to hit the worst of it”.
…
Skies reddened and darkened in areas of south-eastern Australia as wind gusts exacerbated the fires.
Temperatures surpassed 40C (104F) in some areas. In Penrith, west of Sydney, temperatures reached 48.9C. Some reports suggest it was for a time the hottest place on Earth.
Smoky and lethally hot – it sounds unbearable.
The fires can generate their own weather, complete with lightning – which starts new fires.
Diddums
Jan 4th, 2020 11:28 am | By Ophelia BensonTerry Gilliam doesn’t like this strange new fad for saying men shouldn’t rape women.
The Time Bandits director and Monty Python cast member, who first described himself as a black lesbian in interviews last year, made his latest comments to the Independent while promoting his film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, released later this month.
Gilliam said he was “tired, as a white male, of being blamed for everything that is wrong with the world”.
But he’s not, is he. He’s not blamed for everything that is wrong with the world. The fact that some men – far too many men – rape women does not mean or imply that Terry Gilliam does so, nor that Terry Gilliam is the source of everything that is wrong with the world.
On to the #MeToo movement, he said: “I want people to take responsibility and not just constantly point a finger at somebody else, saying, ‘You’ve ruined my life.’”
That’s just fucking stupid, or lazy. Pointing out structural problems is taking responsibility. What exactly does he expect women to do, just ignore the occasional rape and keep smiling for the cameras?
He continued: “#MeToo is a witch-hunt. I really feel there were a lot of people, decent people, or mildly irritating people, who were getting hammered. That’s wrong. I don’t like mob mentality.”
So…the systematic abuse and coercion of women in Hollywood and elsewhere is just trivia, but the effort to put a stop to it is a witch hunt?
Easy to say, I guess, if it’s never been your problem.
Of [Harvey] Weinstein’s alleged victims, he said: “These were ambitious adults … There are many victims in Harvey’s life, and I feel sympathy for them, but then, Hollywood is full of very ambitious people who are adults and they make choices.”
Uh huh. It’s really the women who should be facing trial for raping Harvey Weinstein, amirite?
Just get more marshmallows
Jan 4th, 2020 8:29 am | By Ophelia BensonFires? Are there fires?
The Australian, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship newspaper, has defended itself against criticism it downplayed unprecedented bushfires by failing to put a picture of the disaster on the front page of an edition, even as newspapers across the world featured the harrowing scenes.
Many of the world’s leading mastheads featured pictures of the devastation of the Australian bushfires on page one on Thursday. But the Australian’s first edition ran an upbeat picture story about the New Year’s Day picnic races at Hanging Rock.
Um…Fake News? It may have looked like an upbeat picture story about the New Year’s Day picnic races at Hanging Rock, but actually it was in-depth coverage of the fires.
The national broadsheet’s lead story on Thursday was about a secret proposal by police to ban alcohol in Indigenous communities in Western Australia – a story deemed more important than the bushfire report, which said eight people were dead and mass evacuations were underway.
Maybe Murdoch just doesn’t like sensationalism.
The Australian has been consistent on one front. Throughout the bushfire season it has kept up its coverage of climate denialism.
Before Christmas, the Australian attempted to smear Greg Mullins and his Emergency Leaders for Climate Action group as “largely a vehicle for Tim Flannery”. Flannery is a leading environmentalist and chief counsellor at the Climate Council.
The former fire and emergency chiefs from multiple states and territories say Australia is unprepared for worsening natural disasters from climate change and governments are putting lives at risk.
The Australian says they are a front for Flannery who is an “alarmist” for urging that coal-fired power stations be shut down.
Indeed; what on earth is there to be alarmed about? The fact that the planet is becoming hostile to life is no big deal – people can just stay inside for a few hundred years until things go back to normal.
The far-out option
Jan 4th, 2020 8:18 am | By Ophelia BensonInteresting. Rukmini Callimachi is a correspondent for The New York Times covering ISIS & al-Qaeda and an analyst for NBC and MSNBC.
So, naturally…
Go
Jan 3rd, 2020 5:02 pm | By Ophelia BensonPeople in south-east Australia are being told to evacuate.
Authorities in Australia have urged tens of thousands of people to move to safety amid concerns that bushfires will burn out of control this weekend.
“If you don’t need to be in the area, you need to leave,” warned New South Wales (NSW) Premier Gladys Berejiklian.
Temperatures are expected to soar above 40C (104F) in parts of south-east Australia on Saturday, with strong winds increasing the fire danger.
…
NSW Rural Fire Service deputy commissioner Rob Rogers warned that fires could move “frighteningly” quickly on Saturday because of the extreme weather conditions.
…
Meteorologists have forecast extreme heat and strong winds in fire-affected areas in south-east Australia on Saturday.
Some of the fires could merge.
Women plus
Jan 3rd, 2020 4:28 pm | By Ophelia BensonI see this from Maya:
So I investigate. The British Library is having an exhibition April 24-August 23 2020 on women’s rights. Unfinished Business, it’s called.
Image: Designed by Shakila Taranum Maan for Southall Black Sisters
It starts out well enough.
From bodily autonomy and the right to education, to self-expression and protest, this new exhibition explores how feminist activism in the UK today has its roots in the complex history of women’s rights.
Be inspired by those who paved the way – from Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to study law at Oxford University, to Hope Powell, the first British woman to gain the highest European football coaching licence. Meet lesser-known Suffragettes such as Sophia Duleep Singh and challengers of recent years such as the No More Page 3 campaign.
But then…
Take to the keyboard and the streets by exploring the work of contemporary activist groups working online and offline today. Get to grips with the causes they fight for, from ending period poverty and securing abortion rights to telling the stories of women and non-binary people of colour.
STOP
What do “non-binary people” have to do with anything? Why can’t women’s rights be about women’s rights any more? Why do we always have to add an extra, as if women are so fucking trivial that we can’t just have our own damn movement for half the god damn population?
If there are women who don’t want to be called women but prefer to go by “non-binary” then good luck to them, but they don’t get to take a chain saw to women’s movements. They can join the movement as women or they can piss off, but they don’t get to change the women’s movement to the women and non-binary people’s movement. Enough with this pandering bullshit.
Might is not will
Jan 3rd, 2020 12:35 pm | By Ophelia BensonTrump in 2011:
Narcissists are big on projection.
The thing that annoys me most about that clip though is the last thing he says – Isn’t it pathetic.
What is “it”? The thing Trump predicts Obama will do. It’s a prediction, it’s about the future, so Trump can’t know it will happen. He couldn’t know that even if his reasons for thinking so (or pretending to think so) were good as opposed to contemptible. It’s now in the past so we know it didn’t happen, so his stupid prediction based on ludicrous and disgusting assumptions was a bad wrong prediction, but even if it had been a good one, you can’t exclaim “Isn’t it pathetic!” about an action you predict will happen. You need the conditional tense for that, not the future.
That’s not a merely grammatical or aesthetic point, it’s fundamental – it’s about being able to keep track of what you know and what you don’t, what you can know and what you can’t, of reality itself. What is really pathetic is Trump’s apparent conviction that his thoughts are so powerful that his mere venomous prediction about Obama can create a future fact that he then gets to call pathetic.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself
Jan 3rd, 2020 11:57 am | By Ophelia BensonAndy Lewis on what the trans “movement” has done to skepticism:
So, Rebecca Watson of @skepchicks has produced a video calling JK Rowling a ‘bigoted fuckface’. She comes to this conclusion because the Harry Potter author defended Maya Forstater after Maya lost an employment tribunal over her beliefs that sex is binary and immutable.
Don’t go thinking that’s hyperbole. I haven’t watched the video because I value my sanity, but I skimmed the transcript, and “bigoted fuckface” is right there at the beginning.
JK Rowling, who you may know as the author of the theory that wizards don’t need indoor plumbing because they can just shit on the floor and then magic it away, has finally, officially come out as a TERF — aka a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which is literally just an accurate description of what a TERF believes but apparently they think “TERF” is a slur so I will use a less-loaded term for this video: bigoted fuckface.
Pause for laughter that doesn’t occur.
Back to Andy:
Rebecca is quite happy to use slurs to demonise Rowling & Maya because they disagree with her on science. (The mispronunciation is also unforgivable.) But let’s play Rebecca with a straight bat & address her thoughts on the science of sex to see if her views are justified.
He does a science of sex explainer, the upshot of which is that male and female are not some wack new idea.
Sex arises from the fact that we are evolved sexually reproducing organisms. Sex evolved deep in life’s history and has remained remarkably conserved – although there are many sex determination mechanisms in organisms.
…
To suggest that there are more than two sexes, or even more extreme, that somehow sex forms a continuum, a distribution or a spectrum is completely incompatible with this view of life and sexual reproduction. (The idea that ‘sex is a spectrum’ is a core part of the credo of gender ideology.)
So, how does Rebecca attempt this?
In short, she does not. She nods her head to the complexity of sex development, but makes no attempt to suggest there is anything other than two sexes. It is almost as if she does not want you to see lack of rebuttal after just complaining the XX/XY mechanism is ‘too simplistic’.
There is a referenced blog post though on why we should “Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia.” Like many blog posts in this genre, it makes a number of basic errors.
But but but it was a Scientific American blog post, so how can it be wrong? Scientific American is always right! Except for those think pieces by Michael Shermer, of course…oh look, a squirrel.
Rebecca goes on to a rhetorical trick though to appeal to the ‘diversity of humanity’. She claims that “male” or “female” are just a “shorthand” and that it “simply isn’t enough to account for the diverse array of beautiful human bodies in the world, and it’s anti-scientific to pretend as though it is.”
No justification is given for this & it is another straw-man, since no one is claiming there is not a wide range of variation within people. Even sex characteristics can exist on a wide distribution of scale. Size can vary.
The truth is rather banal – your sex is just one fact about you. An immutable fact. And there are many facts about you that make up the Whole You and “the diverse array of beautiful human bodies in the world”.
…
The core of Maya Forstater’s beliefs in her court case were that sex was a binary and sex was immutable. Despite lots of angry words and invective The @skepchicks have failed to show that this is not true and have instead invoked straw man arguments and thinking errors.
Which is not very…skep.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
This was the defining message of Richard Feynman’s address to graduating students of CalTech in 1974.
Feynman was describing the difference between having a scientific outlook in life and being fooled by false beliefs – no matter how much those beliefs were shared by those around you and how much effort you put into living by those beliefs.
A lesson Feynman was called on to reiterate to the honchos at NASA who ignored what the engineers were telling them about the O-rings and cold temperatures, and so insisted the Challenger launch go ahead despite the engineers. An O-ring did indeed fail.
As Feynman said, “So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.”
I can’t help thinking we are seeing a lot of Cargo Cult Scepticism too right now about how we understand the nature of sex and gender. Worse, I think we are seeing Cargo Cult Progressiveness.
…
The ideology of gender is one massive ‘just so’ story.
It starts off with the required conclusions such as ‘transwomen are women’ and then works backwards. What must be true for this to be true? One thing that must be true is that our conceptualisation of biological sex must be wrong.
Women cannot be female. Males and females must be mutable and blurred in distinction. All scientific facts must then be shoehorned into this outcome.
But @skepchicks are part of a noble movement that questions authority and relies completely on science to get to the bottom of societies core beliefs!
The problem is that this is easy when it comes to homeopathy and ghosts and gods and vaccine injuries.
But there is a Cargo Cult Progressiveness now that insists you accept without question the New Progressive Movement of Gender. To question any aspect of this will result in instant excommunication. The social cost is high.
And it would [look] like the (almost) entire US skeptical movement has decided to fool itself rather than be on the wrong side of this social movement. The cost to anyone is too high to question it.
We see defenders of evolution such as @pzmyers reacting like the worst frothing mouth evangelical preacher when asked to defend the idea that women can have penises.
One would have thought that Myers would have taken the opportunity to use this as a quirky way to explain how evolution works and ends up with counterintuitive results. But no. Shouting and screaming instead.
…
We appear to have ended up with Cargo Cult Scepticism where all that is left is just the precepts and forms of debate but none of the challenging, debate, evidence gathering and – most importantly – thought.
Slogans and epithets instead of thought.
Blocking is the tool of the Cargo Cult Scepticism crowd. Blog posts the sources of evidence – not the primary literature. Denouncing heretics is the cry rather than questioning and discussion.
We are now at a place where scepticism is an Identity and not a set of tools. It is about belonging to the right crowd – ‘on the right side of history’. It is no longer about informing policy and social ideas with well founded science based on robust evidence.
Maybe it was always like this. Maybe it was always just about screaming at homeopaths. But this is not good enough.
In fact, it’s downright bad.
Unanswerable
Jan 3rd, 2020 11:06 am | By Ophelia BensonBut, hey, we’re in good hands. Serious, responsible, thoughtful, grown up.
Wagging
Jan 3rd, 2020 10:31 am | By Ophelia BensonTrump’s cunning plan to avoid impeachment? Or just the normal reckless aggression and urge to smash everything not-self?
George Packer asks some questions:
But the main question about the strike isn’t moral or even legal—it’s strategic. Soleimani was a supremely powerful leader of a state apparatus, with his own cult of personality, but he was not a terror kingpin. His death doesn’t decapitate anything. He had the blood of tens of thousands of people—overwhelmingly fellow Muslims—on his hands, but he was only the agent of a government policy that preceded him and will continue without him. His deeds are beside the point; so is the display of American resolve. The only reason to kill Soleimani is to enter a new war that the United States can win.
What would that war look like? How will Iran fight it? How will the U.S. respond? What credible allies will we have, after Trump’s trashing of the nuclear deal thoroughly alienated Europe? Who will believe any intelligence about Iran’s actions and intentions from an administration that can’t function without telling lies? How will American officials deliberate when Trump has gotten rid of his experts and turned his government into a tool of personal power? What is the point of having a Congress if it has no say about a new American war?
And many more questions.
There’s no sign that anyone in power, least of all the president, has even asked these questions, let alone knows how to answer them. No one seems to have thought past the action itself. The initial statements from the administration have been alarmingly ludicrous. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans,” the Defense Department announced afterward. “The world is a much safer place today,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo intoned, sounding like the Minister of Truth. “I can assure you that Americans in the region are much safer.”
Mike Pompeo can’t assure me it’s January 3, because he’s Mike Pompeo. There’s a cost to having an administration packed with criminals and incompetents.
The outlook is grim.
The role of a social worker is not to please bullying adults
Jan 2nd, 2020 5:59 pm | By Ophelia BensonTalk about real world consequences.
Needs and wants: discuss
Jan 2nd, 2020 5:32 pm | By Ophelia BensonRachel Veronica has the new year spirit.
Again – so sloppy for a philosopher.
Who is “you”?
Why is a generalized population supposed to care what Rachel Veronica needs?
What business is it of Rachel Veronica’s what a generalized population is willing to do?
What are transphobes?
What business is it of Rachel Veronica’s what friends other people have?
What benefit of the doubt is he talking about?
And the last item is just classic male bullying.
All in all pretty gruesome for a working tenured philosopher.
