It matters.

Rudy Giuliani talked to a reporter for New York magazine the other day.

As we sped uptown, he spoke in monologue about the scandal he co-created, weaving one made-up talking point into another and another. He said former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, whom he calls Santa Maria Yovanovitch, is “controlled” by George Soros. “He put all four ambassadors there. And he’s employing the FBI agents.” I told him he sounded crazy, but he insisted he wasn’t.

The sarcasm is interesting. She did her job, and she answered questions before Congress, therefore Giuliani mocks her. She’s not a criminal or a traitor, so let’s sneer at her as a saint.

“Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him,” he said. “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about — he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t go to religion — synagogue. He doesn’t belong to a synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel, he’s an enemy of Israel. He’s elected eight anarchist DA’s in the United States. He’s a horrible human being.”

But “Jew” doesn’t mean just “someone who goes to synagogue.” If it did there would have been fewer Jews killed in the genocide.

In the grand tradition of Soros conspiracy theorists, Giuliani believes the media is doing the billionaire’s bidding by printing lies about him, yet he often bungles his own attempts to discredit the media’s reporting. While attempting to argue that, despite what has been written, “I have no business interests in Ukraine,” he told me about his business interests in Ukraine.

“I’ve done two business deals in Ukraine. I’ve sought four or five others,” he said. Since he’s been representing the president, he said, he has been approached with two opportunities in Ukraine, both of which he turned down to avoid accusations of impropriety.

“The one that I really wanted to do,” Giuliani said, was a lawsuit on behalf of the Ukrainian government against a large financial institution he claims laundered $7 billion for Viktor Yanukovych, the former president. “It would’ve had nothing to do with Trump, nothing to do with Burisma, nothing to do with Biden,” he said. He then explained that the reason why he “really wanted” to take on the case was to learn about Ukrainian money laundering, “so I could figure out they utilize the same money-laundering system for Hunter Biden.”

That’s especially interesting because he’s a lawyer, a lawyer and a former prosecutor. You’d think a prosecutor would be well alert to the importance of keeping his stories consistent.

And then there’s the Southern District of New York, the biggest betrayal of all. That was supposed to be his world, full of his guys; he ran the office for most of the ’80s. It was unrecognizable now. “If they’re investigating me, they’re assholes. They’re absolutely assholes if they’re investigating me,” he said.

…

“If they are, they’re idiots,” he went on. “Then they really are a Trump-deranged bunch of silly New York liberals.”

Again…for the millionth time…I don’t get this. It’s not about being liberal, it’s about Trump’s many crimes and brutalities. It’s not just “liberals” who object to crimes and brutalities. Apparently I have more respect for conservatives than Trumpy conservatives do.

Of course he did.

Stephen Miller pushed to embed agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a refugee agency in a bid to target the parents of unaccompanied migrant children for deportation, a new report has revealed.

Pro tip: that’s not what refugee agencies are for.

The Washington Post reported that according to six current and former Trump administration officials, the White House sought to plant ICE agents at the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which cares for migrant children who cross the border without a parent as part of the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) Program.

Stephen Miller is another Mengele, minus the medical skills.

According to the Post, Miller has long claimed that the ORR is being exploited by parents who hire smugglers to bring their children into the U.S. illegally. Three officials familiar with Miller’s plan said it was part of his wider effort to dismantle the barriers between ICE and the refugee program.

Yes, and let’s place a lot of cops in food banks, and disguise FBI agents as caretakers in public housing, and replace public school teachers with prison guards.

Happy Festivus from Pettson and Findus, via Sven Nordqvist.

Best known for his series about the old farmer Pettson and his talented cat Findus, Sven Otto Rickard Nordqvist originally wanted to be an illustrator but was rejected by several art schools. Instead he studied architecture at Lund Institute of Technology, and worked for a time there as a lecturer in architecture. At the same time he continued to look for work as an illustrator working on advertisements, posters and picture books. In 1983 he won first prize in a children’s book competition and since then has worked exclusively as an author and illustrator of children’s books.

H/t Jeffrey

Common Dreams says it’s very bad in Australia.

The fires in Australia’s southeastern state of New South Wales (NSW) were at the “catastrophic” level on Saturday, according to the BBC. 

“These fires are likely to continue to spread well past Christmas,” said NSW Rural Fire Services Inspector Ben Shepherd.

Photos shared on social media showed hazy skies around the country. 

“Everything is burning,” said one Twitter user. 

As Common Dreams reported Thursday, Australia just endured a heat wave that broke records for temperature in consecutive days. 

“I think this is the single loudest alarm bell I’ve ever heard on global heating,” said Kees van der Leun, a director at the American consultancy firm Navigant.

The view from above:

And guess what: escape routes are closing.

The fires are out of control and will be stopped only by rain. The forecast is no rain for the next couple of months.

Gee, who knew Bill Cosby even still had a publicist? One wonders what the point is. Is he expecting to revive his acting career?

I guess Cosby “used comedy to humanize all genders” in his spare time from assaulting women.

There’s another thing Jolyon Maugham said a couple of days ago…

That’s not it (I’m getting to it), but I’ll just say I haven’t seen anything like that from the gender critical side. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but on the other hand, I think if it did exist we would be buried in screen shots of it. I doubt that it does exist. I think Maugham is equating skepticism about Magic Gender with calling women ugly hearted cunts. I think they are very different.

But that wasn’t it; this is it.

It’s the assertion that “deliberate misgendering” will “contribute to deaths and self-harm” and that that’s a very real wrong done by all of us who don’t believe in Magic Gender, including Maya. It’s the assertion that Maya’s non-compliance with orders to pretend that men are women will cause trans people to die.

He’s a QC. He has some fame and clout. He shouldn’t say things like that.

Oh hey, Jolyon Maugham has finally grasped the point.

Hahaha nah just kidding, he’s talking about something else. New Truth about this subject bad, New Truth about that other subject good.

In actual evil…

For more than nine months, María, 23, has been waiting in an immigration detention center in Arizona hoping to reunite with the six-year-old niece she raised as a daughter. When the two asked for asylum at the border last March because they feared for their lives in Guatemala, border officials detained María in the Eloy detention center and sent the girl to foster care in New York, 2400 miles away.

The Guardian first reported on the ongoing separation of this family in October. As the story spread, lawmakers and more than 200 clergy asked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to grant María parole so she can leave detention and reunite with the girl. A woman in New York volunteered to house them both while María awaits a decision on her appeal for asylum.

But earlier this month ICE said No.

Parole was once the norm for arriving asylum seekers, but in recent years approvals have become increasingly rare. On a standardized form, Ice officers indicated María failed to prove she was “not a flight risk” or that her “continued detention was not in the public interest”.

That would be such an easy thing to prove, from inside a detention center, having fled for your life.

Six years ago, a gang in rural Guatemala murdered María’s last living relatives except her niece, who was a baby. María raised the child and is the only mother the girl has known. They fled toward the United States last Christmas after the gang murdered María’s partner and tried to shoot her.

So now we’re torturing both of them some more. I wish I could throw a bucket of piss in Trump’s face.

Now why would we ever think even for a second that there’s any misogyny involved…

That’s just a small sample; it seems to go on forever.

Andrew Sullivan wonders what the point was.

I read with some interest Peggy Orenstein’s long essay on what’s wrong with boys. An in-depth study of a hundred boys, analyzing their problems and issues, seeing what makes them tick, seeing how the culture has changed them: It’s a fascinating topic. I kept reading and reading in the hope of discovering the point. I’ve now reread it and still can’t figure it out.

Orenstein reports the following facts drawn from her meticulous research: Boys brag to each other about whom they’ve had sex with and compete for girls, they boast about how they screw around on girls, they tend to admire jocks and athletes and mock those less active in sports, they try not to cry in public. They admire “Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day).” Teenage boys may react to the notion that they should become vegans by saying something like, “Being vegans would make us pussies.”

More earth-shattering revelations: Boys find it hard to talk about their feelings, especially with their fathers. They tend to talk about these things with women — girlfriends, sisters, mothers. Many are jealous. One immediately broke off an affair with a girl when he was told she was cheating. In the locker room, male teens can be really gross: “It was all about sex,” one sensitive teen boy complained. “We definitely say fuck a lot; fuckin’ can go anywhere in a sentence. And we call each other pussies, bitches. We never say the N-word, though. That’s going too far.” These boys also saw socializing as instrumental: “The whole goal of going to a party is to hook up with girls and then tell your guys about it.”

Sullivan’s reaction is “You don’t say.” Boys are like that, boys have always been like that, tell us something we don’t know.

This, Orenstein implies, is some kind of crisis. But it’s only a crisis if you find the very idea of male culture as it has always existed somehow problematic.

Yes, there are downsides to this kind of maleness. There’s a reason men tend to die younger than women.

I can think of some other downsides that Sullivan doesn’t mention, like misogyny, rape, the sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, domination, aggression…that kind of thing. Sullivan, weirdly, talks about everything but that. He seems to get so close to it but he never arrives.

What if so much of what she abhors — admiration of strength, envy of others’ ability to have sex with women, aggression, nonverbal forms of interaction, stoicism, risk-taking, mutual mockery, bawdiness — is intrinsic to being male?…[Y]ou’re left with the sinking feeling that the essay is really simply a lament: that men are men, that they are different, that their world can be alien to women, and that their rituals and discourse and company are somehow inherently problematic in a way that women’s simply could not be.

Not “somehow inherently problematic.” It’s not mysterious. Male rivalry and aggression all too often centers on domination and ownership of women, and that’s not great for women. It did its work on Sullivan himself, apparently: he can’t even see the problem.

Going to girly-school:

Trans woman Nicole Thornbur goes to specialist studios to learn how to become more feminine.

But if trans women are women, why does any trans woman need to learn how to become “more feminine”?

Or, more precisely…if trans women are women because they have an internal feeling that they are women, an internal feeling that is absolutely reliable and truth-determining and ungainsayable, an internal feeling that it is evil and criminal to question or doubt, then what possible need can there be to “learn how to be more feminine”? Trans women are women, so whatever they are is feminine enough, because they are women being it.

From that point of view it all seems superfluous. From the point of view that men are men no matter what their internal feelings may be, it seems both ludicrous and obnoxious. We’re not women because we’ve been trained to mince and lisp and look coy, we’re women because that’s the physical reality.

The thing is…that’s what the putative “internal feeling” that you are a woman in fact is: it’s the years of being told it and of dealing with expectations that follow from it, including expectations about how to dress and walk and talk, and what jobs to get and how much education to get and whether or not we get to walk around in the world.

That’s what it is and that’s all it is. Men who want to lisp and act coy should go right ahead, knock themselves out, but they shouldn’t be on women’s soccer teams or in women’s changing rooms.

Uh oh. Is Nike a TERF?

A transgender former Nike contractor is seeking $1.1 million in damages from the sporting goods giant for allegedly allowing gender identity-based harassment. 

According to a civil lawsuit filed this week, Nike and Mainz Brady Group, a staffing firm that hired workers for Nike, discriminated against computer engineer Jazz Lyles, who identifies as transmasculine and prefers the pronouns they/them/their. The complaint was filed with Multnomah Circuit Court in Oregon. 

What does “transmasculine” mean? How is it different from trans male? Is a trans man “transmasculine”? Is that just another way of saying Jazz Lyles identifies as male? Or is it different? Does they merely prefer the pronouns they/them/their, or does they require them? It sounds as if they requires them, seeing as how they is suing.

During Lyles’ tenure at Nike — from May 2017 to September 2018 — the engineer was repeatedly “misgendered” by coworkers, the complaint said. While Lyles notified management about the issue multiple times, the companies allegedly failed to implement any policies, procedures and trainings around the use of gender pronouns in the workplace.

Could it be that the coworkers just forgot? It’s actually not all that easy to remember to override your perceptions every single time you refer to Special Person X, and people at work tend to have other things to think of, more pressing things that are closely related to their paychecks. It’s also not absolutely clear that Nike or any other company should be wasting training time on telling employees to memorize counter-intuitive pronouns for a growing list of special employees.

“When someone refuses to acknowledge a person’s gender identity or insists on referring to them by a gender to which they do not identify (called misgendering), this causes real and significant harm,” read the complaint.

Ah. It’s interesting that you say that, because no it doesn’t. It doesn’t cause real or significant harm. Having a special bespoke pronoun is just a stupid narcissistic demand on others, and their failure to comply causes no harm at all – it might even do some good, by instructing the pronoun-haver in what all adults should have a healthy awareness of: the fact that Them is not more special than other people, and Them can’t put extra burdens on other people as a way of forcing them to pay increased attention to Special Them.

“Employers like Nike have a responsibility to present a safe workplace and ensure that employees respect their coworkers’ gender pronouns,” Shenoa Payne, the plaintiff’s attorney, told CBS News. 

No, they don’t. Safe workplace, yes, of course, but ensure that employees respect their coworkers’ gender pronouns, no – not what Payne means by “gender pronouns,” which is pronouns that don’t match the sex of the pronoun-haver and thus require extra attention for people to remember to use. If employees are calling a guy “her” because they think he’s too girly, that’s harassment, but forgetting to call him “them” is just forgetting.

According to Payne, the misgendering lawsuit against Nike is unique, though it is not the first time the company faced a lawsuit focusing on gender. Last year, four women filed a federal lawsuit against Nike, alleging it violated state and federal equal-pay laws and fostered a work environment that allowed sexual harassment.

And Lyles decided They wanted some of that for Themself.

So they admit it. Only in private, but there they admit it.

One of Donald Trump’s top re-election advisers told influential Republicans in swing state Wisconsin that the party has “traditionally” relied on voter suppression to compete in battleground states, according to an audio recording of a private event. The adviser said later that his remarks referred to frequent and false accusations that Republicans employ such tactics.

But the report emerged just days after news that a conservative group is forcing Wisconsin to purge upwards of 230,000 people from state voter rolls more than a year earlier than planned, a move that would disproportionately affect Democrats before the 2020 election

…

Justin Clark, a senior political adviser and senior counsel to Trump’s re-election campaign, made the remarks about voter suppression on November 21 as part of a wide-ranging discussion about strategies in the 2020 campaign, including more aggressive use of monitoring of polling places on election day in November 2020.

The more aggressive the better, because that will discourage more of the kind of people they want to discourage.

“Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” Clark said at the event. “Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are.

…

Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”

Republican officials publicly signaled plans to step up their Election Day monitoring after a judge in 2018 lifted a consent decree in place since 1982 that barred the Republican National Committee from voter verification and other “ballot security” efforts. Critics have argued the tactics amount to voter intimidation.

Parties should not be doing any voter monitoring.

“We’ve all seen the tweets about voter fraud, blah, blah, blah,” Clark said. “Every time we’re in with him, he asks what are we doing about voter fraud? What are we doing about voter fraud?’ The point is he’s committed to this, he believes in it and he will do whatever it takes to make sure it’s successful.”

Clark said Trump’s campaign plans to focus on rural areas around mid-size cities like Eau Claire and Green Bay, areas he says where Democrats “cheat.” He did not explain what he meant by cheating and did not provide any examples.

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Wisconsin.

The dirty game continues.