Pride Toronto is furious at Toronto Public Library for refusing to banish Meghan Murphy. Pride Toronto has A Statement.

Pride Toronto strongly opposes the Toronto Public Library’s decision to host and support an event with guest speaker Meghan Murphy to take place in a publicly funded space.

For many years, Pride Toronto has worked in partnership and allyship with the Toronto Public Library (TPL), including hosting a sold-out signature event in 2019 featuring headliner Abby Jacobson. It was our understanding that our relationship was entering a new phase of mutual cooperation, support and reciprocity. It was our belief that the TPL was committed to creating library spaces that are inclusive, safe and welcoming. The recent decision to allow the event with Meghan Murphy is a betrayal to our LGBT2SQ+ communities.

It is well known Meghan Murphy asserts publicly and repeatedly that Trans women cannot be women and will always be men. This is a denial of the lives, experiences and identities of Trans people. It is a crude, hateful and hurtful assertion. It says that the existence of Trans people is invalid and that therefore their human rights are up for public debate.

“It is well known that” Meghan Murphy doesn’t agree that men magically become women just by saying they are women. Neither do I; neither do lots of women. The claim is stupid and supernatural and not credible. It’s not the same kind of claim as “women should not be treated as inferiors” and “people of color should not be treated as inferiors.” Treating people as equals is not the same kind of thing as agreeing that people are what they manifestly are not. What if the next move is for people to declare they are trees, and run around threatening and punishing and exiling people who don’t accept that claim? It’s not part of any left worth its salt to try to force people to believe, or pretend to believe, magical nonsensical claims people make about themselves.

I would love to see an end to self-pitying burble about “denial of the lives, experiences and identities of” trans people or tree people or furries or anime characters any other damn fantasies people have about themselves. Have all the fantasies you want, knock yourself out, but don’t try to impose them on everyone else. No. We’re not buying it any more, so threaten all you like but no. No.

Also, claims about “saying the existence of Trans people is invalid” are meaningless garble. Existence isn’t a library card or a bus pass, so “validity” is not a relevant category. Nobody says “the existence of Trans people is invalid”; saying men are not women is not saying the existence of men who claim to be women is “invalid,” whatever that would mean, it’s just saying their claims about themselves are not true. There is no duty to accept all claims people make about themselves. There just isn’t. We couldn’t function if there were. I could claim to be the true owner of any big house with an ocean view I fancied, and then what? No. We don’t have to treat obviously false claims people make about themselves as true. Yelling that they find that hurtful is becoming just so much noise, and very boring noise at that.

Meghan Murphy also spreads the propaganda that as trans rights increase, the rights of women decrease. Feminists with an intersectional lens know that feminism and the rights of women are stronger when feminism includes all women. Trans women are women.

Yes, the rights of women are stronger when feminism includes all women, but not when it includes men. Trans women are men.

In Brexit news:

Boris Johnson has said he will press on “undaunted” with Brexit on 31 October, despite losing a crunch Commons vote.

The prime minister must now ask the EU for an extension to that deadline after MPs backed a motion designed to rule out a no-deal exit by 322 votes to 306.

He told MPs: “I will not negotiate a delay with the EU and neither does the law compel me to do so.”

He vowed to bring in legislation on Monday to implement the deal he struck with Brussels this week.

MPs could also be given another vote on the deal on Monday, if Commons Speaker John Bercow allows it.

The Commons defeat is a major setback for the PM, who has repeatedly insisted that the UK will leave at the end of the month come what may.

So they’re staring each other down on either side of an abyss?

Downing Street refused to offer any explanation as to why the prime minister did not consider he was obliged to negotiate a fresh extension.

Probably because there is no explanation? It’s just more attempted dictatorship, like what we have over here only not quite so crude in the execution?

Walter Shaub is livid about the Doral crime. He’s also informative – he says the Doral thing is a whole new level. I thought that in terms of the extreme blatancy and defiance of boundaries, but he says more than that. I’ll just go way back early yesterday and quote the hell out of him.

Agents of chaos want you to be cynical about democracy and believe public servants are, were and always will be corrupt. If that’s true, nothing matters. The life of Elijah Cummings and last night’s #Sammies2019 tell a different story. Democracy requires belief in what can be.

David Farenthold said:

The summit will be held in June, when Miami is hot and Doral is usually empty. In 2017, only 38% of Doral’s rooms were occupied in June. Only August (31%) was slower. Now — b/c @realdonaldtrump has awarded the summit to himself — it will be full. 

The “Miami is hot” bit matters – people don’t want to go to Florida in summer. Trump is forcing heads of state and everyone who accompanies them to go to a bad nasty place to make money for himself.

Shaub comments:

This is the most overt corruption to date. How any Senator could fail to object to this is beyond me. There’s no universe in which anyone could believe that, in a country as big as ours, the selection of Trump’s resort was anything but a product of the worst kind of corruption.

Somebody please ask the White House what agency ran this procurement. The White House does not have a procurement team that could run this, and it definitely does not have an appropriation to use for the event.

This is so overtly corrupt that it can’t be viewed as anything but a loyalty test for Senators. If they are corrupt enough to look the other way, Trump will know he can do anything. In that case, he will do everything.

Shaub says CREW filed an investigation request with the State Department on the Doral issue a month ago and haven’t heard anything. That’s not a good sign.

In case it’s not clear from my freaking out, this G-7 thing is an escalation. It may look from the outside like it’s been corruption all along—because it has been—but participating in a contract award to yourself is different by orders of magnitude. This is a red line crossed.

Good to know. Bad to know, but good to know.

I’d like you to imagine a conflict of interest prosecution in which a defense attorney’s closing argument is based on the things Mick Mulvaney said in defense of awarding the G7 contract to Doral. That attorney would be disbarred. The arguments are ridiculous.

The President of the United States participated in the award of a contract to himself. Are there Senators who find that acceptable? Are you prepared to say all future Presidents can award themselves contracts? Why do we even have an @OfficeGovEthics if the Senate will allow this?

We now live in a country where government employees like Mick Mulvaney can violate the ethical principle prohibiting misuse of position for private gain without official rebuke. The ethics program died yesterday.

So…there it is. If they let him get away with this everything will get even worse.

Also McKinnon:

The first item in his Twitter profile is “World Champion Cyclist.” But he’s a “World Champion Cyclist” only because he cheated in order to race with women even though he’s a man. He’s not really a “World Champion Cyclist.”

He’s not a public intellectual, either. He’s a public bullshitter and fraud and bully.

He’s pretending to be indignant because people who object to his cheating object to his cheating:

Y’all should be ashamed of yourselves. They’ve had to disable the live chat on the live feed for the world championships because transphobic bigots took over and wouldn’t stop. But I *am* glad they acted and disabled the chat, because it was a horrific mess.

He’s stealing prizes from women and people object to that. The horrific mess is inside the house.

Sky News did a chat with cycling champion and famed trans woman Rachel McKinnon.

RM: I’m legally and medically female, but the people who oppose my existence still want to think of me as male, they use the language of that I’m a man, and so there’s this stereotype that men are always stronger than women, and so if you think of trans women as men, then you think there’s an unfair advantage.

No. We don’t “think of trans women as men” – that’s just what they are. It’s McKinnon who does the thinking of people as what they’re not; those of us who reject the bullshit just know men when we see them. We don’t “think of” McKinnon as a man, we just know he is one, and we don’t “think of” it as fair for him to race on the women’s team in order to scoop all the top prizes. We don’t “think” there’s an unfair advantage, we just know it. (Here’s a hint: how many medals did McKinnon win before he started racing on the women’s team?)

The interviewer presses him.

Interviewer: Do you accept that there may still be an advantage?

RM: Is it possible? Yes. However, the range of body sizes and strength levels within a sport – you can be successful with massively different body compositions, even within my sport.

Then why wasn’t McKinnon successful when he raced on the men’s team? It is just pure coincidence that he’s grabbing all the medals now that he’s moved over?

[rude noise] Of course it’s not. He did it calculatedly, and he’s bullshitting everyone in sight, laughing to himself at all the fools who are buying it.

Journalist goes to meet subject of interview, starts write-up with hipster description of meet and greet, so that we can get our attitude straight at the outset. Lila Shapiro meets Andrea Long Chu:

On an early fall afternoon at a dry-pot restaurant in the East Village, the critic Andrea Long Chu is talking about herself, which is, by her account, one of her favorite things to do.

I guess we’re meant to take that as irony? Or charming self-deprecating frankness? Or, ideally, some of each, so that we’ll fall all the more in love with Chu? I don’t know, but it doesn’t work on me. I’ve become profoundly resistant to people who love nothing more than talking about themselves. There are few things I hate more. If talking about herself really is one of her favorite things to do then I recommend not interviewing her, not meeting up with her in any kind of restaurant in the East Village (or the West Village or the Upper West Side or even the Bronx), not having anything to do with her. Seek out the people who are interested in other things instead.

But hey: of course Chu is a narcissist. I should have known.

A little less than a year ago, in a New York Times op-ed about her plans to undergo surgery to “get a vagina,” Chu made a provocative claim that angered some trans advocates: She did not expect the painful, expensive procedure to make her happy. Still, Chu insisted, she had the right to get it whether it cured her dysphoria or not.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a “right” to “get” a vagina (or a penis either).

Nearly a year after the surgery, she says she’s feeling more miserable than she’d expected. “It’s perversely vindicating,” she adds with a wry smile. Dressed in a jumpsuit patterned with blue-and-white flowers, she brushes a curtain of curls away from her face with a flip of her wrist, revealing a tattoo of a geometric vulva on the underside of her forearm. “It’s very dangerous to get what you want.”

This is the sort of statement — darkly funny, intensely personal, daringly poised between profundity and trolling — that has made Chu one of the most exciting critics working today.

Oh stop. Glib paradoxes of that kind don’t make anyone an exciting anything. They’re easy to make and they’re not particularly interesting, let alone exciting. Why are people so gullible about this kind of dreck?

In her first book, Females, out later this month, she posits a new theory about gender and sexuality, starting with the contention that “everyone is female.” (“I get criticized for projecting a lot,” she says dryly.) In Chu’s usage, female is a “universal existential condition,” defined by submitting to someone else’s desires. For example, even if you conceive of yourself as an alpha male who likes to top in bed, the desire to dominate is ultimately its own form of submission. “A top,” says Chu, “is just a bottom folded into another shape.” So why does she insist on calling a universal condition “female”? “Because everyone already does,” she writes. Women are the “select delegates” of this state of being.

Blah blah blah. It’s the same old shit with a new (but cheap and ugly) ribbon on. It’s Molly Bloom but more reactionary. It’s yet another guy explaining women to women. I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.

#bedbugsummit is trending.

“Bring the leaders of the free world to Doral, he said. What could go wrong, he said,” tweeted songwriter Holly Figueroa O’Reilly, founder of Blue Wave Crowdsource, which supports Democratic candidates.

Twitter users began using the hashtag Thursday after White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney announced that the G7 summit would take place at Trump’s Doral resort because it was “far and away the best physical facility for this meeting.”

Except for the bedbugs. And the heat. And the humidity. And the overall who wants to be stuck at a crap Trump resort near Miami airport. And the fact that there are many better physical facilities. Other than that, it’s definitely the best.

The front page of the Baltimore Sun today:

On the one hand you have the political or philosophical concept of freedom of speech, and on the other hand you have the commercial interest of various people who make lots of money by selling tv shows and magazines and tabloids, and/or the advertising they purvey. If we want to think about the political or philosophical concept of freedom of speech, we’re well advised to consult Tocqueville or Mill or Orwell rather than Murdoch or O’Reilly or…Zuckerberg.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is not impressed by Zuckerberg’s credentials to instruct the masses on free speech.

For his entire adult life, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has been able to make up in hubris what he lacks in education. He continued that trend on Thursday while addressing students at Georgetown University in Washington DC, in what was billed as a major manifesto on “free speech”.

“I am here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression,” Zuckerberg said, as if anyone beyond the growing collection of authoritarian dictators seriously argues against it.

And as if Facebook didn’t have a conspicuous habit of suspending or banning women who express skepticism about the ability of men to become women by simply declaring it to be so.

Zuckerberg’s unsophisticated thoughts on free speech generated a manifesto that can only be called incoherent. Unsurprisingly, Facebook’s content regulations have been incoherent in design and in practice.

Imagine how insulting it must have been for hundreds of the brightest young minds in America, many of whom have considered deeply the history of American constitutional law and the ways it influences democracy, to sit politely and listen to billionaire who seems to have barely cracked a book on the subject and can’t seem to form a clear line of argument.

He’s a billionaire. Why would he bother cracking a book?

The speech was so weak and poorly structured that it could not have served as worse evidence in an argument for the value of speech itself. The event would have been much more valuable to Zuckerberg and his audience if the Georgetown public policy students had lectured him about the history and value of free speech. They, after all, know things and are trained to think and write clearly.

Zuckerberg made a thing that sold well. That’s not the same as knowledge or ability to think and write clearly.

For being such a key player in the young 21st century, Zuckerberg embraces an outdated, 19th-century view of speech. For him there is actually something like a marketplace of ideas through which the best ideas prevail once we encounter evidence and argument. The problem is, Facebook undermines any attempt to sustain such a practice.

We largely solved the challenge of the 19th century. By 2019 we have managed to offer most people in the world a platform for expression and a tool for constant, affordable human communication. In much of the world, speech remains beyond the reach of state control. That’s all fine, except it creates a new problem we have yet to confront.

The problem of the 21st century is cacophony. Too many people are yelling at the same time. Attentions fracture. Passions erupt. Facts crumble. It’s increasingly hard to deliberate deeply about complex crucial issues with an informed public. We have access to more knowledge yet we can’t think and talk like adults about serious things.

Is Trump the inevitable result of that state of affairs?

So Mulvaney says yeah there was a quid pro quo, deal with it, ya big bunch of anti-corruption wimps.

Or almost that.

A senior White House official has admitted military aid to Ukraine was withheld partly to pressure Kyiv to investigate allegations on the Democrats and the 2016 election.

Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said President Donald Trump had mentioned Democratic “corruption”.

But Mr Trump was also concerned about wider corruption in Ukraine, he said.

Yeah like socialist corruption and Mexican corruption and…uh…Muslim corruption. Stuff like that.

Briefing reporters on Thursday, Mr Mulvaney gave a lengthy answer to a question about Ukraine, saying the president had told him Ukraine was a “corrupt place” and that Mr Trump didn’t want to spend aid and “have them use it to line their own pockets”.

This is Trump talking – Trump accusing other people of corruption and lining their own pockets. Trump.

Mr Mulvaney also said that the president “did not like” the fact that European countries weren’t providing much military aid to Ukraine.

“Those were the driving factors,” he said. “Did he also mention to me in past the corruption related to the DNC [Democratic National Convention] server? Absolutely. No question about that.

“But that’s it. That’s why we held up the money.”

Ok then, thanks for being so candid.

When reporters put to him that he had described a “quid pro quo”, Mr Mulvaney replied: “We do that all the time with foreign policy,

“There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy. That is going to happen. Elections have consequences. And foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration,” he said.

He also said that the move had been made in connection with “an ongoing investigation by our Department of Justice”.

But a senior Justice Department official told CBS News: “If the White House was withholding aid in regards to the cooperation with any investigation at the Department of Justice, that is news to us.”

A person familiar with the reaction inside the department said officials were “utterly confused” and “angry” at Mr Mulvaney for saying the aid was withheld in connection to an investigation, CBS reports.

Well they’re just a bunch of whiners.

Originally a comment by What a Maroon on Not angels.

As many of you know, I spent some time in Turkey about 30 years ago. In total I was there for about a year, including a summer in Istanbul and about ten months in Ankara. While I was in Ankara, I also had the opportunity to travel around the country, and visited pretty much every region. I met a lot of wonderful people there and had a fantastic time, and have many cherished memories. Of course spending a year in the country three decades ago doesn’t give me any real insight into what is going on now, but the recent actions of the government have brought back some memories.

If you’re in Turkey, it’s hard to avoid Kurds, though you may not realize it. In Istanbul there was the shoeshine boy who wanted to clean my sneakers; impressed with his persistence, I finally agreed to him cleaning one of my shoes. In Ankara, I had several Kurdish students, though even admitting that was an act of trust on their part. One of them took me around one weekend to show off the apartment he had just bought (that was still under construction), and then brought me to the office of his uncle, a prosperous dentist in the center of the city. While we were there, his uncle took out some cassettes he had hidden away and played them for us. The music was fairly typical Turkish pop from the time, but the songs were in Kurdish, a language that was officially unrecognized and effectively prohibited. Again, this was an enormous amount of trust on their part.

In the summer we had about five weeks of vacation, so I took a long, slow tour around the country. Toward the tail end of the tour, I found myself in Diyarbakır, in the south, wandering around with some time to kill before my next bus. A kid of around 17 approached me offering to take me to a carpet shop. This was a fairly common occurrence in Turkey at the time, and with nothing better to do I agreed, though I made clear I wasn’t interested in buying anything. He took me to the shop, where the served me tea while a man roughly my age (mid-twenties at the time) launched into his spiel about how the carpets were woven while another man in his thirties or forties looked on. Eventually the older man left, and the tone of the younger man changed. He abandoned the spiel, explained that the older man was his math teacher and a Turk, and then explained that he was a Kurd, and denounced Turkey as a fascist state. Yet another act of trust.

I don’t have any grand conclusions to draw from these relatively random encounters, but I’m sickened by what the Turkish government is doing now in Syria, and by our role in it, and I want to believe that the people I knew thirty years ago would be sickened too.