David Karpf on the translucently thin skin of Bret Stephens:

Bret Stephens is above me in the status hierarchy. He knows this. I know this. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and has a regular op-ed column in the New York Times. I am just some professor. I’ve written two books, but unless you are professionally involved with digital politics, you probably have never heard of me.

We have now though.

Karpf was surprised to get an email from Stephens, and surprised to see the provost of his university was cc’ed on the message.

He shares the email. I neglected to quote the whole thing yesterday so why don’t I do that now.

Dear Dr. Karpf,

Someone just pointed out a tweet you wrote about me, calling me a “bedbug.” I’m often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people — people they’ve never met — on Twitter. I think you’ve set a new standard.

I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for for a few minutes, and then call me a “bedbug” to my face. That would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your part. I promise to be courteous no matter what you have to say.

Maybe it will make you feel better about yourself.

Please consider this a standing invitation. You are more than welcome to bring your significant other.

Cordially,
Bret Stephens

Apart from anything else – it’s hilarious that he thinks that one mild joke “set a new standard” for what people are prepared to say on Twitter. Oh, dude. Not within shouting distance.

Karpf was surprised he even knew about the tweet, let alone bothered to pitch a fit about it.

But what was most striking to me was that he had gone to the effort to CC the provost. Including the Provost clarifies the intent of the message. It means he was not reaching out in an earnest attempt to promote online civil discourse.

That insultingly insincere “Cordially” at the end notwithstanding.

It means he was trying to send a message that he stands above me in the status hierarchy, and that people like me are not supposed to write mean jokes about people like him online. It was an exercise in wielding power—using the imprimatur of The New York Times to ward off speech that he finds distasteful.

I was even more surprised this morning, when he was invited to speak on MSNBC about the incident and remarked that, “There’s a bad history of being analogized to insects that goes back to a lot of totalitarian regimes in the past.” You can draw your own conclusion as to whether my joke was worth a chuckle. But equating a random Twitter account with a totalitarian regime is a remarkably long walk. I have to assume that Stephens recognizes that these words would have a different meaning and impact if they came from the ministry of propaganda than when uttered as a cheeky response to a headline about actual bedbugs in a newsroom.

The ministry of propaganda or the president of the US.

The funny thing is the joke was more at the expense of the Times than Stephens himself. Or maybe not more, but equally. I read it as aimed in the general direction of the David Brookses and Bari Weisses – the conspicuously mediocre opinionators they choose to represent The Range of Views.

But here’s what still bothers me as this strange episode recedes from the news cycle: Bret Stephens seems to think that his social status should render him immune from criticism from people like me. I think that the rewards of his social status come with an understanding that lesser-known people will say mean things about him online.

Stephens reached out to me in the mistaken belief that I would feel ashamed. He reached out believing my university would chastise me for provoking the ire of a writer at The New York Times. That’s an abuse of his social station.

But what’s the point of having that kind of social station if you don’t get to abuse it?

And I thought we’d gone crazy. Boris is getting away with his coup.

Parliament will be suspended just days after MPs return to work in September – and only a few weeks before the Brexit deadline.

Boris Johnson said a Queen’s Speech would take place after the suspension, on 14 October, to outline his “very exciting agenda”.

But it means the time MPs have to pass laws to stop a no-deal Brexit on 31 October would be cut.

House of Commons Speaker John Bercow said it was a “constitutional outrage”.

The Speaker, who does not traditionally comment on political announcements, continued: “However it is dressed up, it is blindingly obvious that the purpose of [suspending Parliament] now would be to stop [MPs] debating Brexit and performing its duty in shaping a course for the country.”

Shit’s getting real.

How long will it take Childe Donald to try to do the same?

Three Conservative members of the Queen’s Privy Council took the request to suspend Parliament to the monarch’s Scottish residence in Balmoral on Wednesday morning on behalf of the prime minister.

It has now been approved, allowing the government to suspend Parliament no earlier than Monday 9 September and no later than Thursday 12 September, until Monday 14 October.

Nice job, Brenda.

Could she have done anything else? I have no idea. I don’t understand the arrangement. The Crown plays a merely formal or ceremonial role…but then why did three Tories zip up to Balmoral to get her ok and why does it matter that she handed it over? I don’t know. Anyway she did, so Johnson’s coup is going ahead unless MPs can stop it.

Donnie of course is all for it.

Would be very hard for Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, to seek a no-confidence vote against New Prime Minister Boris Johnson, especially in light of the fact that Boris is exactly what the U.K. has been looking for, & will prove to be “a great one!” Love U.K.

Or England, or Queenville, or whatever they’re calling it today.

Another one:

When June Eastwood steps onto the start line for the Clash of the Inland Northwest cross country meet on Saturday morning in Cheney, Wash., she will make history. Eastwood, a senior at the University of Montana, will become the fastest distance runner to ever compete in an NCAA Division I women’s race.

In fact, it won’t even be close.

Eastwood’s personal best in the 800 meters is 1:55.23. That’s almost four seconds faster than the collegiate record of 1:59.10 set by Raevyn Rogers in 2017.

Her personal best in the 1500 is 3:50.19. Jenny Simpson’s collegiate record, unchallenged for a decade, is almost 10 seconds slower (3:59.90).

Eastwood has run 14:38.80 in the 5,000, far ahead of Simpson’s collegiate record of 15:01.70.

Despite those PBs, it is far from certain Eastwood will win on Saturday. Eastwood has won just two races out of 56 in three years of competition for Montana. She’s never won a national title or earned All-American honors. In fact, she’s never even qualified for the national meet.

The reason? For the first three years of her career, June Eastwood competed on the men’s team.

Competed on the men’s team and didn’t do all that well so hey, let’s try the other team.

Unless Eastwood is utterly awful this fall, it seems likely that she will face questions about whether she has an unfair advantage because of her chromosomal sex — and how big that advantage is. If she’s 20th at NCAAs, will someone complain that she bumped someone out of All-American honors? If she’s 5th at her conference meet, will someone complain she bumped someone out of all-conference honors? If she’s 5th on her team, will someone complain she bumped someone off the travel squad?

All of this makes Eastwood one of the most compelling athletes in the NCAA this fall. How she runs — and how the NCAA reacts — could set a precedent for how the NCAA handles MTF transgender cases and reshape the future of women’s sports.

And “reshape the future of women’s sports” in the sense of killing it stone dead. There won’t be any women’s sports any more, because men who claim to be women will take all of it over.

Pink News tweeted this clip from last year today.

One thing the “non-binary lesbian” on the left said – or “argued” – is interesting.

At the end of the day they are terms, they are linguistic tools to describe an experience that already exists. So someone telling me that I can’t be a non-binary lesbian doesn’t mean anything [snigger] because I already am one.

What?

Yes, they are linguistic tools to describe an experience that already exists, but to do that they have to do that. They have to be accurate as opposed to inaccurate, or otherwise they’re not describing the experience, but failing to do so. If she’s trying to describe her experience of being a lesbian and swaps the word “rabbit” for the word “lesbian” she will fail at describing her experience of being a lesbian because her hearers will think she’s talking about her experience as a rabbit.

It’s the same with “non-binary lesbian.” Lesbians are women and girls attracted to women or girls. I don’t know what non-binary people are, but we are told very firmly what they are not, which is women or men. Our non-binary friend in the flowery shirt is not a woman, so she can’t be a lesbian, because lesbians are women (or girls but she’s an adult). Saying that words are terms are linguistic tools doesn’t change that.

Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter today:

A follow up to the dead rat that was nailed to our door recently… this morning we found this writing scrawled across the windows of our storefront space that we use for support and training groups

“KILL TERFS / TRANS POWER”

Any chance it’s provocateurs, I wonder? It seems pretty insane for actual trans people to self-present that way…but then again it would hardly be the first time.

I also went looking for recent Bret Stephens wisdom, and found some on the subject of The War On Excellence a couple of week ago:

Today’s students are not chafing under some bow-tied patriarchal WASP dispensation. Instead, they are the beneficiaries of a system put in place by professors and administrators whose political views are almost uniformly left wing and whose campus policies indulge nearly every progressive orthodoxy.

So why all the rage?

The answer lies in the title of Anthony Kronman’s necessary, humane and brave new book: “The Assault on American Excellence.” Kronman’s academic credentials are impeccable — he has taught at Yale for 40 years and spent a decade as dean of its law school — and his politics, so far as I can tell, are to the left of mine.

But Yale has been ground zero for recent campus unrest, including a Maoist-style struggle session against a distinguished professor, fights about “cultural appropriation,” the renaming of Calhoun (as in, John C.) College and the decision to drop the term “master” because, to some, it carried “a painful and unwelcome connotation.”

Only to some though. To the people who could answer to the word “master,” why, it’s a lovely word. Several words are like that, I think. “Sir,” “your lordship,” “your holiness” – they all hint at a particular form of male power which does not always entail the consent of those subject to that power, so yes, it does carry “a painful and unwelcome connotation.” Fancy that.

It’s this last decision that seems to have triggered Kronman’s alarm. The word “master” may remind some students of slavery. What it really means is a person who embodies achievement, refinement, distinction — masterliness — and whose spirit is fundamentally aristocratic. Great universities are meant to nurture that spirit, not only for its own sake but also as an essential counterweight to the leveling and conformist tendencies of democratic politics that Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosed as the most insidious threats to American civilization.

Why does Bret Stephens get to decide that “master” really means a person who embodies achievement, refinement, distinction as opposed to a person who owns and extracts labor from slaves?

Also notice the cowardly evasion of the fact that it’s an explicitly male word, with the awkward addition that the female version now means non-marital sex partner rather than The Lady of the House. He says “person” but that’s bullshit, it means male person. And the codswallop about refinement and aristocratic is just that. He sounds like Margaret Mitchell with a better vocabulary.

What’s happening on campuses today isn’t a reaction to Donald Trump or some alleged systemic injustice, at least not really. Fundamentally, Kronman argues, it’s a reaction against this aristocratic spirit — of being, as H.L. Mencken wrote, “beyond responsibility to the general masses of men, and hence superior to both their degraded longings and their no less degraded aversions.” It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few. And it is being undertaken for the sake of a radical egalitarianism in which all are included, all are equal, all are special.

So. David Karpf wasn’t wrong; dude’s a bedbug.

Oh this is interesting. I wondered if I’d written anything about Bret Stephens here before so I did a search and I’ll be darned, look what I found from April 2018:

But sometimes a person’s worst tweets, like a person’s worst blurts or jokes or exclamations, tell you something.

Expressing a belief in a tweet – or on Facebook or Instagram – does not make that belief any less yours. That’s why I found it so odd when New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote an open letter to Williamson this weekend, apologizing to him over having his character “assassinated”.

“I jumped at your abortion comment, but for heaven’s sake, it was a tweet. When you write a whole book on the need to execute the tens of millions of American women who’ve had abortions, then I’ll worry,” Stephens wrote.

Easy for him; he’s not among the people Williamson would like to see hanged.

The first and last sentences are mine, the quoted passage is Jessica Valenti in The Guardian. The subject was a columnist at the Atlantic who was fired when staff learned that he had argued that women who get abortions should be executed.

So to Bret Stephens a tweet saying – not as a joke – that women should be executed for having abortions is merely a tweet, but a tweet saying – as a joke – that he is a bedbug is not mere at all. One the one hand, they (seriously) should be executed; on the other hand, he (heh) is a bedbug. It’s the second that he thinks really matters.

Dang. Beware the distortions of vanity, my friends, for they are the very spawn of the bedbug.

Another entry in the “horrors inflicted on other people are as nothing compared to a minor insult aimed at me” file: NY Times columnist Bret Stephens goes nuclear on one unnoticed tweet.

On Twitter Monday afternoon, a George Washington University professor compared conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens to a bedbug after a Times editor had posted that bedbugs were spotted in its newsroom.

David Karpf’s tweet, which read, “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens,” initially gained little traction.

“Little” traction meaning no traction – zero retweets. But never mind traction; Stephens emailed Karpf all the same, and copied in the provost at GWU where Karpf is a professor.

“This afternoon, I tweeted a brief joke about a well-known NYT op-Ed columnist,” Karpf wrote Monday night. “It got 9 likes and 0 retweets. I did not @ him. He does not follow me. He just emailed me, cc’ing my university provost. He is deeply offended that I called him a metaphorical bedbug.”

As many people have pointed out, Stephens should try being a woman or black on Twitter. He doesn’t know he’s born.

The exchange went viral soon after, when Karpf posted Stephens’ full email on Twitter.

“I’m often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people — people they’ve never met — on Twitter. I think you’ve set a new standard,” Stephens wrote. “I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for a few minutes, and then call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face. That would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your part. I promise to be courteous no matter what you have to say.”

A new standard? Good grief. Donald Trump says worse things than that every other day, and then there are all the other shits on Twitter.

Today Stephens Deleted his Account.

Stephens, an MSNBC contributor, was then asked about the spat by network host Chris Jansing on the air Tuesday morning. Stephens said being compared to a bedbug was “dehumanizing” and “totally unacceptable.”

“Analogizing people to insects is always wrong,” Stephens said, adding there is a “bad history” of comparing humans to insects that “goes back to a lot of totalitarian regimes in the past.”

Always wrong? What about comparing someone to a mosquito whining in your ear? Or a spider? Or an industrious ant? Or a butterfly? Or a moth? Or a caterpillar?

His claim just isn’t true – he should have said “vermin” or “noxious insects” or similar to make it accurate.

But more to the point there’s a consistency issue, combined with a “yes but this was about ME” issue.

Matt McDermott:

Bret Stephens: The biggest threat facing our society today is the stifling of free speech on college campuses.

Also Bret Stephens: I’m going to try and get a college professor fired for a joke he tweeted that didn’t get a single retweet.

I mean come on, @nytimes.

The right to offend! Most precious right! Except when you’re talking about ME!

Also in today – Devon Rape Crisis and Sexual Abuse Services tweets:

Are you a self-identified woman? Are able to commit 3 evenings a month to volunteering? Are you passionate about gender equality & ending violence? If you’ve answered yes to all of the above we want to hear from you. Full details; http://devonrapecrisis.org.uk/support-us/get-involved

Which, as many women angrily responded, is just a terrible thing to do. Women who need rape or sexual abuse services don’t want them from men. They don’t want them from men even if those men “self-identify as” women. Rape and sexual abuse services should not be a place for men to exercise their fantasies. Rape and sexual abuse services should be for women and focus on what women need, not what narcissistic fantasizing men need.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey at the Miscellany Room.

Can you stomach another article on Epstein?

This one is a Mother Jones interview with Stuart Pivar, who described himself as a close friend of Epstein, until he realized what Epstein was up to. Though he still continued to engage in some fairly gross apologetics for him, so I take the claimed separation with a grain of salt. (Pharyngula readers may recall that Pivar once sued PZ Myers for calling him a “crackpot.”)

Some notable excerpts. Those dinners with scientific stars:

There were lavish dinner parties with the likes of Steven Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould during which Epstein would ask provocatively elementary questions like “What is gravity?” If the conversation drifted beyond his interests, Epstein was known to interrupt, “What does that got to do with pussy?!”

Ha ha. Let’s get back to the important topics, amiright? Hmm — one wonders what the women scientists at the party thought of such…. ha, just kidding, obviously there weren’t any women scientists present. Which should have been a red flag to these distinguished male scholars, shouldn’t it? How come they didn’t wonder why Epstein didn’t cultivate any distinguished women scholars? It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the social company of women, after all.

As I said, Pivar’s claim that he stayed away rings a little hollow, given his attitude towards Epstein’s behavior:

What’s the difference between the punishment which befalls a murderer and a serial murderer? It’s the same. If Jeffrey Epstein was found guilty of fooling around with one 16-year-old trollop, nobody would pay any attention. The trouble is, what he did was quantitative and not qualitative.

What Jeffrey did is nothing in comparison to the rapes and the forceful things, which people did. Jeffrey had to do with a bunch of women who were totally complicit. For years, they went, came there time and time and time again. And if there was only one of them who did it, no one would have noticed—except he made an industry out of it. And why did he make an industry out of it? Because Jeffrey was a very, very, very sick man. For some reason that doesn’t get understood. Did you ever hear of nymphomania?

Ah yes, it was just 16-year-old “trollops,” they don’t count for anything. Why, everybody fucks one from time to time, you just shouldn’t make a habit of it, and anyone who does is obviously just ill, not evil!

He didn’t struggle with it. He was in a position financially to yield to it, big time. But nevertheless, he could not help himself. I’ve seen him do things which he couldn’t—couldn’t help himself, he was afflicted with it. If he had tuberculosis it wouldn’t be called a perversion, would it? Because he coughed too much?

Oh, indeed. Quite an apposite comparison. “(cough, cough) Oh, I’m so sorry, I seem to have gotten my penis in your teenaged vagina. Ooopsie.”

Anyone who did one thing, let us say, to some 16-year-old trollop who would come to his house time after time after time and then afterwards bitch about it— why, no one would pay attention. Except Jeffrey made an industry out of it.

The nerve of those 16-year-olds!

There are plenty of people with satyriasis like there are plenty of nymphomaniacs, except very few of them have the money to, let us say, treat themselves to sex three times a day with young girls. That was what he had to do. Other people, there are plenty of cases, presumably, if you want to read up on the subject—it’s called satyriasis, right? It’s the male version of—did you ever meet a nymphomaniac?

Ah, yes. “Treat yourself” to sex with young girls, just, you know, in moderation!

It goes on from there, often in circles. Pivar repeats himself, lectures the writer on how he should have talked to a psychologist about satyriasis, and read Kraft-Ebbing’s work on sexual perversion, threatens to sue the writer, etc.

The least useful message shirt ever:

Smirk smirk abortions not just for THE LADIES.

As if abortions were like earrings or Jimmy Choos or being on the cover of Vogue.

McKinnon is continuing to show what a reasonable, thoughtful, decent, other-regarding human he is.

Nathan Oseroff thought the issue was David Koch:

I saw one of those show up in my feed and I’m wondering if they really think David Koch was a young woman?

McKinnon had to explain he’d been talking the same shit about Magdalen:

Oh, I also said it in relation to a really truly horrible TERF who’s dying of brain cancer.

It’s the latter that they’re so uppity about.

Magdalen is not horrible. “TERF” is just trans-english for “cunt.” We’re “uppity” because gloating about her terminal brain cancer is disgusting.

Trump was too busy adding up how much money he was going to lose by making the G7 pay him for putting the next one in his hotel to make it to the climate session today. (It’s actually sort of relevant that the Doral is in Miami, because Miami is one of those scandalously reckless places that keep building giant hotels and condo towers on a sinking shore. Miami is committing suicide while the world watches, dumbfounded.)

Donald Trump did not attend Monday’s crucial discussion on climate and biodiversity at the G7 meeting of international leaders in Biarritz, missing talks on how to deal with the Amazon rainforest fires as well as new ways to cut carbon emissions.

Reporters noticed at the start of the session that the US president’s chair was empty.

Trump was later asked by reporters covering a meeting with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, whether he had attended the climate session. He replied: “We’re having it in a little while.” He did not appear to hear when a reporter told him it had just taken place.

He was hearing cash register noises in his head.

Trump says the best possible place to hold the next G7 is…you’ll never guess…one of his golf resorts. What a happy coincidence, because he’s in a position to get them a good deal.

Speaking as this year’s meeting of world leaders wrapped up, he told reporters that “my people” had toured venues across the US before concluding his Doral hotel would be ideal.

“It’s not about me, it’s about getting the right location,” he said at a news conference on Monday.

Of course. It’s never about him, it’s always about doing the right thing, and there is nowhere in the entire United States that would do as well for a meeting of world leaders than his personal golf resort in Miami.

Mr Trump’s property, the National Doral Miami, is located around 8 miles (13 km) from Miami’s airport.

He said Secret Service and “military people” were among his scouts who toured “all over the country and they came up and said this is where we’d like to be”.

Nah, they didn’t, any more than the world leaders came up to Trump and asked why the press is always harshing his mellow.

When asked by a reporter on the propriety of picking his own property to host G7, Mr Trump said doing so would actually cost him money.

“In my opinion, I’m not going to make any money,” he said. “I don’t care about making money… I think it just works out well.”

He insisted the idea was “not at all” to boost his own brand.

Obviously not. Why would booking a whole huge bunch of people into his hotel make him any money? How would that even work? Hotels don’t make a profit unless they’re kept empty, everybody knows that.

Earlier on Monday, during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr Trump said Doral was a frontrunner but that no final decision about the exact location had been made.

He added that so far, no other venue “could even come close to competing with” Doral.

“It’s got tremendous acreage, many hundreds of acres, so we can handle whatever happens,” Mr Trump said.

The Washington Post reported that Mr Trump originally floated the idea back in June of his 800-acre Doral property hosting next year’s G7 summit.

Mr Trump’s advisers cautioned against staging such an event at a Trump venue due to ethical questions that would arise, according to the Post.

Oh surely not. What ethical questions could possibly arise, seeing as how having more people paying to stay at his hotel will cost him money?