Another “prosecute the victim” story.

One evening last summer, Mikhail Khachaturyan decided that his living room wasn’t tidy enough, so he summoned his three teenage daughters one by one and doused each with pepper spray.

There was little unusual about this evening in the Khachaturyan household, according to court records, except for one thing: The sisters decided they couldn’t take the violence and abuse anymore.

They waited until their father fell asleep in his rocking chair and attacked him with a kitchen knife and a hammer. He put up a fight, but died within minutes.

The Khachaturyan sisters, now aged 18, 19 and 20, were charged last month with premeditated murder, in a case that has drawn outrage and shone a light on the way the Russian justice system handles domestic violence and sexual abuse cases.

More than 200,000 people have signed an online petition urging the prosecutors to drop the murder charges, which could land the sisters in prison for up to 20 years.

Remember when Putin gave a green light to domestic abuse?

Pressured by conservative family groups, President Vladimir Putin in 2017 signed a law decriminalising some forms of domestic violence, which has no fixed definition in the Russian legislation.

Police routinely turn a blind eye to cases of domestic abuse, while preventive measures, such as restraining orders, are either lacking or not in wide use.

Court filings showed that the Khachaturyan sisters were repeatedly beaten by their father, a war veteran, and sexually abused.

He kept a bunch of guns and knives in the house. He threatened neighbors as well as his daughters with violence.

Prosecutors acknowledge the extraordinary violent circumstances that pushed the teenagers to attack and eventually kill their own father, but they insist that Maria, Angelina and Krestina should be tried for murder.

The sisters’ lawyers argue that they were acting in justified self-defence in circumstances of lasting abuse and life-threatening violence.

H/t Rob

Male boss sexually harasses female underling. She records one of his phone calls. She is sentenced to six months in prison.

Indonesia’s top court has rejected an appeal by a woman who was sentenced to six months in prison for recording and sharing a phone conversation she had with her boss to prove that he was sexually harassing her.

The Supreme Court said Baiq Nuril Maknun was guilty of spreading “indecent” material.

Her boss reported her to the police in 2015 after the recording was circulated.

Rights groups condemned the ruling.

Nuril had complained of getting lewd phone calls from the head teacher of the school she worked at in Mataram, a city on the island of Lombok.

So she recorded one of his calls, and shared it with staff at the school and the head of an education agency. It went viral on social media. The man reported her to the police.

The Supreme Court found her guilty in November of “violating decency” under Indonesia’s electronic information and transactions law. On Thursday, it dismissed her efforts to have the verdict overturned, saying she had failed to produce new evidence.

The court also fined her 500 million rupiah (£28,200; $35,200).

The case has sparked outrage in Indonesia, with rights groups warning that the verdict sends a worrying message to victims of sexual harassment.

“We are concerned about the impact of this decision because it opens a door for perpetrators of sexual violence to criminalise victims,” Ade Wahyudin, executive director of the Legal Aid Foundation for the Press, told Reuters news agency.

H/t Soraya

Sometimes, explaining how patriarchal norms infuse laws is hard. NOT TODAY. After months of harassment, Nuril Maknun recorded one of boss’ phone calls. She’s been sentenced to at least 6 months in jail for “distributing lewd material.” He’s been promoted. https://t.co/2cDQxRvI5S

— Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly) July 6, 2019

I hate it when I agree with Brendan O’Neill, but it does happen sometimes. He’s dead-on with this one.

It’s Pride Month, all month because it’s the anniversary of Stonewall, which was a fine thing.

The gains made by gay-rights warriors over the past five decades have been amazing and important.

But the melting of that great liberatory moment into today’s bland and virtually mandatory forced Pride shenanigans is depressing. It tells a broader story about the demise of radical politics. The riotous counterculturalists of the Sixties and Seventies demanded freedom. They didn’t give a damn what the ‘moral majority’ thought of them  — they just wanted the moral majority to leave them alone.

(It’s not quite that simple. They wanted the moral majority to stop doing some things – bombing Vietnam into rubble, for instance – and to stop voting for people who ordered those things.)

Fast forward to 2019, and that historic human instinct to be left alone in liberty has been replaced by a needy and therapeutic politics of recognition. Now gay-rights activists don’t demand autonomy — they want validation.

I hate agreeing with Brendan, but those two sentences are gold. A needy and therapeutic politics of recognition is exactly right, and I detest it. That long needy bleat by the gender-whoopsie paleontologist yesterday – talk about needy. Needy isn’t political, needy is the opposite of political, needy is All About Me and that’s not politics but idiocy (in the Greek sense). The National Theatre blithering about making its staff feel supported is The Politics of Needy, and if it’s not stopped it will infantilize everyone and no one will be left to plant the crops.

This happened yesterday:

The @greenroomSE1 have called the police to have women and lesbians removed because they don't like the t-shirts we are wearing. #waronlesbians #PrideInLondon#Stonewall50@thetimes @MetroUK @guardian @DailyMirror @TheSun @Telegraph @M_Star_Online

— Anne Ultra Rużyło – Woman ♀️⚕️🇮🇪🇮🇹🇵🇱 (@sargesalute) July 5, 2019

The Green Room is part of the National Theatre.

The Guardian does a Both Sides:

The National Theatre has become embroiled in a bitter war of words after a group of lesbian friends was refused service in the venue’s Green Room bar in the run-up to the Pride in London celebrations.

The women and their supporters claim their treatment at the hands of staff, who called the police, was a response to their campaigning stance on gender identity. Other witnesses in the bar have described their behaviour as disruptive.

The small group, who arrived with placards, included Anne Ruzylo, a political activist and former member of the Bexhill and Battle Labour party, and on Friday night she was one of those who complained on Twitter.

Ruzylo, who was wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Lesbian: a woman who loves other women”, tweeted that staff at the Green Room bar had “called the police to have women and lesbians removed because they don’t like the T-shirts we are wearing”.

On Friday night the National Theatre, which is to host a Pride after-party on Saturday night with the cabaret and drag pub the Glory as part of its River Stage festival, responded on social media, saying: “The NT has not and would not ever discriminate against an individual on the basis of their sexuality – or indeed because they were proudly declaring this on a T-shirt. We do, however, respect and value our trans staff, company and audience members. As such, if the behaviour of visitors impinges on their ability to feel supported and safe, we will take action.”

What a slushy mushy evasive way to claim that the women somehow made trans staff, company and audience members feel unsafe. What behavior? Sitting on chairs? Wearing shirts with words on? Existing as lesbians?

Lisa Burger, the joint chief executive of the National Theatre, said: “While investigations into the incident are ongoing, multiple witnesses corroborate that a group who attended the Green Room restaurant on Friday 5 July were ultimately asked to leave the premises as a result of a series of disturbances.

“These began with their refusal to put placards out of sight that featured messages which upset other customers and contravened our visiting policy, and culminated in abusive behaviour towards our staff.

Abusive behavior? Like, asking to be served, for instance?

I don’t believe there was any abusive behavior. I think this is the usual bullshit of translating “not repeating the dogma at every opportunity” into messages that upset people and abusive behavior.

The police arrived.

Is this a picture of lesbians being removed by the police from the Green Room SE1 because they are same sex attracted? pic.twitter.com/SR9QyLjnfQ

— Dr EM (@PankhurstEM) July 5, 2019

Which is worse – holding people captive in appalling conditions, or pointing out that people are being held captive in appalling conditions?

Adam Serwer discusses the issue:

The journalist Jonathan Katz argued in May that given the intent behind these facilities, and the conditions that migrants are being held in, they are best described as a concentration-camp system in the United States. That assessment was echoed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was promptly accused of trivializing the Holocaust. “Allegations that somehow the United States is operating in a way that is in any way a parallel to the Holocaust is just completely ludicrous,” Representative Liz Cheney wrote. Although Ocasio-Cortez did not mention the Holocaust, the association between the Shoah and concentration camps is strong, and attacking an opponent for hyperbole is easier than defending the torture of children—not that Cheney is at all opposed to torture.

The reaction to Ocasio-Cortez is unsurprising. Whatever the merits of her criticism, when those in power are caught abusing that power in ways that are morally indefensible and politically unpopular, they will always seek to turn an argument about oppression into a dispute about manners. The conversation then shifts from the responsibility of the state for the human lives it is destroying to whether those who object to that destruction have exhibited proper etiquette. If congressional Republicans—or, for that matter, their constituents—had expressed a fraction as much outrage over the treatment of migrant children in American detention facilities as they did in response to Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks, she would never have had cause to make them in the first place.

This variety of tut-tutting is irresistible to many ostensibly objective journalists, who by convention are barred from expressing opinions on policy but are welcome to lecture on tone, and take nearly every opportunity to remind the rabble of their obligation to be polite to their rulers. But to express outrage at the criticism of nefarious conduct while treating that conduct as a typical political conflict in which there are two equally valid positions is to take a side.

I wrote about it in The Freethinker last week.

Here we go again.

Brian Leiter points out an item:

Wollongong Undergraduate Students’ Association… (UPDATED)

…is a disgrace.  How can the Australasian Association of Philosophy permit such an event?  (And if the AAP isn’t hosting this event, why are they permitting the use of the AAP logo?)

What’s it done?

Scheduled an event for a conference on Monday with the thoughtful title “F**k off Holly Lawford-Smith”.

Under “Details” we get:

A well known TERF has been invited to speak at the Australasian Association of Philosophers conference at UoW. She has been overtly transphobic and is a huge supporter of the fake academic theories created by so called “gender critical” academics who use outdated terminology and ideas such as Blanchard’s theory on gender to discriminate against some of the most marginalised people in our society.

This is disgusting, this is unacceptable and this is coming from a university who supposedly supports queer students while allowing hate speech to be propogated on campus.

We at the Allsorts Queer Collective and the Wollongong Undergraduate Student Association find it outrageous that the university and AAP has allowed an explicit TERF to give a talk about exclusionary rights within women’s spaces.

She is not welcome to spew her disgusting discriminatory and exclusionary hate speech at our university. We must stand against this and send not only a message to Holly Lawford-Smith but to UoW that we will not stand for this kind of flagrant disregard for our community at our uni.

Four legs good, two legs bad. Washington’s army took over the airports. It’s all the same thing – mindless yelling, refusal to think, refusal to learn, pig-headed belligerence, brainless tribalism. It has no business in government and it has no business in universities.

Brian did a follow-up post.

I characterized the AAP response as “tepid,” but philosopher John Schwenkler (Florida State) wrote me with a more critical take, which he kindly gave permission to share:

It is not “tepid” — rather it’s effectively a slander of our colleague. The first paragraph begins by indicating that she wasn’t important enough to have been invited by the society, and ends by implying that her positions “conflict with [the AAP’s] commitment to support diversity in philosophy”. And then in the second paragraph there’s a clear suggestion that allowing someone like Holly to speak freely “conflict[s] with the aim of creating a space where everyone is able to participate”. Both of the latter claims are ludicrous.

I’m glad I don’t have to go to university with those “students.”

From Josephine Raap on Facebook:

The mother of a “Drag Kid” is shocked, shocked, that anyone would sexualize her son.

If you really think this mother is surprised, then you have been fooled. No, this mother who has overseen the extreme sexualization & grooming of her son is likely now doing damage control. https://t.co/juh0rcQgDU via @gaystarnews

— Jon K. Uhler, MS, LPC, CCTP (@JonKUhlerLPC) June 27, 2019

What could possibly cause anyone to sexualize a Drag Kid? How is sex even relevant?

https://twitter.com/JonKUhlerLPC/status/1144302466323951616

https://twitter.com/JonKUhlerLPC/status/1144305459026898945

CBC? Any thoughts?

Naturally there are jokes.

One if by Land.
Two if by Sea.
Three if by the Delta Shuttle from LaGuardia.

~Paul Revere#RevolutionaryWarAirports #facts

— M ❄️ (@ElnorFudd) July 5, 2019

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1147151495508451328

Dearest Abigail,

The situation at ye Olde Laguardia Airporte is untenable. Amparts and ramparts clogging metal detectors, and a scrum has begun betwixt Kanye of Cornwallis and Frederick Douglass.

I may not make it to Bowling Green.

Yours,
Philippe#RevolutionaryWarAirports

— BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ (@mmpadellan) July 5, 2019

The tide turned against the British when their gunpowder was re-routed through Newark and arrived at the wrong carousel at LaGuardia. They only received a voucher for 5 shillings for the inconvenience, sealing their fate against the Continental Army. #RevolutionaryWarAirports pic.twitter.com/NW6hSDD8Z8

— Lis (@LisMoxie) July 5, 2019

https://twitter.com/GaddieWindage/status/1147116206996041728

He said it. He said it. He actually said it.

He seriously can only just barely read. He reads like a 5-year-old who is still learning how. He barfs out each word like a hammer blow, wagging his head back and forth to keep time. He tries to make himself sound smooth and natural by having his voice go Up and Down word by word, which succeeds only in making him sound like a lunatic. And he sees airports where there are none.

Dr EM on Queer Theory as destroyer of boundaries:

Unnervingly, the reframing of child sexual abuse and liberating of paedophilia from the margins of society is a dominant idea within queer theory. Although it has attempted to cloak itself under the rainbow and harness the energy, good will and gains gay, lesbian and bisexual people have fought for over decades Queer theory is anything but progressive. Indeed, it is totally opposed to same sex attraction. As Professor Alassandra Tanesini outlines, a ‘characteristic trait of queer theory is its opposition to any view that treats sexual orientation as anything other than socially constructed’.[4]

It goes back to Foucault.

Foucault’s re-conceptualisation of the triad of discourse, power and knowledge entailed a re-thinking of resistance. Transgression of norms, and in particular sexual norms, became the only response to punishment and classification, which would, in Foucauldian thinking, challenge oppression and power. Although Foucault’s challenge to heteronormative dominance was a welcomed intervention, the extension of his idea that all norms are bad and freeing repressed deviant sexualities is good in and of itself poses serious problems.

Just a little.

Feminists have attempted to develop the cultural norm that rape is bad and that children cannot consent to sexual activity. These activities — rape and child sexual abuse — become reframed in postmodernism, and therefore queer theory, as repressed and a transgression of boundaries which is thus challenging power and helping to liberate the individual. For example, Foucault presented the prosecution of a child molester as a petty collective intolerance where the discourse constructs an offender and victim and enacts state power on an individual.

Well, yes, and that’s because people who think about it from a point of view other than “I want to fuck children” have concluded that preventing child molesters from doing their thing is the way to go, state power and all.

Foucault related how

One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there, depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called ‘curdled milk.’ So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration.[10]

Ahhhhhhh fuck that noise. It happens that I can speak to this one, because I have been that little girl. I grew up among fields and brooks, which I loved, and one afternoon I was out playing and a guy driving a tractor in the next field stopped and approached me and invited me to sit on his lap – which I was young and stupid enough to do. (I don’t remember what I was thinking. He seemed friendly and nice, and I don’t remember more than that) All he did was feel a (barely emergent) breast, and I must have jumped up and run away, but naturally it shocked and scared me. He didn’t “obtain a few caresses” from me, he copped a feel, and I hated and resented it (it introduced a very unwanted element into my bucolic paradise), and it was in no way an everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality. It was a nasty move by an adult on a child, it was far from routine, and there was nothing fun about it from my point of view. Foucault isn’t being “transgressive” and oh so cool there, he’s just being the usual dreary pathetic male who can’t see or even imagine the point of view of the female half of these “everyday occurrences in the life of village sexuality.” Ugh. That was my first sexual assault but not my last – like all women, I’ve experienced several.

Despite the supposed banality of adult sexual activity with children, Foucault remained concerned with age of consent legislation. In 1977 Foucault signed a petition to the French Parliament arguing for the abolition of all legislation regarding the age of consent, the effective legalisation of paedophilia.[13]

And so we get Peter Tatchell and MAP and NAMBLA and all the rest of it – and now the CBC promoting children doing drag.

A pox on all of it.

The Lincoln Memorial in DC – normally a wide-open public space – has been fenced off for a very large distance.

It appears most of the folks down on the National Mall won’t be able to get very close to the tanks and military vehicles down by the Lincoln Memorial. That area is behind a lot of fencing and security (accessible to VIP’s and other ticketed guests). pic.twitter.com/2iWoyxqnip

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) July 4, 2019

The people are paying for it, but they’re not allowed to get close enough to see it.

Seems fair.

I beg your pardon?

https://twitter.com/cbckidsnews/status/1146820535931822090

What’s it like to be a kid drag queen? I don’t know, what’s it like to be a kid prostitute? What’s it like to be a kid wife? What’s it like to be a kid factory worker? What’s it like to be a kid in prison?

All pretty bad, I should think. Children are children, and there are a lot of activities that just aren’t right for children – because they’re of no interest, or because they’re too difficult, or because they’re abusive, or all those. I would put being a drag queen firmly on that list, myself.

But the CBC doesn’t look at it that way.

As an art form, drag has always been about breaking down barriers, exploring new territory and daring to do the unexpected. And now, a new type of queen is emerging on the scene: she’s fierce, she’s living in a time of unprecedented access to queer culture and she’s younger than ever before. She’s a drag kid, and she’s a long way from the era of the queens who took part in the Stonewall riots nearly 50 years ago.

She’s younger than ever before, as in, she’s a minor, and it’s deeply weird to see adults enabling this and the CBC cheering it on. Invoking “queer culture” doesn’t make it any less weird.

Stephan, Nemis, Bracken and Jason are very different kids living in very different parts of the world, but they’re united by a deep love of drag.

Fiery Stephan (a.k.a. Laddy Gaga), 9, lives with his British expat family in the south of Spain, where his explosive performances can’t be contained by their villa, so he has started performing at tourist restaurants.

Shy Jason (a.k.a. Suzan Bee Anthony), 11, lives in the U.S. Bible Belt where his chosen family have formed a protective circle around him that has allowed his sassy alter ego to blossom.

Precocious Bracken, 11, lives in Vancouver, where she struggles for acceptance as a “hyper queen” (a female drag performer) and for opportunities to connect in the 19-plus world of drag shows.

Child star Nemis (a.k.a. Queen Lactatia), 9, lives in Montreal, and with the help of his “momager,” he loves pushing boundaries, from selling his merch at a local fetish store to judging a vogue ball in a downtown bar.

So timid and conservative; where are the four year olds? What could be more queer and amazing than a four year old drag queen?

The four children in Drag Kids have never met, but they’re coming together for the first time at Montreal Pride to perform a group number to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and to compete in an all-ages vogue ball.

As they prepare for the big show, each child faces his or her own unique challenges, as well as challenges he or she has in common with the other performers: deep feelings of isolation (most have never met another “drag kid” before) and the struggle of trying to claim a place of one’s own on the fringes of a fringe culture.

What about math class and gym and what’s for lunch? No challenges or struggles there? Or have they all dropped out of school to pursue their drag queen dreams.

Funny kind of “birthday”…

Happy Independence Day, Marines.#HappyBirthdayAmerica pic.twitter.com/6DNndxHazV

— U.S. Marines (@USMC) July 4, 2019

How it’s seen over there.

(Spoiler: not admiringly.)

The US president will deliver an Independence Day speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, which honours the president who won the civil war and helped end slavery and was the site of civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech a century later.

Yes, and the result is that that is how we see it and think of it now. It’s a place where we gather to petition the government for redress of grievances. It has a certain resonance. It’s not a place for triumphalist displays of military power. Right after WW II it might have been, but now, no. It stands for everything Trump hates, and Trump stands for everything that civil rights struggles oppose. Trump doesn’t belong there. He wouldn’t belong there without the military show of force, and with it he’s an excrescence.

And for decades, presidents have kept a low profile during Washington’s annual celebration of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, as typically hundreds of thousands of people gather at the National Mall for a nonpartisan concert and fireworks.

I didn’t know presidents have kept a low profile. I haven’t paid much attention to the 4th. I guess it’s a bit of polite consideration so that people of all parties and none can feel comfortable going. Naturally Trump has no use for any kind of polite consideration.

White House staff are worried the crowds will be thin.

Though thousands of tickets have been distributed to the military, White House aides have reportedly been struggling to draw crowds to Trump’s event because of the last minute arrangements. Congress is not in session, and Washington typically becomes quieter over the holiday, as residents escape the city’s summer heat.

“They started this too late and everyone has plans already,” Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor, told Politico, which reported that even top level White House officials were expected – but not confirmed – to attend.

They could always fly in the people sweltering in camps on the border.

Crowd size is a sensitive subject for the president. A government photographer edited official pictures of Trump’s inauguration to make the crowds seem bigger following a personal intervention from the president, according to investigative documents from the inspector general of the US interior department.

“Edited” is a euphemism. The official pictures were faked.

The Pentagon said the administration has provided 5,000 tickets for Trump’s Independence Day event to the military. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign has also handed passes out to Republican allies and donors.

In other words it’s a campaign event, at taxpayers’ expense. That’s all kinds of illegal.

Asked earlier this week if he could give a speech that would represent all Americans, Trump said he thought he could, and then launched into an attack on Democrats’ policies on healthcare and taxes.

“Instead of addressing something like veteran homelessness, he’s spending it on boosting his ego with a parade that’s fundamentally about him and then getting tickets in the hands of wealthy donors for the Republican party. What a waste of money,” Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro said on CBS This Morning on Wednesday.

It’s a waste of money and a violation of campaign finance laws.