So there won’t be testimony from Jeffrey Epstein. He hanged himself again, and this time he succeeded.

Following news of his death, his alleged victims condemned his suicide and what they described as a lack of justice for them and other accusers.

“I am extremely mad and hurt thinking he once again thought he was above us and took the easy way out … I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that’s really true,” Jena-Lisa Jones, 30, an alleged victim of Epstein when she was 14 in Florida, said in a statement. “God will have his judgement now.”

Jennifer Araoz, 32, who claimed that Epstein raped her when she was 14, called on authorities to “pursue and prosecute his accomplices and enablers.

“I am angry Jeffrey Epstein won’t have to face his survivors of his abuse in court. We have to live with the scars of his actions for the rest of our lives, while he will never face the consequences of the crimes he committed the pain and trauma he caused so many people,” Araoz said.

Michelle Licata, an alleged Florida victim of Epstein when she was 16, said she didn’t want anyone to die.

“I just wanted him to be held accountable for his actions. Simple as that,” she said.

Law enforcement sources told ABC News the criminal case against Epstein will not end with his death. The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan will continue to evaluate the evidence and hear from his accusers, the sources said.

But he got away with it almost unscathed for 66 years.

There’s a feeling that maybe maybe maybe just possibly when you go to visit people injured in a mass shooting you shouldn’t pose for photos grinning broadly and making “yeeeha!” gestures. Maybe.

A backlash is building over a picture posted by Melania Trump on Twitter that showed her and Donald Trump smiling broadly while holding a baby who was orphaned in the mass shooting in El Paso.

On a visit to El Paso this week, the president flashed a thumbs-up when posing with the two-month-old, whose parents Andre and Jordan Anchondo were shot dead last Saturday. When the picture was posted on the first lady’s Twitter account on Thursday, it prompted outrage.

What, because it was crass and tasteless and staggeringly unfeeling? But this is Donald Trump and the woman who is still married to him.

The orphaned child, named Paul, had been brought back to the hospital – reportedly at the request of White House during the visit by the Trumps on Wednesday. The baby’s uncle, standing next to Donald Trump, is reportedly a Trump supporter, as was the deceased father.

The baby was injured, breaking his fingers, in the shooting, after his mother died trying to protect him and her body fell on him. His father had dived to try to shield her as bullets flew.

I’m sure the baby enjoyed the outing very much.

Doctors at the Del Sol medical center in El Paso, where some of the survivors are still being treated, later said the president appeared to “lack empathy” after he boasted during the visit that he drew a larger crowd at a January rally in the city than one held by “crazy” Beto O’Rourke.

Yes, that does seem like an appearance of lacking empathy.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on “Cis lesbians…aren’t always into that”.

I have never encountered a CIS woman who thought she was entitled to sex. I have never read an article by a CIS woman who thought that having a vagina meant that lesbians should be attracted to her, nor have I seen any articles by women claiming that having a vagina means that men should automatically find her attractive.

You know who does think that there is some magical formula which obliges women to have to have sex with them? Douchebags.

Common, garden variety and very male douchebags, who women can’t leave alone with their drink.

It doesn’t matter why someone doesn’t want to date you, it doesn’t matter what you feel about them, if they don’t consent they don’t fucking consent, and trying to pressure them into it? That’s not just stereotypical male behaviour, that’s stereotypical fucking rapist.

About those ICE raids on Wednesday…

US immigration officials say they have temporarily released about 300 people who were arrested in a massive raid in Mississippi on Wednesday.

Democrats and rights groups have condemned the arrests as “cruel”.

Nearly 700 workers from seven agricultural processing plants were arrested for allegedly not having proper documentation to be in the US.

Pictures emerged of children crying after being separated from their parents.

The thing about illegal immigration is…it’s not the kind of crime that is powered by greed or malice or aggression…the kind of crime that Trump, for one, commits regularly and without turning a gilded hair. It’s not a real “crime” (as we generally use the word) despite the illegality.

It seems to me it ought to be possible to enforce immigration laws in a humane way as opposed to the cruelest way possible.

Not this way:

Ever since his father was rounded up in the massive immigration work site raids in Mississippi this week, 6-year-old Nery, who is autistic, has refused to eat, according to his older sister.

“He hasn’t eaten anything, he looks at the food and he doesn’t eat,” Stefany, 18, told NBC News on Friday.

…

Stefany said her father was driving his sister to work Wednesday morning, with his 3-year-old daughter Ingrid in the car. They then saw that the food processing plant in Morton, Mississippi where they both worked was being raided by ICE.

Stefany, a high school senior in Morton, said she was in school when she heard the news.

Her aunt called them crying and told her that immigration authorities had found them hiding in their car, she said.

She said could hear her father telling someone “he has six kids and one with autism.”

“I just heard screaming, people screaming at him that they’re going to take him to jail,” she said. “I was just crying.”

Her father and aunt were detained in front of Ingrid, who was sitting in the backseat of the car, Stefany said. It wasn’t until about two hours later that the little girl was released to another aunt, she said.

Stefany said her little sister now keeps saying, “Daddy. Where is Daddy?”

It’s also interesting that the US news media keep calling them “agricultural processing plants” or “food processing plants.” The BBC called them what they really are:

The raids took place just hours before Mr Trump arrived in the majority Latino city of El Paso to mark a mass shooting which left 22 people dead.

About 600 ICE agents arrived at the chicken processing plants, owned by five different companies, in the towns of Bay Springs, Canton, Carthage, Morton, Pelahatchie and Sebastopol.

Ohhh, chicken processing plants. Those places are hell on earth, and they are also one of the most dangerous workplaces in the country.

We don’t have to be this way.

Another sport buckles to the pressure.

Cricket Australia entered the fraught debate about gender identity and sport yesterday, releasing­ separate policies for the inclusion of transgender players in elite and community cricket.

The policy for elite cricket, consistent with the approach taken by the International Cricket Council, requires transgender players to keep their testosterone levels below a prescribed concentration for a 12-month period, sign a statutory declaration committing to their gender identity and to have their cases assessed by an expert panel.

The policy provides a pathway for a transgender woman to one day represent Australia in an Ashes series or World Cup.

That is, the policy provides a pathway for a man who identifies as a woman to displace a woman in an Ashes series or World Cup.

Cricket Australia chief executive Kevin Roberts said the requirements struck a balance between letting transgender players participate and preserving the integrity of women’s competitions.

A balance. In other words, women’s competitions have to give up the “women’s” part for the sake of letting transgender players participate as the sex they are physically not. Must balance the two. Can’t just say no, men cannot play on women’s teams because it would be grossly unfair to women who have only just recently even been allowed to have teams. No no, must “balance” the two.

The policy also advises local clubs and competitions to “give consideration” to players who are transitioning during a season. This means that a cricketer could start a summer playing as a male and end the season as a female.

It makes clear that any club or competition that fails to follow the policy could face prosecution.

Too bad, girls and women; sucks to be you.

The twin policy was welcomed by transgender cricketer Erica James, who didn’t play for many years because she felt uncomfortable sharing a field with men. She now plays for the Universities Women’s Cricket Club in Sydney.

“I think the hardest thing is my own fear about what could possibly happen,’’ she told The Australian. “I have to say my experience has been entirely positive.”

Well, that’s the important thing – that this one guy who wants to live as a woman has had a positive experience displacing a woman from the Universities Women’s Cricket Club in Sydney.

Kirsti Miller, a transgender footballer who plays with NSW country club Broken Hill, said allowing­ transgender players into local cricket clubs would ease the isolation felt by gender diverse people. “We lose our families, we lose our jobs, we lose our houses and quite often our only family left is a sporting family,” she said.

And what about women? What about any isolation a woman might feel when she loses her place on a team to a man who identifies as a woman? What about any frustration and despair at the injustice a woman might feel when a man pushes her out of a women’s team? Does that not count at all? Are women that privileged now?

During his visit to El Paso Trump babbled to people in a hospital about…

…

…his crowd size.

And the visit is now a campaign ad featuring grinning Trump and his nightmare thumb.

Not just any old logic but exciting new trans logic.

Particularly stupid is the “What? Like, they won’t date you just because you’re trans?”

No, fool. Not “just because you’re trans”; because you’re male, with a male body. “Cis lesbians” i.e. lesbians “aren’t always into that” because lesbians are into women, with female bodies. Bullying lesbians for being attracted to women is just plain old homophobia.

If Aisha wants to “date” how about Aisha dates other “trans lesbians”?

Also Pheobe’s final panel is rich. “To turn around and hate trans girls just for being trans, and for loving who they love?” Not wanting to “date” i.e. have sex with male bodies is not hatred. It’s a sexual orientation, which is what lesbian and gay are about. It’s desperately homophobic to try to mandate that that doesn’t apply when it comes to trans people.

Interesting. William Barr thinks two old movies that glorify vigilante “justice” aka revenge are emblematic of the human desire for justice.

“I believe a sense of justice is hardwired into human beings,” Barr recalled during an interview with Crime Story podcast host Kary Antholis. “Don’t ask me why, but it is there and it’s satisfying to see justice done.”

Why not ask him why? You’d expect lawyers to be interested, and it’s not a particularly arcane subject. There’s been research into a sense of fairness in chimpanzees, for instance, and I’m sure that’s just one item of many.

But hey, why read up on such things when there are crappy old movies to watch.

Barr elaborated on his theory of justice, recalling the Charles Bronson movie Death Wish and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, icons of vigilantism in ’70s filmmaking that spawned movie franchises.

The original 1974 exploitation classic Death Wish tells the story of how a do-gooder Manhattan liberal sees the light after his wife is murdered and his daughter is raped. He becomes a one-man vigilante squad, roaming New York City and executing petty thieves.

Yes, that’s justice all right, killing petty thieves because one woman was murdered and another was raped. We amateurs must be wrong to think it’s a little closer to justice to go after the actual perpetrators as opposed to random people doing more trivial crimes.

“Death Wish, yeah,” Barr said. “That gives people a sense of satisfaction when they see it.”

I haven’t seen it, but I’m not getting what’s satisfying about that. It’s unnerving that the US Attorney General is.

Andrew McCabe is suing the Trump administration.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe has sued the Trump administration for what he calls his “unlawful” termination, arguing that his firing last year was the result of improper political interference by the president.

“It was Trump’s unconstitutional plan and scheme to discredit and remove DOJ and FBI employees who were deemed to be his partisan opponents because they were not politically loyal to him,” the complaint alleges.

The star witness will be Trump’s Twitter account.

The presidential alibi.

The attorney for a Montana man accused of throwing a 13-year-old boy to the ground at a rodeo because the teenager didn’t remove his hat during the national anthem said Wednesday his client believes he was acting on an order from President Donald Trump.

The president’s “rhetoric” contributed to Curt Brockway’s disposition when he grabbed the boy by the throat and slammed him to the ground, fracturing his skull, at the Mineral County fairgrounds Saturday, attorney Lance Jasper told The Missoulian.

That’s the lawyer talking, so who knows how true it is, but it’s certainly plausible.

Brockway, 39, told a sheriff’s deputy that he asked the boy to remove his hat out of respect for the national anthem before the start of the county rodeo, Mineral County Attorney Ellen Donohue wrote in the document describing the attack. The boy cursed at Brockway in response, and the man grabbed him by the throat, “lifted him into the air and slammed the boy into the ground,” Donohue wrote.

If that’s how it happened it seems far more likely that Brockway simply lost his temper when the boy swore at him.

Also, here’s a thought: people could just mind their own business when it comes to things like taking hats off or kneeling or placement of hands when a “national anthem” is sung. In the UK theaters used to play “God Save the Queen” at the end of the performance and everyone was expected to stand. Why? A theater isn’t a church nor is it a government building so why? Just a pretext for feelings of belligerence or self-love? I don’t know. I wish we could stop with all the football-nationalism bullshit.

A radical feminist woman wrote a piece last month about “non-binary” as the new misogyny.

Last summer she lived in a house with three other women.

We spent a lot of time together that year, and there were many late-night conversations about the sexism, misogyny, and male violence we had experienced. We talked about not fitting into what society had expected of women, we stopped shaving together, and we encouraged each other to not be ashamed of our natural bodies. We called rape crisis lines, organized protests, and exposed violent men in our communities. Mitali* shaved her head in a defiant act of rebellion against Indian expectations of beauty. Joy* became empowered to use her voice to speak up for the oppressed. Miriam* started to confront her religious parents and come to terms with her sexuality. The four of us dreamt of what a feminist world could look like and envisioned our lives free from patriarchy and violence.

The asterisks are because the names are all pseudonyms. All three now call themselves non-binary.

A 2018 article in Teen Vogue outlined the experience of one non-binary woman:

I reject the whole concept of gender. Growing up, I never felt people were wrong when they called me a woman, but it felt like a label imposed on me rather than one that fit. Then, in college, I learned about non-binary identity, and that did fit. Sure, I have likes and dislikes that some might label “feminine” or “masculine,” but I don’t feel any need to label them that way. The gender binary has made me feel pigeonholed, and I don’t want to identify with it.

Feminists have long rejected the concept of gender, defining it as oppressive sex-role stereotyping and maintaining the goal of abolishing the gender caste system. Rather than rejecting gender, the writer in Teen Vogue seems to have bought into it entirely, believing that she must not be a woman simply because she does not fully meet the expectations of womanhood.

…

I mourn for these women who have disowned their womanhood, choosing to run and hide from the oppression of their gender rather than boldly reject its power over their selfhood. To have so much pain, misogyny, and fear inside of you is to live in a constant state of unsettledness, never feeling safe or comfortable. In our last days together, I tried to show them a feminism that rejects gender rather than embraces its lies — but since I am “female” and they are “not” I could not possibly understand their pain. They said I was hateful.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Women and girls should be able to live in a world free from gender and all forms of patriarchy and male violence. We should be allowed to be women and be complex, creative, and whole. We should not have to reject our biological reality in favor of magical thinking in order to cope with the world in which we live.

The whole piece is like that – eminently reasonable, and not hostile or cruel.

But there’s a punchline.

Update: I’ve been fired from my unrelated job for writing this piece.

I Googled her and it appears to have been a software engineering job she was booted from. Why? Why on earth? Why why why?

There are quite a few comments and the dissenting ones are startlingly venomous. Maybe a bunch of venomous people put their heads together and decided to see if they could get her fired.

Feminist woman fired for writing that women don’t have to claim to be neither women nor men in order to resist the stupid gender norms that keep us subordinate. That’s some headline.

On his way from Dayton to El Paso yesterday, Trump was so full of grief and sympathy that he tweeted

Watching Sleepy Joe Biden making a speech. Sooo Boring! The LameStream Media will die in the ratings and clicks with this guy. It will be over for them, not to mention the fact that our Country will do poorly with him. It will be one big crash, but at least China will be happy!

It doesn’t get much more compassionate than that.

Trump tweeted this nightmare yesterday:

He thinks that’s what he was there for – to stand in the middle of a row of people in uniform, grinning broadly and showing us his filthy thumb.

Grinny grin grin grin.

It was just one long party.

Oh goody, the blog of the American Philosophical Association has a post on – you’ll never guess – the errors of TERFs. Not that they call it that. It’s a response to the IHE piece, as the APA blog explains:

Editor’s note: The letter below was penned in response to another letter titled “Philosophers Should Not Be Sanctioned Over Their Positions on Sex and Gender” that appeared in Inside Higher Education on July 22, 2019.  On July 30,IHE published a response titled “Taking Trans Lives Seriously” and declined to publish the following letter. The signatories are concerned that the climate in a field of study is being mischaracterized and important voices have been left out of the discussion. 

So, they’re here to clear it up for us.

A recent letter in Inside Higher Education argues that philosophers who debate the nature of sex and gender cannot advocate certain positions, for example, skepticism about the concept of gender identity, or they risk being censured. But debates about sex and gender needn’t be conducted in an exclusionary way. Indeed, they usually are not. We are responding here specifically to clarify a potential misperception about the academic climate when it comes to discussions of sex and gender and to highlight the value of academic responsibility as an important aspect of academic freedom.

Wait. What does “in an exclusionary way” mean? To be more precise, how are the authors using it in this post? What do they mean by “debates about sex and gender needn’t be conducted in an exclusionary way”? Since they are philosophers, we expect them to make such things as clear as possible. And yet…they don’t. I have no idea what they mean.

The nature of sex and gender and the relationship between them are not forbidden topics of philosophical discussion. Many feminists holding significantly different philosophical views have been respectfully debating them for decades. One easy way to see a quick overview of these different positions is by reading the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on “Feminist Metaphysics” or the entry on “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender.”

As feminist philosophers who have, variously, argued for, researched, engaged with, and taught these views, we are well-positioned to claim that there is no established orthodoxy about gender in academic philosophy.

Wait. Aren’t they relying on some sort of established orthodoxy about what is “exclusionary” in the discussion of gender? So established and so orthodox that they don’t even think they need to spell out what it is? Isn’t what they call “academic responsibility” a reference to the established orthodoxy?Aren’t they insinuating that it’s academically irresponsible to dispute that orthodoxy? Because if they’re not, what they hell are they talking about?

There continues to be much lively disagreement on matters of gender without accusations of transphobia. We do, however, think it is important, when exercising our academic freedom, that we consider how our views may impact others. Academic responsibility requires us to consider differences of power and vulnerability in speaking of and to others and the effects of our words in reinforcing structures of oppression. There are many diverse, contentious views about gender and gender identity that can be–and are–engaged with in ways that do not call into question the integrity and sincerity of trans people nor the validity of their own understanding of who they are.

Ah. So that’s what they mean by “in an exclusionary way” and “academic responsibility.” They mean believe whatever trans people say and believe their own understanding of who they are.

But that’s not a small or trivial demand. That’s a demand of a kind that would be laughed out of the room in any other academic discipline. In no other part of the university are we ordered to believe what people say about themselves without question, not least because one of the first things we’re taught there is to understand that we can be wrong about anything, very much including ourselves. It’s a recipe for mental death to decide that some people have infallible self-knowledge and we all have to bend the knee to it. It’s utter bullshit, and it never ceases to amaze me that academics can say that with a straight face.

The final sentence:

We should conduct our research freely and responsibly, without treating other people’s lives as though they are abstract thought experiments.

Bollocks. Academics study, inquire into, debate, research other people’s lives all the time. They don’t do so with an understanding that they’re not allowed to question “the validity of their own understanding of who they are,” because that is often just what is in doubt.

The idea is fundamentally unworkable, because we all like to think better of ourselves than the facts warrant. If there’s a rule that we can’t question people’s self-understandings, how can we for instance talk about Trump? His understanding of who he is is off the charts wrong and delusional, but everyone has that tendency to some degree. Should trans people be the one exception to that?

Don’t be ridiculous.

There are many signers.

Updating to add: Kathleen Stock has a blistering response.

And now for something completely different.

Each year in Italy, grazing animals are moved from high pastures down to the plains. Newborn lambs are unable to make this journey on their own. Instead, they ride in the pouches of a specially made saddle on the back of a donkey or a mule nanny. They are taken down at rest stops and returned to their mothers for a bite to eat and a bit of nuzzling.

Photo: medeamoon

H/t Vanina