The Guardian is following Trump’s awful road trip.

Predictably, Trump talked about irrelevancies.

The president met with first responders and some of the shooting victims at a local hospital. [Senator Sherrod] Brown said Trump expressed a desire to give an award to the police officers who helped end the shooting quickly.

“I said, Mr. President, respectfully, the most important thing you can do for these police officers is take assault weapons off the street,” Brown said.

Trump was generally vague about committing to any concrete action on gun control. Brown said.

It’s so Trump. Ignore the reality, ignore the incalculable anguish on all sides of him, instead prattle about giving an award to someone.

He’s on the way to El Paso now. Maybe he’ll treat the people of El Paso to a rant about people “flooding” across the border to “infest” the country.

Meanwhile the ice keeps melting. All of it.

Alaska’s exceptional summer continues.

The most rapidly changing state in the U.S. has no sea ice within some 150 miles of its shores, according to high-resolution sea ice analysis from the National Weather Service. The big picture is clear: After an Arctic summer with well above-average temperatures, warmer seas, and a historic July heat wave, sea ice has vanished in Alaskan waters.

…

In the continually warming Arctic, sea ice has completely melted around the Alaskan coast before, notably during 2017’s melt season, but never this early. “It’s cleared earlier than it has in any other year,” said Thoman. (Sea ice starts regrowing again in the fall, when temperatures drop.)

Arctic sea ice has been either at record lows or flirting with record lows throughout much of the summer. “I’m losing the ability to communicate the magnitude [of change],” Jeremy Mathis, a longtime Arctic researcher and current board director at the National Academies of Sciences, told Mashable in June, when sea ice levels were at their lowest point in the satellite record for that period. “I’m running out of adjectives to describe the scope of change we’re seeing.”

Make for higher ground.

Meanwhile, in Trump’s America –

A 39-year-old man has been charged with felony assault of a minor in Montana after he allegedly slammed a 13-year-old boy to the ground for not taking his hat off during the national anthem. The incident took place Saturday at the Mineral County Fair and Rodeo in western Montana. Witnesses told a local CBS affiliate that as the anthem began, Curt Brockway grabbed the teen, picked him up, and then slammed him headfirst to the ground. As people nearby approached, Brockway said he slammed the boy to the ground because of his hat. “He said (the boy) was disrespecting the national anthem so he had every right to do that,” eyewitness Taylor Hennick said.

So, what are we respecting when we “respect” the “national anthem”? Are we “respecting” a country where certain gestures and postures are mandatory when a particular song is heard, on pain of extreme violence?

Why would we respect a country like that? It sounds like a horrible dystopian nightmare, not like something to respect.

What does Curt Brockway think the song stands for, I wonder. Slavery? Genocide? Conquest? Capital punishment? Endemic poverty?

“There was a little boy lying on the ground,” Hennick told the Missoulian. “He was bleeding out of his ears, seizing on the ground, just not coherent.” She said she had heard a “pop” when the anthem began and recognized the boy as the neighbor of a family member. The injuries sustained by the boy were severe: He was taken to a local hospital where he was diagnosed with temporal skull fractures before being flown to a children’s hospital in Spokane, Washington. The boy’s parents said he continued bleeding from the ear for nearly six hours after the incident.

Yeah yeah yeah but national anthem. Respect it or die.

Another post attacking gender-critical feminists at Daily Nous…an exceptionally bad one this time.

It starts badly.

The following is a guest post* by three philosophers who wish to remain anonymous (though their identity is known to me).

As many people have been pointing out on Twitter – this is Jason Weinberg allowing three authors to be anonymous while they attack named people. Isn’t there something a little skeevy about that?

But also…

The current crop of trans-exclusionary “gender-critical” philosophers is first and foremost an activist movement. Their writings and behavior are best understood as aimed at achieving their activist ends, such as preventing trans women from using facilities designated for women, or making it more difficult for trans women to be legally recognized as women. Like other activists, they will denigrate or vilify their opponents, make use of dogwhistles, appeal to people’s baser emotions to increase support for their cause, and ignore inconvenient facts. Far from being worthwhile contributions to a scholarly discussion, their writings rehash discredited claims from the 1980s (if not earlier), express demeaning and offensive ideas about trans people, and inhibit truly careful, critical, and thoughtful scholarly debate.

The claim that they are three philosophers becomes hard to believe. Three philosophers wrote that?

We don’t want to advance a view about the correct way to respond to these writings. We understand the worry that suppressing them could do more harm than good. Our main point is that readers need to understand that the central problem is not how to uplift the message of “gender-critical” voices, but how to understand them as activists, and how to manage content that is disrespectful, fear-mongering, and misleading, while avoiding harm to the scholarly community.

Nawwwwwww, come on, they’re pulling our leg, they’re not philosophers.

But it gets worse.

It’s disrespectful to publicly speculate about your colleagues’ genitals, about whether you wish to have sex with them, or about who else wishes to have sex with them. This kind of speculation creates a hostile environment, and does not conduce to legitimate academic debate. And yet, we often see “gender critical” philosophers scrutinizing trans people’s bodies and sexualities in inappropriate ways.

Consider Kathleen Stock’s recent lecture for the Aristotelian Society, which discusses whether lesbians would or should want to have sex with trans women. Stock objects to “two conclusions” typically drawn by her opponents.

The first conclusion effectively says that a lesbian, understood as subject with a ‘female gender’ who is disposed to desire others with a ‘female gender’, might, as such, straightforwardly and repeatedly experience attraction to trans women as part of the normal terms of their own orientation, even under ideal conditions (see for instance, Chuck Tate 2012). The second is that any trans woman who is exclusively attracted to others with a ‘female gender’ counts as a lesbian (Chuck Tate 2012; Sharpe 2019). In other words, biologically male people can be the objects of genuine lesbian desire, and even can be lesbians themselves.

There are many reasons to be wary of such claims… But the main point to take away from present discussion is that such claims look confused.

Stock appears to be making the following two claims:

1. Trans women are not objects of genuine lesbian desire (although lesbians might under “abnormal” or “non-ideal” circumstances experience sexual desire for trans women).
2. Trans women cannot be lesbians.

There’s no reason for academic philosophers to publicly debate the sexual desirability of trans people in this way. This is something we can all sort out in our own private lives.

No. These are not philosophers. Not possible.

At the end:

Comments are closed here, but readers are welcome to discuss this post on Twitter (#DNrecognizing) as well as on the Facebook update for this post.

That’s nice. The authors are anonymous but they get to name their targets, and comments are closed. Hold still while I punch you.

Peter Strzok is suing the bastards.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t pay attention to FBI personnel issues, because what the hell would I know about it, but Trump’s bullying is so disgusting that I do pay some attention.

Peter Strzok accuses the FBI of violating his privacy by sharing the text messages with journalists.

“The campaign to publicly vilify Special Agent Strzok contributed to the FBI’s ultimate decision to unlawfully terminate him,” the suit says.

Strzok was removed from a special probe into links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia after the Justice Department’s inspector general found the messages. He was fired from the FBI in August 2018.

Using his FBI phone, Strzok sent text messages disparaging Trump as a presidential candidate to FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

Shock-horror: his FBI phone! On the other hand who has caused more harm to the FBI, Strzok or Trump?

Strzok’s lawsuit alleges that “unrelenting pressure from President Trump and his political allies in Congress and the media” caused the FBI deputy director to ignore a disciplinary recommendation to demote and suspend Strzok rather than fire him.

He also says that the government acted unfairly because it had “consistently tolerated and even encouraged” pro-Trump “political speech” by other officials.

Strzok is seeking to be reinstated, receive back pay and get an official declaration that the government violated his constitutional rights.

I hope he wins.

Thank you xkcd.

H/t Dave Ricks

Representative Veronica Escobar:

The White House invited me to join @realDonaldTrump during his visit to El Paso. My response was clear. I requested a phone call with him today in order to share what I have now heard from many constituents, including some who are victims of Saturday’s attack.

My message would’ve been that he needs to understand that his words are powerful and have consequences. Using racist language to describe Mexicans, immigrants and other minorities dehumanize us. Those words inflame others.

The domestic terrorist who came to El Paso to kill innocent people had his sights set on Hispanics and immigrants. He took 22 lives, injured more than two dozen.

I have publicly said [Trump] has a responsibility to acknowledge the power of his words, apologize for them, and take them back because they are still hanging over us. I asked for a call so I could say this to him over the phone and ask for a dialogue that could lead to healing.

I was told that @realDonaldTrump is “too busy” to have that conversation.

I declined the invitation because I refuse to be an accessory to his visit. I refuse to join without a dialogue about the pain his racist and hateful words & actions have caused our community and country.

Tomorrow, I will again be spending time with fellow El Pasoans who are dealing with the pain and horror left in the wake of this act of domestic terrorism fueled by hate and racism.

Who is she? She’s the Representative for El Paso, first elected last November.

Trump has no business being “too busy” to talk to her, especially since we all know he’s not “too busy” to watch hours and hours of Fox News and to spend more hours tweeting his rages and resentments and racist insults. He has plenty of time to talk to her, he just doesn’t want to, because he’s all hat and no cattle.

Remembering Toni Morrison:

Toni Morrison, who didn’t publish her first book until she was almost 40, penned roughly a dozen novels, most lauded among them 1987’s “Beloved,” about a former slave who kills her baby to ensure it is never enslaved. “Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Her books gazed unflinchingly on the lives of African Americans and told their stories with a singular lyricism. Her talent for intertwining the stark realities of black life with hints of magical realism and breathtaking prose gained Morrison a loyal literary following.

Themes such as slavery, misogyny, colorism and supernaturalism came to life in her hands.

It seems slightly odd to say “roughly a dozen” but I’m guessing it’s because she did some genre-crossing, so it depends on what you count as a novel.

“I didn’t become interested in writing until I was about 30 years old,” she later said. “I didn’t really regard it as writing then, although I was putting words on paper. I thought of it as a very long, sustained reading process — except that I was the one producing the words.”

Reading and writing can be very intertwined. I read with a spiral notebook always at my elbow, because sometimes – often – I need to write something down. I have more than fifty of them. I recommend the practice.

Then-President Barack Obama awarded Toni Morrison the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

“I remember reading ‘Song of Solomon’ when I was a kid and not just trying to figure out how to write but also how to be and how to think,” Obama said at the ceremony, referecing to Morrison’s 1977 novel.

Ah the fun-loving white boys:

i guess mitch is ok with a bunch of his white boys symbolically attacking a cutout of aoc

One choking, one pointing at her crotch – all good clean fun. Hurr hurr.

Updating to add an observation:

It’s worth noting that strangulation is an almost uniquely gendered crime. A large majority of victims are women (often intimate partners of their attackers) and the vast, vast majority of perpetrators are men.

It’s one of those areas where the size and strength advantage is relevant.

About the Dayton mass-murderer:

[P]olice said there was nothing in the background of 24-year-old Connor Betts that would have prevented him from purchasing the .223-caliber rifle with extended ammunition magazines that he used to open fire outside a crowded bar.

Nothing at all?

High school classmates of the gunman who killed nine people early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, say he was suspended for compiling a “hit list” of those he wanted to kill and a “rape list” of girls he wanted to sexually assault.

Oh, that.

The entire paragraph reads:

High school classmates of the gunman who killed nine people early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, say he was suspended for compiling a “hit list” of those he wanted to kill and a “rape list” of girls he wanted to sexually assault. The accounts by two former classmates emerged after police said there was nothing in the background of 24-year-old Connor Betts that would have prevented him from purchasing the .223-caliber rifle with extended ammunition magazines that he used to open fire outside a crowded bar.

I would have led with the nothing in the background part, myself.

CNN has more:

Another former high school classmate, who asked not to be identified out of concerns for his privacy, also recalled being summoned to a school administrator’s office and being told he was “number one” on the list of students Betts wanted to kill.

He said the list was separated into two columns: a “kill list” for boys and a “rape list” for girls.

Chivalry is not dead.

A fourth person, who also asked not to be named for privacy reasons, said, “All I know is there was a list of violent actions and a list of names including mine.”

She said some of the names were female students who, like her, turned him down for dates. She said Betts often simulated shooting other students and threatened to kill himself and others on several occasions.

“He loved to look at you and pretend to shoot with guns, guns with his hands,” she said.
Another former classmate, who was not on the list, said he met Betts through a “friend of a friend.” He said whenever they hung out, Betts would talk about violence and use harsh language about women, like calling them “sluts.”

I take it back about chivalry.

Saturday the official Twitter account of Mitch McConnell for the Senate tweeted:

The Grim Reaper of Socialism at #FancyFarm today. #FancyFarm139

Amy McGrath is his Democratic opponent. That’s her name on the tombstone in the lower right corner. She tweeted this morning:

Hours after the El Paso shooting, Mitch McConnell proudly tweeted this photo. I find it so troubling that our politics have become so nasty and personal that the Senate Majority Leader thinks it’s appropriate to use imagery of the death of a political opponent (me) as messaging.

As far as I can tell it was the campaign account that tweeted it rather than McConnell himself, but that’s a minor distinction, especially since the tweet is still sitting there.

But please, tell us more about the role of video games.