At least one judge is fast-tracking.

Very big. Overarching q for me has been whether judges would respond to Trump’s unprecedented stonewalling tactics by speeding things up. At least one is. https://t.co/byasjDEgXD

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) May 9, 2019

CNN reports:

Congress and Donald Trump’s fight over his financial records is now on the fast track.

Judge Amit Mehta plans next week to weigh the major legal issues raised in President Donald Trump’s challenge of a congressional subpoena for his accounting firm’s records, according to an order issued Thursday — putting the case on an even faster track than it previously looked to be.

Congress has subpoenaed Trump and his business’ accounting records from the firm Mazars USA, and Trump’s personal legal team sued to stop the records from being turned over.

A hearing is now scheduled for May 14.

Will he have time to incite murder again before the heavy hand descends on his shoulder?

POWERFUL: These women were the last two runners in the Pittsburgh Marathon. They were complete strangers, but they promised each other they'd cross the finish line together – so, they ran hand-in-hand until the very end https://t.co/AdzoOYP1F6 💙 pic.twitter.com/HIkml7vmIy

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 9, 2019

I’m not tearing up, you’re tearing up.

Let’s find out more about these here United Constitutional Patriots.

CNN a couple of weeks ago:

They’d been keeping watch near the border for weeks, drawing little notice as they shared live videos from their desert outpost.

But after posting videos last week showing armed men wearing military fatigues detaining migrants who just crossed the border into New Mexico, a militia group known as the United Constitutional Patriots now finds itself under fire.

State authorities in New Mexico have condemned the group. The American Civil Liberties Union accuses the militia of kidnapping migrants. And now a leader of the group is facing charges of illegal weapons and ammunition possession brought by the FBI.

Hey what’s a little private army or two among friends? Especially when they’re patriots?

It’s between 12 and 20 people. Trivial, in one sense, but then again, it doesn’t take many. Timothy McVeigh got a lot done all by himself.

Videos shared on the United Constitutional Patriots New Mexico Border Ops Facebook page purport to show members of the group detaining migrants, including families with children, who have just crossed the border.

They show people often in full military fatigues, with handguns strapped to their sides, wearing gloves and black masks. Armed men order migrants to stop, force them to sit on the ground and then apparently call Border Patrol to pick them up. At least two videos posted on the group’s Facebook page depict a man in fatigues verbally identifying himself as “Border Patrol” as he stops a group of migrants.

New Mexico’s attorney general told CNN that an armed group had detained nearly 300 people near the border.

What I’m saying – it doesn’t take many. They dress up to look official and hey presto, their victims think they’re official (and wouldn’t much want to resist heavily armed men even if they’re not official).

We need a break from the horror of watching a president of the US laughing gleefully at the recommendation to shoot immigrants at the border, so how about we reminisce about the days of Gamergate:

Most women who were working in or around the video games industry in late 2014 know exactly who Benjamin is. He was one of the more vocal figureheads of Gamergate, an online “movement” that began when an aggrieved ex-boyfriend spread malicious gossip about his game-developer ex-girlfriend. It metamorphosed into a coordinated harassment campaign against a huge number of women, under the smokescreen of anti-censorship and concern over ethics. It is now impossible not to see Gamergate as a foreshadowing of a disease that has since engulfed political and public life.

But long before Gamergate – three years before to be exact – there was Elevatorgate, which was another such foreshadowing.

What people like Benjamin want, with his disgusting speculation on whether female politicians are rape-worthy, is to bring the rank misogyny of the worst online spaces into public dialogue. It is Trumpian trolling transferred into British political life. People like Benjamin believe in a form of consequenceless free speech that dictates that if women wish to exist publicly, create things or have an opinion, they should expect all the harassment and degrading commentary and ceaseless mean-spirited scrutiny that will inevitably follow. This was the message of Gamergate, back in 2014.

And of Elevatorgate back in 2011.

For many women this abuse got bad enough to get the police involved. This largely turned out to be pointless, because the police’s advice to victims of online harassment essentially amounted to “why don’t you stay off the internet?”, as if the internet were some parallel universe that had no bearing on real life.

This kind of rhetoric is just as prevalent in the real world: on the streets outside Westminster, in politics, behind presidential pulpits, in Charlottesville. So, thanks for that, law enforcement. Perhaps it might have been an idea to hold people responsible for their targeted, sometimes violent harassment or hate speech, rather than making it the victim’s responsibility to avoid looking at it. Instead people like Benjamin, who established themselves as anti-feminist mouthpieces in 2014, have forged alliances with other alt-right agitators – including Milo Yiannopoulos, who recently announced he will be joining Benjamin on the campaign trail – and are now speaking at Brexit rallies and running as an MEP for Ukip.

…

I wonder sometimes what could have happened if people had properly listened to the women subjected to the worst of the Gamergate movement, instead of writing infuriating, prevaricating think-pieces gamely digging for legitimate grievances within the mountain of straightforward gendered harassment. Instead it took Trump’s election two years later, led by some of the exact same forces (including Steve Bannon and his coterie of alt-right Breitbart shock jocks), to prompt the tech platforms and wider society to notice that something very bad was going on and that online discourse was definitely enabling it.

If the women of the games industry had been listened to more closely in 2014, would it have taken five more years before toxic bullshitters such as Alex Jones and Yiannopoulos were banished from Twitter and Facebook? Would it have taken so long for online hate speech to become a prosecutable offence? Might white supremacy have spread so easily online, along with misogyny? Would an anti-feminist YouTuber have gained enough of a platform to be running for the European parliament?

Or if the women of the skepticism-atheism industry had been listened to more closely in 2011, would it have taken eight more years before toxic bullshitters such as Jones and Yiannopoulos were taken seriously? Probably, but they weren’t, so here we are.

There was a conversation on violence against women (“domestic abuse”) on Fresh Air yesterday. The subjects were Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises, and Suzanne Dubus, CEO of the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center. Guess what: narcissism came into it.

GROSS: I want to bring up narcissism because, Rachel, you mentioned narcissism as being one of the characteristics that a lot of abusers and murderers have. How does narcissism figure into domestic violence?

SNYDER: Narcissism is one of the key components of an abuser. You know, we have, I think, a vision of what an abuser is. Right? Even in – even when you see media reports of domestic violence, the pictures of – that most often accompany those media reports are really dark. You know, even, like, the coloration – they’re, like, gloomy, dark, dangerous; they’re portentous. And people don’t recognize themselves in those pictures because, of course, they have a much larger context of just a single moment.

And so abusers, in fact, are not people with anger problems, generally speaking. They are about power and control over one person or the people in their family. So they tend to be very – they’re often very gregarious. Only about a quarter of the abusers fit that stereotypical definition of someone who is, you know, generally angry. And so the narcissism plays out in the idea that they are owed something – in the idea that they are entitled to their authority, that their partners have to be subservient to them. There’s very often traditional gender dynamics in abusive relationships.

It’s the same thing, really – entitlement and “traditional gender dynamics” that cash out as “I, the man, get whatever I want.” That crap brings narcissism with it.

GROSS: I guess the narcissism probably figures into the coercive control part of the relationship? The wife and the children – these are people who the man can control or thinks he can control, tries to control. He can’t control the world around him, but he can control them. And it seems like that would be – that that would fit a narcissistic personality who wants the world to just revolve around him.

DUBUS: In our works with survivors, we also notice that abusers typically really do feel like their home is their castle and that everything must be adjusted and retrofitted and – to his whim, to his mood, to his needs. And there is, you know, quick and rapid punishment when it’s not. And to me, that is narcissism, when the world revolves around you and everybody better get into their constellation and do what they need to do to support, to prop up, to make him feel better – whatever it is he needs that day.

SNYDER: Yeah. It’s very black-and-white thinking. Right? Like, it’s my way, and this is it.

Very black-and-white and very very very selfish. This idea that you are the sun and everyone else is a mere planet – it’s poison.

I don’t consider Julie Burchill the best of the Julies, but she says good things at (sorry) Spiked:

Paradoxically, redrawing the boundaries of what is ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate’ in order not to make anyone feel ‘excluded’ actually has the counter-productive effect of literally excluding many groups from both social media and public platforms: ex-Muslims espousing atheism, women querying the rights of the transgendered to play them at sport, and lesbians not attracted to a penis even if it has a frock over it. A whole page of last week’s Sunday Times was entirely composed of items reflecting what I call the Perils Of Inclusivity: ‘Tax expert fired for saying trans women aren’t women’ – ‘Gallery covers up art after complaints by Muslim viewers’ – ‘Anonymous journal lets academics publish and not be damned’. All in aid of preventing hurty feelz!

And now sexual perverts (among whom, on occasion, I happily count myself) are the latest group to demand ‘inclusion’. Please! When I was young, we thought nothing more desirable than being An Outsider – why are the young of today so obsessed with getting a tick on the register, rather than playing hooky? There is a happy place between believing that no one should be excluded on the basis of race, sex or social class, and believing that official validation of every life choice any person freely makes are the same. Someone who likes dressing up in a gimp mask is not Rosa Parks, and I find the increasing lack of ability to differentiate between the two in some quarters highly risible at best and downright insulting at worst.

Too right about the official validation bit. The plaintive cries of “I am valid!” are indeed both hilarious and insulting. What are you, a bus pass? Why do you need “validation” from the world in the first place?

The latest snowflake flutter is ‘Don’t kink-shame me!’. At a Vancouver university last year, a man insisting he was an ‘adult baby’ pestered a university nurse to change his dirty nappy and perved over his repulsed female classmates. A whistle-blowing workplace-safety director was sacked for standing up for the women. In Wolverhampton a few months back, a tattooist calling himself ‘Dr Evil’ was charged with grievous bodily harm after slicing ears and nipples from paying customers. He was reported as having support from ‘the body-modification community’ who set up a petition in his favour.

Say…what? Why were we not told? Does ‘the body-modification community’ get together to validate each other’s plans to body-modify other people?

Consults Google.

It’s true.

A body modification artist known as Dr Evil has been jailed for carrying out ear and nipple removals and splitting a customer’s tongue.

Brendan McCarthy carried out consensual procedures without using anaesthetic.

…

Judge Amjad Nawaz said the body-modification industry was unregulated and McCarthy was only registered as a tattooist and cosmetic piercer.

He said McCarthy “had no qualifications to carry out surgical procedures or to deal with any adverse consequences which could have arisen”.

…

An online petition which attracted 13,000 signatures was set up to support the “knowledgeable, skilful and hygienic” body-piercer, who was refused permission to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The BBC quotes one guy who says if he’d known the whole thing wasn’t legal he wouldn’t have had his ear sliced off, because he certainly wasn’t that desperate to have it done.

Back to Burchill:

I’m a broad-minded broad, so I’m not offended by these people – but I do despise them for being so wimpy that they need their kink validated by straight society. When did perverts start being ashamed to be perverts and need to be a community? ‘Community’ used to be such a jolly word, redolent of cheery singing or a nice place to land on the Monopoly board. Now it just means a bunch of whiners whining about stuff.

So I would say this to the youth of today: grab your outsider status and wear it with pride. Don’t demand that society alters to accommodate you, because that’s the way of the wimp. And try to remember that narcissism is not rebellion next time you call yourself ‘genderqueer’ on the occasion of your heterosexual marriage, Miley Cyrus, when so many genuinely queer people are still being murdered for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality all across the world. Don’t wear a crown that’s been paid for with the blood of others.

There should be a line of T shirts with “narcissism is not rebellion” on them in big scarlet letters.

A Twitter thread with much wisdom.

https://twitter.com/dontkillfrogs/status/1124573634905890816

There’s a thread reader but I’m just going to knit it all together for ease of reading, because I think it’s that useful.

The mad thing is, every feeling or lived experience in “gender dysphoria” can far more readily be explained by the clinical characteristics & traits of many other psych conditions. It’s forbidden to speak of this.

Through our dysregulated emotions & incessant rumination, we become susceptible to the full range of GD/GID symptoms, which we’re told are unique & special. It’s not unique at all. It’s garden variety identity disturbance & diffusion. The only thing somewhat different is the emphasis on wanting to be the opposite sex. This is a combo of cognitive bias and gaslighting by the trans industry.

Men & women develop GD/GID for completely different reasons, and while many are uncomfortable with their bodies, sex roles etc. they can usually manage all right & even work through their discomfort. It’s not a crisis of “identity” for them, there isn’t a relentless unstoppable drive to “transition.” Until: They learn about transgenderism, see a film, read a magazine article, etc. Suddenly there begins the whole pathological process of rumination, disavowal, idealization and “splitting.” This almost always happens during a time of high stress. It becomes a crisis.

The experience has very close parallels with the emergence of borderline personality disorder, with the difference being that the trans industry harnesses the energy of your disturbed identity to sell us a costume and tell us we’re a real girl/boy now. That’s the gaslighting. Had we seen a film, read a book, however we learned about it, without the accompanying lie that our secret wish will now come true, we would not have taken the bait.

Young or old, if we bite the hook, the clinical progression is similar. It’s just our minds under pressure, and when an impossibility is presented as an option, the tension becomes extreme. It’s iatrogenic (caused by medical industry) & also mediagenic. Meanwhile, all the same processes have been studied intensely for decades, with explicit exception of GD/GID.

Further reading in the final tweet:

https://twitter.com/dontkillfrogs/status/1124585311189626880

In short, what we have here is a manufactured “condition” or “identity” or whatever you want to call it. Being trans isn’t a thing, it’s an idea, a thought process, a fantasy, a contagion, a product of incessant rumination. It’s an invention, and not one of the better ones. It’s an idée fixe, and those are usually considered more a hindrance than a help.

It’s not that I think fantasy is always a bad thing. I think it can be quite helpful, as long as it continues to be recognized as fantasy. But not all fantasies are helpful, and the one about being the opposite sex has jumped the tracks into a nightmare. Combine personality disorder with rumination with narcissism with the internet, and what would you expect to come up with?

Via Hell No, We Won’t Go 2:

Asia Bibi has escaped Pakistan and arrived in Canada.

Pakistani government officials did not reveal her destination, or say when she left.

But her lawyer Saif ul Malook told the BBC she had already arrived in Canada, where two of her daughters are understood to have been granted asylum.

Asia Noreen – commonly known as Asia Bibi – was kept at a secret location while arrangements were made for her to leave the country.

The Supreme Court’s quashing of her sentence last October led to violent protests by religious hardliners who support strong blasphemy laws, while more liberal sections of society urged her release.

The thing is, though, you can “support strong blasphemy laws” and still not insist on applying them to people who didn’t commit any blasphemy. You shouldn’t, and no country should have laws against it, any more than it should have laws against saying men are men, but even if you do it still makes no sense to apply it to people who didn’t do anything.

The Guardian took the bait. Eejits.

A production of Don Giovanni opening this weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma, stars a transgender woman in the title role.

While operas around trans themes are starting to emerge, Tulsa’s take on Mozart’s classic represents the first time a professional opera company in the United States has hired a trans person to sing the lead in a standard work.

But is it the first time a professional opera company in the United States has hired a man to play the male lead in a standard work? Well, no. But if you put it that way how would an opera company in Tulsa, Oklahoma get a story in the Guardian?

Lucia Lucas, the woman charged with playing one of the opera canon’s best-known protagonists, is a rising star. The 38-year-old singer has performed on major stages in Europe and Asia. Next season, she will make her debut with the English National Opera in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld. And all this using the dramatic baritone voice with which she launched her international career, before she transitioned, a decade ago.

In other words Lucas has a dramatic baritone voice and will be using it to sing the part of Don Giovanni. As one does.

Opera has long featured non-traditional presentations of gender. For hundreds of years, female singers have been playing young men and boys on stage in so-called “trouser roles”, from Hansel in Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel to Octavian in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. And then there is the once popular, now defunct tradition of male castrati gushing out florid Handel arias in the upper echelons of the human vocal range.

Yet Lucas says she has encountered prejudice since coming out. “I have had opera administrators say to me, ‘It’s not that we don’t like you. But our public, what would they think?’”

She says attitudes towards trans people have become more open over the past five years, since trans characters have started proliferating in movies and on TV. It’s no accident that she only felt ready to make her transition in 2014. “If I would have come out before my audition for Germany in 2009, they probably wouldn’t have taken me,” she says. “Things have changed a lot since then.”

Quite so, but there’s more than one way to look at that. You can see it as a sudden surge in acceptance of an existing category of people, or you can see it as a proliferating fashion that people are drawn into via Twitter and YouTube.

Tulsa Opera’s Don Giovanni is an expression of that change. “The potential doors that this is now opening for trans singers is a very exciting step forward,” says Matthew Shilvock, the director general of the San Francisco Opera.

Why? What’s exciting about it? What’s even interesting about it?

One of the best experiences of her career so far, Lucas says, was playing Wotan in Die Walküre last autumn in Magdeburg, Germany. She feels a particular affinity for Wagner, and she loved playing the Norse God in a straightforward way.

“There was no extra story about being trans, or a female baritone, or anything like that. It was simply the story done as it is always done, in traditional masculine dress.”

Right. A man playing a male part in “traditional masculine dress.” But we’re supposed to see this as Special and Exciting because the man playing the male part tells us he’s a woman? Still not seeing the excitement here.

A first! Another door thrown open! Another marginalized group represented!

Lucia Lucas makes her debut in Don Giovanni at Tulsa Opera tonight, making her the first trans woman to perform a principal opera role in the US.

Lucia Lucas is a transgender woman who has a baritone voice. And she is about to make her US debut, singing the title role in Mozart‘s Don Giovanni.

First ever trans woman to play a principal man in an opera! And the title role at that!

Artistic director of Tulsa Opera, Tobias Picker said: “Making history, Tulsa Opera presents baritone, Lucia Lucas in her American operatic debut as a transgender woman. Lucia Lucas’ appearance here will mark the first time a trans woman has performed a principal role on the operatic stage in the United States.”

And not only that but it’s kind of trans doubled, if not squared. A trans woman playing a male part…it breaks every taboo there’s ever been. So transgressivothrilling!