Well now here’s an interesting thread.

https://twitter.com/kat_blaque/status/1124370495338569734

https://twitter.com/kat_blaque/status/1124370496928116736

https://twitter.com/kat_blaque/status/1124370498400337921

Ahhhhhh don’t you love that fifth one? “One of the things I’m coming to terms with in life is that I am going to be seen as this amazing inspiring fascinating person to a lot of people and that’s as deep as any relationship they have with me will go”? I know I do. I love it for its hilariosity and I love it for its evidentiary worth. It can be everyone’s “NOW do you see the narcissism??” resource.

But also…”It’s always just this weird “hey” and I’m expected to accept it.” Oh yes? Is that what it’s always? And you don’t always feel like accepting it? What might that be like, I wonder?

https://twitter.com/kat_blaque/status/1124370499310473216

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha yeah right, most people who go “Hey I’m trans” give cis women alllllllllll the time in the world to adjust and never call them hard names or threaten them or ostracize them in any way at all. We’ve been seeing that for several years now.

https://twitter.com/kat_blaque/status/1124370501059485706

https://twitter.com/kat_blaque/status/1124371828888096768

Definitely not. They treat cis women with the utmost respect and generosity and don’t at all bully or silence them for any reason whatever.

If you’re wondering who Kat Blaque is, Wikipedia can help:

Blaque was born in Lynwood, California and raised in Walnut, California. She is adopted.^[2] In middle school, Blaque began to question her gender identity and started to identify as genderqueer.^[3] She began identifying as a trans woman in college.^[4] Blaque graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 2012 with a BFA in character animation.^[1]

Bless.

Nothing to see here folks, move on.

Anything in this very interesting world is possible, but I believe that Kim Jong Un fully realizes the great economic potential of North Korea, & will do nothing to interfere or end it. He also knows that I am with him & does not want to break his promise to me. Deal will happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 4, 2019

Trump is with Kim Jong-un. Trump is not with the EU, or NATO, or Merkel, or the UN, or Schumer, or Mueller, or Obama, but he is with Kim Jong-un. Interesting.

South Korea isn’t quite so with Kim.

South Korea initially reported Saturday that a single missile was fired, but later issued a statement that said “several projectiles” had been launched and that they flew up to 200km (125 miles) before splashing into the sea toward the north-east.

If it’s confirmed that the North fired banned ballistic missiles, it would be the first such launch since the North’s November 2017 test of an intercontinental ballistic missile. That year saw a string of increasingly powerful weapons tests from the North and a belligerent response from Trump that had many in the region fearing war.

Experts say the North may increase these sorts of low-level provocations to apply pressure on the US to agree to reduce crushing international sanctions.

Well, Trump is with Kim, so no doubt he’ll be obliging.

Conservative Democrats always think they know that only the most conservative possible platform can get Democrats elected. Pelosi is warning us away from any wild and crazy ideas like universal health insurance, you know like what every other developed country has had for decades.

Sitting in her office with its panoramic view of the National Mall, Ms. Pelosi — the de facto head of the Democratic Party until a presidential nominee is selected in 2020 — offered Democrats her “coldblooded” plan for decisively ridding themselves of Mr. Trump: Do not get dragged into a protracted impeachment bid that will ultimately get crushed in the Republican-controlled Senate, and do not risk alienating the moderate voters who flocked to the party in 2018 by drifting too far to the left.

“Own the center left, own the mainstream,” Ms. Pelosi, 79, said.

“Our passions were for health care, bigger paychecks, cleaner government — a simple message,” Ms. Pelosi said of the 40-seat Democratic pickup last year that resulted in her second ascent to the speakership. “We did not engage in some of the other exuberances that exist in our party” — a reference to some of the most ambitious plans advocated by the left wing of her party and some 2020 candidates, including “Medicare for all” and the Green New Deal, which she has declined to support.

Well what is “health care” supposed to mean? Everybody thinks health care is a good thing, apart from the religious maniacs who decline it on principle and watch their children die in agony. The issue isn’t health care, it’s the ability to pay for it if you’re not rich. The issue is whether or not to treat it as a public good like schools and libraries, or a profit generator like cars and shoes. It’s not “exuberance” to think health insurance should work the way Medicare does; other prosperous countries do it that way and we could too.

There’s also nothing “exuberant” about thinking we have a responsibility to take climate change seriously as opposed to just shrugging it off because we won’t be alive to see the worst of it.

Dispatch from Swansea Pride:

#GetTheLOut Swansea Pride. Lesbians forcibly removed by police for stating lesbians don’t have penises.

From last summer: Why I Put Pronouns on my Email Signature (and LinkedIn profile) and You Should Too.

Pronouns…on your signature?

looks around confusedly as if having just landed on an alien planet

What does that even mean? Signatures don’t have pronouns.

Never mind what it is; the point is it doesn’t cost you anything.

For a cisgender person (a person whose gender is in alignment with the sex they were assigned at birth- more on that another time!) there is little to no risk in sharing your pronouns. When you’ve never questioned what pronouns people use for you, or even thought about the idea of pronouns after you learned about them in 2nd grade, sharing your pronouns on digital profiles is easy and costs you nothing.

Emphasis in the original.

I beg to differ. It would cost me my self-respect, my unconscious feeling of having some clue about how to do basic things like walk through doors, buy food at the supermarket, wear clothes, not fall over. I would feel like a damn fool if I started signing things with My Name + me me me me. That’s a cost.

For a person who is transgender or nonbinary, sharing pronouns can be a bit riskier. If someone is transitioning at work and only a few people know about it, sharing pronouns may out them before they’re ready. For a nonbinary person, sharing they/them pronouns often only sparks a lengthier conversation (*coughthisarticlecough*) rather than simply inform people.

That’s why we ask cisgender people to lead the change by sharing pronouns.It normalizes the process, has little risk, and actually makes for a safer environment for everyone.

What process? Signatures don’t include pronouns, for anyone, not even trans people, so what process?

Finally he explains. (Or maybe it’s not “he”? Despite the name Max Masure and the photo of a man? Am I committing a social crime by assuming he’s a he?)

At Argo Collective, we always have our workshop attendees make a commitment before the close of each session. One of our clients committed to adding his pronouns on his LinkedIn profile. Two days after he added “He/Him” after his last name, a University reached out to him and said they noticed he and some of his colleagues added pronouns on LinkedIn. The University told him they had a transgender student who was looking for an internship placement and this company seemed like a safe environment for the student to begin their career.

Oh, that’s what it means: adding it in parentheses after your name, as some people do on Twitter.

No. It’s stupid and otiose and I’m not doing it.

Now at this point in my reading, I start to have a familiar thought: the intention here is to be kind, and it’s making me feel sick, and isn’t there something dubious about feeling sick at intentions to be kind?

So I pause to think about it.

There could be. Certainly a lot of the struggle against “political correctness” smacks of that. Carl Benjamin smirking at the camera and saying he guesses he would rape Jess Phillips if pressed enough but really there isn’t enough beer – that’s definitely about being pointedly hateful for the sake of being pointedly hateful.

But scorn for people who obsess over pronouns? I don’t think so. There’s such a thing as cruelty, there’s bullying, but there’s also misdirected kindness. I think pronoun follies are infantilizing rather than kind, however kind the intention may be. You can want to be kind to a toddler and give her chocolate until she throws up; a mistaken form of kindness.

One way the mistaken kindness of a lot of “allies” of trans people goes wrong is that it fosters narcissism. Trans ideology seems to attract narcissists as it is, and the ever-ratcheting-upward campaign to “center” them just makes it more attractive to narcissists. It’s inherently narcissistic to believe that one’s own inner feelings can contradict physical reality, and the more people coo over that belief and offer to do it favors even when signing emails, the more narcissistic the believer becomes. I think that’s probably the core reason this “movement” is so fucked up and so filled with idiotic claims and rules.

So, no. I think saying “Don’t be ridiculous about pronouns” is not cruel or bullying the way saying “I guess I’d rape her if pushed” is.

Oh and by the way seven foreign governments have been renting space in Trump World Tower since 2017, without so much as a whisper of Congressional approval. Note that this is not Trump Tower but a different building, next to the UN.

The U.S. State Department allowed seven foreign governments to rent luxury condominiums in New York’s Trump World Tower in 2017 without approval from Congress, according to documents and people familiar with the leases, in what some experts say could be a potential violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause.

Could be a potential, or just plain is a snap of the fingers at the emoluments clause.

Congressional staffers confirmed to Reuters that the Trump World Tower lease requests were never submitted to Congress. Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said his committee has been “stonewalled” in its efforts to obtain detailed information about foreign government payments to Trump’s businesses.

“This new information raises serious questions about the President and his businesses’ potential receipt of payments from foreign governments,” Cummings said in a statement to Reuters. “The American public deserves full transparency.”

A State Department spokesperson referred Reuters to the Justice Department because the subject involved “matters related to ongoing litigation.” The Justice Department declined to comment. The White House referred a request for comment to the State Department and the Trump Organization, which declined to comment before publication.

In other words they all stonewalled, just as Cummings said.

Priorities.

I find it really sad that people think that calling out a predator like JY requires deadnaming/misgendering her, as if respecting identity is a reward for good behaviour bestowed by the 'normal' people and able to be withdrawn if we don't like them anymore.

— Fiona Robertson fionaswriting.bsky.social (@FionasWriting) May 3, 2019

Fiona Robertson is the SNP’s National Women’s and Equalities Convener, and she thinks “respecting” Jonathan Yaniv’s “identity” is important, and not just important but so important that she needs to express sorrow over a putative insult to it despite the abundant reporting on what an aggressive punitive woman-hating shit Yaniv is.

It’s nuts.

At least Donnie and Volodya are still buddies. That’s a comfort.

President Trump spoke with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin by phone for more than an hour Friday about topics including the outcome of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, the White House said.

How sweet.

The two touched “very, very briefly” on Mueller’s findings, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters.

“It was discussed, essentially in the context that it’s over, and there was no collusion, which I’m pretty sure both leaders were very well aware of long before this call took place,” Sanders told reporters at the White House.

But was there Russian interference? Oooooooh let’s not talk about that.

Trump later tweeted about the call, referring to the Muller investigation as the “Russian Hoax.”

“As I have always said, long before the Witch Hunt started, getting along with Russia, China, and everyone is a good thing, not a bad thing,” he wrote. “We discussed Trade, Venezuela, Ukraine, North Korea, Nuclear Arms Control and even the ‘Russian Hoax.’ Very productive talk!”

What about getting along with Venezuela? Cuba? Iran? Is that a good thing, not a bad thing? Do they count as “and everyone”?

Next up is David Frum.

I feel that these two sentences from Volume II of the Mueller report have not gotten anything like the attention they deserve (My retyping; my highlighting) pic.twitter.com/DfXAlmiftS

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 3, 2019

“But the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover” – not might uncover, please note, but would uncover – “facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes…”

They were crimes outside the scope of his inquiry, but a thorough FBI probe would find them.

Interesting.

Oh but surely there’s no law against an Attorney General of the US lying to Congress under oath.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Thursday that the US attorney general, William Barr, committed a “crime” when he told lawmakers during a congressional hearing last month that he was unaware that special counsel Robert Mueller was unhappy with his portrayal of the findings from his investigation into Russian meddling.

“What’s deadly serious about it is the attorney general of the United States of America was not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States,” Pelosi said on Thursday morning during her weekly press conference with reporters. “And that’s a crime.”

Mimi Rocah agrees, sort of:

…Barr has over and over during this process deceived the American public. Mueller reportedly told Barr he should release his executive summaries to the public, which makes sense given that these summaries contain almost no redactions — clearly they were written so they could be widely distributed and read. After Mueller said this, however, Barr testified before Congress. He could have used this opportunity to be honest about the differences in opinion between himself and the special counsel. Instead he said nothing. In fact, he went one step further and misled Congress and the American people.

When asked by Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., if Mueller supported his conclusion, Barr replied, “I don’t know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion.”

But he did know. He knew that Mueller felt his report was not being properly contextualized and wanted more information to be released so that voters and lawmakers could make their own determinations on several questions not definitively answered by the report — especially whether or not the president had obstructed justice. Prosecutors can debate if this fits within the exacting requirements of the statute used to prosecute false statements made under oath to Congress, 18 USC Section 1001 — or whether Barr, a savvy lawyer, walked the line just enough to avoid breaking the law.

But that cannot be the standard for an attorney general of the United States. We should expect and demand objectively, neutrality, honesty and integrity from our top law enforcement official.

It’s debatable whether he committed a crime or not, but why should we grin obediently and accept an Attorney General who just barely didn’t quite break the law but is lying to us in service to a crooked filthy sadist masquerading as a president? Why should we?

Say what now?

https://twitter.com/jonkay/status/1123925236951416833

Where is this??

Ah.

https://twitter.com/jonkay/status/1123998485357969409

Ok so I’m reading the Ledge Bit Kyooeea Inclooosiv Pregnancy n Birth Care post.

Pregnancy and birth care professionals fulfill a wide range of roles and functions in the lives of the people and families we serve. However, as a whole, our goal is to provide compassionate, respectful, culturally appropriate care to all of our clients.

I hope they spare a little attention for the medical aspect of the whole thing.

Most of the resources available to birthworkers are not centered on the lived experience, identity, and needs of people whose gender identity and sexual orientation fall outside of heteronormative mainstream definitions of sex and gender.

What are these “needs” though? Lesbians probably don’t want to be asked questions about their husbands, but surely that’s not all that difficult to manage with notes on the chart or similar, unless the setting is some churchy hospital in the boondocks. It doesn’t seem to require a vast amount of “centering”; just a little would do. Other than that…what? The fact that some pregnant women say they are men? Put another note on the chart and move on.

1. ASK, DON’T ASSUME!
Just because someone “looks like” a particular gender doesn’t mean they identify that way. Ask them what name and pronoun they use, note their name and pronouns on intake and medical history forms—and use them consistently.

But…how? How do you use third person pronouns in two person interactions? You don’t. Also…if it annoys or upsets a trans person not to be asked what pronouns They use, might it upset a person who is not trans to be asked? Might it upset or annoy almost everyone who is asked? Is that something to take into account at all? Are there some contexts in which it actually is better to assume than to ask? Think, for instance, of people who are asked “Where are you from?” when they’re not immigrants but are, say, browner than the majority. Asking what the pregnant woman’s pronouns are could feel like that.

Many (but not all!) LGBTQIA people have complicated relationships with their body. Asking them what terms they use for their body and/or body parts, and then using those terms, can help them feel empowered and affirmed.

Hmmmm. So one person calls her Birth Entryway “Muffy” and another calls it “Love Canal” and another calls it “James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree” – won’t it get a little tricky for the birth care professionals to remember them all?

I see a future in which all the birth professionals are in a huddle trying to remember which name they’re supposed to apply to this particular Birth Entryway while the baby just makes its own way out.

CNN says it’s all over, Barr has done what he was hired to do and protected President Mob Boss for the next year and a half. David Leonhardt at the Times says Mueller blew it.

It’s now clear that he mishandled the end of the Russia investigation.

Mueller naively trusted that William Barr, the attorney general, would act honorably and patriotically, as well, and let Barr decide how to handle the initial release of Mueller’s report. Barr, of course, wrote a letter that misled the public about what was in the report, creating a perception that the investigation cleared President Trump.

“For 27 days, the debate over Mueller’s findings was twisted by Barr’s poisonous distortions that implied a full exoneration of President Trump,” as The Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne wrote yesterday. Mueller himself has since complained to Barr about the letter.

And Barr doesn’t give a shit, because he got what he wanted to get.

What could Mueller have done differently? He could have recognized that Barr wasn’t trustworthy, given that Trump had nominated him for the attorney general job largely because Barr had expressed hostility to Mueller’s investigation. Mueller could then have acted accordingly.

He could have insisted that Barr release a summary written by Mueller and his team. Mueller may not have had the statutory power to insist on such a release, but he did have the actual power. If Barr had refused, Mueller could have made clear that his own summary would leak to the press, in short order.

But he didn’t.

Barr and the Trump administration have staked out the legal position that anything that rankles the president — congressional oversight, press coverage, the Mueller investigation itself — is illegitimate, writes Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick. “It’s Nixonian in scope to imply that anything Trump wants to do in order to push back against the media and protect his reputation is legal and justified,” she writes.

Neal Katyal, who wrote the special counsel regulations, offers a more optimistic take in The Times. He argues that Barr’s failure to defend his spin under congressional questioning is evidence that the system is working. “Barr’s deeply evasive testimony on Wednesday necessitates and tees up a full investigation in Congress,” Katyal writes.

I hope the reality is more Katyal than Barr.

This happened yesterday:

Tonight I’m going to retweet all the abuse I get for calling out misogyny on twitter today in @HumanRightsCtte. It will be instructive. So fasten your seat belts we’re in for a bumpy ride #onlineabuse https://t.co/WPRFo1rSVz

— Joanna Cherry KC (@joannaccherry) May 1, 2019

And another https://t.co/bx38b9bY04

— Joanna Cherry KC (@joannaccherry) May 1, 2019

And another one https://t.co/bx38b9bY04

— Joanna Cherry KC (@joannaccherry) May 1, 2019

It got boring fast.

Ok 20 minutes of that was enough. Off for a G&T. Thanks to all the wonderful women & men who have sent me msgs of thanks or support today. They far outweigh the abusers. I believe in #FreeSpeech & respectful debate. That’s all #onlineabuse @HumanRightsCtte https://t.co/T3mTMl7UVc

— Joanna Cherry KC (@joannaccherry) May 1, 2019

James Kirkup wrote about it at the Spectator today. Twitter is not real life, he notes, but it does shape the discourse, so it does matter.

So when Twitter starts denying a voice and a platform to certain people and certain ideas, that matters. It also matters when Twitter makes it possible for certain people with certain ideas to be violently abused for expressing those ideas.

Twitter matters in the debate about sex and gender because, at a time when some media outlets and some political representatives are a bit reluctant to engage in a full, rounded debate, Twitter is for some people the only place to talk. So it really matters when Twitter allows the nasty intimidation of women who express views that some people don’t like. And it really matters when Twitter bans from its platform women who express such views – or just state facts that some people find inconvenient.

Both of those things are happening, and happening routinely. Nasty abuse of women who question the mantra that ‘trans women are women’ – or simply ask questions about the implications for law and policy of that stance – is commonplace, with grim consequences.

He cites Helen Lewis, and the fact that she doesn’t join the Twitter conversation as much as she might because of

the abuse and threats she receives there from pathetic, cowardly men claiming to promote the interests of transgender people. Abuse and threats that Twitter appears content to tolerate.

Like for instance yesterday:

https://twitter.com/helenlewis/status/1122812276640309254

Yes, certainly, telling a woman – a woman who talks and writes as a profession, a woman who is good enough for The New Statesman and the Atlantic and Saturday Review – to shut the fuck up, from behind a pointed gun, is all part of the “conversation.”

Kirkup goes on:

Yet elsewhere, Twitter takes a very different approach to what it permits to be said on its platform. Among women who question transgender ideology, an experience almost as common as being abused online is being banned from Twitter for saying things some men don’t like. I could write a very, very long article listing all the women who have been barred from a media platform (that turns a blind eye to threats of violence) simply for stating facts. Facts like ‘men are more likely to commit crimes of violence than women’ and ‘in English law, a rapist must be male because rape is defined as inserting your penis into another person’s body without consent’.

He says to check out #TwitterHatesWomen for more examples than anyone could possibly want.

And because Twitter, sadly, matters, this stuff needs to be debated and scrutinised. Which is why this article isn’t really about Twitter and its awfulness, but about a politician who has done something rather wonderful.

That politician is Joanna Cherry QC, an SNP MP and member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. It was at that committee that Cherry recently said ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ a lot, and in so doing did her job as a parliamentarian in an arena where many others have failed.

The context was a hearing where a Twitter representative was giving evidence about the site’s role in the intimidation of politicians.

You can watch the whole thing here, and I recommend that you do.

I plan to.See

The Twitter representative still does not get it though…or pretends not to. Watch the clip:

Never seen Parliament so sweary before. SNP's @joannaccherry interrogates Twitter exec on precisely when it's acceptable to use the C-word online. pic.twitter.com/wLIlU8YKJl

— Hugo Gye (@HugoGye) May 1, 2019

Joanna Cherry: “Do you accept that the word TERF is a gendered term, forgive me, in the same way as bitch and cunt are gendered terms?”

Twitter’s Katy Minshall: “Yes.”

Cherry: “And are bitch and cunt acceptable on Twitter?”

Minshall: “We don’t have a prohibition on swearing…”

BZZZZZZZZZZZT. Wrong. The issue is not swearing, the issue is gendered epithets.

I do wish people could manage to hang on to that thought for longer than five seconds.

A city of ten million people is rapidly sinking, which is a little worrying since it’s a coastal city.

THIS WEEK, AMID devastating flooding, Indonesia announced it’s planning to move its capital out of Jakarta, which really is nothing new—the country’s first president was talking about it way back in 1957. Part of the problem is extreme congestion, but today the city of more than 10 million is facing nothing short of obliteration by rising seas and sinking land, two opposing yet complementary forces of doom. Models predict that by 2050, 95 percent of North Jakarta could be submerged. And Jakarta is far from alone—cities the world over are drowning and sinking, and there’s very little we can do about it short of stopping climate change entirely.

Bombay? New York? Tokyo? Shanghai? Miami?

Jakarta’s situation may be particularly dire, but it isn’t the only coastal metropolis that’s sinking. “Almost every coastal city around the world builds on loose sediment, and all of them are subsiding, regardless of pumping groundwater,” says Arizona State University geophysicist Manoochehr Shirzaei, who studies land subsidence. “In fact, vertical land motion is as important as sea level rise, but unfortunately it gets very little attention, because the process is slow.”

…

That’s an inevitable consequence of building on landfill, but Jakarta has the power to cut back on the groundwater pumping that’s the root of the crisis. Except, even that won’t save the day. “This has been happening for so long, that when you remove water from the ground the porous structure collapses,” says University of Oregon earth scientist Estelle Chaussard, who’s studied land subsidence in Jakarta. “The problem is that a large amount of this subsidence, and this decrease in porous storage of the aquifer, is irreversible.” Not only that, layers of the porous earth will keep deforming even if you stop pumping groundwater, potentially causing further subsidence, though at least a smaller amount of it.

Even if Jakarta could stop land subsidence, it’s still sitting on the edge of the sea, and seas are rising. The city has already deployed a network of canals and seawalls to stave off the threat, but with climate change the threat will only grow worse.

The rich will escape and the poor will drown. Oh and by the way Jakarta is running out of drinking water, with no good solution available.

Barr says he has a headache.

Attorney General William Barr is no longer expected to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, the committee’s chairman Jerry Nadler announced, following a dispute between House Democrats and the nation’s top law enforcement officer over whether Barr would publicly face questions from committee staff.

In comments to reporters on Capitol Hill, Nadler also said the Justice Department told the committee it would not comply with its subpoena for the full, unredacted report from special counsel Robert Mueller, a subpoena which had a deadline of Wednesday to comply.

So much for an independent Department of Justice.

Gee…that certainly sounds like a president who is above the law.

Wild from Barr: If the president feels a proceeding is unfounded, "the president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course. The president could terminate the proceeding and it would not be a corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused." pic.twitter.com/SMpiIXia92

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 1, 2019