Even Rex Tillerson told Kushner he had no business meddling with US foreign policy. (Neither did Tillerson, but giving big policy jobs to CEOs didn’t start with Trump.)

Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was confronted by two of the most senior US government officials for mixing his personal interests with US foreign policy, according to a new book.

Kushner, an envoy to the Middle East for his father-in-law, is said to have been robustly challenged by both Rex Tillerson, then secretary of state, and Gary Cohn, formerly Trump’s top economic adviser.

The confrontations are detailed in Kushner Inc by the journalist Vicky Ward, who also describes interference in foreign relations by Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump.

The Guardian’s been reading it.

Ward reports that Tillerson blamed Kushner for Trump’s abrupt endorsement of a provocative blockade and diplomatic campaign against Qatar by Saudi Arabia and several allies in June 2017. The US has thousands of troops stationed in Qatar.

Tillerson “told Kushner that his interference had endangered the US”, an unidentified Tillerson aide tells Ward.

And then there’s that 666 Fifth Avenue thing…

Meanwhile, Cohn is said to have rebuked Kushner in January 2017 after it was revealed Kushner had dined with executives from the Chinese financial corporation Anbang, which was considering investing in the Kushner family’s troubled tower at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

“You’ve got to be crazy,” Cohn is said to have told Kushner in front of others. Kushner met the executives around the time he hosted Chinese government officials at the Fifth Avenue tower. The building was eventually refinanced by a Qatari-backed investment fund.

Well he needed the money. What’s he supposed to do, not use his wife’s daddy’s theft of the presidency in his own financial interest?

Ward’s book portrays Kushner and Ivanka Trump as relentlessly ambitious operators who are loathed by many forced to work with them. She reports that White House staffers mocked Kushner as the “secretary of everything” for his wide-ranging meddling and derided Ivanka Trump’s team as Habi – “home of all bad ideas”.

Other than that, they’re a lovely pair.

Trump could pardon Manafort and probably will, but that’s not the end of the story.

Paul J. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, has been charged in New York with mortgage fraud and more than a dozen other state felonies, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., said Wednesday, an effort to ensure he will still face prison time if Mr. Trump pardons him for his federal crimes.

News of the indictment came shortly after Mr. Manafort was sentenced to his second federal prison term in two weeks; he now faces a combined sentence of more than seven years for tax and bank fraud and conspiracy in two related cases brought by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

Trump’s pardon power works only in federal cases.

The indictment grew out of an investigation that began in 2017, when the Manhattan prosecutors began examining loans Mr. Manafort received from two banks.

Last week, a grand jury hearing evidence in the case voted to charge Mr. Manafort with residential mortgage fraud, conspiracy, falsifying business records and other charges. A lawyer for Mr. Manafort could not immediately be reached for comment.

…

The loans were also the subject of Mr. Mueller’s investigation and were the basis for some of the counts in the federal indictment that led to Mr. Manafort’s conviction last year in Virginia. But the Manhattan prosecutors deferred their inquiry in order not to interfere with Mr. Mueller’s larger investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

In recent months, prosecutors in the district attorney’s Economic Crimes Bureau resumed their inquiry and began presenting evidence to the grand jury, several people with knowledge of the matter have said.

The district attorney’s office determined some time ago that it would seek charges whether or not the president pardoned Mr. Manafort.

Meanwhile Manafort’s liar in the federal case is still lying.

Definitely important to include the hecklers here for Manafort's lawyers since they were the only ones telling the truth. pic.twitter.com/kW5vCuZUiS

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 13, 2019

The ACLU has fully bought into the dogma.

The title does not inspire confidence:

Banning Trans Girls From School Sports Is Neither Feminist Nor Legal

But nobody is talking about “banning trans girls from school sports.” That’s not the issue.

The first paragraph is no better:

Andraya Yearwood, a junior at Cromwell High School in Connecticut, recently finished second in the 55-meter dash at the state open indoor track championships. But instead of well-deserved accolades from her community, she now finds her achievements being publicly challenged — simply because she is transgender.

No, not simply because she is transgender, and in fact not because she is transgender at all. It’s because she has a male body and is visibly much bigger than the girls with female bodies she raced against.

Next we get a sensible paragraph, about the long history of sex discrimination against female people in athletics. Then we get a lurching non sequitur.

The enactment of Title IX, the federal statute banning sex discrimination in school programs and activities receiving federal funds, was intended to end such discrimination, and it has indeed resulted in a dramatic increase in girls’ participation in sports. But girls — and particularly girls of color — still face stark inequalities in opportunities, funding, and resources.

The marginalization of trans student athletes is rooted in the same harmful history of gender discrimination and stereotyping that has impeded the achievement of gender equality in sports as a whole.

Like hell it is. It’s not the same history at all. That dramatic increase in girls’ participation in sports thanks to Title IX is because girls were able to have their own teams so that they could compete against each other. Allowing trans girls, i.e. girls with male bodies, to play on the girls’ teams takes that away from them.

Old stereotypes regarding athleticism, biology, and gender are being directed at transgender girls, who are frequently told outright that they are not girls (and conversely transgender boys are told they are not really boys). This policing of gender has been used to justify subjecting transgender student athletes to numerous additional barriers to participating in sports, from onerous medical requirements to segregation in locker rooms to outright bans on their participation.

It’s not policing, it’s reality. Bodies are what they are. Female bodies are different from male bodies, and that’s not a “stereotype,” old or otherwise, it’s just factual. The list of male athletic advantages is long; sad but true.

The truth is, transgender women and girls have been competing in sports at all levels for years, and there is no research supporting the claim that they maintain a competitive advantage.

That is a shamefully absurd claim, and the link – to Everyday Feminism! – is worse. Take one look at Hannah Mouncey looming over the women and tell us that again.

When girls are pushed out of sports, they miss out on the community building, leadership skills, and all of the other benefits that being part of a team can offer. This is particularly harmful for transgender students, who face detrimental effects on their physical and emotional wellbeing when they are pushed out of affirming spaces and communities.

I wonder if the authors – Shayna Medley and Galen Sherwin – paused to consider whether girls might be pushed out of sports by the presence of hulking trans girls depriving them of all possibility of winning. I wonder if that worried them for even a second before they plowed ahead with taking real sport away from girls and women.

Monstrous.

Nasrin Sotoudeh, an internationally renowned human rights lawyer jailed in Iran, has been handed a new sentence that her husband said was 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.

Sotoudeh, who has represented opposition activists including women prosecuted for removing their mandatory headscarf, was arrested in June and charged with spying, spreading propaganda and insulting Iran’s supreme leader, her lawyer said.

She was jailed in 2010 for spreading propaganda and conspiring to harm state security – charges she denied – and was released after serving half of her six-year term. The European parliament awarded her the Sakharov human rights prize.

38 years in prison and 148 lashes.

Jonathan Best on the attempted (and failed) no-platforming of Jenni Murray:

On March 1st, an open letter was published on Facebook demanding that Leeds Lit Fest and The Leeds Library cancel an event with BBC Woman’s Hour broadcaster Jenni Murray on the grounds that she is ‘an active transphobe’ and guilty of ‘hate speech’. The signatories included Trans Leeds, Non-Binary Leeds, Trans Pride and Yorkshire Mesmac (all of whom might be expected to sign such a letter) and five of Leeds’ arts and culture organisations: Live Art Bistro, Leeds Queer Film Festival, Aire Place Studios, Oxygen Films and the artist collective Queerology.

With four decades of experience as a BBC journalist, including more than thirty years presenting Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Murray is one of the UK’s most popular and accessible feminist voices. She’s interviewed hundreds of interesting women, from Hilary Clinton to Cher, from Shirley Williams to Bette Davis. And she’s got a new book out too  -  A History of the World in 21 Women. To their credit, Leeds Lit Fest and The Leeds Library stood firm behind their programming decision and the sold-out event went ahead as planned.

They failed, but not for want of trying. The new silencing of women is just like the old silencing of women, and these people who think they’re doing the latest most woke thing are profoundly mistaken. (I kind of hope it wakes them up at night a few years from now. I kind of hope they wake up sweating with shame and guilt, and that that happens to them repeatedly. I’m evil that way.)

Ultimately, Jenni Murray’s sin is to hold a belief;  that trans women are not women. This conflicts with a foundational principle of modern transgender ideology;  that trans women are women. To assert that a male human being who identifies as a woman is a woman is a metaphysical claim and, as such, we all have a right to examine it and choose to either accept or reject it.

We have the moral right, but in practical terms, we often don’t have the actual right in the sense of being free to do so without being shunned and silenced and even fired. This situation is both ridiculous and destructive, and I wish it would come to its natural end with more speed. Why do I think it has a natural end? Because it rests so heavily and unbudgeably on a delusion, and that makes it vulnerable.

However, within the context of today’s LGBTQ politics, Murray’s rejection of the belief that trans women are women is seen as illegitimate and amounts to a secular blasphemy. In fact, the signatories to the open letter have adopted a position not so different from the religious leaders who tried to censor Monty Python’s Life of Brian in 1979. Many Christians were deeply hurt by that film, arguing that it failed to respect their sincerely held beliefs. Similarly, some transgender people are genuinely hurt when the beliefs they hold about womanhood are not respected by other women. But just as the Bishop of Leeds cannot compel me to believe in the Resurrection, so Live Art Bistro cannot compel Jenni Murray to believe that trans women are women.

Or the rest of us, either, and the more frenzied the bullying gets, the more people back away.

Well now look at it from their point of view: how are people going to become The Elite if they never cheat? It’s the American way: get to the top via bribery and fraud.

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people on Tuesday in a major college admission scandal that involved wealthy parents, including Hollywood celebrities and prominent business leaders, paying bribes to get their children into elite American universities.

The Justice Department isn’t in the business of prosecuting scandals; it prosecutes crimes.

Do we soft-pedal the language when it’s the genteel kind of crime committed by people with money? Hmmm? I think it should be called a major college admission fraud or scheme or racket, as opposed to a scandal. Journalists can always use “scandalous” in addition if they want to draw attention to that part, but they should call it what it is.

Thirty-three parents were charged in the case and prosecutors said there could be additional indictments to come. Also implicated were top college coaches, who were accused of accepting millions of dollars to help admit students to Wake Forest, Yale, Stanford, the University of Southern California and other schools, regardless of their academic or sports ability, officials said.

Yes but money. Don’t you understand? Money. Money is god; money can do everything; money is all that matters.

The case unveiled Tuesday was stunning in its breadth and audacity. It was the Justice Department’s largest ever college admissions prosecution, a sprawling investigation that involved 200 agents nationwide and resulted in charges against 50 people in six states.

Trumps and Kushners among them?

The charges also underscored how college admissions have become so cutthroat and competitive that some have sought to break the rules. The authorities say the parents of some of the nation’s wealthiest and most privileged students sought to buy spots for their children at top universities, not only cheating the system, but potentially cheating other hard-working students out of a chance at a college education.

I don’t see how it’s “potentially.” Surely the word should be “inevitably.” Cheaters inevitably cheat someone, because that’s what cheating means.

“The parents are the prime movers of this fraud,” Andrew E. Lelling, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said Tuesday during a news conference. Mr. Lelling said that those parents used their wealth to create a separate and unfair admissions process for their children.

But, Mr. Lelling said, “there will not be a separate criminal justice system” for them.

“The real victims in this case are the hardworking students,” who were displaced in the admissions process by “far less qualified students and their families who simply bought their way in,” Mr. Lelling said.

There you go: no waffle about “potentially”; it’s just reality. The fakes displaced non-fakes.

Now about those Trumps and Kushners…

Moira Donegan has more details on Tucker Carlson’s chatty misogyny with his buddy the lovesponge guy.

In the recordings, Carlson says women are “like dogs”, claiming: “They’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand.” He insists that women find misogynist degradation pleasurable and makes sexual, antagonistic comments about women he does and does not like.

He calls Arianna Huffington “a pig”, Justice Elena Kagan “ugly” and “unattractive”, and Martha Stewart’s daughter, TV host Alexis Stewart, “cunty”. He says he “wants to fuck” Sarah Palin and called for the elimination of rape shield laws, provisions that make it illegal for defense attorneys in rape cases to bring up an accuser’s sexual history as a way to discredit her. He laughs at a story about a woman being choked and calls Paris Hilton and Britney Spears “the biggest white whores in America”, a phrase that seems to imply that there are other, bigger “whores” who are not white. In other recordings, he makes repeated racist overtures, saying that white men are responsible for “creating civilization”, calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” and creating virtuosic combinations of racism and sexism in attacking Michelle Obama and white women who date black men.

Does it matter? Yes, I think so. Tucker Carlson isn’t a random saddo on a barstool blaming women for what a saddo he is, he’s a star talking head on the US president’s favorite tv network. It’s pathetic that we have to pay attention to Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump or Ivanka Trump, but we do.

The radio shows aired at a pivotal moment for Carlson’s career, when he was transitioning from a bow tied conservative commentator for CNN and MSNBC with pretensions to seriousness into a full-throated avatar of the Republican party’s sexist and racist id.

…

It’s clear from the recordings that Carlson’s sexist remarks are part of an effort to ingratiate himself with the radio host. Carlson clearly wants the approval of Bubba the Love Sponge, and is trying to establish a rapport with him by making degrading and lewd attacks on people he perceives as their shared enemies – namely, whichever woman they are talking about at the moment. It is a long-established pattern of male bonding in which misogynist aggression is deployed as a signal of irreverent joy and shared virility, a tactic that Donald Trump, the man Carlson so frequently carries water for on his television show, famously termed “locker room talk”.

Quite so. The same thing was clear in the Access Hollywood tape – Trump was “bonding” with the other two guys by talking contemptuous hostile smack about women. That, it seems to me, is why Billy Bush’s daughter was so upset by the tape: what girl wants to find out her father snickers at women along with Mister Grabthembythepussy?

It is not especially surprising to hear Tucker Carlson saying disgusting things in these newly rediscovered recordings. Scandal is quickly becoming not only a frequent part of his career, but a seemingly deliberate one – after all, he is fresh off the heels of a number of his major advertisers withdrawing from his show, following his racist comments that immigrants make America “dirtier”. He has shown us who he is before – he shows us on cable television, every weeknight, for an hour. But he has also shown us something about ourselves, about the things we tolerate men saying to men, and about the ways that we are willing to sacrifice young girls to grown men’s worst impulses. These comments are controversial now, and they were disgusting then, but the Media Matters report does not reveal anything new about Carlson. After all, he made these comments more than 10 years ago. It didn’t hurt him then, either.

And it hasn’t and doesn’t hurt Trump.

Kirsty Clarke in the Independent saying be more inncloosivv.

Sport is one of society’s most powerful tools for bringing people together and it should be open to everyone, including trans people.

Ok sorry to interrupt after just one sentence but I have to. Sport is open to trans people; that doesn’t mean sport should be open to letting male-bodied trans people compete against women. Everybody participate, yay, but that doesn’t mean throw out all the rules.

However, in recent days, sport has become a divisive issue around trans people’s right to participate.

No it hasn’t. That’s a stupid brainless lie. The objection is to letting male-bodied trans people compete against women.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen female athletes speaking out against trans women competing in sport, contributing to an environment of misinformation.

No; against trans women competing against women in sport.

It’s got to be deliberate, this repeated obfuscation. If it’s deliberate, she must know she’s both bullshitting and arguing for something dubious. She should stop doing that.

The conversation is currently being dominated by an overwhelming amount of bullying, minimising people to their physical bodies and using outdated stereotypes and abusive language.

It’s sport. It’s all about physical bodies.

There are several more paragraphs of evasive glurge full of generalities about the joy of sport and inklooozhyun, but not one word about the unfairness of male bodies competing against female bodies. She must know she’s trying to argue for the indefensible.

Something more cheerful by way of refreshment.

This is Laurel Hubbard NZ. Who twenty years after retiring (at his prime) from weightlifting as a male came back as a trans woman athlete & lifted (age 40!!) just 30kg less!! This is what will happen to female sport if gender not sex is used to classify sport #fairplayforfemales pic.twitter.com/hNh2lG3Plx

— Sharron Davies MBE (@sharrond62) March 11, 2019

Oh noes are we denying her right to exist?

No, actually, we’re denying a man’s “right” to compete against women who will thereby be unable to win anything ever.

The Guardian last April:

New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard went into the women’s +90kg finals at the Commonwealth Games as favourite, expected not only to win but also perhaps break records.

She finished the first half 7kg ahead of Samoa’s Feagaiga Stowers, but her efforts ended after she injured her elbow striving for a lift of 132kg.

But the eyes the Gold Coast’s Carrara Sport and Leisure Centre were also on Hubbard for another reason, after public challenges to her eligibility because she is a transgender woman who had competed in men’s weightlifting prior to transitioning.

Although no country lodged an official objection, many said they felt it was unfair for Hubbard to be going up against their athletes.

Because it is.

[Hubbard] said the support inside the arena spurred her on, even if her afternoon ended in disappointment.

“The Australian crowd was magnificent,” she said. “It felt like just a big embrace. They really made me try to lift my best. I gave it everything and I regret I wasn’t able to make the lift today.

“The Commonwealth Games here are a model for what sport can, and should, be. It’s an incredible environment and an amazing atmosphere. Without any doubt, they have lived up to the mantra of humanity, equality and decency.”

I’m not seeing the humanity, equality and decency in cheering on a person with a male body and a history of weightlifting as a male who is competing against women. What about Feagaiga Stowers? What about humanity, equality and decency for her?

One of the Canadians on that Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed:

The Carleton community is shocked and devastated to learn of the death of Prof. Pius Adesanmi, who was among the 18 Canadians killed in today’s crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jet at the Addis Ababa airport.

Global Affairs Canada has confirmed that Adesanmi is among the victims.

“Pius Adesanmi was a towering figure in African and post-colonial scholarship and his sudden loss is a tragedy,” said Benoit-Antoine Bacon, president and vice-chancellor. “Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and all those who knew and loved him, and with everyone who suffered loss in the tragic crash in Ethiopia.”

“The contributions of Pius Adesanmi to Carleton are immeasurable,” said Pauline Rankin, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. “He worked tirelessly to build the Institute of African Studies, to share his boundless passion for African literature and to connect with and support students. He was a scholar and teacher of the highest calibre who leaves a deep imprint on Carleton.”

H/t Steve Watson

Originally a comment by tiggerthewing on When did it begin?

For me, it was recognising the pattern of Cluster B abuse from when it happened in my favourite Asperger’s/autism forum, although I didn’t have a name for it until fellow commenters, here and on Facebook, joined the dots for themselves with regard to transactivism, and so educated me.

**********

It even happened the same way (Cluster B behaviour seems to go by the book):

Firstly:

Someone points out how unfair it is to expect every member to have a full, official diagnosis of Asperger’s [dysphoria]. They request that self-identifying should be enough.

• Reason 1: Official diagnosis is expensive; and difficult and convoluted to obtain.

• Reason 2: A lot of people are just suspecting that they might be on the spectrum [trans] and a support forum is the best place for them to explore their identity, and it would be mean to deprive fellow autists [possibly dysphoric] people of support just because they hadn’t yet found or couldn’t afford the official channels.

Some commenters argued that this would pave the way for non-autistic [non-dysphoric] abusers to pretend to be Aspie [trans], but were shouted down because “Who on Earth would do that?! No-one is going to pretend to be autistic [trans] just to access accommodations!” (It’s not that autistic people lack a theory of mind; it is that experience has taught us that what we first thought – that everyone thinks the same way that we do – is false, and that we cannot actually know what another person is thinking).

Of course, the cautious people (who might have encountered just such Cluster B abusers in their past) were right, because:

Secondly:

People with Cluster B personality disorders start to infiltrate. They have excellent people-reading skills, and know exactly how to present themselves to get other people to see them the way they want to be seen. They recruit ‘flying monkeys’ in back channels/private messages, and start to pile on the people who have recognised the abusive behaviour, framing the accusations in such a way that it makes it seem that the whistle-blowers are the bad guys.

The autism forum imploded, but the abusers (whilst, no doubt, having huge fun at our expense) failed to get the vehicle that they wanted for influencing wider society in their favour. This is probably because autistics (notoriously) are impossible to organise offline. Despite plenty of war-like rhetoric, the autistic lads were never actually going to get together and storm government offices, demanding whatever it was that the agitators wanted. They also misread the public attitude to autistic people – their sympathy is entirely directed to the poor, martyred ‘autism moms’, and there isn’t an ounce of empathy for autistic people ourselves.

The ‘self-diagnosed’ people simply went back to being camouflaged members of normal society, fading into the woodwork until they discovered a new vulnerable group to be their Trojan Horse. Transsexuals.

**********

Ophelia and the commenters here helped me to see the pattern; the way she was treated at FtB was the catalyst in my leaving that site for good. Discovering that radical feminism has a much better way to deal with dysphoria than blaming the dysphoric person (i.e. get rid of the sex stereotype boxes, don’t mutilate someone to fit into the other box) was a major influence in my deciding that ‘being trans’ actually isn’t what I am, and the totally illogical, quasi-religious ‘arguments’ of the transactivists cemented my peak trans moment.

TL;DR: Peak trans for me was discovering that transactivists are abusers, and that radical feminism has a better answer to dysphoria than saying “You’re trans.”

Sarah Sanders gives her first press briefing since the invention of Post-it notes.

The first White House briefing in six weeks has begun as Sarah Sanders returns to podium in the White House briefing room with Russ Vought, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.

That’s ok, they’re busy, it’s not as if they have any obligation to keep the populace informed about what they’re doing to us.

Sanders says that Democrats should denounce Ilhan Omar’s anti-semitic comments in the same that Republicans denounced Steve King’s comments in support of white supremacy. President Donald Trump has yet to denounce King though.

Good people on both sides, both sides.

The national emergency was Trump’s patriotic duty.

Sanders on Trump's national emergency: "He took an oath of office and he has a constitutional duty to protect the people of this country." We have a crisis at the border. Congress failed to do their job. "He's doing his duty."

— David Smith (@SmithInAmerica) March 11, 2019

Sarah Sanders won’t answer a question from NBC’s Hallie Jackson about whether Donald Trump truly believes that Democrats hate Jews.

In attacking Democrats for not forthrightly condemning Ilhan Omar’s most recent anti-Semitic comments, Sanders drew parallels to Trump’s willingness to condemn neo-Nazis in Charlottesville who marched carrying torches and proclaimed “Jews will not replace us.”

Sanders said: “The president has condemned neo-Nazis by and called then by name, which is what we are asking Democrats to do when they see this same type of hatred.”

Trump famously said after Charlottesville that there were very fine people on both sides.

When? When did Trump condemn neo-Nazis and call them by name?

But more than that…there’s the “shithole countries,” the neglect of Puerto Rico after the hurricane and the picking of fights with the mayor of San Juan, the constant relentless hate-mongering toward everyone south of the border, the birtherism, the murderous campaign against the Central Park 5, the telling April Ryan to “make an appointment” for him with the Congressional Black Caucus…there’s a long long list of blatantly racist garbage pouring out of the current president of the US, so no, he doesn’t get to posture about Ilhan Omar.

Surprise surprise, one of Fox News’s more famous talking heads is contemptuous of women. Who could ever have guessed that?

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, many years ago, would regularly call in and chat with the host of the Bubba the Love Sponge radio show. The idea, as it is with any shock-jock program, was to stir up a buzz by discussing some controversial topics.

Carlson didn’t disappoint.

One of those topics, according to the Media Matters website, focused on Warren Jeffs, who was on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list for his role in arranging illegal marriages between adults and underage girls.

Carlson said criminal charges against Jeffs were “bullshit” because “arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her.”

Unless of course it’s a Muslim man arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and a 27-year-old man. Tucker Carlson wouldn’t brush that off, I’m betting, but when it’s a nice white home-grown Fundamentalist Latter-day Saint then that’s another story entirely.

What else did he say?

‘I love women, but they’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand. And one of the things they hate more than anything is weakness in a man.’

So women are kind of like dogs then? We love them, they make great pets, but they’re useless for discussing foreign policy or poetry or quantum physics.

He didn’t stop there. Carlson called journalist Arianna Huffington a “pig,” and labeled Britney Spears and Paris Hilton “the biggest white whores in America.”

Carlson also referred to Martha Stewart’s daughter Alexis as “cunty.”

He’s explained he said it to save time.

pic.twitter.com/rZdchBXrG2

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 11, 2019

“Naughty.” No, asshole, the objection is not that it’s a swear. It doesn’t go in the box with “shit” and “fuck,” it goes in the box with “nigger” and “faggot” and “bitch.”

Also – wait a second. What’s this we have here? It’s a statement by Tucker Carlson, reported by Business Insider last November.

“On October 13, I had dinner with two of my children and some family friends at the Farmington Country Club in Charlottesville, Virginia. Toward the end of the meal, my 19-year-old daughter went to the bathroom with a friend. On their way back through the bar, a middle aged man stopped my daughter and asked if she was sitting with Tucker Carlson. My daughter had never seen the man before. She answered: ‘That’s my dad,’ and pointed to me. The man responded, ‘Are you Tucker’s whore?’ He then called her a ‘f—— c—.’

Not a helpful place for squeamish publication. He then called her a “fucking cunt.”

“My daughter returned to the table in tears. She soon left the table and the club. My son, who is also a student, went into the bar to confront the man. I followed. My son asked the man if he’d called his sister a ‘whore’ and a ‘cunt.’ The man admitted he had, and again become profane. My son threw a glass of red wine in the man’s face and told him to leave the bar, which he soon did.

“Immediately after the incident, I described these events to the management of the Farmington Country Club. The club spent more than three weeks investigating the incident. Last week, they revoked the man’s membership and threw him out of the club.

So, wait. Let me be sure I understand this. Carlson is defiantly unapologetic today about calling Martha Stewart’s daughter “cunty” but he did not take it placidly when a different guy called his daughter a cunt. How does that work, exactly? Apart from the obvious, that Carlson is a bad human being who dislikes bad treatment aimed at him but loves it aimed at others. How does it work when he has to explain it to the world at large?

Oh I bet I know. It’s that his daughter isn’t a cunt while Martha Stewart’s daughter is a cunt. Just the facts ma’am.

By the way, the guy in the story says he never called Carlson’s daughter names. I wonder which of the two to believe.

Just kidding; no I don’t.

Originally a comment by latsot on Overt rather than clandestine.

Breaking things can be useful, if by breaking them you are able to reassemble them in a new way that improves them

In theory, yes. In practice it hardly ever happens, with even the best will in the world.

It certainly doesn’t happen much in the software business even though we have whole swathes of theory about how to do it in software design and development practice, much of it very good.

It works like this:

1. The boss says “build me a system, don’t worry about the budget, we can sort that out later, just bring me a design”.

2. The boss sees the design, her eyes pop out on stalks at how expensive it looks and she crosses out a bunch of modules saying “combine those into one, get rid of that, make this happen by magic instead of code” etc.

3. We redo the (worse) design according to the same best practice and start building it. Then the budget changes, half the devs get moved to other projects and we are forced to cobble some hideous thing together in the same time with less money. The boss, of course, has already sold the spec to the stakeholders so if we can’t actually achieve it given the new circumstances, it’s our jobs on the line.

4. The boss realises there’s quite a lot of time and budget set aside for testing and just crosses it out saying we’ll have to test each module as we produce it and hope it all works when we put it together at the end, which it never, ever does.

So we build a shitty bit of software that doesn’t work properly or – usually – even do what anyone wanted in the first place. It is also completely unmaintainable; it is so poorly built by necessity that nobody really knows how it works and making even the smallest change is likely to break the whole thing and we probably won’t even notice until months or years down the line.

So a year later the boss finally realises she’s spending more on maintenance than she would if we just rebuilt the whole thing from scratch along the lines of our original design. She promises us untold budget to rebuild and… well, you can see where this is going, can’t you? We always end up trying to break the shitty system and put it back together in a better way, even though this is certain to be way more expensive and take much more time than rebuilding it from scratch.

This is what happens (always) in the relatively simple and well-understood world of software, which usually has at least some design principles lurking around somewhere. It is only through the dedication of developers (to solve ridiculous problems, not dedication to the firm) that any software ever works at all.

I can’t imagine how breaking things for the better can work in such things as political or legal systems, which have grown organically according to hugely divergent and regularly changing requirements, motivations and principles, sometimes across vast spans of time. Humans really don’t know how to do that. Or rather, we do, but the overheads are always unacceptably expensive so we always end up fudging it and making the outcome objectively worse and more difficult to tinker with in the future.

To be clear, I am in full agreement with your point. I’m almost always on the side of breaking things. Sometimes for the sake of it, usually with the aim of making it better. But when something isn’t built well in the first place, options are limited. The type of breaking Trump is doing is such that it will be virtually impossible to put the old system back together again, let alone build a better one, even if anyone had an idea about what a better system would be.

If I sound pessimistic it might be because Brexit is supposed to be happening in a little over a fortnight and we don’t seem to have decided anything yet. Now that is an example of breaking something to make it ‘better’ without understanding what ‘better’ means, what ‘breaking’ even means or how to go from one to the other.

Pliny’s T shirt for International Women’s Day:

If you’re looking for an adventure, I wouldn’t advise looking for it in Saudi Arabia, at least not if you’re a woman. (Or a dissident man.)

At first, Saudi Arabia was an adventure for Bethany Vierra.

An American from Washington State, she taught at a women’s university, started a company, married a Saudi businessman and gave birth to a curly-haired daughter, Zaina.

And couldn’t go anywhere without his permission, right? And had to wear an abaya any time she left home, right? Not all that adventurey.

But since the marriage went sour and she sought a divorce, she has been trapped. Because of the kingdom’s so-called guardianship laws, which give men great power over women, she is unable to use her bank account, leave the country, travel with her daughter or seek legal help, according to her cousin, Nicole Carroll.

One wonders if she did any Googling before she went to Saudi Arabia.

Ms. Vierra, 31, is now divorced, but her ex-husband let her residency expire, meaning she has lost access to her bank account and cannot get authorization to leave the country, Ms. Carroll said. Their 4-year-old daughter cannot travel without her father’s permission, meaning that even if Ms. Vierra finds a way to leave the kingdom, her child may have to stay behind.

Crappiest adventure ever.

A State Department official declined to comment on Ms. Vierra’s case, citing privacy rules. But the consular information page for Saudi Arabia on the State Department’s website notes that even non-Saudi women need a male guardian’s permission to leave the country and that the United States government “cannot obtain exit visas for the departure of minor children without their father/guardian’s permission.”

It also says that when foreigners divorce Saudis, “Saudi courts rarely grant permission for the foreign parent to leave the country with the children born during the marriage, even if he or she has been granted physical custody.”

So that’s her life wrecked.

Let’s hear some more about how women have cis privilege.