Jonathan Chait looks at the question of why our minds boggle so stubbornly when we’re presented with the truth about Trump’s captivity to Russia.

The cause of this incredulity, I have come to suspect, lies in the vast distance the mind must travel between the normal patterns of American politics and the fantastical crimes being alleged. The Russia scandal seems to hint at a reality of fiction or paranoia, a baroque conspiracy in which the leader of the free world has been compromised by a mafiocracy with an economy smaller than South Korea’s.

The flaw lies in the assumption about what constitutes “normal.” In this case, the baseline should not be previous American elections, but other foreign elections in which Russia has intervened.

It’s that so-often useful concept/reply “It depends what you’re comparing it to.”

I suspect that we Americans, even the relatively unillusioned of us, have a hard time comparing even the shitshow of 2016 with “other foreign elections in which Russia has intervened.” We unconsciously think – in spite of everything – we’re better than that. Why? Other than the automatic narcissism of me mine ours? I don’t know. Generations of post-WW2 dominance, maybe, or unusual levels of credulity maybe, or both maybe; I don’t know. Anyway, what’s the pattern?

Moscow has cultivated right-wing parties overseas through a combination of covert payments to their leaders (often disguised as legitimate business transactions), illegal campaign donations, and propaganda support through traditional and social media. Russian election corruption scandals pop up in Europe all the time. Russia secretly and illegally funded Ukraine’s “Party of Regions”; France’s National Front party got a secret 2014 election loan from a Russian bank; the Brexit vote benefited from a huge donation from a British businessman who has secretly met with Russian officials dangling lucrative business deals. Just last month, Italian journalists discovered the leader of a right-wing party had negotiated a lucrative secret transaction with a Russian firm.

The fact that the same person who managed the campaign for the pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine next turned up (after a brief disappearance) to run the campaign of the pro-Russian candidate in the United States is merely one of an overwhelmingly long list of clues placing Trump in the pattern.

We’re not special.

Jeezus, Beeb, work on your headlines.

Oh well in that case maybe we care.

They must have thought again (or someone yelled at them), because if you click on the headline you get the story with a less narcissistic version…but the first one still appears in Top Stories.

Go back to headline school.

Speaking of women…

Congressional Democrats introduced legislation on Thursday that would classify reproductive rights as human rights and require the U.S. State Department to include access to reproductive health care in its annual human rights report, a practice that ended when President Trump took office.

The “Reproductive Rights Are Human Rights Act” was introduced by Democratic caucus vice chair Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA) and announced at a press conference Thursday along with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and U.S. Senate co-sponsors Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). The bill is similar to a bill by the same name introduced by Clark last year in response to the State Department’s sudden decision to drop the sections on reproductive rights from the 2017 human rights report it released last spring.

Now why would they do that? To please Trump’s “base,” no doubt.

Amanda Klasing, acting co-director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch, said the State Department’s annual human rights report has critical government uses. “A lot of people think that it just sits on the website and it’s something that foreign service officers have to do once a year, but actually it’s a really important tool for Congress because it helps in appropriations matters about foreign assistance,” she said in an interview with Rewire.News. “It’s important for immigration judges and for immigration lawyers trying to determine whether asylum claims are founded.”

The report’s use by immigration judges is critical for Stephanie Schmid, U.S. foreign policy council at the Center for Reproductive Rights, who used an example from Central America to demonstrate the harm of excluding reproductive rights from the report. “Any woman that would be coming to the U.S. border right now … fleeing some condition like in El Salvador where you can be jailed for having a miscarriage, and trying to make a refugee or asylum claim at the border, wouldn’t be safe,” she told Rewire.News. “Potentially an immigration judge [could say] ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, the 2017 human rights reports don’t say anything about women being jailed in El Salvador for miscarriages.’ They don’t say anything about the high rate of sexual and gender based violence by gangs and in other situations. So what we do is invalidate and erase the experience and stories of women all over the world.”

The bill won’t pass the Senate, and if it did Trump would veto it, but it’s important to get it out there all the same.

I saw this

https://twitter.com/glosswitch/status/1104344845257199616

so I looked at the source, authors Lyric Thompson and Rachel Clement. There are some odd things.

The degree to which Sweden’s practice lives up to its policy has been critiqued. On rights, it has been criticized for a binary focus on women rather than gender. The policy largely ignores the rights and needs of LGBTQ individuals, with the exception of LGBTQ sexual reproductive health and rights being noted in the health component of the agenda. Positioning LGBTQ people as a key population in health interventions, rather than as part of their broad rights-based agenda is overly limiting and a missed opportunity for a feminist approach.

That looks like the all too familiar move from “intersectional” to “stop talking about women.” It’s not at all clear why a feminist policy should be expected to “center” or otherwise not-ignore “the rights and needs of LGBTQ individuals.” Lesbians are of course women so already not ignored, but why does feminism have to include G? Why can’t feminism be feminism? They don’t really explain.

As an intersectional movement, certainly one of the most readily apparent [areas where improvement is needed] is the tendency of governments to use the word feminist when they mean “women and girls.” This reinforces the binary and undermines work to overcome white, ethnocentric and western-centric, cis feminism’s historical (and current) sins.

Uh. What? Feminism does mean “women and girls” – that’s the whole point. How does it “reinforce the binary” more than the absence of feminism does? Remember the absence of feminism? Look at some old sitcoms if you need help. That was some reinforced binary right there. As for “cis” feminism and its “sins”…I’ll leave my choice of swears to your imagination.

That’s a starting point for debate, but hardly responsive to our interests in anchoring our definition in a focus not just on women, but on power relations and gender equality more broadly, and utilizing an explicitly rightsbased and intersectional understanding of feminism.

They’re trying to come up with a definition of feminist foreign policy by anchoring it “in a focus not just on women” – in other words feminism can’t be “just” about women any more, it has to be more expansive than that. Women are the giving, sharing, self-abnegating sex, therefore they don’t get to have even feminism to themselves.

Finally, we acknowledge that Sweden’s “rights, resources and representation” framework is, both as a first and as the most ambitious example to date, often regarded as definitional. We consider the framework useful, although not necessarily radical—reducing a policy to these three, vague components says nothing that is explicitly feminist and does not assert the commitment to intersectionality that we seek. It is, nonetheless, important to include, and a useful framework to build upon. As such, we offer the following draft definition for discussion: “Feminist Foreign Policy is the policy of a state that defines its interactions with other states and movements in a manner that prioritizes gender equality and enshrines the human rights of women and other traditionally marginalized groups, allocates significant resources to achieve that vision, and seeks through its implementation to disrupt patriarchal and male-dominated power structures across all of its levers of influence (aid, trade, defense and diplomacy), informed by the voices of feminist activists, groups and movements.”

Emphases theirs.

So, Feminist Foreign Policy is the policy of a state…that prioritizes gender equality and enshrines the human rights of women and other traditionally marginalized groups.

Emphasis mine.

The human rights of women and everyone else too, except men who can tick every privilege box there is along with any future privilege boxes. Feminism is, thus, not feminism any more, because in its woken splendor it has moved beyond anything so greedy and selfish as a focus on women’s rights. Good bye feminism! It was nice knowing you.

This means foreign policy that is not only by women or for women, but goes further, taking a nonbinary, gendered lens that recognizes and seeks to correct for historical, patriarchal, and often racist, and/or neocolonialist imbalances of power as they play out on the world stage. Further, our vision of feminist foreign policy is not limited to a single lever of international relations—”feminist diplomacy” or “feminist international assistance” or the like, nor, certainly, is any single assistance program or initiative a feminist foreign policy. Rather, for us feminist foreign policy is a complete, consistent and coherent approach to a body of work encompassing all auspices of foreign policy and international relations. If done right, the approach will include aid, trade and defense, in addition to diplomacy, using all the tools in the foreign policy tool box to advance a more equitable world. And most importantly, it will be informed by and amplifying the voices of the rights-holders it seeks to celebrate and support. This is good news for people of all genders: feminism is an agenda everyone can promote, an agenda that seeks equity for all, not the dominance of one over another.

They might as well be Fox News or the prime minister of Australia.

And there’s the “never let this woman speak anywhere ever again because we say so” thing.

Transgender advocacy groups and supporters have demanded that Leeds Lit Festival ban Dame Jenni Murray from speaking amid accusations of transphobia.

An open letter, signed by TransLeeds, Non-binary Leeds, Yorkshire Mesmac and 13 other groups, says Dame Jenni is ‘an active transphobe’ and that ‘there is no debate as to whether trans women are women’.

Oh but there is debate, it’s just that the narcissistic wing of trans activism wants to wipe it off the map. Saying “there is no debate” is an attempt to enforce the absence of debate by demanding that all dissenters be forcibly prevented from dissenting where anyone can hear them.

Dame Jenni, who was born in Barnsley, is due to appear at The Leeds Library on Saturday to talk about her book A History of the World in 21 Women.

Leeds Lit Festival and The Leeds Library have said they are standing by their position.

See here is one compelling reason to think, and to continue to say, that trans women are not literally women: it’s because of this lust to silence a well-known woman talking about women. There are anti-feminist women, of course, but even they mostly don’t try to prevent women from talking at literary festivals in libraries about their books about women. That bit of specialness is pretty much confined to trans “women”…which makes it ever more difficult to ignore their raging hostility to women.

The open letter to The Leeds Library and Leeds Lit Festival reads: “Jenni Murray is clearly hostile towards the trans community, but especially towards transgender women.

“This isn’t feminism. It is misogyny. This is not free speech or radical discussion. Far from it.

“It is hate speech against a vulnerable minority that in the last year alone has been the subject of a hateful campaign by the British media, both nationally and locally here in Leeds.”

No. Saying that men who “identify as” women are not [literally/in every sense] women is not misogyny. You can call it anti-trans if you want to, but it’s nothing to do with misogyny. Saying a dog is not a cat is not canephobia. It’s not misogyny at all, and calling it that is appropriation of a word that names what keeps women down.

It’s also not hate speech, and the flag-waving about “a vulnerable minority” is, again, appropriation of women’s oppression to dress up narcissistic entitlement as “political.”

The event has happened (or not) by now, but so far I can’t find anything about how it went. I hope it went well, with no raging misogynists in lipstick standing in the way.

Some photos from yesterday’s International Women’s Day rally in Melbourne:

Poster held by a guy with shaved head and beard; very appropriate at a feminist event. About like white people at a racial justice event holding posters saying SHUT UP AND PICK SOME COTTON.

Someone in front of Real Jobs guy has a poster saying, I surmise, “SOME WOMEN HAVE PENISES GET OVER IT”.

News from Pakistan:

Afzal Kohistani had warned for years his life was in danger after he brought public attention to the apparent killing of women seen clapping and singing in a video of men dancing.

…

Mr Kohistani was shot dead on Wednesday in the city of Abbottabad, in north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. He first emerged into the public eye in 2012 by calling for justice in a case involving his family in remote Kohistan district.

Two of his younger brothers were seen dancing in a wedding video that also showed four women singing and clapping. The four women, along with a fifth, were later killed for “breaching the honour” of their family, it is alleged.

Such “honour killings” occur regularly in Pakistan, especially in rural areas, and Mr Kohistani’s decision to expose the alleged murders sparked a blood feud, with three of his other brothers later killed.

Nothing like a pile of corpses to establish one’s “honour.”

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka “Tommy Robinson” takes his right-wing provocations to a new level by harassing journalist Mike Stuchbery in the middle of the night:

For the last few months, I have written about the methods used by “Tommy Robinson” to intimidate and harass those who dare to criticise him. I do this because he’s the most visible figure in a surging UK far right, feted by politicians and media figures alike.

Tonight he paid me a visit. Twice.

Stuchbery had tweeted that Yaxley-Lennon was about to be served papers for defamation.

The first we knew of it was a loud, frantic rapping on my door at around quarter to 11. The shouted voice that accompanied it was unmistakable.

“MIIIIIKE! I JUST WANT TO CHAT!”

There is no “just wanting to chat” when you’re banging on a stranger’s door late at night.

Notifications started pouring in, because Yaxley-Lennon was livestreaming his ambush on Facebook.

The banging went on and on as Stuchbery and his wife waited for the cops. They arrived and got Yaxley-Lennon to leave.

Until it started again at 5am. The thumping began anew, manic this time, loud and booming. The house rattled.

This time the defamatory statements began almost straight away – he seemed almost incoherent now, perhaps even intoxicated. His voice was breaking. He urged others to seek me out, to come find me, before, in an utterly surreal fashion, he announced he was off to the gym, and would be back afterwards.

He just wanted to chat.

A journalist intimidated at home at 5am, live streamed. Women colleagues facing rape and death threats installing panic buttons. The torrent of online abuse undermines democracy and free speech. We must act to stop the online world turning into a cesspit of hate. pic.twitter.com/6G4fSjEue7

— Tom Watson (@tom_watson) March 7, 2019

Arkansas State Senator Stephanie Flowers spoke up.

Flowers, A democrat from Pine Bluff and the lone black face on the state’s eight-member committee, wanted more time to debate the merits of [the] “stand your ground law,” which argues that civilians have the rights to use their firearms when they feel threatened, because it disproportionately targets people of color.

“It doesn’t take much to look on the local news every night and see how many black kids, black boys, black men are being killed with these ‘stand your ground’ defenses that these people raise, then they get off,” she said. “So I take issue with that. I’m the only person here of color, OK? I am a mother, too. And I have a son. And I care as much for my son as y’all care for y’alls. But, my son doesn’t walk the same path as yours do, so this debate deserves more time.”

She added: “For a long time since I’ve been back here in Arkansas, I have feared for my son’s life.”

…

She also pointed to gun rights enthusiasts who openly carry guns in front of the Arkansas courthouse and how uncomfortable that makes her feel because she doesn’t know if any of these people are crazy. She called them bullies.

“In front of my doggone office,” she said; in front of the courthouse and in front of her office. Random people walking up and down with guns; no thank you very much. It’s scary enough seeing them on cops.

The bill failed.

A particularly absurd Trump lie:

President Trump on Friday seized on a portion of a federal judge’s remarks during the sentencing of his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in a financial crimes case to again criticize the Russia investigation and falsely declare a finding of “no collusion.”

Both the Judge and the lawyer in the Paul Manafort case stated loudly and for the world to hear that there was NO COLLUSION with Russia. But the Witch Hunt Hoax continues as you now add these statements to House & Senate Intelligence & Senator Burr. So bad for our Country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 8, 2019

Except the judge didn’t.

What Judge Ellis actually said Thursday was that Mr. Manafort was “not before this court for anything having to do with collusion with the Russian government to influence this election.”

Which is not the same thing at all. That’s like saying “the judge said there’s no such thing as murder” when the judge actually said that “Mr. Trump is not before this court for anything having to do with murder.” Saying a particular person is not before a particular court for anything to do with a particular crime is not the same thing as saying there is none of that particular crime, or even that Mr. Trump is not suspected of that particular crime. Particular trial is particular.

There was “no collusion” because Mr. Manafort was not charged with or convicted of any crimes of collusion, a word that has no legal definition but has become a term of art for the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

But has also become Trump’s all-purpose word for everything he absolutely never did and is totally innocent of – it’s meaningless trump-jargon.

Mr. Manafort’s attorneys used the same false talking point as the president on Thursday, saying in a brief statement after the hearing, “There is absolutely no evidence that Paul Manafort was involved in any collusion with any government official or Russia.”

False talking point=meaningless trump-jargon.

He tried and tried and tried to talk her into continuing the pregnancy, apparently unperturbed by the fact that he was trying to persuade her to endure ever-increasing discomfort and disability for months and then anguish for several hours to have a baby she didn’t want to have.

In an unprecedented move, an Alabama judge is allowing a man to sue a clinic because his ex-girlfriend terminated her pregnancy without his consent. The incident took place in February 2017, when he was 19 and she was 16, The Independent reports. (The age of consent in Alabama is 16.) At the time she terminated the pregnancy, she was six weeks along, making the embryo about the size of a sweet pea. Now, for the first time in United States history, a probate court has recognized an aborted fetus as a person with rights.

In court documents filed on March 6 by Ryan Magers, he claims that he begged his ex-girlfriend to carry the pregnancy to term and give birth. She refused and opted to terminate the pregnancy by taking the so-called “abortion pill,” which is actually two pills, containing mifepristone and misoprostol. The wrongful death lawsuit names both the Alabama Women’s Center and the pharmaceutical company that made the medication.

Because everybody on the planet has the right to veto a woman’s decision to stop being pregnant, apparently.

“I’m here for the men who actually want to have their baby,” Mager explained to ABC 31. “I just tried to plead with her and plead with her and just talk to her about it and see what I could do, but in the end, there was nothing I could do to change her mind.”

So he’s getting his revenge by attempting to create a new right for men to veto women’s abortions.

The case has alarmed reproductive rights groups, who are concerned the “personhood” movement might spread. On Twitter, Ilyse Hogue, the president of Naral Pro-Choice America, called the case “very scary” because it “asserts woman’s rights third in line,” behind the man who impregnates her and the dead fetus. Salon writer Amanda Marcotte agreed, saying any man who “vetoes” an abortion is “not fit to be a father or a partner. Any such man is by definition, an abuser.”

Or we could just give up and agree that women aren’t really people at all but merely devices for the creation of people (males) and more devices for the creation of people (males).

H/t Holms

Aw, sweet. Scott Morrison tells women to be careful not to succeed too much:

Scott Morrison has spoken at an International Women’s Day breakfast at the Chamber of Minerals and Energy in Western Australia.

In the speech he does battle with a straw-person by suggesting that a certain strain of feminism is about tearing men down:

“One of the other female members of my cabinet, Kelly O’Dwyer, our minister for women, said at the Press Club last year gender equality isn’t about pitting girls against boys.

“See, we’re not about setting Australians against each other, trying to push some down to lift others up. That’s not in our values. That is an absolutely Liberal value, that you don’t push some people down to lift some people up. And that is true about gender equality too.

“We want to see women rise. But we don’t want to see women rise only on the basis of others doing worse. We want everybody to do better, and we want to see the rise of women in this country be accelerated to ensure that their overall place is maintained.”

And yet, Scott Morrison is Prime Minister. How does he know he didn’t get there at someone else’s expense? In fact he must have, right, if there were other candidates? Is it only women who are not allowed to do anything if everyone else doesn’t get to do it too? Is it only women who get told not to be ambitious?

Ahhh that’s a good look – State Department tells journalist she will get a Women of Courage Award then says “oh wait no you won’t” when it discovers she’s critical of The Leader. Foreign Policy reports:

Jessikka Aro, a Finnish investigative journalist, has faced down death threats and harassment over her work exposing Russia’s propaganda machine long before the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. In January, the U.S. State Department took notice, telling Aro she would be honored with the prestigious International Women of Courage Award, to be presented in Washington by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Weeks later, the State Department rescinded the award offer. A State Department spokesperson said it was due to a “regrettable error,” but Aro and U.S. officials familiar with the internal deliberations tell a different story. They say the department revoked her award after U.S. officials went through Aro’s social media posts and found she had also frequently criticized President Donald Trump.

Well you see it’s all about how you understand “courage.” Courage is exposing other people’s propaganda machine, not Trump’s.

There is no indication that the decision to revoke the award came from the secretary of state or the White House. Officials who spoke to FP have suggested the decision came from lower-level State Department officials wary of the optics of Pompeo granting an award to an outspoken critic of the Trump administration. The department spokesperson did not respond to questions on who made the decision or why.

The “optics”?

What about the “optics” of Pompeo granting an award to an outspoken critic of the Trump administration and thus demonstrating the administration’s ability to rise above personal spite? What about the “optics” of spitefully snatching the award away in a huff?

They don’t think carefully, these people.

“[When] I was informed about the withdrawal out of the blue, I felt appalled and shocked,” Aro told FP. “The reality in which political decisions or presidential pettiness directs top U.S. diplomats’ choices over whose human rights work is mentioned in the public sphere and whose is not is a really scary reality.”

Quite so. The “optics” of that are nothing to be proud of.

“I use Twitter to exchange ideas and share information freely,” Aro said. “I find the idea of U.S. government officials stalking my Twitter and politicizing my perfectly normal expressions of opinion deeply disturbing.”

Because it is.

After first being notified she would get the award, Aro filled out forms and questionnaires at the request of officials and cancelled paid speaking engagements to travel to Washington to attend the March 7 ceremony in Washington. The State Department also sent her an official invitation to accept the award and planned an itinerary for a corresponding tour of the United States, complete with flights and high-profile visits to newspapers and universities across the country.

They sent her an official invitation, and then snatched it back. Not cool.