They’ve whatnow?

Tell @screenscots what you think of their female erasure. Womxn is an insult. We should be able to define ourselves on our own terms. #WarOnWomen https://t.co/Cd8JTbgMVF

— Joan McAlpine (@JoanMcAlpine) March 21, 2019

A platform for #films by womxn – meaning what? A platform for films by women and trans women? Then say that – or better, don’t do that. Don’t make women share everything with trans women. Have a platform for films by women and one for films by trans women or trans people. Above all, stop erasing women by using that stupid stupid stupid not-word.

Fool responds:

What in the name of god are you doing? Government is for all citizens. Show some responsibility. How dare you try to whip up a mob against trans-inclusive organisations. Shame on you @joanmcalpine. https://t.co/xdAkEKfyA6

— CSbungo (@CSbungo) March 21, 2019

Government is for all citizens; well no shit, why is that a reason to stop naming women?

I don’t know…I see why they had this impulse, but I’m not sure it was a good idea. A university in Calgary canceled a talk by an ex-Muslim, though it said it would welcome him at a later time.

Armin Navabi, who lives in British Columbia, was being brought in by the Atheist Society of Calgary to share his journey and discuss the reasons he doesn’t believe the Islamic faith can be reformed.

But now he says he’s disappointed he won’t get a chance to engage in some passionate discussions with staff and students, including those who still practice Islam, because of MRU’s last-minute decision.

But it’s not even a week yet. Emotions are raw. I get that. I don’t think I would have felt very comfortable giving an atheist talk in Charleston a week after that massacre. But I’m not sure cancellation is the right move.

The Atheist Society of Calgary says it was hoping to provide a safe space for open communication and a chance for people to learn more about atheists, from Navabi’s perspective.

The group says it was also an opportunity to let some people know they are not alone.

“There are people that really resent the ex-Muslims, the ones who have been Muslim and left, they are in a really tough position, and we just wanted to give them, and students that might be in the same position, in the closet, an opportunity to communicate and to explain to people where they are coming from and why,” said Lois Edwards, who is a board member of the Atheists Society of Calgary, and an atheist contact with the Interfaith chaplaincy at MRU.

In other words atheists and exes can have raw emotions too.

Navabi says he always struggled with his Islamic faith growing up, even attempting suicide at age 12, as a way to try to escape his fears.

Eventually he left Islam, became an atheist, and began sharing his journey with others through his podcast, a book, and talks across the globe.

He says his goal is not to convert people, but to show them that people can disagree and still get along.

“If I don’t really don’t like Islam that means I hate Muslims, that’s what people think. But we show them, no we are very much against Islam but we get along with Muslims the same way they very much dislike atheism but they can get along with us. And by showing them that they say, like, ‘Hey look, disagreements are just that[:] disagreements,'” said Navabi.

…

A statement to CBC News reads: “Universities are diverse and inclusive places where people should always feel respected and where there is free exchange of ideas. The tragic event that occurred in Christchurch less than a week ago has had a large impact on many members in our community. We made this decision in light of that impact and we would absolutely have the speaker come to our campus at another time.”

Navabi is still scheduled to speak at C-Space King Edward, an arts centre at 1721 29th Ave. S.W., at 7:30 p.m. Thursday night.

If people could stop massacring others that would be great.

Trump says the same damn thing three times in the first 23 seconds of this clip: he uses Twitter to get the word out because the news media are fake. Three times.

I didn’t listen to the rest of the seconds, which are Fox News.

pic.twitter.com/UhTjBuWY2h

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019

Now here’s a surprise: for once it’s the violence-threatener who has backed out.

The headline act of a transgender event in Dundee has pulled out after calling on people to “throat-punch” radical feminists.

Peyton Rose, a transgender singer-songwriter from Edinburgh who was to top the bill at the Trans Pride Scotland event in Dundee next week, posted the tweet last Friday.

Above an image of a leaflet distributed last summer by For Women Scotland, a women’s rights group, she wrote: “If you catch one of these assholes in the act, please undo their work or throat-punch them.”

She deactivated her Twitter account afterwards and has since withdrawn from performing at the event.

A spokeswoman at For Women Scotland said that “gender-critical feminists”, who campaign against people being able to self-report their gender and highlight conflicts between the rights of biological and transgender women, often receive such threats.

Including on the walls of an exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library.

Ms Rose described the tweet as a “tongue-in-cheek comment” written in anger and retracted the use of “terf”, although she declined to say whether she still considered For Women Scotland transphobic. “I have decided not to do Trans Pride and will be taking a step back for the foreseeable future to work on my mental health,” she said.

Saying it was tongue-in-cheek and saying it was written in anger is contradictory. It can be one or the other but not both. If it’s in anger it’s not really jokey.

A Police Scotland spokeswoman said: “On March 19 police in Edinburgh received a report of threats being made via social media and email, and inquiries are ongoing.”

Trans Pride Scotland did not respond to a request for comment.

You astonish me.

If the Smithsonian declines to display your enormous lurid ugly painting, do you have a legal case against it for declining? My guess would be no, because there is no obligation in law to display all paintings that are offered. Just think what art museums and galleries would be like if there were.

An artist called Julian Raven thinks otherwise.

A Trump portraitist whose lawsuit against the Smithsonian Institution and National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet was thrown out in December is appealing the district court’s decision, arguing that his work deserves to be shown in the hallowed institution.

Yeah see I don’t think that’s something you can argue in a legal sense. I don’t think that’s a legal category.

“It’s remarkable. It is dramatic. And I believe it has the fingerprints of divine providence upon it,” said artist Julian Raven in a homemade video explaining why he was inspired to create a 300-pound, 16-foot-long painting of president Donald Trump.

Well there you go – what if the Smithsonian doesn’t have 16 feet of wall space available? What if the floors aren’t up to a new 300 pounds? Fingerprints of divine providence notwithstanding?

After 600 hours of labor, Raven’s opus, Unafraid and Unashamed, was complete, and it has been making the rounds at Republican rallies for the past few years. Most recently, it appeared at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) where it lit up the Twittersphere, served as the literal backdrop for the right-wing meetup.

Raven believes that his work deserves national recognition, and should hang alongside paintings of other presidents in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The artist has been mired in a legal battle with the Smithsonian since 2017, claiming that the government institution is violating his First Amendment rights.

No. I’m not a lawyer, obviously, but I know the First Amendment ≠ national museums are required to display everything that is offered to them. Everybody knows that.

According to court documents, Raven first applied to have his portrait displayed as part of Trump’s inauguration in 2017. When he was rebuffed by the Rockwell Museum (an affiliate of the Smithsonian), he contacted the National Portrait Gallery’s director, Kim Sajet.

In the filings, Raven describes a hostile conversation that ended with rejection on the grounds that his magnum opus painting was too big, too pro-Trump, and not a very good painting.

That’s putting it very politely. It’s a hideous painting.

See for yourself.

Pro-Trump artist Julian Raven is waging legal war against the @smithsonian for rejecting his magnum opus: https://t.co/JXAQQrsGkc pic.twitter.com/JhYp7mudpC

— Artnet (@artnet) March 14, 2019

Julie Bindel on why abused women need women-only shelters:

My first ever volunteer post was back in 1980, at a Women’s Aid refuge for victims of domestic violence. I will never forget the sight of those women coming in through the doors, crying with desperate relief at having escaped abusive husbands; finding comfort in the company of other women who had experienced the same.

Those services saved many lives, Julie says, but now, between the Right defunding them and the Left forcing them to serve trans women, they’re in peril.

This is not actually [a] new problem. It may be a new front in the transgender turf wars in the UK. But Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR) a women’s support and campaigning NGO in Canada, has been victimised by transgender activists since the mid 1990s. Now after their long struggle, this small, grassroots, volunteer-led organisation is under threat of losing its funding.

I first heard of VRR in December 2003 when I saw a news report about a long-running legal battle that the organisation had with a transgender person, Kimberly Nixon.

In 1995 Nixon, a former airline pilot who had lived as a man until the age of 33, applied to VRR to train as a counsellor for women who had experienced sexual violence. Nixon was rejected because, since she had not had the experience of growing up as a girl, she would not understand the impact of male violence and misogyny on the lives of the women who sought support from VRR.

So she filed a formal Human Rights Complaint supported by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. VRR tried to appease her, to no avail.

Nixon rejected the offers, and pursued the group through various stressful and expensive legal proceedings until it was finally resolved in 2007. In 2009, the Supreme Court awarded VRR costs, but Nixon has not, to this day, paid a cent.

I didn’t know that.

What’s the difference between that and common or garden misogyny? I can’t see any, myself.

Some are more equal than others:

Green and other activists for transgender rights view it as deeply offensive to deliberately use the wrong pronoun for a trans person. Doing so could be an offence under the Malicious Communications Act, which makes it a crime to send messages that are indecent or grossly offensive, threatening, or contain information which is false or believed to be false, if the purpose for sending it is to cause distress or anxiety.

People can view anything as anything; that doesn’t make it true. People can “view” something as deeply offensive when it isn’t, or when reasonable people would agree it isn’t, or when reasonable people would disagree over whether it is or isn’t, and so on. “Deeply offensive” is an opinion word, and also an emotion pump. We’re supposed to feel an extra flush of anger because of the “deeply” – the offensiveness must be at the level of blasphemy or similar.

The reality is that many activists for transgender rights have made a lot of things “deeply offensive” by shouting about them for a long time without stopping. Sometimes when people do that it’s a good thing: slavery is “deeply offensive”; genocide is “deeply offensive”; white supremacy is “deeply offensive”; rape and sexual abuse are “deeply offensive.” But other times when people create a new category of “deeply offensive” it’s not a good thing. Whether and when and in what circumstances and for what reason someone “uses the wrong pronoun for a trans person” can vary, plus of course the claim that the pronoun is “wrong” is already debatable.

With all that, and more that one could say, it’s a little dubious to accept the claim that it in fact is “deeply offensive” to use a disfavored pronoun in a world where calling women cunts is laughed off.

Meanwhile in another part of the forest…

The Open University was forced to cancel a conference on prison reform following threats from the transgender lobby, it has emerged.

Is there really such a thing as the transgender lobby? Not exactly, but there is a mandatory orthodoxy and a large group of people eager to enforce it, so maybe that’s an okay label for it.

The CCJS, an educational charity, has been accused of “transphobia” for its stance that transgender female prisoners should be incarcerated separately from female prisoners.

“The Open University faced quite significant pressure from transgender activists. They received a number of emails where some of the language was extraordinarily overheated,” a source told The Telegraph.

It’s odd that that’s what trans activists want to be known for – overheated language filled with threats and absurd claims. Maybe it’s inevitable when the core mandatory belief is so very…what to call it…counter-reality.

Last month, the CCJS released a statement on transgender prisoners which said that prison service has “a duty to provide fair, decent and respectful provision for trans prisoners”.

It went on: “Given the current state of the prison system, in the case of trans women prisoners, we consider that this can best be achieved through the provision of accommodation that is separate from female prisoners.”

The CCJS statement was released following the case of transgender prisoner Karen White, a  convicted rapist and paedophile who was born a man but used a transgender persona to attack female prisoners in a women’s prison.The prison service has since apologised over failings in the case.

Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous, part 2:

There did not appear to be many such calls to pull the interview, though. This is not to suggest that a certain number of such calls, itself, is sufficient reason to pull an interview, but it does speak, perhaps, to concerns editor and owner Andrew Gallix might have about the survival of his publication.

Besides the feedback on social media, four of the magazine’s editorial board members resigned in protest of the publication of the interview. [Update: they are Eley Williams, David Winters, Hestia Peppe, and Joanna Walsh; for those curious, none of the four is an academic philosopher.]

So four members of the editorial board resigned in protest of the not-silencing of Holly Lawford-Smith.

It would be a significant loss to the philosophical community if this led to the end of Marshall’s interview series, which has included philosophically substantive conversations with an incredibly wide range of philosophers. Marshall has been with 3:AM for 19 of its 20 years in existence. In an email, he writes that he has had “absolute freedom” to conduct and edit his interviews as he sees fit and won’t continue “if I can’t guarantee that when I publish it it will remain published no matter what the response.”

It’s interesting that he had that freedom for 19 years and lost it over this.

Someone (I’m sorry I’ve forgotten who, or where)* recently borrowed Cheshire Calhoun‘s idea of an “abnormal moral context” to characterize the current public understanding of various matters related to transgender persons. In her essay, “Moral Failure,” Calhoun describes an abnormal moral context as one in which “some segment of a society produces advances in moral knowledge that outrun the social mechanisms for disseminating and normalizing that knowledge in the society as a whole.” In these circumstances, there is a gap between “what from a (presumably) advantaged epistemic position is viewed as the right thing to do” and what everyone else thinks. “The gap, of course, will be obvious only to those who take themselves to be reasoning from a more advanced, socially critical point of view.” Those who act on this “more advanced” view Calhoun calls “moral resisters.”

Of course. We know that. It’s Owen Jones constantly saying we’re “on the wrong side of history.” There’s a pattern, which we’ve noticed many times: people tend to be morally blind to a lot of stuff they should see. John Stuart Mill was considered loony for writing The Subjection of Women. Abolitionists were considered dangerously loony by almost everyone. Post-abolition racism and legalized slavery (vagrancy laws and the like) were taken for granted. Lesbians and gays were considered freaks. But, you know…both can be true. We can be morally blind until a new generation of radicals takes our blinders off, and some new generations of radicals can be just wrong (anti-vaxxers, recovered memory apostles, Goop fans). Trans ideology could be the latest form of awakening, or it could be the latest blind alley of bullshit and magical thinking.

JW isn’t allowing comments on that post.

Justin Weinberg of Daily Nous was on it promptly:

Richard Marshall, who has conducted astonishingly rich interviews with hundreds of philosophers for 3:AM Magazine, has resigned from the publication over its editor’s decision to remove one of his interviews from public view.

He quotes Leiter then shares some tweets by the deeply unpleasant Christa Peterson (which poisons the well a good deal, in my view). Then:

There were also a handful of calls for the interview to be deleted, ranging from the thread that begins with

https://twitter.com/ofthesparrows/status/1107968733329395714

and ends expressing the hope that 3:AM “reconsiders this move”, to briefer responses such as

https://twitter.com/MadeOfBarges/status/1107984032883712000

I was naturally curious about this Nora made of barges so I looked and behold, Nora has 87 followers. Nora is trans. Nora is angry.

https://twitter.com/MadeOfBarges/status/1107984741553369088

https://twitter.com/MadeOfBarges/status/1107986874293993472

Such dignity.

https://twitter.com/MadeOfBarges/status/1108121430280060928

https://twitter.com/MadeOfBarges/status/1108172401559420935

So, why cite Nora of the 87 followers who is not very philosophical?

I leave it to your wisdom to determine.

More of the same:

i've just woken up to the news that @3ammagazine has de-platformed me by removing my interview with richard marshall, because of the comments i made about gender. and even though the bulk of the interview was about my other work. h/t @BrianLeiter. https://t.co/HQa4tlOBsI

— A/Prof Holly Lawford-Smith (@aytchellesse) March 19, 2019

Leiter Reports:

3AM Magazine’s radical chic motto–“whatever it is, we’re against it”–turns out to be bollocks

Their real motto is “whatever right-thinking zealots in our little corner of the universe agree on, we’re for it.” The magazine has withdrawn Richard Marshall’s interview with philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith (Melbourne) because in the course of the interview she denied that trans women are women, and expressed the gender critical view of these issues familiar to readers of the blog from the work of philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex).

Richard Marshall has resigned from 3AM Magazine, given this insulting treatment of his work.  He is right to do so, even though this is a huge loss for philosophy.  As he told me, it means the “end of the series” of interviews he has done over many years now, which now numbers nearly 400 interviews with philosophers about their work in accessible terms and freely available on the Internet.

If you value Mr. Marshall’s work and freedom of expression and thought, then e-mail the owner and co-editor of 3AM to make that known.  He is Andrew Gallix, reachable here:   andrew@3ammagazine.com

This is completely outrageous. Why deplatform @aytchellesse, who has a lots interesting things to say? This is just usual invalid argument: Holly thinks X, I disagree with X, so everything Holly thinks is wrong. I expect more from philosophers – shame on you @3ammagazine. https://t.co/DQCTF7gTIQ

— Dr Sophie Allen (@sophie_r_allen) March 19, 2019

The norm against unpublishing stuff is weakening and I promise you you should be worried about it, even if you don't think this tactic will ever affect you or someone you care about. Three years ago we didn't think Trump could possibly be elected. Shit changes fast, in big ways. https://t.co/FB1JS8C2XF

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 20, 2019

Women must be silenced so that trans women can do Being a Woman correctly.

Michelle Goldberg asks a very good question: why don’t Princess Ivanka and Prince Jared have impostor syndrome when they are in fact impostors? Why indeed?

According to “Kushner, Inc.,” Gary Cohn, former director of the National Economic Council, has told people that Ivanka Trump thinks she could someday be president. “Her father’s reign in Washington, D.C., is, she believes, the beginning of a great American dynasty,” writes Ward. Kushner, whose pre-White House experience included owning a boutique newspaper and helming a catastrophically ill-timed real estate deal, has arrogated to himself substantial parts of American foreign policy. According to Ward, shortly after Rex Tillerson was confirmed as secretary of state, Kushner told him “to leave Mexico to him because he’d have Nafta wrapped up by October.”

How can they sleep at night? How can they show up every day not dripping wet from flop sweat?

Partly, the Jared and Ivanka story is about the “reality distortion field” — a term one of Ward’s sources uses about Kushner — created by great family wealth. She quotes a member of Trump’s legal team saying that the two “have no idea how normal people perceive, understand, intuit.” Privilege, in them, has been raised to the level of near sociopathy.

Ward, the author of two previous books about the worlds of high finance and real estate, has known Kushner slightly for a long time; she told me that when he bought The New York Observer newspaper in 2006, he tried to hire her. She knocks down the idea that either he or his wife is a stabilizing force or moral compass in the Trump administration. Multiple White House sources told her they think it was Kushner who ordered the closing of White House visitor logs in April 2017, because he “didn’t want his frenetic networking exposed.” Ward reports that Cohn was stunned by their blasé reaction to Trump’s defense of the white-nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Va.: “He was upset that they were not sufficiently upset.”

I don’t know how the restraining influence thing ever got off the ground, unless it’s sheer “well she cleans up real nice so she must be an okay person” magical thinking.

Aww Trump has a new twin.

President Trump hosted Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian president, at the White House on Tuesday, and it was something like looking in the mirror.

Like other authoritarian leaders that Mr. Trump has embraced since taking office, Mr. Bolsonaro is an echo of the American president: a brash nationalist whose populist appeal comes partly from his use of Twitter and his history of making crude statements about women, gay people and indigenous groups.

Isn’t that sweet? They’re simpatico.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has repeatedly confronted and challenged the United States’ closest democratic allies, including the leaders of Canada, Germany and France, while speaking with glowing admiration of America’s adversaries.

At the top of Mr. Trump’s friendly authoritarians have been some of the globe’s most brutal dictators: Kim Jong-un of North Korea; Vladimir V. Putin of Russia; Xi Jinping of China; Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt; Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey; and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.

Trump has a taste for brutes.

Oh, gawd, here’s a book no one needs: The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution.

Noooooooooo no no no please no.

But it’s too late, it already exists.

This meandering, unmoderated discussion among Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett, a group dubbed the New Atheists, presents their unique positions in provocative but underdeveloped arguments. Composed mainly of transcriptions of a conversation among the four that was posted to YouTube in 2007, the book opens with introductory essays highlighting key points from the three surviving thinkers (Hitchens died in 2011).

I saw it via a tweet from CFI.

Today is the U.S. release of "The Four Horsemen: The Discussion that Sparked an Atheist Revolution," with new essays by @RichardDawkins @danieldennett @SamHarrisOrg and a foreword by the one and only @stephenfry. Proceeds from the book benefit the Center for Inquiry. pic.twitter.com/PUBY5FqeGZ

— Center for Inquiry (@center4inquiry) March 19, 2019

Oh hell yes, step right up and buy this book of a conversation that happened 12 years ago among four men, two of whom have gone on to become droning narrow seers of Angry Dude Twitter.

No thank you.

Devin Nunes is suing, suing I tell you!

Stung by obscene and pointed criticism, Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican from California, has sued Twitter and three users for defamation, claiming the users smeared him and the platform allowed it to happen because of a political agenda.

Poor man. Has no one ever told him that politicians have to expect a lot of harsh criticism?

Though absorbing criticism comes with the territory for politicians, the complaint described the objectionable tweets from the three users as something “that no human being should ever have to bear and suffer in their whole life.”

Welllll, Dev, you kind of signed up for it.

To make his case, he cited a wide variety of tweets that included accusations of criminal misconduct, crude jokes at his expense and relatively banal criticism. The complaint says the tweets “falsely stated” that Mr. Nunes had brought “shame” to his family and that he was voted “Most Likely to Commit Treason” in high school, and that one of them included a cartoon image of a sexual act with Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The complaint lists dozens of other tweets he found insulting.

He’s certainly going the right way about encouraging us all to ignore them.

Mr. Nunes singled out Liz Mair, a Republican strategist who said on Twitter that she would not comment on the lawsuit, and two parody accounts: @DevinNunesMom, which was suspended last year, and @DevinCow, which is still active. The complaint says that Ms. Mair coordinated with the anonymous accounts on “a vicious defamation campaign” but did not offer evidence she was behind them or communicated with them, except for one tweet encouraging people to follow @DevinCow.

Yes but that one tweet totally counts!

“As part of its agenda to squelch Nunes’ voice, cause him extreme pain and suffering, influence the 2018 Congressional election, and distract, intimidate and interfere with Nunes’ investigation into corruption and Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential Election, Twitter did absolutely nothing,” the complaint said.

Naughty Twitter, sitting there in its Twitteroffice giggling into its Twittersleeve about Nunes’s extreme pain and suffering.

The lawsuit by Mr. Nunes had the perhaps unintended effect of sharply increasing the reach of @DevinCow, the parody account that had around 1,200 followers before the lawsuit was filed. The account was up to 46,000 followers as of Tuesday morning and rapidly growing.

Oops.

Morgane Oger continues to peak trans anyone who is paying attention.

The Cost Of Prejudice:

Vancouver Rape Relief would need 9000 donors giving $10 per month each to replace their $1.1 million annual income that relies on govt contracts and a charitable status – both incompatible with discrimination against women on any basis whatsoever.

— Morgane Oger (@MorganeOgerBC) March 18, 2019

The replies are universally hostile.

Wait, not quite, one trans woman is on Team Oger.

Are there any inclusive organizations in the area that this funding might be better suited for? This seems like a great opportunity for a more inclusive service provider to grow and become the primary care center in Vancouver.

— Julie Rei Goldstein Saw The TV Glow (@JulieRei) March 19, 2019

Are there any refuges for raped/battered women that are more incloooosive of the people who rape/batter them?

Oger continues with the “But I am a woman” bullshit.

It's really hard for women to be prejudiced against ourselves.

— Morgane Oger (@MorganeOgerBC) March 19, 2019

Haw haw, see? We have no basis for disagreeing with him because he’s a woman just as we are, why do we keep hitting ourselves?

Quite a few replies point out how very male his sense of entitlement is.

https://twitter.com/lu_hold/status/1107989962912223233

This one in particular…

The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible attack in New Zealand. They will have to work very hard to prove that one. So Ridiculous!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2019

What a filthy human being he is. He couldn’t possibly care less, could he. All he cares about is what people say about him.

It’s not ridiculous. Race hatred is race hatred; xenophobia is xenophobia. Trump holds frequent rallies at which he spews both at a screaming audience, and that stuff is not inert. Trump absolutely is encouraging and fostering racist xenophobic rage, and that has effects. That doesn’t make the Christchurch slaughter all his fault, of course, but it sure as hell does make him blameworthy.

But he’s such a callous selfish narcissistic toad that he can’t pause to think about that for a second.