I think the first step toward being a journalist ought to be a reasonably solid grip on the language you plan to use. There shouldn’t be a mistake or incoherence or clumsiness in every paragraph, as there is in this piece on A Nopen Letter saying…no, I’ll let the reporter explain what it says.

Dozens of female celebrities, politicians and women’s rights campaigners have condemned the “narrow and archaic” opinions they say are are squashing transgender rights in Scotland.

Squashing? Squashing rights? That’s a peculiar word to use. Crushing, yes, quashing, yes, but squashing? It sounds silly, and off.

More than 70 women from across the UK have penned an open letter hitting out at commentators they claim are trying to “roll back the rights” of transgender women.

“Hitting out at” – that’s a more familiar idiom but it’s ridiculous and poisonous. Stating a position, even one that opposes another position, is not “hitting out.”

Since the Scottish Government pledged to reform the Gender Recognition Act to be more inclusive of transgender people, critics have argued doing so will impact on the rights of non-transgender women and girls.

Vague, clumsy, uninformative. “Inclusive” meaning what? “[Have an] impact on” how? Be specific.

Various commentators, news outlets and politicians have argued that by being able to self-declare your gender or non-binary status, services and safe places for women would no longer be safe.

Fail. Subject-verb agreement, also two halves of sentence agreement.

Some argue that by allowing transgender women who may not completed their gender reassignment access to services designated for women it would be impacting on women’s rights.

Jesus. More subject-verb chaos plus there’s even a word missing.

Today, scores of women have joined together for the first time in hitting out at the claims, with signatories of the open letter including Dame Emma Thompson, MPs Mhairi Black and Hannah Bardell, members of women’s aid organisations, charities, lawyers and academics.

Scores? How many scores? Two? Three? Why not just say the number? (I think I saw somewhere that it’s 70. 3.5 score, so not all that many scores, but it sounds big.) And another “hitting out” already.

This person may identify as a journalist, but…

The Beeb might as well hire McKinnon at this rate.

Tennis icon Martina Navratilova has apologised for using the term “cheating” when discussing whether transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in women’s sport.

Navratilova – one of the most successful tennis players of all time – has been criticised as “transphobic” for writing that transgender women had “unfair” physical advantages over female opponents.

There it is again – the “somebody called her transphobic” well-poisoning right at the beginning, so that readers will be fully primed to despise Navratilova before they even know what she said.

On Saturday, former British swimmer Sharron Davies told BBC Sport that many current athletes “feel the same way” and that trans athletes should not compete in female events to “protect women’s sport”.

However, transgender cyclist Rachel McKinnon, who won a UCI Masters Track World Championship title in October, said Davies was “sharing hate speech”.

Athlete Ally – a US-based organisation that campaigns for LGBT sportspeople – cut its links with Navratilova in the wake of the 62-year-old’s original comments, saying they “perpetuate dangerous myths”.

And there that is again – giving Navratilova’s age but not giving McKinnon’s age.

They’ve chosen a side and they’re sticking to it.

https://twitter.com/glosswitch/status/1102183988632977410

The Beeb loads the dice yet again:

Transgender athletes should not compete in female competitions in order to “protect women’s sport”, says former British swimmer Sharron Davies.

Her comments come after 18-time tennis Grand Slam singles champion Martina Navratilova said it was “cheating” to allow transgender women to compete in women’s sport because they had unfair physical advantages.

One campaign group said Navratilova’s comments were “transphobic”.

The BBC did not have to report it that way. It did not have to include that sly childish tattletale one campaign group said Navratilova’s comments were “transphobic”. It didn’t have to and it shouldn’t have, because in fact her comments were not “transphobic.” It’s not “phobic” to say that male bodies have physical advantages over female bodies for many sports. The BBC doesn’t have to rush to say “somebody said that was transphobic!!” every single time a woman states some facts about female and male bodies. Many of us say all this bullshit is misogynistic, but I don’t see the Beeb reporting that ever.

Speaking to BBC Sport, Davies, 56, said she had spoken to many other female athletes who “feel the same way”.

“It is not a transphobic thing – I really want to say we have no issue with people who are transgender,” she said.

But it’s too late. The BBC places that after its “somebody said!!” bullshit, so that readers will be primed to think it is and that the disavowal is fake.

Next up, the obligatory summoning of Rachel McKinnon, the Beeb’s new besty.

In December, transgender cyclist Rachel McKinnon told BBC Sport she estimated she has received more than 100,000 hate messages on Twitter since she won her UCI Masters Track World Championship title in October.

Fellow cyclist Jen Wagner-Assali, who finished third, called it “unfair” and called on cycling’s international governing body to change its rules.

On Saturday, McKinnon said Davies was a “transphobe” and was “sharing hate speech”.

“There is no debate to be had over whether trans women athletes have an unfair advantage: it’s clear that they don’t,” she said on Twitter.

Rachel has spoken.

Athlete Ally – a US-based organisation that campaigns for LGBT sportspeople – cut its links with Navratilova in the wake of the 62-year-old’s comments, saying they “perpetuate dangerous myths”.

Interesting that they never mention McKinnon’s age. Interesting that they make a point of telling us how old Davies is and how old Navratilova is but not how old McKinnon is. I’m guessing they want us to think that Davies and Navratilova are getting soft in the head because so ancient?

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Trump had big hopes for the summit with his dear friend Kim. He thought his charisma would win all the cards.

In a dinner at the Metropole Hotel the evening before, mere feet from the bomb shelter where guests took cover during the Vietnam War, Mr. Kim had resisted what Mr. Trump presented as a grand bargain: North Korea would trade all its nuclear weapons, material and facilities for an end to the American-led sanctions squeezing its economy.

An American official later described this as “a proposal to go big,” a bet by Mr. Trump that his force of personality, and view of himself as a consummate dealmaker, would succeed where three previous presidents had failed.

More reasonable people knew that wouldn’t fly, but that’s beside the point.

Several of Mr. Trump’s own aides, led by national security adviser John R. Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, thought the chances of a grand bargain for total nuclear disarmament were virtually zero. Some questioned whether the summit meeting should go forward.

Mr. Trump disagreed. He had taken to showing what he called Mr. Kim’s “beautiful letters” to visitors to the Oval Office, as evidence he had built a rapport with one of the world’s most brutal dictators. While some in the White House worried Mr. Trump was being played, the president seemed entranced — even declaring “we fell in love.”

He’s so dumb. It never ceases to amaze, how dumb he is.

In interviews with a half-dozen participants, it is clear Mr. Trump’s failed gambit was the culmination of two years of threats, hubris and misjudgment on both sides. Mr. Trump entered office convinced he could intimidate the man he liked to call “Little Rocket Man” with tough talk and sanctions, then abruptly took the opposite tack, overruling his aides and personalizing the diplomacy.

Dumb with the Twitter insults, and dumb with the goo-goo eyes.

This photo is just weird.

That’s Natalie van Gogh again in the middle. All the other members of the team are turned to the side, angled toward the middle person, while the middle person – van Gogh – stands and faces the viewer dead-on. The heights rise from each side to culminate in van Gogh, the tallest and widest. The others’ legs are only slightly parted, while van Gogh’s are in an emphatic upside-down V, aka a straddle. The photo is of a large domineering muscular man with a group of much younger women as his handmaidens on either side.

Is that…a publicity shot? A wtf shot? What is it? Why did van Gogh agree to the pose? Has the world gone mad?

Originally a comment by guest on America’s exceptionally low social mobility.

One of the most striking differences I noticed when I moved from the US to the UK was how many people I met in professional/work circles who had literally ‘worked their way up’–the country/sector director of the large company I worked for in my first job here had started as an apprentice in the ’70s. I don’t think I ever knew anyone in the US who’d done this (I thought I had, but when I mentioned this years ago a catty friend revealed the advantages this person, whose persona was that of someone from an underprivileged background who’d ‘made good’, had actually started with).

I’ve met dozens of people here (almost all women–but that might just be because I spend more time talking with women) in my generation and younger who were the first in their families to get university degrees and professional jobs. It’s not always easy for them–I was actually talking with one the other night, a woman from a ‘deprived’ background who has a PhD from Oxford, who (like plenty of others) pointed out that while it’s certainly a positive thing for Oxbridge to work to get ‘diverse’ students into their programs they’re not so good at acknowledging and making explicit the tacit assumptions and behaviour norms that can make the experience a minefield for an outsider, which can lead to retention problems, and potentially psychological/emotional damage.

On kind of a tangent, I’m realising that my father was actually the first in his family to get a degree and professional job (my mother finished high school, and was a SAHM)–I’ve thought before (and perhaps have even commented to this effect on this blog) that while it meant that although he earned enough to provide us with a ‘nice’ house in the suburbs and plenty of money, and we never went without, physically, my parents had no idea how to support their children into professional careers themselves, or that they even should or had to, and may not have been able to do anything about it (re informal networking, positioning, etc) even if they had.

I feel that my life thus far has not been sufficiently devoted to paying attention to Mark Meadows. I hope to do better.

Kashana Cauley wrote about his dramatic tantrum at the Cohen hearing in the Times:

“You and I,” he said to Representative Elijah Cummings, the Oversight Committee chairman, who is black, “have a personal relationship that isn’t based on color.” He insisted that he couldn’t be racist because he had nieces and nephews of color.

It was a performance that he’s clearly hoping will win him one of next year’s Oscars. He defended his record on race, so we should cast aside that time in 2012 when he embraced the racist birtherism theory to his supporters by saying that “2012 is the time we’re going to send Mr. Obama back home to Kenya or wherever it is.”

Is that something people commonly say about white presidents or senators or representatives? Do people talk about sending the senator back to Ireland or Germany or Cornwall? Not a lot. No, the whole “Kenya hurrhurr” thing was always intensely racist, and Mark Meadows is a revolting hypocrite for putting on that display.

Mr. Meadows threw a fit during a hearing where Mr. Cohen claimed the president had said black people were too stupid to vote for him and had called African nations “shithole” countries. There was actual proof of Mr. Trump’s racism on offer, and Mr. Meadows chose to flip out about an accusation instead. It appears that to him, accusations of racism are more dangerous than racist acts themselves.

Priorities. He’s showing us what his are.

Mr. Meadows’s hissy fit and Ms. Tlaib’s words feel like a microcosm of where we are right now in America on race. The tide may be turning. The increased visibility of people of color in all sectors, including Congress, and the fearlessness of people of color to speak out about racism are moving us forward.

It’s all too easy, given the past demographic and ideological makeup of Congress, to picture a version of yesterday’s hearing where there was no Rashida Tlaib there to remind us that racist acts outweigh accusations of racism.

Where no woman of color stood up against a white man’s insistence on trying to distract us from evidence of racist acts by focusing on his hurt feelings.

Mr. Cummings, in his closing remarks, said that he thought America was “better than this,” a statement that referred to Mr. Trump’s alleged crimes. But it could have also been applied to Mr. Meadows’s belief that accusations of racism are worse than the real thing.

As a country, are we better than this? Yes — Rashida Tlaib showed us that we can be.

Yep. Rock on.

What bullshit is this?!

From Massachusetts to Utah, small community theater productions of To Kill a Mockingbird are being shut down under threat of a lawsuit by the producer of the new Broadway production.

It doesn’t matter that the new version, penned by Aaron Sorkin, is completely different from the Christopher Sergel play that’s been performed by high school students and community theater actors for decades. Nor does it matter that the community theaters paid a licensing fee of at least $100 per performance to the Dramatic Publishing Company, which owns the rights to the earlier version of the play.

What matters, lawyers for Broadway producer Scott Rudin say, is that according to the contract between Dramatic and the Harper Lee estate, most amateur performances can’t proceed now that a new version of the story is on Broadway.

That 1969 contract, according to The Times, blocks Mockingbird performances within 25 miles of cities that had a population of 150,000 or more in 1960 while a “first-class dramatic play” based on the book is playing in New York or on tour.

Gee. Are people allowed to read the novel within 25 miles of cities that had a population of 150,000 or more in 1960? Are enforcers with To Kill a Mockingbird-radar combing the environs of every sizable city in the country even as we speak?

It’s not just community theaters in the U.S. that have been forced to shut down their productions. Last month a touring version of the Sergel play, set to run in the U.K. and Ireland, was canceled after being faced with legal threats.

Rudin “made it clear” that his company “would commence legal proceedings against the tour’s producer, originating theatre and all venues where it was due to be presented if the tour were not cancelled with immediate effect,” the tour’s producers said in a statement, according to Playbill.

The show must go on! Unless it’s competition.

I saw this the other day but didn’t get around to it.

A revised statement from Little, Brown and Company. pic.twitter.com/zSQp1Q132C

— Little, Brown and Co (@littlebrown) February 26, 2019

We will work with E. J. Levy to publish her novel with sensitivity to the issues that have been raised, including the use of the proper pronouns to describe Dr. Barry’s embodiment.

The “proper pronouns” forsooth – they might as well be obeying a demand for submission from the god-emperor. Use the proper pronouns or it’s ten years in the slammer for lèse-majesté.

It’s interesting to think about how many novels there have been in which women are portrayed as evil schemers, bloodsucking sex fiends, stupid empty dependents, silly vain dolls, barely perceptible nonentities…yet have women ever once been able to pressure a publisher into telling an author to do a better job with the female characters? Maybe some female editors have, but groups of women outsiders forming pressure groups? Not that I’ve ever heard of; do let me know if I’m wrong.

Okay…

Transgender cyclist wins Dutch professional women’s cycling event. At the age of 44. The average age of her 8 team mates is 24. This is all fine, though. Totally fine. https://t.co/rAwq7szGhn

— Ben (@BenWlv) March 1, 2019

Googles

Yes, that’s a male body in the middle.

Paul Krugman gives himself a break from thinking about Trump to think about the Trump Princess.

You see, recently she said something that would have been remarkable coming from any Republican, but was truly awesome coming from the Daughter in Chief.

The subject under discussion was the proposal, part of the Green New Deal, that the government offer a jobs guarantee. Ms. Trump trashed the notion, claiming that Americans “want to work for what they get,” that they want to live in a country “where there is the potential for upward mobility.”

O.K., this was world-class lack of self-awareness: It doesn’t get much better than being lectured on self-reliance by an heiress whose business strategy involves trading on her father’s name.

Right? What real work has Princess Ivanka ever done? Mincing around the landscape looking like a Barbie doll doesn’t count.

But Krugman’s point is that the upward mobility thing is bullshit; we have less of it than the other developed countries, not more. This comes as zero surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the ever-growing gulf between rich and poor here.

America’s exceptionally low social mobility is distinct from its exceptionally high income inequality, although these are almost surely related. Among advanced countries, there is a strong negative correlation between inequality and mobility, sometimes referred to as the “Great Gatsby curve.” This makes sense. After all, huge disparities in parents’ income tend to translate into large disparities in children’s opportunities.

Witness the Trump and Kushner offspring, talentless dweebs to a person.

Where do people from poor or modest backgrounds have the best chance of getting ahead? The answer is that Scandinavia leads the rankings, although Canada also does well. And here’s the thing: The Nordic countries don’t just have low inequality, they also have much bigger governments, much more extensive social safety nets, than we do. In other words, they have what Republicans denounce as “socialism” (it really isn’t, but never mind).

What does that translate to? Universal health care, better schools, more public housing. What does that help foster? New generations who get decent schooling and a safe place to do homework and get enough sleep. You do the math.

News out of Missouri:

The Missouri House of Representatives voted 117-39 Wednesday to approve a bill that would effectively ban abortions in Missouri except for medical emergencies.

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Nick Schroer, R-O’Fallon, would ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is usually around six weeks of pregnancy.

The legislation, sponsored by someone who will never, under any circumstance, be forced to undergo 9 months of increasing physical strain and then hours of trauma, to force people of the sex he is not to undergo 9 months of increasing physical strain and then hours of trauma. A man sponsored legislation that would (if passed) force women to suffer pregnancy and then childbirth against their wills. That’s what this legislation does: it forces women to suffer trauma they don’t want.

Supporters of the legislation called it the “strongest pro-life bill in the country” at a time when Missouri has only one abortion provider.

“I think here in Missouri, we know that life is precious. We want to give women, men, young people the choice: the choice to live,” Schroer said.

Women? No. They are not giving women the choice. They are hoping to force women to continue pregnancies that they don’t want.

Via Acolyte of Sagan, a hideous crime in Argentina:

An 11-year old girl who became pregnant after being raped was forced to give birth after Argentine authorities refused to allow her the abortion to which she was entitled.

11. She’s 11. ELEVEN.

The authorities ignored repeated requests for an abortion from the child, called “Lucía” to protect her identity, as well as her mother and a number of Argentine women’s right activists. After 23 weeks of pregnancy, she had to undergo a caesarean section on Tuesday. The baby is unlikely to survive.

They wouldn’t let her end the pregnancy that was criminally forced on her, then they ripped her open. In other words the rapist raped her and then the authorities committed GBH on her.

Lucía told the psychologist at the hospital to which she was admitted after two suicide attempts: “I want you to remove what the old man put inside me.”

Lucía, the youngest of three sisters, became pregnant after she was abused by her grandmother’s 65-year-old partner. She was placed under her grandmother’s care in 2015, after her two older sisters were reportedly abused by her mother’s partner.

So I guess the authorities felt her life hadn’t been shit enough yet, and they needed to make it much more so.

No surprise, but still horrifying. The (non-)mystery of Prince Jared’s security clearance is solved:

President Trump ordered his chief of staff to grant his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, a top-secret security clearance last year, overruling concerns flagged by intelligence officials and the White House’s top lawyer, four people briefed on the matter said.

Sure, that’s fine – that scummy little weasel of a real estate hustler can’t possibly do any harm with access to top-secret intelligence, any more than his wife’s father can do any harm with access to top-secret intelligence and nuclear weapons.

Mr. Trump’s decision in May so troubled senior administration officials that at least one, the White House chief of staff at the time, John F. Kelly, wrote a contemporaneous internal memo about how he had been “ordered” to give Mr. Kushner the top-secret clearance.

The White House counsel at the time, Donald F. McGahn II, also wrote an internal memo outlining the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Kushner — including by the C.I.A. — and how Mr. McGahn had recommended that he not be given a top-secret clearance.

Yeah great. They wrote memos. That’ll fix everything.

Trump lied to the Times about it last month. Of course he did.

Kushner’s lawyer lied about it. Princess Ivanka lied about it.

Asked on Thursday about the memos contradicting the president’s account, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said, “We don’t comment on security clearances.”

We hand them out to criminals and gangsters, and we lie to anyone who asks us about it, but we don’t comment. Peasants.

Mr. Kushner has spent this week abroad working on a Middle East peace plan. Among his meetings was one with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

He’s not qualified to be “working on a Middle East peace plan.” He’s a crooked little weasel with no relevant education or training or experience. He should be selling cheap condos in Pierre, South Dakota.