Maureen Dowd on the role of Saudi bribery:

Hollywood, Silicon Valley, presidential libraries and foundations, politically connected private equity groups, P.R. firms, think tanks, universities and Trump family enterprises are awash in Arab money. The Saudis satisfy American greed, deftly playing their role as dollar signs in robes.

I’ve long thought there should be a great deal more reporting on this.

Donald Trump, who may be the only person more fond of lavish displays of arriviste gilt than the Saudis, is bedazzled by a Saudi pledge to buy billions worth of American weapons, just as he was flattered by the Saudi sword dance and weird luminescent orb séance on his visit to the kingdom.

Bedazzled and flattered and utterly helpless to counter any of that with scruples or rational thought or information or anything else that might prompt him to resist. He’s too stupid, too greedy, too corrupt, too ignorant, too mindless, too impulsive, too narcissistic…with nothing at all to pull the other way.

The Saudis blithely assume abhorrence at their inhumane behavior — from beheadings to forcing teenage girls without head scarves back into a burning school to die, as the religious police did in Mecca in 2002, to the brazen murder of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist — can be lubricated away with oil and money.

And they’re right, too.

Our Faustian deal was this: As long as the Saudis kept our oil prices low, bought our fighter jets, housed our fleets and drones and gave us cover in the region, they could keep their country proudly medieval.

It was accepted wisdom that it was futile to press the Saudis on the feudal, the degradation of women and human rights atrocities, because it would just make them dig in their heels. Even Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, never made an impassioned Beijing-style speech about women in Saudi Arabia being obliterated under a black tarp.

And that hasn’t changed.

The president of the US engaged in active, blatant, highly visible voter suppression.

All levels of government and Law Enforcement are watching carefully for VOTER FRAUD, including during EARLY VOTING. Cheat at your own peril. Violators will be subject to maximum penalties, both civil and criminal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 21, 2018

Trump is pretending to believe the Saudis.

President Trump broke with his own intelligence agencies on Friday, appearing to accept Saudi Arabia’s explanationthat the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed by accident during a fistfight, while the United States’ spy agencies are increasingly convinced that he was assassinated on high-level orders from the Saudi royal court.

A fistfight for godsake. Right because journalists in their 50s always fling themselves into fistfights with 15 or 18 young beefy hit men and get accidentally beheaded as a result.

The growing evidence that Mr. Khashoggi, a Virginia resident and a columnist for The Washington Post, was killed on orders from the Saudi royal family has put Mr. Trump in an increasingly untenable position.

On Friday evening, the president praised the statement issued by the Saudi government, which confirmed Mr. Khashoggi’s death, as a “good first step” and a “big step.” Earlier, the prince and other senior Saudi officials had denied any role in Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance.

Kushner has been leaning on his daddy-in-law to stay tight with MbS.

But as Turkish officials leaked details of the grisly killing of Mr. Khashoggi and of the dismemberment of his body, the White House has become increasingly isolated in its defense of Saudi Arabia.

A stream of prominent Wall Street and tech executives canceled plansto attend an investor conference convened by the prince next week in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

Yes yes yes but Trump is busy holding rallies.

For Mr. Trump, who is on a three-day swing in the West before the midterm elections, the Khashoggi affair has become a distraction during a period in which he had hoped to campaign for Republican congressional candidates on a message of economic growth and the recent confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Just after answering questions about the Saudi announcement, Mr. Trump flew to a “Make America Great Again” rally in Mesa, Ariz.

Dude’s got important business to take care of.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1053334095114182657

Not a good analogy. Nobody is saying trans people shouldn’t compete in sport at all, some people are saying male-bodied people shouldn’t compete against women. Nobody is saying trans people are non-human animals. Nobody is saying trans people should be rounded up and sent to camps. Feminist women are not comparable to Nazis.

This impasse is one reason I can’t see most trans activism as genuinely progressive: it’s so resolutely blind and indifferent to the vulnerabilities and disadvantages of anyone else. Another way of putting it would be that it’s so unintersectional. A progressive trans activism would give a shit about any physical advantages trans women might have over women. It wouldn’t callously wave that off and carry on regardless. It wouldn’t be so grossly narcissistic.

Updating to add: Of course there’s another aspect, which I overlooked.

Oh. My. God.

People pointing out that being biologically male means having an athletic advantage over biological females, isn't equivalent to you being a victim of racism or the Nazis.

You have absolutely no shame whatsoever. This is excruciating. https://t.co/3MY3jEllGh

— Harvey Jeni (@GappyTales) October 20, 2018

Oh yes, that. Rachel McKinnon is not comparable to victims of Nazism. Rachel McKinnon being told that male bodies have an advantage over female bodies in cycle racing is not comparable to being a victim of genocide.

It’s all about the narcissism.

Talk about voter suppression…

At a time when many rural towns are slowly dying, the arrival of two massive meatpacking plants boosted Dodge City’s economy and transformed its demographics as immigrants from Mexico and other countries flooded in to fill those jobs.

Dodge City, Kansas, this is.

But the city located 160 miles (257 kilometers) west of Wichita has only one polling site for its 27,000 residents. Since 2002, the lone site was at the civic center just blocks from the local country club — in the wealthy, white part of town. For this November’s election, local officials have moved it outside the city limits to a facility more than a mile from the nearest bus stop, citing road construction that blocked the previous site.

One polling site…which is now outside of town and a hefty walk from the closest bus stop. That’ll keep those pesky immigrants from voting!

Do we not have any laws governing access to voting?

Some local voters and the American Civil Liberties Union have long criticized the use of a lone Dodge City polling site even before its move just weeks before the midterm election.

That single polling site services more than 13,000 voters in the Dodge City area, compared to an average of 1,200 voters per polling site at other locations, said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU in Kansas.

Well, the Roberts Court said they could.

Kansas is not the only state that has closed polling sites. Polling places across the country have also been shuttered since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act. A 2016 research report from the civil rights coalition Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights found local officials had shuttered 868 polling places in the three years after the court’s ruling.

That’s a lot of votes suppressed.

I saw a tweet from Nazir Afzal:

Restrictions lifted so you can learn about the latest grooming trials in Huddersfield
My interviews will be broadcast

This was not the work of Tommy Robinson & his cohorts, his lot nearly derailed it again

It was the bravery of victims & professionals

https://t.co/Vfn9KFQWig

— nazir afzal (@nazirafzal) October 19, 2018

So I read the BBC report.

Twenty men have been found guilty of being part of a grooming gang that raped and abused girls as young as 11 in Huddersfield.

The men were convicted of more than 120 offences against 15 girls.

Victims were plied with drink and drugs and then “used and abused at will” in a seven-year “campaign of rape and abuse” between 2004 and 2011.

As if girls are just insentient objects there for the use of men.

During the three trials, jurors heard how the men – who are all British Asians mainly of Pakistani heritage – preyed on young, vulnerable girls, one of whom was described as having the mental age of a seven-year-old.

The men, all from Yorkshire, went by nicknames including “Dracula” – which Nahman Mohammed was known as.

Mohammed Imran Ibrar was known as “Bully”, Abdul Rehman was nicknamed “Beastie”, while Nasarat Hussain was known as “Nurse”.

All a joke to them, I guess.

In May, the former leader of the English Defence League Tommy Robinson was arrested for reporting on the case live on Facebook during the second of the trials.

Analysis by Mark Easton:

Rotherham, Oxford, Rochdale, Derby, Banbury, Telford, Peterborough, Aylesbury, Bristol, Halifax, Keighley, Newcastle… now Huddersfield. The list seems endless… and there will almost certainly be more.

The sexual abuse of vulnerable children in English towns by groups of men, often from immigrant communities, is an incarnation of a wider scandal that is dominating our news and overwhelming our police and our courts.

…

Victims and their families said they repeatedly told West Yorkshire Police what was happening but no arrests were made until years later.

Which is odd because West Yorkshire Police recently found time to caution Graham Linehan for saying Unapproved Things about “gender” on Twitter. Graham Linehan lives in Norfolk – a very long way away from West Yorkshire. Time to police what distant people say about gender on Twitter, but not time to police what men do to girls under their noses.

Jane Clare Jones on ontological totalitarianism:

When I first encountered trans ideology about six years ago, it never occurred to me in a million years that the academy would just roll over for this pile of cobbled-together, anti-materialist, life-denying, patriarchal, bullying bullshit and ask it to tickle its tummy. The whole thing is a reality distortion cognitive dissonance machine. It’s an exercise in mass gaslighting that relies on a concatenation of double-thinks. And I had supposed, naively it turns out, that the people who are paid to think about things, would, y’know, think. Quite why it has prompted not inquiry, but compliance, is complex. It has, in the first instance, a lot to do with a catastrophically clay-headed application of the analysis of oppression. With the fact that people have just lapped up the cis-trans binary and the claim that women are the ‘oppressors’ of trans people, and that their political interests are, therefore, the interests of the dominant class (yeah, because radical feminists have so much institutional power, don’t they, Professors of Gender Studies?).

But why people have just lapped up the cis-trans binary and the claim that women are the ‘oppressors’ of trans people and have failed to spit it back out is still (and will probably always be) a profound mystery.

The other major factor in why this ideology has been so easily absorbed by the academy is, however, down to the dominance of what we’ve been talking around over the last few months – the pre-eminence of what we might call a ‘discourse all the way down’ model of reality. I’m not here, intending to ally myself with the Pluckrosean faction and start banging a drum for a simple return to objectivism (because yeah, that always collapses into a ‘view from nowhere’ which is also, often, ‘a view from privilege’).

Heh, and I just got finished dissing the bullshit from a member of the Pluckrosean faction claiming that it’s “posmodernism” to think it’s bad for presidents to rain insults down on women and other underlings in such a public outlet as Twitter.

However, as I’ve been trying to map out, the problem, as always, is with the way these two positions are structured in an opposition that excludes the space between. Reality is made between subjects and objects, between the subjective and the objective, between culture and nature, between ideas and material limits. It is as wrong-headed to think it’s all a matter of objective facts as it is to think it’s all a matter of discourse.

What I said in response to Lindsay, basically: language isn’t everything but neither is it nothing.

In short, get a grip.

Oh yes, if only we hadn’t internalized pesky “grievance studies” we’d be just fine with a president who calls women “Horseface” and “Pocahontas” and fat and ugly and all the rest of the bully-boy crap he vomits out.

The reason we are obsessing so much over Trump calling a woman "horseface," and all his other similar jibes against women and minorities, is because our culture has internalized an awful lot of grievance studies. It's a straight line from the scholarship.https://t.co/ZzjIIUgdMt

— James Lindsay, full varsity (@ConceptualJames) October 17, 2018

False dichotomy, chum. It’s not a choice between “language is everything” and “language doesn’t matter.” Trump’s venomous name-calling is not all there is to Trump, but it’s not nothing, either.

Also I’m pretty sure it’s not a postmodernist invention that language matters.

The what?

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/1052662266988883968

The actual MATERIAL violence that we as cis women pose to trans women? What the fuck is Zoé Samudzi talking about? Since when do women commit violence against people with male bodies? Her all-caps on MATERIAL make clear she doesn’t mean rhetorical or psychological violence but the real, physical, punch-kick variety. Women are not violent toward trans women. It’s some kind of wokeness or more radical than thou-ness that generates these ludicrous counter-factual panics, but that’s so radical it’s reactionary…as is so often the case when people start “standing with” their trans sisters.

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/1052663652891803648

Yes these terrible frightening women who say that women are women and men are not women – how very arrogant and playing-god-like.

I missed this one last week.

“I think Ivanka would be incredible,” POTUS says when asked about his daughter as UN Ambassador. He bemoans that it would cause accusations of nepotism. “I’m not sure there’s anyone more competent in the world.”

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 9, 2018

Trump thinks his daughter, who worked as a model for a time and then moved to selling clothes made by badly underpaid Chinese workers, is likely the most competent candidate for UN ambassador IN THE WORLD.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on On both sides.

Science isn’t magic. It isn’t some innate sense that people are born with that is “science” – it isn’t natural and it isn’t instinctual. It requires quite rigorous training to get good at it.

And a lot of it is all about taking the shit you think you know, the stuff you think is just “common sense” and testing it.

Scientists don’t get stuff right by applying their gut-feels to it, part of the training they undergo is learning not to apply gut feels to things, to actually come at the evidence in as unbiased a manner as possible because their brains will screw with their perceptions.

This is why you get research into stuff that seems obvious – because what is obvious isn’t always what is right.

And you know what? Even with all the training they undergo, even with how hard they work to do it, even the best scientists in the world do not have an instinct for science.

Albert Einstein couldn’t accept quantum mechanics, Linus Pauling sparked the vitamin craze, Isaac Newton was a whackjob alchemist.

Great physicists will wax lyrically wrong about biology, and great biologists will wax lyrically wrong about physics, both sets are scientists and even with lifetimes worth of training their abilities are often limited to their fields.

That is why there is peer review, why science has to work collectively and not individually, why the replication crisis is a crisis.

Even with peer review you still get issues with the biases of the reviewers, science takes a long, long time to figure stuff out precisely because it is not instinctual.

To even suggest you have an instinct for science is to fundamentally not get it.

Trump made a particularly absurd claim in his interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday.

He added: “I have a natural instinct for science…”

No. No no no. Oh no, not at all.

He has the opposite of that. Without even delving into details of his ignorance, we can say with great confidence that he has no such thing, for the simple reason that he constantly claims to know things that he can’t possibly know. That’s a dead giveaway. No one with “a natural instinct for science” does that. People with a natural instinct for science know how limited human knowledge is, how provisional most of it is, how necessary caution is, and so on.

Ironically, he made that claim in aid of invoking scientific doubt in the form of pseudo-skepticism. Climate change: oh, nobody knows, it’s all a toss-up, there’s no more evidence one way than another.

Trump again cast doubt on climate change, suggesting, incorrectly, that the scientific community was evenly split on the existence of climate change and its causes. There are “scientists on both sides of the issue,” Trump said.

“But what I’m not willing to do is sacrifice the economic well-being of our country for something that nobody really knows,” Trump said.

He added: “I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.”

In the sense of three on one side and several million on the other, yes. In the sense of evenly split, no.

A couple of years ago the Georgia secretary of state – he who is now running for governor while remaining secretary of state even though the latter job involves supervision of elections – released a video on how to do early voting, which is still on the secretary of state website. There’s a funny thing about that video…

The video, produced in six different languages and still linked on the secretary of state’s website, shows a white boy arriving at his voting location, presenting his photo ID and successfully voting. The black girl who shows up to vote does not have the proper form of ID and is turned away from the poll.

The video—showing a white man being able to vote while a black woman is turned away—is gaining attention amid accusations of voter suppression in Georgia, as well as an alleged conflict of interest in the gubernatorial race.

The description is not actually accurate: the black girl is not turned away, she’s given a provisional ballot which she fills out and hands in, returning later with The Proper Form of Voter ID, which is apparently accepted, so the upshot seems to be that her vote will be counted.

That said – it’s still grotesque to make it the white boy [symbolizing a man] who does it right and the black girl [symbolizing a woman] who gets it wrong. This is Georgia we’re talking about. The people in Kemp’s office can be so dim that they did that by accident.

Election officials in Georgia have placed on hold the voter registrations of more than 50,000 people, most of whom are black, largely under a policy requiring personal information on registrations to precisely match Social Security or drivers’ license records. The man in charge of that system and the fairness of all Georgia elections is Republican Secretary of State Brain Kemp, who is running for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams, a woman trying to become the country’s first black female governor.

The video has a striking resemblance to Abrams’s claims that Kemp is trying to suppress the vote of minorities and women through his official power. Her campaign has called for his resignation, or at least his recusal, as secretary of state, to end the alleged ongoing conflict of interest of overseeing his own election.

“We have known since 2016 that the exact match system has a disproportionate effect on people of color and on women,” Abrams said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

Which Kemp’s office helpfully illustrates with a video of a black woman [played by a girl] showing up to vote without the right ID. See? Like this.

I wanted to embed the video, but when I went to the YouTube page to get the share link I couldn’t get to it. Between the time I read the article and watched the video and the time I finished the post, the link became useless. It appears that Kemp’s people have now removed the video. So you can’t now watch it to confirm that the girl was not turned away but was “only” made to jump through extra hoops. But at least we know Kemp’s office is embarrassed.

Trump is doing a fascist rally in Missoula tonight, and his goons are issuing threats.

“For all the prospective attendees to the Trump event. Come early,” [Will] Deschamps, who chaired Republican state activities from 2009 to 2015, wrote Tuesday on Facebook. “Also all you protesters, show up as well. This is a concealed and open carry state and we know how to use em.”

In other words: if you show up, we will shoot you.

Deschamps, a Marine Corps veteran, signed off with “USMC trained,” an apparent reference to firearms expertise.

He said Thursday that the post was not to be taken as a directive for people to confront protesters or take weapons to the rally.

“I have genuine concern about what’s happening around the United States by these far, far-left antagonistic groups,” he told The Washington Post.

Like the ones in Charlottesville? Like the one Dylan Roof belonged to?

No, those are far, far-right antagonistic groups, and they are apparently a good thing.

There’s disagreement – highly charged disagreement – over whether the label “TERF” is a neutral descriptive label or a loaded pejorative one. The BBC has let us know what it thinks.

https://twitter.com/K_IngalaSmith/status/1052894983244668928

https://twitter.com/ThrupennyBit/status/1052895493242671104

Updating to add:

https://twitter.com/K_IngalaSmith/status/1053262037223137281

Result!