The Daily Dot tells us, with great indignation, that trans activists are getting Twitter suspensions or bans merely for threatening women they dislike. What is the world coming to when people aren’t free to threaten women on social media?

Trans Twitter has witnessed a spike in transgender users having their accounts suspended or banned on Twitter, and people are searching for answers. Given the apparently related manner in which these suspensions are happening, the community suspects a targeted effort against them. But who?

Some think it has to do with the word “TERF” while others think it takes more than that.

One trans Twitter user, who wished to remain anonymous, shared her evidence with the Daily Dot for TERF itself not being the sole key to this censorship. “Anecdotally I’ve been using TERF constantly without consequence, and so have many others,” she said. She pointed to the Twitter account Your Fave Hates TERFs as further evidence that just using the acronym is not enough to have action taken against you.

Yet the combination of TERF and any keyword that could be considered violent seems to be all it takes to get Twitter’s algorithms to designate a tweet as abusive.

Ohhhh…mere violence. Gee, how dare they.

That and a big push from mass organized reporting. “A tweet that said ‘kick TERFs out of your spaces’ is actionable because of the word kick. They’re mass reporting tweets like that,” she said. Another blatant example of this is the following tweets, which were labeled “abusive”:

We are shown some tweets that talk about giving TERFs some punch and mixing the punch “real good” and giving them straws to make sure they do not choke.

Rather than an explicit policy change, it seems to be TERFs abusing an automated system that sees words like “kick” and “punch,” but not the words that give them context, and certainly not the societal context that informs how trans people talk about TERFs.

Ahhhhhhhh yes the “societal context” that makes it perfectly all right for “activists” to talk publicly about punching kicking stabbing killing feminist women who object to being shoved out of their own spaces, political movements, realities, histories, experiences, everything, to make way for men who are determined to take them over.

Talk about reversing victim and offender.

Discussions of the harm TERFs do to the trans community, or even light-hearted jokes at their expense, might be enough to get someone removed from the platform altogether.

Oh yes those lighthearted jokes about punching stabbing killing women. If only women had a sense of humor, knowutImean?

Tasneem Khalil reports:

*Appeal for urgent medical attention for Dr Shahidul Alam*

Dhaka, Wednesday 22 August 2018.

Today, as Eid-ul-Azha is being celebrated across the country, we went to Keraniganj Central Jail in the morning to meet Dr Shahidul Alam. He has been imprisoned there for 10 days now, since 12 August, when he was taken there after being produced before the magistrate, and following 6 days in remand in the custody of the Detective Branch of the Police.

Dr Alam informed us that he is suffering from breathing difficulties, has pain in the jaw and gums and is facing eyesight problems. Shahidul did not have any such health-related complaints before he was taken into police custody on the night of 5th August 2018. We appeal to the government and more specifically, the jail authorities to ensure immediate medical attention for Dr Shahidul Alam by transfer to a hospital.

Rahnuma Ahmed
(Shahidul Alam’s wife, anthropologist)

Saydia Gulrukh
(Shahidul Alam’s colleague, journalist)

The CREW guys and another lawyer explain some things about the Manfort convictions.

The conviction conclusively and publicly demonstrates what many of us have said since the start of the investigation: This is no “witch hunt.” It instead is one of the most successful special counsel investigations in history. Coming alongside the guilty plea by Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, implicating the president in campaign finance violations, it was a very bad day for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Manafort’s conviction cannot be diminished by arguing, as Mr. Trump and his coterie are fond of doing, that the misconduct was unrelated to the Trump campaign or Russian “collusion.” On the contrary, the trial evidence included Mr. Manafort’s close ties to pro-Russia forces and his desperate financial straits as he “volunteered” his time for the next president. The trial revealed how willing Mr. Manafort was to corruptly leverage his position of influence over Mr. Trump during the campaign for his own personal benefit. He offered briefings to a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch and dangled a position in the Trump administration in front of a banker who provided him a loan for which he would not otherwise have qualified.

That in particular is useful – I’ve been unclear on what use Manafort made of his internship with the Trump campaign.

Mr. Manafort’s conviction should also send chills down the spines of other potential defendants, possibly including the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. and his informal adviser Roger Stone. As far as we know, they have been excluded from the hundreds of witnesses the special counsel has interviewed. That fact, and the public evidence about their conduct, signals that they may be facing Mr. Mueller’s scrutiny.

Oh really. Interesting.

The conviction is also bad news for the president because it increases the pressure on Mr. Manafort to cooperate with investigators. He has a second trial coming shortly in Washington, D.C., which could add even more time to what will likely be a substantial sentence — and Mr. Mueller reportedly has much more evidence to present to jurors in that trial than he did in the trial that just concluded.

Nor can Mr. Manafort simply wait for a presidential pardon. Mr. Trump hinted at one in his inappropriate tweets while the jury was deliberating, and has otherwise signaled his readiness to use his pardon pen. But should Mr. Trump pardon him, Mr. Manafort should expect state attorneys general to pick up under applicable state laws the threads of corruption and tax fraud that Mr. Mueller has already woven together. Unlike the federal crimes for which he has been convicted, state crimes cannot be wiped away with a presidential pardon. The risk of state charges maintains the pressure on Mr. Manafort to cooperate — especially after Tuesday’s conviction revealed what jurors think of his questionable business practices and other activities.

Bad day for Trump; good day – at last!! – for us.

Uh oh.

The oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic has started to break up, opening waters north of Greenland that are normally frozen, even in summer.

This phenomenon – which has never been recorded before – has occurred twice this year due to warm winds and a climate-change driven heatwave in the northern hemisphere.

One meteorologist described the loss of ice as “scary”. Others said it could force scientists to revise their theories about which part of the Arctic will withstand warming the longest.

In other words it’s happening much faster than the most pessimistic predictions.

The sea off the north coast of Greenland is normally so frozen that it was referred to, until recently, as “the last ice area” because it was assumed that this would be the final northern holdout against the melting effects of a hotter planet.

Oops.

As well as reducing ice cover, the ocean intrusion raises concerns of feedbacks, which could tip the Earth towards a hothouse state.

Freakish Arctic temperatures have alarmed climate scientists since the beginning of the year. During the sunless winter, a heatwave raised concerns that the polar vortex may be eroding.

This includes the Gulf Stream, which is at its weakest level in 1,600 years due to melting Greenland ice and ocean warming. With lower circulation of water and air, weather systems tend to linger longer.

A dormant hot front has been blamed for record temperatures in Laplandand forest fires in Siberia, much of Scandinavia and elsewhere in the Arctic circle.

As they say…scary.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan in Miscellany Room

Bill Donohue, president and sole member of what he hilariously calls “The Catholic League,” has written a “they do it too!!!” piece to explain why it’s no big deal for priests to rape children and the church to cover it up.

No one is calling for an investigation of Hollywood perverts, even though over 400 Hollywood executives and employees have been named for sexual misconduct in the past year-and-a-half. That’s over 100 more than the number of Pennsylvania priests implicated in sexual abuse over the past 70 years.

But many people are calling for investigations of Hollywood rapists, plus some investigations are already in print, like those of Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker and Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in the Times.

But also, a central point: Hollywood is in the entertainment business; it doesn’t pretend to be a holy moral arbiter for all of humanity. The Catholic church, on the other hand, does.

It’s back-to-school time, and that means more kids will be sexually molested. Fortunately for the public school teachers, they will be protected by their union chiefs. More important, no one will call for a grand jury investigation. As for the victims, if they don’t file notice of a claim within 90 days, they are out of luck, and nobody will do anything about it.

They do it too, they do it too!!! Cardinal Timothy Dolan made the same point during a previous explosion of coverage of rapist priests.

The Catholic church is a moral sewer.

Meanwhile, in Indonesia:

An Indonesian court has sentenced a Buddhist woman to 18 months in prison for blasphemy after she was accused of insulting Islam.

Meiliana, a 44-year-old ethnic Chinese woman, had complained the Muslim call to prayer, which is repeated five times a day, was being played too loudly at the mosque near her house in North Sumatra.

She burst into tears as the presiding judge, Wahyu Prasetyo Wibowo announced her sentence on Tuesday and she was taken from the court in handcuffs.

Damn I hate religion sometimes. This is one of those times. People shouldn’t be persecuted by any “call to prayer” in the first place, much less one that’s electronically amplified, much less five times a day every day starting at dawn.

In July 2016, mobs burned and ransacked at least 14 Buddhist temples throughout Tanjung Balai, a port town on Sumatra, following reports of Meiliana’s complaint about a mosque’s noisy loudspeakers.

Her lawyer, Ranto Sibarani, said they would appeal the verdict.

“We will appeal the verdict because the judges could not prove that our client has committed blasphemy,” he told The Jakarta Post.

Another reason to hate religion. Muslims persecuting Buddhists in Indonesia, Buddhists persecuting Muslims in Burma.

Responding to the sentencing, Usman Hamid, Amnesty International Indonesia’s executive director, said: “Making a complaint about noise is not a criminal offence. This ludicrous decision is a flagrant violation of freedom of expression.

“Sentencing someone to 18 months in prison for something so trivial is a stark illustration of the increasingly arbitrary and repressive application of the blasphemy law in the country.”

It’s also a flagrant violation of people’s right to sleep, work, read, think, talk without amplified yammerings about religion disturbing them five times a day every day. A pox on religion.

Well well well. How about that.

A jury has found former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty on tax and bank fraud charges — a major if not complete victory for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as he continues to investigate the president’s associates.

The jury convicted Manafort on eight of the 18 counts against him and said it was deadlocked on the other 10. U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis declared a mistrial on those charges.

What do you know.

President Trump reacted to the verdict by denouncing Mueller’s investigation.

“It doesn’t involve me … it’s a very sad thing,” the president said after arriving in West Virginia for a political rally, adding that the Manafort case “has nothing to do with” Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Sad.

Manafort’s possible prison sentence wasn’t immediately clear, but legal experts said he likely faces more than a decade in prison under federal sentencing guidelines.

The verdict comes as President Trump has stepped up his criticism of Mueller’s investigation, publicly criticizing it on a weekly basis. As the Manafort trial began, Trump called for the probe to be shut down immediately.

Weekly? Is that all? Not alternate daily?

The 18 charges in the Manafort trial centered around Manafort’s personal finances, and had little to do with the special counsel’s mandate of probing Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with those efforts.

But the trial was the first to emerge from Mueller’s probe, and as such it marked a significant public test of his work.

The jury deliberated for four days before announcing its verdict.

…

Manafort faces a second trial in September in Washington D.C., on charges he failed to register as a lobbyist for the Ukraine government, and conspired to tamper with witnesses in that case. Manafort has been in jail since June as a result of the witness tampering charges.

What he did in Ukraine is truly awful.

Wait a minute.

The premier of Alberta:

Eid Mubarak!
Wishing all Albertans who celebrate Eid al-Adha tonight peace and joy, and many blessings for the year ahead.#EidAlAdha #ableg #abpoli pic.twitter.com/LSA47PDUrz

— Rachel Notley (@RachelNotley) August 20, 2018

I’m all for politicians being welcoming and affirming and all that, especially of groups who are targets of hatred and scorn…but putting on hijab to do it? Women are targets of hatred and scorn, and one version of that is forcing them to wear uncomfortable stifling concealing layers of cloth, often on pain of violence or even death. I don’t see why Notley couldn’t send a friendly Eid Mubarak without putting on a Modesty Garment to do it.

– OK, why you wear hijab!

– OK, pourquoi tu porte un hijab! https://t.co/kURX6aGI3u

— Ensaf Haidar (@miss9afi) August 21, 2018

Mark Joseph Stern has a very useful backgrounder at Slate on the move to stifle the black vote in Georgia.

Because of its history of racist voting laws, Randolph County was once required to seek federal permission before altering its election procedures. But after the Supreme Court gutted this oversight in 2013, the county was freed to crack down on the franchise. It is no coincidence that its election board chose this moment to shutter most of its polls: In November, the popular Democrat Stacey Abrams will compete for the governorship against Republican Brian Kemp, the current Georgia secretary of state. Kemp, who has devoted his time in office to a ruthless campaign of voter suppression, called upon Randolph County to abandon the plan when it spurred widespread outrage. That being said, the key figure in the Randolph County controversy is a Kemp ally who was handpicked by the secretary of state to close polls throughout Georgia.

Emphasis added.

To understand the brazen attack on black suffrage now occurring in Randolph County, it’s important to remember that Georgia is in the midst of a seismic demographic shift. As whites cease to be the majority in more and more counties, Republicans have clung to power by disenfranchising minority voters. Kemp’s opposition to the Randolph County plan marks the first time that he has adopted an affirmatively pro-suffrage stance. During his nearly eight years as secretary of state, Kemp engaged in mass voter purges, removing hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls. State officials appear to have singled out black voters in targeted purges.

…

Perhaps most egregiously, Kemp launched an investigation into Abrams’ efforts to register more minority voters despite no evidence of fraud. He used the probe to harass and intimidate voting rights advocates. Later, he refused to register 40,000 would-be voters who had signed up through the drive. Speaking to Republicans behind closed doors, Kemp explained the stakes: “Registering all these minority voters that are out there … if they can do that, they can win these elections.” During Kemp’s tenure, Georgia’s population has increased substantially—yet the number of registered voters has actually gone down.

And Kemp seems to have played a big part in the Randolph County closures, even though he backed away once people noticed.

At the meeting on Thursday night, the election board revealed that the move had been encouraged by Mike Malone, an associate of Kemp’s. Malone, who attended the meeting, explained that Kemp—who now claims that the poll closures are a bad idea—had asked him to go around the state and “recommend polling place closures” to various counties. Ten Georgia counties have already taken Malone’s suggestions and closed polling places. All of those counties have large black populations.

Emphasis added again.

Kemp doesn’t need to continue shuttering polling places to disenfranchise minority voters in November. He has spent eight years purging black voters from the rolls and canceling their registrations. Last-minute chicanery may be helpful to Kemp, but it probably isn’t worth the publicity nightmare. It’s possible he’s already suppressed enough to votes to win himself four years in the governor’s mansion, a perch he’d doubtless use to continue his erosion of democracy in Georgia.

I recommend reading the whole piece; it’s shockingly informative.

Trump at his most graceful:

Speaking before agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection officers, Trump lashed out at opponents of ICE and CBP (which Trump repeatedly referred to as CBC) who have blocked access to ICE offices and called for abolition of the agency over the administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents and strict enforcement of immigration laws.

“The vast majority, they’re all with you,” Trump said, calling opponents a small group that gets a lot of publicity.

“They have no courage, they have no guts, just big loudmouths. We don’t want to put up with that.”

Ah that reminds me of someone, who can it be. Oh yes, chickenshit  big loudmouth Trump, that’s who.

Trump singled out several ICE and Border Patrol agents during his remarks, including Border Patrol agent Adrian Anzaldua, who was responsible for discovering a trailer truck containing nearly 80 immigrants in Laredo, Texas.

Trump asked Anzaldua to come up to the stage to recount his actions, saying “He speaks perfect English.”

Geddit? Geddit? Despite the weird creepy foreign name that sounds like somebody brown from Down There, he speaks perfect English.

Too bad Trump doesn’t.

That Georgia county that’s planning to close 7 of its 9 polling places is getting a lot of attention from civil rights groups.

The closures would come just before a high-stakes midterm election in which Stacey Abrams, a black woman, is the Democratic nominee for governor.

“This is nothing more than a racially motivated, voter suppression scheme that aims to lock Black voters out of a historic election cycle,” Kristen Clarke, who leads the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law, tweeted on Sunday. The Lawyers’ Committee, representing three Georgia civil rights groups, sent a letter to the Randolph County Board of Elections and Registration threatening legal action if the plan moves forward.

It’s a rural county, with no public transportation, and a majority-black population.

Some residents would have to travel more than 10 miles to vote in a county that lacks public transportation. According to the Census Bureau, the county is more than 60 percent black, and 30 percent of residents live in poverty, nearly twice Georgia’s 16 percent statewide poverty rate.

Last week, the Georgia chapter of the ACLU likewise threatened legal action against the county. In a letter, the group pointed out that the transportation difficulties of reaching a polling location would fall disproportionately on the county’s poor, black, rural voters. “When polling place configurations or closures have such a starkly disproportionate impact on racial minorities or lower-income rural voters without transportation, such closures almost certainly constitute a violation of the Voting Rights Act or the United States Constitution,” the letter warned.

That kind of crap used to be absolutely routine in the South, and that’s why Johnson pushed for the Voting Rights Act.

The election board defended its plan at two contentious public meetings last week, according to the local Fox affiliate. A consultant hired by the board explained that the seven locations slated for closure are not compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act, and the board doesn’t have time to fix the problem before the election. The Lawyers’ Committee, finding the justification unreasonable, submitted a public records request in order to acquire information about how the board reached its decision. Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, who is also the Republican nominee for governor, issued a statement urging the county to abandon the plan; Abrams likewise announced her opposition.

The plan to close these precincts was made possible by the Supreme Court, which in 2013 struck down a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to clear changes to voting procedures with the federal government. In his decision, Chief Justice John Roberts said that the South had changed since the law passed in 1965, and that the burden of clearing changes with the government was no longer necessary.

Ha. Ha ha ha fucking ha.

Oh good god.

This is spectacular. pic.twitter.com/rGybFAAva4

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) August 20, 2018

Staggered by the malevolent stupidity of that opening I rushed to find the source: “The ‘Nanette’ Problem.”

It took me a while to write a critique of Nanette, the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby’s universally praised one-woman Netflix special that premiered in June, because I couldn’t quite figure out what I hated about it.

But when my cis, straight, liberal parents told me how much they loved it, the reason for my dislike coalesced: In order to make straight, cis viewers feel comfortably woke, Gadsby shits on an entire language of comedy developed over decades largely by Jews and queers. The greatest trick Gadsby pulls is convincing those who have little interest in actual gender, sexuality, or political radicalism — and apparently little knowledge of comedy — that they are watching something new and radical.

“Little interest in gender,” says a man about a feminist lesbian. I guess this man simply assumes that people he calls “cis” have little interest in gender, because of being “cis” and all? That it’s only people who declare themselves trans or queer or nonbinary who have lotta interest in gender? Needless to say, Peter takes care to let us know he’s nonbinary.

Comedy, Gadsby says, cannot hold her trauma — and so she spends the last half of her show explicating her trauma, saying that she actually cut off a true story at the halfway point earlier in the set, because in truth it ended with her being beaten up for being gay, and that no one would laugh at that.

Gadsby is good at relaying these powerful and heartbreaking stories of trauma. They’re important to tell. As a nonbinary person with trans and queer friends who have been harassed and assaulted for who they are, they resonated with me. But it’s in her analysis of comedy that Gadsby lost me.

So apparently it’s only nonbinary, trans, and queer people who understand about being harassed and assaulted for who they are? Lesbians aren’t good enough? Women aren’t good enough? They’re all way too old hat and wrong wave and “cis” and parent-like?

Comedy can be radical; it’s just that when it is, it’s not typically on Netflix. Queer and trans people have been performing comedy that transgresses how we traditionally think of the form: sets without easy punchlines that are weird and often unreadable unless you’ve been deep into the lexicon of queerness for years. There’s new, fresh, and interesting queer comedy being performed in basements and clubs in New York and elsewhere (see: here and here ) — but it’s comedy that is written and performed in a self-referential vernacular built over years that makes it mostly accessible only to fellow queers (and less-covered by the mainstream media).

In other words, Peter Moskowitz is cooler than any of us can dream of being, and obviously way cooler than that boring lesbian Hannah Gadsby.

In a few lines, Gadsby completely lets her audience off the hook, transforming justified queer rage (whether it comes in the form of outward anger or inwardly facing self-deprecating humor) that is often ignored by the mainstream press and the rest of society because it can be so challenging to power structures, into a fault within herself, and by extension all of us.

As a queer person, I want my anger to be heard. I believe my anger constructive, even if it’s self-deprecating, and even if you don’t get it. By telling us we need to challenge our anger, sublimate it into love and understanding lest we destroy the world, Gadsby is not challenging her audience, she’s challenging her fellow queers to be more respectful, more civil, to display our pain in ways that cis, straight people can appreciate, in ways that get us called groundbreaking by those who have broken no ground, and have no interest in listening to us when we speak in ways that are unreadable. Gadsby hasn’t changed comedy, she’s just let cis and straight people in on the joke. And there’s nothing radical about that.

Seriously. The whole point is to exclude cis and straight people.