What Trump should have been asking Xi about instead of three American basketball players who were going to be sent home anyway:

After the death in July of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was China’s most prominent democracy activist, many advocates wondered what would happen to his wife, the artist Liu Xia.

Ms. Liu, a painter and photographer, expressed a desire to relocate overseas after her husband’s death, but activists say that she is being held in unofficial custody away from family and friends.

William Nee, a China researcher for Amnesty International, said Ms. Liu was being punished “simply for being the wife of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.”

Friends of Ms. Liu hoped Mr. Trump, whose administration had previously called for her freedom, would raise the issue with Mr. Xi during his Beijing visit. But Mr. Trump has not said whether he did so, and the Chinese authorities have not offered any new details about her fate, adding to fears that the government may continue to restrict her freedom.

Is it at all likely that he did? Would he have been able to keep the facts about her in his head long enough? Would he have cared? I think the chances are zero.

Ilham Tohti had long called on the Chinese authorities to show greater respect for the culture of Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority who live primarily in Xinjiang, a western autonomous region. Mr. Tohti, an economics professor, documented abuses by the police in Xinjiang and urged the government to do more to defuse tensions between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group.

In 2014, Mr. Tohti was arrested and later convicted of promoting separatism. The government portrayed him as a demagogue who embraced hatred and violence. He was sentenced to life in prison, and the authorities have rebuffed calls to lessen his punishment.

We know Trump wouldn’t go for that. Uighurs are mostly Mooslims – oh no no no no no.

As a lawyer, Wang Quanzhang gravitated toward controversy, taking on cases that involved religious worshipers accusing the government of persecution and activists protesting forced demolitions of houses.

But in the summer of 2015, Mr. Wang’s career came to an abrupt end when he was detained by the police as part of a crackdown on hundreds of human rights lawyers across China. He was later accused of subverting state power and inciting social unrest.

Also not Trump’s kind of thing. He sides with power, not with human rights activists.

Heather Brunskell-Evans wrote a public statement to the Women’s Equality Party dated November 19th.

The Women’s Equality Party (WEP) has informed me that three Party Members have alleged that my “conduct” on the BBC Radio 4 Programme the Moral Maze on 15th November 2017 has “promoted prejudice against the transgender community”. The Party is currently giving weight to this allegation. As a Spokesperson for the Policy on Violence Against Women and Girls I have been informed I am under review by the Executive Committee.

The Committee is now examining my public statements including my blogs, social media, and on-line forums. It is also assessing whether I have complied with the Volunteer Agreement which I signed at the beginning of my term of office. If the Committee concludes my views do promote prejudice, ‘any decision of the Executive Body shall be effective immediately but may be appealed to the Appeals Body, whose decision shall be final’ [1.]

[1.] I mistakenly understood this statement to mean my membership would be revoked. WEP has clarified: ‘According to the Constitution, the Executive Committee will decide whether censure is required and what the appropriate sanction should be in those circumstances’

At the same time, the Party is completely silent about the “conduct” of a fellow panellist on the Moral Maze, Jane Fae. Fae, a trans woman who transitioned to a feminine identity in middle-age, is a speaker for Mermaids (the charity that supports children to transition).  She alleged that the prescription of hormone blockers to delay puberty in girls, or the injection of testosterone at the age of 16, is of no greater social or moral concern than prescribing the contraceptive pill.

There are complex psychological and social reasons why, in a society structured by gender and the sexualisation of girls and young women, there is an unprecedented upsurge of girls declaring they are ‘really’ boys. However, there is no credible science to back the narrative that gender ‘identity’ (rather than biological sex) is innate. Hormone blockers have serious consequences on the body, including the probability of infertility. A substantive number of medical practitioners are extremely worried about this practice (as well as the serious medical interventions that usually follow, such as surgical removal of breasts) but daren’t speak out for fear of accusations of transphobia.

However, there is no credible science to back the narrative that gender ‘identity’ (rather than biological sex) is innate. 

It’s not really even a scientific question – “identity” isn’t really a scientific category. Identity is a social or political or literary category, or all three or two of the three. Subjective states aren’t really scientific categories, because they’re too…subjective.

And that’s why all this noisy bullying insistence that there are definitely true facts about “gender identity” is so irritating, especially since the definitely true facts change every week or two.

To sum  up: it’s all much too fuzzy and debatable to exile or punish or investigate people over. The WEP shouldn’t be investigating Brunskell-Evans.

I joined the Women’s Equality Party because I believed in a political party which would keep at the forefront the rights and safety of girls and women. Through the example of the Moral Maze, the Party has demonstrated it shares similar approaches to transgenderism and to girls and women’s rights as other political parties: it has not questioned Fae’s views whilst rendering my free speech ideologically suspect; it is concerned to protect the trans community rather than the swathes of girls who are increasingly subject to harmful medical practices.

I refute that I have promoted prejudice against the trans community either on the programme or through my writing and social media.  I have called for transparent public debate, without fear of reprisal, of the social, psychological and physical consequences of the narrative that children can be born in ‘the wrong body’.

Both can be true, after all. It can be true that there are people who really do need to live as the Other sex (other than their natal sex or biological sex – both of which terms have been ruled impermissible, so apply your own adjective if you feel rumpled) and never look back, and that there are people who only think they do, temporarily, because of social contagion. In fact we pretty much know both are true, don’t we? We know the first category exists, and since we know some people have detransitioned, we also know the second one does. If both exist, what is so wicked about urging caution and low speed when dealing with teenagers? Teenagers haven’t finished cooking yet, so how can they possibly know for sure that they want to live as the Other sex forever?

But by this point the pouncing on Error has become an entrenched part of trans activism, so there we are. Not a good sitch.

From the Times (the London one): another woman no-platformed by university students for wrongthink about gender.

Heather Brunskell-Evans, a research fellow at King’s College London, who is also a spokeswoman for the Women’s Equality Party, told The Times that she believed such institutions were running scared from public debate, out of fear of offending the transgender lobby.

She had been asked by medical students from the Reproductive and Sexual Health Society at King’s to give a talk this week on the subject of pornography and the sexualisation of young women, at the college’s Guy’s Campus in south London.

But days after appearing on the Moral Maze, the Radio 4 series hosted by Michael Buerk, she was told that the event had been cancelled because of concerns that her views on “transgender health . . . would violate the student union’s ‘Safe Space’ policy”.

What views? On Moral Maze, Brunskell-Evans and a psychotherapist and two trans activists talked about defining gender.

The academic had argued in favour of transgender adults defining themselves “in whichever way they want”, but she questioned the advice being promoted to schools and youth groups by transgender organisations that positive affirmation was the only correct way to support children who expressed confusion over their gender.

She said: “If a child decides that it’s an astronaut, one can play along with this. One doesn’t have to moralise about it but quite clearly the child is not an astronaut. In fact it’s incumbent upon adults who are responsible for the welfare, psychological and social and medical, of children not to go along with this story.” It is understood her comments prompted three complaints from transgender members of the Women’s Equality Party, accusing her of “promoting prejudice against the transgender community”.

There’s no such thing as “the transgender community.” There are transgender people, there is trans activism, but there’s no such thing as “the community,” any more than there’s “the feminist community” or “the immigrant community.” In this context the word is being used to bully, making it sound as if skeptical academics are invading a peaceful little village at the foot of the Alps.

But the WEP is investigating Brunskell-Evans, who is their spokeswoman on violence against women and girls.

Dr Brunskell-Evans said she feared “there’s something very dark going on. People who were male are now in the Women’s Equality Party dictating what the party spokeswoman should say on issues affecting women and girls. You could not write this.

“The cowardliness of institutional response is more than reprehensible. No one will speak out. Good people are standing back, doing nothing, as others get pilloried. Organisations and individuals are petrified to be seen as taking any other view than unequivocally endorsing transgender doctrine. It’s truly shocking.

“How has the trans lobby become so powerful that people, including those medical practitioners about to be qualified in the specific field of sexual and reproductive health, are unwilling to tolerate a talk from me on another topic?”

Twitter, mostly.

Killing net neutrality will be very bad.

Back in 2005, a small phone company based in North Carolina named Madison River began preventing its subscribers from making phone calls using the internet application Vonage. As Vonage was a competitor in the phone call market, Madison River’s action was obviously anticompetitive. Consumers complained, and the Federal Communications Commission, under Michael Powell, its Republican-appointed chairman, promptly fined the company and forced it to stop blocking Vonage.

That was the moment when “net neutrality” rules went from a mere academic proposal to a part of the United States legal order. On that foundation — an open internet, with no blocking — much of our current internet ecosystem was built.

On Tuesday, the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, announced plans to eliminate even the most basic net neutrality protections — including the ban on blocking — replacing them with a “transparency” regime enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. “Transparency,” of course, is a euphemism for “doing nothing.”

It’s like the courts ruling that pouring money into politics is fine as long as it’s all “transparent” – as if we all have the time and resources to keep track of who is bribing which senators. “Transparency” is no use to us; we want to use the damn internet, not spend all our time monitoring interference with it.

Companies like Madison River, it seems, will soon be able to block internet calls so long as they disclose the blocking (presumably in fine print). Indeed, a broadband carrier like AT&T, if it wanted, might even practice internet censorship akin to that of the Chinese state, blocking its critics and promoting its own agenda.

Allowing such censorship is anathema to the internet’s (and America’s) founding spirit. And by going this far, the F.C.C. may also have overplayed its legal hand. So drastic is the reversal of policy (if, as expected, the commission approves Mr. Pai’s proposal next month), and so weak is the evidence to support the change, that it seems destined to be struck down in court.

The problem for Mr. Pai is that government agencies are not free to abruptly reverse longstanding rules on which many have relied without a good reason, such as a change in factual circumstances. A mere change in F.C.C. ideology isn’t enough. As the Supreme Court has said, a federal agency must “examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action.” Given that net neutrality rules have been a huge success by most measures, the justification for killing them would have to be very strong.

It isn’t. The “justification” is that cable and phone companies want more money. They make lots already, but they want more, damn it. What their customers want is beside the point.

Mr. Pai faces a more serious legal problem. Because he is killing net neutrality outright, not merely weakening it, he will have to explain to a court not just the shift from 2015 but also his reasoning for destroying the basic bans on blocking and throttling, which have been in effect since 2005 and have been relied on extensively by the entire internet ecosystem.

This will be a difficult task. What has changed since 2004 that now makes the blocking or throttling of competitors not a problem? The evidence points strongly in the opposite direction: There is a long history of anticompetitive throttling and blocking — often concealed — that the F.C.C. has had to stop to preserve the health of the internet economy. Examples include AT&T’s efforts to keep Skype off iPhones and the blocking of Google Wallet by Verizon. Services like Skype and Netflix would have met an early death without basic net neutrality protections. Mr. Pai needs to explain why we no longer have to worry about this sort of threat — and “You can trust your cable company” will not suffice.

I’m so tired of living in Mordor.

The Times points out that Europe is tilting more towards National Pride than against it.

Far from the quieted theaters of Balkan conflict, nationalist passions, the clamor for redrawn frontiers and collisions of faith are rising anew, not to the crump of mortar fire and the stutter of machine guns, but in the recharting of the political landscape.

In October, Austria became the latest European nation to veer to the right, following Hungary and Poland. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany secured enough votes in national elections in September to enter Parliament for the first time. In many lands there is a sense of flux, from the secessionist yearnings of Catalonia in Spain to Britain’s planned departure from the European Union.

…

In Britain, many who voted in June 2016 to leave the European Union did so, they said, out of resentment of outsiders’ influence over their destinies and the presence of what they saw as unchecked European immigrants.

In Serbia, calls are intensifying for a return to the nationalist politics of the 1990s. Once-discredited senior officials from the barbarous government of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade — and not a few convicted war criminals — are reclaiming positions of prominence.

In the US there’s a racist maniac as head of state.

Commenting on the outcome of the trial in The Hague, Natasa Kandic, a leading Serbian human rights activist, said that with the atrocities in the Bosnian war, “we stopped being part of the civilized world.”

“Now we can see who stopped our progress and why we became a society without solidarity or compassion,” Ms. Kandic said.

It can happen to anyone. Beware.

News from the Hague:

The former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić, nicknamed the ‘butcher of Bosnia’, has been sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

More than 20 years after the Srebrenica massacre, Mladić was found guilty at the United Nations-backed international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague of 10 offences involving extermination, murder and persecution of civilian populations.

As he entered the courtroom, Mladić gave a broad smile and thumbs up to the cameras – a gesture that infuriated relatives of the victims. His defiance shifted into detachment as the judgment began: Mladić played with his fingers and nodded occasionally, looking initially relaxed.

The verdict was disrupted for more than half an hour when he asked the judges for a bathroom break. After he returned, defence lawyers requested that proceedings be halted or shortened because of his high blood pressure. The judges denied the request. Mladić then stood up shouting “this is all lies” and “I’ll fuck your mother”. He was forcibly removed from the courtroom. The verdicts were read in his absence.

Interesting how they go for the mother, isn’t it. Duterte called Obama “son of a whore.” It’s always a woman’s fault really.

Men and boys were the victims at Srebrenica though.

The one-time fugitive from international justice faced 11 charges, two of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and four of violations of the laws or customs of war. He was cleared of one count of genocide, but found guilty of all other charges. The separate counts related to “ethnic cleansing” operations in Bosnia, sniping and shelling attacks on besieged civilians in Sarajevo, the massacre of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica and taking UN personnel hostage in an attempt to deter Nato airstrikes.

The trial took 530 days spread out over four years, with more than 600 people testifying.

Relatives of victims flew into the Netherlands to attend the hearing, determined to see Mladić receive justice decades after the end of the war in which more than 100,000 people were killed.

Among those present was Fikret Alić, the Bosnian who was photographed as an emaciated prisonerbehind the wire of a prison camp in 1992. “Justice has won and the war criminal has been convicted,” he said after the verdict. Others were reduced to tears by the judge’s description of past atrocities.

Phil Nijhuis/AP

There are still people who think he’s a hero though.

The hearing, broadcast live, was followed closely in Bosnia. The Bosnian prime minister, Denis Zvizdić, said the verdict “confirmed that war criminals cannot escape justice regardless of how long they hide”.

In Lazarevo, the Serbian village where Mladić was arrested in 2011, residents dismissed the guilty verdicts as biased. One, Igor Topolic, said: “All this is a farce for me. He [Mladić] is a Serbian national hero.”

Mladić’s home village of Bozinovici retains a street named after the former general, where he is praised as a symbol of defiance and national pride.

That’s what “national pride” does to people.

But! Don’t worry – the Laurier Rainbow Centre wrote an emergency Facebook post to explain how transphobic it all is.

Dear Laurier Community,

In the face of recent media attention, we feel it is our responsibility to speak out against the climate of transphobia that is being fostered at Laurier. The university’s silence on these issues has allowed for a one-sided perspective to be cultivated in the media that is entirely disconnected from the experiences of trans people. We speak now as a collective of queer and trans students, asking you to engage critically with the media you read and to hold our community with care.

On Friday November 10th, an article was published in the National Post that disparaged the university’s response to a situation that emerged in a first year Communications course. We are obligated to uphold the confidentiality of all parties and, therefore, are unable to comment directly on the situation that instigated this article.* We can, however, speak to the ways in which this article, and the dozens that have been published since, are defending and perpetuating transphobic beliefs and attitudes.

*Nonsense; it was all over the press for days, with the protagonists named. Also a situation can’t “instigate” an article. They mean “inspired” or “motivated.”

Under the banner of freedom of speech, the news media have advanced a critique of institutional practices aimed at increasing inclusivity and challenging oppression. The always present but often unnamed ‘other’ at the center of these critiques, are the trans and non-binary individuals who these institutional practices would support. We must understand the ways in which these attacks on the “PC culture” of the university are, in actuality, attacks on the needs of trans people that these critics do not support.

The discourse of freedom of speech, is being used to cover over the underlying reality of transphobia that is so deeply ingrained in our contemporary political context. Ironically, these discourses seem intent on silencing those who speak out against the systemic violence perpetrated against trans people while propagating a far right ideology. In fact, recent empirical studies conducted by White and Crandall (2017) have shown that freedom of speech endorsement is predicted by underlying prejudicial attitudes.

So…they’re saying Rambukka was “speaking out against the systemic violence perpetrated against trans people” when he bullied and browbeat Lindsay Shepherd for using a brief clip of Jordan Peterson in her tutorial? How was he doing that? Shepherd wasn’t endorsing Peterson, so even if you accept the claim that Peterson is perpetrating violence against trans people, it’s not reasonable to claim that Shepherd is also doing so.

We must, therefore, be critical of the ways in which trans bodies are being appropriated as the battleground on which the war of freedom of speech is waged.

Really. Shepherd stole trans bodies and fought a battle while standing on them? Really? Why hasn’t this been reported?

Debates about gender neutral pronouns or the validity of trans identities are not only discussions about (dis)allowable speech but, also, affronts on the reality of trans experience. These debates, regardless of how “neutrally” they are presented, constitute a form of epistemic violence that dehumanizes trans people by denying the validity of trans experience.

No they don’t. You can’t use “regardless of” that way. You can’t say “regardless of the obvious fact that presenting an example of an opinion is not the same as embracing it, I’m going to say it is, because I want to” and expect to be taken seriously. That’s a good deal more “epistemically violent” than anything Lindsay Shepherd did.

For trans people, these debates invalidate their gender identity or expression as wrong or pathological, with very material impacts for their well-being. According to a national study, two-thirds of trans youth in Canada have engaged in self-harm and one-third have attempted suicide (Veale et al., 2015). For cisgender (non-trans) people, these debates validate the ideologies of cisnormativity and genderism that inform transphobia, once again with material impacts for trans people. According to the Trans Pulse project, for example, 20% of trans people in Ontario have been physically or sexually assaulted for being trans and 34% have been verbally threatened or harassed (Bauer & Scheim, 2015).

In this context, we must respond to the enactment and maintenance of transphobia and problematize media that upholds transphobic ideologies. We should take students’ concerns about their safety and well-being as a result of the intensification of these ideologies on campus very seriously. These concerns are real, with students accessing the Rainbow Centre for support around experiences of harassment in their classrooms, on campus, and in online forms, as a result of this increased media attention. The Rainbow Centre itself is being targeted on this issue, with antagonizing posters being left on our windows and emails criticizing our educational initiatives around Transgender Day of Remembrance.

These experiences of transphobia and their aforementioned implications, are the realities in which our conversations about this issue need to be embedded. We all have a responsibility to create an environment for learning and living in which trans people are safe from epistemic and transphobic violence. We all have a responsibility to speak out about these issues, and we call on our allies who have remained silent to please take a stance. This political moment is intent on derogating trans people in the name of freedom of speech and we cannot allow for this profound violence to be continued.

It isn’t violence. There are arguments that can be made about ways that speech can create climates that become friendly to violence; I think Trump did that during his campaign, for instance, and has been doing a lot of it since. But that doesn’t make the speech itself “violence” and people will just roll their eyes when you tell them it does.

Grade: F. Repeat the course.

So it appears Laurier is feeling a little embarrassed, or at least a little uncomfortable. It’s apologized to Lindsay Shepherd.

The president of Wilfrid Laurier University said the school is proceeding with a third-party investigation into the dispute with graduate student Lindsay Shepherd, but said recently revealed audio recordings of her interactions with her immediate superiors made it clear an apology was in order.

Shepherd said she discreetly recorded a meeting with three Laurier faculty and staff members in which she was roundly criticized for failing to condemn the views of polarizing University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who has refused to use gender-neutral pronouns. She had aired a clip of a debate featuring the professor as part of a communications tutorial.

Three people, to shame and berate one grad student.

“The conversation I heard does not reflect the values and practices to which Laurier aspires,” the university’s president, Deborah MacLatchy, said in a statement Tuesday. “I am sorry it occurred in the way that it did and I regret the impact it had on Lindsay Shepherd.”

Shepherd said she accepted and welcomed the apology, but felt it rang hollow coming on the heels of intensive media attention around her case.

…

The saga began earlier this month when Shepherd led two tutorial groups of students taking a first-year communications course.

As part of a lesson on the complexities of grammar, Shepherd said she was trying to demonstrate that the structure of a language can impact the society in which its spoken in ways people might not anticipate.

To illustrate her point, she said she mentioned that long-standing views on gender had likely been shaped by the gender-specific pronouns that are part of English’s fundamental grammatical structure.

And her use of the clip with Peterson was part of that illustration; attribution not use.

Rambukkana also apologized in an open letter to Shepherd…sort of apologized. Passive-aggressively half apologized and half said he was still right.

“While I still think that such material needs to be handled carefully, especially so as to not infringe on the rights of any of our students or make them feel unwelcome in the learning environment, I believe you are right that making a space for controversial or oppositional views is important, and even essential to a university,” he wrote in the letter.

“The trick is how to properly contextualize such material.”

Rambukkana also apologized for meeting with Shepherd in the company of two other colleagues, responding to criticism that such a set-up demonstrated a power imbalance.

Ya think? Bully.

Trump and his sleazy friends continue smashing everything.

The Federal Communications Commission announced on Tuesday that it planned to dismantle landmark regulations that ensure equal access to the internet, clearing the way for companies to charge more and block access to some websites.

The proposal, put forward by the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, is a sweeping repeal of rules put in place by the Obama administration that prohibited high-speed internet service providers from blocking or slowing down the delivery websites, or charging extra fees for the best quality of streaming and other internet services for their subscribers.

Good for AT&T and Comcast, bad for everyone else.

The plan to repeal the 2015 net neutrality rules also reverses a hallmark decision by the agency to declare broadband as a service as essential as phones and electricity, a move that created the legal foundation for the net neutrality rules and underscored the importance of high-speed internet service to the nation.

The proposal is widely expected to be approved during a Dec. 14 meeting in a 3-to-2 majority vote along party lines.

Smashing all the things.

The world of morning tv news is a closed book to me, a locked room, a sealed vault. The idea of tv news in the morning makes me feel queasy, sort of like chocolate cake for breakfast. This is why I didn’t know Charlie Rose was a big noise in morning tv. I thought he was a mystifyingly big noise in public tv chat shows late at night. Apparently he covered both ends of the day, which just goes to show what weirdly low standards we have in the US…as if we needed more evidence of that.

Gayle King, Norah O’Donnell, and Charlie Rose built “CBS This Morning” from a dusty franchise into a lively, news-focused broadcast, primarily around the banter and bon mots they shared as the show’s genial hosts.

Bons mots, please; adjectives agree with nouns in French. But anyway, see what I mean? Ugh – banter and bad jokes from “genial” people at dawn; shoot me now.

Anyway, point is, no bons mots this morning.

On Tuesday morning, Mr. Rose was absent, and Ms. King and Ms. O’Donnell were left to deliver the news that he had been accused by at least eight women of making crude sexual advances.

“None of us ever thought that we’d be sitting at this table in particular and telling this story,” Ms. King said grimly. “But here we are.”

Being ungenial.

The backstage drama of morning television rarely makes it on air in a genre that thrives on affability and studied ease.

But on Tuesday, “CBS This Morning” viewers witnessed an extraordinary public reckoning. The show’s producers devoted the opening 10 minutes of the show to an unvarnished account of the allegations that have been made against Mr. Rose, including a snippet from a media critic, James Warren, who said that the veteran broadcaster’s career was “probably toast.”

CBS fired him later in the morning.

You know, here’s another thing. He’s 75. Can you imagine a woman being one of the hosts of that show or any other show like it at age 75? It is to laugh. For men, age is added gravitas; for women, age is ewwwwwwwwwwww gross get out of here.

(Mind you, not absolutely all men. It hasn’t given Trump any more goddam gravitas.)

As a wave of harassment claims has cascaded across industries, news organizations have increasingly faced the delicate task of covering allegations against their own employees.

Mark Halperin of NBC News, the former New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier and Michael Oreskes, National Public Radio’s top editor, are among the prominent media figures to be accused of sexual misconduct. On Monday, The New York Times suspended Glenn Thrush, one of its White House correspondents, after the website Vox published an article in which four women described him engaging in inappropriate sexual behavior.

And since then people have been pointing out Glenn Thrush’s relentless obsession with Clinton’s emails. Makes ya think.

Now it makes sense.

Megyn Kelly has spoken out about an experience she had with the TV host [Charlie Rose], whom she also considers a friend. She recalled asking Rose to emcee the first event on her book tour last year, during which she said Rose hijacked the opportunity and instead interrogated her on the sexual-harassment accusations she had made against Roger Ailes. “The exchange felt to me like a cross-examine focused on one issue,” she said on Megyn Kelly Today. “I felt defensive in the exchange with Charlie and wound up angry about how he handled my book event. Obviously now his behavior makes more sense.”

Sinister sense, but sense.

Her response to it then: “I sent him a bottle of wine and a thank you note.” Correcting the audience’s applause at what seemed like Kelly taking the high road, Kelly said she only backed off because women are taught it’s “better to be nice” than challenge a man. “It’s well past time for us to express our upset,” she said. “The time has come. The time has come. We are in the middle of an empowerment revolution in this country.”

Taken long enough, hasn’t it.

Another one.

Eight women have told The Washington Post that longtime television host Charlie Rose made unwanted sexual advances toward them, including lewd phone calls, walking around naked in their presence, or groping their breasts, buttocks or genital areas.

The women were employees or aspired to work for Rose at the “Charlie Rose” show from the late 1990s to as recently as 2011. They ranged in age from 21 to 37 at the time of the alleged encounters. Rose, 75, whose show airs on PBS and Bloomberg TV, also co-hosts “CBS This Morning” and is a contributing correspondent for “60 Minutes.”

I can’t stand Charlie Rose and never watch him. It’s beyond me why he’s ever been a thing.

Within hours of the publication of this story, PBS and Bloomberg LP immediately suspended distribution of the “Charlie Rose” show. CBS announced that it was suspending Rose as it looked into the matter.

I suppose they’ll replace him with Deepak Chopra or one of those people who walk around on stages talking about vitamins.

Most of the women said Rose alternated between fury and flattery in his interactions with them. Five described Rose putting his hand on their legs, sometimes their upper thigh, in what they perceived as a test to gauge their reactions. Two said that while they were working for Rose at his residences or were traveling with him on business, he emerged from the shower and walked naked in front of them. One said he groped her buttocks at a staff party.

Naked Charlie Rose. Naked furious Charlie Rose. Nope, I’m not seeing the allure.

Rumors about Rose’s behavior have circulated for years. One of the authors of this report, Outlook contributing writer Irin Carmon, first heard and attempted to report on the allegations involving two of the women while she was a journalist at Jezebel in 2010 but was unable to confirm them. In the past several weeks in the wake of accusations against Harvey Weinstein, Carmon and Post investigative reporter Amy Brittain jointly began contacting dozens of men and women who had worked on the “Charlie Rose” show or interviewed for jobs there.

A woman then in her 30s who was at the Bellport home in 2010 to discuss a job opportunity said Rose appeared before her in an untethered bathrobe, naked underneath. She said he subsequently attempted to put his hands down her pants. She said she pushed his hands away and wept throughout the encounter.

In his statement he said: “I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realize I was mistaken.” Oh come on.

Rose’s eponymous show, with its trademark black background and round oak table, has been in production since 1991. What it lacks in mass viewership, the “Charlie Rose” show makes up for in prestige and high-profile bookings of the likes of former president Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Warren Buffett. Rose’s show is produced by Charlie Rose Inc., an independent television production company, and distributed by PBS. It is filmed at Bloomberg headquarters in Manhattan.

The prestige is what I don’t get. He’s dull, and he asks dull questions.

The “Charlie Rose” show prides itself on its highbrow intellectual ambition, but his life is glamorous, full of black-tie galas and famous friends. He can be charming and generous, consulting favored employees for their opinions on what to ask heads of state or whisking them off to exotic locations for interviews. But his wrath was swift and often fiercely personal, according to interviews with multiple former employees.

Maybe Star Dudes aren’t such a terrific idea after all.

Brian Platt at the National Post on C-16 and whether or not it makes it a Crime for people who teach in universities to show examples of more than one point of view by way of illustrating that there is often more than one point of view.

A federal bill passed last June that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity or expression had been hotly contested by critics who called it a drastic restriction on free speech rights.

Now, just five months after it became law, Bill C-16 has its first big controversy — and it shows how the legislation is being misinterpreted in practice.

Isn’t that one of the things critics warned about? I didn’t follow the discussion, but that generally is one of the things critics warn about when new laws turn up forbidding certain kinds of speech. Critics warn about it because it’s a thing that can happen. People are assholes, and they will pounce on opportunities to bully others the way those assholes pounced on Shepherd.

Lindsay Shepherd, a 22-year-old teaching assistant in communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, was disciplined this month by faculty for showing first-year students clips from a debate on pronouns and gender. The debate, aired on Ontario’s public broadcaster TVO, involved University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who’s become internationally known for railing against gender-neutral pronouns as radical left-wing indoctrination.

Shepherd was called into a meeting with her supervising professor, Nathan Rambukkana, as well as another professor and an official from the university’s diversity and equity office. In a recording, Rambukkana is heard telling a tearful Shepherd that she created a “toxic climate” for students by showing parts of Peterson’s argument, and compared it to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler.”

But Rambukkana goes further, telling Shepherd she’s also in violation of the legal regime created by C-16.

“These arguments are counter to the Canadian Human Rights Code ever since, and I know that you talked about C-16, ever since this passed, it is discriminatory to be targeting someone due to their gender identity and gender expression,” he says.

That was one of the more disgusting aspects of that trainwreck, the way they kept talking about targeting, as if she were doing any such thing.

Here, for the record, is what Bill C-16 does and doesn’t do when it comes to debates on transgender issues.

C-16 added gender identity and expressions as a category for what counts under Canada’s hate-crime laws, which include calling for genocide or wilfully inciting hatred toward an identifiable group. The categories of colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation and mental or physical disability were already on the list of identifiable groups.

The threshold for a conviction under these laws is high, and charges can only be laid with the approval of a province’s attorney general.

The bill also added the targeting of gender identity and expression as an aggravating factor in sentencing. This means that if you’re convicted of an offence such as assault, the sentence can be made harsher if there’s evidence you were motivated by hatred or prejudice on this basis.

If you’re giving a tutorial on communication in a university, not so much – Rambukkana notwithstanding.

Anyway, it’s part of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which doesn’t apply to people who work at universities.

Universities instead fall under provincial codes — but the Ontario Human Rights Code has included gender identity and expression for five years now, long before Peterson gained fame for his arguments.

Ok, so is it a crime under that code?

Nobody knows for sure, but it would be a stretch.

A workplace, housing or service provider covered by the provincial code could be forced to pay a fine or change their practices if found to be discriminating on the matter of gender identity or expression. But it’s unclear how the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario would rule on a case involving pronoun use.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission, which is separate from the tribunal and focuses on education, has a policy guideline saying that “refusing to refer to a person by their self-identified name and proper personal pronoun” could constitute gender-based harassment.

But the commission also says cases involving pronouns and free speech require a balancing act.

“The Supreme Court has also found that some limits on free speech are justifiable to protect people from harassment and discrimination in social areas like employment and services,” says a document posted online. “On the other hand, decision-makers have said that freedom of expression is much less likely to be limited in the context of a public debate on social, political or religious issues in a university or a newspaper.”

Cossman strongly doubts that showing some clips as part of an academic debate would lead to a discrimination finding.

“It is hard to imagine that a court would make such a finding,” she said. “The point of showing the video was to discuss the content of the ideas, and a court would have to balance the rights to non-discrimination with the values of academic freedom and freedom of expression.”

I’m strangely not reassured. It’s hard to imagine but not impossible.

Pronouns for fuck’s sake.

Alice Ollstein at Talking Points Memo makes the zany argument that if you destroy something, people will blame you for destroying it rather than the people who created it. Wild, huh?

As his administration has steadily chipped away at the Affordable Care Act, President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that the public will blame the Democratic Party for any health care fallout.

Now, as Republicans in Congress inch towards striking what could be the biggest blow yet to Obamacare—sticking a provision repealing the individual mandate into their tax bill—even some on the right are starting to sweat that the GOP will fully own the issue going forward.

“You can make an argument that Obamacare is falling of its own weight, until we repeal the individual mandate,” a grave-faced Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters in the halls of the Capitol on Thursday. “I hope every Republican knows that when you pass a repeal of the individual mandate, it’s no longer their problem. It becomes our problem.”

A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation confirms these fears. More than 60 percent of respondents, including a majority of Republicans, in the think tank’s November tracking poll said that Trump and the GOP are “responsible for any problems” with the Affordable Care Act going forward.

It seems so unfair, doesn’t it? Just because Trump has been shouting his intention to destroy the ACA all along, that’s no reason to blame him or the Republicans when they succeed in doing it.

More Republicans now also blame the Republicans for the demolition job.

That notable shift happened as the Trump administration took a number of blatant actions to undermine the Affordable Care Act—gutting outreach by 90 percent and in-person signup assistance by more than half, abruptly canceling billions in cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers, severing partnerships with dozens of community groups that promoted enrollment, and using the presidential megaphone and agency resources to attack the ACA and predict its imminent demise.

They’re doing all this why? Because they think people should be left without health insurance if they’re not rich. It’s the heart of the Republican creed: rich people are good and everyone else sucks.