Is there any merit to this?

Every believing Muslim says Allahu Akbar every day during prayers. We cannot criminalize "God is great." Prosecute the criminal not a faith.

— Linda Sarsour (@lsarsour) October 31, 2017

I don’t know of any plans to “criminalize” saying “Allahu akbar,” or to prosecute the religion that says it. On the other hand it does get pointed out when guys who drive trucks onto bridges or bicycle paths or shoot up editorial offices shout the phrase as they do so. Should journalists suppress that fact?

No. It’s evidence of motive, for one thing. The perpetrators themselves want us to know that that’s their motive; that’s why they shout it. We’re supposed to be converted, or frightened, or deeply impressed.

But for another thing it’s part of the picture. No doubt Linda Sarsour is worried that it’s not flattering to Islam, and of course she’s right, it’s not – but that’s not the fault of reporters who report the phrase or the rest of us who discuss it.

It’s fucked up. Thinking a shout that “God is great” equals a reason to murder a lot of random people is very fucked up. Human beings need to think about that fact. We need to understand that kind of god so that we can avoid it, and urge other people to avoid it. Sarsour doesn’t like that, because she likes her religion, but that’s not a good reason to expect the rest of us to shield it.

In honor of Tariq Ramadan – last week’s Jesus and Mo:

Support J and M on Patreon

Oh good god.

A French official has admitted knowing Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan was “violent and aggressive” sexually, but denied hearing anything about rape.

Bernard Godard, who was considered the “Monsieur Islam” of the French Ministry of the Interior between 1997 and 2014, was well acquainted with Mr Ramadan, a prominent Islamic scholar and grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

A prominent Islamist scholar, albeit one who disguised himself to some extent as a sophisticated academic and deep thinker – but he’s the guy who refused to condemn stoning out of hand but instead called for a “moratorium” while serious theocrats debated the issue. He’s awful but with a veneer of okayness.

And now there are claims he’s rapey.

When asked whether he had any knowledge of the rape and sexual assault that Mr Ramadan is now being accused of, Mr Godard insisted he had “never heard of rapes” and that he was “stunned”.

“That he had many mistresses, that he consulted sites, that girls were brought to the hotel at the end of his lectures, that he invited them to undress, that some resisted and that he could become violent and aggressive, yes, but I have never heard of rapes, I am stunned,” he told French magazine L’Obs.

Mark that. Mark it well. Let it be seared into your memory. Some resisted and he became violent and aggressive, but Monsieur Islam never heard of rapes. Violence toward resistance, yes, but not rapes. One wonders what exactly he thinks rape is.

Mr Ramadan, who is professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University, has been accused of rape and sexual assault by three women in the past 10 days.

One of them, French writer Henda Ayari, says Mr Ramadan raped her in a Paris hotel room in 2012. Ms Ayari, 41, who lodged a rape complaint against the 55-year-old Swiss national on October 20, claimed that for Mr Ramadan, “either you wear a veil or you get raped”.

“He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die,” she told Le Parisien on Monday.

But that’s just violence and aggression, not rape.

The Swiss scholar became at professor at St Anthony’s college, which is part of the prestigious British university, in 2009. His appointment was tinged with controversy given Qatar is a major patron of the establishment, and in 2013, Mr Ramadan was forced to deny that he was using his role to promote the ideas of the emirate.

In an interview with Liberation, he said: “My Oxford Chair is a permanent chair, which Qatar has financed, but whose management is under the exclusive authority of Oxford.”

Give the chair to Taslima Nasreen, instead.

Scott Pruitt cut the EPA off at the knees yesterday.

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, stripped a half-dozen scientists and academics of advisory positions Tuesday and issued new rules barring anyone who receives E.P.A. grant money from serving on panels that counsel the agency on scientific decisions.

The move will effectively bar a large number of academic researchers, many of them experts in fields ranging from toxicology to epidemiology, from advising the E.P.A. on scientific matters, since the agency is one of the largest funders of environmental research.

They get the grants because they know the subject – so Pruitt throws them out. Let’s not have any experts on environmental science in the EPA, because who needs the environment, right? It’s there to be used until it’s worn out and useless, and then we’ll

uh

What is it we’ll do then? I forget.

Mr. Pruitt was expected to appoint several industry representatives to the panels. He did not impose any new restrictions to prevent them from offering advice on environmental regulations that may affect their businesses.

Industry reps have the right kind of vested interest – profit. The wrong kind is evidence about harm to the environment that we all depend on for survival.

In an announcement at agency headquarters surrounded by conservative activists and Republican lawmakers who have long called for an overhaul of the advisory boards, Mr. Pruitt said he made the decision to ensure the agency would receive data and advice free from conflicts of interest or any appearance of a conflict. He said that people currently serving on E.P.A. advisory boards had received $77 million in grant money over the past three years as they were issuing advice on policy.

The industry people on the other hand have no conflict of interest, or appearance of same. Also, chocolate makes you immortal.

Mr. Pruitt is expected to ask about two dozen people to replace advisers whose terms have ended or were removed under the new rules, according to a list provided by several people close to the process. Among the expected appointees, several are state regulators and private consultants; one is a senior director at the American Chemistry Council, a trade association; another is the chief environmental officer for Southern Company, an electric utility; and one is the vice president of technology for Phillips 66 Research Center in Oklahoma, and previously worked for ConocoPhillips.

The E.P.A. did not confirm the full list of new appointees, but did announce that Michael E. Honeycutt, the top toxicologist at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, would chair the E.P.A.’s Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Honeycutt has sparred with the E.P.A. over ozone standards, and was a co-author of a study in an air and waste management magazine arguing that the agency has inflated the health benefits of more stringent air quality standards.

Yeah, pollution is good for you.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: women dressing up in exaggeratedly “feminine” clothes is appropriation.

Across the globe, men, women and non-binary individuals practice cross-dressing and drag as a form of expression. The encyclopedia Britannica identifies individuals in drag as performers dressing as the opposite sex or rather, outside of their assigned gender. It is a way of experimenting with the aspect of “the other” in terms of identity.

This practice can be seen in a myriad of settings, including the television show, Ru Paul’s drag race. Individuals who practice drag and cross-dressing have often been persecuted throughout history, resulting in violent discrimination that can even lead to death. Although it has become more socially acceptable over the years, the stigma against it persists. Drag performers have been associated with the LGBTQA community, as it gives individuals the freedom to explore gender identities outside of the norm.

That’s a sloppy (and wrong) generalization, actually. Cross-dressing was a carnivalesque thing to do for centuries before it was called drag or “associated with the LGBTQA community.” It did not result in violent discrimination. There was also of course the tradition in the theatre of having boys play women’s roles; that too did not result in violent discrimination, although it did get up the Puritans’ noses, as did everything else.

One recent event I found out about was that of cis women dressing in “drag” by wearing dresses and excessive makeup while identifying as drag queens.

They sum it up as a form of experimenting with “extreme femininity”. I was confused as to why cis women would choose to identify as drag queens when all they are doing is putting on dresses and makeup, which is something within their gender norm. I discussed this odd occurrence with some non-binary individuals and one of them quickly pointed out that this can even be considered homophobic.

Sure it can, if you work really hard. That’s the great thing about women – you can accuse them of everything, even “appropriating” that which they’ve been bullied into doing since forever. You can call women femmephobic if they refuse to wear skirts and appropriators if they wear skirts – they’re wrong no matter what they do, it’s awesome! And women are so stupid and weak they put up with it. Or else they don’t and then you can call them TERFs and kick the shit out of them while saying it’s all their fault.

When cis women perform as drag queens, they are dipping their feet into the performance of it, this being the positive experience, without receiving any of the backlash of stepping out of their gender norms and being discriminated against for it.

Bitches! Women can do any damn thing they want to and never receive any backlash. No domestic violence, no harassment or abuse, no public mockery and trolling, no rape, no wage or hiring discrimination, no pay gap, no insults, no questioning of their intelligence or stamina or courage or ambition or determination – none of that. They should be locked up.

In addition, cis women are justifying this action by claiming they do it out of admiration for drag performers. So again, why is this act to be considered homophobic?

Because appropriation is a form of discrimination. Essentially, individuals outside of that culture, conveniently steal certain aspects of it, for their own use, without receiving the prejudice and discrimination individuals from that culture are faced with

How dare women steal skirts and makeup from other cultures. They should be executed.

NPR on John Kelly’s twisted understanding of the Civil War:

During an interview Monday night on Fox News, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said that “the lack of the ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”

His comment was swiftly countered by confounded observers, who pointed out that the Civil War was fought over slavery and that compromising on slavery would be morally unconscionable — and that the country did strike such compromises for decades and they did not, in fact, prevent war.

They did prevent war for several decades. Lots of people died in time to miss the war, so from that point of view, the compromises were a big success…except of course for the people who were slaves who died in time to miss the war.

Kelly said he thought applying contemporary standards of ethics to the past is “very very dangerous” and demonstrates “a lack of appreciation of history.” He praised the “men and women of good faith on both sides” of the Civil War who followed their “conscience” in their fight.

That really is an incredibly stupid thing to say. We should apply contemporary standards of ethics if we have reason to think they’re better standards. We can still understand that people are stuck with what’s available to them, but that doesn’t mean we have to say oh well slavery was seen as a fine thing by people who owned slaves so mustn’t judge.

After Kelly’s remarks, scores of commentators responded with rebuttals, their tone ranging from bafflement to shock to weary repetition.

John Podhoretz, the conservative editor of Commentary magazine, wrote on Twitter, “80 years leading up to the Civil War were a history of efforts to compromise with the South. And then the war came. Started by the South.”

As Vann Newkirk, a writer at theAtlantic, put it succinctly, “the entire fabric of American law was a compromise with slavery.”

The idea that the Civil War was caused by a failure to compromise was expressed by historian Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary The Civil War. Foote, who once wrote that he “would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar,” was criticized by fellow historians for, as The New York Times put it, playing down “the economic, intellectual and political causes of the Civil War.”

…

“Compromise on what?” asked Joshua Zeitz, a historian and the author of Lincoln’s Boys, asked on Twitter. “Extending chattel slavery throughout the western territories?”

“The only compromise on the table in 1861 would have given slavery explicit constitutional protection,” writes Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent at Slate.

“Focus on compromise only makes sense if you view slavery as bad but not *that* bad,” Bouie later wrote.

The way the Magdalene laundries were not that bad…if you were a male Catholic apologist at no risk of being held captive in one.

[Ta-Nehisi] Coates also directly rebutted Kelly’s assertion that “we make a mistake … when we take what is today accepted as right and wrong and go back 100, 200, 300 years or more … and apply it back then.”

The “notion that we are putting today’s standards on the past is, in itself, racist — implies only white, slave-holding, opinions matter,” Coates writes. “Majority of people living in South Carolina in 1860 were black — they did not need modern white wokeness to tell them slavery was wrong. Majority of people living in Mississippi in 1860 were black. They knew, in their own time, that enslavement was wrong.”

Oh but that’s some of those terrible contemporary standards of ethics, thinking that the people enslaved or held captive or exploited or tortured should be heeded at least as much as the people who did the enslaving or torturing. We should stick with the Eternal Truth that only people like John Kelly and Brendan O’Neill get to have standards of ethics that count.

10. That said, pro-Islamic State channels on Telegram are hungrily sharing updates on their supposed "brother." See below: pic.twitter.com/vd5f1eZ66R

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) October 31, 2017

The crying with laughter emojis are nice.

The Times reports:

Eight people were killed when a man drove 20 blocks down a bike path beside the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon before he crashed his pickup truck, jumped out with fake guns and was shot by police officers, the authorities said.

Federal authorities were treating the incident as a terrorist attack and were taking the lead in the investigation, a senior law enforcement official said. Two law enforcement officials said that after the attacker got out of the truck, he was heard yelling, “Allahu Akbar.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference: “Based on information we have at this moment, this was an act of terror, and a particularly cowardly act of terror aimed at innocent civilians.”

Two law enforcement officials said the driver of the truck, a 29-year-old man who came to the United States in 2010, was in grave condition. One official said he had rented the truck in New Jersey.

He’s dead now.*

The motorist, driving south down the path in a Home Depot rental truck, hit numerous people as nearby Stuyvesant High School was letting out for the day, officials said. At least 15 people were injured, but officials were still working to assess the extent of the casualties.

Sarah Sanders wants us to stop saying slavery was wrong.

During a White House news briefing on Tuesday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Chief of Staff John Kelly’s praise of Robert E. Lee and remarks about how “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,” not the Confederacy’s refusal to abolish slavery.

“Look, all of our leaders have flaws — Washington, Jefferson, JFK, Roosevelt, Kennedy — that doesn’t diminish their contributions to our country, and it certainly can’t erase them from our history,” she said. “And General Kelly was simply making the point that just because history isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not our history.”

No, he was not. He said what he said and not some other thing. He did not say “Just because history isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not our history.”

“And to try to create something and push a narrative that simple doesn’t exist is just frankly outrageous and absurd,” Sanders continued. “I think the fact that we keep trying to drive, the media continues to want to make this and push that this is some sort of a racially charged and divided White House — frankly the only people I see stoking political racism right now are the people in the groups that are running ads like the one you saw take place in Virginia earlier this week. That’s the type of thing that I think really is a problem, and I think it is absurd and disgraceful to keep trying to make comments and take them out of context and mean something they simply don’t.”

Well…she’s not the smartest person in the world. Maybe she really doesn’t grasp that saying the confederacy was acting in good faith and according to its conscience is a gross sanitization of why the South seceded. Maybe she really doesn’t, but then she shouldn’t be in that job.

The latest Civil War-related controversy to envelope the White House was not, however, a media invention. Kelly went out of his way to praise Lee and the Confederacy during an interview on the debut edition of Laura Ingraham’s new Fox News show Monday night. Kelly was responding to a question about the removal of Confederate plaques.

Lee “was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days,” Kelly said. “But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

At no point did Kelly mention the role that the South’s determination to preserve the institution of slavery play in sparking the Civil War. Nor did Sanders mention it on Tuesday. As she left the podium, a reporter repeatedly tried to ask her, “Does this administration believe slavery was wrong?” Sanders didn’t answer.

The reporter in question is April Ryan, of “are they friends of yours?” fame. She’s tweeting about it now…saying she’s still waiting for an answer.

This again.

We older women (I’m much older than JHB) have a way with words and a look. ‘Punch you in the face’ covers it Women are not wilting wimps! https://t.co/PLU8blt2Av

— Rt Hon Nadine Dorries (@NadineDorries) October 31, 2017

Oh please. It’s not always that easy, to put it mildly.

Plus people shouldn’t have to “have a way” to deal with various forms of personal interference. We don’t expect to be pushed and slapped and jostled in the street if we happen not to look ferocious for a second. We expect ordinary everyday respect for boundaries. It’s not everyone’s responsibility to scare off attackers, it’s everyone’s responsibility not to be an attacker.

Perhaps you could follow every intimidated, nervous junior member of staff who is terrified of losing her job saying that for her.

— Rebecca Reid (@RebeccaCNReid) October 31, 2017

Do you realise in saying that you are ‘not the type to be messed with’ you are saying those who do suffer are weak & somehow responsible?

— Marie Donn (@Marie_Donn) October 31, 2017

While you’re bragging about what a toughy you are, it’s also worth considering that not everyone is able to defend themselves as well as you

— Simon Attwood #TransformPolitics #ANewHope 🟠🌤🔺 (@SimonAttwood) October 31, 2017

It’s fine to be tough and strong and not a pushover but it’s also fine not to be any of those things. The onus is on the aggressor, not the person aggressed.

Not very complicated, is it.

So the White House chief of staff is a fan of the Southern secessionist defenders of slavery.

Kelly was interviewed on Fox last night and delivered this pile of crap.

Kelly was asked about the decision of a church in Alexandria to remove plaques honoring George Washington and Robert E. Lee.

“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” Kelly said. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

Men and women of good faith; their conscience.

It’s just rhetoric to put the label “good faith” on a military defense of the custom of holding people captive and forcing them to do hard labor for life. Sure, no doubt many of them had persuaded themselves there was nothing morally wrong with that at all, and in that very limited sense they were acting in “good faith,” but so what? People can convince themselves of anything.

And it’s a perversion to say their “conscience” had them violently defend slavery. Slavery is not morally defensible, so violently defending it is not a matter of “conscience.”

“That statement could have been given by [former Confederate general] Jubal Early in 1880,” said Stephanie McCurry, professor of history at Columbia University and author of “Confederate Reckoning: Politics and Power in the Civil War South.”

“What’s so strange about this statement is how closely it tracks or resembles the view of the Civil War that the South had finally got the nation to embrace by the early 20th century,” she said. “It’s the Jim Crow version of the causes of the Civil War. I mean, it tracks all of the major talking points of this pro-Confederate view of the Civil War.”

And he’s a general and the president’s chief of staff – he should have a much better grasp of US history than that.

Kelly makes several points. That Lee was honorable. That fighting for state was more important than fighting for country. That a lack of compromise led to the war. That good people on both sides were fighting for conscientious reasons. Both McCurry and David Blight, professor of history at Yale University and author of “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” broadly reject all of these arguments.

“This is profound ignorance, that’s what one has to say first, at least of pretty basic things about the American historical narrative,” Blight said. “I mean, it’s one thing to hear it from Trump who, let’s be honest, just really doesn’t know any history and has demonstrated it over and over and over. But Gen. Kelly has a long history in the American military.”

Exactly. In his jobs, he should know better.

Blight described Kelly’s argument in similar terms as McCurry — an “old reconciliationist narrative” about the Civil War that, in the last half-century or so has “just been exploded” by historical research since.

The idea that compromise might have been possible was rejected out of hand by both McCurry and Blight.

“It was not about slavery, it was about honorable men fighting for honorable causes?” McCurry said. “Well, what was the cause? . . . In 1861, they were very clear on what the causes of the war were. The reason there was no compromise possible was that people in the country could not agree over the wisdom of the continued and expanding enslavement of millions of African Americans.”

There’s also a sickening pseudo-Romantic story in the background.

Kelly’s framework is “also rooted, frankly, in a Lost Cause mentality that swept over American culture in the wake of the war, swept over Northerners,” Blight said, “this idea that good and honorable men of the South were pushed aside and exploited by the ‘fanatical’ — ironically — first Republican Party.”

You can see that dopy story in the way Gone With the Wind was filmed, in 19fucking39.

Both historians, though, held particular disdain for the idea that putting state over nation was the essence of the fight.

“My God, where does he get that from?” Blight asked. “That denies the very reason to be, the essential reason for the existence of the original Republican Party, which formed in the 1850s to stop the expansion of slavery and ended up developing a political ideology that threatened the South because they really were going to cordon off slavery.”

…

“It’s just so absurd,” Blight said. “It’s just so sad. It’s just so disappointing that generations of history have been written to explode all of this and yet millions of people — serious people; experienced, serious people and now people with tremendous power — have grown up believing all this.”

Absurd and sad and worse, because of the tremendous power. Kelly repeated his absolute refusal to apologize for his vicious lies about Representative Wilson.

There was, however, a small silver lining.

“This Trump-era ignorance and misuse of history is forcing historians — and I think this is a good thing — to use words like ‘truth’ and ‘right or wrong,’ ” Blight said. “In the academy we get very caught up in relativism and whether we can be objective and so on, and that’s a real argument.”

“But there are some things that are just not true,” he said. “And we’ve got to point that out.”

Ahahaha…why truth matters. Yes indeed.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Easier than persuading the laws of physics to change their minds.

You can in fact have both a growing economy and good environmental standards.

The thing about the economy that a lot of people miss is that a strong economy is basically everyone, not just the richest chunk of it. If you have to pay people to properly maintain your factory – that money isn’t vanishing into a void, it is going into their pockets where it will then be spent on the stuff that they need.

Not only that but regulation creates those jobs, and creates sub-industries which otherwise wouldn’t exist. For example, with mining, what happens when the mine runs out? Well in a well regulated country the mine has to fund land recovery – which requires people to do it.

Which means that in an area where a mine has run out of whatever was being mined environmental regulation provides for at least some continued employment – generally at a cost to people who would otherwise not spend the money as effectively.

The main motive for investment is to turn a profit. If you have a situation where there is no redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, over time the demand for goods will drop as the money pools in the hands of the rich (Because there is only a certain amount of stuff one person can want), which means you will get a corporate emphasis on cost cutting rather than growth because there is no room for that growth.

Which in turn means that there will be even less demand for goods as people lose their jobs and supply is constrained to cut those costs further, which in turn means that all of the investment the American right talks about isn’t going to happen because there is no demand, and thus the best potential for growth is – sticking your money in a bank account.

The net cost to the economy for regulation is pretty much nothing, and generally it works out at a profit. The net cost for de-regulation however?

That is when you end up with money going stagnant, essentially taken out of the system. Not only that, but a lot of regulation is basically designed to reduce cross contagion from bad business practices.

One business going under can have a domino effect where multiple industries collapse, bankruptcies screw the supplied and the supplier, and what causes bankruptcies in America?

Health issues mostly – and those are made much worse by poor environmental regulations. Hurricanes and fires are also not good.

The very basis of Republican economic thought is a complete clusterfuck which undermines economic growth, in favour of growing the bank accounts of the rich. Having people becoming too rich is a symptom of a sick economy, because that means money is going stagnant.

Money needs to constantly change hands for the economy to grow, at least if what you care about is the actual economy rather than the bank accounts of like eight people. Regulation is thus largely a good thing on a macro-economic level.

Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes do a quick summing up:

The first big takeaway from Monday morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III and George Papadopoulos is this: The president of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.

The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some of them.

…

President Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators. One of them ran the campaign. The other, meanwhile, was interfacing with people he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials” and with a person introduced to him as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” All of this while President Trump was assuring the American people that he and his campaign had “nothing to do with Russia.”

It looks bad, doesn’t it. Shady.

Mueller’s opening bid is a remarkable show of strength. He has a cooperating witness from inside the campaign’s interactions with the Russians. And he is alleging not mere technical infractions of law but astonishing criminality on the part of Trump’s campaign manager, a man who also attended the Trump Tower meeting.

Any hope the White House may have had that the Mueller investigation might be fading away vanished Monday morning. Things are only going to get worse from here.

Which could mean that larger things will eventually get better.