Glosswitch at the New Statesman takes issue with the way “genius” male movie-makers get a pass for obvious misogyny in their movies because Genius. Are they even Genius? she asks.

One of the many ways in which abusive men get away with terrible things is because we’re supposed to respect their genius (and assume that misogyny is somehow a necessary part of it). Right now we’re calling time on the misogyny, but why can’t we call time on the perception of genius too?

…

Men who don’t like women – and there are an awful lot of them – frequently make art that a male-dominated establishment considers to be amazing, but which a high proportion of women consider to be crap. You didn’t know this? That’s because up till now we haven’t said.

Why haven’t we said? Partly because of the hipster aura around guys like Tarentino.

Just as the “best” postmodern theory tends to be appallingly written in order to fool us that the difficulty is in the ideas, the nihilism and misogyny of the “best” male directors is so glaringly obvious we end up assuming we’ve missed the hidden message (so we use “hyper-reality” as a posh way of describing unimaginative exaggeration). The real creativity isn’t in Manhattan or Inglourious Basterds; it’s in the imaginative contortions critics have gone through to make these films seem more than the sum of their parts.

[jumps up waving hand] I’ve considered Manhattan misogynist all along – misogynist, and bad, and self-admiring.

There’s nothing unsophisticated in recognising that an industry mired in sexism will produce art that is tainted by sexist beliefs. There’s nothing childish or bourgeois about calling time on representations of the human condition which fail to accommodate half the human race. For too long genius has been defined as male, far removed from such petty concerns as granting consideration to the female gaze. This isn’t just unfair; it’s dull.

Time to say good-bye to hipster misogyny.

Princess Ivanka and Marco Rubio have an awesome new plan for Princess Ivanka’s pet project of family leave. It’s so genius. What you do is, you tell people to pay for it out of their savings, and then they can have it! The CEO and the WalMart employee alike can have paid leave if they pay for it with their own money! It only costs about $1.50 a week, right? And people are getting these huge raises of $1.50 a week thanks to the tax cut – except for CEOs and similar who are getting like $10,000 a week – so it all works perfectly.

Marco Rubio is starting to strategize with Ivanka Trump to win over skeptical Republicans on a traditionally Democratic issue: paid family leave.

Capitalizing on President Donald Trump’s endorsement of the idea in his State of the Union address, Rubio is trying to marshal Republicans behind a plan that would neither impose a mandate on employers nor raise taxes to pay for it — two hurdles that have long halted the GOP from embracing paid family leave.

And they finally hit on it! Make the people who want the leave pay for it! And go right on calling it “paid family leave” at the same time!

Rubio has barely started crafting a paid leave bill, much less a broader legislative strategy. But he envisions an idea that has recently gained traction in conservative circles: allowing people to draw Social Security benefits when they want to take time off for a new baby or other family-related matters, and then delay their checks when they hit retirement age.

For instance, a person who would begin receiving full benefits when he or she turns 67 years old but wants to take six weeks of paid leave wouldn’t draw Social Security checks until six weeks after his or her 67th birthday.

It’s practically FDR-level progressive, yeah?

“That’s a new idea for Republicans who still identify it as something that comes out of the left,” Rubio said of paid family leave. “Forcing companies to provide it is perhaps an idea that finds its genesis on the left, but the notion that pregnancy should not be a bankruptcy-eliciting event is one that I think all Americans should be supportive.”

I don’t know, it seems kind of scary-lefty for Republicans to say use your own savings to keep from going bankrupt when a baby turns up. Shouldn’t people be made to give half of the money to the nearest CEO to balance things out?

Rubio and Ivanka Trump have recently exchanged emails about paid family leave. And in his Senate office in late January, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) also privately pitched the concept to the president’s daughter, who gave it a warm reception, according to one person familiar with the meeting.

Yaaaaay paid family leave for all, paid out of their own Social Security! Utopia at last!

Rubio argues the overall plan would benefit those with lower incomes, since they’re less likely to work for companies that proactively offer paid family leave.

Of course, they also won’t have much in their Social Security accounts, because it’s based on income, but oh well – they should have thought of that before they decided to be low income.

Speaking of the difference between saying insults and violence are the same thing and saying they are related…Eve Wiseman at the Guardian starts a piece on Jo Brand with that subject:

It was early in November and, responding to a headline about an MP taking his personal trainer to the cinema, Ian Hislop had chuckled: “Some of this is not ‘high-level’ crime, is it?” But Jo Brand, hosting, didn’t smile. The temperature changed quite suddenly. “If I can just say,” she began, “as the only representative of the female gender here today – I know it’s not high-level, but it doesn’t have to be ‘high-level’ for women to feel under siege in somewhere like the House of Commons. Actually, for women, if you’re constantly being harassed, even in a small way, that builds up, and that wears you down.” There was a pause. Then the audience started cheering.

See how that works? She doesn’t say they’re the same, and she says that doesn’t mean they don’t both matter. Too bad Katie Roiphe can’t see that not very obscure point.

Today, Brand, a woman who refuses to be described as a national treasure, preferring “national disgrace”, says she didn’t plan to say a word. “I’m a real hectorer usually – it was lucky I didn’t shout, because otherwise it wouldn’t have taken the wind out of everyone’s sails in the same way. It had an impact.” She says this as if it was a surprise but, of course, Brand, now 60, has been making an impact for decades, first with her monotone standup about men and weight (“I read that book Fat Is A Feminist Issue, got a bit desperate halfway through and ate it”) and today for her dry contributions to primetime TV where, as well presenting the sister programme to The Great British Bake Off, she is often the lone woman on a panel of men.

I hadn’t heard of her before. Clearly a big mistake.

One of Brand’s small pleasures is an hour on Mumsnet. Partly because of the usernames. “My favourite is ‘EatShitDerek’. I’m dying to know the story behind that one.” Partly because she’s a mother, of two teenage girls. And partly because she feels it’s a good reflection of people’s attitudes to controversial topics. “I understand the generational gap in feminist thinking, but the problem comes when the conversations are shut down – they need to be discussed. As a nurse, for instance, I learned that five times as many black people were diagnosed as schizophrenic than white people, and I wanted to know why. You can’t explore difficult questions without offending some people. So I had to admit I was coming from a point of ignorance, and then start a conversation.”

She worries about “no-platforming”.

“If older feminists’ opinions are suppressed, where do we go next? They did a lot of work to move women forward, they can’t be forgotten. But the anger that appears when people do try to talk – even around something as gentle as Caroline Criado-Perez’s plan to put a woman on the £10 note. She got death and rape threats. Who are these people threatening her, and why are they so angry?”

One evening, she was compering an awards ceremony, and a single advertising agency was winning every prize. When they inevitably won the final award, Brand rolled her eyes into the microphone, and tutted: “Not them again.” The crowd laughed, but when the agency’s CEO arrived on stage to receive his trophy, he whispered in her ear: “I always knew you weren’t funny, but I never realised what a cunt you were.”

“He did it to humiliate me, and it worked – I felt like I was shrinking. But then I took the microphone back and told the audience what he’d said. And I’d never heard 1,500 people gasp before. These bullies are lurking around every corner, but it’s worse when they’re anonymous online – at least in print you know where it’s coming from.”

Huh. What was that again about how “cunt” is not a misogynist insult in the UK? The CEO doesn’t seem to see it that way, nor does Jo Brand, nor does that audience of 1500 people.

Indonesia is often touted as that rare thing, a somewhat/comparatively liberal majority-Muslim state. To put it another way it’s touted as being not as bad as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Bangladesh or need I go on. But that’s one hell of a low bar.

Now it’s thinking of making all sex outside of marriage a crime.

Indonesia’s parliament is drafting proposed revisions to the national criminal code that could ban all consensual sex outside marriage, sparking alarm among activists who it would breach basic rights and could be misused to target the LGBT community.

The parliamentary commission drawing up recommendations to change the Dutch colonial-era criminal code has still to finalize its proposals.

But a draft, seen by Reuters on Monday, included measures to criminalize extramarital sex, same-sex relations, and co-habitation, all of which were previously unregulated by law.

Not very liberal, is it. Why should a government even care how citizens arrange their sex lives?

Last month, the Constitutional Court narrowly voted to strike down a similar petition filed by the Family Love Alliance, one of the conservative groups behind the move to push legislation through parliament.

“The truth is the majority of religions in Indonesia hold the same values, so…(the revisions) are representative of the majority and of all cultures in Indonesia,” said Euis Sunarti, a member of the Family Love Alliance, which likens itself to conservative evangelical Christian groups in the United States.

It doesn’t matter what kind of theocracy it is, as long as it is a theocracy.

Junimart Girsang, a member of parliament from the nationalist Indonesian Democratic Party of Stuggle (PDIP), said same-sex relations could not be accepted in the country.

“In legal terms, religious terms and ethical terms, we cannot have that in our country,” Girsang, a member of the parliamentary commission, said.

Few Indonesian politicians have voiced support for LGBT rights for fear of alienating a largely conservative voter base ahead of legislative and presidential elections next year.

Not all that liberal then, it seems.

I saw this tweet before I saw the CNN story and I thought it had to be a parody, despite the blue check.

I mean come on. Even Paul Ryan can’t be so clueless that he thinks $1.50 a week is a meaningful pay increase. $1.50 won’t get you a bus ride, or a half gallon of milk, or a pair of socks. You could probably get an apple with $1.50, or a couple of carrots, or a small tub of Greek yogurt. How can Paul Ryan possibly think anyone would be “pleasantly surprised” to have an additional $1.50 a week? It’s meaningless. $1.50 an hour would be a small raise; a week is just nothing.

And yet – it really was his very own tweet.

House Speaker Paul Ryan deleted a tweet Saturday touting the GOP tax overhaul after critics called him out for appearing out of touch with the reality of low-income individuals’ financial situations.

The tweet shared the story of a secretary who, according to a report by the Associated Press, was “pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week.”

“A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, PA, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week … she said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for the year,” Ryan tweeted with a link to the full article.

A basic Costco membership costs $60 a year.

And 52 times 1.5 is 78 so wuhay she comes out way ahead – 18 whole spare dollars to buy socks with.

Paul Ryan deleted his embarrassing tweet of a blatant admission because he and Republicans don’t want you to know the truth: the #GOPTaxScam is a gift to corporate America and the top 1% at your expense.

He also doesn’t want you to know he got $500.000.00 from the Koch family. pic.twitter.com/ENXxASfAMP

— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) February 3, 2018

https://twitter.com/jonfavs/status/959840911541788672

A whole six dollars more every month. Thank god for Republicans.

Another thought about the Trump versus the FBI melodrama:

Mr. Trump’s current campaign threatens the autonomy of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which was seared into the public consciousness after Watergate, according to veterans of the legal system. “Starting with Jimmy Carter, every president has embraced norms that preserve the independence of the D.O.J., law enforcement and intelligence matters from the White House,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “What is happening now is a violation of post-Watergate norms.”

What that passage doesn’t quite make clear is what Watergate has to do with it. Watergate made it eye-scorchingly clear how crucial it is to have federal law enforcement be independent of the president, so that he doesn’t get away with committing crimes while in office. Trump acts out every day the very reason he needs to stop acting out what he acts out every day – his megalomaniacal belief that the Justice Department is his Justice Department and has to do whatever he tells it to do. The independence of the DoJ is a bulwark against authoritarian government…even though it can be authoritarian itself, because nothing is simple. Trump and the Republicans are systematically breaking down that bulwark. This is dangerous, and a constitutional crisis.

David Strauss, a University of Chicago law professor, said Mr. Trump’s accusations were not mere political rhetoric, but messages with consequences. “It’s got to undermine public confidence in the F.B.I. to a certain degree. And it’s got to undermine morale at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department to an even greater degree,” he said.

“We have a president who seems to have no understanding of the professional ethos of the Justice Department, who has no understanding how these people think about their jobs,” he added.

Quite. That’s what I was saying about merit and skills and Trump the empty balloon.

Especially upsetting, some former officials said, is how Mr. Trump has publicly taunted specific individuals — a top F.B.I. official, an F.B.I. lawyer and an F.B.I. supervisor.

“It’s one thing for the president to criticize political appointees — although it is quite odd for him to criticize his own political appointees,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a lawyer who left the Justice Department’s national security division in April and now teaches at the University of Minnesota law school. But to attack career employees at the F.B.I. who are barred by regulations from publicly responding, he said, “that’s really bad.”

Some agents are leaving as a result. Josh Campbell, who spent a decade at the F.B.I. and worked directly for Mr. Comey at one time, wrote in The Times on Saturday that he was resigning so that he could speak out. “These political attacks on the bureau must stop,” he wrote. “If those critics of the agency persuade the public that the F.B.I. cannot be trusted, they will also have succeeded in making our nation less safe.”

One F.B.I. supervisor in a field office said public shaming of his colleagues had wiped out any desire he had to work at the bureau’s headquarters in Washington. “I’d rather chew glass,” he said.

MAGA.

How are they doing at the FBI? It can’t be easy.

In the 109 years of the FBI’s existence, it has repeatedly come under fire for abuses of power, privacy or civil rights. From Red Scares to recording and threatening to expose the private conduct of Martin Luther King Jr. to benefiting from bulk surveillance in the digital age, the FBI is accustomed to intense criticism.

What is so unusual about the current moment, say current and former law enforcement officials, is the source of the attacks.

The bureau is under fire not from those on the left but rather conservatives who have long been the agency’s biggest supporters, as well as the president who handpicked the FBI’s leader.

Republican critics charge that the birth of the investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian government was fatally infected by the political bias of senior FBI officials — and President Trump tweeted Saturday that the release of a memo on the issue “totally vindicates ‘Trump.’ ”

But what if it’s not “political bias” but rather “bias” against a president who is in bed with Russia?

And/or – what if it’s “bias” against ignorant lazy talentless incompetence from a bunch of people who, whatever you think about the institution, have impressive skills?

KnowwhatImean? That’s an aspect of Trump that’s got to grate on a lot of people who do serious demanding work. He’s such an empty balloon. He has no talents, no skills, no training, no knowledge, no expertise – he’s all flash and marketing and nothing else. He’s a big meaningless noise, and here he is shouting at and accusing people who are – let’s be clear about this – Better Than He Is. He likes to rant about “merit” but that’s ironic when he himself has none.

One law enforcement official summed it up bluntly: “There’s a lot of anger. The irony is it’s a conservative-leaning organization, and it’s being trashed by conservatives. At first it was just perplexing. Now there’s anger, because it’s not going away.”

It turns out they’re not really conservatives. They’re opportunists/street fighters.

From the Classroom Vignettes file:

A teacher with Colorado’s Boulder Valley School District was placed on paid administrative leave following an alleged incident at the middle school, the school district said Thursday. CBS Denver confirmed the Lafayette Police Department is investigating reports that teacher allegedly assaulted a student who refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Karen Smith, Angevine’s physical education teacher, was placed on leave Thursday.

This again. Football players MUST stand up with their hands on their chests (one hand per player) when a certain song is sung. God MUST be namechecked whenever a politician comments on an outburst of violence. Students MUST swear fealty to a piece of cloth and to God at the start of every school day. All this MUST be mandatory or everything will rot and fall off and die.

Except of course that none of that is true, but it’s treated as if it were true.

Pennsylvania Republicans are refusing to obey a court order to redraw their congressional map to make it not so grotesquely gerrymandered.

A top Pennsylvania state Senate Republican is refusing to follow a court order requiring lawmakers to turn over data that would redraw the state’s congressional map.

In a letter to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which struck down the map, state Sen. Joe Scarnati on Wednesday called the order unconstitutional and said he would not comply.
“In light of the unconstitutionality of the court’s orders and the court’s plain intent to usurp the General Assembly’s constitutionally delegated role of drafting Pennsylvania’s congressional district plan, Senator Scarnati will not be turning over any data identified in the court’s orders,” wrote Brian Paszamant, Scarnati’s attorney.

Let’s hear more about how patriotic and law-respecting the Republicans are.

To move to a less distasteful subject than rapey theocrats and constitution-trampling crooks, there’s this exciting story that’s been in the headlines for a couple of days of finding huge previously unknown Maya sites buried in Guatemala.

By raining down laser pulses on some 770 square miles of dense forest in northern Guatemala, archaeologists have discovered 60,000 Maya structures that make up full sprawling cities.

And the new technology provides them with an unprecedented view into how the ancient civilization worked, revealing almost industrial agricultural infrastructure and new insights into Maya warfare.

“This is a game changer,” says Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at Ithaca College who is one of the leaders of the project. It changes “the base level at which we do Maya archaeology.”

The data reveals that the area was three or four times more densely populated than originally thought. “I mean, we’re talking about millions of people, conservatively,” says Garrison. “Probably more than 10 million people.”

The technology makes it possible to strip away vegetation visually and see what it’s hiding. Garrison spent eight years with a team mapping less than a square mile at a site called El Zotz without LiDAR, while LiDar took data for 67 square miles in a few hours.

The most important Maya city, Tikal, was found to be three or four times larger than the scientists had thought, with a previously undiscovered pyramid in its center. And Garrison adds that they’re not totally sure they’ve surveyed the entire extent of that city.

Suddenly having a broad view allows archaeologists to ask many new questions, he says. And there’s plenty of forest to still explore — the study area is a fraction of the total area where the Maya lived.

I call that exciting.

Tariq Ramadan has been charged with rape and is currently incarcerated.

I don’t see anything in English yet so this is from Le Monde:

Tariq Ramadan a été mis en examen, vendredi 2 février, pour viol et viol sur personne vulnérable. L’islamologue suisse a demandé qu’un éventuel placement en détention provisoire, requis par le parquet, fasse l’objet d’un débat ultérieur entre le juge des libertés et de la détention (JLD) et sa défense. Dans l’attente de ce débat, qui doit avoir lieu dans les quatre jours, il a été incarcéré.

Les enquêteurs du deuxième district de police judiciaire ont enquêté pendant trois mois, méthodiquement et sans laisser échapper la moindre information, avant de se décider à entendre, à partir de mercredi 31 janvier, le théologien suisse de 55 ans, qui a longtemps eu une très large audience auprès de centaines de milliers de musulmans européens.

Après avoir reçu deux plaintes pour viol, l’une déposée le 20 octobre 2017 par Henda Ayari, une ancienne salafiste devenue militante de la laïcité, l’autre le 27 octobre par une femme qui a préféré rester anonyme, et dont Le Monde avait publié le témoignage accablant, les policiers ont recueilli d’autres récits de femmes. Elles ont décrit la même forme d’emprise, la même violence et, selon un proche de l’enquête, « le même modus operandi » que celui dénoncé par les plaignantes, sans pour autant déposer plainte à leur tour.

Since the two complaints that were in the news in October the police have gathered more women’s accounts that fit the pattern of the first two.

Updating to include the BBC version:

A French judge has placed prominent Islamic studies scholar Tariq Ramadan under criminal investigation on two charges of rape.

The 55-year-old was questioned by police in Paris earlier this week and has now been remanded into custody.

He denies wrongdoing and is suing one of his accusers, a former radical Islamist, for slander.

Mr Ramadan teaches at Oxford University, but took leave of absence after the claims surfaced in October.

Then there’s the typical BBC refusal to admit that he’s not a nice liberal human rightsy kind of guy:

A controversial and influential figure among Muslim scholars, he is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian imam who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.

Tariq Ramadan challenges Muslim fundamentalists and encourages dialogue between religions, but some critics say he is a promoting a version of Islam that is inconsistent with French secular values.

He has made regular media appearances in France and Britain, and is a popular figure among young Muslims in Europe.

“Some critics say”; “a version of Islam that is inconsistent with French secular values”; “a popular figure among young Muslims in Europe” – he’s an Islamist, a radical religionist who thinks religious rules should govern everyone. The Beeb as usual makes him sound like a liberal.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest that Trump is chopping down – now we want more global disease outbreaks.

Four years after the United States pledged to help the world fight infectious-disease epidemics such as Ebola, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is dramatically downsizing its epidemic prevention activities in 39 out of 49 countries because money is running out, U.S. government officials said.

But don’t worry, Donald Trump’s golf courses and hotels are profiting like crazy.

The CDC programs, part of a global health security initiative, train front-line workers in outbreak detection and work to strengthen laboratory and emergency response systems in countries where disease risks are greatest. The goal is to stop future outbreaks at their source.

Most of the funding comes from a one-time, five-year emergency package that Congress approved to respond to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. About $600 million was awarded to the CDC to help countries prevent infectious-disease threats from becoming epidemics. That money is slated to run out by September 2019. Despite statements from President Trump and senior administration officials affirming the importance of controlling outbreaks, officials and global infectious-disease experts are not anticipating that the administration will budget additional resources.

Of course not. He thinks epidemics are what shithole countries deserve.

Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo. Last year, when Congo experienced a potentially deadly Ebola outbreak in a remote, forested area, CDC-trained disease detectives and rapid responders helped contain it quickly.

But in future? The outbreak will just have to proceed according to nature’s plan.