Adam Zyglis

Robert Reich offers some optimism (and a way to make a difference for those of us in the US):

Every time I post about another outrage perpetrated by Trump and his enablers, several of you ask “What can I do?” The answer is to do what hundreds of thousands are already doing – join with others in Indivisible groups to “kick the bums out,” as the old saying goes.

It’s working. Yesterday, one of the most right-wing members of Congress, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA 49), announced he will not seek reelection. Issa is the second California Republican to retire this week. He joins a growing list of GOP House retirements.

One reason for Issa’s – and the other GOP retirements – is the work of Indivisible groups. Indivisible groups in San Diego showed up to Issa’s office 49 weeks in a row with an average of 370 constituents each week, to let him know what an awful job he was doing and how strong the opposition wold be to his reelection. (Yesterday, Indivisible San Diego and other groups from their district held a retirement party for Issa.)

A wave of Republican retirements will help take the big, blue wave across America on Election Day, November 6, 2018, replacing people who don’t represent what’s best about America with those who do – diverse, progressive, local leaders.

So, in the midst of all the gloom and outrage, please know that America is rallying – and please get back to work to take back the House and hopefully the Senate as well. Get involved with your local Indivisible group, register to vote, and read up on how we’ll hold our MoCs accountable for their vote on the #TrumpTaxScam.

More on that arrest of a teacher who objected to a pay raise for an administrator.

Deyshia Hargrave previously spoke out against the Vermilion Parish School Board (VPSB) for voting to give the standing superintendent nearly $30,000 raise, which she claimed was a “slap in the face” to hard-working teachers who haven’t seen a boost in pay in years.

…

Since those in attendance at Monday’s board meeting were allowed to comment on superintendent Jerome Puyau’s pay raise, Hargrave chose to make mention of the “serious issue” she had with such action occurring.

“I have a serious issue with a superintendent or any person in a position of leadership getting any type of raise,” Hargrave said before the board and others in attendance. “I feel like it’s a slap in the face to all the teachers, cafeteria workers and any other support staff we have. We work very hard with very little to maintain the salaries we have.”

Hargrave also questioned Puyau directly on why he was willing to essentially take a pay hike that would affect the salaries of Vermilion Parish teachers, to which a school board member claimed her comments weren’t “germane to what’s on the agenda.” Hargrave continued to press the board members further, but she was eventually escorted out of the meeting by an officer on site.

And then the officer on site handcuffed her for no apparent reason, not to mention pushing her to the floor.

But the board still thinks she had it coming.

“Everybody wants to side on the poor little woman who got thrown out,” Anthony Fontana, the VPSB president, said to WAFB. “Well, she made a choice. She could have walked out and nothing would have happened.”

Erm. She made a choice to ask the school board questions at a public hearing. Is there some compelling reason she should be forbidden to do that, and roughly arrested if she does do it? A member of the board said her question was not germane to their agenda, but it’s far from clear why it wasn’t.

It’s true that people can always make a choice to avoid asking troublesome questions in order to avoid being roughed up, but that shouldn’t be necessary in a free society.

Mei Fong asks how much more are men paid.

About 50 percent, in the BBC journalist Carrie Gracie’s case. Over the weekend, Ms. Gracie quit as the broadcaster’s China editor and announced she was returning to London. “Enough is enough,” she wrote, in an astringent open letter, describing how she discovered last year that the BBC paid two of its four international editors — men, of course — 50 percent more than the female editors.

(I think it was closer to twice as much.)

It says something when it’s considered an advancement for women just to get to the bargaining table and ask for equal pay. Many of us never even get that far.

More than a decade ago, I was coming off a successful summer stint as a Wall Street Journal reporting intern. Naturally, I vied with other interns for a full-time reporting job. A post came up in the Hong Kong bureau. Did I, a Cantonese speaker with prior Asian reporting experience, get it? I wasn’t even asked to apply. Instead, a fellow intern with no prior Asia experience was hired. He was white.

There were no doubt other variables, but still that seems odd.

Last year, the Independent Association of Publishers’ Employees reported a persistent wage gap between men and women employed by Dow Jones, The Journal’s parent company. The report found that full-time female employees make on average less than 85 percent of what their male counterparts earn, even when accounting for differences in age and location. And there is a distinct and persistent gap between pay for men and for women, even when they hold the same job title and have worked the same amount of time. Dow Jones female employees in New York — hardly a cheap place to live — made $10,000 less than their male counterparts, and $13,000 less in Washington. Multiply that difference over the span of a career and that’s the home you can never buy, or several children’s college educations.

Ok but on the plus side, you get lots of sexual invitations on the job.

Our understanding of China would be hugely diminished without the contribution of many outstanding female correspondents. There was The New Yorker’s China correspondent Emily Hahn, who wrote the first authoritative biography of the Soong sisters and had met both Mao and Zhou Enlai. (She frequently complained in letters home of being underpaid and financially strapped.) Or Time magazine’s Annalee Jacoby, who had to work around the War Department’s rules forbidding female correspondents. Rather patronizingly called the “girl reporter of this war” during World War II, she co-wrote the best seller “Thunder Out of China,” chronicling the Chiang Kai-shek era. Ms. Jacoby would later give up her foreign correspondent career for marriage and motherhood.

The case for equal pay is the case for better reporting. Pay women equally to men and more women will stay in the business; more women lessens the preponderance of male viewpoints and allows a clearer presentation of how things are. Certainly female reporters who covered the Vietnam War have made the case that their gender frequently helped them look beyond a near-fetishistic coverage of guns and bombs to the real costs of war.

To put it another way, it would be quite a good idea to get the whole human story and not just half of it.

There’s that teacher in Louisiana who was arrested and handcuffed for asking questions at a school board meeting about why an administrator was getting a raise while teachers hadn’t had a raise in years.

Deyshia Hargrave had a question for the Vermillion Parish School Board: Why was the superintendent getting a pay raise when teachers like her and other school employees hadn’t had one in years?

“I feel like it is a slap in the face of all the teachers, cafeteria workers and any other support staff we have,” she told the board in a public meeting Monday. “We work very hard with very little.”

What happened next might have stayed in the tiny Louisiana town of Abbeville, about 150 miles west of New Orleans. But captured on videotape and viewed nearly 2 million times on YouTube, it became an international incident. The school board reportedly received death threats from around the world, as local parents and teachers planned their own protests.

A little girl in Pakistan was raped, strangled, and thrown into a dumpster. She was seven.

As her relatives tell it, Zainab’s horrifying last few hours unfolded like this: The child had been staying with her aunt while her parents traveled to Saudi Arabia to perform the umrah pilgrimage. On Thursday, relatives say, she left home for a nearby Koran recital. She never returned.

On Tuesday, police found her body in a dumpster about a mile from her home in Kasur, a city in Punjab province. According to early autopsy reports, Zainab had been raped multiple times and strangled four or five days earlier.

She was seven. Seven. Seven.

The condemnable & horrific rape & murder of little Zainab exposes once again how vulnerable our children are in our society. This is not the first time such horrific acts have happened. We have to act swiftly to punish the guilty & ensure that our children are better protected. pic.twitter.com/9f7OM3hYT1

— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) January 10, 2018

Zainab’s case, though, seems to have hit a nerve, prompting attention from politicians, athletes and performers. On Wednesday, riots erupted over alleged inaction by authorities. At least two people were fatally shot when protesters tried to storm a police station to demand justice, according to Dawn. Shop owners in the city shut their doors on Wednesday in solidarity with Zainab’s family.

In Pakistan, rape and violence against women are endemic. Sometimes, they’re even sanctioned by traditional authorities. In Pakistan, tribal councils have come under fire for ordering the rape of women whose relatives commit crimes. In July, a 12-year-old girl was raped by a teenager in a field. Two days later, the perpetrator’s 16-year-old sister was sexually assaulted as punishment. Although it’s hard to know how often this happens, experts estimate that hundreds of women suffer this fate each year.

God hates women, everybody hates women.

Another example of how not to amplify support for your cause: Pensacola Women’s March on Facebook:

Trigger Warning and Content Warning for comments:
Transphobia, Cissexism, Racism, mention of Sexual Assault, Genital Mutilation, Misogyny and Trans-Misogyny.

The Pink P*ssy Hats represent a very concentrated and thus, exclusionary sect of feminism that ignores, neglects, and ultimately harms the fight for global women’s liberation. The entire concept is based around the idea of biological essentialism and shared womanhood (Mia McKenzie, Black Girl Dangerous): two incorrect ideas that women are all on the same level despite conflicting classes, races, sexualities, etc. and are also bound by “the power of the vagina”. This is a very popular concept developed and expanded upon during the second wave of feminism, usually called “radical feminism”. This type of feminism, though hugely successful in terms of reproductive justice, ultimately emphasized a mistreatment of transgender women that continues today. Though some transgender women do choose to have Genital Reconstruction Surgery, many do not, and should not have to to prove their being a woman. The right to self-determination, a concept that all feminists must get behind, allows transgender women to be women. Thus, not every woman has a vagina, and with the right to self-determination existing for transgender men and non-binary transgender people as well, not every person who has a vagina is a woman. The Pink P*ssy Hat reinforces the notion that woman = vagina and vagina = woman, and both of these are incorrect. Additionally, the Pink P*ssy Hat is white-focused and Eurocentric in that it assumes that all vaginas are pink; this is also an incorrect assertion.

The Pensacola Women’s March organizers understand that this idea was a knee-jerk reaction to the heinous, sexist, misogynistic Trump administration, but it is also just that: a knee-jerk reaction, not fully thought out. Therefore, we ask that march goers refrain from wearing this hat and instead, pick an alternative headwear that focuses on collective women’s liberation for ALL women: transgender women, multinational women, disabled women, queer women — the most marginalized. It is only through the centering and leadership of these groups that women will be liberated — not through exclusionary white feminism, which the Pink P*ssy Hat is indicative of.

The Pensacola Women’s March team will be removing all forms of hate speech that they encounter in an effort to promote a safer environment for all women.

Let’s discuss that. The idea appears to be that feminism made a big mistake from the outset by…well, by being feminism: by seeing women as an oppressed class and working to end that oppression.

There’s a lot that’s strange about that idea. To pick out just one – why is it only feminism that is accused of this? Why are other oppressed classes allowed to name their oppression and their class while women are told that’s “mistreatment”?

To pick out another – how can women organize to end their oppression if they can’t name themselves?

To pick out a third – this claim that feminists think women are ‘bound by “the power of the vagina”’ is nonsense. There’s some rhetoric about pussy power and so on, but that’s because of entrenched fear and loathing that is entangled with misogyny and male supremacy and all the rest of it; it’s not a literal belief in “the power of the vagina.” Again, feminists should not be ordered to stop using rhetoric to counter fear and loathing.

Updating to add: A trans friend of mine left this comment on the post:

This was anti trump protest in the most graphic way possible on television. I can’t see how anybody who is against his illegal reign would be offended . Only thing I can conclude is some these folks allegedly opposed to pink hats are agents of a GOP fifth column. When the right wants to wreck something , what better than to set it up to look like an attack from the left. Nixon used those tactics too.

I think that’s all too plausible.

Bien sûr, c’est normal. There are Christina Hoff Sommerses and Ella Whelans in France too, and they join their anglophone sisters in saying this has gone too far.

Just one day after Hollywood offered a show of support for the #MeToo movement on the Golden Globes red carpet and stage, a famous actress on the other side of the Atlantic lent her name to a public letter denouncing the movement, as well as its French counterpart, #Balancetonporc, or “Expose Your Pig.”

Catherine Deneuve joined more than 100 other Frenchwomen in entertainment, publishing and academic fields Tuesday in the pages of the newspaper Le Monde and on its website in arguing that the two movements, in which women and men have used social media as a forum to describe sexual misconduct, have gone too far by publicly prosecuting private experiences and have created a totalitarian climate.

“Rape is a crime. But insistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime, nor is gallantry a chauvinist aggression,” the letter, dated Monday, begins.

But the claim is not that “insistent flirting” is [necessarily] a crime, but rather that it’s one branch of the systemic subordination of women, that it hampers women at work, that it violates workplace rules, that it’s a form of bullying, and so on. The idea isn’t that all the harassing men should be thrown into prison, it’s that the harassing should stop.

(Also, “gallantry” – give me a break.)

“As a result of the Weinstein affair, there has been a legitimate realization of the sexual violence women experience, particularly in the workplace, where some men abuse their power. It was necessary. But now this liberation of speech has been turned on its head.”

They contend that the #MeToo movement has led to a campaign of public accusations that have placed undeserving people in the same category as sex offenders without giving them a chance to defend themselves. “This expedited justice already has its victims, men prevented from practicing their profession as punishment, forced to resign, etc., while the only thing they did wrong was touching a knee, trying to steal a kiss, or speaking about ‘intimate’ things at a work dinner, or sending messages with sexual connotations to a woman whose feelings were not mutual,” they write. The letter, written in French was translated here by The New York Times.

The only thing they did wrong was treat work colleagues who had the bad luck to be women as if they were merchandise laid out on a shelf for consumption. It’s several decades too late to pretend that men just have no idea that women at work want to be treated as colleagues rather than sexual opportunities.

They believe that the scope of the two movements represses sexual expression and freedom…

They continue, “The philosopher Ruwen Ogien defended the freedom to offend as essential to artistic creation. In the same way, we defend a freedom to bother, indispensable to sexual freedom.” Though the writers do not draw clear lines between what constitutes sexual misconduct and what does not, they say that they are “sufficiently farseeing not to confuse a clumsy come-on and sexual assault.”

But #MeToo doesn’t confuse a clumsy come-on and sexual assault either. It’s entirely possible to say both: an unwanted sexual overture is not assault, and an unwanted sexual overture is out of place in a work environment. A thing can be bad without being a crime; we can call things bad without thereby saying or implying they are crimes. I don’t think anyone has called for Charlie Rose or Leon Wieseltier to be prosecuted. That doesn’t mean what they did was harmless.

In concluding the letter, the writers return to the concept of self-victimization and a call for women to accept the pitfalls that come with freedom. “Accidents that can affect a woman’s body do not necessarily affect her dignity and must not, as hard as they can be, necessarily make her a perpetual victim,” they write. “Because we are not reducible to our bodies. Our inner freedom is inviolable. And this freedom that we cherish is not without risks and responsibilities.”

Dear god. That’s truly sad. That’s what people tell themselves in concentration camps – “my inner freedom is inviolable.” Women don’t have to put up with accidents that can affect their bodies; women are allowed to say no, stop treating us as if we were there for your sexual coffee break.

Originally a comment by Lady Mondegreen on Spiked says solidarity is the work of the devil.

That is, equality was won by was won by ordinary women standing up for themselves one at a time and separately and without conferring or joining forces in any way whatsoever. Yeah! No need for solidarity, no need to organize, no need for campaigns, just each woman square her shoulders and be as great as she can be.

This is the story conservative America tells itself over and over again about how equal rights were fought for.

I grew up hearing that Rosa Parks was really tired one day after a hard day’s work, so she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person.

–Wait, Rosa Parks was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP? She had marched for civil rights and workers’ rights? She’d attended activist training? She wasn’t the first black person to be arrested for resisting bus segregation, but her case was chosen for the lawsuit challenging it?

What a disappointment. Rights are supposed to be won by individualistic individual heroes who are so strong and brave and good they vanquish the meanies and win over the public by virtue of their individual awesomeness. Anything else would be people organizing and fighting together against the powerful, and we can’t have that. That’s communism, and collectivism, and being contemptible helpless creatures.

Funny how libertarian/conservative types run down Hollywood while clinging to the most hackneyed and unrealistic star-vehicle narratives. It isn’t superheroes who win equal rights, Whelan.

David Brooks being even more willfully wrong and middleminded than usual.

Let me start with three inconvenient observations, based on dozens of conversations around Washington over the past year:

That is, let him start with congratulating himself for Going Against the Tide, for Thinking For Himself, for Not Following the Herd.

First, people who go into the White House to have a meeting with President Trump usually leave pleasantly surprised. They find that Trump is not the raving madman they expected from his tweetstorms or the media coverage. They generally say that he is affable, if repetitive. He runs a normal, good meeting and seems well-informed enough to get by.

Are.you.fucking.kidding.

If they’re going there to have a meeting with him they’re at least somewhat on his side and thus predisposed to think he’s ok.

The issue is not whether or not he’s a “raving madman.”

Who cares if he’s affable to people predisposed to be on his side?

Whoaaaaa with that “if repetitive” throwaway – that is not a trivial matter. That’s a symptom of dementia. He’s the president; it’s very bad if he has dementia.

He seems well-informed enough to get by??? We’re supposed to think that’s good enough? This isn’t an after-school job at which getting by is all that’s expected; this is the presidency. Also “getting by” at a meeting of people on the same side is really saying almost nothing. He’s not there to be a stuffed dummy who is good enough if he doesn’t vomit on the table.

And that is one of Brooks’s “inconvenient observations.”

He is such a dullard. It never stops amazing me that he’s a prominent talking head.

Second, people who work in the Trump administration have wildly divergent views about their boss. Some think he is a deranged child, as Michael Wolff reported. But some think he is merely a distraction they can work around. Some think he is strange, but not impossible. Some genuinely admire Trump. Many filter out his crazy stuff and pretend it doesn’t exist.

That’s the inconvenient part? That’s some kind of dissent from the view that Trump is incompetent and dangerous in his job? They filter him, they work around him, they think he’s a deranged child, some of them actually admire him – this is different from the conventional wisdom how exactly?

My impression is that the Trump administration is an unhappy place to work, because there is a lot of infighting and often no direction from the top. But this is not an administration full of people itching to invoke the 25th Amendment.

Because it includes a lot of people who are pissing themselves with excitement at their chance to trash the environment and take away health insurance and slash taxes on the rich. We know.

Third, the White House is getting more professional. Imagine if Trump didn’t tweet. The craziness of the past weeks would be out of the way, and we’d see a White House that is briskly pursuing its goals: the shift in our Pakistan policy, the shift in our offshore drilling policy, the fruition of our ISIS policy, the nomination for judgeships and the formation of policies on infrastructure, DACA, North Korea and trade.

If Trump didn’t tweet – that’s like saying if Hitler didn’t hate the Jews. Trump does tweet, and that’s not a sideshow.

Plus we would see a White House that is briskly pursuing its horrendous goals that we don’t want it to pursue. We don’t want a “shift in our offshore drilling policy,” just as we don’t want another Deepwater Horizon.

Then he lectures us on being too much in a bubble, then he laments how lowbrow the opposition is.

Why does the Times pay him a large salary for this?

However. A ruling just now:

A panel of federal judges struck down North Carolina’s congressional map on Tuesday, declaring it unconstitutionally gerrymandered and demanding that the Republican-controlled General Assembly redraw district lines before this year’s midterm elections.

The ruling was the first time that a federal court had blocked a congressional map because the judges believed it to be a partisan gerrymander, and it deepened the political chaos that has enveloped North Carolina in recent years.

“We agree with plaintiffs that a wealth of evidence proves the General Assembly’s intent to ‘subordinate’ the interests of non-Republican voters and ‘entrench’ Republican domination of the state’s congressional delegation,” Judge James A. Wynn Jr. wrote in a 191-page opinion that another judge joined in full.

The state has a couple of weeks to offer a better map, but if they can’t do it the court will.

Again the Times pretends shit is a bowl of rose petals. Joe Arpaio is “fiery” and now Breitbart has a “defiant editorial spirit.” Defiant of what, though? Oh, truth, civility, fairness, proportion, humanity – that kind of bourgeois frippery.

They’re reporting that Breitbart has thrown Bannon out.

Mr. Bannon’s departure, which was forced by a onetime financial patron, Rebekah Mercer, comes as Mr. Bannon remained unable to quell the furor over remarks attributed to him in a new book in which he questions President Trump’s mental fitness and disparages his elder son, Donald Trump Jr.

Mr. Bannon and Breitbart will work together on a smooth transition, a statement from the company’s chief executive, Larry Solov, said.

In the statement, Mr. Bannon added that he was “proud of what the Breitbart team has accomplished in so short a period of time in building out a world-class news platform.”

The popularity of Breitbart, like the “genius” of Trump in getting elected, shows there are a lot of mean people in the world. It doesn’t show that Trump is a genius or that Breitbart is a world-class anything, it just shows that being a mean shit is way too popular.

No one has been more closely identified with the Breitbart website or had more to do with emboldening its defiant editorial spirit than Mr. Bannon did after its namesake, Andrew Breitbart, died of a heart attack in 2012. In Washington, Mr. Bannon works and lives part time in a townhouse nicknamed the Breitbart Embassy.

Can this be the last we ever hear of him? Because that would be greeeeeaaaaaat.

Spiked has another “contrarian” what’s all this fuss about sexual harassment piece, this one by Ella Whelan. The target this time is Time’s Up, which turns out to be rich women condescending to poor women, I guess by not ignoring them.

No one should have to put up with injustice. But this patronising campaign assumes working-class women are incapable of sticking up for themselves. How did women ever win equality in the workplace in the first place? Was it through Hollywood-run schemes to stop bad male behaviour with lawsuits? Of course not. Equality was won by ordinary women standing up for themselves and demanding their freedom. This is what #MeToo types can’t understand – that women aren’t all helpless creatures, simply waiting to be freed by a hashtag or a handout.

That is, equality was won by was won by ordinary women standing up for themselves one at a time and separately and without conferring or joining forces in any way whatsoever. Yeah! No need for solidarity, no need to organize, no need for campaigns, just each woman square her shoulders and be as great as she can be. If women dare to band together then by god they’re all treating each other as helpless creatures.