Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, yesterday:

As many of you know, Bloodroot has recently come under attack and is currently being trolled by a number of people in the transgender community and their supporters. We felt it was time to make an official statement. Because it seems whenever we try and explain what happened and our stance on this issue, it only serves to inspire more hatred, we will not be replying to comments.

Bloodroot and her owners are not transphobic – far from it! Bloodroot has always welcomed and respected everyone – especially people who might feel uncomfortable in a public space. Whether that be people from other countries, people of color, people of every type of sexuality, and yes, people who are transgender. Our long-time customers know that, many who are transgender, which is why they have been rallying to our defense.

One of our relatively new customers was enthusiastically telling us about a space in Massachusetts that catered to trans people and asked if we knew about it. We didn’t but since we are not trans, it wasn’t all that interesting to us personally and stated that for us, we prefer women only spaces. This comes from our history. When Bloodroot first started in the 70’s we were trying to create a space specifically safe for women, since there were so few places like that at the time. Of course even back then we were open and welcoming to everyone, not just women. This customer misunderstood what was really an off-hand comment and perceived that to mean that we were anti-trans. She then wrote a post slamming us. That post was seen and shared. Then some in the trans community – most of whom have never been to Bloodroot – started trolling us. We find it ironic that of all the many businesses that you probably buy things from, it’s hard to imagine any of them being as supportive of not only trans people, but all people who are “different” from societal norms as Bloodroot has been and continues to be. But Bloodroot, a Vegetarian (mostly vegan) Restaurant and Feminist bookstore, that has been in business for 40+ years and is owned and run by two lesbians aged 73 and 83, is the place they decide to attack. Women who through their activism as second wave feminists help pave the way for the rights and freedoms that the trans community today enjoy!

You couldn’t make it up. Not angry men making violent threats; not angry men carrying out violent actions; not racists; not fascists; not anti-abortion fanatics terrorizing women seeking abortions; not homophobes, not gay-bashers, not pussygrabbers, not rapists – but two feminist lesbians who have have run a vegetarian restaurant for 40 years. Yeah, kids, let’s attack them, because that will be easy and won’t take any courage!

Some of these “activists” are posting hostile reviews on Yelp, in hopes of harming Bloodroot’s business.

Imagine for a minute if hundreds of people who don’t know you started to attack you online, spewing lies about you that go against your core values, and trying to destroy you. Better yet, imagine them doing that to someone you love – your mother or grandmother for example. We understand this is a subject matter that many people are passionate about, but we feel this anger is misguided and misplaced.

Regardless of how you feel about Bloodroot’s stand on this, we will continue to be a welcoming space for all types of people, including those that are transgender, and treat everyone with respect. If you feel our explanation and response is inadequate for you, then you should not patronize us.

But, more urgently, you should also learn who your real enemies are. They are not Bloodroot and they are not Selma and Noel.

Benjamin Wittes looks at Trump’s war on the Deep State so far, and finds it fulfilling dire predictions but also not as bad as it could be if Trump were more competent.

The first few weeks of the Trump administration raised the question of the degree to which Trump’s malevolence would be tempered by his incompetence. In the first year of the Trump presidency, the answer to that question was that incompetence did a lot of tempering. Trump blundered from crisis to crisis. The lawyering around him was comically dreadful—as was the broader executive functioning. Taking on established democratic institutions and wrecking them actually takes a certain amount of focus and energy—and Trump just isn’t very good at it. His heart may be in it, but Vladimir Putin he isn’t. And the United States isn’t a fragile new democracy with weak institutions either.

He’s got the rage but not the talent, the venom but not the discipline, the greed but not the dedication.

Trump has another personality liability for the project at hand, one that fewer people notice: He is ultimately a wuss. He talks about his boldness all the time, and a lot of people—including his enemies—lap up the self-description. He likes to talk in sweeping, grandiose terms about the things he is going to do and the things he has done. In practice, however, he’s actually very cautious most of the time. Think about it this way: Leaving aside Trump’s words and claims about himself, do the actions of his first year in office generally bespeak boldness? Yes, he left the Paris Climate Agreement. And yes, he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And yes, he did the travel ban. But think about all of the bold things Trump has promised and backed away from: scrapping NAFTA and waging a trade war against the Chinese, ditching the Iran deal, walking away from Europe, draining the swamp, and confronting conservative orthodoxy on taxation.

The boldest step Trump has taken, the firing of James Comey, was an accident. Trump actually appears to have believed that this move would be popular, because Comey had angered Democrats during the 2016 campaign. Most of Trump’s supposed boldness is just tweets and bombast and things he says. It’s a big part of his self-image, but the self-image is mostly a game of dress-up. When push comes to shove, he’s pretty paralyzed by circumstances much of the time.

Well, unless there’s some pesky Balkan head of state in his way.

On the other hand, Wittes goes on, he could do a lot of damage just by hollowing out the federal bureaucracy, and that he is in fact doing. (It doesn’t take much boldness.)

All of which is to emphasize that we are emphatically not out of the woods. The situation remains dangerous, because Trump’s personality is so fundamentally incompatible with the nature and demands of the office he holds. His impulsiveness can get us into trouble any day. As his political situation, or his legal situation, continues to degrade, he could lash out and change the equilibrium at any time. Moreover, chipping away at institutions slowly, both by institutional and budgetary evisceration and by leadership attrition—one Chuck Rosenberg a few months ago, one James Baker last month, one Andrew McCabe in March—will take a big toll over time.

But Trump simply cannot look back on the last year and be satisfied with the success of his war on the Deep State. His battle to remake it in his image has been largely unavailing—and has come at far greater cost to his presidency than to the institutions he is trying to undermine.

But the blot on our record is there forever.

Deborah Cameron has a shorter and of course vastly better list of some good reads.

• Mary Beard, Women and Power: A Manifesto.
• Emma Jane, Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History.
• Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and tumblr to Trump and the alt-right.

About the Nagle, she says

Before anyone was talking about the ‘alt-right’, Angela Nagle was investigating the online subcultures from which it emerged, tracking the people involved, the platforms they used, the political positions they espoused and—from a linguist’s perspective most interestingly—the evolution of their distinctive communication style. This isn’t as distinctive as we might think: it has much in common with earlier celebrations of transgression (‘kill all normies’ is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s ‘il faut épater les bourgeois’), and its emphasis on men rebelling against the domesticating influence of women recalls the leftist counter-culture of the 1960s (think Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).

Yesssss – and other “transgressive” fiction before that. I remember noticing it decades ago when reading something late 19th century, I can’t remember what – it was all about the surging genius of the male protagonist and the determination of the castrating woman he had the bad luck to fancy to tie him down to domestic wharblegarble. I remember reading it and scowling and noting what a familiar pattern it is. Man has dreams, woman wants to put an apron on them.

Another item to put alongside Jack Nicholson versus Nurse Ratched is Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould versus Hotlips Houlihan, in which the dudes get their revenge on the uptight nurse by gathering everyone on the base to watch and then tearing down the curtain behind which Houlihan is taking a shower. Haw haw haw, naked lady in front of all those laughing fully clothed men. So transgressive.

Cameron then offers some shorter reads.

Unsurprisingly, 2017 produced many reflections on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, and one issue some of these reflections addressed was the role played by gendered language in shaping responses to the candidates. Among the most intriguing approaches to the question was a dramatic experiment asking ‘What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had swapped genders?’

Must read that.

Oh goody, a list. On the other hand it’s a pretty odd list. It’s Robert McCrum’s choice for The 100 best nonfiction books of all time – in English, though that’s not stated, and the last one is the bible which was not written in English. But that’s the only translation as far as I could tell, unless Popper wrote The Open Society in German, which I don’t think he did.

But McCrum includes poetry and drama in non-fiction, which seems like cheating. It lets him include the First Folio, which by all means, but non-fiction, really?

Anyway the contemporary and modern choices seem pretty meh to me – more most popular or most familiar than best. Naomi Klein’s No Logo? Top 100 of all time? Come on. And the Oliver Sacks book that was translated into a movie, when there are others that are such gems.

22. A Grief Observed by CS Lewis (1961)
This powerful study of loss asks: “Where is God?” and explores the feeling of solitude and sense of betrayal that even non-believers will recognise.

23. The Elements of Style by William Strunk and EB White (1959)
Dorothy Parker and Stephen King have both urged aspiring writers towards this crisp guide to the English language where brevity is key.

No no no.

41. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936)
The original self-help manual on American life – with its influence stretching from the Great Depression to Donald Trump – has a lot to answer for.

Indeed, but that doesn’t make it one of the best.

73. Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb (1807)
A troubled brother-and-sister team produced one of the 19th century’s bestselling volumes and simplified the complexity of Shakespeare’s plays for younger audiences.

Again, doesn’t make it a best.

93. Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk by Sir Thomas Browne (1658)
Browne earned his reputation as a “writer’s writer” with this dazzling short essay on burial customs.

Now you’re talking. Urn Burial is extraordinary. You can find it online, too, and it’s not really a book, more a long essay.

100. King James Bible: The Authorised Version (1611)
It is impossible to imagine the English-speaking world celebrated in this series without the King James Bible, which is as universal and influential as Shakespeare.

But it’s hardly non-fiction now is it?!

Got any nominees?

Originally a comment by Jeff Engel on Still never.

President Clinton would have made for a glorious 4-8 years of moaning and crying from the right, able to pick on every peccadillo and declaim about the moral superiority of the Republican Party who – they’d be happy to say – ultimately rejected Trump while the Democrats embraced Her Satanic Majesty. So yeah, it’s not that expensive being a Never Trumper from the op-ed pages.

Still – I don’t believe I can take fully seriously the complaints about Trump’s character combined with the delight in his policies. Bullying, pettiness, aggressive ignorance – these are the same things that will underlie the preferred conservative society of “ordered classes”, people “knowing their place”, and the eager trampling of every protection against well-understood environmental threats. Crassness, bigotry – again, where else do you suppose the dismantling of minority protections comes from? Toadyism as the form of public service – this is what comes of the tireless elevation of business culture as the model of efficiency to which government should aspire, and setting the lobbyists to work drafting the regulations for their industries.

There could be conservative political virtues. There’s a lot to be said for preserving working institutions and reforming them carefully, rather than replacing them wholesale; for insisting on genuine character in leaders and for acknowledging it respectfully regardless of policy differences; for regarding society as an organism more than a mechanism and treating governance as more the work of a doctor than an engineer.

Bret Stephens really could have had all of that with a President Hillary Clinton. He wouldn’t have the policies he’s crowing about, precisely because those come from the vices he supposedly condemns.

In today’s US Gun Terrorism news so far:

The Denver Post:

One Douglas County deputy died and four more were wounded along with two civilians Sunday morning at a Highlands Ranch apartment complex. The shooter was also shot and is believed dead, the Sheriff’s Office said in a tweet at 9:32 a.m.

Deputies were responding to a domestic disturbance call.

CBS News:

Police in Houston say they arrested a man found with guns and ammunition in his hotel room early Sunday, as authorities across the country remain on high alert ahead of planned New Year’s Eve celebrations.

The guy was drunk and tottering around hassling other guests, so police asked him to go to his room and when he refused they escorted him there preparatory to escorting him with his belongings out of the hotel.

When officers arrived at his room, they found “several” firearms and rounds of ammunition in the room. Cintillas said there were “several” firearms but “not a huge amount.”

The man was taken into custody. Police would not comment on the exact type of firearms nor on why the suspect had the weapons and ammunition in his room. Cintillas said the officers’ intervention “averted a potentially bad situation.”

And it’s not even afternoon yet.

This woman in #Iran took off her #Hijab to protest the mandatory Islamic dress code imposed on Iranian women. #IStandWithHer #IranProtests #Islam pic.twitter.com/G6oKHIPA68

— Armin Navabi (@ArminNavabi) December 29, 2017

A clear photo via Fariborz Pooya:

Maryam’s new Facebook cover photo:

Trump’s good buddy former Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke:

I am UNINTIMIDATED by lib media attempts to smear and discredit me with their FAKE NEWS reports designed to silence me. I will continue to poke them in the eye with a sharp stick and bitch slap these scum bags til they get it. I have been attacked by better people than them #MAGA pic.twitter.com/XtZW5PdU2b

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) December 30, 2017

I am UNINTIMIDATED by lib media attempts to smear and discredit me with their FAKE NEWS reports designed to silence me. I will continue to poke them in the eye with a sharp stick and bitch slap these scum bags til they get it. I have been attacked by better people than them #MAGA

https://twitter.com/SheriffClarke/status/947225820493426688

BREAKING NEWS! When LYING LIB MEDIA makes up FAKE NEWS to smear me, the ANTIDOTE is go right at them. Punch them in the nose & MAKE THEM TASTE THEIR OWN BLOOD. Nothing gets a bully like LYING LIB MEDIA’S attention better than to give them a taste of their own blood #neverbackdown

Nothing like getting under the skin of lefties like I did today. I fight to win. You come at me libs you better bring a hard hat, some aspirin and your veggie wrap because it’s going to be a long day and I’m going to smack you around until you crawl back to your mom’s basement. pic.twitter.com/CgmrRiBp8Y

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) December 31, 2017

Nothing like getting under the skin of lefties like I did today. I fight to win. You come at me libs you better bring a hard hat, some aspirin and your veggie wrap because it’s going to be a long day and I’m going to smack you around until you crawl back to your mom’s basement.

This man used to be in law enforcement, until he resigned last August. People like that should not be in law enforcement, nor should they be on Twitter. I’ve reported him a couple of times now.

This is not normal and it should never become normal.

From the ACLU:

During the holiday season, many of us think about what we can do to help people struggling with poverty. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, decided just before Christmas to rescind a guidance meant to protect low-income Americans.

The 2016 guidance, issued by former President Obama’s Justice Department, urged state and local courts nationwide to abide by constitutional principles prohibiting the jailing of poor people who cannot afford to pay court fines and fees. Jeff Sessions’ action makes clear that he and his Justice Department are unconcerned by courts trampling on the rights of poor people.

The Obama Justice Department issued the 2016 letter after reports and lawsuits by the ACLU and other groups revealed how modern-day debtors’ prisons function in more than a dozen states, despite the fact that the U.S. two centuries ago formally outlawed jailing people simply because they have unpaid debts.

These efforts revealed that poor people were being locked up in Georgia, Washington, Mississippi, and elsewhere without court hearings or legal representation when they could not pay fines and fees for traffic tickets or other civil infractions or criminal offenses. These efforts also show that modern-day debtors’ prisons result from state laws allowing or requiring the suspension of driver’s licenses for unpaid court fines or fees without first requiring confirmation that the person could actually pay.

Modern-day debtors’ prisons received unprecedented national attention in 2015 when the Justice Department issued a 185-page report in its investigation of the Ferguson Police Department after the shooting of teenager Michael Brown. It documented how Ferguson police sought to advance the “City’s focus on revenue rather than … public safety needs,” leading to the routine incarceration of poor people to elicit court fine and fee payments, which raised due process concerns and reflected racial bias.

This wave of attention on draconian debtors’ prisons spurred the Justice Department to issue the 2016 letter on fines and fees.

But Jeff Sessions wants to see poor people locked up and/or made poorer by fines. It’s how he rolls.

The hot Donnie-news today is what got the FBI started on the Russia investigation. It turns out it was Papadopoulos blabbing to an Australian diplomat.

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

July 2016. That early.

The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?

It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.

Via one of Trump’s own people, babbling as he sucked down the gin. The FBI, on the other hand, did the opposite.

Once the information Mr. Papadopoulos had disclosed to the Australian diplomat reached the F.B.I., the bureau opened an investigation that became one of its most closely guarded secrets. Senior agents did not discuss it at the daily morning briefing, a classified setting where officials normally speak freely about highly sensitive operations.

There was debate about whether to go public or not, and the agency decided not.

Ultimately, the F.B.I. and Justice Department decided to keep the investigation quiet, a decision that Democrats in particular have criticized. And agents did not interview Mr. Papadopoulos until late January.

So we’re now living in Putin’s world.

Jonathan Freedland wrote a book about the American revolution almost 20 years ago. The timing was not great.

The American revolution, I argued, was our inheritance, a part of our patrimony mislaid across the Atlantic. From a written constitution to a system of radically devolved power to the replacement of monarchy with an elected head of state, it was time for us to bring home the revolution that we had made in America.

Mere months after publication came the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

“So you want us to live the American dream?” one interviewer asked. “All a bit of nightmare now, isn’t it?”

And that was then.

That, or something like it, has happened at intervals ever since. If it wasn’t a hideous, only-in-America mass shooting, it would be an election in which a man with fewer votes defeated an infinitely more qualified opponent who had won more.

Usually, I have managed to deflect these challenges, arguing that my book was a homage to a founding ideal, not to the necessarily flawed reality. But it’s time for me to admit my doubts about its core idea – its admiration for the US constitution and system of government. For this first year of the Donald Trump presidency has exposed two flaws in the model that I cannot brush aside so easily.

The first is the one we keep talking about, the one we were talking about only yesterday – the fact that much of what we think is mandatory is actually a matter of custom, and thus worthless in the face of someone like Trump.

The first is that Trump has vividly demonstrated that much of what keeps a democracy intact is not enshrined in the written letter of a constitution, but resides instead in customs and conventions – norms – that are essential to civic wellbeing. Trump trampled all over those as a candidate – refusing to disclose his tax returns, for example – and has trampled over even more as president.

Convention dictated that he had to divest himself of private business concerns on taking office, to prevent a conflict of interest – but in the absence of a law explicitly forcing him to do so, he did no such thing. The same goes for appointing unqualified relatives to senior jobs, sacking the director of the FBI with no legitimate cause, or endorsing an accused child molester for the US Senate. No law told him he couldn’t, so he did.

There’s not even anything ruling out complete incompetence or mental dissolution.

[T]his year of Trump has also shown the extent to which the US has an unwritten constitution that – just like ours – relies on the self-restraint of the key political players, a self-restraint usually insisted upon by a free press. Yet when confronted with a leader unbound by any sense of shame – and shamelessness might just be Trump’s defining quality – America is left unexpectedly vulnerable.

There’s impeachment, but it turns out that impeachment is entirely political. Trump could eat babies on camera and still the Republican Congress would not impeach him.

In 2017 we saw with new clarity that the strength of the US constitution depends entirely on the willingness of those charged with enforcing it to do their duty. And today’s Republicans refuse to fulfil that obligation. They, like Trump, are without shame. This was a fatal oversight by Hamilton, James Madison and their fellow framers of the constitution. They did not reckon on a partisanship so intense it would blind elected representatives to the national interest – so that they would, repeatedly, put party ahead of country. The founders did not conceive of a force like today’s Republican party, willing to indulge a president nakedly hostile to ideals Americans once held sacred.

And to the most basic everyday inhibitions and ethical considerations.

And these weaknesses in the US model have prompted me to see others. The second amendment does not compel Americans to allow an unrestricted flow of guns into the hands of the violent and dangerous, but the fact that the argument hinges on interpretations of a text written more than two centuries ago is itself a problem. It means America, in the words of that great revolutionary Thomas Paine, is too often “like dead and living bodies chained together”, today’s generation shackled to the words of their ancestors.

Yes. It’s not working out well at present.

Weirdness.

A tweet by Lindsay Shepherd:

"Wilfrid Laurier University is not safe for their students nor the surrounding community" – local antifascist group

I actually kind of respect how militant these people are.

Their writing needs some work though. pic.twitter.com/9zG5YauFUO

— Lindsay Shepherd (@NewWorldHominin) December 30, 2017

Oof – the writing and thinking in that post is so bad I have to go look at the Facebook group. I’m especially curious about what any of that has to do with the IWW – the Industrial Workers of the World aka Wobblies.

The About page sounds IWW-compatible, ish, sort of.

The General Defense Committee (GDC) acts in defense and solidarity for those oppressed by capitalism. We advocate for a model of community self-defense, where marginalized people are provided with a platform to speak and organize.

The GDC works in tandem with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a grassroots labour union, with the understanding that a broad strategy is needed for the defense of persecuted communities.

But the front page is another story.

The first item is the one Lindsay Shepherd tweeted.

No, Deborah. Trans students deserve an apology.

This troubling release has made Wilfrid Laurier University‘s position absolutely clear and it’s thoroughly unsurprising. Deborah MacLatchy has decided to inform us about some elusive “independent fact-finder report” (invisible to us commoners) seemingly created to entertain the alt-right’s favourite weapons “do non-binary people really exist?” and “cis people need a safer space too”. The MacLatchy administration has, once again, made it blatantly clear that Wilfrid Laurier University is not safe for their students nor the surrounding community. For shame.

No, Deborah. Showcasing blatant transphobia is not a “reasonable classroom teaching tool”. You wouldn’t showcase Peterson’s blatant misogyny- would you? Would you showcase it if it was aired on TVO? Your followers think that you would.

No, Deborah. You don’t do enough to ensure that your school has “necessary supports and tools to help those who have experienced marginalization and discrimination to engage fully”. Should you have had a postering campaign demanding an apology for trans students? Should the victim’s complaint been registered through unofficial channels? Your followers think that you should.

No, Deborah. We absolutely refuse to “turn the page on a very unfortunate incident”. We absolutely refuse to let you call trampling on our existence the “politicization of an issue”. We absolutely refuse to let you admonish us with your call to “put an end to it.”

Your followers, the far-right, aren’t going to stop. Your centrism will continue to cater to them. You’ve made it clear that our community must defend itself, and we absolutely refuse to take this sitting down.

A post December 25:

For all my trans and nonbinary siblings out there at holiday gatherings today, I hope it goes as smoothly as possible. For all the individuals whose pronouns won’t be respected or names will be ignored, chin up and try to stay strong. For everyone whose families might treat them with intolerance or bigotry, know that I love you, and that your worth isn’t determined by them. For anyone who can’t present the way they want to today, I hope that you get through it as quickly as possible, and maybe you can wear something that at least feels not whollly uncomfortable. For the people out there wearing binders, remember to stretch as you eat, your binder can get tight as your stomach fills up. For the transfem people out there who can’t shave or wear makeup today, you are still beautiful, you are always beautiful. And for the people who don’t have a family or place to go today, I hope you can find some safety and comfort.

What does that have to do with the IWW?

I don’t know, it seems to be a very small group; I wouldn’t have been aware of it if Lindsay Shepherd hadn’t tweeted it; maybe it’s just one person dressed up as a group. But I do wonder why the IWW is being arbitrarily attached to this touchy-feely gender idennidee stuff, especially when actual labor issues don’t seem to get a mention at all. It makes me wonder if there’s a fashion for co-opting labor and socialist groups to promote gender idennidee instead.