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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

It can happen to anyone. Beware.

News from the Hague:

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

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

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

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

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

Men and boys were the victims at Srebrenica though.

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

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

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

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

Phil Nijhuis/AP

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Laurier Community,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grade: F. Repeat the course.

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

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

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

Three people, to shame and berate one grad student.

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ya think? Bully.

Trump and his sleazy friends continue smashing everything.

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

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

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

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

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

Smashing all the things.

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

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

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

Anyway, point is, no bons mots this morning.

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

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

Being ungenial.

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

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

CBS fired him later in the morning.

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

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

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

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

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

Now it makes sense.

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

Sinister sense, but sense.

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

Taken long enough, hasn’t it.

Another one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok, so is it a crime under that code?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pronouns for fuck’s sake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok there’s this: Laurier university starts independent probe after teaching assistant plays clip of gender debate.

Oh no, not clip of gender debate!! Say it isn’t so!

Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University, said she ran afoul of school authorities after she aired a clip in two tutorials of a debate on gender-neutral pronouns featuring polarizing University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson.

The excerpt from TVO’s current affairs program The Agenda shows Peterson, who has famously refused to use gender pronouns other than “he” or “she,” defending his position against a professor who argued it was necessary to use the pronouns that a person prefers to be called.

As I just mentioned the other day, I don’t see Peterson as a serious or interesting source, but that’s way beside the point here. Shepherd was doing a “here are examples of opposing points of view on this subject,” not a “here are two of my very favorite thinkers for you to admire.” Peterson is conspicuous for his views on gender and pronouns, so it would make sense to use him for one pole.

The excerpt from TVO’s current affairs program The Agenda shows Peterson, who has famously refused to use gender pronouns other than “he” or “she,” defending his position against a professor who argued it was necessary to use the pronouns that a person prefers to be called.

Shepherd said she was chastised by her superiors for failing to condemn Peterson’s remarks outright and told her neutral approach to the clip was tantamount to remaining neutral on other objectionable views such as those of Adolf Hitler.

The university would not confirm what was said to Shepherd, but said it had enlisted an unidentified “neutral third-party professional” to “gather the facts” of the situation.

Well guess what, there’s a recording, and excerpts from it have been published. (Shepherd is very clear and her inquisitors are farther away and much less clear, so I assume it’s Shepherd who both recorded the inquisition and gave it to the press.)

I urge listening to it. It’s a little over 9 minutes, and it’s deeply disgusting.

I transcribed some. Do listen, though, to get the full sanctimony and confidence of her torturers.

Man: “It is discriminatory to be targeting someone due to their gender identity or gender expression. So, bringing something like that up in class, not critically – and I understand that you’re trying to, like –

LS: “It was critical. I introduced it critically.”

Man: “How so?”

LS: “Like I said, it was in the spirit of debate.”

Man: “Ok. In the spirit of the debate is slightly different than being like, ok, this is like a problematic idea that we might want to unpack – “

LS: “But that’s taking sides.” [1:48]

[skip ahead]

Man: “You’re perfectly entitled to your own opinion, but when you’re bringing it into the context of the classroom, that can be problematic.” [3:02]

Woman: “Let me mention the gender violence, the gender and sexual violence policy…doesn’t mean just violence but that does include targeting folks based on gender, so that includes transphobia, biphobia, homophobia, all those sorts of things are protected under the policy.”

She doesn’t mean “protected,” obviously, she means the opposite.

It’s awful. Awful. She’s there alone and they’re accusing her of all this nonsense, full of smugness and disapproval.

Back to the Star:

For Shepherd, the incident has raised fundamental questions about the purpose of a post-secondary institution.

Silencing unpopular opinions is not true to the spirit of an institution that purports to encourage intellectual exploration, she said, adding that launching a third-party investigation only reinforces that impression.

“This was an opportunity for the university to be like ‘it’s true, we should be able to have a debate, we’re sorry it became an issue and we’re happy to foster debate in the university environment,’ ” she said. “Instead, they’re being weird about it.”

Shepherd said the lesson to her communications tutorial class was focusing on the complexities of grammar.

Shepherd said she was trying to demonstrate that the structure of a language can affect the society in which it is spoken in ways people might not anticipate. To illustrate her point, she said she mentioned that long-standing views on gender had probably been shaped by the gender-specific pronouns that are part of English’s fundamental grammatical structure.

The clip of Peterson debating sexual diversity scholar Nicholas Matte, she said, was meant to demonstrate ways in which the existence of gender-specific pronouns has caused controversy.

Shepherd said a student complained about the clip, which she showed to two tutorials of roughly 24 participants each. In response, she said, her supervisors censured her for airing the clips, told her she was “transphobic” for playing them and said she ought to have spoken out against the positions Peterson expressed during the excerpt.

They’ve told her she has to submit lesson plans and put up with people spying on her classes any time they feel like it. She’s strongly considering leaving.

Yesterday Kashif Chaudhry went to a conference in Virginia – a conference about hating Ahmadi Muslims. Kashif is an Ahmadi Muslim, and a cardiologist. He’s writing up the conference, and in the meantime he has this public Facebook post about it:

Every American, but especially American Muslims, should be worried about this and must condemn it loudly. Whether its Islamophobes hating on Muslims, Neo-Nazis hating on Muslims and Jews, or Sunni extremists hating on Shia and Ahmadi Muslims, all Americans must condemn the hate and protect our values of pluralism and inclusivity.

Today, I went to an anti-Ahmadi “Khatme Nabuwat” conference in Virginia, a fundraiser by an extremist organization. I can’t believe the hatred that was being spewed by the extremist Sunni clerics in attendance and I was shocked at the extent of radicalization of Muslim youth occurring right here on American soil (America was repeatedly referred to as the “land of the infidels”) at the hands of these extremist clerics. I will be writing about the whole experience and sharing quotes of the speakers soon. For now, I will just share one interesting encounter. During the Q/A session, after letting the speakers know I was an Ahmadi Muslim, I asked Omar F. Khan (speaking in the picture), the director of the institute that organized the event and who reiterated how Ahmadis were infidels, how he defined a Muslim.

Me: “Maulana Sahib, how do you define a Muslim?”

Omar Khan: Anyone who recites the Kalima.

Me: I recited the Kalima loudly, turned to the crowd, and then back at the Maulana and asked if I was a Muslim by his definition now.

Omar Khan: “No. you have to believe in Khatme Nabuwat also.”

I recited verse 33:40 in which Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is called the Khataman Nabiyeen and said I believe in this verse 100%. Now what?

Another speaker interrupted and said mere words were not enough, and that I had to believe in his interpretation of Khatme Nabuwat.

Me: I asked them to come up with a definition of a Muslim and be consistent. I then asked Omar Khan what he thought of the Shia Muslims. “Are the Shias Muslims in your eyes because they believe in your interpretation of Khatme Nabuwat?”

Omar Khan: “No, the Shias are Kafirs (infidels). They cannot be considered Muslims.”

American Muslims must NOT allow such Takfiri, divisive, hateful, extremist-minded clerics to speak for us on US soil. It is these bigots who give us all a bad name. We must be the first to call them out. There is much more. Stay tuned for a comprehensive piece on my experience.

Tabatha Southey at MacLeans explains about Jordan Peterson.

“Postmodern neo-Marxism” is Peterson’s nemesis, and the best way to explain what postmodern neo-Marxism is, is to explain what it is not—that is, it is entirely distinct from the concept of “cultural Marxism.”

“Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values. “Postmodern neo-Marxism,” on the other hand, is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values with “cultural” taken out of the name so it doesn’t sound quite so similar to the literal Nazi conspiracy theory of “cultural Bolshevism.”

Ha. good to know. I’ve wondered in the past what “Cultural Marxism” might be, without feeling motivated enough to google it. It was a popular epithet among the he-man skeptics for awhile…or maybe still is.

To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi, but there’s a reason he’s as popular as he is on the alt-right. You’ll never hear him use the phrase “We must secure a future for our white children”; what you will hear him say is that, while there does appear to be a causal relationship between empowering women and economic growth, we have to consider whether this is good for society, “‘’cause the birth rate is plummeting.” He doesn’t call for a “white ethnostate,” but he does retweet Daily Caller articles with opening lines like: “Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.” He has dedicated two-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube videos to “identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege.”

A Peter Boghossian type, in other words, except he’s had way more success at making it pay.

As far as I can tell, Jordie—and not the cool “Geordi” from Star Trek either— rewards the devotion of his Patreon patsies with regular rants against “political correctness,” and relationship advice I can only call “Angry Oprah Says.” For USD $29.99, Petersonites can get access to the Self Authoring Suite (a USD $119.92 value!). Those looking for further opportunities to give him money can pay USD $9.99 for “100 question phrases” which “can be found, along with similar question sets, elsewhere on the web” so that they might learn how your personality compares to 10,000 others.

Pro tip: just take a personality test from the back of an issue of Glamour; you’ll only be out about five bucks, and you might find a free perfume sample.

He also gives book recommendations apparently drawn from a high-school English-class reading list. If somehow you missed them, Mistress Peterson is the portal to such obscure works as Animal Farm, OfMice and Men, and that cornerstone of the Western canon, Flowers for Algernon.

There is no polite way to put this, but since Peterson claims that “If you worry about hurting people’s feelings and disturbing the social structure, you’re not going to put your ideas forward,” I’m just going to say it: Spend half an hour on his website, sit through a few of his interminable videos, and you realize that what he has going for him, the niche he has found—he never seems to say “know” where he could instead say “cognizant of”—is that Jordan Peterson is the stupid man’s smart person.

That too is familiar. The he-man skeptics seem to be fatally drawn to them.

It’s easy to assume Peterson is deserving of respect. A lot of what he says sounds, on the surface, like serious thought. It’s easy to laugh at him: after all, most of what he says is, after fifteen seconds’ consideration, completely inane. But in between his long rambling pseudo-academic takes on common self-help advice and his weird fixation on Disney movies, is a dreadfully serious message.

What he’s telling you is that certain people—most of them women and minorities—are trying to destroy not only our freedom to spite nonbinary university students for kicks, but all of Western civilization and the idea of objective truth itself. He’s telling you that when someone tells you racism is still a problem and that something should be done about it, they are, at best, a dupe and, at worst, part of a Marxist conspiracy to destroy your way of life.

Ice cream, Mandrake? Children’s ice cream?

Here’s why legalized use of women for sex is so fabulous: it means that Good women won’t be attacked, only Bad Slutty women will.

https://twitter.com/Khanoisseur/status/931240149391835136

See? Great. Herd the rapey men off into this area over here where the women it’s ok to rape are. Problem solved!

https://twitter.com/Khanoisseur/status/931240695498547200

Not counting the “street prostitutes” of course, and why would we count them? They ask for it.

Legalizing prostitution is a sustainable route to stop sexual assaults by curbing sexual frustration and increasing access.

— Erik Stanger (he/him) (@erikforCO) November 16, 2017

Yes, increasing access! It’s a terrible mistake to restrict access by allowing women to say no to sex when they want to. Women are a natural resource, like air, and it’s not up to them how much access there should be. It’s up to the men who want increased access to decide.