Someone in Florida was sentenced to five months in prison this week for threatening the father of one the children killed at Sandy Hook elementary school. There’s a whole big conspiracy theory about Sandy Hook.

[Leonard] Pozner has spent years using every tool at his disposal to scrub the online record of his son’s memory clean of videos suggesting that Noah and his surviving siblings and his parents are actors perpetrating a massive conspiracy against the American public. Pozner has made some progress in defending his family against these lies, but he said that countering hoaxers is still an uphill battle. Big tech companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook are doing far too little to deter the conspiracies, harassment and hatred that flourish on their sites, Pozner said.

While these companies have been talking publicly about confronting fake news, “They really don’t do that much. They can be doing a lot more – especially Facebook. It really turns the other way.”

He said tech companies that allow the spread of conspiracies and hatred, including Islamic State propaganda, “have blood on their hands”.

Why would there be a conspiracy theory about Sandy Hook?

Pozner’s six-year-old son, Noah, was murdered alongside his first-grade classmates in Newtown on 14 December 2012. Pozner’s young son was one of 20 first-graders and six educators who were shot to death in a small suburban elementary school by a troubled local man with a military-style rifle in one of the most shocking mass shootings in US history.

But in the early stages of mourning their murdered children, the Pozners and other families of victims had to confront an extra burden: accusations that their children were not dead, and that the tragedy that upended their lives was all a fraud designed to undermine Americans’ gun rights.

Oh. That. Good god.

While he had no exact data, Pozner said he believes there are “tens of thousands” of conspiracy theorists globally who believe that mass casualty attacks such as Sandy Hook, the Boston Marathon bombing and the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, are hoaxes.

As more and more people join social media sites, Pozner believes the problem is growing more acute – and more people vulnerable to conspiracy theories are exposed to the “contagious addictive content” that spread hoaxes like viruses across the internet.

Pozner, who once listened to InfoWars’ Alex Jones before Jones became a Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist, said that people were drawn to hoaxes for different reasons.

Some “have nothing else going on in their lives and this gives them a sense of community, a sense of identity. It’s like a cult,” he said. Others are drawn to feeling “smarter” than the people around them who do not believe the conspiracy, thinking, “Oh, I’m awake – you guys are not awake.”

That works going in both directions though, and if you do it in the other direction, at least you’re not harassing the families of the murdered children.

The Honr Network, the organization Pozner founded to hold hoaxers accountable for their behavior, now has about 300 volunteers who help monitor hoaxer content online.

It is a gruesome world to confront briefly, much less over and over again. Hoaxers, for example, will share videos of Boston Marathon bombing victims having their limbs blown off, and then debate whether the color of the blood in the footage is realistic, or look for evidence that the person in the footage whose limb was just blown off was already an amputee who is now faking a new injury.

The long fight to use copyright protections to remove family photographs of Noah and his surviving children from posts full of wild conspiracies has left him frustrated at tech companies, who he said often push back or simply refuse to take down content related to his young children.

“If you become the victim of a crime, shouldn’t you be protected by society somehow? Shouldn’t society hold you up when you’re kind of weakened? That’s not the case right now. If life has thrown you a curveball and you’ve been knocked to the ground, YouTube and Google and Facebook think that others should be allowed to kick you while you’re down as much as they like, and they’ll protect those people’s right to kick you.”

Yes, they do, and they will.

Carol Tavris on feminism and misogyny, which she could also have called feminism and reaction or feminism and backlash.

Feminism and misogyny have been locked in a painful, inextricable embrace for centuries: The ascendance of one enrages, provokes and energizes the other. Each seeks justifications for its premisses and goals in religion, culture, tradition – and that most solemn of authorities, science.

No they don’t. Anti-feminism does, but feminism is deeply rooted in resistance to religion, culture, tradition. Until very recently religion, culture, tradition have been centrally about keeping women subordinate and silent.

Anyway, it gets better after that.

Whenever women sought to enter these or any other male-dominated fields, they would get the sneering question that Angela Saini, in her book Inferior, reports that a man asked her after a lecture: “Where are all the women scientists? Where are the women Nobel Prize-winners? Women just aren’t as good at science as men are. They’ve been shown to be less intelligent”. This ignorant question never subsides; it just moves to a new target. Once women got through answering “where are the women bartenders, business leaders, soldiers, politicians, scientists, and physicians?” – they are here in great numbers now, thank you, once the barriers of discrimination and tradition were lifted – the opposition is still not satisfied. The architectural historian Despina Stratigakos got so exasperated hearing “Where are the women architects?” that in 2016 – 2016! – she wrote a splendid book with that title, explaining what should have been the familiar answer: They are here. They have always been here. There would be more of them but you guys shut them out of the academies, the prizes and the historical records.

In short, stop asking questions like that and you’ll see where women are.

[T]he particular biological deficiency said to afflict women and limit their abilities keeps changing. In 1970, a prominent American physician declared that women’s “raging hormones” made them unfit for public office, commenting, apparently with a straight face, that a female president in menopause might irrationally start a war. The anthropologist Lionel Tiger announced, apparently with a straight face, that any young woman who took the US Graduate Records Exam while menstruating was in danger of jeopardizing her entire career.

I watched Lionel Tiger give a bafflingly anti-feminist (and structureless) talk at a conference once. I think everyone in the audience was bewildered.

Then, starting in the 1980s, the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, biology came roaring back – a result of new technologies, billions of dollars available for research, and the turn of the political wheel back towards conservatism and traditionalism.

…

As night must follow day, biology must follow bigotry as the popular explanation of persistent gender differences. Brains are so much sexier than those pesky problems of salary, parental leave, status, harassment, and who does the dishes. And so we got a deluge of books about the “essential”, hard-wired differences between men and women: Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference (2003); Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate (2002); Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain (2006), followed by The Male Brain in 2010; and a bunch of silliness from the Gurian Institute, such as It’s a Baby Girl! (2009), which claimed that “Without testosterone interfering, your daughter develops not only female genitalia but a decidedly female brain . . . [one] that will direct her female approach to the world”.

It was popular.

Explanations of behaviour based on brain scans feel so final – who could argue with all those lit-up areas? Women have a fatter corpus callosum than men? So that explains their greater chattiness! And testosterone – so that explains murder and war! And evolution – so that explains male promiscuity! It’s in men’s nature – live with it, girls!

But now feminism has returned, and with it the resistance to all that.

And so, as day must follow night, we find the emergence of books designed to counter the belief that women and men are inherently, biologically different. The first out of this decade’s chute was Cordelia Fine’s splendid Delusions of Gender: The real science behind sex differences (which I reviewed in these pages; January 28, 2011); she has followed up this volume with Testosterone Rex: Myths of sex, science, and society (to be reviewed in a forthcoming issue of the TLS). Note the emphasis on “science” in both subtitles, “real” and “mythical”.

Gavin Evans’s Mapreaders and Multitaskers: Men, women, nature, nurture reports that “male brains” are not fundamentally different from “female brains”; that men have not evolved to be more promiscuous than women; that men talk just as much as women; that the sexes don’t differ in multi-tasking, map-reading, maths or nurturing skills; that evolutionary psychologists “exaggerate the gender divide” and “routinely overstate the impact of genes and understate the impact of culture and environment”; that women are not “naturally” more empathetic than men nor worse at maths; that gender-linked preferences for pink and blue are recent cultural constructions, not genetically based; and that almost all of the media’s breathlessly reported claims of hard-wired sex differences (e.g., that genes “dictate shopping styles”) are scientifically unwarranted and reductionistic. All of this is true; none of this is new. Readers who are not familiar with these arguments, and the science of the past forty years that supports them, should read this book. Especially fathers who have daughters, as Evans does.

Unless now in the Age of Bannon we have to give the whole thing up again and wait for the next turn?

A couple of weeks ago there was an evangelical Christian conference in Sydney “devoted to what it means to be a godly woman.” Oooh I know this one! It means to be obedient, submissive, subordinate, compliant, complaisant, “sweet,” deferential, self-effacing, and not at all in any way challenging to the Authority and Superiority of Men.

During a talk about the meaning of Bible verses on male headship — where men are leaders in the home and the church — an image of newly-shorn actress Kristen Stewart flashed onto an overhead screen.

Was this platinum blonde buzz cut, asked the speaker, Carmelina Read, appropriate for a woman? Was it feminine and submissive, or instead flagging independence and rebellion?

Women should have long hair to serve as convenient handles.

But what annoyed some of the thousands of women there was a claim that “women should also consider themselves ‘helpers’ of men in the workplace.”

Sure. Even if she has more talent, experience, education, and knowledge than the nearest man, she should consider herself his helper. Always inferior, you see; it’s god’s divine rule.

While it is generally accepted amongst conservative Christians that “headship” means women should submit to men at home and in the church, extending the idea to the world beyond is considered controversial, a form of mission creep.

So there’s a lot of arguing going on.

The doctrine of headship means, in short, that men are to be the heads of women in the church as well as in marriage. The verses being discussed in 1 Corinthians 11 say:

“… the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonours his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonours her head — it is the same as having her head shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head.”

The idea of headship has long divided Protestants in Australia, with the conservative pockets — where women are not allowed to be priests, such as the Sydney Anglican diocese, and Presbyterian church — adhering to it most vigorously.

Those who argue for male headship are called complementarians; the idea being that women and men are equal before God, but have different and complementary roles to play (as per literal interpretations of verses in Ephesians 5, where wives are told to submit to their husbands as their heads, and 1 Timothy 2, where women are told not to teach or have authority over a man).

By an amazing coincidence, that’s also the view of the Catholic church, bless its heart. Naturally this was just men dressing up their determination to be the boss of everything as somehow holy, but I think after all these centuries we can let it go now. Men are not the heads of women. Women have their own damn heads.

H/t Barry Duke

Alan Dershowitz has been telling the world that Trump can’t be charged with obstruction of justice. Rick Pildes at Lawfare explains what he’s ignoring.

The reason, according to Dershowitz, is that the Constitution gives the exclusive power to the President to control all federal law-enforcement investigations—and  thus to shut any of them down for any reason the President sees fit.  In other words, the President can never commit obstruction of justice by shutting down a criminal investigation or prosecution.

But Dershowitz fails to take into account that the Supreme Court has decisively rejected this view.  In Morrison v. Olson (1988), a 7-1 Supreme Court turned back constitutional challenges   to Congress’ creation of the Act that gave us the office of the Independent Counsel—and in doing so, dismissed exactly the argument that Dershowitz now seeks to invoke.

The Ethics in Government Act was created out of the recognition that the President should be taken out of the process of controlling investigations and prosecutions that involved potential crimes by himself or high-ranking government officials—i.e., close aides of the President.

The act was passed in 1978. That seems awfully…delayed.

The Act created a process that could lead to the appointment of an Independent Counsel for this role, and the entire point of the Act was to insulate the Independent Counsel—and hence the investigation and prosecution of crimes involving the President and his or her  top aides—from the President’s complete control.  The Act essentially put the powers of the Department of Justice in the hands of the Independent Counsel:  it vested him or her with the “full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions and powers of the Department of Justice [and] the Attorney General.”

Then, to even further ensure that the President not have unfettered control when potential crimes involving himself and his top aides were at stake, the Independent Counsel, once appointed, was wrapped in several layers of additional insulation from presidential control.  Thus, the only person who could remove the counsel from office was the Attorney General—and, very importantly, the Attorney General could only do that for limited and specific reasons (“good cause”), such as misconduct in office or inability to perform the counsel’s duties.*  If the Attorney General did remove a counsel, the AG had to file a report with Congress and the courts stating the factual basis for this removal.

Ah, but then what if one party is in control of all of them, and has a dismal record of holding its own members to account for violations of law, norms, ethics and the like? What then? I ask because that’s the situation right now, at a time when the worst human being on the planet sits at the apex of the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are stealthily pushing through the no health care for you bill without hearings.

Republican senators are quietly moving toward something that has been their party’s goal for nearly eight years: dismantling the Affordable Care Act. The question, of course, is how they plan to replace it.

Republicans in the Senate will need 50 votes to pass their version of the American Health Care Act. Several senators have expressed reservations about the House version of the bill, which withdraws federal support for Planned Parenthood and rolls back the Medicaid expansion accomplished by the A.C.A.. Despite the lack of consensus within the party, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, on Wednesday began the process of fast-tracking the bill under Rule 14, which enables the Senate to bypass the committee process and instead move the bill on to the Senate calendar for a vote as soon as it is ready.

Yes, hurry up with this bill to take Medicaid away from people who need it, because what could be more urgent than that.

The A.H.C.A.’s fast-tracking is not driven by necessity, but rather by the concern that a more transparent legislative process would lay bare the reality that the bill, if passed, would cause millions of Americans to lose their health insurance and drive up costs for millions of others.

Pause to reflect on that. These people are rushing to force the bill through with no hearings because they don’t want the public to notice that it will cause millions of Americans to lose their health insurance and drive up costs for millions of others. It will do what Republicans always do: take funding away from the poor and middling in order to shunt it to the very rich.

With only 20 percent of Americans supporting the A.H.C.A. (and only 8 percent believing the Senate should pass the House version of the bill), and support for Obamacare at an all-time high, Senate Republicans are in a bind. While abandoning the A.H.C.A. in favor of fixing Obamacare would reflect the will of the majority of the American people, it would require abandoning a central campaign pledge to the Republican base and result in an untenable reconciliation process with the more conservative House. But pursuit of a deeply unpopular policy that is likely to have disastrous health and economic consequences for millions could be far costlier as the Republicans face the possibility of a stinging defeat in 2018.

But much more to the point – it is likely to have disastrous health and economic consequences for millions. Can we keep our eye on the damn ball here? Can we forget the inside baseball for one second in order to focus on the horrific consequences for living breathing people?