The sleaze.

On April 6, Ivanka Trump‘s company won provisional approval from the Chinese government for three new trademarks, giving it monopoly rights to sell Ivanka brand jewelry, bags and spa services in the world’s second-largest economy. That night, the first daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, sat next to the president of China and his wife for a steak and Dover sole dinner at Mar-a-Lago, her father’s Florida resort.

That’s not a good look. The two facts may have nothing to do with each other, but that’s beside the point. It makes the administration look like sleazy hacks (which they are, but that doesn’t make their looking like that any less destructive), and it makes the whole country look corrupt and broken…just as Putin wanted.

In a recent interview with CBS News, Trump argued that her business would be doing even better if she hadn’t moved to Washington and placed restrictions on her team to ensure that “any growth is done with extreme caution.”

Oh horseshit. The whole thing is one giant marketing opportunity, and they’re all using it.

Gorelick, Trump’s attorney, said that she and her husband would steer clear of specific areas that could impact her business, or be seen as conflicts of interest, but are under no legal obligation to step back from huge swaths of policy, like trade with China.

This is what makes them so utterly disgusting. They shouldn’t be arguing the toss in this way, they should be doing everything they can to eliminate the remotest possibility of conflicts of interest. They shouldn’t be making it about them and their fucking business interests, they should be making it about the public interest.

The number of Ivanka Trump items sold through Lyst was 46% higher the month her father was elected president than in November 2015. Sales spiked 771% in February over the same month last year, after White House counselor Kellyanne Conway exhorted Fox viewers to “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff.” Conway was later reprimanded. The bounce appears somewhat sustained. March sales on Lyst were up 262% over the same period last year.

“You can’t separate Ivanka from her role in life and from her business,” said Allen Adamson, founder of BrandSimpleConsulting. “Her celebrity status is now not only being fueled by her wealth and her family connection, but by her huge role in the White House. All that buzz is hardwired to her products.” That, he added, is a competitive advantage other brands just can’t match — though it does come with risk.

Her celebrity status; all that buzz; competitive advantage. That’s pure sleaze.

The Times has more.

Even though many of her trademark applications were filed long before she took her government job, they could be decided on by foreign governments while she works in the White House, creating ethical issues with little precedent. While trademarks do not directly confer financial gains, they protect the use of logos and other intellectual property, making them valuable tools for companies looking to build new ventures or expand existing operations.

None of which should have anything to do with government work.

While presidents are exempt from federal conflict of interest law, Ms. Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, another senior White House aide, are not. They are barred from making decisions in government that could benefit their financial holdings, which are worth as much as $740 million, according to recent filings. They are also covered by the Constitution’s emoluments clause barring federal officials from accepting “any present, emolument, office or title of any kind whatever from any king, prince or foreign state.”

Whether trademarks run afoul of such rules is a matter of debate between the Trump administration and its critics.

And it shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t debate; they should do the maximum disengagement. They should put their own interests entirely aside while they are entangled in government. They shouldn’t want to debate it. They wouldn’t if they weren’t so sleazy and revolting.

Ms. Trump also maintains a stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, just down the street from the White House.

“When they weren’t going into the White House, I thought there was a lot of leeway there,” said John Pudner, the executive director of the conservative nonprofit Take Back Our Republic.

Now, he said, “anything can be viewed as influence.”

“I think it’s bad for the administration,” added Mr. Pudner, who voted for Mr. Trump. “It could call into question any decision made, people wondering if there’s a business angle to it.”

It’s bad for the country. It’s corrupt and sleazy and ugly, and that’s bad for us.

The White House referred comments to the Trump Organization, which did not comment.

Yeah that’s charming. The White House said talk to the hand, and the hand refused to talk. They shouldn’t be refusing to talk. They’re not monarchs. They should be answering questions.

“Everything she does,” said Mr. Weissman of Public Citizen, “is effectively an advertisement for the Ivanka Trump brand.”

Make America A Retail Outlet.

Mike Pence is super mad at North Korea.

Brrr. I wouldn’t want to defy his orders.

The Borowitz Report says it worked.

PYONGYANG (The Borowitz Report)—In a major foreign-policy coup for the Trump Administration, North Korea offered to unconditionally abandon its nuclear program on Monday, after Mike Pence spent several minutes angrily squinting at the nation from just across the border.

Warning North Korea that the United States had jettisoned its policy of “strategic patience” and that “all options were on the table,” Pence fixed his steely glare on the isolated Communist nation and began furiously staring it down.

After Pence spent between five and six minutes demonstrating U.S. resolve by squinting indignantly, the government in Pyongyang released a statement indicating that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions were a thing of the past.

I would too.

Oh, man. So much scowl.

Women are like shoes, or gloves. Shoes don’t make any sense by themselves, they make sense only on feet. Women don’t make any sense by themselves, they make sense only owned by men.

At least that’s how most people in Afghanistan see it.

To escape an abusive marriage, Wida Saghari struggled for five years to finalize a divorce. When it was done, she thought, finally, she could get some peace. Instead, she had stepped into a different kind of hell.

Ms. Saghari, 31, a mother of two who has worked for years as a television host, found that neither Afghan society nor the government sees young divorced women as adults who can function independently of men.

And women also confront persistent harassment, much of it insinuative or sexual, beginning even during the divorce proceedings.

“You are like a piece of china that everyone, every minute, can hit to the ground to break you,” Ms. Saghari said.

It’s just how women are. We’re deficient. We’re like half a bridge, that doesn’t work unless it’s attached to the other half. Men are whole bridges, but women aren’t.

The most dangerous time for women may be when they seek to leave, but they also face a pervasive and persistent social struggle after divorce: The most mundane activities become daunting obstacles. Often, the easiest way is to hide the fact that they are divorced.

“I did not tell anyone about my status — sometimes, I told them my husband is in Iran,” said Zahra Yaganah, 32, an activist and writer who published her first novel last year. A mother of two teenagers, she has been divorced for about a decade. “But when people find out that I am divorced — I feel like a divorced woman is up for grabs for the men around her.”

She’s like a sandwich. You don’t leave a sandwich just lying around uneaten. It’s a waste, and it might attract rats.

Ms. Yaganah said her divorced status followed her everywhere, from the office to her apartment block, with men thinking that she was an easy target.

“As a divorced woman,” she said, “to them you are a thing — like a pot without a cover.”

Men have approached her privately. Married senior officials have invited her on foreign trips. Two years ago, after a celebration for International Women’s Day at her office, a male colleague she had worked with for only three days started sending her text messages.

“He told me that: ‘Your dress was beautiful. Let’s we two have a celebration together tonight, and be with me all the night,’” Ms. Yaganah said. “I was in shock for three days.”

She’s like a horse that’s been broken in. Why waste all that breaking in? Might as well ride her.

H/t Gretchen

Originally a comment by morganmine on Why no outrage?

If this was a discussion about how, say, factory workers were exploited (low pay, long hours, dangerous working conditions, etc.) would the “choice” argument still come up? It seems pretty uncontroversial to talk about the exploitation of people working minimum-wage jobs among the left. There seems to be a pretty good understanding that these people are working in these jobs because their options are limited; that having limited options shouldn’t condemn one to unsafe working conditions (because you always have the “choice” to quit, right?); and that these industries should be criticized and held accountable for the way they treat their workers. Why is porn different?

Adult film actresses have talked about the brutality they have been subjected to during film shoots. They have talked about signing up for one sex act, then when they get to the set they are expected to do something else entirely, something they absolutely did not want to do. And it’s either do it or walk off and not get paid. They have talked about their clear “no” being ignored while the film was rolling; about being held down against their will; about having to do drugs and alcohol in order to get through a scene. They have talked about the damages done to their bodies and the diseases they have contracted. If workers from any other industry were talking about this, would we still be talking about those workers “choice” to work in that field, or would we be asking questions about the way the industry treats its workers?

The thing is, there is very little in the way of regulation in the porn industry. Some of the larger producers and distributors seem to be a little better about the way they treat their performers, but they are not the only ones making porn. There is also the “amateur” and “professional amateur” categories, and there seems to be precious little oversight in these categories. These are not niche porn categories sought after by only a few individuals. And the thing is, because there is so little oversight, no one knows whether the “amateur” porn they’re watching is something that the performers consented to or not. There is no way to know whether we are watching a filmed rape. Even something as “mainstream” and “tame” as “Deep Throat;” as the star of that movie, Linda Boreman, said she was forced into porn and prostitution by her abusive boyfriend.

Even if it is only a small percentage of porn that contains the rape and abuse of women, does that mean it is acceptable? Do we shrug our shoulders and say those women “chose” to do it, or do we take a good long look at the industry and how it operates?

And that doesn’t even get into the issue of depictions of violence against women being portrayed as sexually arousing. Why is critical analysis of porn and its depiction of women so controversial? Any other medium, any other genre, there may be a a disagreement about whether those depictions of women are sexist or not, but no one ever makes the argument that because an actress “chose” to play that character or the writer “chose” to write that character that way, that the argument is invalid.

Gulalai Ismail a couple of hours ago:

No sane mind should defend blasphemy law onwards, after seeing the implication of making blasphemy a punishable crime no one should ever suggest that their feelings are more worthy than human life. This brutal murder would have never happened if we had taught our children it’s totally okay if someone say something blasphemous, don’t feel hurt with it, it says nothing about your religion or Faith. Engage with them in dialogue and if they don’t listen to you – move on! Your Prophet’s respect won’t be at stake, your religion won’t be at stake with someone doing blasphemy.

I wish more believers listened to fellow believers like Gulalai.

Why the March for Science?

Because an unprecedented attack on science, scientists and evidence-based policymaking is underway in the US federal government.

Nowhere is the attack more ferocious than on the issue of global warming, where the Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the modest but important policies put in place by President Obama. First among them is the Obama administration’s signature Clean Power Plan, the nation’s first-ever limit on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, which Trump has vowed to repeal.He has also pledged to “reopen” (which could well mean “weaken”) hard-won vehicle fuel economy standards that have already begun lowering carbon emissions and oil consumption. Meanwhile, in a tragic example of wilful blindness, Trump has abolished a rule requiring federal agencies to consider how large federal projects affect climate change and how climate impacts, such as sea level rises and drought, might affect the long-term viability of the projects themselves. This is akin to erecting a building on a fault zone without considering earthquakes.

Well Trump doesn’t care: he’ll be dead before the worst happens. Doesn’t he care about his children and their children though? No, he doesn’t.

There is nothing subtle about Trump’s antipathy to science. As a candidate, he dismissed decades of established scientific evidence by calling global warming a “hoax” and he has displayed an unprecedented disregard for facts and evidence throughout his brief presidency, even on matters as trivial as the size of the crowd at his inauguration.

What he has goes beyond antipathy to science. It’s antipathy to thinking in general – antipathy to anything that’s not acting on first impulses no matter how bad or stupid they may be. His first impulses, that is – he doesn’t give a shit about anyone else’s.

The anti-science approach extends far beyond climate science. In one of Pruitt’s first official acts, for example, he overruled the recommendation of his own agency’s scientists, based on years of meticulous research, to ban a pesticide shown to cause nerve damage, one that poses a clear risk to children, farmworkers and rural drinking water supplies. What’s more, Trump hasn’t even yet followed in the time-honoured tradition of appointing a presidential science adviser. His proposed budget cuts government science across the board, reducing vital research and data gathering on topics such as sustainable farming methods, weather prediction, the fate and transport of air pollutants and clean energy technologies.

In short he has contempt for knowledge of all kinds. Where other people have knowledge he has a taste for big shiny things, so he devoted his life to building and selling them. He’s such a dedicated solipsist that he can’t grasp the fact that other people have genuine useful knowledge.

Congress is using a radical tool called the Congressional Review Act to eliminate numerous public safeguards that took years to develop and is actively working to pass bills that make it harder for federal agencies to issue science-based safeguards for public health and safety. One bill, for example, would prevent academic scientists – but not industry-funded scientists – on federal advisory boards from weighing in on scientific issues within their expertise.

Get the disinterested science out and keep the industry-funded science in. Awesome.

The swamp is rising.

H/t Omar

Gail Dines wonders why the outrage of what was done to David Dao is so obvious while the outrage of what’s done to women in porn is so obscure.

People saw the video, put themselves in Dao’s place, and came to the very sensible conclusion that what they were watching was a level of callous brutality that is unacceptable in a civil society. Andrea Dworkin would not have found our empathy strange because, despite her sadness and anger at the cruelty in the world, she always had faith in the ability for people to do the right thing.

What is strange, however, is that there is no public outcry over porn. You can type “porn” into Google and in 10 seconds come up with images that are so violent, so brutal, so dehumanizing that they take your breath away. You can see people being raped, tortured, strangled, beaten, electrocuted, and physically destroyed to the point that many must be thinking to themselves: “Just kill me.”

Why no outrage? Why no demands for the companies who produce this brutality to apologize? Because these people are women, and when women are brutalized in the name of sex, the violence is rendered invisible. As long as it is semen, not blood, dripping from her mouth (and usually from every other orifice as well), and she is saying “just fuck me” as she is grimacing, crying, and sometimes screaming in pain, it seems, as Dworkin pointed out, people require an explanation as to why this particular brutality is not acceptable.

If that’s considered sexually arousing…why isn’t the video of David Dao being passed around as porn?

Today’s mainstream internet porn — now a multi-billion, not multi-million dollar industry —  makes the porn I saw in the 1980s look almost soft-core. The level of violence that women on the porn set endure today is akin to what has euphemistically been called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” If it was happening to men, it would be seen for what it is, and we would be asking: How is this possible? How has a global industry built on the torture of human beings been branded as “sex positive,” “empowering,” and “harmless fantasy?”

The answer of course, is that a woman is not viewed as a full human being. She is, as Simone de Beauvoir said, “sex… absolute sex, no less.” And indeed, no more. This is why, when we see pictures of men being brutalized, we see the brutality; when we see pictures of women in porn being brutalized, the culture sees sex.

I’ve never understood this. I don’t suppose I ever will.

I was chatting with latsot on Twitter about worrying or weird or cryptic song lyrics and mentioned Emmylou Harris’s “If You Were a Bluebird” as the most random song lyrics of my acquaintance. So then I decided I needed to revisit them to see, and yes, they’re still that random.

If you were a bluebird you’d be a sad one.
I’d give you a true word
But you’ve already had one.

If you were a bluebird,
You’d be crying
You’d be flying home.

The way Emmylou sings it, it seems to mean something…but then when you think about the words with your brain, you see that there is no something that the words mean. You’ve already had one? You’d be flying home? Wut?

If you were a raindrop,
You’d shine like a rainbow

And if you were a train stop,
The conductor would sing low

Well that’s just rhyme-seeking. What rhymes with raindrop.

If you were a raindrop,
You’d be falling
You’d be calling home

If you were a raindrop you’d be calling home? Come on now. Why would a raindrop be calling home? What would it say if home answered?

If you were a hotel
Honey, you’d be a grand one,
But if you hit a slow spell,
Do you think you could stand one

Well I guess it would depend on the last quarterly report and – wait, how did we get from bluebird to hotel?

Weirdly, it’s a great song – but the lyrics always make me laugh.

Foreign Policy on the death of modern Turkey:

The new country called Turkey, quite unlike the Ottoman Empire, was structured along modern lines. It was to be administered by executive and legislative branches, as well as a Council of Ministers composed of elected representatives of the parliament. What had once been the authority of the sultan, who ruled alone with political and ecclesiastic legitimacy, was placed in the hands of legislators who represented the sovereignty of the people.

The yes vote represents a rejection of all that.

The AKP and supporters of the “yes” vote argue that the criticism of the constitutional amendments was unfair. They point out that the changes do not undermine a popularly elected parliament and president as well as an independent (at least formally) judiciary. This is all true, but it is also an exceedingly narrow description of the political system that Erdogan envisions. Rather, the powers that would be afforded to the executive presidency are vast, including the ability to appoint judges without input from parliament, issue decrees with the force of law, and dissolve parliament. The president would also have the sole prerogative over all senior appointments in the bureaucracy and exercise exclusive control of the armed forces. The amendments obviate the need for the post of prime minister, which would be abolished. The Grand National Assembly does retain some oversight and legislative powers, but if the president and the majority are from the same political party, the power of the presidency will be unconstrained. With massive imbalances and virtually no checks on the head of state, who will now also be the head of government, the constitutional amendments render the Law on Fundamental Organization and all subsequent efforts to emulate the organizational principles of a modern state moot. It turns out that Erdogan, who would wield power not vested in Turkish leaders since the sultans, is actually a neo-Ottoman.

Which is not surprising. Authoritarianisms go together: theocracy and authoritarian government make a natural pairing. It doesn’t always work that way, of course – there have been plenty of secular authoritarians. But the idea behind both is the same: one all-powerful boss is better than a diverse crowd of voices arguing.

Caroline Criado-Perez has some thoughts on Fearless Girl versus Raging Bull, and whether or not artists get to have a veto on artistic responses to their work.

She knows something about statues and women, especially in the UK. The upshot: there are very few statues of women, especially of women on their own; most of the ones there are represent mythical or royal women; this matters.

I will admit to not having counted all the statues in the US, but given the recent news that every statue in statue-filled Sofia is of a man; given there are more statues of animals in Edinburgh than of women; given in New York’s Central Park there are 22 statues of men and none of women other than fictional characters like Alice in Wonderland; given that women make up less than 30% of speaking roles in Hollywood films; given US congress is 80% male; and, finally, given, you know, just general patriarchy, there is no reason to think the US is a feminist statue Utopia.

Hahahaha that’s for sure. The US is not a feminist anything Utopia.

The vast majority of female statues are of nude sexualised women in the role of adoring muse to male brains (I mean, come on, half naked Euterpe is literally weeping over a male HEAD). The representation of a defiant, clothed, non-sexualised female in a prominent work of art is still vanishingly rare — and is therefore a radical act no matter who commissioned it and what the artistic intent was.

Now about that artistic intent.

Like many other men, Di Modica may not realise that rampant male-dominated capitalism already is a symbol of patriarchal oppression, already is an aggressive threat to women and girls all around the world, but that doesn’t make it any less the case. Here in the UK, women have repeatedly been found to bear the major brunt of the austerity policies that have been considered necessary to wipe up the mess to the global economy caused by these very same bankers. Last year, the UN charged Switzerland with failing its obligations under the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), specifically because of their laissez-faire banking policies, of which Wall Street bankers make such great use. I’m not going to go into a full-on lecture on feminist economics here, but if you’re interested, read anything by Nancy Folbre and you can’t go wrong. But to be clear: rampant unchecked capitalism is a symbol of patriarchal oppression whether Di Modica likes it or not. Fearless Girl does not therefore change the meaning to Charging Bull. She makes it explicit. And for that, I love her.

Di Modica wanted to represent “the strength and power of the American people”. I don’t want to be pedantic here, but to do this, he chose a bull. A male cow. Di Modica chose to represent the American people with an animal that is perhaps above all others considered a byword for male sexual aggression. And my god the balls on that thing. I think we can be fairly certain how Di Modica visualises power and strength — the phrase “grow a pair” comes to mind. Let’s be clear: this statue never represented the strength and power of American people. It represented the strength and power of American men.

And in all fairness this is a thing – this business of thinking “the people”=men and men=”the people.” Of thinking a charging bull can stand for “the [anything] people.” This business of forgetting that women exist.

Di Modica chose to represent the strength and power of the American people with an intensely male and sexually aggressive symbol. Now he doesn’t like that Fearless Girl is, essentially, calling him out on it. Well. Welcome to the 21st century, Mr Di Modica. You’re going to be seeing an awful lot more of this kind of thing.

Assuming no one puts a stop to it.

Seen on Facebook:

Spicey does Passover.

Hurriyet reports:

Some 51.3 percent of the more than 58 million Turkish voters said “yes” to the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) constitutional amendment package in a tight race to decide on whether to shift to an executive presidential system.

The gap between the two votes stood at around 1.3 million according to midnight figures by the state-run Anadolu Agency. The turnout exceeded 84 percent.

So there will be more Erdoğan, and more and more and more. He’ll never leave.

Authoritarians are on a roll.

The BBC’s Mark Lowen in Ankara:

They are rejoicing into the night here outside the headquarters of the governing AK party (AKP), confident in the victory claimed by President Erdogan.

He and his government say more than 51% of voters have backed the constitutional reform but the opposition has cried foul, claiming massive irregularities over invalid votes and vowing to challenge the result at the supreme electoral board.

Mr Erdogan said the clear victory needed to be respected. In a typically rabble-rousing speech, he proposed another referendum on reinstating the death penalty, which would end Turkey’s EU negotiations.

Let’s have more state killing; that’s always popular.

Nick Cohen looks at the hatred of the nationalist right for George Soros.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump ruled that Americans protesting against him were “professional” agitators. Roger Stone, who has worked for the filthy wing of the right since Nixon’s day, followed up by announcing he had discovered the agitators were “paid for” by none other than Soros.

Now it is commonplace for right-wing Americans to say that only Soros’s corrupt influence can explain why their fellow citizens take to the streets. A typically sly report in the Washington Times said one in three Trump voters believed Soros paid protesters to join the women’s march on Trump’s inauguration day.

One in three Trump voters believe a panoply of absurd things. Most of them appear to believe it’s possible to live in a small Appalachian town and have a wide range of job opportunities, in defiance of the obvious fact that small towns by definition don’t have a wide range of job opportunities, because they’re small towns. But hey, this is Murrika, people can believe whatever they like, and you’re not allowed to tell them they’re wrong.

It’s not just Putin who goes for Soros. Macedonia’s former autocratic prime minister, Nikola Gruevski, has called for a “de-Sorosisation” of society, as the country’s right uses every trick it can think of, including the threat of street violence by “patriotic associations”, to stop the opposition taking power.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s self-proclaimed illiberal democracy is threatening the Soros-funded Central European University. Its president, the former Canadian Liberal party leader and former Observer columnist Michael Ignatieff, is bewildered. He protests that he is running a university, not an opposition political party that might take Orbán’s power away.

I could go on. Romania’s socialist elite imitates Trump and claims Soros pays citizens to take to the streets to demonstrate against corruption. The supposedly reputable financial analysts at Zero Hedge claim Soros “singlehandedly created the European refugee crisis”. Steve Bannon’s Breitbart says Soros’s funding of Black Lives Matter was part of an agenda to swing the US presidential election. The European far right claims he is trying to destroy Christian white Europe by importing Muslim refugees.

Why all this? Nationalism, aka xenophobia.

Billionaires shouldn’t be able to give money to politicians, Nick says, but the demonization of Soros isn’t about that.

Soros is the recipient of a hatred far beyond normal partisan rancour. The satanic influence attributed to the man who escaped the Holocaust as a child and resolved after the fall of the Berlin Wall to use his wealth to stop xenophobia returning to Europe isn’t normal. Not remotely so. It is one of the most striking signs of the crisis in conservatism, which is threatening free societies across what we used to call “the west”.

Most of Soros’s charitable efforts are not devoted to funding politicians, but values conservatives once claimed to believe in: transparency, free elections, free speech and a free press. Instead of upholding them, the dominant faction on the right has turned to a nationalism that treats opposition as treason. To learn about its antecedents, listen to the antisemitic echoes of the Nazi and communist eras in the vilification of Soros. They are so loud they deafen.

Orbán says he is against “the globalists and liberals, the power brokers sitting in their palaces with ivory towers” and “the swarm of media locusts”. Behind them all stands the “transnational empire of George Soros, with its international heavy artillery and huge sums of money”. March against Orbán in Budapest or Trump in Washington, DC, and you are a hireling of Soros’s cosmopolitan conspiracy.

Nope; just a cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism is a good thing, and xenophobia is a bad one.