But some female lawmakers, like New York’s Kathleen Rice, have begun to ask why elected officials aren’t being drummed out like their private sector counterparts. “You see the actions that CBS, NBC take when there are allegations against very well-known men in positions of power, and we don’t do the same,” Rice said. “I think it’s a disgrace.” — CBS News “Allegations.” She’s talking about Al Franken and John Conyers. The Franken case has photographic evidence, so the allegations against him are provably true. But Conyers vehemently denies the allegations made against him. Why should he be “drummed out”? Why is there a presumption of guilt? Anyone who’s ever been alone with another person can be the subject of allegations. Why is there a presumption in favor of the accuser? A case study on false allegations, which you probably remember if you’re old enough, is the McMartin preschool trial: Members… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Politics
Slut-Shaming: It’s Not Just For Women Anymore
Some of the recent sexual misconduct allegations seem serious enough to warrant adjudication in a courtroom, but a lot of them sound like what would be called slut-shaming if the targets were women. (Slut-shaming is the practice of criticizing or attacking [wo]men for having casual or promiscuous sex, acknowledging sexual feelings and/or acting on sexual feelings. The implication is that if a [wo]man engages in sexual activity that traditional society disapproves of, [s]he should feel guilty and inferior.) Joe Barton is the congressman from Texas whose nude photo was posted online, apparently by a jealous ex-girlfriend. (That link goes to an NPR story, not to the actual photo. I’m sure you can find the photo if you want to but be advised that Barton is overweight and 68 years old.) Some facts are in dispute, but everyone agrees that the photo was posted (by someone) after Barton told the woman… Read more →
Thomas Jefferson: Bush 41 Calls Trump a “Blowhard”
Stinging rebuke from a one-term president who won the White House on the coattails of Ronald Reagan! Read my lips: Hurry up and die. I dislike Republicans and Democrats equally. It’s a choice between which gang of thieves you want to be robbed by. Elect a Democratic president and get four years of trench warfare against Republicans. Elect a Republican president and get four years of trench warfare against Democrats. One of the things I like about President Trump: Democrats don’t like him, Republicans don’t like him, nobody likes him except the people who voted for him, and that’s enough. Read more →
Thomas Jefferson: Election Rigged For Hillary
My fellow Americans — Democrats are now confirming something that we already knew: the primary election was rigged for Hillary Clinton. I observed during the 2016 primary election campaigns that both parties would rather lose the White House than give up the power to shove horseshit candidates down the public’s throats and make them think that’s who they voted for. Read more →
Russian Propaganda on Facebook
Facebook says that as many as 126 million people may have been exposed to 80,000 posts from a Russian propaganda group known as the Internet Research Agency over a two-year period. Who cares? People believe what they want to believe. Have you ever heard anyone say “I completely changed my mind on this issue after reading a Facebook post by nobody I know”? Or “I was going to vote for Candidate A and now I’m going to vote for Candidate B”? Neither have I . . . Read more →
Spot the Fake News: Obamacare Subsidies
I read four news stories on the same topic — the end of Obamacare subsidies to insurance companies. The Wall Street Journal plays it straight down the middle: President Donald Trump’s executive order on health care issued Thursday marks the first major salvo in what the White House promises will be an extensive, targeted campaign to unravel the Affordable Care Act administratively. As does Bloomberg: President Donald Trump said he is moving “step by step” on his own to remake the U.S. health care system because Congress won’t act on his demand to repeal Obamacare. The Trump administration took its most drastic measure yet to roll back the Affordable Care Act Thursday evening, announcing it would cut off a subsidy to insurers hours after issuing an executive order designed to draw people away from the health law’s markets. See if you can spot the fake news in the Politico version:… Read more →
Camille Paglia on Hefner, Trump, Masculinity, Feminism, Etc.
The Hollywood Reporter has an interview with the always articulate and interesting Camille Paglia: Before the election, I kept pointing out that the mainstream media based in Manhattan, particularly The New York Times, was hopelessly off in the way it was simplistically viewing Trump as a classic troglodyte misogynist. I certainly saw in Trump the entire Playboy aesthetic, including the glitzy world of casinos and beauty pageants. It’s a long passé world of confident male privilege that preceded the birth of second-wave feminism. There is no doubt that Trump strongly identified with it as he was growing up. It seems to be truly his worldview. But it is categorically not a world of unwilling women. Nor is it driven by masculine abuse. It’s a world of show girls, of flamboyant femaleness, a certain kind of strutting style that has its own intoxicating sexual allure — which most young people attending… Read more →
The Jemele Hills of the World
Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists. — Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 11, 2017 Trump is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. His rise is a direct result of white supremacy. Period. — Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 11, 2017 He has surrounded himself with white supremacists — no they are not "alt right" — and you want me to believe he isn't a white supremacist? — Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 11, 2017 He is unqualified and unfit to be president. He is not a leader. And if he were not white, he never would have been elected — Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 12, 2017 That’s a great opinion. It’s intelligent, well thought out . . . haha no it’s insane. I hope ESPN gets this woman some professional help. Oh you don’t see the world the same way I do?… Read more →
What Happened?
According to this review by Piers Morgan, Hillary has narrowed down the list of people and entities responsible for her 2016 election defeat to James Comey, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and his supporters, Mitch McConnell, the mainstream media, the New York Times, Matt Lauer, Fox News, Jill Stein, men, women, white people, black people, Joe Biden, Anthony Weiner, and the Electoral College. Notably absent from the list: Hillary Clinton and the people she paid to win the election. Read more →
61% Say It’s Time for Hillary Clinton To Retire
61% Say It’s Time for Hillary Clinton To Retire — Rasmussen Reports I feel like this is something the whole country can agree on. Granted, 61 percent is not 100 percent but you have to take into account that 25 percent of Americans think the sun goes around the earth, nearly 30 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 cannot locate the Pacific Ocean on a map and half the residents of Detroit can’t read. Hillary Clinton has come out of seclusion just as we remember the 16th anniversary of 9/11, and as both Texas and Florida are underwater, and all she wants to talk about is Hillary Clinton. This woman is completely tone-deaf, always has been and apparently always will be . . . Read more →
A Fake News Taxonomy: 7 Types of Mis- and Disinformation
First Draft makes an interesting effort to classify different types of misinformation (the inadvertent sharing of false information) and disinformation (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false), based on the type of content, the motivations of those who create the content and the ways that content is disseminated Here are the categories they came up with, in descending order of intent to deceive: Fabricated Content: New content that is 100% false Manipulated Content: Genuine information or imagery is manipulated Imposter Content: Impersonation of genuine sources False Context: Genuine content is shared with false contextual information Misleading Content: Misleading use of information to frame an issue/individual False Connection: Headlines, visuals or captions don’t support the content Satire or Parody: No intention to cause harm but potential to fool We used to have the Five W’s: who, what, when, where and why. Now we have the Eight P’s:… Read more →
A University Professor Suggested Harvey Was Karma for Texas Republicans
Then — he was fired. The tweet, since deleted, from Kenneth L. Storey, formerly of the University of Tampa, read: “I dont believe in instant karma but this kinda feels like it for Texas. Hopefully this will help them realize the GOP doesnt care about them.” In a follow-up, he said that “good people” in red states like Texas and Florida “need to do more to stop the evil their state pushes.” He continued: “I’m only blaming those who support the GOP there.” Let this hurricane be a lesson to the evil people of Texas: Vote Democrat! Embed from Getty Images If you’re a university professor, left-of-center opinions usually won’t get you fired, but exceptions may occur. Another professor, Kathy Dettwyler, was fired by the University of Delaware in June for writing in a now-deleted Facebook post that Otto Warmbier, who was taken into custody in North Korea, then fell into… Read more →
When You Lose the Mayor of Berkeley, You’ve Lost America
In the aftermath of a right-wing rally Sunday that ended with anarchists chasing attendees from a downtown park, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin urged UC Berkeley on Monday to cancel conservatives’ plans for a Free Speech Week next month to avoid making the city the center of more violent unrest. “I’m very concerned about Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter and some of these other right-wing speakers coming to the Berkeley campus, because it’s just a target for black bloc to come out and commit mayhem on the Berkeley campus and have that potentially spill out on the street,” Arreguin said, referring to militants who have also been called anti-fascists or antifa. — San Francisco Chronicle Read more →
Fighting Fascism With Mob Violence
Here’s how different media outlets covered yesterday’s Berkeley rally . . . USA Today and the Sun-Sentinel, a Florida paper, play it straight up, telling us what happened and who was responsible: Black-clad anarchists stormed the rally, fighting against hate by kicking and punching people until police intervened. Even the Washington Post, the most left-wing, anti-Trump paper in America, which recently informed readers that there is no political violence on the left, got this one right. The Daily Mail uses the same photo as USA Today but reports only that violence broke out between the two sides. If they know any more about who was responsible, they’re not saying. Finally, NPR reports that scattered violence between left and right marred an otherwise peaceful protest. NPR notes that a radio host tried to protect a man he was afraid would be beaten to death by “a group of protestors.” If you… Read more →
An Insignificant Number of Confused, Poorly Organized Losers
News networks have been running a two-week-long (with no end in sight) infomercial on white supremacists and white nationalists and neo-Nazis as though they represent a powerful force that has to be reckoned with, a vast army of domestic terrorists, which they don’t. The most important thing to know about white supremacists and neo-Nazis is that there are actually not very many of them. The leading white supremacist organization is the Ku Klux Klan. How many members do you think the KKK currently has? Take a guess. Keep in mind we live in a country of more than 320 million people. Estimates of current KKK membership run between 5,000 and 8,000 members. Is that less than you thought? As for neo-Nazis, the New York Times ran an article a few years ago on the National Socialist Movement (NSM), which they identified as the largest neo-Nazi group in the country. Take… Read more →
Poll: Most Black Americans Don’t Want Confederate Statues Removed
NPR and PBS News Hour conducted a poll asking whether statues “honoring leaders of the Confederacy” should “remain as a historical symbol” or “be removed because they are offensive to some people.” Results by race: White: 65 percent of respondents said the statues should stay, 25 percent said they should be taken down and 8 percent were unsure. (I know these numbers don’t sum to 100 percent but I’m taking them directly from the link above.) Black: 44 percent stay, 40 percent remove, 11 percent unsure. (Same comment as previous.) Latino: 65 percent stay, 24 percent remove, 11 percent unsure. The media, which according to a Harvard University study are very biased against Donald Trump, have been flogging him with this issue for the past week and a half, the thinking being that anyone who doesn’t support the removal of Confederate statues is a white supremacist, in which case 75… Read more →
No Political Violence on the Left?
I’m still shaking my head on this one: Even left-wing stalwarts like The Atlantic know that the Post’s “no violence on the left” premise is bogus: Look how peaceful and non-violent everyone is in the Post photo. Contrast that with, for example, these protesters at Berkeley earlier this year: I’m drawn to Berkeley examples because our son went to Berkeley and still lives in the area, because I know some current Berkeley students, and because Berkeley, ironically, used to be synonymous with the Free Speech Movement. The photos above show the protesters who showed up to violently shut down a scheduled talk by Milo Yiannopoulos, but the same thing seems to happen whenever any university schedules a conservative speaker. Here are a couple more left-wing protests, in Chicago and Charlottesville: We could go on and on with this . . . we’ve all seen this before so I don’t know… Read more →
10 Reasons That NY Times Chart Might Not Mean What You Think It Means
From the New York Times: Money is not the only metric for measuring life outcomes. Charts and articles like this seem to reflect an inappropriate obsession with narrowly materialist values. If you do want to measure your life with money, it looks like the 99th percentile is where you want to be. Why aren’t you there? Why aren’t you a CEO? Why aren’t you making a million a year? If you can’t figure out how to get there, don’t begrudge the people who did figure it out. If you don’t have the education, motivation, intelligence or skills to get there, don’t begrudge those who do. The amount of wealth is not a fixed amount. It’s not a zero-sum game. If it were, it would be concerning that a few people are very wealthy. But it isn’t. The distribution of income has to be skewed to the right because income is… Read more →
Identity Politics = Liberal Suicide?
Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. He’s got a book coming out, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. As you might have surmised from his job title, Lilla is a liberal himself. His concern is “the divisive, zero-sum world of identity politics” and its negative effect on liberalism in America. Here’s an excerpt of an excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal: As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that they are engaged in politics as an X, concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness. And they are less and less comfortable with debate. Over the past decade a… Read more →
One Thing I Can’t Tolerate is Intolerance: The Google Memo
The now-famous Google memo was first published by Gizmodo under the headline Here’s The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google. If you’re interested in the topic, you should read the memo yourself, otherwise you’re going to get a terribly slanted second-hand judgment, e.g., “anti-diversity screed.” I’ve read it and I don’t think it’s “anti-diversity” and it’s definitely not what I’d call a screed. I’ve seen that word — screed — used by multiple sources. That’s one way of dismissing and declining to engage with an opinion you don’t like: give it a label like “screed,” suggesting that the author is angry and irrational and not fit to have a discussion with. In my reading though, I found the original memo to be academic and clinical, much less screed-like than the responses I’ve seen. As usual (in my experience), the most intolerant people in the mix are the ones… Read more →