How To Continue Playing The Game Trump Began With The Cummings Tweets

To truly get this post, you have to read my previous one.  This post builds on that.

The debate Trump began with his vicious tweets about Elijah Cummings has now been moved (by him) from the attacks on Baltimore (which elicited defense responses from others) to new attacks against Bernie Sanders and Al Sharpton!  We now discuss those topics, almost unrelated to the earlier arguments in the chain Trump has built, because that is what he wants us to do!*

And what does he  NOT want us to discuss, to the same extent?

That Russia may have interfered in the 2016 presidential elections, that Russia may have tried to interfere in the 2018 midterm elections, and that Russia will probably interfere in the 2020 elections. 

Trump doesn't want us to focus on how Mitch McConnell (now called Moscow Mitch by some) made sure that the Russians have some wiggle-room left to get at important parts of the US election system.  Neither does Trump want us to think too much about why he is replacing the Director of the National Intelligence, Dan Coats, with a Trump yes-man, John Ratcliffe, who lacks other qualifications for the job and who seems utterly uninterested in taking Russian intervention seriously:

In contrast to Coats, Ratcliffe is a Trump loyalist who has backed Trump's claims that Mueller 's investigation into Russian election interference was a partisan plot to unseat Trump.

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, he said the special counsel's report and its conclusions "weren't from Robert Mueller" but rather "were written by what a lot of people believe was Hillary Clinton's de facto legal team."

All this makes narcissistic sense.  The narcissistic injury is about Trump's victory as not being legitimate, and to heal that injury there must not have been any outside powers who influenced the 2016 election outcome, just as his re-election in 2020 must never be questioned.  I doubt Trump cares about foreign powers interfering with US elections at all, as long as it's he who gets to win.

So how do we continue playing this game?  As I wrote in the previous post, the only way to beat a narcissist in his or her game is not to play at all.  We can't really do that, but what we can do is keep talking about the issues Trump does not want us to talk about.  Foremost among those is election integrity.


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*  It's a relief for me to start seeing more clearly what Trump is doing, because of his narcissistic injury.  But it's also unpleasant to realize that the same injury might well mean that Vladimir Putin will be allowed to influence the 2020 US elections.

How To Play The Political Game Trump Started With The Cummings Tweets

I've been reading on narcissism for a possible future article about the pro-narcissist online culture in places like Twitter.  That culture, aiming to increase participation byyy eliciting anger,  also favors narcissists by supporting the kinds of games they like to play with other people's emotions as the game pieces.

That's the background for seeing why I reacted to Trump's recent hate tweets against Rep. Elijah Cummings (D - MD 7th district) the way I did:

As responses by a narcissist to a narcissistic injury.  

These are the relevant Trump  tweets:

....As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2019

 
The first question to ask is what caused Trump to go on this rampage?  What did Cummings say to trigger that narcissistic injury (because I believe this IS an example of a narcissistic injury in Trump)?

Most people just take Trump at face value, and assume that he was criticizing Cummings on the latter's strong criticisms about what's happening at the southern border. And perhaps it's those strong words which wounded Trump.

But they were said ten days ago, and that's a long time for Trump's rage to boil over.  More recently Cummings spoke about the Mueller testimony and its implications for the future of democracy in this country.  I believe that it is this later speech which stabbed Trump in his gut, because it triggered his terrible fear that he wasn't, after all, fairly elected.

Whatever the precipitating event was,  it opened the floodgates of Trump's narcissistic rage, and so he retaliated against Cummings.  But he did not do it the way most of us would have: By addressing the issues Cummings raised and by trying to disprove Cummings' arguments.  

Instead, Trump barely touched upon the underlying issue and then shifted the debate to a completely different topic.

That, I believe, can be a narcissistic move.  See how Trump is not addressing the criticisms Cummings has made about the border or about possible Russian influence in future American elections?  Instead, he moves his focus, and the focus of all of us, to debates about Baltimore as a possible hell-hole and to Trump as a racist.

This is what he wants.  We now debate the topics Trump has chosen, not the topics Cummings chose for his criticism. We are now playing a game Trump set up, and narcissists cannot lose the games they set up and direct.

They are the only ones who know the secret rules and once they control the debate they simply will never stop if they don't wish to stop.  You will see how Trump fans the flames of the debate, how that debate moves further and further away from the initial concerns Cummings had, and how it is now Trump alone who decides where that debate will go.

How does he manage to do that?  Partly, it's because he is the president and cannot be ignored, but mostly it's because he chooses to be extremely insulting.  

He always attacks the individuals who have criticized him, not the criticism they made of him.  He attacks their intelligence, their ethics, their morals, their families and their neighborhoods, and he makes these attacks so nasty that journalists and politicians feel they cannot stay silent about them.

But in a narcissistic game Trump wants all that negative attention!  He is winning!  We forget about Mueller's warnings concerning the future of American democracy, we debate the conditions in Baltimore, not on the southern US border!  And Trump's base is utterly unconcerned with Trump's racist utterances.

You may have gathered by now that if Trump truly is a narcissist, then we are all playing the games he sets up, and we cannot win those games, by definition.

So how should we play these games?  What makes the general psychological advice I have gathered less effective is that we probably have a narcissist in a position where his games cannot be ignored, and not playing the games a narcissist sets up is the only truly effective move.

Still, certain general principles may apply.  The most important of those is not to play the narcissistic games thinking that they can be won.  They cannot be won. 

It's better to stay on the initial topics, the ones Cummings addressed in his criticisms, because those are the topics Trump doesn't want us to focus on.  

His first set of hate tweets against Cummings should have been met with a short, firm and calm condemnation of how Trump, again, has attacked a Congressperson of color in an insulting manner, and then the focus should have immediately turned back to the initial topics.  

In other words, we should maintain our own boundaries, and that means we shouldn't let Trump lead us by our noses to whatever topic he picks for the next one.  And then for the one after that, and so on.

And yes, I know those moves in Trump's games are almost impossible, because for them to be truly successful they'd need to be adopted by most journalists and politicians out there, not just by a few.  But even being aware of what the game is Trump is currently playing has been helpful to me.

 



Will Your Vote Count in 2020? Will It Be Counted?

Or will the "votes" of one Vlad "The Impaler" Putin override yours, if necessary, to guarantee the continuation of the Trump Reich which is very much to Putin's advantage?

Who can tell?

But what we can tell is that the Republicans in the Congress are not at all interested in the integrity of American elections, nosir.  Not even after hearing Robert Mueller's warning in his testimony yesterday about Russians certainly planning to continue their intervention in US elections:

While the Senate Intelligence Committee’s findings were bipartisan, they came on a day when Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, moved again to block consideration of election security legislation put forward by Democrats.

Mr. McConnell has long opposed giving the federal government a greater hand in an institution of American democracy typically run by the states.

And despite the warnings about the Russia threat, he argues that Congress has already done enough — passing $380 million worth of grants for states to update their election systems and supporting executive branch agencies as they make their own changes. Some administration officials have suggested that the issue is not getting enough high-level attention because President Trump equates any public discussion of malign Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his victory.

The findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee, referred to in the first sentence of that quote, came out today.  They tell us that the Russians targeted the election systems of all fifty US states!

To then suggest that they did nothing more but left their footprints there (a Kilroy-Was-Here-stunt?) is irrational.  Either Russia did affect votes in 2016 or the 2016 hacks were a dress rehearsal for something far bigger, perhaps to be staged in 2020.

It's the latter possibility, combined with the utter reluctance of Mitch McConnell&Co to do anything at all to safeguard democracy*, which worries me.

But I am also worried by this new world in which we have to tiptoe around the psychological problems Our Supreme Leader suffers from.  For an example of that, read the last sentence in the above quote again:  Election integrity is not getting the attention it is begging for (on its knees) because that attention would hurt Trump's feelings.

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* Fighting for the integrity of elections is one of my non-negotiable items, because without such integrity democracy (even in its current flawed form) will die. 

It should be among the non-negotiable items for all voters (and non-voters) who believe in democracy, even for the Republican voters.  Once it is known that the US allows election hacking by foreign powers many other countries might join Russia in that hacking enterprise, and not all of them would try to tip the scale toward the Republican Party.

The Mueller Testimony. My Take.

I've been having fun listening to Mueller testifying before the House (and the Intelligence Committee) on the 2016  election interference report, mostly, because I keep yelling corrections at various questioners who are getting the facts wrong.  On the Internet, even!

In any case, this is a good place to remind you that I wrote summaries of the two volumes in the Mueller Report.  Part I is here and Part II here.

The only new thing I learned today, on top of what I have read before and what I read in the Report, is that Mueller is very concerned about the integrity of US elections and the likelihood that foreign governments will continue trying to influence them.  He commented on that several times, and given how often he refused to answer questions outside the Report, this is something to take seriously.

I agree with Mueller.  The Russian government will certainly continue on the same merry path they opened for themselves in 2016 unless someone goes and erects some gates across it.  And there is no logical reason why other governments wouldn't follow suit if the US political system continues to ignore that problem.

Back Pain, Heat And The Male Gaze In Art

A week ago I decided to repaint the waist-high plywood paneling (scuffed and ancient) in one room.  It only comes to about waist level, so I spent several hours squatting and crawling on the floor, extending my arm out to paint corners and so on.  An enjoyable little project, because few things make a room look so much better quickly than a lick of paint (1).

Or so I thought until I got up.  Because my back decided not to get up, the bit where the spine joins the pelvic girdle, the bit which is evidence suggesting that the creator of humans was drunk on the day when human sinuses and the human back were created.

Anyway, fast forward to The Great Heat Of 2019 (which will become the standard heat of the future), and I found myself pretty much confined to bed in the only room where the air-conditioning works (2). 

And bored out of my mind, lying there, with invisible gnomes chewing on the small of my back with their tiny rotten teeth. 

That's how I began watching hours and hours of art history films, all intended for the general audience, about the great European masters of the past, about the French impressionists and so on (3).

These films had guides, art critics or art historians which explained the paintings for the viewers.   Tim Marlow wrote and directed one longer series and Waldemar Januszczak several series.  I watched all of those and several more, and on the whole found these two men quite entertaining and interesting, even when I disagreed with them.

But I had forgotten to turn the feminist part of my brain off, and it began sending me those beep beep signals — like a fire alarm does when the battery is going — and they got louder and louder. 

I tried to ignore them.  After all, I knew exactly what I was going to get in programs about the Great Masters (they were not Great Mistresses (4) after all), and I'm not so far gone that I can't admire great art created by humans in general.

That wasn't the reason for the feminist alarm beeps. It was something different, more subtle:

After some hours of watching these films, I realized that both Marlow and Januszczak, inside their minds,  saw the audience of those paintings, both at the time they were painted and now, as hundred percent male.

Thus, in these series (5) female nudes are often interpreted as paintings created for the erotic arousal of the audience (and not just for the erotic arousal of the heterosexual men who paid for them), and early Venice is described as a pleasure palace for travelers (not just for male travelers) because it had such a vast number of prostitutes.  This reporting was accompanied with sounds of female giggling and pictures of taverns with amorous couples enjoying themselves.

Even the struggles of the famous early Impressionists, the "outsiders," to be accepted by the dominant powers in the French art world were discussed in a way which made it hard to remember that no female artist, Impressionist or not, was admitted to the most influential art school of that era, L'École des Beaux-Arts, until 1897.   That these "outsider" struggles were multiplied for such painters as Suzanne Valadon, even today apparently more important as Renoir's model than as a painter (6), is not something that approach can show us.  But it can hide it.

Thus, I found it refreshing to find one French film (7) about the neglected female artists in European history.  But that shouldn't be something we must look up separately from general art history films.


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(1)  Why a lick?  Do people taste the paints?

(2)  Leaving it in heat always feels like stepping into a poorly heated sauna, but this time it felt like a poorly heated sauna with carbon monoxide still inside it (Heating a sauna with wood requires great care about getting rid of the carbon monoxide).

(3)  I couldn't type lying down (the gnomes protested, with their little squeaky voices) so I couldn't write, and I wanted to watch something which would not anger me or frighten me or wouldn't even be terribly relevant today, but which would still offer some aesthetic and intellectual pleasure.

(4)  Even the term "mistress" now means something quite different than the term "master."  In any case, there were very few female painters or sculptors that history has deigned to notice, and I knew this to be the case.  I can even write (in excruciating detail, if you wish)  about the myriad reasons for that scarcity.

(5)  I didn't plan to write about those series so I didn't take notes.  Some examples I give here (the giggling sex workers) are from Januszczak, but others might be from either Marlow or Januszczak.

It's important to note that I'm not accusing either Marlow or Januszczak of doing any of the things I write about here on purpose, probably the reverse.  Had they spotted those things they would have removed them.

But we are all still taught that the male gaze in art is the neutral gaze, and it's so easy to slip into that way of looking and hearing.  I was just a little bit shocked to see that at work so very recently.

(6)  She was pointed out as Renoir's model, often a nude model, in Janszczak's series about Impressionism.  That she later became a painter herself is something I had to learn from other sources.

(7)  I will post the name of the series here when I find it.

A recent reassessment of Berthe Morisot, a member of the early Impressionist movement,  serves to remind us that the art world truly is doing so much better now when it comes to sexism. 

Where Trump Fails A Simple Knowledge Or Memory Test

Here's a not-so-reassuring story about our Dear Leader:

When President Trump this week met human rights activist Nadia Murad, an Iraqi who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for speaking out about her agonizing torture and rape while in Islamic State captivity, he seemed unaware of her story and the plight of her Yazidi ethnic minority.

Do read the whole story where you will find that Trump's ignorance is of the extreme sort. 

Keep in mind that presidents are briefed right before such meetings, so either Trump wasn't listening to the briefing at all or he had already forgotten what he was told about the Yazidis* not very many minutes earlier.  Both explanations are disconcerting.  Or should be disconcerting if we lived in more ordinary times.


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* To put Nadia Murad's experiences into context, read this post (trigger warning for extreme violence) I wrote in 2015 about the treatment of women and especially Yazidi women and girls  by ISIS then. 

Why Now? Or On The Timing Of Trump's Most Recent Wrath Tweets

It's not news that Trump has racist and sexist views.  He ran on those views, after all.  So I am not particularly interested in trying to saw open his skull to see what monsters there might tell us about why* he is tweet-attacking four progressive Democratic politicians, all of them women and all of them women of color.

A more interesting question than repeatedly asking if he might, after all, be a teeny weeny bit bigoted, is to ask why he chose to attack "the Squad" at this particular point in time.

The most obvious explanation is this one:

Mr. Trump clearly sees a political advantage in his targeting of the congresswomen, betting that by focusing attention on them, he will be better able to paint all Democrats with a broad brush of socialism and radical policies.

“The Dems were trying to distance themselves from the four ‘progressives,’ but now they are forced to embrace them,” Mr. Trump gloated on Twitter on Monday evening. “That means they are endorsing Socialism, hate of Israel and the USA! Not good for the Democrats!”

Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster and strategist, said Mr. Trump’s latest remarks reflected a broader strategy to use the same kind of racial animus that helped propel his 2016 presidential bid to bolster his base for his 2020 re-election push.

And the timing may simply be because Maureen Dowd had just written a column (in her inimitable slap-the-bitches schoolyard style) which strongly suggests that Nancy Pelosi tries to distance the views of the Squad from the general messages of the Democratic Party.** 

Thus, the situation was tailor-made for Trump to hop into the saddle and ride this particular pony of our political apocalypse.  (I'm being taken captive by bad metaphors!  Help!  Send chocolate!)

But other tentative explanations exist.  For instance, the Epstein case is very much in the news, and there may be good reasons why Trump might wish to make certain that there are competing baits for the journalist fishes out there.

And the man really is a master baiter.

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* In one sense his tweets are nothing more than the old "America.  Love It Or Leave It" argument, which frames dissent as treason. 

In another sense it's just his id speaking.  He loves letting it off the leash because he knows that his base adores him for their chance of vicariously doing the same, and, as we all know, nothing bad ever happens to Trump when he does that. 

But there are also political reasons for focusing the magnifying glass on the Democrats while the southern border continues as a pure hell on earth and so on.  The media eagerly swallows his bait and then dangles off his fishing rod, helpless and dull-eyed.  (I told you that I'm being kidnapped by bad metaphors today!)

**  I have not tried to analyze that Dowd column and Pelosi's possible thought processes which led her to giving that interview to an opinion columnist who truly detests Democratic women and always analyzes them from the Mean Girls Angle.

Life is too tiring as it is.   

The Cases Of R.Kelly And Jeffrey Epstein. Compare And Contrast.

From recent news:

Singer R. Kelly has been arrested in Chicago on federal sex crime charges, according to two law enforcement officials.
The 52-year-old was arrested by NYPD detectives and Homeland Security Investigation agents on sex trafficking charges, officials tell News 4, and it is expected he will be brought to New York.
…

The R&B star has been the subject of different sexual abuse allegations for nearly two decades, with some of the alleged acts dating back to 1998.
Back in February, Kelly was charged with aggravated sexual abuse involving four women, three of whom were minors when the alleged abuse occurred. He pleaded not guilty and was released from Chicago's Cook County Jail after posting bail.
...

A jury in 2008 acquitted Kelly of child pornography charges stemming from a video showing him having sex with a girl as young as 13, prosecutors claimed at the time. Kelly faced 15 years in prison for that charge, but the young woman in that claim denied it was her and did not testify.

If you think there might be an echo in the room, you are correct.  This case looks a lot like the Jeffrey Epstein case:  Both men are rich and powerful and both have successfully slithered out of earlier sexual abuse allegations concerning minors, while apparently not changing their lives at all.

But there are differences, too.  R. Kelly is black, Jeffrey Epstein is not, R. Kelly is a famous musician, Jeffrey Epstein is mostly famous for being close to famous people, and the two used different strategies in their (alleged) preying for victims:

R. Kelly has been accused of creating a cult* where women and girls were held hostage inside his properties, while Epstein seems to have kept his targets on longer leashes**, to be called back when required.

Still, the differences in those hunting styles disguise a deeper similarity, one which is an integral part of much sex trafficking:

The relationship between the sex trafficker and the exploited minor is often "a mental tether and not a physical chain," she said.

"Once manipulated" by the sex trafficker, "she can be in any social space and still be exploited but not see herself as a victim," she continued.

...

With victims too young to understand that they're being manipulated and used, they often tragically blame themselves or cover for their abuser. 

 And:

Victims reported that Epstein paid them when they were hard up for cash — and paid extra when they brought new girls. He offered them affection, or promised to boost their future careers. That’s what kept them coming back to his palatial Palm Beach estate for years.

That line of thinking isn’t uncommon for victims of human trafficking rings, experts say, and it can take years for survivors to realize they were victimized twice: once sexually, and a second time through manipulation with money, power, or praise.

“They’ll often talk about the extent to which they have agency in their own decision, but they don’t see themselves as being exploited,” said Rachel Lovell, sex trafficking expert and assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. “They see themselves as being in love, as making the best decisions with the limited circumstances that they have.”

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*  This article, from 2017,  gives some insights into how the process of —what?  conversion? brain-washing? — slowly worked for one woman, Kitti Jones, who has since sued R. Kelly.

Note how familiar some aspects of that gradual tightening of the noose sound.  Kelly used the kinds of devices domestic and intimate partner abusers routinely employ, only he did it to several girls and women at the same time.  Another woman suing Kelly, Faith Rodgers, recounts similar incidents in 2018:

The allegations are similar to others made against Kelly recently, from women who allege he held them against his will in a “cult”, where as well as being forced into sexual acts, the women had their diet and even use of the bathroom controlled by Kelly. Rodgers’ lawsuit describes her case as “run-of-the-mill R Kelly sexual abuse”.

** Or used the girls and women he had already hunted to find him new targets.

Meanwhile, At Trump's Golf Resort

From today's presidential news, anno 2019:

President Trump’s golf resort in Doral, Fla., is scheduled to host a golf tournament Saturday put on by a Miami-area strip club, which will allow golfers to pay for a dancer to serve as their “caddy girl” while they play at the president’s club.
The “Shadow All Star Tournament” is organized by the Shadow Cabaret, a strip club in Hialeah, Fla.

So it goes. I'm trying to imagine what the reactions of the public would be if, say, Hillary Clinton had done something similar.  For instance, suppose that she had organized a fund-raising party where the guests could pay to have young male strippers sit at their tables during the dinner.*

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* To be clear she never did that.  And to be even clearer, I wrote that paragraph to point out the gendered nature of the above arrangement.  It's female dancers that the male golf-players pay for.  And to be clearer than that, this is about sex, but it's really only about sex for the buyers, and not for the sellers.  Still, most of Trump's base would like all of reality to work like this:

Mancuso said there would be no nudity at the resort. On the course, he said, the caddies would wear pink miniskirts and what he called “a sexy white polo.” Afterward, however, the golfers and the dancers would return to another venue — the cabaret itself — for what he described as a “very tasteful” burlesque show, which could involve nudity.
“They’re going to be clothed the whole time” at the golf course, Mancuso said. “At the venue is different.”

Human Rights For Thee, My Brother, But Not For Me?

The Trump administration is doing the bidding of Vlad "The Impaler" Putin and of the fanatic religious fundamentalists.  We know that, of course, but that bidding is now going to affect the way the US foreign policy will interpret human rights.  My guess is that the new definition of human rights will try to return that concept to the era of the American Founding Fathers when women, as a class, had very few rights and when blacks counted as fractional human beings.

Snippets:

The Trump administration said Monday that it will review the role of human rights in American foreign policy, appointing a commission expected to elevate concerns about religious freedom and abortion.

...

A group of Democratic senators said in a letter last month that they were dismayed that the commission was being assembled without congressional oversight. Several of the names of people reported to be on it, they charged, support discriminatory policies against gays and lesbians, “hold views hostile to women’s rights, and/or to support positions at odds with U.S. treaty obligations.”

The hilarious aspect in this is that these changes are also very much desired by the groups the United States is currently fighting in Syria and in Afghanistan.

Fundamentalists are brothers under the skin, and it's pretty clear that the new "rights" would not affect the human rights of straight religious men.  Everyone else, fasten your seat belts.

I am always uncomfortable when people use the term "religious freedom," unless carefully specified, because one person's religious freedom too often seems to mean that other people must lose their rights of being viewed as equally human beings.  Besides, religious communities use that term to police the members of their own flock which can, ironically, strip those members of their human rights.  There's an odd collective aspect to that term, which may be why organized religion likes it. 

Whether this new commission ends up having any power or not, the very fact that it has been created makes me sad.  It's an ominous sign of the end of that era when powerful Western powers paid at least lip service to general human rights, the fair treatment of women and of sexual minorities and so on.  Unless we fight to preserve those basic rights, of course.

On Privilege As Initially Defined: Jeffrey Epstein And Private Law

The billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein was arrested yesterday on sex trafficking charges involving minors:

Epstein has been arrested for allegedly sex trafficking dozens of minors between 2002 and 2005 while residing in New York and Florida, according to a story broken by The Daily Beast and confirmed by CNN. The new indictment reportedly accuses Epstein of paying underage girls in cash for "massages" in order to molest or otherwise sexually abuse them at his residences in either the Upper East Side of Manhattan or in a wealthy neighborhood of Palm Beach, Florida. The indictment will also reportedly claim that some of Epstein's employees and associates helped him recruit these girls for his abuse — and that many of the sex abuse victims ultimately assisted him in recruiting his future victims.

This is not the first time Epstein has faced similar allegations*.  In 2007 and 2008 he avoided similar federal charges in a plea deal which many have criticized as overly lenient:

Before the plea deal, Mr. Epstein, a former hedge-fund manager, had been friendly with Donald J. Trump, former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.

He pleaded guilty to lesser state charges of soliciting prostitution, served 13 months in a county lockup and registered as a sex offender. His jail arrangement allowed him to get out of the Palm Beach County Stockade six days a week to work out of his office.

Well, the deal may have been overly lenient, but it was also just shitty:

The plea deal that protected Mr. Epstein from federal charges was signed by the top federal prosecutor in Miami at the time, Alexander Acosta, who is now President Trump’s labor secretary.

In February, a judge in Florida ruled that the prosecutors led by Mr. Acosta violated federal law when they failed to disclose Mr. Epstein’s nonprosecution agreement to his victims.

The agreement was negotiated in secret while victims were told prosecutors were still pursuing a possible federal criminal case.

Scan through the last two quotes above, and you do get the feeling that the law for some people is, indeed, in a very concrete sense a private law, which is one of the original meanings of "privilege:"  

The unwashed masses have one law, the rich and powerful and their tribal associates have a different one.

And why not, in their own minds?  After all, they have the right to have the best cars, wines, houses and caviar.  They get to fly in private jets.  They never have to stand in line.  Why shouldn't they have access to the bodies they most desire for sexual purposes, even if the law for the hoi polloi regards that access as illegal?

To be crystal-clear, the above paragraph is my attempt to enter the mind of someone like Jeffrey Epstein.  It is NOT what I believe, of course.  In particular, there's an enormous moral and ethical difference between cars, houses, wines and caviar on the one hand and the bodies of young and very vulnerable** girls and women on the other hand.
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*  For even earlier hints about all this, see this article.   Or Google Epstein's name and "parties." The problem, of course, is that until cases are brought to court (or good third-party evidenced is presented) all the hints must be treated as mere rumors by those of us who are on the outside of the judicial system.

** The NYT article:

One of the victims, Courtney Wild, now 31, was wearing braces when she first met Mr. Epstein. “Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless,” Ms. Wild told The Herald. “He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right.”

What Was Your First Memory?

Because this is a holiday week in the US, I feel free not to write about only politics and other stress-inducing topics.  For a change of pace, I thought back to the misty past when I was a very small goddess, to figure out my first memory.

The one I'm surest about* is this:

I am upright in the hot sun.  Outside.

Heat.  Light.  Light and heat.  From above.  Above exists.  Cold below.  Below exists.  The stepping stone is cold and I stand on it.  I exist.

I am not the heat, I am not the light, I am not the cold or the stone. 

I AM, small, I end there and I end here, and I stand on this stepping stone and it is hot and it is glaring white above and my legs (I have legs) are bare and warm and I wear a ---- onesie?  and a baby bonnet.

What's your first memory?

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*  I have another one which is a little fuzzier and involves hearing people talk but not being able to understand a single word.  Also, feeling like a turtle on its back, unable to move toward the light from the window.   But the one I write about here is much stronger.

She Is Not My Type. The Recent Sexual Assault Allegation Against Donald Trump.

"She is not my type."  That's partly how Donald Trump responded to the allegations that he had sexually assaulted Jean E. Carroll, long an advice columnist for Elle magazine, in a Bergdorf & Goodman dressing-room twenty-three years ago.

These allegations appeared in print at the Cut which published a short excerpt from Carroll's forthcoming book.  Here's the central bit:

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

Carroll wrote that she told two women about the event at the time, and two women have come forward to verify that. Trump's response was that Carroll is "totally lying" and that "she is not his type."

I find it hard to get over the idea that "she is not my type" would be a defense against sexual assault allegations.  Indeed, I can't get my head around that.  I wonder what his type for sexual assault purposes might be...

The longer the Trump era continues, the more I feel like Alice in Wonderland: (1)

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." 

And Our Dear Leader Speaks About The Demise Of Liberal Democracy

This is funny:

President Trump held a lengthy news conference Saturday in Osaka, Japan, during which he displayed his apparent ignorance of some very basic political terms and historical concepts.

When asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comments saying Western-style liberalism was “obsolete,” Trump apparently thought this term literally referred to the western United States and American liberals.

....

Democratic liberalism, of course, does not refer to the western United States, but rather the Western world -- which generally includes the United States and much of Europe. And liberalism is a political theory that values the freedom of the individual. That term has come to be associated with left-leaning American politicians and political activists, but some right-leaning political thinkers still claim the term as their own.

Broadly speaking, democratic liberalism has been the leading political ideology across the western world since World War II. Of late, though, populist movements across Europe have gained power, leading to questions about how long liberal democracies can survive. Putin’s comments were clearly about that, but Trump doesn’t appear to have processed this very significant development on the world stage.

No.  It's not funny.  It's frightening, as if we live in a mirror world where the Russian dictator is pleased that the idea of democracy, freedom of the individuals and associated concepts such as human rights are now becoming obsolete, and the wannabe American dictator doesn't even understand what the fuck Vlad The Impaler is talking about.

The BBC has a more detailed take on both the meaning of liberal democracy in the Western world, and Putin's assertions:

"Putin's position is that Russia has a specific and different kind of civilisation, where sovereignty trumps democracy, and national unity and stability trumps rule of law and human rights," says Prof Cox.
"Not surprisingly, he's not keen on Western-style liberalism, which he'll see as a fundamental challenge to his style of government.

Bolds are mine. 

Putin's views remind me of how Mussolini, too, made the trains run on time...

Never mind.  The point of this post is that while Putin's war-of-the-ideas uses sophisticated weapons in, say, cyber-warfare, Trump brings with him a toy train.
 

And Alabama Keeps Moving Toward Gilead. The Case Of Marshae Jones.

In Alabama, the state which takes The Handmaid's Tale not as dystopian fiction, but as an instruction manual about the proper care and management of those pesky females, this happened:

Marshae Jones was five months pregnant when she was shot in the stomach. Her fetus did not survive the shooting, which the authorities say happened during a dispute with another woman.

But on Wednesday, it was Ms. Jones who was charged in the death.

Ms. Jones, 28, was charged with manslaughter and booked into jail on a $50,000 bond, according to the authorities in Jefferson County, Ala. The police have said she was culpable because she started the fight that led to the shooting and failed to remove herself from harm’s way.

“The only true victim in this was the unborn baby,” Lt. Danny Reid of the Pleasant Grove Police Department, said after the shooting in December, AL.com reported. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”

My dear readers, welcome to a taste of the wonderful world where egg-Americans have full human rights and therefore their carriers do not*.

To see how that will work in the glorious future, should the forced-birthers get their way, consider this manly opinion by Lt. Reid:

“When a five-month pregnant woman initiates a fight and attacks another person, I believe some responsibility lies with her as to any injury to her unborn child,” Lt. Reid said then. “That child is dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations.”

She probably shouldn't drink alcohol, either, or smoke tobacco.  She probably shouldn't go scuba diving or mountain climbing, she shouldn't travel to dangerous places, and she probably shouldn't be allowed to be in the military or the police or the fire brigade.  What if she goes out alone, at night, in a potentially dangerous area?  What if she eats too much tuna?  Fails to take folic acid?

Duh, some of you might say.  It's only for nine months per child.  Isn't a healthy child worth a few restrictions on your life? 

And most women do make those restrictive choices on their own.  But this is not about their decisions.  It's about the society decreeing that they cannot have the same rights as other adults do.  In other words, human rights for egg-Americans will remove at least some rights from adult women that adult men get to keep.

It could get even worse: 

Because any fertile woman is potentially pre-pregnant, and because pregnancy is invisible to outsiders in the early stages, this way of thinking can easily slide into the policing of all women between the ages of, say, ten and fifty, including keeping them away from dangerous occupations and hobbies and scrutinizing every miscarriage for possible evidence of a homicide.

That's the dystopia we might one day live in if the forced-birthers have their way.  I don't think it will become reality, because most people don't want to see that world realized.  But the doctrine of full personhood of egg-Americans will unavoidably lead us there.

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* Quite a few women, often women of color,  are already familiar with that world.  
 

Children In Cages At The Border: A Feature, Not A Bug.

I rarely write about certain topics*, even when they are of great importance, even when I worry about them every single day.  That's because often I have nothing useful to contribute to what is already being said, or I have no special expertise in the area.  Just joining in the general lamentations about the atrocities that the Trump administration perpetuates doesn't seem particularly worthwhile.   The Greek chorus is loud enough, but the White House is sound-insulated.

What is taking place at the US southern border is one of those topics where my voice is unnecessary, in general, though I do worry about the lack of debate on the left side of the political aisle on what ideal immigration policies would look like, what the US should have done to prevent the current perfect storm from taking place to begin with,** and how to prepare better for similar future events.

Children in cages.  People with any empathy are aghast at the news that some three hundred children were held in cages, many, if not most, separated from their parents or guardians at the border, left without proper basic care and adult supervision.

We can thank the Trump administration policies for a large part*** of that problem, and especially Stephen "Dead Eyes" Miller, the architect of the current immigration policies, the so-called "zero tolerance" among them.   As McKay Coppins writes in an Atlantic Monthly article,

But while Miller’s influence on this issue is a matter of documented fact, his motives remain somewhat murkier. Why exactly is he using his perch to champion a measure that’s so unpopular that it’s opposed by fully two-thirds of Americans? Theories abound, of course—ranging from ideology to incompetence to xenophobia—but they are almost all products of distant speculation.

Coppins believes that Miller wants to "agitate," to create "constructive controversies", because he trusts that they will ultimately resolve to Trump's advantage in the next elections:

But for Miller, it seems, all is going according to plan—another “constructive controversy” unfolding with great potential for enlightenment. His bet appears to be that voters will witness this showdown between Trump and his angry antagonists, and ultimately side with the president. It’s a theory that will be put to the test in November. In the meantime, the heartrending orchestra on the border will play on.

 But why would the voters side with the president here? 

This is where the "feature, not a bug" arguments comes out to play:  Miller wants the news about children in cages to leak out, because he wants those news to be seen and discussed in the source countries of the current migrants and asylum seekers. 

It's as if he is whispering in the ears of those planning to come to the US about what might happen to their children if they do make the journey, suggesting that whatever the reasons they contemplate leaving might be, the likely treatment they would face at the US border is even worse.  And for that approach to work (i.e. to noticeably reduce the number of migrants seeking entry into the US), the news must be cruel enough.

That all-whip-no-carrot approach is, of course, the way this administration carries out almost all its foreign policy, except toward countries led by strong-men dictators whom Trump admires.

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*  Climate change is the most important one of those.  I do what I can in my own life and try to be well-informed, but I'm not a scientist in that area. 

** The reverse of what Trump did.  Give more support to the source countries of the recent migrants in ways which would improve their security safety and economic position.  People don't usually want to leave their countries if they have a safe choice to stay.  And the US, for historical reasons,  owes some real help to that area.

Such aid is not only good for people who live there but also for peace, the control of migration and even for creating new markets for US products, through greater affluence.  And if properly thought out, it's also good for human rights.

Fighting climate change is another central part of the longer-run solution to global migrations and the problems they cause.

For more about some of the problems in the current asylum-based system, see this Time article from last November.

*** Though the sudden increase in the numbers of asylum-seekers and migrants and the lack of resources and preparedness at the border also contributed. 

Friday Coleslaw: The Finnish Cabinet, A Rose, The Female Bomber Pilots in WWII and Conducting-While-Female

This post is full of random stuff, like a coleslaw.  Enjoy.




1.  The new  Finnish cabinet has more women than men. 

It does not mean that  now patriarchy will be tipped on its head, even in Finland, and nobody will come around with gelding shears.   Honest.

Rather, one day future governments, all over the world,  will have women and men in percentages which over the long-run end up matching the percentages of women and men in the relevant populations.   Some years there will be more men, some years there will be more women, and some years the numbers are roughly equal.

A goddess can dream, in any case.

(Now I suddenly imagine a cabinet created by all those people with Trump masks on.  That's the kind of dream Trump dreams:  Himself, eternally, in power.  And fuck the rest of the humankind.)


2.  The story about "the night witches," Russian women who flew bombers in WWII is fascinating.

3.  Marin Alsop, the first woman to lead a major US orchestra, describes conducting-while-female as follows:

Despite the progress made in recent years, she said, female conductors were still judged differently from their male counterparts while on the podium. “The thing about conducting is it’s all body language,” she said, and “our society interprets gesture very differently from men or from women.”

A delicate touch from a woman, for example, is often seen as weakness, when the same gesture from a man is seen as sensitive, she said. Unlike men, women conductors are “required to think twice about gesture because it’s not just the gesture, it’s how the musicians interpret the gesture.”

I found that fascinating, because it's a concrete example of the frequent pattern many of us have observed:  Women are held to different standards in, say, politics and business, because their behavior and statements are interpreted with added expectations about how women behave or should behave.

This phenomenon may well have to do with fields where women are a minority, and might fade away when women stop being minorities.  On the other hand, I may be wrong about that.

4.  The first rose opened in my garden.  It's a David Austin one, with a difficult metallic tone of soft orange (if that makes sense), and tends to clash with the purple-pale-yellow-white-and-pink colors of the June garden here.  So I isolate it with lots of lady's mantles (visible in the picture as the small yellow flowers).

 

On Political Allies. In Housecleaning

A recent UK Guardian article, about even liberal and progressive men not sharing housework fairly, has a bizarre headline*:

Want to be a male ally? Start by cleaning the house.

It's bizarre, because it suggests that doing one's fair share of housecleaning is a way of being a political (?) ally, but to whom?  The class of women?  One's own female partner?

That headline is like asking the readers to go  around several blocks and then to come into the (messy) house through the backdoor, while the front door (the simple explanation) is wide open and the shortest way in: 

Sharing paid and unpaid work equally** is what fairness in a relationship requires.

Okay.  So I am a curmudgeony goddess who has trouble accepting some of the jargon on both the right and left political extremes.  This particular example is about the meaning of the term "ally" on the political left***.

It's not the same as the dictionary definition about alliances between nations or people, such as this one, even though it initially might look the same:

a person, group, or nation that is associated with another or others for some common cause or purpose: Canada and the United States were allies in World War II.

The difference is that the Guardian headline asks the reader (presumably a man) if he wants to be a male ally.  In other words, it's closer to the following definition:


Rather, it's closer to this one:

2 : one that is associated with another as a helper : a person or group that provides assistance and support in an ongoing effort, activity, or struggle a political ally ... —often now used specifically of a person who is not a member of a marginalized or mistreated group but who expresses or gives support to that group

Bolds are mine.

The two bolded sections explain why I disliked the Guardian headline:  The male partner should not be viewed as a "helper" of the female partner when it comes to housecleaning or child-care or other chores.  The male partner, in this context,  is not someone outside the "marginalized or mistreated" group ( of women, here, or just his own female partner?) who is just expected to give support.   He is inside the group "partnership" with his female partner, and his role is not that of a helper, but of an equal participant.

I wonder if that's clear...



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*  Since most headlines are not written by the authors of the articles, this  headline probably wasn't picked by Moira Donegan who wrote the article (which is worth reading, as is this one on house cleaning).

** Absent health problems etc.  Note that there are different ways of sharing work and household chores fairly, but when both partners work equal hours, it's not fair to expect only one of them to take care of all unpaid work as well.

***  The list of the duties of a political ally can be psychologically very onerous.  There are good reasons for making sure that the eager allies won't just take over and get the whole movement centered on their wants, needs, and desires, which makes those lists understandable.

Still, I am not sure that the allyship-concept in politics is ultimately a productive one (in terms of gaining many supporters in various fights for justice) because it signals that different demographic groups really are like different countries, and unless potential allies can prove otherwise,  they are assumed to be citizens of an enemy country (from the angle of the oppressed group).

Today's Granola Post: A Study on Women's Advancement in British Universities.

Granola posts are good for you!  I'm the parent who is making you eat your granola, because it will help you grow big and strong and smart.


A British study examined why male faculty members in the UK tend to rise higher in the academic hierarchies than female faculty members.  The study controlled for (1) variables which roughly measure the idea that women's advancement is hampered by the traditional gendered division of labor within households, and it also controlled for age (as it takes time to climb to the top) as well as research output (papers published in peer reviewed articles, grants obtained and conference papers presented,  all in the last five years).  The study abstract:

In Alabama, Rapists' Fatherhood Rights Rule

Alabama's extreme forced-birth bill is not the only Tealiban*-type move there against the awful possibility that women might have some rights.  Alabama is also one of the two remaining states (Minnesota being the other) where rapists' fatherhood rights are strong. 

Take the case of Jessica Stalling: 

She has stated that her mother's half-brother began climbing into her bed when she was twelve or thirteen**.  By the age of eighteen or nineteen she had been pregnant four times and was the mother of two living children.  Her family forced her to marry her "uncle Lennie."  The marriage was later declared invalid because of the close familiar connection.

But now "uncle Lennie" has gone to court and won visitation rights to her two remaining children.