A Desert Full of Bones: Razor Wire, Asylum, and Fascism

There’s a scene in the 1981 film Time Bandits (spoiler warning), in which Kevin the landscaping angels who kidnapped him find themselves in a flat, barren landscape, with mist in the air, and the bones of strange creatures strewn about. They’re following a divine map, but it’s leading them so far into the desert that they might never find their way out. It’s a fair concern, given that time God “guided” the Israelites on a 40-year version of an 11-day trek, but just when the group is close to giving up, they hit a wall. An invisible barrier.

Randall shatters it with a skull, and they continue on their quest into the lair of Evil, but what if the barrier hadn’t broken? What if they’d come all that way, braving ogres and giants, shipwrecks and cannonfire, only to die in that desert, and become just a few more bones littering the ground outside the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness?

When I hear Republicans (and some Democrats) demand that we build a wall along the southern border, this desert full of bones always comes to mind. At first, it felt too “extreme” to say, but there has never been a question that every barrier erected along that border means more people dead. It has also become increasingly clear that Border Patrol and the people howling for a closed border absolutely do want to fill that desert with bones. They want to kill anyone trying to cross that border from the south who doesn’t go through a checkpoint. They don’t care that US law states that all humans have a right to enter the United States, by any means, to request asylum. Those who do so have a right to have their request considered, before any action is taken to deport them. When they talk about “The Law”, what they mean is “what we think ought to be the law”, and they feel fully justified in “enforcing” that, regardless of the actual legality, or the harm done. They look at some of the most desperate and powerless people in the world, and they want them to die.

They are sadistic, murderous extremists, and I no longer feel any hesitation in labeling them as such.

Honestly, I haven’t felt much hesitation about that for a while now. Desantis committed human trafficking for political gain, and conservatives across the US cheered him on, but now Gregg Abbot has taken things to another level, by actively trying to kill and maim anyone trying to cross using razor wire barriers and traps in and around the Rio Grande. Content warning for descriptions of horrifying violence, and discussion of hate speech going forward.

The trooper, who works as a medic, sent the email to a sergeant on July 3 detailing some of the things he witnessed while on patrol in Eagle Pass — where Gov. Greg Abbott recently ordered the deployment of a floating barrier in the Rio Grande to deter migrant crossings.

“I believe we a have stepped over a line into the in humane. We need to operate it correctly in the eyes of God,” the trooper wrote in the email, which DPS provided to The Texas Tribune. “We need to recognize that these are people who are made in the image of God and need to be treated as such.”

The trooper said in the email that he was out on patrol around 10 p.m. June 25 when he and other troopers came across a group of about 120 people, including small children and nursing babies, who were “exhausted, hungry and tired” along a fence line on the U.S. side.

“We called the shift officer in command, and we were given orders to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico. We decided that this was not the correct thing to do. With the very real potential of exhausted people drowning. We made contact with command again and expressed our concerns and we were given the order to tell them to go to Mexico.”

The trooper wrote in the email that five days later, a 4-year-old girl who attempted to cross the razor wire “was pressed back by Texas Guard soldiers due to the orders given to them.” The temperature “was well over 100 degrees” and the girl passed out, the email said, adding that she had received medical treatment.

That same day, a man rescued his child who got stuck on a barrel in the water covered with razor wire, according to the trooper’s email. During the rescue, the man got a “significant” cut on his left leg, the trooper wrote. A 15-year-old boy also broke his leg trying to walk around the wire in the river and his father had to carry him across to the U.S. side, the trooper wrote.

Later that night, troopers found a 19-year-old woman stuck in the razor wire having a miscarriage, the trooper’s email said.

“Stuck in razor wire”

If that phrase doesn’t give you a reflexive chill, take a moment to really think about what it means.

And think about what it means that someone would see razor wire, and try to cross it anyway. We hear a lot about how dangerous the journey north can be, and when you see people willing to risk shredding their bodies like that, it’s hard not to conclude that they must be fleeing something genuinely awful; so awful that no amount of deterrence will dissuade them. It’s very clear that the people who want a closed border don’t actually care whether someone has a legitimate asylum request. They neither know nor care about the history or conditions of the countries from which people are fleeing, and if we’re honest, they don’t even see these people as human.

In addition to the buoy barrier, it appears that there are barrels wrapped in razor wire, presumably to tempt anyone crossing the river to use the barrels as floats, only to be cut up or – in the case of the child mentioned above, stuck on the blades of the wire. It also seems that there’s razor wire just in the water, where nobody crossing would be able to see it. This is, as said in this interview, torture. It’s also attempted murder, because in case anyone needed to hear this, slashing someone with a blade while they’re trying to cross a river dramatically increases their chances of drowning, not to mention the danger from the injury itself.

The Biden administration has not been great on the border issue. They didn’t stop separating children from their families, and they’re continuing to push for unreasonable – and unconstitutional – restrictions at the border. That said, this stuff with the razor wire was too much for them, and the DOJ has sued Texas for failing to remove the barriers as directed:

The DOJ suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Texas, seeks an injunction to block the state from placing more of the wrecking ball-sized, razor wire-topped buoys, which have already reportedly injured several people. The complaint accuses Texas and Abbott of violating the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act by erecting the barrier in a U.S. waterway without permission.

“This floating barrier poses threats to navigation and public safety and presents humanitarian concerns,” Associate U.S. Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement. “Additionally, the presence of the floating barrier has prompted diplomatic protests by Mexico and risks damaging U.S. foreign policy.”

The lawsuit came on the same day that Abbott defiantly refused a DOJ request to dismantle the 1,000-foot barrier, which was installed along with netting and razor wire in and along the river that Mexicans call the Río Bravo near Eagle Pass in Maverick County.

“Texas will fully utilize its constitutional authority to deal with the crisis you have caused,” Abbott wrote in a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden in response to the DOJ’s request. “Texas will see you in court, Mr. President.”

In a weekend CNN appearance, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) called Abbott’s anti-migrant efforts “barbaric” and “extreme cruelty.”

“For him, this isn’t about border security—it’s about using taxpayer money to feed red meat to right-wing extremists,” Castro said of Abbott on Twitter.

It is also, I think, not just about immigration. This is how they want to respond to global warming. They know that global warming is already causing migration, just like they’ve always known that their efforts to close the border were killing people. Their solution to climate change is to maintain US power, and to use that power to force poor countries to keep supporting the rich ones, and to murder anyone who steps out of line. For that plan, climate change is actually a benefit, because it will make it that much harder for poorer nations to stand on their own, and to try to improve their conditions. At the same time, it will make it harder for people to survive the journey to the US and the crossing. They absolutely want that desert full of bones – they’d string bodies up along the wall as a warning, if they could – but deaths that happen before reaching the border make them happy too.

There were a few articles that went around, during Trump’s first (and hopefully only) term as President, about how folks close to him were big fans of a book called The Camp of the Saints. This book, beloved of Stephens Bannon and Miller is a revolting work of  propaganda from a French white supremacist who died in 2020 (good riddance), and it tells the story of a fleet of refugee boats sailing from India to France. The basic overview is that the Indian refugees are described throughout the book in disgusting and dehumanizing terms, as a liberal French society welcomes their approach, and the conservative “heroes” recommend that the boats be sunk at sea (sound familiar?) to save France from the zombie-like horde.

I do not recommend you read the book, but I do recommend you check out this overview of it by Youtuber José. I’m putting emphasis on this book right now, because I think it is extremely relevant to the current international fascist movement. Fascists seem to be driven by an obsession with humiliation and disgust. They constantly think and talk about cuckoldry, and the defeat of the “West”, and when they talk about groups of people they hate, they always find ways to invoke disgust. My first encounter with it was a website I found, back in highschool dedicated to hating Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who was tortured to death in 1998. It was filled with graphic descriptions of what the website’s creator apparently thought gay people did, and all of them, including body fluids and excrement, could have come straight from the pages of The Camp of the Saints. Likewise, fascists love describing their targets as diseased – another thing immigrants apparently share with LGBTQIA people.

There are many groups under attack right now, but all of them are facing the same threat, and it is a very real threat. Fascists are actively coming for trans people and asylum seekers, just as the Nazis did in the early days. Defending those groups should be enough motivation for any decent person, but even if it’s not, they never stop there, because they always need people to blame and punish for their society’s problems.

I think it’s likely that the courts will rule against Abbot and his death traps, but they will keep hurting and killing people in the meantime. More than that, this will not be the last such attempt. If you take anything away from this let it be that, as long as fascists have any power, they will use that power for these ends. What’s happening at the border is shocking, but it’s not actually very far from what’s considered acceptable in US political discourse. Plenty of Democrats support closing the border. Plenty of Democrats support US meddling in South and Central America, and want to continue doing it. Part of the reason fascists have power in the US, is because the Democrats are a center-right party within a government that has spent decades supporting and aiding fascist groups all over the world, in the name of opposing left-wing movements. This is why I don’t have much faith in the Democratic Party’s ability to fend off rising fascism, and why I think it’s so important for us to build organized, collective power that’s not centered around elections or beholden to political parties. There is ample evidence that even if the Democrats are in power, they won’t do what’s needed without relentless pressure from the left. We are fighting fascism, with all of the horror and death that brings, and that means being clear about both the danger, and what tools and allies we do or do not have in that fight.

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Everybody Knew Already: The Supreme Corrupt’s “decision” and its consequences

This was utterly predictable and preventable.

After the US’s Supreme Corrupt (containing male two rapists, one incompentent woman, and one cisgender heterosexual male that wants to legalize rape) “overturned Roe”, the inevitable has happened.  The rates of violence by cisgender heterosexual male partners of women have literally doubled, whether controlling abuse (destroying women’s means of birth control), rape, assault, murder, or other crimes.

Domestic Violence Hotline Reports 99% Increase in Calls Post-Roe

The hotline told Jezebel how abortion bans are now in the “toolbox of abusive partners.”

Crystal Justice, chief external affairs officer for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, has heard a lot of gutting cases of domestic violence from hotline callers over the years. But since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June, Justice told Jezebel that a few calls, in particular, have stood out to her—namely one woman who said her partner was intercepting her birth control pills after learning she was having them mailed to her. She eventually became pregnant but lived in a state where abortion is banned, and called the hotline desperate to learn her options.

Justice also heard from callers, post-Roe, whose abusive partners have weaponized their states’ abortion laws, as well as the widespread confusion around the laws’ particularities, to confuse and control them. “We’ve seen abusive partners weaponize the possible criminality of accessing abortion, or wrongfully tell a victim that if they do access abortion, they themselves could go to jail, or they’ll report them to the police,” Justice said. (Pregnancy outcomes and self-managed abortion are heavily policed and can lead to criminal charges—but no abortion bans currently in effect criminalize the abortion patient.)

Overall, the National Domestic Violence Hotline said they’ve seen a 99% increase in calls from people saying their partners are trying to control their reproductive choices (which domestic violence experts call reproductive coercion) since Roe was overturned. The hotline told Vice News that the year before Roe, they received 1,230 calls; in the year since, the hotline’s received 2,442

[. . .]

In May, a Texas woman was killed by her partner—who had a prior record of domestic violence—for getting an abortion, according to police. (A leading cause of death for pregnant people is homicide, often by intimate partners.) And last summer, a Missouri man was sentenced to life in prison for murdering his wife in 2019; before she went missing, she’d searched on her cell phone: “what to do if your husband is upset you are pregnant.”

There are plenty of news sources reporting the same things: pregnancy through rape, pregnancy coercion, threats and violence by males trying to control women bodily and mentally.  From PBS:

Why post-Roe abortion restrictions worry domestic violence experts

Elizabeth Holmes knew she was in trouble. After rekindling a relationship with her ex-boyfriend, she became pregnant a month later. And then, she said, his old patterns of abuse resurfaced, despite his promises that he had undergone therapy to change his possessive, controlling and violent behavior. He would deny being the father of their child one day, only to wake up the next with plans to buy a house for their family, Holmes said, in addition to other verbal, emotional and physical abuse.

She often regretted telling him that she was pregnant, but had also worried about what would happen if she had hid it from him.

At the time, she lived in Massachusetts, where a pregnant person is legally bound to inform the other parent before putting a child up for adoption. Holmes said she was afraid that she would be arrested and jailed if she lied about the pregnancy – both its existence and its end – and her partner found out. He had told her she could get an abortion, but refused to pay for it. Holmes could not afford the procedure on her own and did not know where else to turn.

And from Vice News.  Women who were raped by partners and dates are now being raped by the “legal system”.

Domestic Abusers Are Using Abortion Bans to Control Their Victims

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, people warned abortion bans would become another tool for people to abuse their partners. A year later, early data indicates those warnings were right.

In the year before Roe fell, roughly 1,230 people told the National Domestic Violence Hotline that they had endured some kind of what anti-domestic abuse activists call “reproductive coercion,” including being denied an abortion or being forced into one. In the year since it was overturned, 2,442 people said the same. That’s a 99-percent increase.

“When you have laws that come along that are now stripping survivors of their bodily autonomy and right to control their own lives and health—which is exactly what abusive partners are trying to do—it is taking the harm even further,” said Crystal Justice, chief external affairs officer for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Abusive partners, Justice said, now feel “emboldened and justified in their use of reproductive coercion to control the survivor, which in many cases includes survivors being forced to become pregnant.”

There’s more below the fold about increasing rates of Intimate Partner Violence not related to the Supreme Corrupt.   These are worldwide problems, not just the US, and not just about pregnancy.

[Read more…]

Compare and contrast

Here’s the Republican party:

Meanwhile, the Minnesota Democratic party is actually being effective. Follow that link for the long, long list of progressive accomplishments we got just this past year. Democrats who actually fought for labor and education and immigrants and gun control and abortion and trans rights? Unheard of!

This is not a blanket approval for the national Democratic party, however. The article points out how other state parties have failed.

All told, it’s quite the record of accomplishment—all done in less than half a year, and with a governor, Walz, who was not notably progressive in his prior career in Congress. One wonders why it is so difficult to get anything even remotely similar done in solid-blue states like New York, where Gov. Kathy Hochul has been faceplanting on minor things like getting a state judge confirmed or passing moderate housing reform to bring down her state’s sky-high rents.

I suspect the difference is that Minnesota Dems had to run on a serious progressive agenda to win. By all accounts, the backlash to Dobbs was especially important in the 2022 midterms. Where New York Democrats generally win easily, and so the Democratic establishment focuses above all on maintaining its control of the party machine and associated patronage, Minnesota Democrats have to actually represent their constituents. It turns out when a political party has a coherent agenda that it actually tries to carry out, it can get a lot done.

Oh, a coherent agenda and also a sense that they have to live up to their promises. Those sound like good things for a political party. One of our American afflictions is parties whose main mission is to simply get re-elected year after year.

Could be grim…but I’ll probably watch it

On 2 June, we get a new docuseries on the Duggars, Bill Gothard, and the IBLP cult. It’s going to be ugly. It’ll be hours of hateful, stupid people manipulating each other…so kinda like Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, only with more religion.

It’s an interesting new genre: documentaries exposing the seedy, tawdry abuses within religious organizations. I saw one episode of another series, The Secrets of Hillsong, this weekend. So far, I’m not impressed, since it was dedicated to giving Carl Lentz’s side of the story, and we already know he’s a creepy sexual predator…so subsequent episodes better give the victims’ side of the story. It promises to get much juicier and unpleasant in the future.

Sexual abuse is a central theme of the first half of the four-part docuseries. Hillsong founder Brian Houston is the one who confronted Lentz on his inappropriate sexual relations and oversaw Lentz’s removal, but Houston, too, would be ousted from the church in 2022 for his own infidelities—and currently faces up to five years in jail for allegedly helping to cover up his father Frank Houston’s sexual abuse of children. In 1977, Frank founded the original iteration of Hillsong, the Sydney Christian Life Centre, but stepped down when pedophilia allegations against him emerged in 1998. Nonetheless, Frank was invited to pray with former President Trump at the White House in 2019.

Additionally, Vanity Fair reported in 2021 that a college student and congregant named Anna Crenshaw alleged that she was sexually abused in 2015 by Hillsong staffer Jason Mays, who had already previously pleaded guilty to indecent assault. Despite these allegations against Mays, Hillsong briefly suspended then reinstated him. Even back in 2018, according to Page Six, whistleblowers in the church sent a letter to leaders citing “verified, widely circulated stories of inappropriate sexual behavior amongst staff/interns,” and characterized Hillsong as “dangerous and a breeding ground for unchecked abuse.” The letter references an unnamed church leader who had “multiple inappropriate sexual relationships with several female leaders and volunteers and was verbally, emotionally, and according to one woman, physically abusive in his relationships with these women.”

Of course, the allegations levied against Hillsong in FX’s new docuseries expand beyond sexual abuse: Lentz acknowledges deep institutionalized racism that prevented anyone but white men from assuming leadership positions within the international church, while one of Hillsong’s few Black female congregants in Kansas City recalls in the docuseries that she was once physically removed from the church by police when church leaders learned she had spoken out against lacking diversity in the organization. The woman is one of several Black women to allege racial discrimination within the church in the docuseries.

These cults are rotten all the way through, as demonstrated by IBLP and Hillsong, but somehow their followers are so fervent and sincere, even as they are exploited.

Why don’t we have “good” cops? Ask the ones we do have…

I remember seeing an article going around, back in June, about the funeral of a police officer who’d been “accidentally killed during a training exercise”. I had other things on my mind at the time so I didn’t look into it much, but I remember assuming that he was deliberately killed by other officers for either investigating a crime one of them committed, or for reporting misconduct. I honestly didn’t expect to hear about it again any time soon, but just today I saw the same funeral picture, this time with a Jezebel headline supporting my initial suspicion:

LAPD Officer Killed in Training ‘Accident’ Was Investigating Gang Rape by 4 Other Officers

The lawyer of a Los Angeles police officer killed in what the LAPD called a training accident back in May said the officer, Houston Tipping, had been investigating an alleged gang rape perpetrated by four LAPD officers in 2021 when he was killed. Tipping’s lawyer, Bradley Gage, claimed on Monday that one of the four officers who allegedly participated in the gang rape was present when Tipping was killed.

There was a time in my life, long ago, when some of this would have surprised me. Hell, there was a time not too long ago that I still believed that some, or even most cops were “good”. I’ve learned a bit more since then – enough to realize that I had been taken by the propaganda that fills the culture of the United States like some kind of cursed fog. According to the cops, Tipping died when he was trying to demonstrate a grappling move by some sort of ledge, and both officers fell off. The attorney representing Tipping’s interests here has a different perspective:

At a July news conference, Gage showed reporters MRI scans revealing that Tipping had staples in his head due to the injuries he sustained leading up to his death. Gage also cited sworn declarations from a nurse and a paramedic and alleged that Tipping had suffered spinal cord injuries, a collapsed lung, broken ribs, and liver damage consistent with being fatally beaten. “When you look at all these horrific injuries, the truth is something went seriously wrong here,” Gage said. “I cannot fathom anything other than a severe beating.”

In June, Gage first filed a damages claim against the LAPD on behalf of Tipping’s mother, Shirley Huffman, alleging that he had been beaten to death as part of a training exercise to “simulate a mob.” According to the claim filed by Gage, Tipping died after being repeatedly hit in the head, causing bleeding and multiple fatal neck fractures.

At this point, it’s more reasonable to assume any police statement is more likely to be a lie than the truth. They lie far more often than they attack people, and they attack people all the time. I don’t know what sort of person Tipping was, but given that he was a cop, he probably wasn’t great. That said, it was good that he was investigating the crime committed by his colleagues. People with power over others have a tendency to use that power to get away with sexual harassment, assault, and rape. Few people have more unaccountable power in the United States than the police, so it should not surprise you that they commit sex crimes all the time.

And Tipping’s fate shows what can happen to anyone who tries to hold them accountable. As with all the other police atrocities we’ve been seeing, it’s worth remembering that this stuff is not new. Non-white communities in particular have been sounding the alarm on the horrors of policing for decades, and have been largely ignored. All that has changed is that now they’re being caught on camera more often, so now we can see them lying.

I don’t know what will come of this story. Ideally, the people responsible would be put on trial for murder or manslaughter, and would be blacklisted from police or guard work in the future. It may be that because they got caught killing a fellow cop – you know, an actual person – they’ll actually face prison time. It seems more likely to me that they’ll either get a slap on the wrist for getting caught, or maybe they’ll just be fired. As ever, I’d love to be proven wrong, but LA is notorious for the viciousness and corruption of its law enforcement:

The allegations against the LAPD suggesting officers may have killed Tipping because of his investigation come amid years of whistleblowing and reports about “shadow-gangs” within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. These gangs allegedly comprise a sort of shadow government within local law enforcement to cover up officers’ crimes. As of July, at roughly the same time Gage and the LAPD were disputing the circumstances that led to Tipping’s death, LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s former chief of staff publicly admitted he’d once belonged to the alleged “Grim Reaper” deputy gang within the county sheriff’s department.
In August 2020, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors paid a $5.5 million settlement to a young woman who said a LA County Sheriff’s Department had raped her in 2017 when she was 15. The detective in question had faced two prior allegations of sexual misconduct that included committing a lewd act with a child and unlawful sexual intercourse. The Los Angeles Times recently reported on the LAPD’s history of systematically declining to discipline officers for sex crimes and then concealing these crimes from the public.

This is why I no longer believe reform can work. Better training is a waste of everyone’s time, because new cops are told to ignore that training the second they tart actually working, and because old cops will just ignore any training that doesn’t rank their ego above the life of every other human they interact with. Abolition isn’t something that will happen overnight, or in isolation from the rest of society, but until it does happen, this will continue. From what I can tell, we cannot expect other outcomes from creating a class of unaccountable people with power over life and death. Hell, even giving them far less power to kill doesn’t remove this dynamic, as the UK has shown. Replacing our current police with “better people” will not change the fundamental purpose served by the institution. We need first responders, but we do not need cops. Trying to reform them is useless, and continuing to have them destroys countless lives on an ongoing basis.

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“Dr” Oz, celebrity physician

He really is a Dr Nick.

And then there is this horrible report from Jezebel about his research activities. I’ve mentioned before that part of the way I worked through college was as an assistant in a med school animal surgery, where I’d help out with prep and cleanup and animal care for researchers doing experiments on dogs and cats and a few other kinds of animals, so this is familiar ground to me. I know what this stuff is like, and I also know that the majority of the experimenters were deeply concerned for the care and welfare of the animals (that’s why I was hired — despite not having a degree yet, people like me could work in the lab and advocate for the animals). Would you believe that about half my job was just hanging out in the animal room, playing with cats and dogs? That was nice. The other half was helping to stick recording instruments in their brains and hearts. Not so nice, and a reason why I’d rather work on fish and arthropods.

A warning about the Jezebel article, though: it doesn’t really say anything about the purpose or results of the animal experimentation, which means they’re ignoring a big part of the story. I mean, I assisted in the catheterization of the carotid artery in dogs, which wasn’t for their benefit at all, but was important for monitoring blood flow in the heart — you couldn’t do detailed analysis of circulatory responses without doing that. So I’m wondering what specific goal Oz’s experiments on dogs had, and this isn’t mentioned at all in the article.

Maybe he was actually doing good research? Ha ha ha. This was at the same time he was going on Oprah’s show and his own show to peddle green coffee bean extracts and other such quackery, so I’d be surprised. Another possibility is that this was part of medical training exercises. Some of the animal surgeries I monitored were done by medical students, who were basically practicing basic techniques before being turned loose to cut into humans.

There is no excuse, however, for neglect or abuse of animals under your care. Some of what is reported is simply bad animal care.

Dell’Orto testified that a dog experimented on by Oz’s team experienced lethargy, vomiting, paralysis, and kidney failure, but wasn’t euthanized for a full two days. She alleged other truly horrifying examples of gratuitously cruel treatment of dogs, including at least one dog who was kept alive for a month for continued experimentation despite her unstable, painful condition, despite how data from her continued experimentation was deemed unusable. According to Dell’Orto, one Oz-led study resulted in a litter of puppies being killed by intracardiac injection with syringes of expired drugs inserted in their hearts without any sedation.

That first dog: that’s a massive experimental failure. I want to know what was done for it in those two days; even from a cruelly utilitarian standpoint, that’s a huge expense, because you are obligated to give round-the-clock care to an animal you fucked up. Did they? Or did they just let it suffer for days?

That second dog is a similar failure. Why was it unstable and in pain? What possible information did they think they could get from a botched surgery?

The litter of puppies brought back more unpleasant memories. As the low level lab grunt, euthanizing animals post-experiment was one of my duties. The standard process was to take the animal in a back room, out of the general care area, calming it, and putting in a butterfly needle (I got quite good at that, and could almost stick a vein with the animal hardly noticing), and give it a general anesthetic to gently put it to sleep. Stabbing it in the heart and throwing it in a bag? No way.

Columbia University was fined $2000 for violations of the Animal Welfare Act. That’s a pittance, a mere token. It just tells us that there were definitely some sloppy procedures in that lab.

Oh, also significant is that the accusations are all against researchers and techs working with and for Oz. It’s not as if Oz himself was doing any of the actual dirty work himself, he had a quack business & entertainment empire to run. I tried looking up his research on PubMed, and he has quite a few publications, but most of them are clinical studies, nothing to do with animal experimentation. I did find this ironic gem of a paper, Impact of unauthorized celebrity endorsements on cardiovascular healthcare, which begins with an anecdote about Kim Kardashian recommending pills on her show, and ends by suggesting it is crucial that doctors work with celebrities.

In the future, it is crucial that the cardiologists and other healthcare professionals work with celebrities in order to counter the negative influences of fake celebrity healthcare endorsements. First, cardiologists should speak to their patients about the legitimacy of celebrity advice and the source of the health information. Comments by patients of recent celebrity endorsements should not be received with annoyance, but rather as a crucial opportunity to start educational conversations about cardiovascular health. Second, a certification/registration process or database by the FTC or equivalent regulatory body, should be formed to double-check whether a celebrity actually allowed a company or advertiser to use his or her persona, body or reputation to endorse a product or service related to cardiovascular health. Ultimately, there is an urgent need for large-scale studies to help researchers better understand where people receive false advertisements and what compels them to act on this false information.

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Yeah, the quack celebrity doctor has no interest in telling other doctors that they ought to work more with celebrities.

Does Jesse Singal still get writing gigs?

He’s a creep.

At least, no publisher ought to commission him to write about trans issues. There’s just so much information damning him as an untrustworthy actor.

This tweet bugs me.

When anyone talks about “biological” sex or “biological” males or “biological” females, it throws up a red flag for me. What does that mean? They don’t say; there are all these unstated assumptions behind it. I have to guess that what they mean is something about penises and vaginas and chromosomes and hormones, but those are all less absolutely deterministic than they imagine. Singal is a guy who writes about sex and gender a lot, so how can he be so casual and sloppy with his words?

And then I learn he’s part of a cabal of cis journalists who coordinate their agenda behind the scenes. Singal, of course is chatting away there.

Singal posted these messages in the discussion forum of a closed listserv he belongs to, hosted on Google Groups. The listserv, per its “About” page, aims to provide an “off-the-record discussion forum for left-of-center journalists, authors, academics and wonks.” It has been around for at least eight years (I found discussion posts dating back as far as 2010), and has just over 400 members (403 at the time of this writing). These members include New York Times best-selling authors, Ivy League academics, magazine editors, and other public intellectuals—in short, a lot of important people who influence public discourse through their written work. They use the listserv’s forum to discuss current events, news from their respective fields, articles they’ve read, articles they’ve written, and other topics of public importance. There are a number of threads about trans stuff, and they read like a greatest hits of the past decade of trans-related cultural anxieties: whether Chelsea Manning would pose a threat in a women’s prison; Janet Mock’s contentious 2014 interview with Piers Morgan and the “Twitter mob” she inspired; Elinor Burkett’s New York Times piece about Caitlyn Jenner and womanhood; comparisons between Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal; erasure of the word “vagina”; saying “pregnant people” vs. “pregnant women”; and a number of Jesse Singal’s articles over the past few years.

None of these discussions brought trans voices to the table because the group has never had any out trans members, at least as far as I can tell. “I really wish we had some trans people on this list, it’s a real void we have,” posted an award-winning investigative journalist in a thread about Singal temporarily leaving Twitter last December. “I’m not interested in sharing this list or any other space with someone who is going to insist on nullifying and erasing my existence and experience as female,” a prominent futurist in progressive news media wrote back. The exchange demonstrates two different means of excluding trans people from the discussion: passive exclusion (empty calls for inclusion that don’t lead to action) and active exclusion (we must keep them out). At the time of this exchange, the listserv had existed for nearly a decade. If the group’s members really wanted to bring trans people to the table, they could have done so at any point. The fact that they never did suggests that the group’s members—400 prominent, influential figures in academia, media, and publishing—would rather keep trans people at a safe, anthropological remove where they can talk about trans people without speaking to trans people directly. A less generous reading of this exclusion would say that they don’t see us as potential intellectual equals and, thus, don’t read our work.

Awww, how sweet — they sure would like to have some trans members, unless they somehow “nullify” cis people’s experience of their sex. I’ve met other men and women, cis and trans, and none of them have ever made me question my identity. Someone needs to get out more!

The final nail in the coffin ought to be this lengthy and thorough deconstruction of Singal’s devious anti-trans history. Here’s just a taste:

One reason we can confidently assert that Singal is distorting the narrative (whether consciously or in accordance with his own biases) is because he did consult people capable of fact-checking him for the article—he simply didn’t use their input. Singal interviewed multiple trans women for the piece, including trans writers Julia Serano and Parker Molloy, but their comments appear to have had little impact on the final draft. After it was published, both writers spoke out about several inaccuracies of fact and framing. They had addressed these points in their interviews and were ignored. Molloy’s response offers a nuanced critique of Singal’s pro-GIC arguments; Serano’s rebuttal contains crucial historical context about “how both ‘gay conversion’ and [Zucker’s style of] ‘gender reparative’ therapies share the exact same strategy of coercing gender non-conforming children to behave in a more normative manner.”

That interview was, it appears, the earliest contact between Singal and Serano, and he did not take her criticisms well. According to her, he lied about her views on transition to outrage his Twitter fan base. This would become an example of an alleged pattern of behavior by Singal. First, he is critiqued by trans people or allies. He misrepresents their positions to incite backlash online, or simply screenshots or quote tweets them to direct harassment their way. Trans writer Emily VanDerWerff said her experience with being misrepresented and harassed included “death threats, rape threats, invitations to commit suicide, [and] constant misgendering.” Singal contacts critics, threatening to sue. He contacts their employers. He sends them abusive emails. When someone reports a fact about him that he finds unflattering or releases a critique he doesn’t like, he frivolously threatens to sue and demands publications issue corrections—then howls about not getting them on Twitter. At this point, it’s a little bit of a joke on trans Twitter that every trans writer or academic, no matter how minor, is eventually subject to a Singal meltdown and volley of threats.

Singal’s behavior is unprofessional, to say the least. Julia Serano, when targeted by Singal, felt she had to temporarily leave social media for her safety. Another one of Singal’s trans targets was fired after he repeatedly contacted her boss. Singal’s habit of consistently and viciously attacking his critics poisons the well; it deflects any chance of real criticism, since it allows him to claim that any given critic simply personally dislikes him. He has, of course, helped ensure that this is the case by treating them poorly. This bad behavior extends beyond minor Twitter slap fights—it’s also a means of warping the conversation, punishing and dismissing dissenting voices before they can even speak. Leveling threats and directing abuse at sources and experts in this way goes beyond mere unprofessionalism—for a journalist, it’s genuinely unethical.

I think it’s clear that anything Singal writes on trans issues is biased, unreliable, and untrustworthy. Yet he still gets published in high-profile magazines! What do you think: do publishers and editors not realize how awful he is on these topics, or they’re all just awful people who share his ugly views?

Capitalism wins!

It’s impressive that Lyft can profit off women getting raped in their cars. Lyft just paid out $25 million in a lawsuit that accused them of failing to protect passengers from predatory drivers. You might assume that money went to the victims, but no.

According to Alison Turkos, one of the survivor-plaintiffs suing Lyft, neither she nor any of the other survivors harmed by Lyft are receiving a dime. She told Jezebel in a phone interview that she fears people who see Thursday’s news will read “$25 million” and “settlement” and conclude that Lyft is paying survivors.

It’s not.

In 2017, Turkos was held at gun-point and kidnapped by a Lyft driver, taken to an abandoned park and gang-raped by him and several men. Now, Lyft is paying its ultra-rich shareholders $25 million. They say they were the ones who were harmed—because Lyft cost them money by mishandling sexual assault allegations. Lyft did not immediately respond to Jezebel’s request for comment for this piece.

Holding shares in Lyft is an investment in profiting off rape.

Dave (ch)Appalls: Anti-Trans bigotry, and racism to boot

As others on FtB have mentioned, netflix plan to broadcast a bigoted, transphobic and homophobic “comedy special” in the name of profit and hate.  Concepts like basic decency and two years of Black Lives Matter have clearly taught them nothing.

Several netflix employees spoke up in protest against airing of the “special”, arguing that hate speech should be falsely labelled as “entertainment”.  The CEO disagrees.

Now according to The Root, netflix have fired the only Black Transgender employee involved in the protest against Chappelle’s appalling “special”, a pregnant man.  Because anti-Trans bigotry wasn’t enough, apparrently.

Netflix Fires Organizer of Planned Trans Employee Walkout Over Dave Chappelle’s Recent Special

Days before a planned walkout of trans employees and allies at Netflix in protest of Dave Chappelle’s latest “comedy” special The Closer, the streaming giant confirmed that it has fired one of the staffers leading the charge.

The Verge reports that the employee is Black and pregnant, and was a leader of Netflix’s trans employee resource group. The employee’s firing comes after Netflix suspended and later reinstated a trans employee for trying to attend a director-level meeting about the special that she and others weren’t invited to.

Netflix and Chappelle have been roundly criticized by trans activists and others over The Closer due to content that GLAAD and the National Black Justice Coalition have said perpetuates transphobia. Netflix has stuck by the special and its decision to keep it on the platform despite calls to remove it, which is what sparked the impending Oct. 20 walkout.

You really have to wonder what it will take for bigots like those to actually learn.  A severe drop in revenues, probably.

 

 

Addendum, from Jezebel:

Hannah Gadsby Tells Netflix Exec Who Used Her As an Example For Inclusivity: ‘F**k You’

Comedian Hannah Gadsby went after Netflix, the co-CEO of Netflix Ted Sarandos, and Dave Chappelle in a recent statement after Sarandos name-dropped her in the streaming service’s latest scandal.

On Thursday, Gadsby posted a statement on Instagram in response to Sarandos’ remarks about how “inclusive” Netflix has been.

“Hey Ted Sarandos! Just a quick note to let you know that I would prefer if you didn’t drag my name into your mess. Now I have to deal with even more of the hate and anger that Dave Chappelle’s fans like to unleash on me every time Dave gets 20 million dollars to process his emotionally stunted partial world view,” she wrote.