What does it take?

So…a Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, was brutally murdered by a Saudi pathologist in the Saudi embassy with the full knowledge of the Saudi consul, apparently at the request of the Saudi government, who didn’t like the reporter’s coverage of the repressive Saudi regime. Audio of his death was recorded.

It took seven minutes for Jamal Khashoggi to die, a Turkish source who has listened in full to an audio recording of the Saudi journalist’s last moments told Middle East Eye.

Khashoggi was dragged from the consul-general’s office at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and onto the table of his study next door, the Turkish source said.

Horrendous screams were then heard by a witness downstairs, the source said.

“The consul himself was taken out of the room. There was no attempt to interrogate him. They had come to kill him,” the source told MEE.

The screaming stopped when Khashoggi – who was last seen entering the Saudi consulate on 2 October – was injected with an as yet unknown substance.

We even know who did it.

Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, who has been identified as the head of forensic evidence in the Saudi general security department, was one of the 15-member squad who arrived in Ankara earlier that day on a private jet.

Tubaigy began to cut Khashoggi’s body up on a table in the study while he was still alive, the Turkish source said.

The killing took seven minutes, the source said.

As he started to dismember the body, Tubaigy put on earphones and listened to music. He advised other members of the squad to do the same.

“When I do this job, I listen to music. You should do [that] too,” Tubaigy was recorded as saying, the source told MEE.

When he does this job? This is something he’s done before?

This is a horrific and unforgivable act. So what does the “leader of the free world” have to say about it?

I’m not giving cover at all, Trump said. I just want to find out what’s happening.

With that being said, Saudi Arabia has been a very important ally of ours in the Middle East, he added, pointing to a US-Saudi arms deal that he valued at $110 billion, even though just $14.5 billion of that figure has actually begun to materialize.

Speaking in Washingon, Trump said he was hopeful the crisis would resolve itself, while Pompeo told reporters in Brussels the US takes the journalist’s suspected killing and dismemberment seriously, even as both men stressed the importance of the US-Saudi relationship.

I guess $110 billion will buy you the right to torture-murder someone. Is it just the one? Or do the Saudis get to slaughter any journalist they want while they hold the promise of a fucking “deal”?

Also, the deal doesn’t exist. It’s a loose collection of non-binding promises, nothing more.

A real leader would have cut these barbaric killers off at the knees, immediately announced a suspension of all these arms deals to a backward, vicious kingdom, and made it clear that that murder was intolerable. All Trump sees is dollar signs, even illusory dollar signs are enough to keep him in line.

It’s also not just Trump. These “deals” were made during the Obama years, and once again we see that a much-admired president had a thoroughly reprehensible foreign policy. Fuck these monsters. Why are we even selling arms to Saudi Arabia in the first place, even before they’d started openly torturing journalists?

He sure dines out a lot on his uncle

Donald Trump only listens to one scientist, apparently — his oft-mentioned Uncle John Trump of MIT.

I finally had to look him up. He was an electrical engineer, with no qualifications at all to speak on climate science, and as the President* even admits, they did not discuss climatology. But even worse, he’s been dead for 33 years.

I’m going to guess that they never discussed science while he was alive at all — he was just the one member of the family they could point to and say, “See? Not all Trumps are venal morons.” He was the family token, and now he’s nothing but a useful prop from the grave.

Don’t ever play the racist game

A simple question: did Elizabeth Warren have an Indian ancestor? Yes. Definitely. As Carl Zimmer explains, the science is good and robust on this one. Anyone who is arguing that this is fake science ought to be immediately fired from any job that involves setting science policy. Bye, Donald!

More complex question: does Elizabeth Warren have any legitimate claim to any kind of Indian affiliation? Nope, not that she claimed she did. And she played right into Trump’s racist hand.

Warren ended up providing one of the clearest examples yet of how Trumpian rhetoric shifts the political conversation. The woman who is hoping to become the most progressive Democratic nominee in generations is not merely letting herself get jerked around by a Trumpian taunt. She is also reinforcing one of the most insidious ways in which Americans talk about race: as though it were a measurable biological category, one that, in some cases, can be determined by a single drop of blood. Genetic-test evidence is circular: if everyone who claims to be X has a particular genetic marker, then everyone with the marker is likely to be X. This would be flawed reasoning in any area, but what makes it bad science is that it reinforces the belief in the existence of X—in this case, race as a biological category. Warren’s video will hardly convince a Trump voter, who will see only a woman who feels that she has to prove something. Trump himself has already walked back his promise of a million-dollar charity donation. Warren, meanwhile, has allowed herself to be dragged into a conversation based on an outdated, harmful concept of racial blood—one that promotes the pernicious idea of biological differences among people—and she has pulled her supporters right along with her.

See? You can understand that it is good science while also recognizing that she’s promoting odious ideological implications that are contrary to her political position.

We can be angry for all the right reasons

An interesting take on the psychology of Trump:

Donald Trump is an anger troll. Rage is the one thing he capably nurtures and grows. He stoked anger in people horrified by Kavanaugh’s confirmation and is now turning it against them. This is an old tactic: drive people crazy, then call them so. As projects of government go, this one is as familiar as it is contemptible. He wants to make his followers feel threatened. To achieve this, he needs his opponents to seem irrational. So he sets about making them angry.

He insults them, railroads them, calls people protesting for justice liars and profit-seekers even as he openly enriches his friends. He gives them offensive nicknames and mocks their pain for fun, and to get them to lose control. He’s doing this in plain sight—it’s pretty obvious why people are angry—but his goal is to make their reaction look inexplicable, beyond the pale. After leading angry crowds to yell abuse at anyone he points to, he turns around and marvels at how irrational and dangerous his targets are.

As tactics go, this one is dumb and transparent, but it’s worth describing it because it works. It works a lot. Trump is not a genius. But he instinctively understands the dynamic of provoking and then delegitimizing someone else’s pain. As Adam Serwer wrote, he’s energized by the suffering he causes others and—secondarily—by the bond that ritualized cruelty forges with his base, which has been connected by fear of others. From Trump’s perspective, it’s kind of fun that people feel compassion for the families he separated. It’s delightful that women are worried about rights he has expressly said he wanted to take from them. And, after insulting and belittling people he’s supposed to be governing, he enjoys acting surprised that they mind.

It’s a silly and ugly game, but it’s the only true rule of Trumpism: be the sorest winner imaginable. Aspire to nothing but power and status. Hold no principle sacred. Withhold justice and insult those who object. Yes, the effects of this are predictable. It doesn’t take a genius of social engineering to be the “why are you hitting yourself?” guy. All it takes is a willingness to be him.

Yeah, that’s the man. But it’s only half the problem: the other half is an electorate that falls for it every time, that fails to recognize that a lack of principle and a narcissistic need for power are bad things, and not a sufficient reason to give the narcissist the power he craves. Slightly more than half the population sees right through him and is really pissed that the orange troll has gotten what he was after — they are righteously angry — and the remainder have completely fallen for the lies and are in a mad race to hurt themselves even more.

We need to own our anger, because that’s the alternative. Our rage is aimed at a deserving target, their rage seems to be self-inflicted.

There’s a heck of a lot more to identity than what genes you carry

I’ve done the 23andMe test. I’m 50% Scandinavian.

More significantly, I knew my great-grandparents personally; my great-grandmother was a Swedish immigrant, while my great-grandfather was part of a Norwegian-American community in Minnesota that had been around for generations. They spoke some kind of Norwegian/Swedish/English pidgin, they had connections with the Old Country, we ate Scandinavian food at home, we went to a church that had services in Swedish and Norwegian.

I think I can confidently say that I’m a Scandinavian-American.

The other 50% of my genome is mostly English/Irish/Scot. That side of my family emigrated to America in the 17th/18th century. All cultural vestiges of that connection have been scoured clean by a few hundred years of history, poverty, and total immersion in this mongrel American pastiche we live in, and they retained no connections with family on the other side of the Atlantic. I wouldn’t be as comfortable with claiming to be a British-American, despite my genes sending a clear signal of my biological ancestry.

Elizabeth Warren is not Indian. A few genetic scraps from a distant ancestor do not make you an Indian, any more than the 0.6% of my DNA that is Iberian makes me a Spaniard.

Bustamante’s analysis places Warren’s Native American ancestor between six and 10 generations ago, with the report estimating eight generations. “The identity of the sample donor, Elizabeth Warren, was not known to the analyst during the time the work was performed,” the report says.

Eight generations back means she’s about 0.4% Indian, with zero cultural association. No Indian tribe recognizes her as a member. I think it was a terrible mistake for Warren to play the genetic essentialist game and essentially vindicate racist arguments about one drop of blood making you a member of a racial group, and if vague rumors of a distant relative being a Cherokee princess makes you an Indian, then a multitude of people who belong with 99% certainty to the oppressor genetic group that committed genocide get to play Indian. This is just wrong.

That said, I have a bit of sympathy for her in that she’s trying to defend herself against a racist bigot who has been mocking her remote, slight Indian affiliation by using it as a pejorative. Warren did not use her ancestry as a tool to gain an advantage, to her credit, and it’s shameful that anyone would think that association with one of the most strongly oppressed groups in this country is a way exploit the system.

We’re now at the point where we’re grimacing a bit at Warren’s exaggeration of her connection to Indian culture, while at the same time we’re tolerating a president who openly expresses contempt for Indian culture. All the hypocrites who are berating Warren ought to be even more aghast that Trump is frequently using “Pocahantas” as a slur. But they aren’t.

Also, it’s naive to think that Trump would pay up on his $1 million dollar bet. He’s always been a welcher.

Jennifer Raff weighs in. She’s an expert on this stuff.

The madness unparalleled, genuinely epic

James O’Brien explains the chaos in the UK. He’s incredulous at how incapable Parliament is at confronting a bad idea like Brexit. I’m similarly boggled at how the US is incapable of confronting the obvious problem that the president and leaders of congress are venal incompetents are sending us careening down a greased chute to our doom.

But at least it fills me with a feeling of deep connection with people across the Atlantic. We’re both neck deep in shitholes.

After Kavanaugh’s Destruction…

That’s news to me, but it’s actually good news, I’m just missing the details. Did he explode, was he loaded into a missile and fired into the sun, was he fed to crocodiles? Inquiring minds want to know.

That was the title of a whine by Rod Dreher, wonders After Kavanaugh’s Destruction, Who Is Safe? Really, that’s his title.

Someone should break the harsh news to his persecution complex that Kavanaugh wasn’t destroyed, but was instead appointed to the Supreme Court, the pinnacle of achievement for an American lawyer who likes his brewskis. The President of the US made it a great big partisan event! A Facebook executive threw a big party for him (Facebook loves the Trumpster, and the Russians who make all those ad buys for him). The Nazis are celebrating on the internet!

I don’t know how he missed it all. Maybe it’s because his source on this article is David Brooks, whose head is so far up his own ass that he vocalizes by vibrating his hemorrhoids while farting.

But if there’s anyone dumber than David Brooks, it’s Rod Dreher. He proceeds to out-Brooks Brooks with a story.

I can’t tell this story often enough: In my rural Southern town, back in the 1940s, a black man and a white woman were discovered in sexual congress. The woman accused him of rape. The sheriff and two deputies hunted the black man down through the woods, captured him, dragged him back to the jailhouse, and lynched him. Days later, the white accuser broke down under the weight of her conscience. She confessed that the black man had been her lover. She had accused him of rape to save her own reputation in that white supremacist culture.

There was never any chance that that black man would have had the opportunity to defend himself in court. There was never any chance that he would be considered innocent until proven guilty. Everybody (that is, all whites, who held all the power) knew that black men seethed with lust for white women. Everybody knew that no white woman could possibly find black men sexually desirable. In a case like this one, there’s no need for a fair trial; you believe the woman. If you don’t believe the woman, and exact swift and sure punishment for her assailant, then it will be open season for black men to rape white women. That was what the power-holders in that time and place believed.

So let me get this straight. In this metaphor for the current situation, a wealthy white prep school boy and Yalie is…the Southern black man in the 1940s? And Christine Blasey Ford is the wicked woman who lied to protect her honor…by stepping forward and revealing an otherwise unknown act, paying for it with loss of security, the need to leave her home, and receiving a deluge of death threats? And “lynching” is being used as a synonym for “being appointed to the Supreme Court”?

Does Dreher think Ford and Kavanaugh were secret lovers? I would not be surprised. Conservatives have been flinging all kinds of ludicrous justifications around.

Everything about this story is totally inappropriate and misplaced. This is a guy weaponizing racism to make bogus excuses for a wealthy, privileged white man.

His conclusion is also bizarre.

Brett Kavanaugh, from what I can tell, is a by-the-book pinstriped Washington Republican. If the liberal mob can turn him into History’s Greatest Monster on the basis of unsupported allegations from his teenage years, and on the basis of his race and gender, then who is safe?

Errm, “by-the-book pinstriped Washington Republican” has become synonymous with “History’s Greatest Monster”. That’s not the work of a liberal mob, but the actions of Republicans — you can’t support Republican policies like denial of science, gutting of education, an overt attack on women’s autonomy, widespread corruption and incompetence, and then be surprised when people wear garlic necklaces and throw holy water as you pass by.

And who is safe? Men who didn’t assault women. It’s like suddenly every Republican is tugging at their collar and beading up with sweat, as if they have a guilty conscience or something. It makes one wonder.