"The fact that Kirk was killed while he was answering a question about the purported prevalence of trans mass shooters (a fiction he had helped promulgate)..."

"... and the news that the suspect in Kirk’s killing apparently has a romantic partner who is trans have hypercharged this process of disowning [the work of civil society]. On Monday morning, before returning from a weekend away, I entered the following words into the search bar on my phone: 'famous trans people.' Then I tried 'transgender journalists,' 'transgender professors' and a few similar queries. My name did not come up. This was my inexact way of measuring the risk that someone would target me. It appeared to be low, even after a weekend of Donald Trump and his prominent allies blaming the left in general and trans people in particular for Kirk’s assassination. OK, I thought, I could go home, for now...."

Writes M. Gessen in "This Is the Feeling of Losing a Country. I Know It Well" (NYT).

"Some people, including those self-identified liberals worried about going too far, will see reducing the number of people who choose to transition as a good thing..."

"... as proof that only mythical 'real' trans people — those who feel that they must transition, no matter how hard it may be — are seeking treatment. But I ask you to imagine that teenager, the one who has to leave Tennessee or this country. The one who has to go through 'natal' puberty when everything about it feels wrong. The one who spends those hours in front of the mirror not trying to make their hair look good but trying to hide body parts that make them hate themselves. The one who adjusts, stuffing their desire, their shame and their hope into some dark closet of the mind."

Writes M. Gessen, in "The Supreme Court Fails to See Transgender Teens" (NYT)(free-access link).

"Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy. Joseph Stalin’s regime outlawed genetics as 'pseudoscience'..."

"... while he himself was declared an expert in all fields, from linguistics to biology. Contempt for expertise is not the only autocratic force at work in the case of S.B.1 [the Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormones for transgender children]....  I expect the court to uphold the Tennessee law.... [I]t won’t stop with trans care. Governments at different levels will be emboldened to meddle in what should be private, family decisions. In and out of government, people who know what they are talking about will be supplanted by people who perform their loyalty most loudly. Quackery will continue its ascent; expert consensus, not only in medicine but in all the disciplines that enable us to know and navigate the world, will be marginalized...."

Writes M. Gessen, in "The Supreme Court Just Showed Us What Contempt for Expertise Looks Like" (NYT).

Why did Gessen write "genuine expertise" if not to admit that experts can go wrong? Obviously, autocrats have their "experts" too, and respecting them has done great harm. I think first of Josef Mengele, who earned a cum laude doctorate in medicine from the University of Frankfurt for a thesis dealing with genetics and who conducted genetic research at Auschwitz. That doesn't make genetics a "pseudoscience," but it does show that we'd be fools to think there's a binary choice between deference to experts and marginalizing them.

Here's the Wikipedia article about the Soviets' banning of genetics. I can see that those who did the banning regarded themselves as experts:

"Their existence, and my relationships with each of them, are essential to my understanding of life itself."

That's a very strangely written sentence... by M. Gessen, in "What Democrats Are Getting Wrong About Transgender Rights" (NYT). 

Context:

I am trans and I am a parent of three children, one of whom I carried. Their existence, and my relationships with each of them, are essential to my understanding of life itself. I also have many friends (none of them trans, as it happens) who never had children. I occasionally envy their freedom. They may occasionally envy me my sprawling family. In neither case is the feeling of regret — if it can even be called that — significant or particularly long-lasting. It is, rather, an awareness that life is a series of choices, all of which are made with incomplete information.

Presumably, Gessen has one relationship with each of the children, but it's possible that Gessen really does means to claim multiple relationships with each one. I suppose the grammar was a minor distraction on the way to proclaiming the superiority of a life lived without regrets. 

Anxiety about trans people and reproduction, and the laws and rules that it produces, cut both ways...

Puzzling commas again. And why choose a cutting metaphor here? Intentional prodding of our anxiety about surgery?

There's a lot more going on in the article, which was originally titled "The Secret Behind America's Moral Panic." What's the secret? And what are "Democrats... Getting Wrong About Transgender Rights"? This is the most useful passage:

NYT opinion columnist M. Gessen displays shockingly little concern for free-speech values...

... in the podcast "The Real Loser of the V.P. Debate/It’s our politics": 

I think we need a harm reduction philosophy of covering Trump and his party and the election. And these are some things to consider: One is to cut his or Vance’s mic when they start lying.

So not only is censorship the go-to remedy, but it's one-sided — openly one-sided.  

And I know this is a hugely controversial idea, and it’s usually controversial because it will enable them to scream censorship, but there needs to be a philosophy of journalism that is oriented toward the public good.

That is, Gessen has thought through the censorship problem and determined that "harm reduction" or "the public good" supervenes the free flow of ideas to the people and allowing us to choose what we like. Gesson seems to object even to the speech that is objecting to the suppression of speech — to the "them" who "scream censorship."

When I talk to my students about it...

Gessen teaches journalism at the City University of New York.

I always say: Imagine that information is water and some of the water is poisoned.

How is speech like water? Speech comes from a human mind. And when is speech "information"? When it is truth? Poison is not water, but an additional substance tainting the water. Lies and mistakes in speech are not like poison in water. How would you go about purifying speech and turning it into "information"? The traditional American ideology is that the way to get to the truth is to have a free flow of words — a marketplace of ideas — and to let people read and hear and think and have their own discussions about what is true. How could you possibly know the truth in advance and deliver it to the people? 

But Gessen pushes on with the analogy, which has been tested in the CUNY classroom:

And if you are tasked with conveying the water to the public...

So a censor is posited at the outset. 

... it would be a crime for you to convey poisoned water.

The censor is presumed to have the capacity to tell truth from lies. And the government is visualized as having the power to criminalize speech.

And I think that political lies, lies in the public sphere, are just as poisonous to our politics as poisoned water is to humans. And if we think of ourselves as conveyors, as mediators, as media, who transport this information, this water, then we have this abiding responsibility to do something about it. We can’t just turn to one of the candidates and say, “I’d like to see you take a sip of that. And see what happens to you.”

So one idea is to turn off the microphone when the disfavored candidate is deemed to be lying. But that is not all. Gessen continues:

I think we also need to figure out ways to contextualize the candidates. Certainly, this two-minute-per-person debate format is not conducive to creating nuanced or contextualized pictures.

Ah! Nuance! Context! I have tags for "nuance" and "context." I love when that happens. A chime goes off in my blogger brain. But back to Gessen:

But what if we had a different format? What if journalists prepared fact-based reports to create context for the debate? Who said that the debate absolutely has to be broadcast live? If we have one person who is lying in the debate, maybe that’s not the best possible format.

If you increase the power of the journalists who are known to disfavor one of the candidates, why would that person agree to debate? There are so many other outlets for free speech. The water overflows its once-solid banks and floods where it will. Now where is your fantasy of control?

"Putin’s obsession with history is genuine, as is his belief in a narrative that justifies, indeed makes inevitable, Russia’s war against Ukraine."

"That Carlson was surprised suggests that he either didn’t watch Putin’s earlier appearances in preparation for the interview, or that, despite copious evidence to the contrary, he imagined that Putin the man would match Putin the role: a dictator whose opponents get killed and jailed and who invades neighboring countries ought to be larger than life, terrifying in person, and certainly not boring.... 'The professional liars in Washington . . . are trying to convince you that this guy is Hitler, that he is trying to take the Sudetenland, or something,' Carlson [said afterward]. 'Not analogous in any way!' In fact, Putin had clearly, and more explicitly than ever before, channelled Hitler during the interview. This is what a tyrant looks like: small, and full of tedious resentments...."

Writes Masha Gessen, in "Tucker Carlson Promised an Unedited Putin. The Result Was Boring/In an interview that lasted more than two hours, the Russian President aired well-trod grievances and gave a lecture full of spurious history meant to justify his war in Ukraine" (The New Yorker).

"I think that free expression is a complicated, broad, nuanced field, and I’m not a free-speech absolutist."

"We make decisions about speech and expression all the time, and that’s the job of a free-expression organization. The question of whether a festival should feature both Ukrainian and Russian writers is a perfectly legitimate one, and it raises all sorts of other questions: is it O.K. for them to speak in the same spaces, or for them to speak in different spaces on the same topic, or in different time slots? But that’s not what happened. What happened was that both Russian and Ukrainian writers were invited. And then, when the Ukrainian writers arrived and said, 'We can’t speak at the same festival with Russians,' the Russians were disinvited. To disinvite them is not just impolite, but it’s also basically saying, 'Look, we thought your expression was legitimate and desirable until other people said it wasn’t.' That, I think, violates the principles of free expression. A free-expression organization can’t be in that business of saying, 'We don’t want you to speak because someone else doesn’t want you to speak.'"

Said Masha Gessen, with stunningly perfect clarity, quoted in "Why Masha Gessen Resigned from the PEN America Board/A conversation about balancing free-speech commitments in an era of war" (The New Yorker).

"Contrary to popular perception, totalitarian ideologies are not coherent or consistent..."

"... rather, they are opportunistic concoctions of ideas and words that are useful in times of crisis and mobilization... [Aleksandr Dugan's] star seemed to rise in 2014, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time. Dugin... had called for the creation of a 'Russian World,' a geographically non-specific concept that imagined Russia on a civilizational mission rooted in traditional values and the Russian Orthodox religion.... In 2014, the Kremlin, in its pivot from the politics of Soviet nostalgia to the politics of imperial resurgence, started speaking Dugin’s language...." 

Writes Masha Gessen in "The Mysterious Murder of Darya Dugina/Whoever killed Dugina likely meant to kill her more famous father, but that reveals little about the motives and identities of the perpetrators" (The New Yorker).

"Graphically, the 'Z' is clearly closer to the swastika than to any prominent Soviet symbol, such as the five-pointed star, the hammer and sickle, or the red flag."

"Its use seems to require a double inversion: first, the people of Ukraine—a nation that suffered some of the greatest losses at the hands of Nazi Germany and one that is currently led by a Jewish President—are rendered as Nazis; then, the Russians, who claim to be fighting for peace and 'de-Nazification,' adopt a visual symbol that appears to reference the swastika.... It took only a week for the 'Z' to become the symbol of the new Russian totalitarianism. But totalitarian symbols are usually created at the top. The red flag and the swastika—the two main visual symbols of twentieth-century totalitarianism—emerged from years of ideological, aesthetic, and even spiritual movement-shaping. The 'Z' is a different animal, a ready-made symbol picked up by a society that has already reconstituted itself as totalitarian."

Writes Masha Gessen in "'Z' Is the Symbol of the New Russian Politics of Aggression/In the days following the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine, the letter came to stand for devotion to the state, murderous rage, and unchecked power" (The New Yorker).

"Opponents of trans girls’ participation in sports frame their fight in terms of the rights and opportunities of cis girls..."

"... they claim that trans girls, with their unfair advantage, will snag the medals and the college scholarships that rightfully belong to athletes who were assigned female at birth. But, as I listened to the Judiciary Committee hearing, it struck me that the opposition set up in the arguments was between cis-girl athletes on the one hand and a vast liberal conspiracy on the other. (The term 'gender ideology,' a favorite bugaboo of the global far-right movement, made an appearance, too—gender ideology is also apparently out to destroy girls’ sports.) Trans girls were not a part of this imaginary equation, and this was perhaps the most telling part of the hearing. Nor are trans boys ever mentioned in this conversation, perhaps because forcing trans boys to compete against girls, as has happened in Texas, where a trans-boy wrestler who had begun testosterone therapy handily beat female competitors, would expose the inconsistency of the argument from defenders of sex purity in sports. The goal of this campaign is not to protect cis-girl athletes as much as it is to make trans athletes disappear. This is a movement to exclude trans girls from community and opportunity. It is a movement driven by panic over the safety of women and children that reproduces earlier panics, like those over the presence of lesbians on women’s sports teams. And, just like earlier panics, this one is based on what passes for common sense but is in fact ignorance and hate."

From "The Movement to Exclude Trans Girls from Sports/The opposition is cast as one between cis-girl athletes on the one hand and a vast liberal conspiracy on the other" by Masha Gessen (The New Yorker).

1. The rhetorical move here is to characterize one's antagonists as bundles of emotion — hate and panic. Then, the idea is that we don't need to take their stated arguments seriously, because we know what they are really about and we certainly don't want to associate with such awful people. 

2. We're expected not to care about the field of women's sports, which has been specially cultivated over the years in the interest of equality in education. We're expected to feel bad about ourselves if we think that the medals and scholarships of women's sports "rightfully belong" to those who were "assigned female at birth."

3. "It is a movement driven by panic over the safety of women and children that reproduces earlier panics, like...." Like the Me Too movement? The safety of women and children is overwhelmingly important... except when they tell you that it is not.

4. I looked up the committee hearing because I wanted to see how the term "gender ideology" was used. Gessen tells us it's "a favorite bugaboo of the global far-right movement." There's this, from Abigail Shrier (author of "Irreversible Damage"): 

"I think 27 years of superb reporting and commitment to The New Yorker should have been weighed against an incident that horribly embarrassed the magazine but mostly embarrassed himself."

Said Tina Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker, quoted in "The Undoing of Jeffrey Toobin How a leading man of legal journalism lost his sweetest gig" (NYT). 

Malcolm Gladwell, an important New Yorker writer, said: "I read the Condé Nast news release, and I was puzzled because I couldn’t find any intellectual justification for what they were doing. They just assumed he had done something terrible, but never told us what the terrible thing was. And my only feeling — the only way I could explain it — was that Condé Nast had taken an unexpected turn toward traditional Catholic teaching." He then, we're told he took out his... ... ... "Bible and read to a reporter an allegory from Genesis 38 in which God strikes down a man for succumbing to the sin of self-gratification."

And Masha Gessen, "who initially found the incident 'traumatic'" said: "I think it’s tragic that a guy would get fired for really just doing something really stupid. It is the Zoom equivalent of taking an inappropriately long lunch break, having sex during it and getting stumbled upon."

That's all from the near the end of the NYT article. What follows is this:  

But Mr. Toobin may not want anyone’s pity. Amid the 2018 Supreme Court confirmation process for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the journalist scoffed on CNN at Republicans who said white men, as a demographic, were being mistreated. “Garbage,” Mr. Toobin said. “All this whining about the poor plight of white men is ridiculous.”

Here's the Genesis 38 story, by the way. Not sure how what Catholics think about this story, but Gladwell and the NYT doesn't seem to care much about accurate textualism. It's not about "succumbing to the sin of self-gratification":

At that time, Judah left his brothers and went down to stay with a man of Adullam named Hirah. There Judah met the daughter of a Canaanite man named Shua. He married her and made love to her; she became pregnant and gave birth to a son, who was named Er. She conceived again and gave birth to a son and named him Onan.... Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death. Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to raise up offspring for your brother.” But Onan knew that the child would not be his; so whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death also.

Boy, what a minor character Er is! Onan got to be the eponym, but he's an eponym for something he didn't even do. As for the wife, she got slept with by 2 men, and we're not even told her name. 

CORRECTION: Sorry! She has a name. Tamar. The story continues (and it's more interesting than the Tale of Toobin):

When Tamar was told, “Your father-in-law is on his way to Timnah to shear his sheep,” 14 she took off her widow’s clothes, covered herself with a veil to disguise herself, and then sat down at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. For she saw that, though Shelah had now grown up, she had not been given to him as his wife.

Shelah is Judah's third son after Er and Onan. 

When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face. Not realizing that she was his daughter-in-law, he went over to her by the roadside and said, “Come now, let me sleep with you.” “And what will you give me to sleep with you?” she asked. “I’ll send you a young goat from my flock,” he said. “Will you give me something as a pledge until you send it?” she asked. He said, “What pledge should I give you?” “Your seal and its cord, and the staff in your hand,” she answered. So he gave them to her and slept with her, and she became pregnant by him. After she left, she took off her veil and put on her widow’s clothes again. Meanwhile Judah sent the young goat by his friend the Adullamite in order to get his pledge back from the woman, but he did not find her. He asked the men who lived there, “Where is the shrine prostitute who was beside the road at Enaim?” “There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here,” they said. So he went back to Judah and said, “I didn’t find her. Besides, the men who lived there said, ‘There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here.’” Then Judah said, “Let her keep what she has, or we will become a laughingstock. After all, I did send her this young goat, but you didn’t find her.” About three months later Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant.” Judah said, “Bring her out and have her burned to death!” As she was being brought out, she sent a message to her father-in-law. “I am pregnant by the man who owns these,” she said. And she added, “See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are.” Judah recognized them and said, “She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah.” And he did not sleep with her again. When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb. As she was giving birth, one of them put out his hand; so the midwife took a scarlet thread and tied it on his wrist and said, “This one came out first.” But when he drew back his hand, his brother came out, and she said, “So this is how you have broken out!” And he was named Perez. Then his brother, who had the scarlet thread on his wrist, came out. And he was named Zerah.

Rembrandt liked the story of Judah and Tamar: 

"The New Yorker has suspended reporter Jeffrey Toobin... because he exposed himself during a Zoom call last week between members of the New Yorker and WNYC radio."

"Toobin said in a statement to Motherboard: 'I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera. I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers. I believed I was not visible on Zoom. I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video".... 'Jeff Toobin has asked for some time off while he deals with a personal issue, which we have granted,' CNN said in a statement."

Vice reports, referring to this as the "Zoom Dick Incident."

Who believes he thought he was off camera? Even if he thought he had "muted the Zoom video," how could he not make absolutely sure before bringing his penis out and why would that be something he'd do during a Zoom call anyway?!

ADDED: The headline at The Washington Post is "The New Yorker suspends writer Jeffrey Toobin after accidental Zoom exposure," and the highest rated comment is: "How do you know it was 'accidental'? Wouldn't more neutral language be to just say he exposed himself and quote him as saying it was inadvertent? Isn't it for the investigation to determine whether it was an 'accident' or not?" 

AND: There's an update — a hell of an update — at Vice now: "This piece has been updated with more detail about the call and the headline has been updated to reflect that Toobin was masturbating."

Two people who were on the call told Motherboard separately that the call was an election simulation featuring many of the New Yorker's biggest stars: Jane Mayer was playing establishment Republicans; Evan Osnos was Joe Biden, Jelani Cobb was establishment Democrats, Masha Gessen played Donald Trump, Andrew Marantz was the far right, Sue Halpern was left wing democrats, Dexter Filkins was the military, and Jeffrey Toobin playing the courts. There were also a handful of other producers on the call from the New Yorker and WNYC. Both people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, noted that it was unclear how much each individual person on the call saw, but both of the people we spoke to said that they saw Toobin jerking off.... The sources said that when the groups returned from their break out rooms, Toobin lowered the camera. The people on the call said they could see Toobin touching his penis. Toobin then left the call. Moments later, he called back in, seemingly unaware of what his colleagues had been able to see, and the simulation continued....

And the stimulation did not continue (one presumes).

This may be the stupidest thing I have seen in 17 years of blogging.

PLUS: "seemingly unaware" is funny. I'm picturing: He realizes he's on camera, leaves the call, hoping it might work to call back and act like nothing happened. Oh, hello...

ALSO: Heh...

Crazy story, can't believe they had Jane Mayer as their stand-in for Republicans. https://t.co/b8xCNt41s6

— Ramesh Ponnuru (@RameshPonnuru) October 19, 2020

"[I]n the liberal individualist way of thinking, the individual is always an adult male in his prime, who, just at this particular moment when we encounter him, happens to have no needs and dependencies that would bind him to others."

Masha Gesson prompts Judith Butler, in "Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape Our Rage" (The New Yorker). Butler answers:

That model of the individual is comic, in a way, but also lethal. The goal is to overcome the formative and dependent stages of life to emerge, separate, and individuate—and then you become this self-standing individual. That’s a translation from German. They say selbstständig, implying that you stand on your own. But who actually stands on their own? We are all, if we stand, supported by any number of things. Even coming to see you today—the pavement allowed me to move, and so did my shoes, my orthotics, and the long hours spent by my physical therapist. His labor is in my walk, as it were. I wouldn’t have been able to get here without any of those wonderful technologies and supporting relations.

Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough. But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well. If we were to rethink ourselves as social creatures who are fundamentally dependent upon one another—and there’s no shame, no humiliation, no “feminization” in that—I think that we would treat each other differently, because our very conception of self would not be defined by individual self-interest.

I'm reading "How to Resist Validating President Trump’s View of Sanctuary Cities."

By Masha Gessen in The New Yorker. Her idea is that the right response to Trump is not what Nancy Pelosi said (through a spokesperson):

Pelosi’s spokeswoman Ashley Etienne issued a standard statement: “The extent of this administration’s cynicism and cruelty cannot be overstated. Using human beings—including little children—as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants is despicable.” Like the media, Pelosi, whose district covers the sanctuary city of San Francisco, didn’t directly challenge the unspoken but clear premise that something terrible would happen to these cities if immigrants came to them.

Such is the framing of the issue by the White House, and the framing of the story by the media, that no one had the one right response to this idea: “But this is the very point of a sanctuary city! Immigrants, regardless of status, are safe in them. Bring them here! They are welcome.”

That's how the piece ends, and I found it a little hard to understand, but I think Gessen is seeing that the responses to Trump are reinforcing what he's saying, that it's bad to have a sudden big influx of economically needy immigrants. Trump wins if he gets the sanctuary city proponents to show that they were just posing as immigrant friendly. He called their bluff. Why did they fold so quickly? They should have kept bluffing: Bring them here! They are welcome!

I think that's what Gessen is really saying, but she's kind of hiding it, because she's part of the bluff. She thinks Trump is bluffing too. If Trump won't really dump the immigrants in San Francisco and those other virtue-signaling places, then they can continue to virtue-signal, and they should, so he doesn't win.

It's also possible that Gessen really believes that San Francisco should follow through on this conception of virtue and welcome a sudden big influx of economically needy immigrants. In that view, Bring them here! They are welcome! is not a bluff, but an authentic heartfelt wish for the future of the genuinely good places that have declared themselves a sanctuary.

Maybe my reading skills are off and I'm missing something. Help me out. I know I'm reading The New Yorker, so I'm not even considering the possibility that Gessen might mean that Trump has cleverly boxed in his antagonists.

"It matters that the alleged perpetrator is a woman and the alleged victim is a man. It matters, too, that he is young and handsome..."

"... and she is older: her apparently desperate neediness is part of what makes the case documents such cringeworthy reading. It matters that he identifies as gay and she as a lesbian, because it makes us question how important the sexual really is in sexual harassment. It matters that the investigation was conducted by a private university under conditions of confidentiality, and that the accuser is now suing that university... It also matters a great deal that the latest fallen star is an academic and a feminist.... Perhaps justice can be found neither in closed investigations nor in open court but in a different sort of public forum. If the ultimate objective of #MeToo is a fundamental change in power relationships—if it is indeed a revolution and not merely a series of attempts at retribution—then it may call for confrontations and discussions in the mode of truth-and-reconciliation commissions that societies undergoing change have organized. Perhaps victims should face their abusers and tell their stories not only to and through the media but to one another."

From "An N.Y.U. Sexual-Harassment Case Has Spurred a Necessary Conversation About #MeToo" by Masha Gessen (in The New Yorker), about the NYT literary scholar and philosopher Avital Ronell.

I was particularly interested in this quote about Ronell's method of teaching, which "circulated on Facebook." The author wrote anonymously, reportedly out of fear of retaliation:

We don’t need a conversation about sexual harassment by AR, we should instead talk about what AR and many of her generation call ‘pedagogy’ and what is still excused as ‘genius.’ When people talk about sexual harassment it’s within the logic of the symbolic order – penetration, body parts – I doubt you will find much of this here. But AR is all about manipulation and psychic violence. . . . AR pulls students and young faculty in by flattery, then breaks their self-esteem, goes on to humiliate them in front of others, until the only way to tell yourself and others that you have not been debased, that you have not been used by a pathological narcissist as a private slave, is that you are just so incredibly close, and that Avi is just so incredibly fragile and lonely and needs you 24/7 to do groceries, to fold her laundry, to bring her to acupuncture, to pick her up from acupuncture, to drive her to JFK, to talk to her at night, etc. . . . All I am saying is: the AR-case is not about a single case of sexual harassment, it’s about systematic manipulation, bullying, intimidation, pitting students against each other, creating rivalry between them. . . . I agree the concept of “Avital Ronell” is a great one: I too would love to be friends with a smart, hilarious, queer, Jewish, feminist, anarchist theorist!

"A few weeks ago, fourteen Russian first-year air-transport cadets made a parody of a fifteen-year-old music clip, and now it’s all a lot of Russians can talk about."

"This is a story of spontaneous solidarity, self-organization, and, ultimately, just possibly, the triumph of freedom over bureaucracy," writes Masha Gessen, in The New Yorker, showing us New Yorker readers this:



We're told they didn't mean for that to go up on line. Whatever. But when it did, the air-travel ministry said it would “investigate all circumstances and causes of this outrageous incident.” That led Russian news TV to entertain the Russian people by showing the clip over and over and pointing out the "clear expressions of homosexuality." That led to lots more #Satisfaction clips, which The New Yorker helpfully links to and instructs us to watch in order — "construction, agricultural... emergency services... jockeys... stable boys... theatre troupe... nurses... women’s biathlon team... Medical... Deep-sea divers... mixed-gender group shot in a sauna... retired women of St. Petersburg...."

What does it all mean? Gessen says:

Given Russia’s official and highly politicized homophobia, these parodies are pure protest, raunchy and playful. They demonstrate that Russians can still form horizontal connections, despite the state’s monopoly on the public sphere, and despite the threat of harsh penalties for protest in general and “propaganda of homosexuality” in particular. Each clip is at once a show of solidarity with a group of young strangers and a show of ordinary people’s ability to organize and act together—an ability that the state would seem to have stamped out....

The original video has a power tools theme...



... and Gessen ends with a "power tools" witticism: "Performing homoeroticism is, as it turns out, the real power tool when it comes to sticking it to the authorities."