"The wax lips is my statement against plastic surgery. I’ve been very vocal about the genocide of a generation of women..."

"...  by the cosmeceutical industrial complex who’ve disfigured themselves. The wax lips really sends it home.”

Said Jamie Lee Curtis, posing in wax lips and quoted in "'Generations of women have been disfigured': Jamie Lee Curtis lets rip on plastic surgery, power, and Hollywood’s age problem" (Guardian).

Obviously, the word “genocide” is very strong and risks causing offence, given its proper meaning. To Curtis, however, it is accurate. “I’ve used that word for a long time and I use it specifically because it’s a strong word. I believe that we have wiped out a generation or two of natural human [appearance]. The concept that you can alter the way you look through chemicals, surgical procedures, fillers – there’s a disfigurement of generations of predominantly women who are altering their appearances...."

And yet: 

Curtis’s daughter Ruby, 29, is trans.... “I’m an outspoken advocate for the right of human beings to be who they are.... I’m a John Steinbeck student... and there’s a beautiful piece of writing from East of Eden about the freedom of people to be who they are. Any government, religion, institution trying to limit that freedom is what I need to fight against.””

I guess those Hollywood actresses with their chemicals and surgical procedures are not trying to "be who they are" but to be what they feel others want them to be. How "against plastic surgery" is Curtis? When is it "disfigurement"? When does she feel motivated to use the word "genocide"? One might feel inclined to say that each person is free to make their own decision, but when do onlookers judge them harshly? How do we know who is truly finding their real self in these medical cuttings and who is straining to conform to real or imagined societal expectations?

ADDED: Here's the question I was motivated to ask Grok: "Are trans women mostly attempting to look like beautiful women or is the goal simply to look like an ordinary woman (and to 'read' as a woman)? Or is it enough merely to feel, from their own perspective, that they are expressing their own personal idea of womanliness (or femininity) and not focused on what other people think of what they are seeing?" 

"On May 14, the chatbot began responding to all kinds of unrelated queries by holding forth on the topic of 'white genocide' in South Africa, to users’ bafflement."

"It’s a theory that holds that the country’s formerly ascendant White minority is being targeted for elimination by its Black majority — a claim the South African-born Musk has helped to popularize via his influential X account. The theory has been rejected as false by courts, government ministers and fact-checkers. Grok’s sudden obsession with it coincided with a push by the Trump administration to justify its controversial move to welcome White South African refugees at a time when the United States is turning away refugees of color from countries around the world.

I'm reading "How Elon Musk’s ‘truth-seeking’ chatbot lost its way/Grok has proved popular with X users. But a string of bizarre blunders threatened to turn it into a punchline" (WaPo)(free-access link).

"President Donald Trump pressed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to protect White Afrikaner farmers from violent attacks in an extraordinary Oval Office conversation..."

"... in which Trump made no mention of the African nation’s long-standing epidemic of violence against both White and Black people, nor its violent and discriminatory history of White rule. Trump amplified false claims that White Afrikaners have been victims of a genocide, even showing video of crosses and earthen mounds that he said represented more than 1,000 grave sites of murdered farmers. The mounds were in fact part of a protest against the violence, not actual graves. Ramaphosa stared straight ahead, wiping his face and occasionally moving in his seat and looking over at Trump, who wouldn’t make eye contact as a clip played of crowds repeatedly shouting, 'Kill the Boers,' a reference to White farmers descended from colonists who built and led the nation’s racist apartheid regime...."

WaPo reports.

Trump said Abraham Lincoln was only "probably" a great president, because "Why wasn’t that settled?" ("That" = the Civil War.)

A kid asked Trump who was his favorite President when he was a kid, and, after talking about Reagan, his favorite President, who didn't become President until Trump was 35, he said:

"Uh, great presidents — well, Lincoln was probably a great president. Although I’ve always said, why wasn’t that settled? You know? I’m a guy that — it doesn’t make sense we had a civil war."

This remark fits with his determined insistence that if he'd been President, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine and the October 7th massacre would never have happened. War can be avoided, we'd all like to think, but who are the peacemakers? Trump would like you to think he's the one. 

I'm reading that quote in a NYT article called "Four of Trump’s Most Meandering Remarks This Week/The former president says that his style is to 'weave' from one subject to the next. Others see something more worrisome in his ramblings."

I love the Abraham Lincoln quote. Why do we see war Presidents as the great ones? If there was a war, why don't we fault him for not saving us from it? And who, this time around, will save the world from war?

But let's not talk about that. Let's talk about the extent to which Trump is meandering. Let's worry about what are pointless ramblings.

The other article about Trump on the front page of the NYT is "At a Pennsylvania Rally, Trump Descends to New Levels of Vulgarity." He's speaking in a way that can be characterized as unpresidential. He said 1. "Such a horrible four years, we had a horrible — think of the — everything they touch turns to —" and the audience yelled "Shit!" 2. (about Harris) "We can’t stand you, you’re a shit vice president," and 3. (about Arnold Palmer) "This is a guy that was all man.... And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, 'Oh, my god, that’s unbelievable.'... I had to tell you the shower part of it because it’s true... We want to be honest.'"

Meanwhile, there's only one article about Kamala Harris on the front page of the NYT at the moment, and it's not about problems with the way she speaks. It's not that she said "It's real," when someone asserted that Israel is committing genocide. It's not that she taunted "You guys are at the wrong rally" when somebody yelled "Christ is Lord."

No, readers are left to assume Harris is speaking in the normal, presidential manner, while Trump is in worrisome decline.

The article the NYT gives us about Harris is news of a weak blip in one question on a poll: "Harris May Be Catching Up on a Key Polling Question: Which Candidate Helps You?"

The NYT seems to be saying: Please be encouraged about Harris, though there's nothing positive that she's said or done that we can elaborate for you today. Leave the Harris door shut, and look at Trump. Isn't he terrible in the same way we've considered him terrible for an entire decade... or, uh, no, at some new more worrisome and ever lower level of descent into hell?

"Respectability politics."

If that's a term of art, it's new to me. I'm seeing it, with a link to another article, in "Senators Need to Stop the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act," a NYT column by Michelle Goldberg. Context:

Some pro-Palestinian demonstrators seem to believe, given the moral enormity of mass death, displacement and starvation in Gaza, that deferring to mainstream Jewish sensitivities means buckling to so-called respectability politics, which whitewash horror in the name of civility. “To the Jewish students, faculty and trustees blocking divestment and urging the violent crackdowns on campus: You threaten everyone’s safety,” said a recent communiqué from the Columbia Law chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a left-wing group that’s been providing legal support to the protesters.

The statement disdains the ethos of nonviolence, quoting Black Panther leader Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael: “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” Within the movement, I imagine such rhetoric functions as a sign of total commitment, a no-going-back rejection of hollow liberal pieties. Outside of it, to the extent that anyone takes this language seriously, it serves to stoke a raging panic about the protests that both distracts from the war and feeds a growing backlash that threatens academic freedom....

The linked article is "What are the politics of respectability during a genocide?" by Maryam Iqbal in the Columbia Spectator. Excerpt:

"Notably, the court has not ordered Israel to cease its attacks, but only to take actions to ensure its soldiers and citizens adhere to the Genocide Convention."

From "U.N. Court Declines to Demand That Israel Stop Its Military Campaign/The International Court of Justice ruled that Israel must take action to ensure that its military doesn’t violate the Genocide Convention, and to let more aid in to Gaza" (NYT).

Cornel West said "We’re living in a genocidal attack in real time, where nearly 7,000 children have been killed in less than 45 days..."

"... so all of the talk about X or Y is nothing but rationalizations of the proceeding, of the promoting of this kind of genocidal attack."

Said Cornel West, quoted in "Cornel West accuses Israel of ‘genocidal attack’ on Gaza" (NewsNation)(with video of interview with Chris Cuomo). 

 “We have to be morally consistent” about calling out war crimes, West said. “We can’t lose sight of the larger structural institutional realities in which people are being killed every day in the occupation beginning 1948. That’s like zeroing in on Nat Turner because he’s killing some white children and he’s wrong, but Black people were enslaved for 240 years.”

Cuomo weakly noted, “Palestinians have had a much better shot than Blacks in America have had,” and pointed to the "deals" that have been offered to Palestinians.

That fired up West: 

"To say what is or is not 'excessive' or 'disproportionate' requires a judgment call based on a cost-benefit analysis."

"But how can anyone weigh the costs and benefits of incommensurable goods like lives and military advantage? In practice, militaries like those of the U.S. and Israel follow procedures that are supposed to anticipate damage in advance and try to keep it within reason. This effort captures Michael Walzer’s observation that it is not enough to not intend to target civilians; one must also intend not to target them—by making efforts to avoid their death.... Determining whether a given act of violence constitutes genocide... turns on the intent of the actor: Was it meant to destroy a group, in whole or in part?... Israel has declared the war objective of eliminating Hamas, which is a military-political organization, not a whole people.... As for Hamas, its 1988 charter called for the liberation of Palestine and for Muslim sovereignty over the entire land... and does not expressly specify the destruction of Israelis in whole or in part. The upshot is that charges of genocide, made in either direction, likely do not satisfy the legal definition of genocide, certainly not as it would be adjudged by any international tribunal today...."

 
Writes Noah Feldman, in "The Word ‘Genocide’ Has An Actual Meaning/Using legal terms in ways that either differ from or actually contradict their definitions erodes the power of international humanitarian law" (The Atlantic).

"Susan Benesch, the executive director of the Dangerous Speech Project, said that genocidal leaders often use fear of a looming threat..."

"... to prod groups into pre-emptive violence. Those who commit the violence do not need to hate the people they are attacking. They just need to be afraid of the consequences of not attacking. For instance, before the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Hutu politicians told the Hutus that they were about to be exterminated by Tutsis. During the Holocaust, Nazi propagandists declared that Jews were planning to annihilate the German people. Before the Bosnian genocide, Serbs were warned to protect themselves from a fundamentalist Muslim threat that was planning a genocide against them. 'I was stunned at how similar this rhetoric is from case to case,' Ms. Benesch told me.... 'It’s as if there’s some horrible school that they all attend.'...  Fear speech is much less studied than hate speech.... The 'nontoxic and argumentative nature' of fear speech prompts more engagement than hate speech...."

 
From "Few Are Addressing One of Social Media’s Greatest Perils" by Julia Angwin (NYT).

Is this a suggestion that "fear speech" should be censored? No. What Angwin recommends that social media companies do more fact-checking, add "context and counterpoints to false fear-inducing posts," and rely less on the kind of "engagement algorithms" that promote "outrageous and divisive content." She'd also like us, the users of social media, to notice fear speech and to challenge it ourselves, to provide our own counterspeech — "not necessarily to change the views of true believers but rather to provide a counter‌narrative for people watching on the sidelines."

That's a big part of what I try to do with this blog.

"Is this genocide?"/"Indeed. This is genocide."

“Is this genocide?” @margbrennan asks Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“Indeed. This is genocide,” Zelenskyy says, adding that Ukraine is being “destroyed and exterminated” by Russian forces.

Tune in at 10:30a E.T. to hear more. pic.twitter.com/VyI246euAH

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) April 3, 2022

"Russia did not show up for a hearing at the United Nations’ top court on Monday, effectively boycotting Ukrainian efforts to seek an immediate end to the fighting."

"The proceedings in front of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, went ahead without Russia’s presence. The case centers on Russia’s official explanation for its invasion of Ukraine, which President Vladimir Putin has said is supposed to lead to the 'denazification' of Ukraine and end a 'genocide' in eastern Ukraine.... Ukraine seeks an emergency order that would require Russia to halt its invasion. Both countries have signed the 1948 treaty on the prevention of genocide, and Russia would in theory be mandated to follow the court decision.... [O]ne of its long-time lawyers, Alain Pellet, resigned last week, writing in an open letter that it 'has become impossible to represent in forums dedicated to the application of the law a country that so cynically despises it.'"

WaPo reports.

Putin says his goal is the "demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine" — defending "civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation" from "persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime."

According to "Putin announces a ‘military operation’ in Ukraine as the U.N. Security Council pleads with him to pull back" (NYT). 

Mr. Putin cast his operation both as an attack on “Nazis” in Ukraine, as well as rejection of the American-led world order. Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO, he said, represented a dire threat to Russia. He evoked the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 to make it clear that he viewed the West as morally bankrupt.

“For 30 years, we deliberately and patiently tried to reach agreement with the NATO countries on equal and indivisible security in Europe,” Mr. Putin said. But Russia was met, he said, with “cynical lies” and “blackmail” on the part of the West. The American-led West, he said, represented an “empire of lies.” ...

“You and I know that our strength lies in fairness and truth, which is on our side,” Mr. Putin said [addressing the Russian people]. “And if this is so, then it is hard not to agree that it is strength and readiness to fight that are the foundation for independence and sovereignty.” 

I don't think Biden has responded to the charge of Nazism, militarization, genocide, and persecution. He simply blames Putin for choosing to go to war and notes that war brings "death and destruction." That works as an argument against ever fighting a war — including a war against genuine Nazism, militarization, genocide, and persecution. 

I would like to hear a strong, clear statement detailing what's wrong with Putin's justification of his war. I would like something more erudite and fact-based than saying it was "bizarrely" asserted. From Biden's February 23rd speech:

Yesterday Vladimir Putin... bizarrely asserted that [two] regions are no longer part of Ukraine and they’re sovereign territory... Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called countries on territory that belong to his neighbors?

I'd like to hear Biden address Putin's reasons, which sound like the kind of reasons American leaders give when they invade other countries. Where's the sophistication that was supposed to come with the ousting of Trump? I can do without rhetorical questions involving "the Lord."

"In a climactic moment to end the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics, China chose two athletes — including one it said was of Uyghur heritage — to deliver the flame to the Olympic cauldron..."

"... and officially start the Games. The moment was tinged with layers of symbolism — a man and a woman working together, a nod to China’s Olympic history — but it was the choice of Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a cross-country skier who the Chinese said has Uyghur roots, that confronted head-on one of the biggest criticisms of the country’s role as host."

The NYT reports.

"Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts has said that an Ireland-based photo restoration artist broke the country’s archive law after he digitally colourised and added smiles..."

"... to images of genocide victims. VICE has removed an article showcasing Matt Loughrey’s work, whilst a petition demanding an apology gained traction on Sunday evening.... ... Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts said on Sunday that the photos 'are in violation of the dignity of Cambodian Genocide victims and of the rights of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum… We urge researchers, artists and the public not to manipulate any historical source to respect the victims.'... The project received a widespread backlash on social media with many calling it 'tasteless,' 'racist' and 'tone-deaf.'... Cambodia-based photojournalist John Vink was among the critics on Twitter: 'Matt Loughrey in Vice is not colourising S21 photographs. He is falsifying history,' he tweeted."  

Hong Kong Free Press reports. 

I can't imagine that Loughrey thought he was doing something that was anything other than uplifting and kindly, making a nice image of a real person from a photograph captured under horrific circumstances. I don't think what he did was racist, but it was poor judgment — by Loughrey and by VICE. There shouldn't be laws against artistic poor judgment, and I would think the intense disapproval is enough. But Cambodia has its own laws.

FROM THE EMAIL: Colin writes:

The people sent to this prison were tortured and then executed, usually in the most brutal and horrific fashion. After a few months of operation, essentially everyone in Cambodia knew that NO ONE got out from Tuol Sleng Prison. These people in the photos were all facing terror and death with no hope of reprieve or escape. 20,000 people passed into this place, there were just 12 known survivors. Putting smiles on these people’s faces is an abomination. It makes a mockery of what they were facing.

I agree it's bad, but I am nearly certain Loughrey meant well. It's an example of embarrassingly bad judgment, not any sort of evil. It's a shame VICE saw fit to highlight his work. 

AND: The reader Tina emails:

It’s easier to understand VICE’s motive for whitewashing the horror of communist concentration camp victim photos if you first understand that VICE is just a hip iteration of old-school anti-America demoralization agitprop for disaffected truthers types of both political flavors, funded by the usual suspects, as are Al Jazeera, RT, Unz Review, Alex Jones, Voltaire Network, Nation Magazine, etc. Also, of course, they get a permanent pass for concentration camp whitewash stuff because they courageously cancelled Gavin McInnes.

AND: Laura writes: 

Thank you for this post. It prompted me to think remember the work of French artist Christian Boltanski, specifically this piece, Gymnasium Chases from 1991. 

"China Tries To Discredit Female Uighur Witnesses By Releasing Private Sexual Health Data/The officials said the information..."

"... was evidence of bad character, in an effort to invalidate the women’s accounts of abuse in Xinjiang," HuffPo reports. 

“One reason that the Communist Party is so concerned about these testimonies from women is because it undermines their initial premise for what they’re doing there, which is anti-terrorism,” said James Millward, a professor of Chinese history at Georgetown University and expert in Xinjiang policy. “The fact that there are so many women in the camps ... who don’t have the faintest appearance of being violent people, this just shows how this has nothing to do with terrorism.”

"The State Department declared on Tuesday that the Chinese government is committing genocide and crimes against humanity through its wide-scale repression of Uighurs..."

"... and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in its northwestern region of Xinjiang, including in its use of internment camps and forced sterilization. The move is expected to be the Trump administration’s final action on China, made on its last full day, and is the culmination of a yearslong debate over how to punish what many consider Beijing’s worst human rights abuses in decades.... The determination of atrocities is a rare action on the part of the State Department, and could lead the United States to impose more sanctions against China under the new administration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., who said last year through a spokesman that the policies by Beijing amounted to 'genocide.'"

The NYT reports.

"Disney has thanked four propaganda departments and a public security bureau in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China that is the site of one of the world’s worst human rights abuses happening today."

"More than a million Muslims in Xinjiang, mostly of the Uighur minority, have been imprisoned in concentration camps.... Disney... worked with regions where genocide is occurring, and thanked government departments that are helping to carry it out....  Disney executives had thought that the original 'Mulan' would please both the Chinese government and Chinese filmgoers. But because Disney had distributed 'Kundun' (1997), a film glorifying the Dalai Lama, Beijing restricted the studio’s ability to work in China. Disney spent the next several years trying to get back into the party’s good graces. 'We made a stupid mistake in releasing "Kundun,"' the then-CEO of Disney Michael Eisner told Premier Zhu Rongji in October 1998. 'Here I want to apologize, and in the future we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening.' Since then, Disney has endeavored to please Beijing...."

From "Why Disney’s new ‘Mulan’ is a scandal" (WaPo).

"Kundun" deserves a more respectful description than "a film glorifying the Dalai Lama"! This is a beautiful film directed by Martin Scorsese:

"The Chinese government is under pressure to stave off economic calamity, and is treating Uighur laborers as dispensable because they have no rights..."

"... and no say, Dr. Ferhat Bilgin, a Uighur American, told the Uighur Times, a Washington-based website disseminating news about the Uihghur crisis. 'If they survive they produce a profit, if they die, that would be "too bad"... For the first time in history, Uyghurs [have] become commodities of the State.' The activists’ demand is simple: The Chinese government must close the camps, free the innocent people and provide for other Xinjiang residents’ basic needs...."

From "The coronavirus brings new and awful repression for Uighurs in China," published in The Washington Post a month ago. I found that this morning because I was looking for news of the plight of the Uighurs. What is happening to them during the pandemic? Over a million of them were confined and crowded into "re-education camps" where they are especially vulnerable to the disease. Now, there are no believable statistics about the disease as it exists in China today, and the story of the Uighurs is overshadowed by the larger story. But what looked like a genocide was already happening, and now that the disease is — I presume — accelerating a genocide, we're not even seeing it at all.

"In today’s world, authoritarian politics and predatory commerce cooperate to exploit 'cultural differences.'"

"Nowhere is this point clearer than in the symbiosis in recent decades between Western corporations and the Communist elite in China. The West offers capital and much-needed technology, while China’s rulers supply a vast, captive, hard-working, low-paid and unprotected labor force. Western politicians, as if trying to justify the unholy collusion, for years argued that rising living standards in China would produce a middle class who would demand freedom and democracy. It is clear by now that that has not happened. The Chinese elite, now far wealthier than before and as in control as ever, can laugh up its sleeve at the Westerners and their visions of inevitable democracy. Instead the West’s own hard-won democracy has become vulnerable. But does the West know it? ... Westerners may think of Xinjiang as a distant and mysterious place, but... Volkswagen, Siemens, Unilever and Nestlé have factories there.... What is it about this remote place... that makes it so attractive? Might a 'culturally different' nonwhite labor force play a role? People in no need of control because a harsh Communist government is already doing that work? In Xinjiang, as elsewhere in China, bosses from East and West have exchanged benefits, formed common interests and have even come to share some values. The chief executive of Volkswagen, which leads China in car sales, was recently asked for the company’s comment on the concentration camps in Xinjiang. He answered that VW knew nothing of such things...."

From "Capitalism and ‘Culturecide'/The idea of ‘cultural differences’ has been used as a justification for some of humanity’s worst crimes," by the artist Ai Weiwei in the NYT.

"In a rare show of bipartisan unity, Republicans and Democrats are planning to try to force President Trump to take a more active stand on human rights in China..."

"... preparing veto-proof legislation that would punish top Chinese officials for detaining more than one million Muslims in internment camps. The effort comes amid growing congressional frustration with Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to challenge China over human rights abuses, despite vivid news reports this year outlining atrocities, or to confront such issues globally.... 'There’s been a sense by some that the administration hasn’t prioritized human rights in its broader foreign policy,' said Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. 'I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate — but that sense has grown. There’s been a sense that Congress needs to step up.'... Although Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have criticized China on the persecution of Muslims, Mr. Trump has said nothing. In July, Jewher Ilham, the daughter of Ilham Tohti, a Uighur professor whom China sentenced to life in prison in 2014, joined other victims of religious persecution to meet with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office. When she tried to explain the camps to Mr. Trump, he appeared ignorant of the situation and simply said, 'That’s tough stuff.'... 'I’m a big fan of the president on many fronts, but on this, someone has to stand up,' Senator Rand Paul [said]."

From "Congress Wants to Force Trump’s Hand on Human Rights in China and Beyond/Lawmakers aim to pass veto-proof legislation in 2020 that would punish China over its treatment of ethnic Uighur Muslims" (NYT).