In the wake of all the men who have been outed as sexual harassers and weak attempts at excusing their behavior by them and their apologists, Kate Harding sent out a tweet and that and the replies to it are well worth reading as beautiful examples of the power of role reversals to reveal hypocrisy.
While much of the attention regarding the documents that have been released about the Kennedy assassination has focused on the issue of whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole perpetrator or whether there was a larger conspiracy that was covered up, my attention was drawn to an item that did not get much attention and that was about one of the plans that the CIA developed to undermine Fidel Castro. We already knew that the US, the very country that is now up in arms about the possibility of the Russian government interfering in US elections by doing things such as the dastardly practice of buying ads on Facebook, tried many times to actually murder Castro.
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Now that the floodgates have opened and many women are coming forth with allegations of sexual harassment by powerful men, the question remains who else will be named. So far, the people involved have been in high-profile industries like films, TV, Silicon Valley, and politics. I have noticed that current members of Congress have not been named and wonder if that is only a matter of time. But the power dynamics that led to such abuse exist in other contexts as well and any business that really values its employees should take a pro-active role in ensuring that such things do not happen.
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While attention is focused on what Donald Trump is doing to the Republican party, whether he is splitting it into two, transforming it into his own image, leading it into the ditch, or successfully channeling all the racist, sexist, and xenophobic impulses that seems to be quite widespread in the nation, there are some interesting goings on within the Democratic party.
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We have recently seen three Republican senators (Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and John McCain) voice harsh criticisms of Donald Trump. But each of them have almost unfailingly voted in favor of issues that Trump supports, such as voting to advance the Republican budget and in yesterday’s vote to reduce consumer protections against fraud by the banks that issue credit cards. This is not surprising. These senators are all solid conservatives and supporters of the oligarchy. What is surprising is that they are being lauded as heroic truth-tellers when they are not. All three are not running for re-election, the first two choosing to withdraw and the third due to ill-health. So only those people not interested in re-election feel free to say what they feel about Trump. That is not heroism, just face-saving.
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Jordan Klepper’s new show The Opposition had a good piece by Kobi Libii who investigated the antifa movement to examine the claim, made by many in the establishment media, that they are as bad as the fascists they are protesting against. Watch Libii put one of those people, columnist Eli Lake of Bloomberg News, on the spot.
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[UPDATE: On November 7, 2017, Syria said it would also sign the Paris accord leaving the US as the only holdout.]
Nicaragua has agreed to sign on to the Paris accord on climate change, leaving the US and Syria as the only two nations on the planet who are not signatories. Nicaragua held out for so long for reasons opposite to that of the US, in that it felt that the accord did not go far enough in protecting the environment. The reasons for Syria’s abstention have not been made clear.
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In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, more and more women feel confident to come forward with their own stories of being sexually harassed, groped, and raped where once they chose to remain silent because their attackers were powerful people and they feared being shamed and retaliated against. Some of these things happened years ago. One of latest allegations comes from Jennifer Listman who is now an anthropological geneticist working at New York University. In a detailed blog post, she describes how in 1989, when she was 19 years of age, she was shocked when she was groped by Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel during a photographing at a public charity event. Wiesel died in 2016 at the age of 87.
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Articles like to use photographs to liven up their appearance. But getting your own photographs is time-consuming and expensive so many publications resort to using stock images from the various sources that provide them and that can be easily searched on to provide one that seems to most closely fit the needs of the article. But Adam Jonson at FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) has noticed that not enough care seems to go into selecting images and that, for example, a single trope tend to dominate in reports about Iran that perpetuate myths about that country.
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Some time ago, I read a piece by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo that anyone who comes into the vicinity of Donald Trump ends up having their reputation trashed because they get forced to do things that they would not otherwise do simply to stay on in their jobs. That article was in the context of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who according to Marshall, had a good reputation before his role in the firing of James Comey was revealed.
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