Sally Zelikovsky, American Idiot:
Obama thinks liberals are stupid

Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. BENGHAZI!!!!!

It’s been pretty painfully obvious what the money men have been ordering all the winged monkeys to rant about for their wingnut welfare as of late. In possibly the most obvious case of manufacturing a story out of nothing in… well, months… maybe, every Tom, Dick, and Hairy Nut Sack on every wingnut blog has been cranking out post after post about Benghazi and how this is totally going to impeach Obama.

Which is impressive, because if Benghazi were any less of the story, it’d be… well, probably the oh noes, IRS looked into a Tea Party organization story that some of the more desperate wingnuts are hoping will lead to impeachment. And all attempts to manufacture something out of this story just make me think more and more about the genuine intelligence failures that lead to 9/11 or the various cover-ups done about the intelligence for ginning up support for the Iraq War and torture. Which, of course it should, seeing as how the only reason that wingnuts are pretending to care is a) out of open revenge for how liberals commented on that shit during Bush’s term and b) because having finally accepted the reality of a black president, they are now committed to manufacturing whatever BS excuse they can to impeach him away.

So, unless the wingnuts come up with something spectacularly batshit, this will be my one and only post on this made-up non-story, because fuck right-wingers getting to dictate the national “topic du jour” whenever they damn well want just by being loud and crazy.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• My dear, foolish, liberals, I have proved my intellect fierce on this day for I have noted the impossibility of someone knowing that something was terrorism and saying so and then later, by which I mean, the same sentence, not know who did it or why they did it. And as we know, when it’s terrorism, it’s impossible to not know who did something and why if we know it occurred. QED.

Which yeah. That’s pretty much it.

And what makes it even more amazing is that this article was written AFTER the Boston Marathon bombing in which everyone, including right-wing websites like the American Thinker, knew that it was terrorism but didn’t know how or why they did it until days afterward.

I mean, I can understand writing an article like that back when Benghazi first happened… maybe… if you had suffered a traumatic brain injury. But a handful of weeks after the Boston Massacre and I’m left wondering if this was just sitting in the can waiting for when the marching orders to pretend to give a fuck were passed down or if that Daily Show joke about conservatives being unable to remember history beyond a week is sadly, true.

And yes, for added fail they quoted the president saying this:

“The Day after it happened I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.”

“What we have been very clear about throughout, was that immediately after this event had happened we were not clear who exactly had carried it out, how it had occurred, what the motivations were. It happened at the same time we had seen attacks on the US Embassy in Cairo as a result of this film.”

“Nobody understood exactly what was taking place during the course of those first few days.”

“Suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there’s something new to the story. There’s no “there” there.

And followed it up by saying this:

Obama claims to have known the day after the attacks that they were an act of terrorism. (He’s claiming that his Rose Garden comments about terrorism in general amount to a statement that the attacks were terror-related, but this is not the case. However, for the sake of, ahem, clarity, let’s assume it is.) So, thus far, we have:

Day After. Obama. Terrorism.

But, immediately after it happened he wasn’t clear who did it, how it occurred and the motivation. So:

Immediately After. Obama. Unclear.

Obama knew it was terrorism the day after, but immediately after, it wasn’t clear. When exactly does “immediately after the attack” begin and end before it becomes the “day after”? Isn’t the “day after” it happened pretty much the same as “immediately after” it happened?

And somehow she thinks this will reflect poorly on Obama, because… conservatives really are that stupid.

But hey, why stop there. If this is the only post I’m going to be doing on this non-story, might as well crack all the nuts.

Bonus Paid Whore

Rich Lowry, National Pretense:
Benghazi Patsy

I lied when I said there were two main reasons that the wingnuts were circling around Benghazi. There are three. And the third is absolute reflexive anger at the notion that the actions that wingnuts take could possibly have any meaningful consequences. So when it seemed at the time like the Benghazi attacks were connected to related protests about a piece of right-wing Christian hate about Muslims produced by one of the Evangelical psychopaths we’re so damn good at manufacturing, it made all the other Evangelical psychopaths a wee might twitchy and self-introspective.

And Bob-damnitt, they will never ever forgive Obama for ever making them think about the consequences of their actions.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Free Mumia! I mean, that guy who violated his parole in unnecessary fashion in order to make a hate film about muslims that he didn’t even have the balls to stand behind with his real name.

Yeah, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is a right-wing hero now for daring to make a cheap little propaganda flick about the evils of muslims in order to fleece the Evangelical rubes. Which given some of the right-wing hero choices of late like Anders Breivik and George Zimmerman, this is sadly a step up for them.

And since wingnuts apparently only love law-and-order when it’s being used to illegally detain brown people and hate it when it actually responds to illegal activity by rich people or honorary conservatives, they’ve decided that Nakoula being busted for straight-up violating his parole on 8 separate occassions is somehow a moral outrage.

A parole which was part of a laughingly tiny sentence for multi-million dollar bank fraud in which he was convicted in 2010, but was already out and wandering around being a dickwaffle by 2012 and in which he was supposed to not use the internet without permission or use a fake name again (both easy things to avoid that he failed amazingly thoroughly in order to make his hate video).

But if you hear the wingnuts wail, you’d think he was the last of the true political prisoners, jailed for merely speaking truth to power with a journalist’s eye. No seriously:

You won’t find that anywhere in the charges against him, of course. As a practical matter, though, everyone knows that Nakoula wouldn’t be in jail if he hadn’t produced a video crudely lampooning the prophet Mohammed.

Violations of parole would never be enforced if they weren’t punishing him for having the rare wit to rant about the evils of Islam for an hour. And he’s serious about that…

Which I guess makes sense. Conservatives have repeatedly demonstrated that they earnestly believe that laws simply should not apply to “their tribe” of rich conservative assholes. And I can only imagine the outcry if a poor black writer even loosely approximated saying the same.

The second is that he has a history of fraud. A few years ago, he was sentenced to nearly two years in jail on bank-fraud charges. Using a false name, Nakoula gulled actors into appearing in his video on the pretense that it was a desert epic. He is not going to win any good-citizenship awards, and he violated the terms of his probation by using an alias (something Nakoula admits).

A violation of probation, though, usually produces a court summons and doesn’t typically lead to more jail time unless it involves an offense that would be worth prosecuting in its own right under federal standards. Not for Nakoula.

Since when? You go on parole as a “good behavior” thing (usually accomplished by claiming you found Jesus in prison) in lieu of serving out the rest of your term. If you fuck that up by immediately returning to the behavior that got you tossed in jail in the first place, you are sent right back to prison to serve out the rest of your sentence. That’s the fucking point of parole.

But hey, I guess parole violations are another thing that’s OKIYAR.

And I lied again earlier when I said there were three reasons. There are actually four

Shorter Every Other Wingnut in the Jungle:

• Wah! Benghazi was supposed to be our Iran Hostage Crisis preceding a glorious new Reagan era in The Smiler and his unholy reign. And you fucking liberals cock-blocked us. We would have totally won if you hadn’t cock-blocked us, so ipso facto, you cheated and we ipso facto, actually won the election, so depart naer do well and apologize to your white proper master for not letting him steal the election as he was supposed to.

And since this is pretty much the real shorter of the other three reasons as well, this is why I can’t be bothered to waste any more neurons on this made-up bullshit.

And the irony is I wouldn’t even give a fuck about these constant pity parties if they weren’t constantly working to make the shitty lives of various minority groups even shittier.

W.F. Price, Not At All Compensating for Our Penis Head:
A NY Times Mother’s Day Op-ed: Trannies are Equal Moms

The denial of privilege is a very common thread in wingnut posts. Which makes perfect sense. If one can deny that one is more advantaged than other groups, you can imagine that your social advantages are due to inherent internal ability (i.e. you have a better job, easier life, etc… because of being super smart or better at life) rather than exploiting oppression. It also helps alleviate guilt when you enforce unfair or oppressive systems, because you’re not kicking the people below you on the ladder, you’re just standing up for the way the world naturally is, which is why it constantly needs to be enforced with legal and social backlash… wait, what?

Jeffrey T. Brown, American Schmuck:
Like the IRS Scandal? You’ll Love Obamacare

But of course, in a world where relative social benefits flow like eternal ice cream into the cups of the privileged groups (i.e. a world where dominating all media attention, all participation, and all control is seen as normal), there inevitably comes a time when a spare drop falls on an oppressed group. Maybe there is a historic first professional sports player or a historic rights bill gets passed or maybe a news media story or television show is focusing on someone other than a dominant group member for an episode. Whatever it is, for the person used to pretending that the current inequal state is a perfect equality, it seems like a disruption of the natural order. Something unfair to them.

Kyle Smith, New York is an Unwilling Host:
Gag Order

Matt “I Swear I Only Look at Gay Porn for Research” Barber, Renew Erection:
Memo to Christian Troops: “We’ve Got Your Back”

Robert VerBruggen, National White Supremacist:
Heritage was Wrong

Thus, we are, from time to time, “treated” to a particular variation on the conservative whine about privilege and oppression. A pure tantrum by a dominant group, not just denying their advantages, but trying to pretend that it is actually they who are the aggrieved minority whose important struggles are ignored by the media. That they are the ones whose lives are harder just for being a dominant group, the ones suffering societal oppression. And often there is an unspoken (or sometimes far too spoken) belief in these posts of… well…

Shorter Myopic Assholes Everywhere:

• Wah! Our lives would be so much relatively better if we were oppressed minority group instead of boring old “safe to hate” dominant group. If we were the real minority group, then we’d finally have the moral high ground we so desperately crave.

(With a bonus point if they invoke the dread spectre of “political correctness” to make their point without a hint of irony or awareness that “political correctness” just means not being a deliberate asshole unless you want people to notice you are a deliberate asshole)

And to every instance of these writers, I say this:

No you don’t.

You don’t actually want to live even a fraction of the lives of a real minority group, to suffer even a picoliter of the bullshit and oppression that minority groups face every day. Fuck, you couldn’t even begin to withstand the fear and pain it takes to actually change society enough to be a place where a minority group can live safely and equally.

And yes. I get that most of these chuckleheads don’t really sample their own product on this. That it is in essence, a fantasy they sell themselves and their followers in order to justify the horrible things they do to minority members, the oppression they help enact in their daily lives. For all the blather about how “lucky” welfare recipients are, there isn’t a rich conservative in the world who would legitimately swap places with them and “enjoy” all that supposed free money without effort while letting the lower-class “mooch” learn how truly difficult it is to write poorly sourced bullshit once a week for a 6 figure paycheck.

But they still want to do their little dance every time a minority group starts getting a shred of dignity and pretend like their little group of over-privileged assholes is the Queen of Daniel getting eaten by Lions Mountain. And it’s so easy to do so because our society is designed to make relative social power invisible largely by the efforts of said douchebags to treat their privileges as “normal and right” and to help discourage minorities speaking up about their life experiences in public.

And thus, I’d like to take a quick deviation from my usual format and hammer home just how incredibly shitty it is to be a minority group member in today’s America.

Assorted wingnuts and crybabies, you know what life is like for you? All the little ways you’ve made your lives worse by promoting policies to screw the little guy that ended up screwing you too? Imagine that, but everything is suddenly unnecessarily ten or a hundred times more difficult. Because for all minority groups may talk about specific injustices, it’s worth noticing that this occurs on a backdrop of how life already sucks for everyone else.

Take for instance, getting fired without a social safety net. Sucks pretty hard for any American with the massive stress about how fast your savings might run out, having to go through the rigmarole of searching for a new job, update your resume, and so on and all because you had an asshole boss or your work wasn’t quite enough to stand out from the pack.

Now imagine that the reason you got axed wasn’t about trying to fuck the secretary or calling the big client an asshole, but it was because you wouldn’t sleep with your boss. Or that you were the best at your job in the whole company and were widely recognized for it, but your bosses decide that you have to go because you’re the wrong race, sexuality, or gender identity and no matter your performance, they don’t want to risk putting off what they imagine old white men in suits think.

Imagine in searching for that new job that every single accomplishment you have will be viewed as 20-50% less impressive just because of how your name sounds or what gender you are. Imagine having to figure out how much to downplay your last employment because they know you by the wrong name or gender and might reveal something to interviewers. Imagine having to bleach your skin or go in drag to your interviews knowing that if you get the position, you’ll have to do that every day hence.

Imagine further that there is no savings to last a couple of months on. That if you don’t find a job by the end of the week, you will end up homeless or without food for a month. Imagine that you could end up homeless or without food even when you are working 40+ hours a week. Imagine that you don’t have a long list of industry-relevant experience because when you entered the job market, the economy was shitty enough that entry level positions required 5 years experience. Imagine you only have a small stream of under-employment complete with various gaps to show for yourself.

Even more, imagine trying to job search while actually homeless, where every single employer looks at your PO Box home address as a symbol for “lazy and untrustworthy” regardless of your qualifications. Imagine how much stressful all of this is.

Actually, scratch that, you tend to suck at that. So instead think of this. You’re going to interviews so depressed that the world seems in a fog. You can’t focus on things and you’re forgetting more than usual. Every morning it’s difficult to wake up or really sit down to work and every fiber of your being is calling for you to curl up into a fetal position and give up. Your hands are shaking, your back is seizing up, you’re choking for no physiological reason and you can’t ever see a doctor about it because if you do it’ll bankrupt your family for generations.

You’re also driving a car on its last legs and if it dies, well you’re just fucked because there ain’t no way you can afford to replace it or repair it. Or maybe you have to fill out applications by the dying light of a cell phone in the backseat of your car, which will be your room for the night and every night hence. But do it quick if you don’t want to die out on the streets, especially with winter fast approaching.

And you can’t ever stop for an instance, take a vacation and clear your head, because if you did you’re going to end up without food or shelter and may very well end up dead by either exposure or suicide.

But hey, money is what it is, but if you have the love and support (especially that support, financial or housing support in times of transition can be literally the difference between scrapping with the dogs in the street and having a warm bed) of your family, you can carry through, right?

Yeah, thanks largely to people like you, that’s hardly something a number of groups can count on. Did you have to acknowledge that you’re an atheist? That you’re gay? Heaven forbid that you are trans*? Or poly? Or a sex worker? Welp, then more often than not, say goodbye to that family.

Also, note that this will often work in concert with job and life discrimination. Are some assholes ranting about how people like you are evil sinners who are destroying the world because “their faith”? Well, that’s used to justify the cowardice of employers and their willingness to get rid of you in illegal fashion in case those mean haters spend less money on their company’s products because of some filthy faggot or tranny. And then that discrimination is used to justify more. Hey, being that minority group seems to net you fewer job opportunities, more on-the-job discrimination where your job performance doesn’t matter, worse treatment by society. What must you have been thinking to choose that lifestyle? I guess people like you just aren’t qualified for whatever reason. What reason could that be? I dunno, but let’s pick one and use it to justify doing the same to anyone like them down the road.

Fewer latin@s and blacks are in the boardrooms than there should due to discrimination? They must be inherently stupid, that’s why we can’t promote them. Fewer women feel safe going to our conferences because of harassment? They must be foreign invaders on the subject and must be treated as such with more harassment. A trans* person is being discriminated out of a job and people are ignorant on queer issues? Well, it must be because they sabotaged their life and career and frankly why should we support someone whose life is in a tailspin.

Know why this touching letter of support for a gay son went viral across the internet?

Because most letters from one’s parent when one is queer look more like this*:

So I’ve been hearing about your last few conversations with Uncle. Boy, have you dug yourself into a shithole. Let’s recap: so far in 2013 you’ve torpedoed your career, alienated your uncle, and sent your mom into therapy. Well done.

I firmly believe in second chances, and taking responsibility for your actions. If you think your life is heading in the right direction then by all means – tally ho! But if you see it as the train wreck it’s become, and you maybe want to talk, let me know. I’ll be in Location next week and we can meet up. But just you, no Partner (one piece of free advice: she’s your Iago, and best you realized this before you wake up and wonder where all the blood came from).

Also, “talk” in this context doesn’t mean you get to tell me how you’re “transgender” (which is bullshit) or how all your problems are caused by external forces (double bullshit) or that studies show blah blah blah. This is the kind of talk where you get told to man up, and how I might help. Just so we’re clear.

Cerberus, your mom and I love you very much. It’s time you decided to love yourself as well.

You know how to reach me.

Dad

And even when they are trying to be supportive, are more likely to contain lines like**:

In fairness if Partner loves you and has your dick and balls removed you should have her cut off her clitoris so you two would be “sexually” equal. Just a thought.

To love someone so much you would mutilate yourself and your lover is pushing you to that end is not a sign of a great relationship. You played many fantasy games as kid but you are old enough now to understand the real world from fantasy. What kind of sexual relation do you have with Partner? Do you fornicate or has she reduced you to a limp dick confused about who you are?

But wait! There’s more!

Work and family are just a piece. There’s also society at large. Surely it is here that those assorted dominant groups are the most hard-done. I mean, they have to deal with… people treating their dominant group membership as a given… and also having terrible things they say get reacted to poorly by the people they dehumanize and demean… and let’s not forget the way people say MEAN THINGS by noting that other people like them have unearned relative privileges or have supported the continued oppression of minority groups.

Certainly getting called out for bigotry is so much worse than:

1) Living in a world where you and everyone like you are not just casually assumed to be the sex class and thus open-season for rape and molestation to the point where it is actually hard to find a fellow-group member who hasn’t been raped in some way. But then, also living in a world where rapists are constantly publicly cried over, because “they didn’t deserve to have their lives ruined over a mistake” even when they ruin someone else’s life. And one where no matter how brutal and obvious the rape, there’ll always be someone there to blame you for it.

Oh, and just in the very likely case that you’re one of those people devoted to minimizing rape and sexual violence against women, here’s some of the lifestyle changes that rape often entails for the victim. You’ll get to enjoy: Constant ‘nam style flashbacks to the scene of the attack, internalized hatred constantly seeking a way it was your fault by ignoring red flags or not speaking up enough, giant triggers around areas of your body or non-sexual activities (hey, have you ever wanted your entire right thigh to feel like a creepy-crawling zone of intense panic and fear unless you squashed it up against the couch at random intervals? Look no further!), random fits of unfocused rage or deep depression, TRIGGERS! Lots and lots of triggers about everything (Did your rapist once eat an english muffin? Enjoy having that turn into a day-destroying source of pain and frustration), a lowered ability to enjoy sex in general (hey, it’s not like you were using that ability to get hard without weeping uncontrollably anyways), problematic intimacy with your main romantic partner (hey, being able to cuddle your partner or sleep in the same bed without occasionally kicking them in the head in blind fear was overrated anyways!), and of course all those various depression symptoms we were talking about in the work section. Bonus points if you’re going through the flashbacks during the job discrimination like I did. Ever called in sick because you were stressed out and needed a day? Yeah, I didn’t get to have any of those. And I had to perform like I was manically happy every day I was at work. FUN!

2) Living in a world where the color of your skin marks you as an expendable criminal no matter your behavior in real life. Imagine, white people, that you are a butcher going home on the train because it’s a convenient way to get home. Two idiots are fighting and you break it up. So a man puts you on the ground, restrained and puts a bullet in your head and no one expects him to do anything other than walk, because he’s a white police officer and you are a black man. Imagine that the police felt fully comfortable confiscating any evidence of their execution, but even with that evidence, they still walk. Imagine that your kid is walking home and a black man shot him dead on the street after stalking him and the cops who have all the details not only refuse to arrest the man but actively work to compromise any case that could be made against him. You pretty much can’t imagine that outside of some weird Batman or Punisher comic, but in our world, you made the shooter your national hero and whine about how you’re not allowed to tamper with the state’s witnesses to further hurt the case.

Imagine being a national hero, the one man brave enough to solve a decade’s old case and rescue our most precious national resource: blond, white children. Imagine that even then, as the cops and news media circle to congratulate you, being so used to a system where a police siren means unnecessary harassment or premature death, that a police siren nearly makes you have a heart attack on camera. And where you yourself have trouble processing yourself as anything other than a villain because that’s the most common depiction of you in media.

3) Living in a world where society’s opinion is simply that you deserve to die and that anyone who can aid this process should be complimented and cheered. Where the suicide rates for your population are nearly 1 in 3 and over 50% attempt. Where no one feels even a moment of conscience for letting their glee over trying to destroy you shine. Where people regularly get more money than you’ll ever see in your life for saying that everyone like you deserves to die. Where that isn’t the viewpoint of some crazy on the street, but rather a majority opinion. One where your population has the highest percentage of hate crimes and murders based on your identity committed against you. Where you having the right to pee in public is seen as a taut societal issue.

Imagine that people feel fully justified in denying you housing, aid, or employment, even if it’s against the law, no matter if you are able to afford it or are highly qualified. That when you walk down the street, being looked at with mild contempt is fairly common even if you’re not making a big show of your identity.

And again, let’s make it easy for the empathy impaired. This is the common reaction to minor shit. It’s like if you just wore a subtle little inch long cross in a chain under your shirt and by doing so expected that 1 in 5 people on the street will look at you as if you were a cross between a serial killer and a child molester. By doing so you expected that most jobs will find an excuse not to hire you and most jobs you belong to will try to eliminate you no matter your quality. Or that by doing so you were blocked from using the restroom. No imagine it’s not a necklace, but something you can’t hide. For a population that whines when a business owner loses federal aid when they try and oppress other minorities, I don’t need to guess that a day in this life would break you like Batman’s back in a famous 90s era comic.

That people would actually try and manufacture a system where you were in fact encouraged to commit suicide because that way you weren’t “inconveniencing normal people”.

Oh and let’s throw on the final over-privileged tantrum. Media depiction.

Oh noes, men are sometimes depicted as goofballs… and also nearly 100% of all heroes in every form of media anywhere. Iconic characters in one medium like a comic book or tv show will happily be translated to another medium like movies without people trying to downplay or destroy what you loved about them because by depicting a strong female hero, they’re instantly “controversial” or “uninteresting”. And they never ever get treated like the reward for the hero that he wins for doing a good job. And they get to be praised when they do heroism in real life, unlike women when they do something brave like save elementary school kids from a gunman, who get half a mention, if that.

Oh noes, white people are… well depicted in every form of way imaginable, while black and brown characters get to exist as thugs, support characters, and stereotypes! Yeah, that’ll totally help those watching them feel like they exist and matter and those depictions will never ever be used constantly by conservatives to argue that black and brown people in real life must be treated as if they were all movie and tv stereotypes. They certainly will never react in anger and disbelief when a prominent black or brown person turns out to fulfill none of the proscribed stereotypes and is successful on their own terms. And they’ll never ever deal with this dissonance by trying to scream that the person actually is all the stereotypes simply because they can’t handle a successful black or brown person being their own person.

Oh noes, Christians are depicted occasionally as small-minded bullies in fiction because their most proud and public face in reality is the small-minded bullying of queer people and women. That’s so much worse than being barely depicted at all, and when you are, you’re depicted almost universally as sex-obsessed psychotic killers or pathetic jokes lost in self-delusion. To such an extent in fact, that the most common public perception of the real people separate from the fiction is in fact, that, which is then in turn used to justify real discrimination and bigotry in the real world against real, non-fictional people.

And then, let’s bring up social rights. All those fights and parades and historic laws and first X Ys. You know why we constantly have those headline grabbing stuff?

Because we don’t have it now.

Because we didn’t have it for generations beforehand. When we fight for gay marriage, it’s because our relationships with our loved ones, something you take for granted, are treated as jokes unworthy of all the protections you can gain by simply driving down to Las Vegas in a drunken haze. When we fight for the right of brown people to walk down the street unmolested, it’s because they don’t have the right that every white person walking their dog or jogging down the street takes for granted. When we cheer the first atheist or Buddhist legislator, it’s because the other couple of hundred are all out Christians who often try and make not being Christian a punishable offense. When we have to stand up and “come out” about our experiences with rape or needing to undergo a common and legal medical operation, it’s because there are whole movements dedicated to shaming anyone who does.

It’s just not on the same level. No matter how much you might try and delude yourself that you’re as much a victim of the system or having one person calling you a douchenozzle somehow equals unrelenting and overpowering hatred from every corner making every task more difficult, it’s just not true.

And what makes it worse, is that the struggle to fix inequality, real inequality, is a genuine martyr’s game.

Every single goddamn time, a right that in a few generations is seen as a no duh that everyone must have supported, is won by people taking a risk and being seen visibly as speaking out on or being something despised and oppressed and being tortured over it. The right for people to work was built by people being visible at work and being fired for it until that happened less and less. The right for people to be themselves in public was won by people being murdered, hated, or looked down upon and having to gamble their lives everyday, often for the worse. The right for people to have basic human dignities we take for granted today began with people being murdered for it, beaten for it, having their name turned into a universal synonym for scum, and often sacrificing their right to ever be employed or treated as anything other than an enemy by the majority of the population.

And if any minority member wanted a world where they had that equal treatment and didn’t want to be discriminated against, it meant they had to sacrifice themselves on that track. Take the risk, be public, be burned, have to gamble on basic survival, often lose, because without those people being out there and changing that public ignorance, fear, and inherited bigotry, there is nothing to humanize them, make things better, make a world where they could be free and supported.

And you can be damn well sure that a lot of bigots understand that. It’s why that backlash is brutal and unrelenting. Because they know that if they can scare enough minority members from being visible, from taking that first step, from risking themselves by simply being themselves, then they can buy a few more years where simply not being that feared “other” can be an invitation for unearned rewards and where ignorance and hate are seen as “proper values”.

And it’s the loss of this, most of all, is what leads these smug sonuvabitches to mewl like wounded kittens about the fictional loss of a meaningless expectation. Of a mere request on people to be mindful of other people, try and use some basic empathy, and try not to make their already shitty oppressed lives any worse. And to try and minimize and victim blame all they can on that before trying to steal even the not-at-all-worth-it moral high ground and underdog story as well.

Because a world in which anyone not a white cis straight christian male from the middle or upper class tax brackets is given even the slightest hint of anything is one that assholes will fight to the death to uphold and then two generations later deny fighting at all.

And for those of us continually caught in the thresher’s teeth, desperately trying to find a way to survive another day, much less another week, it’s getting harder and harder to even fake sympathy for all you fuckers and your “but I swear I’m the jew of Minority Fascism” bullshit.

*Actual email from my father, names changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike.

**Excerpts from actual email from my uncle***.

***I know I used a number of personal examples, but what makes it worse is that my story isn’t in fact remarkable in any way and may in fact be better than what a lot of trans* people are dealing with. I would have gladly stuck to the more universal examples if I didn’t have so fucking many life experiences that resonated with the response that the posts that prompted this rant demanded. Fuck anyone who ever even thinks about saying that being this way is some grand old choice because sometimes occasionally institutions try and do a tiny little bit to fix the damage. It’s pretty much like trying to blow up rescue helicopters working to save people trapped by rising floods, because you didn’t get a ride up to your roof last summer to repair the storm tiles and thus it’s unfair that anyone ever get a “free ride” on a helicopter. And for those of us drowning, we look at you fucks about the same way you’d look at a person who did that****.

****I mean, sheesh, you wonder why people have slowly learned to hate you simply for “speaking your mind”.

*****Just consider this a footnote for the entire post, but all of these oppressions would hit a fuckton less if we actually were allowed to have a functional safety net in place. Being disowned by family members wouldn’t matter if you were always guaranteed a roof and a meal. Being discriminated out of a job wouldn’t matter with a guaranteed living wage that made it possible to use the free market to legitimately punish workplaces that discriminated by allowing the discriminated against to form rival companies and bleed off all the non-bigots. Being hated in public wouldn’t matter if the legal protections for minority groups had real enforcement that ensured that no one slipped through the cracks. Which is sort of the real reason that conservatives are so anti-safety-net. If people could be themselves without living in fear for what that might mean to their job prospects, familial support, or ability to survive in the world, then they’d simply do so, forcing everyone to see and discover that minority group members aren’t actually the evil monsters they’ve been led to believe, which would lead to even further social growth away from the archaic social values that conservatives love to cling to. And no, I don’t at all forgive them for casually condemning so many people to misery and death simply because they don’t want to have to grow up like the goddamn adults they pretend to be. And that’d be true even if I wasn’t one of the ones in the rubbish bin.

For what it’s worth, didn’t have any sense there was a reason to be concerned.

Yeah, you hold that gun real high there, champ. That’ll prove your masculinity isn’t a glass flower, ready to shatter at the slightest cough.

Kevin D. Williamson, National Enraged Grue:
Frank Rich Is Wrong about Civil Rights

All right, let’s play a quick game of make-believe. Okay, let’s say you are a hack, specifically hired by a pack of racist dickweasels to help obfuscate the terrible social ills your party and ideology have foisted upon the world, especially against minority groups. Sure, every single post you write is a direct cash-in of your soul, a painfully obvious whitewashing of recorded history for the purpose of encouraging the continued ignorance of wannabe-intelligent dumb white hicks from the suburbs in ways that will continue to deny black people long delayed civil rights and public recognition as full human beings. It may be a terrible job, but hey, some whores weren’t born with a gifted mouth if you know what I mean.

Then imagine someone in the sane world notices and calls attention to the fact that you are a cheap sell-out deliberately trying to trade misinformation about black history in service to a squadron of historical revisionists without the balls to stand by the conviction of the ideas and actions they fought so hard to preserve and frankly, still fight for to this day. Imagine the pained rage at having your head forced against the mirror eyes locked on exactly what you said you’d never become.

Imagine trying to sputter out a feeble self-defense for your crimes. Imagine it sounds something like this:

Slightly Shorter (or the port looks nice this time of year):

• I shall defend against your scurrilous accusations of rewriting racial history in service to my paymasters by rewriting racial history in accordance to their whim. Did you know that the Party Switcheroo on race didn’t occur around the Civil Rights Act as lying reality might maintain but rather because of a refreshing grape soda in the 90s? Also, the only reason blacks and whites swapped places during the 60s is because blacks are welfare queens willing to part with their humanity and support bigots just for a taste of government dependence and white people are just moral enough to be appalled by that… what’s that? You can see my soul divorcing my body as I speak? How dare you notice that!

Even with that grueling exercise in empathy, is there even a remote chance you don’t want to kick ol’ Kev in the balls until he fully recites the Southern Strategy’s effect in exploiting racism for temporary Republican electoral gains?

It’s also worth noting that Kevin Williamson is on record knowing damn well when the switch over between the parties happened. But hey, if they were intellectually honest, they wouldn’t be conservatives.

Sorry, Superman, there’s no cure. You’re just going to have to punch him repeatedly in the nuts.

Matt Welch, Yet Another Reason to Hate Libertarians:
The Importance of Allowing People to Say That You Can’t Be a Gay Basketball Player and a Christian

Ah Libertarians. The end result of people who really do believe that it doesn’t matter who you are or what you believe, just how you market yourself.

If we want to understand how modern conservatives got to the point where they really seem to think that “better branding” will solve the fact that they’ve spent the last 30 years directly antagonizing everyone who isn’t a rich white cissexual heterosexual male and overall fucking up every aspect of the planet, we need look no farther than “libertarianism”.

Not only is libertarianism in and of itself, a rebranding effort to disguise support of segregation into the modern age as a principled stand for the free market and state’s rights. It is also a testament to how for all its blather of being made up by the “true makers” of society, who claim to deeply understand capitalism and how marketing works, they absolutely fail to take advantage of easy opportunities to lend even minor support to their marketing claims.

Take for instance it’s oft sold “libertarianism matrix” argument that it combines traditionally conservative economics (or economic “liberty”) with socially liberal beliefs. Not only do they fail to stand for this when it would coincide with their supposed small government beliefs (like not supporting the government trying to get all up in women’s uteruses), but they also fail to stand up for easy slam-dunks with increasing social support where it would separate them from traditional conservative beliefs.

Like gay rights. It should be a no-brainer for libertarians who want to take advantage of the fact that conservatism is looking about as palatable as mämmi. Gay rights are starting to earn a majority of social support, thus it wouldn’t be all that outside the bigoted normal, but it would generate a whole bunch of media noise about “how this brand of conservatism is more liberal”. Marketing-wise it’s the easiest lay-up in history. It’s easier to do the right thing than doing certain people’s mothers. And yet, they can’t help it, because at their hearts, libertarians are the same small-minded idiots as the conservative movements that spawned it, or rather…

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• We really need to trumpet ignorant bigotry as an important part of the dialogue for reasons that aren’t because we’re homophobes, like… oh, how it made Martin Luther King Jr a better martyr… Ok, bad example, how about how it forced Jackie Robinson to suffer endless bullshit with a smile on his face lest he make it impossible for any other black athlete to cross over… er… you need to “go slow”?

So yeah, small-minded idiots, passing up the opportunity of a lifetime with the historic coming out of first openly gay American team sports athlete, Jason Collins, by throwing all their support behind… some asshole on ESPN ranting like a cartoon villain about the perfidy of dem queers and what they’re doing to the soil.

Great job there, libertarians, way to stay ahead of the curve.

You have probably heard the news that mediocre but long-lasting NBA backup center Jason Collins

Yeah, I don’t think you’re allowed to damn with faint praise an athlete when you played the easy layup by knocking yourself out on the bottom of the hoop.

today became the first active professional men’s team sports player to come out as gay. Read his Sports Illustrated essay if you haven’t.

See, for instance, I would strongly agree with this. You should read his essay if you haven’t, because sports has always been a deeply homophobic space saddled with a lot of unnecessary toxic masculinity baggage. Solving that problem requires athletes to be brave and not only come out after they’ve long left the sport, but while they are still playing. Only that way will younger athletes feel safe coming out and not think that they’re sacrificing their only chance at a big paycheck by doing so. And it’s also worth reading, because it’s worth it to remember how brave this is in the context of other athletes coming out in other team sports historically being treated very poorly. Take Justin Fashanu who was the only English football player to come out as gay and ended up killing himself at least in part because of the hatred and homophobia other players, coaches, and fans showed him. Or Graeme Le Saux who endured constant homophobic bullying by fans and players despite being straight and married simply because he liked “girly” hobbies like antique collecting. While there are also positive stories like Gro Hammerseng and Katja Nyberg the gold medal winning lesbian Norwegian handball couple, that’s not exactly the dominant narrative hanging over gay athletes deciding whether or not to come out.

And if the libertarians were half as good at marketing as they want to be, their response would simply be “liberals strongly agree with libertarian article on social justice”.

Since then, commentary from his fellow basketball players, from politicians (including President Barack Obama), and from journalists has been overwhelmingly positive (just click on Deadspin and scroll down).

For now. Which is really good and comforting. Coming out shouldn’t always be an invitation for unnecessary pain and suffering. Often times in the first wave, it turns out that way and certainly those of us who have come out as one form of queer or another have our set of scars from the practice.

But the point of going through this rigmarole is to make a world where the majority of coming out stories are met with support either hesitant or enthusiastic. That Jason Collins, in this first wave of responses, is mostly meeting positive responses is good. It will help him the first time a team owner decides to treat him like shit or a teammate comes cussing at him or visiting fans somewhere start a homophobic chant when he comes on. And it will hopefully help make a world where those people who try to start shit are treated as the small-minded bullies they are.

One of the few exceptions has been ESPN commentator Chris Broussard, who said:

Case in point. For all this “enthusiastic support”, there have still been a number of small-minded bigots having public meltdowns over the no-duh announcement that yeah, gays exist in sports, same as anywhere else. And you can see the nuclear meltdown and resulting cleanup of such, not only in the impressively ignorant rant by employed by ESPN commentator, Chris Broussard, but also in the vast number of right-wing articles doing passive-aggressive “why can’t we treat every single Christian athlete as big news to take the spotlight off the icky gays” whines.

So let’s hear the rant that (spoiler warning) prominent libertarian and Jimmy Olsen-lookalike Matt Welch will defend as “an important part of the dialogue” that we’d be poorer for leaving out.

If you’re openly living that type of lifestyle, then the Bible says you know them by their fruits. It says that, you know, that’s a sin. If you’re openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just homosexuality, whatever it may be, I believe that’s walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ. So I would not characterize that person as a Christian because I don’t think the Bible would characterize them as a Christian.

Wah! Mommy! Wah! I wanna impose my narrow-minded cherry-picking vision of Christianity on everyone else and use that to throw out people I find icky for totally not bigoted reasons as well as try and passively argue that only my type of people should be playing this secular ball game. And I want to do this despite being a FUCKING BOBBLE HEAD employed by ESPN to essentially go “losing team should have shown more hustle”.

Seriously, what errant brain fart made this meat head think “gosh, what everyone needs right now are my ignorant as fuck ideas about comparative religion”? And when people are calling out the ignorance of something that was said on an American sports analysis show on ESPN, that’s saying a fuckton. And it would be saying that even if this wasn’t a tired, hackneyed rehash of Evangelical talking points they’ve been recycling for the last 30 years.

Broussard is predictably getting beaten to a rhetoric pulp on Twitter.

Oh, is Broussard getting “beaten to a rhetoric pulp” through the historically awe-inspiring medium of Twitter?

One second, let me play the world’s tinniest fucking violin for him.

Sorry, in a world where Jason Collins is taking a large risk of being actually physically beaten and certainly will end up being fouled harder by certain bigots in the sport and where people who have stood up for basic rights have been stalked and harassed through twitter to the point where they can’t even speak up for themselves anymore, I seem to find my empathy bag completely empty of fucks to give to a man having to deal with minor backlash from saying something intensely dehumanizing and legitimately fucked up and ignorant.

And while I think today is a wonderful, watershed day for people (especially the artist formerly known as Ron Artest) to live as open and free as they wanna be,

Leaving aside the savior comma, there’s just so much fail here in this little piece, that there’s almost nothing left to salvage before it completes its suicide run. Where even to start? Well, there’s the Prince joke, because that’s sure as fuck topical and shows how down libertarians are down with the kids, yo. There’s also the sad little homophobe dig at Metta World Peace (it is now my life-ambition to eventually become as “fuck what the world thinks” as this man). Yes, cause see Jason Collins coming out is really a watershed moment for Metta World Peace to be “as open and free” as he wants to be, IYKWISAIKYD. And fuck the claim to innocence on that phrasing. Metta World Peace shows up to press conferences in a Cookie Monster shirt because he’s a World Class defender and he doesn’t give a fuck. Jason Collins coming out is barely a blip in that guy’s life. And here’s the proof of that.

If it’s a watershed moment for anyone other than the sport, Jason Collins, the fans, and future and current gay NBA players, it’s probably John Amaechi, who was the first NBA player to come out during retirement and has been waiting for a current player to come out for awhile. On that note, I love this quote by him: “Right now there are still people with great power in positions of leadership within politics, within business, who behave like 5-year-olds being touched by a girl for the first time when they talk about gay stuff”. Ha!

I agree with the New York Post editorial Robert George here:

A self-described libertarian ignoring the opportunity to live up to their claims of social liberalism and instead quoting the likes of the New York fucking Post instead? One second, let me take a moment to fake the appropriate amount of surprise.

Oh noes, how could it be that libertarians would be poorly disguised social conservatives who predominantly use conservative news sources for their information?!?

And that’ll be 50 cents… plus postage.

Chris Broussard spoke what more than a few players feel. If such comments aren’t expressed, a real conversation can’t be had.

Yes, we couldn’t possibly have a real conversation about the allowance of the aggrieved minority to finally have a moment to speak about their life experiences if we didn’t include the most ignorant and tired of rehashes of the dominant group’s attempt to enforce conformity.

How in the world could we have a “real conversation” if we allowed the minority group to speak, for once, on their own behalf and from a position of actual knowledge on the subject? And if we actually listened to their life experiences instead of rushing once again towards the eventual minimization of the historic impact and rehashing of old bigotries?

IT’S UNPOSSIBLE!!!!!

One of the fascinating and valuable thing about Jackie Robinson’s 1964 book about baseball desegregation and civil rights,

A “fascinating” and “valuable” thing about Jackie Robinson from the papered over “Segregation Forever” movement… Oh this is going to be a treat.

which I wrote about two weeks ago, was that baseball’s pioneer gave space in his oral history for whites who didn’t agree with the federal civil rights push that Robinson was fighting for.

Probably because it was 1964 and a black man speaking frankly on his own about the incredible amount of bullshit without having to continue to bow and scrape to the ignorant white assholes of the time might as well have been a guy in a dashiki cap waving around a machine gun.

Here, for example, is shortstop-turned redass manager Alvin Dark:

I feel that too many people are trying to solve the Southerners’ problems before they solve their own problems in the North. In Chicago, in New York and other cities where they’re having racial problems—if these problems were solved by the Northerners or people from the West who come down South, if they would take care of their own problems first and let the Southerners work it out I know they would work it out, because there are a lot of people in the South that feel that everyone’s a human being, a son of God, if they are Christians, all born equally. I feel that right now it’s being handled a bit too fast. [...] Being a Christian, I feel that this will be solved one day in the South. But they’re rushing it a little bit too quick right now.

Yes, if we had just left those poor Southerners alone, instead of harrying and hurrying them with our unreasonable requests (and what were we doing trying to fix the South when the North wasn’t yet impeccably perfect), then they totally would have gotten around to giving African-Americans full rights one of these centuries.

I mean, sure, they didn’t even begin to work on the issue on their own in the 100 years after the end of the Civil War and instead spent all that time trying to reinstitute all the legal and illegal barriers they could thrust in front of civil rights in order to try and replace as much of the inequality of the Slavery system as they could (and even after they were forced, have spent the last 50 years trying to expand their racist ass system to the rest of America). But hey, they really would have gotten to it if we’d just respected “state’s rights” enough. Honest! And if you can’t believe in Southern Honor, what can you believe in? Except ghosts and the Easter Bunny.

Now, there is no doubt that Jackie Robinson vehemently disagreed with this go-slow sentiment,

Obligatory Nina Simone reference.

but he also understood that you can’t always persuade fence-sitters through a two-handed chest-shove.*

Is that? Is that an actual footnote? Oh how wonderful, let us explore that bounding cul-de-sac next. And yeah, if you knew fuck-all about Jackie Robinson’s story (and why would you bring him up if you didn’t know fuck-all about him, oh wait, conservative, never mind), you’d know the reason he couldn’t “persuade with a chest-shove” is because he had his fucking hands tied by the “first minority problem”. That is the first X person has to be preternaturally nice, inoffensive, mellow, and a living refutation of every negative stereotype held against that minority group lest the nervous bigoted dominant majority have a freak out and decide that any X minority member that comes after can never be given the opportunity because “oh, it went so badly the first time” or “we were right, they really are all (insert stereotype here)” (it’s one of the big reasons that Obama is so mealy-mouthed and moderate and so careful not to live up to the angry or stupid black stereotypes). And one of the big things about pretty much all notes about Jackie Robinson’s story point out how much that demand weighed on his soul in terms of having to swallow some pretty vicious bigotry with a smile on his face so as not to look “bad tempered”. But hey, reality has a liberal bias and all that.
Now onward, footnote soldiers!

* Interestingly, the same year Robinson’s book was published, Alvin Dark was widely accused of being racist after criticizing his largely minority San Francisco Giants team for making “dumb” plays.

The bigoted Southerner demanding that those uppity black people just needed to wait forever for their rights was accused of bigotry the same year? Gosh, how could that be?

According to this article published by the Society for American Baseball Research, the alleged racist had an important black friend:

Wait… seriously? “Alleged” racist? He was defending the Segregation South and arguing that “things were being too rushed” after a fucking century of stonewalling. I think by any post-Civil Rights Act perspective on his position, or hell, even contemporary perspective we can absolutely conclude that he was racist as shit.

But hey, given that libertarians are the mantle bearers of segregation its pretty obvious why Matt Welch would be hesitant to call segregationists anything more than “alleged” racists (hint, hint, dog whistle about how uppity blacks make up accusations of racism to “smear” totally not-racist honest conservatives).

Well, in his slight defense, the article writer he cites also was fast to bury the accuracy of the notice of racism at the time, but seeing as how he quotes a fucking hagiography (in a hagiography, someone could strangle a puppy on live tv and it would be written about as a “controversial moment” where an “alleged attack took place” but luckily prominent canine once said something positive about him), I’m not tempted to cut him (Dark or Welch) on their transparent racism.

Jackie Robinson quickly rushed to Dark’s defense. The two had been friends since their playing days, and Robinson told the New York Times that he had “known Dark for many years, and my relationships with him have always been exceptional. I have found him to be a gentleman, and above all, unbiased. Our relationship has not only been on the baseball field but off it. We played golf together.”

As noted, hagiographies.

All right, this footnote explored, let’s jump to the next argument on why we need to focus on what ignorant bigots say (but not in a way that actually examines and pushes back bigotry and treats it like a part of the conversation, no no, that’s “blocking an important voice out of the conversation”. Because if it’s conservative it must remain on its own and unfought as the only thing mentioned on the subject otherwise WAH! Silencing debate! FREE SPEECH! WAH!).

And sometimes engaging with the I’m not ready to go that far just yet crowd

That might be the most exceptionally elaborate euphemism for “bigoted disingenuous fuck” I have encountered in my life.

I know I’ve harped on this a lot this post, but it’s worth noting not only that libertarians are the ideological successor to the Segregation movement, but that they are FUCKING TERRIBLE about hiding it! For fuck’s sake, if libertarians gave even one single fuck on actually appearing even vaguely liberal, it would be simplicity itself to condemn an era in American history so universally acknowledged as racist that if all the people who claimed to be on one side or the other actually were, segregation would have been physically impossible. And yet here’s Matt Welch playing mealy mouthed about how… misunderstood those poor gentle beasts were.

brings out the best in activists. See, for example, Martin Luther King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.“

…I…

Okay, I’m having difficulty picking which outraged response, so we’re breaking it up into 3 possible alternative timelines.

Timeline 1: It’s worth noting that that his link doesn’t actually go to MLK’s famous work, but rather a “Reason” article which basically manages to somehow combine shit-talking MLK with straight-up stealing the rhetorical power of his legacy to argue that libertarians are the inheritors to his legacy. Ah, rich white entitled douchebags stealing the hard work of black activists. Will that ever get old? …Please Bob let that get fucking old soon.

That’s how it could have happened. But how about this?

Timeline 2: “brings out the best in activists”…? I suppose it’s the natural conclusion of the douchey form of devil’s advocate (nah, nah, minority group, our constantly shifting bullshit needling of your basic humanity is just us helping you be a better arguer when you encounter real bigots, but the fact that you are occasionally losing your temper would seem to show that your argument couldn’t have been all that accurate in the first place, because naturally that’s how philosophy works) that libertarians tend to specialize in. Really all those bigots MLK and other black civil rights activists at the time faced (also worth noting how much white douchebags try and make a historic movement into one or two people because it’s much easier to exploit or dismiss one person rather than many) were just trying to help out those poor activists and make them a better form of activist capable of producing much more useful texts for future douchebags to steal. Again, I have to point out that even when they are vaguely trying to say MLK was awesome, they’re still doing their best to try and make segregation seem vaguely noble.

But here’s how it actually happened.

Timeline 3: Ignore the other blips in the multiverse. Let’s get right down to the fucking heart of the matter. MLK was beaten, arrested, and finally shot in the fucking head before reaching the age of 40. All for standing up for something a handful of decades ago that we all try and pretend we all supported as a no duh today. To take that risk of standing up for what was right, for the basic humanity of one’s people, often comes with that penalty. And when it isn’t, it often comes with a harder life. Those who go first, those who speak loudest, those who speak most eloquently often paint a giant target on their chest and have to resolve that. It isn’t even remotely right nor just that activists should have to face police harassment, righteous imprisonment, hateful dehumanization, job discrimination, bigoted arguments, cultural hate, familial abandonment, and/or FUCKING MURDER, because of who they be and what they stand for.

Those bigots weren’t trying to “make MLK a better activist” and they didn’t. MLK had the capacity to speak on behalf of his people’s suffering regardless of whether they were suffering and if allowed he could have had a long life separate from having to fight for what we finally recognize as a “no duh”. What those bigots were trying to do was shut him up. Though the terrorism they put him and others through to try and prevent them bringing their voices into the conversation was swift, horrifying and was definitely too much for some to take that risk.

Minority groups shouldn’t have to go through hell, every time, out of some misguided duty to the overprivileged wankers in society who just want a neat aemotional story they can borrow and stitch from later. And the petty bullshit they face doesn’t need to be focused on and given “attention”, because a) it’s not an actual argument, it’s a terrorism tactic designed to make being brave and moving society forward something that is seen as ALWAYS punished and b) it’s already the dominant conversation. No one’s listening to Jason Collins and going “gosh, I wonder if petty bigots are going to be assholes about this”. We know they will and the reason Jason and others have to stand up is because those passive threats against whoever takes that risk are the only thing we ever hear until someone does. I doubt Jason Collins will meet the same end as MLK, but that history for those who are brave exists and colors and breeds fear.

Because that’s the intention. To make minority groups so scared that they dare not call attention to themselves. And to make allies so scared that they dare not publicly support them if they do. Leaving every one of those activists feeling alone and harassed and trying to push through all reasonableness inside of them for the sake of doing the right thing.

Now then, Taintweasel, what else you got?

Jason Collins in his essay from today talked about how former NBA great Tim Hardaway had come around from being a rhetorical gay-basher to a strong supporter of gay rights. The country is changing fast, and while many of us are yelling faster!, it’s important to recognize that a lot of people feel uncomfortable about it all. Better to have that conversation out loud, than let it fester.

Hey, we’re on your side, gay people! We just think that the country is being changed way too fast into one that actually recognizes you as full human beings and allows you full participation in society without constant harassment and we’re thinking that might make the bigots uncomfortable and you know how they get when you drag them out of their comfort zone, HINT HINT. Hey now! We weren’t making any threats or passive-aggressively supporting a system of terrorism and bigotry designed to slow down long delayed civil rights that then uses that discrimination to justify the bigotry, we’re just saying you’re taking a risk being this “fast”.

And we’re just so concerned that this “quickness” might be shutting out all the bigoted backlash that we just don’t feel is being focused on quite enough in this particular exact moment and thus might accidentally give people the wrong idea that you are a human being and coming out and being visibly your community and speaking your story is something right and proper. And we just want to make sure that impulse is curbed before people get dangerous ideas.

But remember, everyone, despite our not-very-high-pitched dog-whistles and our fawning sympathy for segregationists, libertarians are really quite socially liberal and it’s only our ever-present love for liberty that drives us to constantly support parties (and people and movements and laws and…) that hate.

So if we continue the baseball notation for all three strikeouts performed we get… oh… ohhhhhh. Awkward.

Frank Louis, The Latest We’ll Let America be Renewed to is 18th Century:
A new twist to the “three strikes and you’re out” policy: the agenda to make criminals out of law-abiding citizens

Yes.

That is in fact the real title from the article. Just in case there was a tiny little spark of hope left in you that dared to believe that what I was offering today was anything other than the sweaty drippings off Alex Jones’s conspiratorial ball sack.

Now, even then, there might be a small little ball of hope still working in you going “sure it may be crazy, but hey, maybe it is a belated acknowledgment of the way the over-expansion of the prison industrial complex has begun inconveniencing even white middle class members in its abuses” like an injured puppy trying to lick its wounds.

Let me bash that poor puppy’s brains out on the sharp rocks of reality.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Ooh be scared! They’re going to throw you in prison just for owning a gun, being a dick to gay people, or buying a house you can’t afford! Sure, not a single one of those things is even remotely illegal on its own much less in any way equivalent to actual real people who have been sucked up into permanent imprisonment because of bullshit “tough on crimes” laws, but still, we want to borrow their suffering (while acknowledging exactly zero of said suffering) in order to make our myopic whining seem principled!

And in case that stubborn ember of hope hasn’t yet been fully snuffed, it’s worth noting that those reductions of his “strikes” is me being generous.

Now, my dear sex idols, I mean readers (I said readers), let’s continue on now that you have been properly reduced to the cold soulless husks our corporate masters most desire (your employers are more than welcome, and if you have none, I’m ordered to tell you to get a job even though you’ve been desperately trying).

You’ve undoubtedly heard the expression “three strikes and you’re out” before- in baseball of course. But in the legal world as well when it comes to certain 3rd time offences (most felonies). Third offence and you are in the slammer!

The Three-Strikes Law. Possibly one of the worst manifestations of Republican and Democratic battles to “look tough on crime”. Coming from California, home to one of the worst manifestations of the law, where even misdemeanors (and where certain minor crimes could count for multiple “strikes”) could get you 25 to Life, this unbelievably fucked up and racist as shit law has been our state’s fourth greatest modern shame (fifth if you count the entire LA/Orange County region) right behind Prop 13 and Presidents Nixon and Reagan.

About 25% of current California inmates are in jail on bullshit “third strike” convictions, some for little more than a few minor theft or minor drug possession busts. We’ve had 25-to-life sentences over a single slice of pizza, less than a gram of meth, or a handful of children’s videos. And shock of shocks, it turns out that the system, promised to put away “those vile rapists”* once and for all, has mostly been used on non-violent crime or victimless offenders, especially with regards to the mentally ill, racial minorities, and sexual minorities (largely trans* sex workers).

Indeed the shamelessness of system’s abuses and the way it has entrenched prisons by inventing reasons to become more and more overcrowded when violent crime and crime in general has been decreasing statewide has been one of the central evidence for prison abolition work here.

It has been far too late that we’ve even begun unraveling this tragedy from our state laws by finally requiring that the third crime for a “three strikes” actually be yanno, violent or serious, and be something worth throwing someone behind bars for their entire lives over.

And it’s worth noting that these laws are something that conservatives have long campaigned to make the default law of the land, along with national disenfranchisement of prison inmates.

But hey, why bother bringing any of that up? Certainly Frank Louis doesn’t give a flying fuck!

So, what has happened to make this law easy to turn against average, law obeying citizens of this country?

… We passed it in the first place???

For fuck’s sake, Frank, if you just wanted to use some random bit of ephemera in order to set up your “i’m a badass rebel, abandoned by the system” pose, you could have picked something that isn’t currently being abused to all fuck to make the most minor of repeat criminals into career “felons” who have been robbed of any ability to be productive citizens.

Easy, make us all criminals. Watch out, it is coming to a courtroom near you… and sooner that you might think.

If… If it really was just this. Just Frank belatedly freaking out like the wingnuts did once white people’s junk started having to go through the Rapeocancertron 9000 at airports, (You know, shock and surprise that their many successes in stripping away their own rights would actually strip away their own rights) I would already have all the excuse needed to go on an epic rant.

But as we’ll shortly see, he’s not even freaking out about anything that’s fucking illegal yet. He’s having a pre-emptive temper tantrum about his own addle-minded fears of how things he does (besides the meth intake and child abuse) could be considered illegal unless BE SCARED, BE SCARED! And I don’t think that even with that giant gap in time between now and his feared future space society, he’d even consider just… abandoning the fucked up and abusive laws before they can be used against middle-class white “law-abiding” citizens. It’s like that parody of the henchmen death scenes in Austin Powers where the guy halfway across the room can’t dodge out of the way of the slow-moving steamroller. But infinitely more depressing and dated.

Strike One: so you bought a house in 2005 or so. Because you didn’t believe in the NINJA Loans, you put your life savings into it as the down payment.

Your entire life savings as just the down payment on a home? Unless you get a reasonable mortgage or are one of the majority of Americans whose life savings are for utter shit, that is a pretty financially bad decision right there. And I mean, it’s also worth noting that it wasn’t exactly the “liberal” side of the equation that was feeding that whole bubble in the first place. Not to mention-

Wait. NINJA Loans?!? Why would you ever turn those down?!? I would steal your house to secure one of those!

Now you’re trying to retire and the house is worth less than you owe.

Sorry, I know that there have been a number of legitimate tragedies caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. And it’s worth noting that perennial wingnut-punching-bags Occupy Wall Street have been one of the few organizations actually working to alleviate the fallout from those.

But I also grew up in Suburban Hell during the growth of the Housing Bubble and met the exact type of douchebag that Frank wants to view as the only possible victim. The fuckers who gleefully propagated the Housing Bubble by treating fucking HOUSES as “safe investment opportunities” that would only “go up in price” and got burned with all the people they fucked over when the scam collapsed on them.

Yeah, turns out treating a house like a fucking “retirement portfolio” while far too many go without basic shelter was a dumb fucking idea (oh hey, something else Occupy is trying to alleviate). But of course the same reasons I have difficulty mustering sympathy for those particular douchebag “speculators” is exactly the same reason that assholes like Frank view them as the only sympathetic victims of the crisis.

No problem, don’t retire… ever (if you have that option), work till you die.

And we’re supposed to pretend that this hasn’t been the conservative “solution” to the retirement problem for a long fucking time, because…? For fuck’s sake, they’ve been hard-selling privatizing social security for nearly a decade now simply because it’s one of the few pools of money that isn’t currently in their rigged casinos. But I guess, this is somehow our fault now, because reasons.

Also, not to belabor a minor point, but… where the fuck is even the approximation of a crime in this? Oh no, you bought a house you can’t afford and are forced to accept foreclosure and bankruptcy. It’s fucking tragic and financially crippling (not going to argue otherwise), but it’s not like we’ve got debtor’s prisons any more (though the right has certainly been hard at work trying to bring them back).

Either way, your financial life is destroyed. Foreclosure, perhaps bankruptcy awaits you as you approach your golden years.

Ah, there’s the belated acknowledgment of all that. I was wondering if he would even bother.

A big judgment is wht awaits you in my crystal ball.

…?

The fuck does that mean?!?

Typo aside, how does this even begin to relate to the subject at hand? It’s like he knew ahead of time that his second two “strikes” were even dumber, and wanted something vaguely sympathetic to blunt criticism but forgot to even bother connecting it to the framing topic.

I mean, let’s try and follow the logic. I guess, being financially ruined in the Brave New World “might as well be a crime” in the eyes of conservatives, but… Actually, given that conservatives view being poor as a crime in and of itself, I probably shouldn’t have been that surprised by this ending.

Strike Two: So you believe in the Bible. You think that it is wrong to be gay, immoral even. Even more so, you are morally opposed to gay marriage. You want to continue teaching your children and grandchildren (great grand children too???) the same traditional Christian values you grew up with.

Speaking of stupidity, we get this bit of self-victimization pablum. Oh noes! Being anti-gay is no longer the majority opinion of the nation and now majority-appeasing moderates aren’t as willing to stand in solidarity with you as you continue to champion an increasingly unpopular position you only hold because your religious leaders thought it would be good for their pew numbers a couple of decades ago. Truly no one else has ever felt such cruel and violent oppression.

Sure, there isn’t yet national protections for all queer people to be employed and secure shelter and even in locales with said protections, perceptions of “visible queerness” are still used to discriminate in hiring, internal promotion, and continued employment, but hey, I’m sure the fact that people might look at you askance when you rant about how you’re going to teach your great grand children how to hate them faggots from your nursing home bed is much more emotionally draining than having your humanity devalued to the point where your employer is willing to drive you to suicide over risking being sued over their patently illegal behavior.

Bitter? Moi? How could you suggest such a thing? I have only the deepest sympathies for what Fuckwad Frank is going through. In fact, the way the er… things are now illegal… er… Actually, sorry, which track were you trying to divert this Fail Train to again?

The ones that are now considered “hate speech.”

Holy fuck, Canada took us over and no one told me?!? I’m sorry everyone, but I need to run out right now and secure me some of that actually functional health care system. The automatic post software can take over until I get back.

Initializing

(Curse word) (Patronizing use of writer’s first name), (Overly-descriptive description of feces) (Big word) (Overused joke) (Elipses) HURGAGURDA *Smoke*

And I’m back**. Turns out that we don’t actually have Canadian Overlords, so this is either about some nightmarish future where Canuckistan conquers us with mad curling skills or it’s yet another example of conservatives using another country’s sensible laws to try and claim oppression in a country where we won’t even press charges if you engineer a genocide in another country, much less if you create a climate where huge amounts of a minority class are driven to suicide or murdered in hate crimes because of what you “preach” as “religion”.

Tough choice, but I think I’m going to go with the dystopia where we’re all ruled over by a goalie-masked Wayne Gretsky. It’s more sci-fi!

Say you own a bed and breakfast or small inn, perhaps you are a wedding photographer or maybe a baker.

See, you can tell that the Christianist fucks are the real oppressed group in all of this, because they keep turning to the same 4 or 5 “examples” of their oppression which were all bigots who were not allowed to use public funds to selectively practice their bigotry any more, but were in no other way stopped from being complete and utter dicks.

I mean, if they were faking it, they’d probably like invent a day out of the year where you just list all the people in your community who have been horrifically murdered for being who they are or something suspicious like that.

And not to belabor the point, but again, it seems like you were so eager to jump into the Lion’s Den and show off your Daniel skills, that you seem to have forgotten to even pretend to connect it to your half-arsed premise. So again, how the fuck is this illegal or soon to be illegal again?

You can’t refuse to celebrate this event, despite your religious convictions. Go ahead, turn the business down.

Yes, truly in the Obama Marxist gulags of the future, everyone will be forced to attend gay weddings and if they don’t look suitably cheerful or, GOD FORBID, reject a sexual advance from the Best Person (Political Correctness Oder Tod!), they are instantly ignited with glitter bombs. Such is THE LAW!

There are already people being prosecuted for this very thing in this country and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

And tonight in “Things That Never Happened Outside the Fevered Imaginations of Conservatives” we talk to a Hippo who has learned the secret of flight (apparently you just throw yourself at the ground and miss [Ha! Pre-emptive Douglas Adams reference]).

Just wait until you are told you are “unfit” and are court ordered to stay from your own family because of the “hate” you spew quoting those nasty scriptures.

Sigh… Why do conservatives have to keep taunting us with images of a MUCH better world with their fearful delusions?

Imagine if people trying desperately to train the next generation to hate were actually blocked from passing on those prejudices. If those future queers growing up in ultra-religious communities didn’t have to ride through a gauntlet of learned internalized shame and could just be themselves from a young age. And if those employers didn’t feel it was “their place” to enforce their “moral values” in the workplaces they run so that people could deal with the stress of a major life change without people kicking them while they’re down***. If religious child abuse was treated as it was rather than treated as the only untouchable right outside the right to arm yourself with a small nation’s entire arsenal.

Sigh…

Recently, the hit TV show, “The Bible” was aired.

I’m sorry. I seem to have gotten a bit of a case of whiplash from you switching topics on me without a fucking clutch. Praytell, dear rambling madman, how does this bit of Nielsen trivia relate to any fucking thing you’ve been talking about so far?

I don’t know if you noticed or not but the program started each week with the title “The Bible” followed wirh a statement that read “not yet rated.” Wow, did that catch my eye. When is it going to be rated “R” for violence and hate speech or receive the ESRB Rating of “A” for adults only content? Just wait. Don’t you even think about sharing it with the children. No the president has spoken. He has a way with subtleties in wordings. He has said we have the right to “worship” however we want. He didn’t say we could practice our religious convictions. “Worship” in your church or synagogue or temple (even your mosque) just keep your beliefs to yourself.

…

I think my brain just broke a little bit trying to follow the bouncing ball down the Mountains of Madness. So… a show entirely based in throwing away the reputation of one of the few channels left on television that used to deal at least slightly with reality in order to give you the sloppiest blowjob imaginable and which is kind enough to literally depict Obama as the devil for you is… equal to you being Christian being made illegal because… There isn’t a rating on it (and let’s not even get into the irony of you whining about the complete impossibility of it being rated adults only (as if that would at all effect anything because it’s a fucking TV show on cable) considering that fuckwad Christian pastors are responsible for rating any movie that shows a woman enjoying sex or even the tamest same-sex relationship as adults only)… and that means that somehow blocks you from showing it to kids… on the TV that is in your home and which has no real gatekeepers preventing you from showing it to your kids… Also, apparently Obama is directly responsible for Television content rating systems, because that’s totally a job handled at the top level of the Executive Branch and not at all a task given to the lowest rung in the FCC hierarchy… But hey, it’s probably because he’s the Antichrist anyways (I mean, seriously, have you seen that documentary on the History channel where the Devil looks exactly like him?!?) and sends secret messages that only deranged wanna-be martyrs can see… Also, freedom of religion exists, but doesn’t exist, but only exists in one’s religious services… except that it’s not and even if it was that would somehow be the same as not having religious freedom at all and-

Why does everything smell like copper all of a sudden?

Much being said today about historic events in professional sports. Any Christians going to come out of the closet?

Oh. Suddenly it makes sense. He’s suffering from Oppression Envy and wants to play-act like his dominant oppressive group is equivalent to the minorities whose lives they actively work to make worse because there’s whole picoseconds being given to something other than the lives of rich-to-upper-middle-class white Christian heterosexual males.

And somehow this is worse than actual oppression or actual imprisonment, but not at all because he’s an overprivileged wanker whose never had a real problem in his life, oh no!

And yeah, about those historic events… It might be because they are yanno, historic and occurring in sports where an assumption of heteronormativity has been enforced with brutal bullying, active discrimination, and a dudebro culture that desperately tries and equate the sports with a type of toxic masculinity that looks upon queerness as feminization.

And if Christians were not represented in something, but then were, you bet your ass it would be a news story as well. Like when an all muslim Egyptian National Football squad for the London Olympics was coached by a Coptic Christian, but hey, let’s not let reality get in the way of a good hard pout.

Show me one thread of scientific evidence that in anyway establishes that there is a gay gene… a gay anything. You can’t.

(Evil grin)

I believe any of the 99 links gathered here will satisfy nicely.

And yeah, I think it’s safe to say at this point, he’s completely forgotten what he was trying to argue.

But my free speech and freedom of religion as guaranteed under the constitution have just been tossed down the toilet dare I state this fact!

Which is why you weren’t able to write that complete bit of scientific inaccuracy on the blog you are paid to write for, nor talk about these issues regularly on the weekly radio show you are probably paid more than I’ll ever make to host. By saying this, you are guaranteeing that you will be thrown in a gulag, your picture ripped out of your family photo albums and burned, while former friends three times deny your name.

Truly a horrifying outcome. Even I, discriminated against for simply being who I am and asking direct permission before undergoing anything, see your plight and weep at the injustice exhibited. I will devote all my waking hours to your court case, brother. Solidarity!

Strike Three: So you own a gun or believe in the 2nd amendment.

So you gunned down an entire classroom full of kindergartners… Oh wait, no that would be related to something that would ever have a remote chance of actually being illegal. It’s just the usual “Obama gun’ grab your guns” free marketing for the firearm manufacturing companies.

I guess if all you have to go on is the tired phantoms in your head, you might as well have them trot the circle like all the other doggies.

Going to surrender them? Register them at the $100 each many “lawmakers” are discussing? This is not going away folks.

That is correct.

Tired conspiracy theories regarding even the most threadbare attempts at common sense gun control legislation are never. EVER. going away.

A sadly true statement.

Why aren’t the thousands of gun laws already on the books getting enforced?

Because the NRA works tirelessly to defang the legislation where possible and ensure that easily exploitable loopholes remain open enough to drive a truck through? Because Republicans try and underfund the ATF to the point of starvation because of decades of selling conspiracy theory bullshit to the rubes? Because the right-wing reflexively embraces as hero anyone, and I mean anyone, who violates existing law to stock illegal firearms (see the continued deification of Waco)?

I dunno, fuckstick. Take your pick.

I will tell you, because none of the existing laws accomplish what this new legislation is going to accomplish: Make everyday citizens into criminals.

That is certainly a… pick.

Yes, not enforcing laws… =… being a citizen is now a felony.

Yeah, that’s how… that… works. Yup. It’s not like with the actual three-strikes law whose legacy you’re offensively borrowing for your conspiracy theory pity party, the way it’s actually works is by over-enforcing bad laws like maximum sentence seeking on petty thefts, victimless drug charges, or Vice harassment busts of sex workers. Nope, it’s all not enforcing laws on the books or that aren’t even remotely close to being on the books or are actively banned by the constitution from being on the books. This somehow spells the actual oppression that will throw all the conservatives into the Obama Death Camps before they can discover the Weally Weally Twue Kenyan Birth Certificate.

Three Strikes… You’re Out!

Folks, you keep electing and reelecting thee people. Not me.

Yes, the elusive “they” is electing the people continuing to argue for the expansion of abusive “tough on crime” laws that ill serve the public, the people who propped up the Housing Bubble and caused the Global Financial Collapse, the people who abuse religious freedom laws in order to dictate a “correct way of living” that is punished by discrimination and dehumanization, the people who are preventing gun laws from being enforced…

Hmm, sorry there’s something on your forehead. It looks like it’s a blinking IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION sign.

In fact, fuck the projection and the whiny “I wish I was an oppressed minority so I could be in the moral right” martyr envy. Let’s look at what possible combination of these could lead someone to actually fear running afoul of the Three Strikes Law.

Strike One: Let’s leave aside obvious candidates like stealing your house while not actually being a financial institution or living in a home wherein someone you sublet to once smoked a little pot and didn’t take the bag with them when they left and instead nominate being dinged for “illegal squatting” in your home once you discovered that the bank trying to foreclose on you doesn’t actually have the mortgage they are claiming you forfeited on (by refusing to accept payment or renegotiation on it in order to justify foreclosing).

Strike Two: Well, seeing as how even actively arguing for the violent murder of queers and open discrimination is protected criminally in these United States, there’s really only one way this becomes a strike and it’s a way that’s going to fuck you even with the recent change to the law. And it’s assault, murder, or some other violent crime undertaken to “enforce morality”. Sorry, buddy, but even if you claim that God commanded you to do it, actual hate crimes are still actual hate crimes.

Strike Three: As much as I’d like to include terminal stupidity on the list of felonies and misdemeanors that could apply, the misinterpretation of the 2nd amendment (it’s pretty clearly about actual militias, I.E. the creation of the national guard and yet you fuckers keep arguing it’s clearly about letting every Tom, Dick, and Harry own his own penis-extending arsenal) still remains the most overprotected “right” in the Bill of Rights. Thus like the last one, the only way this ends up applying is if you decide to use your arsenal to strike down the “feminizing agents in our society”.

So yeah, if you really were “law-abidingly” violating these strikes, you would single-handedly be the most deserving person to ever be tried under the Three-Strikes Law and no amount of having a “law-abiding” skin tone and bank balance could possibly save you.

*Yeah, no cookies for guessing if California’s rape conviction rate is dramatically better than any other states or if the percentage of rapists dinged by a three strikes law is at all comparable to what was used to sell the Amendment in the first place. Also, no cookies for guessing if rape in California prisons is a less omnipresent issue than in other state penitentiaries. But hey, it helped build a fuckton more prisons and incarcerate a fuckton of black people, so let’s count it as a win anyways, shall we?

**Like I was never gone at all.

***If you want to ask, let’s just say it’s all going poorly and leave it at that for now.

Apparently conservatives have gotten all their information on how civil prisons work from 80s cartoon villains.

Jan LaRue (not to be confused with LaRouche), American Bloodsport:
Tsarnaev the Fraud

Sigh…

When I first heard about the terrible bombings at the Boston Marathon, I was in the middle of writing a post on some storm in a tea-kettle thing wherein the only objectionable thing seemed to be the only thing no one wanted to talk about in any real depth.

Which admittedly, after the attack, felt a bit cold and hallow. And it didn’t feel right writing about frivolous matters when something so big was in the radar.

At the same time, it was difficult to write about the bombings themselves, because there was little to no real information. I mean sure, there were enough early responses from wingnuts that deserved a good kicking. This piece of work was impressively bad in terms of reflexive “anyone who suspects us just because we have done the last 12 attacks and tend to blow shit up around Tax Day is a vile commie rat” is impressively bad.

But empathy and good judgment demanded waiting until the facts come out.

And the facts are that the bombers, motive yet to be fully determined, turned out to be foreigny, Russian-adjacent, immigrant, muslim types. And my heart just sank straight to the ground. Not just for those victims of the bombings who had their days and some their lives ruined for such ill-defined bullshit reasons. Not just for the immigrant or muslim communities who do not need another hot-head asshole blowing shit up when the dominant population has treated them so terribly for so long after every time something like this happens. But also, sad to say, for the quality of right-wing noise we’re sure to be drowning in for the next couple of months/years.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, the right-wingers have already been desperate for something, anything to distract from incidents like Sandy Hook or how the vast majority of terrorist attacks in America come from white conservatives punching down on minority groups (especially women and/or queers) or perceived enemies (such as the government) and this is like fucking Christmas for them. The only thing that would make them perversely happier would be if the killers were also a queer female-identified feminist couple who worked as personal abortion doctors for Obama’s secret Kenyan family.

So, rejoice and repent Sadly Noians, because this is going to be the caliber of articles we’re going to be inundated with for a long long while.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Wait. An immigrant muslim committed this attack? Well, dust off the trucks to Arkham and revoke that citizenship. Because what’s the point of having illegal prison camps and a complete revoking of basic human rights unless it can be the default fate for anyone muslimy who commits an act of terrorist violence.

Unwritten but nonetheless accurate follow-up: “What’s that, you say? Should the same fate befall white people who commit terrorist acts? Kssh. Sorry, can’t hear you. Kssh. Going through a tunnel. Oh, and by the way, those people are obviously heroes being persecuted by the liberal media and shouldn’t even be so much as investigated.”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be tried by a military commission at Guantanamo Bay rather than in U.S. federal court on charges related to the Boston Marathon bombing. Naturalized American citizenship obtained by fraud is revocable.

As I noted in the shorter, it’s just straight up reflexive at this point. What? He’s mulsimy? Find an excuse to throw him in Arkham… I mean Guantanamo.

I mean, yes, I get that the torture and abuse, and the never having a chance to ever leave and having an excuse to abuse innocent people who happen to share a religion is the point of this reflex, but do they ever realize how batshit this sounds to someone with a conscience?

For fuck’s sake, Tsarnaev was caught on film carrying one of the backpacks used in the explosion, was involved in several murders and major felonies while trying to avoid capture, was identified by one of the bombing victims, and has pretty much fessed up to committing the crime while in custody. He’s going to prison. For the rest of his life. There’s no fucking reason to hide from due process like you’re scared he’s going to use his heat rays to melt the judge presiding and then bust out of the Court using his latent telekinetic abilities. If this was any more open and shut, it’d be the literal book that the Federal Government will be throwing at him.

There is Supreme Court precedent for revoking naturalized citizenship based on swearing a false oath of allegiance. See Knauer v. United States (1946); Perez v. Brownell (“Of course, naturalization unlawfully procured can be set aside.”); and Fedorenko v. United States.

Moreover, during WWII, a German soldier who claimed naturalized U.S. citizenship but had gone back to Germany changed into civilian clothes after landing on U.S. soil from a German submarine with the intent of engaging in espionage and sabotage. The Supreme Court held in Ex Parte Quirin, that his claim of American citizenship and the right to trial in civil court was irrelevant to his confinement in a military brig as an unlawful belligerent in violation of the rules of war.

Back in the day, The New York Times opined that a military tribunal was the fitting venue for the Americans charged with conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. And so they were.

Because we revoked due process in questionable circumstances in the past involving public freakouts and concurrent or recently ended brutal wars, we must always repeat those lapses into the future. Because what’s the point of a democracy if we can’t just straight up suspend the rule of law and institute kangaroo courts every time we’re the slightest bit scared that an open-and-shut case won’t go our way.

Because that’s a great long-term strategy that has never been abused- oh, wait!

So far, the Obama administration hasn’t announced when or where charges will be filed. The odds are that it will be a prolonged and costly civil trial in federal court with threats and disruptions to the city where a civil trial is held.

I wonder… what will be the costs of our indefinite illegal prison in Cuba over the next infinity and a half years? Especially if we decide to tacitly make it our “anybody muslim” prison. Or how much the civil suits for basic upholding of civil rights, international suits for failure to abide by war crime protocol? Or the damage in material benefits caused by our lowered status because of such terrible practices of regularly revoking the rule of law for reasons of being brown?

Cause somehow I think it outweighs one fucking open-and-shut trial that will last a week at best and the slightly increased security just in case the zero of fuckwads that stood behind these assholes decides to… do something… I guess?

But hey, since we’re on the topic of law and wasted money, I’m glad you’re worried about it too, because I’ve been noticing how much government money we are wasting finding any and all excuses to throw brown people in prison for huge prison sentences for victimless crimes like drug possession, made-up bullshit, or minor misdemeanors like stealing $20 worth of diapers adding up under things like the Three Strikes Law. Maybe we can finally bridge the gap and work, both right and left together on reducing our financial waste on- Oh, what’s that? You’re going through another tunnel? Fan-fucking-tastic.

Seven months after becoming a U.S. citizen on Sept. 11, 2012, Tsarnaev faces charges of committing terrorist acts against “his” country, in addition to murder, mayhem, and numerous other felonies.

Yes, like any number of right-wing terrorist we’ve encountered in the last two decades. Fuckers like Eric Rudolph, David Koresh, and Timothy McVeigh all committed terrorist acts against their country. Any number of fucks have committed terrorist acts against certain members of their country and many in addition to murder, abuse, torture, rape, and other felonies. But the main difference between them and Tsarnaev in the eyes of the right-wing is that those terrorists were white and Christian.

Are we to believe that it was after swearing his oath of “true faith and allegiance to the United States of America” not one year ago, that “Dzhokhar the Innocent” was brainwashed and provoked by his older brother, Tamerlan, into murdering, maiming and terrorizing fellow Americans?

We don’t know what the fuck Dzokhar’s motive was in this whole thing and why he helped his brother out yet. It’s one of the big reasons it’s taken so long to get any definite reasons or information about the attack in general. I imagine it will come out hopefully soon as the feds continue to interrogate him.

Hey, you know what would force him to provide his rationale for the attack and help shed some light on his involvement? Putting him through a trial for his crimes and seeing what his defense is.

More likely, the bombing was planned prior to Tsarnaev becoming a “citizen.” He sought the privileges of citizenship to have an advantage in the event that he was captured and prosecuted.

Yes, he was clearly planning this bombing for years. That’s why there was so much information about their plans in their home and why law enforcement was already tipped off about a possible bombing attempt involving Boston long before the incident, but it just slipped through the cracks…

Or it was a more spur of the moment thing based on who knows what and maybe we should take advantage of the rule of law in order to find out more information about what our black box of a bomber thought he was doing and why.

… Oh wait, silly me. You just want to feed into arguments that immigrants should be treated as suspicious until proven otherwise in the same way that last paragraph you were trying to insinuate that there’s some massive pro-Tsarnaev community making excuses for him by expecting the rule of law to play itself out in order to demonize anyone who thinks that the other Amendments besides the 2nd one are kinda important too.

On that note, I notice you laying the defenses early in case it turns out that one of the triggering factors in Tsarnaev’s attack was the way immigrants are treated like enemy combatants waiting to happen. Stay classy there, Janet.

Both Mother Jones.com and Forbes.com report that Tsarnaev maintained the Twitter account identified as “J_star.” Consider his anti-American tweets prior to taking the oath of citizenship:

I wonder… How cold would the modern age have been for conservatives without Twitter? It’s like it’s personally made for modern conservatism. From the tight character limit that makes it difficult to do anything other than recite talking points to the way it makes complex dialogue nearly impossible to the way it makes it easy to sic your followers on other users you hate to the way it allows you to grab random bad seeming snippets whose context is almost impossible to discern, it’s like their horrifying horrifying wet dream come true.

Just seven months before becoming naturalized Jahar @J_tsar posted on March 14, 2012, “a decade in America and I want out.” There aren’t any posts indicating a change of heart.

Seven months before becoming naturalized, he had already spent a decade in America. So it took over ten years for him to finally finish jumping through the hoops and he did so as one of the lucky ones coming from a European country.

Yeah, I don’t see how that hellish and dehumanizing process could at all have led him to growing bitter and angry about the whole ordeal.

Fuck, I’ve lived here my whole damn life and I want fucking out of our broken fucking system and the way it chews anyone different up and spits them back out. It doesn’t mean I’m going to start blowing up shit.

And before we continue, you know what’s especially sad about this example? That it’s completely unnecessary. Most non-crazy right-wingers are pretty much on board with “yup, he certainly is a terrorist fuck”. It’s not like everyone’s nervously on the fence waiting for someone to go “but wait! There’s a single slightly bitter tweet from a long time ago that anyone in a depressed state could have written.” to break out the torches and pitchforks.

But I guess, it wouldn’t be a right-wing post without them tripping over their own arguments and trying to present their case in the most counter-intuitive straight-up wrong way they could.

Ten days before swearing his “allegiance” to the U.S., Jahar @J_tsar tweeted on Sept. 1, 2012 came out as a “truther”: “Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job, I mean I guess [f***] the facts y’all are some real #patriots #gethip.

So was Alex Jones, but I didn’t see you blanching away from him when he was helping your fellow fuckheads at American Birther sell Obama birth certificate conspiracy theories.

Do you have anything fucking real to say?

Seven months after swearing allegiance to the United States, Tsarnaev lies in a Boston hospital with bullet holes from a gunfight with police who pulled him from a boat in a backyard where he was hiding. Eyewitnesses and videotapes link his cowardly terrorist acts from the bullets on Friday to the bombs in Boston on Monday.

Thank you.

Wow, that’s actually rather good. Accurate facts, no rambling shortcut to conspiracy or tweet-picking lane. In fact, it’s so reasonable that I’m left wondering when the next shoe will dr-

As usual, we’re hearing the liberal victimization meme that 19-year-old Tsarnaev, who drove a car over his brother, is just a regular American kid led astray while grieving over injustice in his homeland of Chechnya, and should be afforded all of the rights of citizenship.

And there it is.

Okay, Jan, who?

Who is trading this “victimization meme” about Tsarnaev. Who is arguing that he’s some innocent victim of the system who surely couldn’t be held responsible for the bombing?

What’s that, you say? No one, is it?

Oh wait, you’re just trying to argue that anyone that says American citizens are afforded the same Constitutional rights as any other American citizen is arguing for Tsarnaev to go free. Because you’re a cowardly shit who can’t even bother to stand behind a “I want to live in a dictatorship that brutally oppresses minority groups I don’t like under a different set of laws than that given dominant group members” argument even when they are making it.

Yeah, Tsarnaev gets his constitutional right to appear in court, just like the many and varied right-wing terrorists, vile mass-shooters, and serial killers we’ve tried through courts without incident. We didn’t fret about Charles Manson getting his due process. Nor about Scott Roeder. Fuck, the only people we’ve had recently arguing that being an American citizen meant not having to suffer the indignity of going to court and trying to prove your innocence were the fucks trying to defend George Zimmerman.

But slap on a connection to conservative Islamic fuckwittery and suddenly it’s a national freakout.

Oh, and on a side-note, if you have so little faith in the American Justice system that you expect a high-profile murderer involved in an open-and-shut terrorist attack to walk from a court tried in the city he tried to terrorize, then buddy, we need to fucking scrap what we call an American Justice System because it’s so broken we might as well start from fucking scratch.

Tsarnaev should be confined and interrogated in Gitmo as an illegal enemy combatant. His confinement should be defended against a writ of habeas corpus on that basis along with a complaint to revoke his fraudulent citizenship.

Rend the meat from his bones. Seed his homeland’s farms with salt. Flood the Earth and set fire to the sky. Make of him an example that no human shall ever survive. Only in this way shall we be protected from the vengeful terrorism Gods.

Jan LaRue is a Senior Legal Analyst for the American Civil Rights Union.

ACRU… ACLU… I see what you did there.

Well, I’m shocked, shocked to discover that greater Wingnutistan has latched on to the Boston bombings as an opportunity to find their favorite liberal bogeymen hiding behind the explosions. Who would have thought?

Of course, you don’t have to be the fastest shooting wingnut in the butthurt corral to point your fingers at immigrants and immigration and all that. Hell, they were going to do that even if the bombers’ parents had immigrated to the United States on the May-fucking-flower itself. I mean, even if the perpetrators were whiter than Tagg Romney, then that just goes to prove that swarthy Middle Easterners are bound to be even worse if we let them in. I mean, if a real American could do that just imagine what a devil-worshiping foreigner would be able to do!

Of course, you can always count on America’s Shittiest Website™ to take any normal right-wing talking point and give it that special little twist, that slight whiff of eliminationism, that makes them so special. Let’s see that in action by paying a little visit to Stanley Kurtz, shown above in his profile picture on ChristianMingle.com. Stanley isn’t just worried about keeping the foreigners and immigrants out in the wake of the bombings. No, the bombings have him all worried about the ones that are already here and who pose an existential threat to the American way of life because they speak multiple languages fluently, because they like soccer more than baseball, because they dress funny and because they listen to scary music with funny instruments and weird ululations that sound like, at least to patriotic ears, cattle fucking in a crowded parking lot.

Thanks to the rise of multiculturalism and bilingualism in the United States, our assimilation system now suffers from the same flaws as its European counterpart. The proposed immigration bill does little to fix this, and if anything aggravates an already critical situation. Without fixing our system of patriotic assimilation first …, a path to citizenship will surely do more harm than good.

(And you thought I was joking about Stanley being afraid of people who spoke more than one language!)

Not surprisingly, Stanley isn’t letting us in on his secret plan to assimilate all the furinners already here, although I suspect it goes beyond doling out jail sentences for people speaking anything other than English in public. Probably he’s got in mind reeducation camps where Muslims and Buddhists are forced to watch “Leave It To Beaver,” “Father Knows Best,” and the “700 Club.”

The number of immigrants who might someday turn into terrorists is small. Yet it only takes a few to cause trouble.

You know, the number of right-wing evangelicals who might someday bomb abortion clinics or gay bars is also quite small, but, as Stanley says, it only takes a few to cause trouble. Perhaps right-wing evangelicals need to be assimilated better as well although, oddly, Stanley doesn’t seem to advocate that. I do think, however, that re-education and assimilation camps where right-wing evangelicals are required to watch “The New Normal,” to go to the gym, to eat sushi and to learn how to make a bone-dry martini might be way more fun! What do you think?

Larry Klayman: I blame Obama for letting the terrorists blow up that fertilizer plant in Texas.

Judie Brown: I blame text messaging and iPads for euthanasia.

Chris Adamo: I blame the left for the Boston Marathon bombings.

Lloyd Marcus: I blame the media for not pointing out that the Boston bombings were probably the work of left-wing extremists.

Tabitha Korol: I blame the Irish Teacher’s Union for turning St. Patrick into a Muslim.

Fuck the photoshop. I want this image forever linked to Robert Johnson’s lame attempts at post hoc rationalization.

Robert Johnson, Business Insider Humanity Outsider:
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GITMO STRIKE: Detainees Are Treated Absurdly Well

…

We go on and on here about the sad truism that is “IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION” here at Sadly, No! Because unfortunately IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION with so many right-wing arguments, freak-outs, and accusations thrown out at liberals. And that sad reality is rarely ever more true when it comes to the conservative fetish object of “Personal Responsibility”. “Personal Responsibility” is the conservative one stop response to pretty much any and all discrimination and bigotry in the world.

Oh, are you poor and starving on the streets because rich people are hogging all the money and have actively opposed the notion of social safety nets? Welp, should have had some “Personal Responsibility” and magicked up a high paying job from your colon. Oh, are you queer and being harassed for it? Welp, maybe you should have thought about “Personal Responsibility” before you started shoving your differences in people’s faces. Oh, are you a woman and you’ve been raped? Welp, you definitely should have shown some “Personal Responsibility” before going to a place that contained at least one rapist while living in a rape culture that actively and passively condones it… I mean, something about short skirts and being a whore, I dunno.

And for all they love the word (and only the word) when they are trying to dodge their way out of empathy or actually having to pretend that the suffering and deaths of “undesirables” isn’t the fucking point, there is nothing they actually hate accepting more in substance.

Conservatives hate taking actual personal responsibility for their successes. Every kid gunned down by their proud successes in making the 2nd Amendment such a third rail that no one dares even pass obvious gun control measures. Every back-alley abortion chop shop that’s allowed to endure and crop up because the conservatives have been blowing up and murdering real abortion doctors by the handfuls. Every economy tanked into the toilet because of their fetishistic love of how libertarian reforms make the rich richer. Every massive disaster made worse because poor responses to Anthropic Climate Change have had dire consequences to world weather patterns.

They hate getting the credit for these deliberate successes and constantly try and throw the blame on anyone else they can or just try and deny the consequences of their policy away.

And that has never been more true than the hesitancy in which conservatives approach their eternal monument to their greatest successes. That being our permanent illegal prison in Guantanamo Bay. Not only did we kidnap any Ahmed, Bettina, and Muhammad we could roust off the streets and accuse of a crime, ripping them away from their families and disappearing them for years and then ritually torturing them with no promise of release. But we then turned them into a public badge of our war crimes, practically daring foreign nations to try and call us out on our shit as we straight up took their citizens as well into our hell hole. And then once the smoke had cleared and we all realized that there was no way in Hell we’d be able to keep these people legally and it was time to fess up and release our prisoners. Conservatives got another bright idea and decided it wanted to burn liberals for “releasing terrorists” if they followed the law, thus ending up with a situation where we all have a not-so-secret secret prison filled with illegal detainees in a permanent torture camp that will never be closed because Congress is too frightened of bad press from bad-faith conservative assholes to do the right thing.

And so conservatives, thanks to all these successes, are left with a permanent monument to how far America has fallen in public regard and why it has deserved to do so and whose fault that squarely is.

So, left with no other choice other than to admit their fuckups and let go of some pressure to ensure their mistakes are cleaned up with only a minimum of painful fallout, conservatives turn to one of their only two responses to the rewards of their policy decisions:

1) Blaming liberals for it

or

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• 2) Do I really even need to say it? It was the verbatim in his fucking POST TITLE for fuck’s sake. Sigh. All right: Ignore your lying eyes, Gitmo detainees are treated absurdly well in their illegal permanent imprisonment where they are kept on mere suspicion of crimes that the American government knows it cannot win a real criminal case on (because of all the torture) because of an absurd assumption that muslimy people are comic-book supervillains like Doctor Doom.

Which yeah, let’s go back to that post title for a second. They’re not just being treated “well” or “surprisingly well” or even “better than you’d expect”. Nope, they’re being treated “absurdly well”. I mean, it’s absurd how kindly we are treating our permanent disappeared uncitizens, ripped away from their families, regularly tortured, many of whom lacking any official “charge” before receiving this permanent life sentence imprisoned by idiots too weak to actually stand up for what’s right. Fuck, I know if I was to be disappeared in the middle of the night, I would want to end up in the lovely bootheels of American masters than in the state prisons of any of those dictators we are obviously better than.

It’s such a lovely euphemism for what they actually mean. That they are being treated “absurdly well” because in the conservative mind, the only “just” way to treat anyone who is guilty of being suspiciously muslim is to shoot them in the back of the head in front of their weeping families after nuking all their neighbors and friends. And by lovely I mean disturbing.

And on that cheerful note, let’s go on a dainty stroll for the many varied tropical fruits that await.

The latest Guantanamo Bay hunger strike is working as planned.

Insidious hunger strikers! Like that evil vile Gandhi fellow! Cruelly suffering unto themselves in direct assault to their righteous overlords! What a cruel and underhanded trick!

…And you know what the saddest part is? Pretty much every mouthpiece for a brutal oppressive power ever referring to a prisoner of said oppressive power engaging in a hunger strike actually really does condemn their prisoners in exactly the same way including Gandhi. Lots of treatment of self-destruction as a sinister attack, accusing it of being a media stunt, of working to increase terrorist violence against the oppressive power, etc… Every last one including Gandhi himself.

With 31 of 166 detainees acknowledged as hunger strikers, international media reports are hailing this as a desperate protest by mistreated men.

I mean, honestly, desperate? Why the hell would those liberal socialist commie, American-hating bastard liars ever see the detainees as desperate and mistreated? The only explanation is international anti-American sentiments and-

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interviewed public defender Carlos Warner, who claims that his clients face “dire” conditions ever since a new commander took over Guantanamo and the White House abandoned plans to close the detention center.

Oh… right… that.

Well… uh… er… you’re the poopyhead!

I mean, it’s not like being literally abandoned by your oppressors in a hellish illegal camp might dishearten victims who have lost all hopes to see their families again because their jailers are too cowardly to even fully acknowledge their existence.

Or that your bosses literally turning a blind eye to your permanent torture camp might give the green light to all sorts of abusive and authoritarian behavior on behalf of jail commanders. Especially if they are stuck in a dead-end assignment that none of your superiors will ever acknowledge fully and you’re awash in cultural messages that no one will give a fuck what you do to these unpeople who are probably all terrorists directly responsible for 9/11 anyways.

I mean, that’s like… madness… or… something… I’ll stop talking now.

Military spokesman Navy Capt. Robert Durand tells a different story, however, maintaining that the strike is an “orchestrated event intended to garner media attention,” according to the New York Times.

Oh, if only dear readers, if only.

Yes, we’re going to “he said”/”she said” with the oppressive authority itself. Because abusive authorities never ever lie about their mistreatment of prisoners or accuse those who try and draw attention to their reality of just “trying to get media attention” as if that would somehow be a bad thing to an oppressive authority that really was going above and beyond like they claim.

So which is the real story? When I visited Guantanamo earlier this month, it was hard not to see things from the military’s point of view.

Because you were invited specifically by the military as a deliberate sympathetic voice given a cherry-picked tour of a facility that straight up blocks most genuine aid-workers who would have any experience whatsoever touring state prisons of oppressive authorities.

I mean, fuck, did you really think that the Gitmo military authority wouldn’t be scrubbing up and putting on their best face when allowing a very rare media presence? That this isn’t standard practice by any abusive incarceration facility whether it be the torture prison of some petty dictator or a poorly run American prison being investigated for complaints.

That you managed to fall for it hook line and sinker and then publicly continue to reference this on your paid writing gig for the Business Insider demonstrates that you are sadly probably well suited for a job of repeating what businesses would like the general public to hear with little to no critical thinking or self-awareness.

Take the incident that started the strikes: When a guard allegedly defiled a Koran during cell inspections. The base has clear protocols in place to prevent such an incident, with all inspections performed by a Muslim interpreter under the supervision of trained guards and under the direction of the on-base cultural advisor, a fifty-something Iraqi named Zak.

Zak tells me he doubts there was any breach of protocol — something the military officially denies as well.

It’s also hard to believe that guards, who already gripe about the difficulty of their assignment, would do anything that would make their lives tougher.

Dear Bob, where to begin with this rusty smear of santorum.

Um… let’s see, there’s the fact that the CNN article he directly links which is already pretty well aligned with American interests and perspectives to begin with notes that the detainees were actually willing to give up the right to own Korans entirely if it would only end the abusive searching in general. You know, because abusive and deliberately humiliating searches occurring at all hours, being incredibly invasive, and often physically or sexually abusive is sadly a common staple of American prisons.

There’s the fact that also in said article was a note that the protests were mostly about the denial of sources of heat in the winter and the direct impact that was having on their health and safety and were based entirely on the new commander not giving a shit about what they were previously allowed because “what the fuck, they are here forever anyways”.

There’s the fact that 2/3s of the Gitmo detainees are not only innocent by way of illegal torture or uncharged and indefinitely detained on bullshit, but full on, actually cleared of charges and ready to transfer innocent who have been forever locked in a hellhole and mistreated because while we’re ready to admit that they were innocent at the time. We, and any nation we would send them to, are now terrified that 10 years of torture and illegal detention might elicit a few anti-American sentiments and “terrorist” sympathies in their once-innocent victims.

And then we get into the “meat” of the fail as it were. The fact that he’s honestly arguing that prison guards would never ever abuse their charges if the rules say they shouldn’t. Because they would fear “making their jobs harder”. I mean… do I even need to counter this with all the “not approved” abuse that state and federal prison guards regularly engage in and the wealth of scholarship regarding it? Or get into the way that our illegal bullshit prisons only have the minimum of oversight that they do because of the sheer level of outright torture and other war crimes that were being committed there? Or mention that there’s only a “Zak” because Gitmo jailers in particular have been ripping up Korans as if they were the Hulk’s pants?

And that’s just the surface layers of the unblinking unquestioning bullshitting for an authority!

Zak demonstrated why Koran inspections are important, taking a hardcover Koran, flipping it upside down, and showing the wide opening under the spine.

Last time they stopped Koran searches, he explains, several detainees stashed medication in these tunnels of paper and then took the medication all at once in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Suicide is another effective way of getting media attention, and there remains a rumor among detainees that three simultaneous suicides would force the Pentagon to close Guantanamo — despite three suicides already happening in 2006.

In short, it’s not at all clear that the Koran incident even happened, and the strikers’ demand that Koran searches be stopped is impossible.

!?

The hebbitywhatthefuck?

I-I… Scuse, me, one sec, clearing cache of all critical thinking and basic level empathy and let’s try again.

Okay, so let’s forget the many many failures of… everything here, I’ll leave that to you all.

Let’s instead just follow the oppressive authority’s “logic” as if it wasn’t the half-farted post-hoc rationalization for the abusive system in place.

So, removing basic humanity and let’s go.

MOUTHPIECE MCSADJUSTIFICATION: Okay, so we need to search through the Korans. Super important. Why? Well, obviously, they might try to sneak things inside of it. What? Like shivs or bombs or super spy acid that will allow them to break their chains and go on a rampage of revenge ending in a dramatic helicopter escape and lots of pyrotechnics? No, not really. We’re mostly filled with grocers we yanked off the street one day because someone else we tortured threw out random names to make us stop. I mean, they might sneak in medicines… What? Medicine doesn’t sound all that bad and it actually seems to be pretty important to have considering that we’ve had a terrible history of getting life-saving medicine into the hands of our illegal detainees? Um, well they could swallow a lot of it and try to kill themselves… How would that be a security issue for the camp? Well, it could make the illegal prison look bad and bring media attention! Which is bad because… we don’t do anything bad anymore and besides we definitely need to look through Korans!

ROBERT JOHNSON: Clearly, given this impeccable chain of logic, we can only conclude that the Gitmo prisoners are Lying McLiartons and it is patently impossible that anyone in a location that has destroyed MANY Korans could have done it yet again once they were smug in the knowledge that their abused prisoners have literally no recourse of freedom at this point.

And… hurk… Sorry, I think the remnants of whatever remains of my black and tarnished soul just tried to violently expel itself from my body just trying to follow that.

As for the claim that detainees are mistreated, that also does not jibe with what I saw in Guantanamo. While indefinite detainment without trial may be morally offensive

Abort/Retry/FAIL Robert Johnson!

Anytime you find yourself going “blah deblah may be morally offensive”?

That’s your conscience desperately trying to cluebat you upside the head so hard you won’t be able to spell your name for a week.

Yes, it “may be morally offensive”. Because it’s a gross abuse of human rights, an international war crime, a grievous violation of the spirit of the law envisioned by our Bill of Rights, and one of the worst things we can do to someone.

We are literally taking random people and putting them in jail FOREVER without even the pretense of justice, without the pretense of a fair trial and refusing to fix our fuck ups when the regime changed because “it might make us look bad and besides they probably hate us now”. By choosing this action we actually managed to surpass many infamous oppressive systems in our cruelty to illegal prisoners. Apartheid South Africa? Colonial Era Britain? Yeah, exactly.

All the trappings and johnny-come-lately “comforts” that we’ve drizzled in front of the cameras and the locked out aid workers and lawyers is so much chocolate sauce on a mound of shit for all it matters.

Not that this obvious context seems to matter for Robert Johnson’s desperate “no, no, conservatives you are right to hate the most obvious victims of your obscene war crimes” bullshittery.

the overriding philosophy on base these days is to treat the detainees really well. Compliant detainees enjoy a selection of six balanced meals, 25 cable TV channels, classes, and an array of electronic gadgetry and entertainment. I’m talking about a Nintendo DS for every compliant detainee, plus Playstation 3 access with a library full of video games.

Conditions at Guantanamo are absurdly good for the simple reason of getting the media to leave them alone. This is the White House’s best option for making the controversy go away, since closing the detention center has proven impossible. It’s not a perfect option, seeing that Guantanamo is insanely expensive compared to every prison in the world, but that’s where we are.

A)Bullshit on the same crap they try and pull when claiming that our home-grown abusive hellhole prisons are somehow “luxury resorts for criminals”

B) Bullshit on “we’re a happy fun factory now that everyone is pretending we don’t exist and we no longer give a fuck about even pretending we’re seeking to end our continued war crimes”.

C) Even if true, how would that even begin to matter? They are denied their homes, their families, their lives. And they are kept in perpetual indefinite and extremely illegal bondage because our country doesn’t want to admit they ever existed, that they were ever wronged, or are at all owed a life debt (not to mention immediate freedom to whatever country they want and earnest apologies) by our government for all they have suffered. Even if their lives were an endless parade of fine cuisine, luxury entertainment, ivy league education, and constant sexual relief from the attractive appropriately-gendered person(s) of their choice, how the fuck would it at all mean fuck all to that central flaw?!? How would it all make up for the fact that the US’s stated purpose with regards to them is to “make them go away” from being discussed as an issue.

Maybe this might be one of the main reasons that the Gitmo detainees have so given up on life that they see death as a welcome release to their daily hell and why the Gitmo staff have given up on even trying to come up with bullshit to defend why they are working so hard to keep them alive against their will anymore.

But nice to see that even when conservatives are talking about the most obvious and regrettable victims of their policies, they still can’t resist painting them as some over-entitled fat cats sucking at the public teat in “undeserving” fashion.

But hey, as I noted up above, IT’S ALWAYS fucking PROJECTION!

It continues on with some more obvious self-serving bullshit, so I’ll skip straight ahead to the final stream of piss on the beaten and humiliated illegal prisoner.

Detainees read the news, talk to family at home, and have cable, they see what everyone else does. When they saw Obama failed to mention the camp in his inaugural address, they noticed. The last bit of hope maintained by many began to fade. They needed control and attention to get back in the news.

“They use our religion as a shield and a weapon,” Zak tells me.

Yes, a series of tragic figures, aware of their imprisoning country’s apathy to them, were made aware that there is not even the slim promise of hope. That they are truly abandoned to a life of hell because no one seems to care enough to risk angering the violent bully that is the US and stand up for the powerless. They were going to be forgotten and beaten and lost and possibly even just “dealt with” and there is literally nothing they can do to stop it.

The only power left to them was the ability to choose their own end and try and bring some final attention to their plight and what harm happened to them as they prepare to exist this world in final protest in the exact way that Gandhi had been prepared to do.

And the oppressive authority’s “see we have one of the sand niggers too” mouthpiece’s only response to this is “WHAT ABOUT THE OPPRESSORZ!” How poor America and Gitmo are being “hurt” by having media attention brought to the detainees’ suffering. How poor America is being victimized by these self-destructive victims daring to “shield” themselves from abuse and use their “weapon” of self-mutilation to hurt America… in public opinion.

Because somehow the prisoners forced America to abuse them and illegally lock them up without trial or possibility of trial. Because somehow the prisoners forced America to torture them and turn America’s name into an international synonym for unrepentant war criminal. Because somehow the prisoners are forcing America to refuse to release them. Or make them look bad to the handful of media that even pretends to care. Because somehow they are forcing America to continue to mistreat them and drive them to a point where suicide appears preferable to continued pain.

This is somehow all their fault.

Because if we actually dared acknowledge whose fault it really is, some personal responsibility might lightly splash on the conservatives who have done everything in their power to destroy these various people’s lives.

And nothing, literally nothing is too underhanded in service to preventing that.

As Robert Johnson aptly demonstrates here.

Okay, I get that white people can be liberals and I get that white people can be poor, but are you absolutely sure white people can’t be cavemen because I’ve really been wanting to reuse this photoshop for awhile.

Joan Walsh, Salon:
How to talk about white people

In this gig, we read a LOT of complete and utter assholes, pure scum of the Earth types, some of whom, I am convinced, are actively trying to be worse people out of some twisted obligation to “pissing off the liberals”. As such, it can be worthwhile to take a break from the National Reviews and American Thinkers of the world and remember that truly mind-numbing stupidity can come from all sorts of sources.

Such as say, a “well-meaning liberal” stepping boldly out and sliding ever forward on the banana peel of unchecked privilege.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Oh holy shit, it just dawned on me that non-white people are starting to gain legitimate power. In response, let me trip painfully over my own privilege and lecture to you inferior darkies how you should still bow ever so deferentially to us white people, otherwise we’ll abandon you immediately and try and burn the bridges we’ve got while they still matter. P.S. Why is it so hard for racial minorities to fully trust white allies?

Oh deary deary me, this is going to get awkward fast.

Discussing America’s soon-to-be newest minority with care and respect, not stereotyping and scorn

As I said, not even out of the tagline and I’m already facepalming just out of sympathy for how badly she’s stepping in it here.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, Joan, talk about reflexive privilege panic. You’re not even remotely a political minority yet, still live in a system that overwhelmingly socially, politically, and economically rewards white skin through discriminatory systems of institutional oppression, and no one’s even thought about oppressing white people and you’re already worried about people treating you like other racial minorities have been treated.

Yeah, sorry, but like with every other time a marginalized group has gained uneasy “equality” gains with a brutally oppressive dominant group, they’ve forgiven and forgotten. And every time, the dominant group still reacted in fear, twitching at every mention of legitimate atrocities as if it was someone yelling “Kill Whitey” at the top of their lungs. In fact, this guilty reflexive twitch on the part of white people whenever racial minorities gain any and all power should be the real definition of “white guilt”.

At least then, it would reference to something that actually fucking happens.

When I wrote “What’s the Matter With White People?” I chose the title for its many meanings. Talking about it during last fall’s election season, when 90 percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were white, however, only one meaning came through: What’s the matter with the GOP, that it has become, essentially, the party of white people?

Because they are a party of racists who are terrified of racial minorities gaining any measure of equality and thus attract white supremacists and casual racists who want to delay equality long enough to enjoy a few more decades of white dominance.

Less attention focused on the flip side of that question: Why were Democrats having a harder time with white voters, and what if anything could they do to change that?

Because of said racists who were terrified blah blah blah, you get the drill. Not really that hard to figure out. Barack Obama got slightly less white votes than normal for a Democrat, because racist white Democrats who couldn’t get over that enough to vote their supposed “consciences” couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the black man.

And nonetheless, the rest of us, the coalition of the various “others” and those white cis straight males who weren’t complete cockbags and thus not so racist as to abandon their “principles” over a melanin-enriched candidate trounced their motherfucking asses. Thus neatly proving that the “conventional pundit” “wisdom” that white men are the only voters that matter was complete horseshit and the days of the Southern Strategy were finally winding to a close.

Oh dear Bob, this is going to come back in a later paragraph whining about how white male voters are still the only voters that matter and Democrats need to abandon talking strongly about racial and gender equality issues sos not to scare the delicate feefees of unreliable assholes, isn’t it?

(glance down the page)

Sonuvabitch. I willen hate being right.

With President Obama embarked on his second term, and Democrats seeing their future in the alliance of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, college-educated women and young people he assembled, I sometimes find myself asking “What’s the matter with white people?” in a different way – as in, “don’t they have a place in this new multiracial coalition?”

…

You’re a racist.

I’m sorry, honey, I know you don’t think so. I know you can point to your shiny I voted sticker for voting for Barack Obama and whatnot, but… yeah, this shit is still racist as shit and betrays some deep fucking issues. Cause see, I and most other liberals, see the sea of diverse bodies that make up Obama’s coalition of supporters and while we may often be disappointed with Obama’s failure to use it, the power we have showed by finally mattering together is something to be optimistic about. When I see that coalition, I think “finally”. “Finally, we might be able to fix this shit, get some equality for those who’ve been so long denied.” Whereas here you are, unable to think of anything other than “eek, will they still let us run everything for our own benefit or will they get all uppity on us”. Now admittedly it’s probably unconscious bigotry rather than the moustache-twirling intentional douchebaggery we so often encounter on this site, but still…

As whites become just one of several American minorities in the near future — brown babies already outnumber white babies in the nation’s nurseries

Yeah, there are a lot of whites thinking nervously about that. A lot of whites literally unable to handle the notion of not being special and not being given special privileges because of the arbitrary nature of their skin color. If only there was a name for them.

– I’ve been thinking more about the ways language can ease our transition to a multiracial America. The paperback version of my book comes out April 16 – you can pre-order it here – and I got to take on a lot of these post-election thoughts in an afterword.

That’s your sales pitch?!?

Hey, everybody, I’m utterly terrified that a minor loss in relative power will be exactly the same as suffering decades upon decades of brutal oppression. Buy my book!?!

Let’s start with one term used occasionally for the Obama alliance: the “coalition of the ascendant,” as the National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein calls it. That’s fine for a journalist, but when used by Democrats it sounds like a snub to white voters: “We’re the future and you’re not.”

…

If “white voters” (and I am punching the air with the intensity of the quote/unquote surrounding that term) are really so rabbit-twitchy that merely talking about minorities having new power feels like its the prelude to Soylent Green, then there is nothing, literally nothing the minority populations could do to keep said “white voters” (~air shredder!~) from bailing right the fuck over to the Republicans at the first chance they can get.

Fortunately for Democrats in general, “white voters” is not even remotely synonymous with all white voters and in fact the number of “white voters” who will be fleeing at any shadow they can rationalize as a “snub” is becoming increasingly irrelevant with each passing year.

So maybe instead of telling minorities to walk on egg shells to keep people who will bail anyways, we can actually celebrate the increase in relative power and hope for long-delayed civil rights and actual conversations about race in America. Y’know, like with white people actually listening to the conversation and learning from it rather than just putting their fingers in their ears and going lalalalala.

Democrats still need white support.

Yup, I was right. I hate being right. So yeah, even as the Republican Party bleeds off everyone who isn’t a hateful bigot and the Southern Strategy enters its Twilight hours much to the consternation of wingnuts everywhere, we still get “concerned liberals” arguing that the only voters that matter are those fucking white people. You know, the braintrust that was one of the few groups to majority vote for the fucking Smiler.

The party did well with Obama at the top of the ticket in 2008 and 2012, but in the midterms of 2010, they received what the president called “a shellacking.” Key members of their coalition stayed home, and that “coalition of decline” – older white voters – renewed its habit of voting en masse, and voting Republican. That could happen again in 2014.

Oh, I’m sorry. Did I say white voters? Obviously I meant to say that old white men are the only voters who matter and get to “count”. Why? Apparently because Joan Walsh is either too ignorant to understand or is deliberately not mentioning the fact that midterms and other off-year elections always see an increase in relative voting power for old white people.

It’s almost like our antiquated voting system rewards people with endless time on their hands giving them greater relative power, especially in off-years where it can feel more worthwhile to give up on hours-long lines than to stick it out.

That’s not going to be fixed by running to the old white men and begging them to love the darkie-loving party, though. It’s going to be fixed the same way as the rest of the problems with the Southern Strategy will be fixed. By waiting for enough old people to die and be replaced with young voters who’ve regularly grown up with at least one differently raced friend and so don’t panic like gazelles at the first sign of motion.

Some Democrats get it. The Center for American Progress just launched the Robert Kennedy Project, to look at strategies designed to pull more white voters into the Obama coalition, post-Obama. And among the chief targets here is the white working class, just as it was for Bobby Kennedy in 1968. The goal is “not just to mobilize the Obama coalition but to expand it,” John Halpin and Ruy Teixiera wrote.

It’s worth noting here that for all the fear-mongering about the darkie hordes getting all abusive. The actual response from Obama and the other Dems, sadly, has been them bending over backwards for white voters. Working hard to fix things that only really help them and leave the rest of us swinging in the wind.

And yet, still Joan Walsh feels all “they’re going to replace us with robots any second”. As they say, “Innnnnnteresting”.

The project will focus mainly on policy, and that’s exciting. I want to focus here on language. Because if they want to widen their coalition in the post-Obama age, Democrats, and all of us, ought to think about how to talk to America’s newest minority with care and respect. Here are three tips:

Yes, how to talk to white people… Um, the same way I’ve been doing so far? Basically a lot of calling my fellow white people out on their privilege when they slip on it and standing up for the dignity of racial minorities everywhere. But otherwise treating them like the human beings they automatically get to be treated as because of the accident of genetics that gave them primarily pan-European ancestry?

How to talk to “white people”, however? Probably 80% more curse words and a good dash of “fuck off honkey”, because any asshole who thinks its at all appropriate as a white person, in the cultural context of centuries of white people dictating to racial minorities how they can talk and act, to spout off with condescending “advice” to racial minorities on how they can babysit them through this difficult time, deserves to get their teeth kicked in until they learn some fucking humility.

Speaking of which…

Don’t assume that whites are Republicans: Politics is at least partly a game of projection. Strong campaigns work hard to create an air of momentum, even inevitability; even struggling campaigns insist their own polls show things are better than Nate Silver says they are. So why did Democrats, in the run-up to the 2012 election, go along with the media contention that their party, and their president, had “a problem with white voters”? As I tried to argue at the time, Obama had a problem with certain groups of white voters.

Although the president lost the white vote by 20 points, those numbers look different when you take out the South. Mitt Romney won a staggering 89 percent of white voters in Mississippi, according to CNN exit polls, and 84 percent in Alabama. But Obama won or tied among white voters in a lot of blue states; you can’t win overwhelmingly white Iowa, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont or even Wisconsin without doing so.

Yes, the president lost married white men and women, but he won a majority of unmarried white women. He tied Romney with young white women 18-29, though he lost young white men this time around. And he won white working-class women in several Rust Belt swing states.

To put it another way: an estimated 93 million whites voted in 2012, and if Obama won almost 40 percent of them, that’s 37.2 million white supporters. The president got a total of 66 million votes, meaning 57 percent of his voters were white. Why risk losing more white voters by stereotyping whites as anti-Obama?

Yeah, my good faith quotient is used up. I guess, we’re not taking a break from the intentional assholes after all.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, this is smug belittling horseshit right here. Now, now, little darkie, you need to remember that not every white person is a Republican. Yeah, bet you didn’t know that with your little dark-skinned brain, did you?

Yeah, no, whitey, sorry, racial minorities are well aware that not every white is a Republican. Just as they are painfully aware that not every racist is a Republican. They didn’t need you to come along and point that out, because it’s not remotely something they’ve been believing.

But let us indeed talk about your fucking assumptions. I.e. that there is some overwhelming brand of white conservative jackasses just waiting to be mischaracterized as a Republican and whose totally non-racist exoduses to the Republican Party will all be the racial minority members faults for daring to breathe too loudly in a non-pre-approved way.

Kind of some high-level victim blaming horseshit there and based in some bizarre ideas of human behavior. Oh, here I am and so very not at all racist too, but oh no, a black person assumed I was a Republican for being white, now I suddenly hate all black people and suddenly very angry about Chappaquidick! Yeah, that sure happens enough times in reality to justify any of the “worries” you’re having here.

Don’t assume that whites are wealthy: In a recent New York Times “Room for Debate” feature on college admissions, writers repeatedly used “white” as a synonym for “wealthy” when discussing the racial impact of legacy policies, which give preference to the children of alumni and thus too often shut out blacks, Latinos and Asians. Indeed, most legacy admissions are white, but they’re a particular shade of white: the affluent. The vast majority of white kids are disadvantaged by legacy admissions, too.

Because clearly the New York Motherfucking Times (now with 20% Douchehat) is truly a sister magazine to Vibe Magazine [DOUBLECHECK] and is not just a fallen star who tends to assume that the only people who matter are rich white socialites and thus tend to universalize their experiences to all sorts of greater populations ALL THE FUCKING TIME!

Fuck is this “advice” condescending as hell. There’s not a racial minority on the planet that actually holds any of these assumptions. They know whites can be liberal. They know whites can be poor. Because unlike whites, they don’t have the option of ignoring that sort of thing. They are steeped in a culture that views white people as the only color of people that matters. They see our lives on nearly all the television shows and movies. And all the public conversations we’re really allowed to have are all about the various permutations of being white. And that’s before we get to the fact that they’ve marched in solidarity and probably are friends with a poor white liberal somewhere, largely because poor white liberals usually end up in majority minority neighborhoods.

But hey, I’m sure that’s something Joan Walsh hasn’t had to think about in her majority white suburb far away from white or black or latin@ poor people.

Don’t assume that whites are racists. Just as social justice-minded people have learned not to generalize about African-Americans, Latinos and Asians, we’ll have to learn the same thing about whites. In my work over the years, I’ve heard “white” used, without a modifier, as a synonym for clueless, out of touch, even racist. Complaining about “white teachers” or “white funders” or, yes, “white voters,” you don’t even have to say what’s the matter with them – it’s enough that they’re white.

Oh really?

Don’t assume that you’re racist?

Okay, white people who are just so concerned about all those racial minorities thinking they are racist.

Why don’t you try NOT BEING FUCKING RACIST.

Actually do the motherfucking work, check your privileges, examine what you’ve inherited from our toxic fucking culture. The next time you get scared seeing a black man approaching you or assume a black mother is a welfare-cheating thief, check yourself, ask yourself why you are feeling that way. Actually do something about your white privilege. Don’t just go, oh, yeah, I guess I have that yaknow, in the abstract, actually deconstruct what you don’t know because of it. What you’ve been able to ignore and how you are tempted to come across and what you’re tempted to blame others for.

And FUCKING LISTEN to racial minorities when they talk about their life experiences or their issues gain prominence. They have been shut out of the fucking debate for centuries and know a fuckton more about you than you do them, so shut up and listen and learn and use that to examine yourself and improve and eventually, one day, hopefully, stop having those inherited racist responses, or at least become enough aware of them to catch yourself when they trigger.

And most importantly of all, the next time, you, “white people” of the world, with your twitchy little Republican voter registration waiting to happen, get worried about those uppity minorities thinking you’re a racist, maybe think for a second before you write a condescending overly privileged incredibly racist dump of fail that pre-emptively blames them for seeing your fucked up actions for what they are.

Cause if white people really want to stop being viewed as racist until proven otherwise? If white people want to be trusted to be strong allies for issues of anti-racism? Then they actually need to walk the walk and prove they can be relied on. Prove they will stand up and fight and always self-improve and listen and not threaten to turn tail and run at the first hard conversation about privilege and power.

In short, white people need to start being legitimate allies instead of living their lives one privilege fail away from pulling a Joan Walsh.

The prostitute lay back and considered her options carefully. And to think she was such a normal girl before the hippie commie brainwashing of (DRAMATIC MUSIC) a liberal-arts education!!!

Eliana Johnson, National Discarded Sprue:
Queer Gardens, Pocahontas, and Prostitutes

It’s almost cute, when you get right down to it. The right-wing’s dual obsessions regarding academia. With all the various faux-intellectual “think-tanks” designed to produce various afactual “studies” to prove their bigoted nonsense, it is clear that the right-wing desperately CRAVES the respectability and gravitas of genuine academic scholarship. But at the same time, it so thoroughly despises academia for its commitments to the pursuit of truth and genuine investigation of the world. Not to mention, academia’s nasty habit of routinely proving various wingnut conspiracy theories so very wrong.

The right-wing, in all it’s anti-intellectual fervor, despises those smarty-pants stuffed-shirts who actually know things about the world, but also wants to be them, have the respect carefully earned by proving oneself repeatedly right. It’s like they actually comprehend on some level that all their various wingnut welfare gigs for various propaganda factories are the real act of undeserved promotion they decry “affirmative action” as and so long for the accolades that come with genuinely earning your position.

They don’t want to do the work or accept the low paychecks that come with said hard work, mind you. Just the accolades, just the respectability. It’s the same reason that so many no-nothing pundits try to sell themselves off as “experts”.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• How dare colleges teach anything other than dead white men! Burn the heretics who admit anyone other than dead white men exist and might have scholarly worth! Burn them!

And today’s offering is all sorts of nexus between those competing desires. The desire for an aura of academic respectability that drives the creation of sad tomes like J-Load’s Liberal Fascism. As well as the pure hatred of universities for daring to poison their artifact childrens’ minds by exposing them to the real world and a chance to be themselves rather than a phantom playacting for their brain-dead parents.

Obviously this massive dissonance will only create scholarly works of the greatest quality.

What Does Bowdoin Teach? — a report released today by the National Association of Scholars (NAS)

The greatest!

Oh man, where do we start?

I guess, we should start with “I wanna be real science too” conservative “think-tank” du jour, the “National Association of Scholars”. The organization is basically a who’s who of other right-wing propaganda mills, what with borrowing “talent” from such luminaries as the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Independent Women’s Forum.

Its job is essentially to spam “studies” like this one harassing various real institutions with accusations of being “anti-education” for ever daring to offer education about anything other than white men or to anything other than white men. Their favorite targets are multiculturalism and Women’s and Ethnic Studies programs, because obviously the only real standard of a well-rounded humanities education is the list of “classics” arbitrarily copied from contemporary English universities by early American universities, because anything made after the 18th century couldn’t possibly hold value to modern society.

The particular… “source” she is citing is a smear-job on Maine liberal-arts college Bowdoin College, largely because it dares to be a high-profiled “liberal-arts college” and the authors are not particularly subtle about hiding their Pavlovian response to the word liberal.

And it’s all one would expect from a right-wing attempt at a scholarly paper, including a sterling grasp of reality.

Like take this excerpt from the article:

One cannot predict how much, if anything, a Bowdoin graduate will know about the philosophy of Aristotle, the plays of Shakespeare, or the Civil War.

Written while decrying:

One course that was ultimately cancelled because of lack of student interest was entitled “Queer Gardens,” a survey of the horticultural achievements of “gay and lesbian gardeners” and a rereading of literary works on gardens from a “queer” perspective.

Yeah… um, leaving aside the obvious, let’s just take a quick jaunt down to the course finder for the Fall 2013 semester for Bowdoin college, shall we? And you might as well leave that open in a new tab as we’ll be coming back to it a lot.

Yes, and we see zero possibility they could learn about the philosophy of Aristotle… you know except for ya know, PHIL 111: Ancient Philosophy, PHIL 145 Truth and Morality, and PHIL 321 Empiricism and Common Sense, not to mention most of the Classics Department. But hey, that’s just a fluke.

What about Shakespeare? That poor dead white man is completely unexplored despite being so very influential to so much English-language literature and… Oh wait, ENG 10 Shakespeare’s Afterlives and ENG 210 Shakespeare’s Comedies and Romances.

Okay, surely the Civil War is the one that got the boot then. I mean, the poor wannabe “big thinker” spent an entire paragraph or two whining about poor Joseph Chamberlain and how his legacy of being the nerdy teacher who used basic tactics to make mincemeat of Conferderate soldiers was undone by a single canceled class on a little-studied interesting subject being offered in a seminar class. Surely that wasn’t all complete bullshit. I’ll just click over and… oh wait, HIST 025 The Civil War in Film, HIST 011 Memoirs and Memory in American History, and HIST 285 Conquests and Heroes. Or if you want to be on the nose, we could just look at the Fall 2012 History Curriculum, specifically 139 The Civil War Era.

But hey, in defense of this work of scholarship, these were really difficult things to find. I had to like… do a google search and everything.

Anyways, we were talking about the brain trust that thought that brain trust was worth citing.

And cite it, she did! Apparently that study’s labia must be coated with dribblings off the Fountain of Youth for how eagerly Eliana Johnson dove in there and polished it off.

The study, authored by NAS president and former Boston University professor and administrator Peter Wood, is the product of 18 months of research and is primarily devoted to answering the question it poses.

18 whole months of thinking about the issue with his brain words. Truly it must have no peers as a scholarly work. Hence why it is found in no peer-reviewed academic journal and instead needs to be self-published by the band of hacks who couldn’t figure out that google might very well disprove their initial assumptions before they even begin.

A social anthropologist by training, Wood refers to his study as a “full-fledged ethnography.”

See! Super academic! It’s like a golden shower of intellectualishyness that will wash away evil liberal-arts colleges and their desires to cover all issues. I mean, it’s not like we can look at the article in question and see how its description as a “ethnography” betrays that if there is any affirmative action going on, it’s in whatever poor institution gave Mr. Wood a degree in Anthropology.

The report documents an increasingly fractured academy that has no common curriculum and in which so-called identity studies take priority over a study of the West. It highlights, for example, the 36 freshmen seminars offered at Bowdoin in the fall of 2012. They are designed to teach writing and critical-thinking skills and to introduce students to the various academic departments.

No, you didn’t just misread that. They really did ignore all the actual curriculum that shows that Bowdoin College has the same sort of classes that most any college carries to instead focus on a small smattering of freshmen composition seminar classes. Why?

Probably because freshman comp seminars tend to focus on more esoteric, less focused on micro-subjects to serve as a deviation from what they’ll usually encounter as part of a “standard education” and therefore help transition the freshman student from a high schooler used to parroting whatever their teacher wants in order to get good grades to a university student able to think critically about the world and the subjects to follow.

It also lends an aspect of choice to the student to make up for the fact that they are required to take a boring composition class.

Some of the subjects are unsurprising: The Korean War, Great Issues in Science, Political Leadership.

And despite all that, they still offer the incoming student the choice to be a boring fuddy-duddy if they are so inclined. So if the class is something “novel” and not indicative of overall university expectations and offers plenty of alternative choices, what’s the issue for the right-wing screech-tank?

Others seem less conducive to critical thinking and fruitful classroom discussion: Queer Gardens, Beyond Pocahontas: Native American Stereotypes; Sexual Life of Colonialism; Modern Western Prostitutes.

Oh right.

You know, I sort of covered the main thrust already in the shorter, so I more want to focus on just how amazingly obvious they are getting in their opposition of literally anything that acknowledges that non-white people, queer people, or women exist and are worth studying. I mean, for fuck’s sake, they are whining about optional freshman seminar classes. OPTIONAL classes daring to cover subjects they don’t personally find engaging.

I mean, we’ve seen some serious lows in right-wingers trying to claim oppression at the hands of the big bad academy before, but this might be the absolute nadir so far.

And fuck, if they weren’t so reflexively against anything that dares mention non-white-men, they might have realized their fatal mistake in citing subjects that sound down-right fascinating.

I mean, queer gardens? As a comp class? That sounds absolutely amazing, especially when compared to my dull freshman comp class analyzing the rhetoric of academic papers (hint, they were all the fucking same, because they were all written in the same academic style). I mean, is it an exploration of garden imagery by queer writers? Comparisons of gardening works and queer works to really test the students’ compositional dexterity? I don’t know, but I really want to know.

And the rest of the subjects sound fascinating too and are even more revealing for the right-wingers to bitch about.

I mean, really, right-wingers? Complaining about a class looking at actual Native life separate from Disney movie notions? Yeah, that doesn’t at all make you look like the anti-Native racists you are. Same with “Sexual Life of Colonialism”. What’s the matter, right-wingers? Scared that someone might note how rape has always been used as a means of keeping marginalized populations down? And the opposition to “Modern Western Prostitutes” is just reflexive fear of acknowledging sex in its nonsensicality. Fuck, “modern western prostitutes” have been used in a fucking HUGE amount of so-called “classic literature”. The “hooker with a heart of gold” trope alone is worth a class or two.

Queer Gardens, an exploration of the work of gay and lesbian gardeners and of “the link between gardens and transgression,”

That sounds amazing, one sec. I need to look this fucker up.

Let’s see, from the “I swear I’m science” screed we get this bit of information:

“Queer Gardens,” which was meant to deal with horticultural observations by gay writers

Which frankly just plain makes sense. Garden imagery was often used as a means for queer authors to explore or talk about their attractions in prose. Especially in the days when it was considered unthinkable for a writer to admit to such attractions. Authors such as Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde all used garden motifs heavily. And studying such coded language and the way those early queer writers inspired more modern queer writers (in much the same way as Shakespeare, who I’m happy to note also admitted to bisexuality in his poetry) is an amazing application of composition that really hammers home the purpose of studying rhetoric and why certain themes and images get reused.

And we can see that when we look at the full course description here at 028 Queer Gardens. Also, apparently reading Emily Dickinson isn’t considered “classicky” enough for the NASties, because… lesbians I guess.

simply “does not teach critical thinking as well as Plato’s Republic,” the report notes;

A) It’s a comp class, not a philosophy class

B) Actual philosophy classes cover Plato all over the place. As do the Classics classes. As does the Classics major if you want to devote yourself to nothing but the deadest of dead white men during your time at Bowdoin.

C) Plato was a gay man in love with his teacher and mentor (Isn’t it fun pointing out how the sacred “straight white men” considered the “greats” so often weren’t entirely straight?). I imagine examining his uses of gardens would have been fascinating.

D) Um, not to knock Philosphy majors or anything (no seriously, my partner is a dual Philosophy/Literature major), but I’ve met enough Freshman Philosophy major assholes in my day to be thoroughly dissuaded of the notion that reading philosophy in and of itself makes you any kind of critical thinker. Hell, some of the most tedious, most disingenuous, and overall intellectually laziest discussions I’ve ever had on certain subjects have come with talking to some terrible “philosophy teaches you all you need to know” asshole wanting to practice their “debate club judo” on me. It’s not all Philosophy majors, hell, it’s not even remotely close to over half, but it’s an annoying enough minority to justify pointing it out here.

E) It’s a comp class. Your argument is like yelling at a Freshman biology class for not bringing up the Cold War.

nor does any subject that has “no canon of works that embody exemplary achievement in the difficult dialogic task of critical thinking.”

Again, I’ll note that the list of authors the seminar was going to cover included Marvell, Lanyer, Pope, Seward, Dickinson, Burnett, Carroll, Sackville-West, Nichols, Jarman, and Pollan.

If some of those names sound familiar, that’s because they’re also names in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Also available in new comic form.

But I guess, works that are considered proper British “classics” are no longer acknowledged as a “worthy canon of works” if you admit that some of those classic authors liked to use their parts in non-approved ways with other similarly gendered people.

The freshmen seminars, and Queer Gardens in particular, illustrate the increasing specialization of academia, which Wood documents statistically. Bowdoin today teaches far fewer survey courses than it did in the 1964–65 academic year, used for the purposes of comparison. As a result, students wind up in courses that presume they have obtained general knowledge in the subject area and mastered basic ideas.

This is also hilarious. The right-wing has been starving and starving higher education for decades now. Dramatically underfunding it, attacking various disciplines as “worthless” and arguing against education in general.

And then they have the unmitigated gall to blame the institutions for having to deal with that loss of money by scaling back on classes, overworking teachers, exploiting adjunct positions, and providing fewer options.

Because apparently in wingnut land, being able to offer less because you have less money is entirely caused by the existence of Gay and Lesbian Studies classes… Actually, given the right-wing penchant for blaming the victim in all cases, I’m betting they actually do blame various X Studies courses for “making us attack higher education and work to defund it”.

The school does not offer a single course in American military, political, diplomatic, or intellectual history.

…Snrk… BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh man, let’s look at our good friend, the Fall 2013 course list. Uh, let’s see we’ve got, GOV 025 Representation, Participation, and Power in American Politics, GOV 027 Political Leadership, GOV 010 The Pursuit of Peace, GOV 160 Introduction to International Relations, GOV 202 The American Presidency… I’m going to be here all day, let’s just leave it as the entire GOV department and leave it at that. Also… GOV 216 Maine Politics… nice! I like to imagine that’s a required course for Government majors.

Again. This is not hard. I used the google machine to go to Bowdoin’s own website and look at their current course listings. I didn’t use some magical wizardry or high-tech sleuthing ability. I’m disproving this literally by using Firefox tabs as I write. And yet, these hacks still want to be treated like “super smart academicians!” PUH-LEEZE!

In some instances, critical thinking is thwarted because the instructor has answered fundamental questions in advance, long before the first day of class, and thereby foreclosed discussion of important alternatives. The report cites as an example the course catalogue for the 2012–13 academic year, which explains that courses in Bowdoin’s Gender and Women’s Studies Department investigate “the experience of women and men in light of the social construction of gender” and how gender has been used “as an institutionalized means of structuring inequality and dominance.”

These courses, the authors conclude, prevent any exploration of possible alternative origins of gender differences and block any meaningful debate over the issue.

Bob damnitt. You’re going to make me break out the multiple answers again, aren’t you?

Sigh, all right.

A) How is it “blocking alternative origins” if it’s exploring the experiences of men and women? It’s acknowledging lived life experiences and using current research and understanding on the subject to show how they fit into the world. Oh right… you’re using “alternative origins” in the same way that creationists use “teach the controversy” and are mad that if some anti-feminist tried pulling some Privilege 101 Fails to “put the uppity feminazi teacher in her place”, he’d get his ass handed to him in a paper bag as said teacher politely pointed out the wealth of genuine scholarship on the subject of how men and women and others are.

B) No, dumkopft, it’s not “thwarting critical thinking” for instructors to have answered fundamental questions in advance, it’s the fucking definition of education. I know wingnuts would greatly appreciate it if every single class just had the teacher going “well, we can’t know anything, because otherwise I’d have the answers in advance, so just go on believing whatever you’ve read in a comic book about how this shit works”, but that’s not what people are going into massive debt to receive. They want to hear from experts on these subjects. People who actually know what they are fucking talking about and have some genuine comprehension of the fundamental findings of their major. That way they can relate what that field has genuinely discovered to the students and thus help make them closer to experts on the subject and ready to join in with the state of the field as it is.

C) Yeah, continuing that. It’s not “foreclosing” “discussion of important alternatives”. It’s not even “closing” “discussion of important alternatives”. Hell, any “important alternative” that’s been discovered and has any academic merit to it will probably be covered in a class on the subject. Anything else is just a distraction intended to interrupt other people’s education with ignorant conjectures. Your biology class doesn’t need to hear John Douchenozzle’s “important alternative” to the lesson on evolution that he heard from a pastor on the radio. They don’t even fully need Dr. I Actually Know What I’m Talking About to thoroughly describe the reams upon reams of data that prove John Douchenozzle an ignorant asshole. They need to learn what the current state of understanding is on the issue and how to approach the evidence that we currently have. And frankly, despite decades of trying to convince the public otherwise, the fields of Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Ethnic Studies, African-American Studies, Asian-American Studies, Latin-American Studies, and so on have genuine scholarship behind them and a lot of conclusions that aren’t just somebody pulling out a fat dookie, but the products of real studies on how the world works.

D) Speaking of which… yeah, gender has been used institutionally to structure inequality and dominance. It’s kind of a no shit before anyone bothered to do the research proving it. Fuck, it’s the sort of thing right-wingers will even admit to having happened in the past when they want to show up their “not-sexist” creds before arguing that nowadays men live under the iron high-heel of Gynofascism. But I guess, that stops happening once they think they’re back in their natural element. Cause you know women automatically being literally the property of their fathers and then husbands (whom the father alone chose) was not at all gender being used to structure inequality when a feminist notices it.

Tom Klingenstein, the chairman of the Claremont Institute, who commissioned and funded the report, says that this approach leads students “to assume that what they are taught is established opinion, that there isn’t any valid alternative, and that only someone morally corrupt or of dubious character could disagree.” In the end, he says, this undermines the school’s efforts to cultivate openness and tolerance. “If you’re not exposed to competing ideas, you’re shortchanged.”

Teach the controversy!

Man did so ride dinosaurs to the stone-mining office!

Fuck, is it just me or are all these “think tanks” starting to blur together with their outright theft of unsuccessful bullshit tactics from each other.

Also, got to love the complete bad faith attempt to exploit liberal tendencies to being fair, open-minded, and tolerant. Hey, you liberals care about that hippie shit, right? Well, why don’t you throw it all away and let our ignorant ass snoops disrupt and silence all your classes with their petty ante harassment about topics that have long since been covered by the field? If you don’t, then you’re not being “open to alternatives” and therefore indoctrinating people.

Fuck, you almost have to pity them for this shit. I mean, do they really think academics, especially academics in fields specifically studying how dominant groups harass and silence minority groups, are really dumb enough to fall for this shit?

There are also at Bowdoin the kinds of people and attitudes you might expect on a progressive campus: a valedictorian elected by popular vote, a culture that enthusiastically promotes sex as long as it is safe and consensual, a student who tells Klingenstein that “it took balls” for him (a conservative) even to show up on campus.

How shocking. Ooh. Um, really? This is your “scandalous” college culture? One where students fuck safely and consensually? Hell, that already puts it above the rape cultures that exist at colleges where conservatives have a stronger presence (such as any place that has a thriving Greek or Rugby With Pads culture… like say Penn State… for example). And ooh, a college that doesn’t really have valedictorians… because valedictorians are a high school thing… and anyone who’s ever seen the inside of a college would know that. And scandal of scandals, shock of shocks, a pompous smear-merchant carefully antagonizing the student body of a college so he could accuse them of being unamerican traitors for daring to go to a school advertised as a “liberal-arts” school (you know, in the same way that NAS tries to play itself off as “liberal” because of the similar use of the term), got MILD-PUSHBACK!

Nooooooooooos! Impossible! Some rude conservative asshole openly dismissing the humanity of the student body at a college got mildly treated like the asshole he is when he went deliberately looking for something, anything he could use to paint himself the victim of anti-conservative oppression?

Truly the worst oppression ANYONE has ever faced in the history of the WORLD! I mean, sure others have faced rape, violence, stalking, having their rights and humanity deliberately removed and any subject studying their lives harassed by petty conservatives who want everyone to remain ignorant of the life experiences of minority group members in order to prevent anything from ever being fixed for them. But hey, a conservative jackass was denied his right to say anything and have no one comment back ever, and that’s 20 Hitlers and a Satangoat powered by 30 more Stalins, right there!

And yeah, as a trans* individual still trying to figure out if I’ve weathered the storm of legitimate trans* discrimination at my job so I can at least remain employed until the season runs out in June, my cup of empathy fucking runneth over for every one of these “I totally was oppressed for being a rich white cis male conservative” bullshit stories and their sick fucking co-opting of the language of oppression to argue for even more silencing of marginalized voices.

The origins of the study lie in a game of golf. In the summer of 2010, Klingenstein hit the links with three others, among them Bowdoin president Barry Mills, whom he had never met. Over the course of 18 holes, Klingenstein shared his disapproval of diversity as it is practiced on many college campuses — by his lights, something used to emphasize ethnic differences at the expense of a common American heritage.

He was surprised to find himself the subject of an unflattering portrayal in Mills’s 2010 convocation address. Though Mills did not identify him by name, Klingenstein recognized himself when the president referred to the “opponent who announce[d] mid-swing, ‘I would never support Bowdoin — you are a ridiculous liberal school that brings all the wrong students to campus for all the wrong reasons.’” Mills told his audience that he had walked off that golf green “in despair and with deep concern.”

…

I want to frame these paragraphs on my wall and make sweet sweet love to them all night.

I… I don’t even know where to begin. It’s such a perfect distillation of everything conservative.

The centrality of a game of golf, the petty revenge against a target specifically chosen because they dared quote the conservative’s words back at them and “like, make it sound bad and stuff”, the desperate need of the conservative to “stick it to a liberal” even when, or rather especially when the perceived liberal is politely tolerating their company, the need to dominate conversations that drives conservatives to assume total ownership over spaces and be dumbstruck when their failure to think of the life experiences of others comes back to bite them, the fucking golf.

It’s just… MWAH!

Mills “badly distorted my point of view,” Klingenstein tells National Review Online.

Offff course he did, poodle. You only ranted for 18 holes straight on the perfidy of his institution and “said some common sense truths” about “ethnic differences”, “American heritage”, and so on, and suddenly he’s out quoting your words exactly and making you look like a complete tool. And you know you couldn’t have been a complete tool because YOU IZ ALWAYS SCHMOTT GUY making oh so clever arguments!

And, damnitt, you were going to be sure to find anything and everything you could to burn his institution as a “ridiculous liberal school that brings all the wrong students to campus for all the wrong reasons” to prove how much of a lie it was!

I mean, for fuck’s sake, shitbeard, did you even think for five seconds about this shit during those “18 months” you were stalking Bowdoir students “researching” your article? That just maybe trying to publish a smear job on how liberal and filled with darkies and queers Bowdoin is might just make Mills’s accurate convocation address look even more accurate. And that bringing up a speech no one, and I mean no one gave a fuck about besides you again just brings it to fresh light and assures it might actually be read by other people who will also have the context of you being a petty and small-minded bully willing to try and destroy institutions all because one person noted something painfully obviously accurate about you? Hmm?

If Mills failed to acknowledge the legitimacy of Klingenstein’s views on the golf course three years ago, What Does Bowdoin Teach? is another call for him to do so.

Yes, I can’t wait for the even longer, even less filled with accurate information follow-up he’ll produce after this “work” is used as the inspiration for the 2013 convocation address.

It sets forth his case in painstaking detail and scholarly prose over 360 pages. “There’s nothing in this that consists of cherry-picking the most outrageous cases,” Wood says.

…

Do I even have to dignify this with a response?

That sentence is so bald-faced it might as well start investing in shady corporations and trying to destroy Superman.

Klingenstein’s immediate goal is for Bowdoin’s leaders to acknowledge that the school’s academic standards are in virtual free fall. He hopes that alumni elsewhere will start to ask, “What’s the case at our school?” If Wood, the anthropologist, is right, the study of transgressive gardens is par for the course.

Well, while you’re hoping for things that aren’t going to fucking happen, you can also wish for a pony that can jump to the moon. Fuck, any “liberal-arts” college worth its tuition fee has been through this song and dance of conservative assholes trying to destroy it through bullshit and lies a million times before.

Because that’s sort of what conservatives do these days. Harass and attempt to destroy anything and everything that acknowledges reality and how it works. Because conservatives have declared war on reality and think that if they are just cruel and abusive enough to anyone who knows better, that the real world will just fold up quietly and go away taking all us minority groups with it and leaving them with their very own rich-white-cis-male asshole utopia.

Sorry to disappoint you dipshits, but that’s never going to happen. We minorities exist and will continue to exist. And furthermore, the real world is getting easier and easier to observe and learn about and spread information about than ever before. The internet makes it easy to disprove horseshit in a fraction of a second and even easier for minority groups to get together and talk and share their experiences.

And you can kick and scream about that and say “Mommy, it’s not fair” and try and disrupt all their meetings with trolling and hissy-fits, but it doesn’t change that reality.

The world is moving on without you. And you can either get on and accept having to earn respectability the hard way…

Or you can remain where you are, old men and their concubines rotting away in a shrinking pool of defectives and the deliberately ignorant, a one-eyed king in a nation of blind-men, while we have our safe consensual queer orgies out here in the two-eyed world.

Ya know… out by the garden…

This was a real ad that Ford commissioned and fairly high level approved. This is a real Ford ad completed concept sketch that got pretty far in the completed ad development process in its ad agency before being proudly leaked to the internet. But the fact that this was seen as acceptable in the first place and seriously proposed as a way to sell motor vehicles is not at all a sign of an increase in sexist backlash against women or anything like that. Or something. All I know is that I should be able to blame MISANDRY for all this somehow.

Carol Sarler, The Daily Burden Upon My Very Soul Mail Online:
Why bosses are right to distrust women who don’t want children… by a VERY outspoken mother (and ex-boss)

… Oh sweet toe-nibbling sub Jesus, that fucking title! Not just any outspoken mother, but a VERY outspoken mother. Sorry, Daily Mail, were you worried that we’d only consider her SLIGHTLY outspoken? Did you think we’d be trudging along and then go “Whot, ho! This scurrilous wench has deceived me! Her condescending ‘concern’ is only PASSABLY outspoken at best!” and you wanted to nip that in the bud early on and assure us that regardless of how she is presented here, she is surely VERY outspoken in general? Well, I for one, am a little put off by the defensiveness shown here. I’m starting to suspect there might have been vocal chord doping involved in this year’s Outspoken Games and I’m-

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• I know you bitches always complain about being denied jobs and advancement because “you little ladies are just going to drop out and have children anyways”. Well, it turns out we’re also willing to discriminate against you for being evil soulless “career women” who lack the fundamental “humanity” to drop out of the boy’s club and retire back to your gilded cages where you belong.

Sorry, I seemed to drift off there a little bit. The Daily Fail is one of those unholy slogs through nightmarish hellscapes and seems to have been specially designed by sadists to personally drive me insane.

For example, today’s “output” from the proud fascists’ condescending fishwrap “marketed for the lower classes”, is part of their special Femail section…KRRRRRRRRRCCCCCCCCHHHHHHH

Sorry, I think my teeth just filed themselves into point sharp spikes as a Pavlovian response. Anyways, we’ve seen various terrible “for women” sections in wingnut media, but this may, BY FAR, be the worst yet. The whole section is festooned in pink (*tik*) with important sections on fashion, food, and babies, because bitchesamirite (*tikgrind*), and based on the sidebar, most of the articles seem to consist of “women you need breed now” (*tikgrindhssss*) articles next to poorly photoshopped bikini photos of famous straight actresses (*tikgrindhssssnap*), because… I think they are a bit confused on their intended message there admittedly. Overall, it’s enough-

Interrupting Your Author’s Mental Exodus:

• Are we actually going to start talking about the article or…

Oh don’t you start on me! I’ll talk about the article when I’m damn well ready!

…

Okay, let’s begin… by talking about Carol Sarler. Carol Sarler is that woman you’ve seen a million times in print media. The professional misogynist who happens to be a woman so all the old white male editors can pretend that “it’s not us who are saying this archaic crap, it’s another woman, therefore blah blah blah, feminism is dead”. The only difference is that Carol Sarler tends to take it the full Dr. Helen in trying desperately to earn her honorary man card so she can escape the horrors of being considered a woman in sexist conservative society. It’d be heartbreaking if she wasn’t such a terrible conspiracy-selling vile excuse for humanity (I’d have written a full post about her post in the final link, but when I attempted it, I blacked out for 5 hours and when I woke up my screen was covered in 12,000 words of eldritch screaming and the word “fuck”).

And so, like every professional misogynist out there, she’s of course taken her various swings at those vile women who dare participate in man’s word by trying to avoid starving to death in the streets. But since she works for racist, British Empire Uber Alles dickweasels, her particular incarnation and obsession is a bit more on those vile white women who refuse their “biological programming” to breed and instead commit themselves to career in the same way that men are pretty much expected to.

But since, that’s still not quite enough pure venom for one post, she does her best to “season it” with little dog-whistles and jabs at the standard conservative bugaboos. For instance:

Much as I like to trumpet the importance of a woman’s right to choose all things at all times,

Ha ha, she really really doesn’t, but like most wingnuts, she hopes that by appropriating cultural ideas that conservatives have publicly lost and trying to twist them to support retrogressive positions, she can somehow make those hideous ideas last longer or otherwise cudgel minority groups into shutting up. You know, like arguing that blacks are the real racists because they don’t let Klansmen join the NAACP?

Oh, hey, you see that comma at the end of that “sentence”. Yeah… I call that a savior comma. Savior commas appear at the end of sentences like a giant question to the author going “are you sure you don’t want to end here safely on this side of the sentence where you won’t quite reveal the maggots that feast upon your mind? Sadly, savior commas are possibly the most ineffectual bunch of punctuation known to man and can only serve to warn those of us continuing on to grab on for dear life.

there’s one choice I simply cannot understand: the choice of an otherwise sane and healthy woman not to have children.

Yes, apparently all of us whorish young women who haven’t yet squeezed a batch of mewling flesh from our uterii and especially those harlots among us who have no intention of ever doing so, are just unthinkable, insane, and diseased specimens.

And just in case, we didn’t quite get the message, she proceeds to mention a number of right-wing scare-groups that we’re less human than in the eyes of people who thought Hitler should have won World War II.

Like:

If a would-be mother is a singleton of 40 who decides to have a baby without a partner, I might wish she’d thought of it sooner and prepared for it better – but I understand.

SINGLE MOTHERS! Those sick, ungrateful, patriarchy-eschewing harlots who dare breed without a man and therefore are single-handedly responsible for all crime everywhere according to The Smiler and others. Also:

If she’s half of a lesbian couple who ‘borrows’ the wherewithal, I might cross my fingers that the child is not teased at school – but I understand.

CUM-BURGLING LESBIANS! She’s willing to “understand” that they exist and may be theoretically human, because, at least they’re not the diseased, possibly asexual creatures known as “the childless”.

Even if she’s a 66-year- old pregnant pensioner, threatening to turn motherhood into a freak show, I might (indeed, I do) think she’s monstrously selfish and dangerously wrong – but again, more or less, I understand.

EVEN POOR PEOPLE AND OLD PEOPLE! Yes, those two unholy groups of hideous twisted villainy! Poor people and their sickening poverty, corrupting the very land around them because such squalor couldn’t possibly have resulted due to institutional neglect and predatory slumlords! Old people and their… oldness, neglecting their youthful looks by daring to get old, and stealing from hard-working bankers by daring to have government-guaranteed incomes that are not going straight to wealthy douchenozzles who couldn’t possibly hope to spend it in their lives*! Mere novice Satanists compared to the galaxy-destroying evils of the Childless!

Yet if she says she hasn’t a shred of maternal feeling in her, moreover, if she says she would prefer to concentrate on her career and that a child would only get in the way of it, then my head might acknowledge her right to do so. But my heart whispers: ‘Lady, you’re weird.’

I’ll totally tolerate them and their temporary “right” to do… something that hasn’t been weird for women to do in the UK in at least 30 years and is these days honestly a bit expected, but that’s only because I fear cold steel would fail to pierce their black, dead hearts.

It was welcome news, therefore, to discover this week that I am not alone.

Huh, seconds after introducing the “savior comma”, we get an example of its marginally more successful cousin, the “savior period”. It knows well enough to close the sentence and lock and bar its gates from the horribleness to come, but sadly, it can do naught but watch in horror as the rest of the paragraph is consumed in flames.

Research conducted over six years shows that far from bosses and colleagues always being suspicious of a working mother, the opposite is becoming true: it is the childless woman who is regarded as cold and odd.

What’s that, you say?

Sexists who cling to excuses about women “leaving their jobs to raise families” to justify sexist discriminatory hiring and promotion policies look down most strongly on the exact groups that disprove their sexist assumptions?

Next you’re going to tell me that employers who believe there are fundamental differences between men and women discriminate most strongly against transgender, genderqueer, and queer individuals who blur the line rather than the living stereotypes who playact upholding them! Or maybe that employers or political parties who believe in the inherent inferiority of other races might hold their vilest hatreds for those minority members who demonstrate their intelligence and competence and thus treat them worse than the token members they hire to make them look less racist! Or maybe that women who speak out against sexism in industries are always treated worse than the women in those industries who make sure to shut up when shit like that happens!

Seriously, this is a more pathetic attempt at dodging accurate accusations of bigotry than even the shit-dance Republicans have been making around immigration of late.

As a result, it is these single-track careerists who are increasingly likely to be vilified, refused jobs and denied promotion

Really? I am so shocked that women trying to participate fully in the corporate world are actively harassed, denied employment, and denied advancement due to archaic sexism. It’s almost like all those feminists bitching about the problem were RIGHT or something.

because many employers believe them to lack what the study calls ‘an essential humanity’.

…

I know this is a minor nitpick what with the horror of the overall viewpoint and all, but…

Holy fuckballs are wingnuts getting bad at hiding their “I wanna be real science too, mommy” bullshit. Fuck, here, we’re getting this study cited in terms of the years spent studying the subject and even directly quoted here. It’s apparently a major source for the news article itself (and yes, it’s trying to pass itself as an opinion-based news article) and they still can’t be bothered to link to the study itself or even name who worked on it?

What, have they spent so many years shitcanning the reputations of so many think tanks that they think their readers will recognize their in-house lie-merchants by sight? Or is the article itself a rare bit of real science that they’re trying to obfuscate by failing to note how the study rips its teeth savagely into the patriarchy and removes its still beating heart? Or have they realized that their audience is so dumb and lazy that just referring generally to “studies” that never existed outside the tightly sewn-up reaches of their digestive tracks will be treated with the same gravitas and weight as genuine peer-reviewed scholarship?

And I know exactly what they mean.

Yes, I bet you would know what “they” mean, Constipation Lady.

In the little hothouse of my own trade as a hack,

(pause in drinking soda)PSSSSSSSSSHHHH!

What?!?

I… I… never expected to hear one of them actually admit it… I can die happy now. Tell my post-writing software I love….

I play a game with myself. Reading all the other female scribblers, sometimes with grudging admiration and sometimes none at all, I try to guess from their expression of their world view whether or not they are mothers.

I haven’t – yet – been wrong. Now, with MPs so much in the headlines, I’ve extended the game and started to guess about the women among them, too.

As far as I can tell, my score is also pretty high there – even though it’s just a feeling. On both sides of the political divide, as with the writers, it’s not what MPs say or do, so much as how they go about it.

… I think you could have stopped with the savior period up there, Carol… Fuckin’ hell. You “play a game” guessing whether or not women have kids based on whether or not you view their hearts as having fangs like a beast and blah blah archaic sexism and you congratulate yourself for being spot on despite never having checked your answers about rather prominent public figures whose marital status is pretty high-profile.

There are ways to be less deserving of the highly-paid writing job you currently hold, but I’m having difficulty thinking of them at the moment.

Fuck… I’m strongly regretting turning down my chance to work at the Weekly Shithead ranting about the evils of trans* people.

‘Mothers bring something extra’

Oh, hey, we could have spent an article ranting about how childless women deserve their discrimination for being all weird and childless, but it turns out that Carol Sarler does have a pair of neurons to rub together (and no more) and has realized that proper child-breeding women would be next in line in her perfect world and so wants to try and innoculate herself first by trying to argue that pushing out a child from your uterus somehow makes you even more qualified than usual to be employable as a woman.

And if that touch of ‘essential humanity’ – or its absence – colours such notably tough professions, it’s hardly surprising that employers are starting to notice that the same applies across the spectrum of workplaces.

Or she could try and argue that being childless casts a zombie cloud of death around the hulking abomination frames that house their unfeeling metal hearts that causes them to regard customers with inhuman indifference and casual malice.

Because when all you know is kicking women when they’re down, apparently you completely lose the ability to speak in your own defense.

Of course, we need not be silly about it.

Yes, not breeding apparently makes you a subhuman monster, one whose very interactions with other people leaves them cold and drained as from a close encounter with some vile succubus, but we don’t want to be silly about this discriminatory nonsense.

You’re right Carol Sarler, let’s start rolling up the stats for a 26-year-old Careerist Doppleganger!

Nobody wishes to see a female soldier in combat with a six-week-old infant in one arm and a rifle in the other.

Or a high-flier working 20-hour days while still breast-feeding. Or the mother of a small brood taking on any job of such erratic hours that she cannot promise them when or even if she’ll be home.

Oh, that’s what you meant…

Yeah, no bets allowed on whether or not she thinks the solution to this little “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” trap is for women to abandon those fields once more so they can safely be the all-male fetish objects that closeted wingnuts crave them to be.

Also, no bets on whether or not that would be her ideal solution (for everyone other than her) for the rest of the industries as well.

But most jobs aren’t like that – and most children don’t stay babies for long.

Yeah, you greedy harlots. All you have to do is drop out of those age-sensitive and seniority-sensitive industries for 6-8 years in order to raise a child that can be safely left behind for extended stays (but more like 18-20 if you don’t want to be viewed as a terrible mother) so that we don’t think you’re one of those evil “careerists”. And hey, in the meantime, you don’t mind being paid 75% of a real salary because you’re just “going to drop out and plop out a kid, anyways”, right?

Also, none of these women could ever expect that the man drop out of their less time or travel sensitive position and take up more child-raising duties, because… ha ha, silly bitches, don’t you know that Patriarchy Inc doesn’t work like that?

Fuck, you’d think after over 50 years of banging this particular drum, they might have learned to hide the double-standard horseshit a bit better.

Besides which, in my experiences both as a colleague and an employer, I have found that mothers almost always bring something extra to the job, to the benefit of all.

So say certain commenters of this forum as well, but I think they had something in their eye because they were winking the whole time they were saying it.

It’s not the mothers, for a start, who are going to turn up late and hungover after a night on the razz;

Spoken like a woman who paid her maid to wake up and take care of the baby during those “peaky” first months.

they’ll have been up, dressed and alert for hours, having cooked a family breakfast and delivered their children to school. On time.

Dude.

You are a mother. Or at least you’ve shoved your little artifact child in front of as many articles as you can justify getting paid for. So how the flying fuck do you know less about what it’s like to be a mother than Ann Fucking Romney…? Wait, are we entirely sure Carol Sarler isn’t Ann Romney’s pseudonym? Cause both seem to have the same “I paid the maid to take care of all this shit” relationship when talking about what “mothers are like”.

Fuck, that shit is so fantasy kingdom sitcom that it’s almost laughable. Unless the mother was damn lucky enough to move her hours so they don’t start until noon or cruel enough to drop them off 2 or 3 hours before school starts, those kids are pretty much damn lucky if they’ve got some lunchboxes packed for their school day and a note telling them to make sure they catch the bus on time and by the way, mommy’s going to be busy tonight with a “late meeting” with someone who isn’t a neglectful patriarchal asshole like their father.

Oh and hey, patriarchal fantasists? You want the “return” of sitcom families? Then you might want to A) make working hours more flexible without mentally “dinging” those who attempt to take advantage, B) pay people enough so they can regularly afford to take care of a family with a single salary, and C) give up all the capitalist exploitation and theft of the public purse and instead gleefully support both a robust safety net as well as extensive family friendly facilities and programs in all places of employment.

In short, stop being you.

It’s not the mothers, usually, who run the office bitch-fest.

Yes… Totally, it’s not at all “mothers”… No, fuck her euphemism and attempt to universalize her petty bullshit under the guise of speaking for “mothers”. It’s not at all “patriarchy-invested grown-up Plastics” who run the gossip mills about those evil young bitches and their damnable wasted youth or who try and support the old white men in the office in their discrimination efforts against gender-non-conforming and/or career-minded women or who default office conversations to the standard soup of Patriarchy-approved topics and bitter conservatism that are always considered the only “acceptable” “business conversations”.

Please, if the IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION was any stronger on this bit of odious bullshit, we could use it to visualize dark matter in space!

They’re not there to compete for the attentions of the male executives;

…

Have you ever even worked a day in your fucking life?

Competing for the attentions of the male executives? Like that’s been a thing in… fuck, decades? Like when that was even a “thing”, it wasn’t because of intense restrictions and cultural pressure on women against ever having a career and thus needing to quickly rely on getting a man before their “expiration date” hit?

Do… do you even know what you’re arguing against at this point?

So, evil heartless childless young women are evil because… they are patriarchal throwbacks to a time rightfully stabbed in the heart by thousands of brave feminists who went before and fought for the right of women to work in the workplace and be taken seriously?

Uh huh. Yeah, I’m sure adding more layers of Patriarchal discrimination to the workplace will totally solve those problems, mmm hmmm.

they’re there to get out of the house; they’re there because they genuinely enjoy some adult company;

Wait?

This is your long-awaited argument on behalf of working mothers? That they are so traumatized by the unblinking hell of their home lives that they are willing to quietly suffer through any bullshit their workplace throws at them and give away what remains of their life and energy because at least it’s not clinging up shit all night and then fending off the drunken advances of an ungrateful pub-crawling husband?

Leaving aside the archaic sexism of those assumptions (as well as the assumptions that parents never need to go out and get crazy to forget the Hell they’ve made shaping their life into the White Picket Fence fantasy), I’m forced to actually agree with this a little.

I imagine that workplaces, when forced to allow women in, do in fact prefer to hire desperate people who are willing to suffer anything because at least its preferable to their home life. That, however is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the bag of Capitalist Fail we have now, though.

Also? I think the vast majority of working mothers who would rather not be abused by their workplaces and in fact actually like their home lives (hence why they choose to stay in them rather than bailing) and like having adult interactions outside of work because they haven’t destroyed their entire lives to fit a sitcom’s idea of what a family “should” look like might have a few words of choice regarding your overall “defense” of them.

and they’re there because they have mouths to feed other than their own and shoes to buy for someone else’s feet.

Yes, Bob forbid, they ever dare want to put food in their own mouth or buy themselves some pretty shoes or a luxury item that isn’t based on a stereotype. Why, if a mother dared do that and not consider her entire salary the sole property of her children and her deadbeat husband (because apparently every husband in Carol Land is a deadbeat who can’t be expected to help out even a little), then she’d be just as heartless and cruel as those vile feminist “childless” people.

Also, wasn’t this article supposed to, at one time, argue WHY these bigoted viewpoints about childless women were right rather than just going “grrr, I hate them for having money and time and lives outside work and bossing the maids around!”?

Oh, and I should also take the time to point out in the midst of the little dog-whistle about “shoes for someone else’s feet” that we’ve yet again got the Capitalism Fetishists arguing that one’s employers have a right to dictate what you can use your earned salary on.

Cause apparently underpaying you for work provided means they personally control that money forever and if they think you’re just going to spend it on luxuries like a pair of shoes that look professional for the office but don’t cripple the feet like the mandatory heels have been or a quick single-person meal from the local fast-food restaurant, then they have the right to underpay you even more to stop you.

Note that I’m not being facetious here. That’s what the conservatives have been more and more openly arguing for both here in USA!USA!USA! and abroad in cheeze-eatin-surrender-land. The right to own your money even after they underpay you for the work you provide making them even more undeservedly rich.

There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s on all of us.

Two-thirds of working mothers, a recent survey found, could not provide for the children they love in the manner they would wish if they lost their jobs. So there’s incentive for you.

Are… You’re… I…

…

She’s openly praising that even the Capitalism of the UK provides a shitty enough safety net to force working mothers to cling to shitty jobs and put up with outright abuse out of desperation.

Considering this is the woman who argued that an even more abusive law system in the UK that actively scared women out of reporting is better than one that still scares most women out of reporting crimes because the low conviction and legal system support prove that the vast majority of women try to lie about being raped for the wonderful free smoothies (Yes, yes, she did), this is hardly unsurprising, but it is still amazing when you see something so coldly thrown up. Hey, IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION girl, which group of individuals were the cold, unfeeling creatures again? Was it the group of stereotypical ideas of what younger and more feminist women are like (euphemismed to “childless”) or was it the group of proferssional misogynist capitalism fetishists working to make the workforce even more hostile to women (euphemismed sickly to “mothers”, because apparently non-douche working mothers just don’t fucking count)? I just keep losing track and FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHY IS THE PAGE SO FUCKING PINK?!?

Hahhh, hahhh… Anyhoo:

They will, it is true, snatch time off for poorly children and Christmas carol services.

Wanting time off for Christmas is seen as a bad thing?

And it’s true they will insist that, in return for arriving on the dot of 9am, they must also leave on the dot of 5pm.

Wanting to only work the hours for which they receive PAY is a bad thing?!?

Valuing assets in your staff

Ooh, after that, can we value humans in our resources?

Quelle ironie, of all the poses she’s attempted to do this article, only the boss one has come across halfway competently… Shame that abusing the staff that actually raise your child doesn’t really count as being a “boss”, now isn’t it?

But rarely have I encountered a mother who did not offer to make up time lost,

Make up the time lost… to actually working her set hours and the hours for which she was paid rather than the made-up unpaid overtime hours the rest of the staff is expected to fulfill out of some sick misunderstanding of the point of receiving a “salary” instead of hourly pay?

This is almost becoming beautiful. In her attempt to argue that no, no, it’s the proper patriarchal role fulfillers who should be considered exemplary female-cootied employees rather than the ones who “dare put on the man-role”, she’s turning to more and more bizarre stretches of logic in order to argue that working mothers are more easily abused and mistreated than their alternative.

It’s like watching a greedy sub beg to be tied up with ramen noodles and beaten with wooden mallet but without any of the dignity or class.

often in lunch hours.

Between the fantasy of mothers spending all their time cooking other people meals and this belief that they don’t need lunch hours, I’m having to wonder if you haven’t gotten “working mothers” confused with robot servants.

Cause, yeah, little bit of a difference between the two.

As for leaving on time, put enough mothers together in one workplace and you’ll get rid of the ghastly ethos of ‘presenteeism’, whereby people vie for plaudits based solely on how late – albeit often uselessly – they hang around the office.

Oh how cute, she thinks that if and her fellow breeders make a big show of how properly chastised they are by the patriarchy and how hard they worked to make it a single-chick free space, their Capitalist oppressors will look kindly upon them and allow them to have actual lives rather than demanding pointless busy work and unnecessarily late hours…

And for some reason, I’m suddenly reminded of the ending of this song.

The prioritising that may baffle other people is a cinch for a woman who has spent years juggling a household. Negotiating skills? A request for 10 per cent off an overdue invoice is nothing to a woman who has had to broker a deal on Britain’s Got Talent versus bedtime.

When it comes to emergencies, if you have run all the way to a clinic with a terrified toddler vomiting down your neck then, trust me, a package delayed in transit is a piece of cake. And if those are the tangibles, the intangibles – the ‘essential humanity’ – are more important still.

Are… Are you attempting to barter for your honorary humanity from a patriarchal system by trading entirely in cliches?

My God, woman, have some fucking dignity! You’re like a beat dog who hasn’t realized yet their owner is a complete and utter jackhole and the punishments have nothing to do with how “good” you’ve been or not.

You cannot be a mother without knowing something about selflessness, compassion, generosity, commitment, fierce loyalty and plain hard work.

Yes, you can’t be a mother without having those qualities and you can’t not be a mother and have even one of them.

You cannot – surely – be a boss and not value assets such as those in your staff.

A harsh blow I’m sure to all the men on staff, who must inherently lack such qualities (what with not being mothers) and thus must be immediately downsized in favor of the all working mother armada!

Nor is it the boss who pays the price for the extras a mother brings with her; she’s the one who pays for that. Enough reams have been written about the long hours of slog it takes to run a home and hold down a job at the same time. Yet still we keep doing it because we want our work, our independence and our money.

Or maybe this is all just transparent self-serving bullshit by someone belatedly realizing that the sexist bosses of the world hate working women for being working women and whether or not they breed could matter fuck all for how tenuous their employment and advancement options are thus treated.

I mean, seriously, what is this paragraph even trying to say beyond “please don’t fire me Mr. ‘Femail is a Great Name for a ‘Lifestyles’ section’, I can pimp breeding for white women harder if you want!”

But, more than all the things we want, we actually need our children; they complete us as women, they are our light and our love and our legacy.

Because without that ability to spawn actual human beings with their uteruses (well, about 49 or so % of the time anyways), women would be the useless malfunctioning fleshlights Patriarchal society treats them as, amirite?

We feel desperately sorry for those who yearn for children they cannot have; the unwilling barren, if you will.

Translation: The last time I tried to argue that childless women were soulless abominations, I got my ass deep-roasted in flames from barren conservative women, so this time I’m trying to throw this belated shield up in the hopes of making it more clear that “childless” is just an attempted dog whistle for “those young feministy types that actually want to be treated like full people in the workplace and society” that makes “curtain-twitching patriarchy defender” sound like something halfway appealing in contrast.

But when we meet a woman who chooses her childlessness in the belief that there is something out there worth more, we smile politely even while – once again – our guts whisper: ‘Lady, you’re weird.’

You keep using that condescending attempt at sassy insult. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

So three cheers for the employers who are catching on,

Three cheers for those who discriminate against women, treating them like garbage for daring to participate in the workplace that they kinda have to thanks to all those “employer” victories over worker’s rights.

the ones who don’t want to people their workforces with the cold, the calculating,

Yeah, I think if workplaces cared about any of that, then they’d have a fuckton less MBA douchenozzles and layers of upper management and a fuckton more support for strong social safety nets.

the sad and the mad.

Yes, those darn uppity women daring to be depressed and angry about the discrimination you admitted was occurring against them on a widespread level and which you’re helping to propagate!!!

Yeah, I wonder why they would be sad and angry about that?!?

Fuck, every time someone actively supports discrimination or second class treatment of minorities and then tries to blame the victims for being all weird emotionally about the fallout of that the perpetrators should immediately be kicked in the reproductive organs until death.

The only question is: what took you so long?

It didn’t.

That’s sort of the point of all these desperate anti-minority-group-X-rights screeds calling for more general discrimination both on the job and off of it.

That these discriminatory attitudes are not coming at the rate they used to, or more importantly the minority groups are less willing to put up with it and there’s less social and legal support for those who try and continue it.

Already, right now, despite decades of hard desperate, often violent resistance on behalf of Patriarchal Capitalism to the idea of including women in the workforce, more and more women are working. More and more women are expecting to work as adults, are expected to work as adults. More and more young girls are planning what they will be in our broken ass capitalist system when they grow up in the same way that young boys are. Fewer and fewer people still buy the old lies on what a woman’s role should be in life or the Catch 22s those always were.

And a lot of the responsibility for that can be shared with a capitalist system that made these feminist growths critical and necessary for our Western society to continue limping forward.

The days when the discrimination discouraged women from working are done and over. As are the days when the argument that women need to be paid less because “they’re just going to drop out and raise a family” held any goddamn weight. Hopefully in a decade or two, maybe even less, so will the wage gap itself or the differential way women are treated for advancement. Perhaps we’ll even see the growth of family leave for both a child’s parents if they have two parents, regardless of their sex so that both genders can take that personal time for new additions. Maybe businesses can be pressured into actually footing some of the bill for child care rather than shirking that and many other responsibilities onto their employees.

Maybe we’ll even have a day when any paper that tries to publish an article like this** is burned to the ground and the former site converted to low-cost housing.

At least it’s a nice thought and something much better to fight for than the hope that you can encourage businesses to discriminate against people like you, but not you specifically.

And that is why, no matter who you are, nor what you do, you are a better person and smarter than Carol Sarler, professional scum merchant.

*Hey, average American elderly people, when are you going to figure out that conservatives hate you as much as they do those “inner city” “freeloaders”?

**Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this, but this wonderful article came with this picture and caption:

Yeah… See this is why I start to go on tangent rants whenever the subject of The Daily Fail comes up. I mean, what the fuck kind of dog whistle bingo is that shit? I mean, we’ve got the makeup and jewelry and proper feminine attire vs more gender neutral shit. We’ve got the creepy, needing a male partner’s name and photo evidence of the kids around the desk shit vs. the “how dare young people party” shit. The hair, oh my god the hair v hair and all the infinite baggage they managed to shove into that whole rigmarole. The idiotic belief that the working mother is going to be a morning person while the other person isn’t that’s based on… wishful thinking at best. The posture dog-whistle they managed to also shove in there. The fact that their most visual “work” difference is of course typing speed, because, that’s all lady workers are good for, amirite? The dumbass party poster shit, because, yeah, there’s a worker on the planet that actually puts up party posters at work. And even the good archaic technology by proper housewife vs evil modern technology by unwashed hippie garbage. Also it’s FUCKING PINK!

You know what? Fuck it, no. Here’s my interpretation of the two.

Righty there is doped to the gills on about 40 pounds of horse tranquilizers because the stress of dealing with her impending divorce (hence why “Gary” is missing from the photo collage on the wall) and trying to keep her job and raise two young children is driving her insane. Every day when she goes off to lunch, she sits in her car and screams for at least 10 minutes. Her rictus smile is a grimace of rage from constantly being considered by her bosses as a sex object and a less “committed” worker now that she is no longer connected with her husband. Right now she is writing an email to her boss trying to politely tell him that if he keeps on drunkingly hitting on her, she’s reporting him to HR. She’s stuck working on a backup computer because her drunken frat asshole coworker who will always make more than her and be given the credit of her successes came in and fucked up her real work computer before she came in, because he thought it was his.

Meanwhile poor Lefty there is the IT techie for the company and has been up for 36 hours straight fixing various fuckups by upper management that have caused major server problems that required immediate emergency response. She’s also been fending off drunk frat asshole whose been giving her constant bullshit over Adria Richards and teasing her with sexual harassment to “make sure she’s not one of those feminazis too, hurr hurr.” Fixing Righty’s laptop is a final favor to a long time friend before she can fuck off for the day and remember what it feels like to be a non-zombie. Meanwhile, she’s getting shit from some stupid ass bint from the newspaper pointing at her and claiming she’s a soulless pile of puke who deserves even less respect and pay for her hard work. Because she’s exhausted, she wasn’t quite able to repress the “are you fucking kidding me” face as the picture is taken.

Eventually they will move to Sweden together and start a new company that will kick their current one’s ass. Newspaper bint lady will claim the success of the company is due to Righty’s child bearing hips.

Please sir, can I have some malign neglect?

Ken Connors, Rue America:
Discounting parents’ rights

If you’re a lucky sonuvabitch, you may have been able to remain ignorant of a little right-wing shibboleth they like to call “parents’ rights”. In which case, Ha! You apparently weren’t lucky enough, you bastard!

“Parents’ rights”, like most right-wing euphemisms, is a bold attempt to lobby for a form of abuse with the trappings of a rights movement, so you can pretty much guess exactly which group this little “movement” wants to justify abusing.

To even better summarize, this proud band of freedom fighters trying to undo systemic oppression is the moniker a handful of Real True Christians TM who firmly believe that women and children are the rightful owned property of the “man of the house” use when they want to argue that said property can be used as they see fit in terms of things like ruining their lives by denying them an education, having the “right” to physically abuse or sexually abuse them in the name of “discipline”, or marrying them off to their favorite gay sex partner in order to “keep them in the family”.

Which means that when they get their knickers in a twist, it usually means good things for children and satirists everywhere.

Shorter (the port’s fine by me):

• Every parent should have the right to keep their artifact children in perfect ignorance! Also Obama and Holder still insist on being black at us.

Yeah, pretty much.

And in addition to the usual fuckwittery, it turns out this particular iteration is also a two-fer in that it is an attempt to diminish asylum laws as well. Because what do those uppity little bitches and faggots whining about “I’m going to be raped and murdered if I stay here” need political asylum for? Those illustrious citizenship rights should only be doled out to the nuttiest Snickers bars that the white enclaves of first-world Europe can produce.

No, seriously, the central “argument” of his post is crying over the fates of those whose “suffering at the hands of an oppressive government” consisted of “we broke the law by refusing to educate our children, thus depriving them of equal opportunity, so the German government sued us and started having to involve their version of Social Services (I like to imagine their version contains at least 12% more whips) and WAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!”

Because of course, to the type of abusers who feel that motherfucking children have too much relative power to them, those are the only type of overprivileged douches that matter.

Though I do love this little bit of unintentional honesty in the midst of this extended crying jag for the “rights” of terrible parents:

Under our president’s scheme, educating children means producing multicultural, socially-aware, environmentally-conscious, Progressive-minded citizens

Oh yes! The horror! The horror!

Truly proof positive of the efficacy of “ex-gay” therapy!

Dyed Moustache of Totally Not Gay, Wing Nut Daily:
Illegal to Help Change Sexual Orientation

Sorry libertine liberals, but Joseph Farah, owner of the thousand pedophile stare and proud mustache dye fetishist, has got our number. See, he’s managed to land a rare exclusive post on the pages of the distinguished printable shit rag, Wing Nut Daily, (by being the owner of the whole cage of winged monkeys) to demonstrate his new knock down argument that completely puts those uppity homosexualists in their place.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• The only way I could understand hypocrisy less would be if someone trepanned my skull and even then, I’d probably gain some clarity. On that note, abusive “ex-gay therapies” of demented closet cases ranting at queers to get back in the closet or else should be supported by gays because something something, trannies are disgusting.

Damn boy, we’re not going to be able to sit again for weeks after a totally not-kinky-or-homosexual whipping like that! He’s got us dead to rights on…um…er… something? Maybe? It’s kind of hard to tell.

Think about this.

No, Joey, don’t ask your readers to that! It might accidentally start a few house fires what with all the dust buildup up there.

In America today, it is perfectly legal to change one’s sexual plumbing in a bizarre and twisted medical mutilation to achieve “transgenderism.”

…

You know, with all the shit and head games and “it’s all a coincidence” and “being perfect for just a few more weeks of reduced hours and employment so’s I don’t starve” bullshit at my primary job and all the subtle and possibly unconscious bigotry of that whole world of vomit*, it’s actually refreshing to deal with straight-up no-question-about-it “you are not a person” old-fashioned bigoted hatred.

Like a cool refreshing splash of sewage water on a warm summer day. Ok, back to teh funnie!

In fact, in some states and municipalities, taxpayers are forced to pick up the tab.

Where?

Seriously, tell me where and I’ll move there within the week and send you all the pictures of my medical surgery “mutilation”** as thanks. Cause, see, in the America I’m stuck in, I can’t even manage to get in to see the mandatory therapist for the “are you sure you’re a woman?” “yes” “super positive?” “yes” “hmm, keep doing what you’ve been doing for another year just to be sure” bullshit steps without an employment granted health insurance (so I can have the privilege of paying them out of pocket anyways). But hey, maybe the UK joined the US and brought their national health care and more robust transsexual rights with them while I wasn’t looking.

It is also perfectly legal for men to commit sodomy

Oh my god! It’s legal for men to fuck! I mean, if a man wanted to take his legally married opposite sexed woman-wife-bride and fuck her up the ass like in those videos he pretends to watch for research purposes, he can do so without going to jail.

Truly, with this unprecedented sexual ability, the fall of mankind is nigh! Repent! REPENT!

Oh wait, that’s what these fuckers actually do believe. My bad. Continue.

and for women to have sexual relations with each other.

Dude, I’m having a hard time believing at this point that your “research” for this “oh so deep thought experiment” was the porn collection you keep in that drawer you think your beard, I mean wife, doesn’t know about it. Shame, you’ll never know that she gets off to it way way more than you ever will no matter how many times you watch it weeping, yelling at your dick to get hard and chase away the demons.

In fact, in some states and municipalities, it is illegal for a landlord with a moral objection to that kind of behavior to turn down practitioners of this kind of sexual behavior from renting their apartments.

What? You can’t block them from purchasing shelter, leaving them to die like animals in the street?

What is this poor nation coming to.***

Public schools in more and more states and locales are encouraging homosexuality, tranvestism, lesbianism

He’s not wrong. I still remember my Grade 9 syllabus: “Math, Science, Spanish, English, How to Wear Skirts and Destroy the Moral Fabric of the Universe”. Good times.

– even to the point of allowing children to define their own “gender identification” by using the locker rooms and restrooms of their choice.

Oh noes, people using the correct locker rooms and bathrooms! Oooh!****

Now, maybe I’m using the shithouse wrong, but I’ve never seen the naked orgies that these fuckers seem to think are going on in there. In either the men’s or the women’s restrooms*****. Similarly, in gym class, in the one and only space where I was forced to use a locker room, I… changed into my boy shorts, trying to do so to minimize all nudity (through over the clothing movements and so on), just like everyone else. Despite the depiction of the movies, most people seek to reduce the amount of time other people of their gender judge their growing shifting bodies.

It’s perfectly legal for counselors to encourage lesbianism, homosexuality, transvestism and the aforementioned medical mutilations known as sex-change operations. It is even perfectly legal for counselors and therapists to offer assistance in changing the sexual orientation of adults and children from heterosexual to homosexual.

At the same time American society takes this anything-goes approach to sexuality, there is one new glaring taboo being constructed in some states: Counseling and therapy for minors who want to change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual.

Counseling… doesn’t work that way. Sexual orientation doesn’t work that way. Ex-gay bullshit abuse factories don’t work that way. Nothing you mentioned works those ways!

I know, I know, preaching to the willfully ignorant, but as much as you’d like to imagine that sexual orientation is like a constant game of badminton between demons and angels, that’s not how it works. You’re stuck as whatever sexuality you are and the first moment of the first attraction is where you start to learn who you are, regardless of what you do. The first instant you start to have that same-sex attraction, boom, you’re on the Kinsey Scale somewhere 1-6 with 0 and X forever grayed off, never to be unlocked. You can pretend it away, you can ignore it. If you’re bisexual or pansexual, you can focus on attractions to opposite-sexed people and just sort of go on with your life never thinking much about it. But you can’t change it.

And that is sorta why “ex-gay therapy” will never be anything more than an abuse factory preying on social condemnation in order to further damage people about their healthy reactions to their own sexuality. Because they really think that gayness is some curable thing that you can just add enough straightness (read stereotypical gendered behavior or intense psychological self-trauma or closeted pretense) to make all better and that their enemies must be doing the same by having resources available to people figuring out themselves for the first time.

And it’s also why the various wingnuts have stopped highlighting their “success stories” by name, because there hasn’t been a predominant “ex-gay” yet who hasn’t been found to have been enjoying some “extracurricular activities” on the side. And why finally, sane states have started to move to ban these abuse factories and fraud networks built on exploiting familial unease.

I mean, would I love to have been born a cismale heterosexual? To not have been bullied because I didn’t have attractions to the “opposite sex” at the right time? To still be praised by my workplace and have probably a quick advancement and a huge amount of social support and never have to feel awkward in a crowded restroom? To be able to provide a low-stress socially-approved relationship to my partner, to be able to return her desires with true sexual interest?

I dunno. It certainly would have made my life easier. But I wasn’t born that way. I was born a transfemale asexual and anything I did to try and run from that and pretend it away would just be pointless self-destruction.

Of course, for Jospeh Farah and the other misery merchants, that self-destruction is the entire point. As long as one more person is helping to prop up the lie they desperately use to try and fool themselves, then who cares about the social cost, or the cost in human lives from those who assume the treatment failed because they are too weak or that their innate sexual desires are sinful and who therefore commit suicide.

Such legislation was passed by the California Legislature before being struck down by the courts.

But now similar legislation is being introduced in New Jersey, in what can fairly be described as the next big push by those promoting sexual anarchy in America.

~Sexual Anarchy in the NJ!~

What are these radicals afraid of? They claim, believe it or not, that any counseling or therapy to change those with inclinations toward homosexuality is quackery. So let me get this straight: It’s perfectly justifiable and effective to provide counseling and therapy – and even permanent medical mutilations – to change from heterosexuality to homosexuality, but not the other way around.

It’s true. That’s why you have to state whether you are hetero- or homosexual when you apply for those magical free cardiovascular mutilation, I mean genital surgery, I mean… that are available to trans* people free of charge specifically paid for by the fund of Churches who are illegally taxed by Obama paid goons. Bisexuals and asexuals can be allowed to proceed on a provisional, but only if they sign a binding legal contract to act at least 10% more gay when they complete the procedure, otherwise they take it all back.

And it’s why there is not a single trans* individual on the planet who is a heterosexual transsexual. You’re just straight up banned if you try, because of the strict hetero-to-homo rule being enforced.

Or maybe Creepy McMoustache doesn’t have the first fucking notion of what he’s talking about.

They literally deny that tens of thousands – maybe far more – have left the homosexual lifestyle and become “ex-gays.”

Yeah, no one’s denying that lying closet-cases calling themselves, as you so demonstrably put it, quote-unquote “ex-gays” exist.

Indeed, organizations such as Truth Wins Out are specifically designed as protests of the phenomenon and specifically talk about the damage said groups do, the lack of connection to credentialed therapists, and the overall scam tactics they use.

Hell, they don’t even deny that a number of people have indeed gone screaming back into the closet thanks to them. Some examples of that, like Lisa Miller, are heartbreaking in the extreme, but we do not deny that these self-delusions have happened.

Now, Farah might argue that that isn’t what he meant. Maybe not, but then maybe he should have learned what the fuck he’s talking about before trying to defend the scam network and abuse factory he’s actively profiting off of!

Why do they deny it? Because they fear losing constituents.

IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION! 100% of the time, accept no substitutes. I mean, this bit of straight-up fantasy doesn’t even make sense outside of an IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION viewpoint. Wait, being gay is a religion now and is worried about losing constituents in the religion, because that means reduced glitter tithes?

Though you will see open homosexuals by the score in TV shows and movies and read “heroic” stories about them coming to grips with their sexual identity in the major media, one thing you will never see or read about is a person who turned his or her back on that lifestyle. Yet it happens all the time.

Are you sure about that? Because I’m pretty sure that was the entire point of the forced in romantic subplot of Top Gun. Or more seriously, that’s the main result of 9 out of 10 bisexual plots in shows (especially for female characters).

Even more seriously. Uh, yeah, you sometimes get gay characters in movies and television shows. Characters who are gay, plots about dealing with issues that affect gay characters like coming out, dating, facing bigotry, and very sometimes even entire movies or shows revolving around a queer relationship or story…

Just like the vast majority of the time you get straight characters in movies and television shows. Characters who are straight, plots revolving around straight romantic drama, straight romantic subplots thrown into nearly every movie, and whole genres where the notion that someone might not actually be straight is so unthinkable that they’ll jam in a forced romantic subplot if things are looking a little too “dude-heavy” (oh hi there Top Gun). It’s so unbelievably common that it constantly reinforces the notion that heterosexual relationships (and a specific type of heterosexual relationship) is the “correct” and “normal” model, allowing douchenozzles like yourself to view the paltry handful of queer focused movies and tv-show characters as an aberration.

You’re not going to get a movie about someone changing their sexuality from hetero-to-homo willingly and you’re not going to get a movie about them changing their sexuality from homo-to-hetero willingly. Because, despite your determination to believe otherwise, sexuality doesn’t work that way.

And if you abandoned the reflexive bigotry for 5 minutes to read even the most introductory information about it, you’d already know that.

And that’s what the homosexual lobby and its enablers in political liberalism don’t want you to known about.

So now they are making their big push to make it illegal to counsel or offer therapy to those who want to go straight.

This is an illustration of just how dangerous and totalitarian in nature the homosexual lobby truly is.

Single sentence paragraphs

Make everything

More dramatic.

What’s happening in our society today is nothing short of the active recruitment of children into aberrant sexual lifestyles. We once called this child abuse. But today it’s official state policy. The next step, which may have been unimaginable a few years ago, is to ensure there’s no way out for those recruits.

Gyaahh! WORDS DON’T WORK THAT WAY!

Parents and children shouldn’t have an opportunity to explore their options in enjoying a heterosexual lifestyle. Change only works one way, according to these fiends.

Ewwww… No, I don’t want parents exploring any “heterosexual lifestyle” options with children. That’s just… ugh.

Think about this: Children molested by same-sex adults are much more likely to adopt a same-sex attraction.

For proof of this assertion, please write a formal request and then shove it up your own ass, because it’ll probably produce a faster result than to wait for Farah to even pretend to have an answer.

Sometimes all those kids need is some counseling to overcome their victimization.

Yes, molestation victims need counseling. Real counseling. And see, that, dear douchecanoe, is why we hate your little cult of child abusers and suicide-creators. You take people who need real counseling. Someone legitimately trained to listen to what the person is going through and help them through that, whether they want to hide in a closet, avoid any sexual contact, or explore who they are. And you instead give them an incoherent rant or a stream of abuse designed to prey on their fears and nightmares and turn it into hatred for a group of people you randomly despise for being smaller (in number) and weaker (politically and socially) than you.

Those abuse victims need real trained counseling. Those people feeling conflicted and frightened about the fantasies inside them need someone actually qualified to provide therapy and advice. Someone real who can help them, not some charlatan paid by churches to make people so scared to talk about anything that they bottle it all up and tell people what they want to hear.

All to help perpetuate this fantasy notion on how sexuality works, that it is this badminton game of good and evil, queer or heteronormative, that in no way resembles our real world in any way. And it is why these abuse mills need to be shut down, because every individual stuck in them is another individual who is only going to have more trauma to process through whenever they can finally get to a real therapist to help them with their real problems.

And it’s for those reasons and the thousands of bodies created by these scam artists, that I have no sympathy for the crocodile tears of those who have so long profited off this bloody industry of pain and lies.

That would be legally prohibited by the legislation now under consideration in New Jersey and the legislation passed in California.

Because, of course, “ex-gay therapy” = all therapy anywhere and everywhere.

It would deny kids a chance at a normal life. It would deny parents their rights to look out for the best interests of their own kids.

It’s also blatantly discriminatory – banning therapy leading to heterosexuality while allowing homosexual-affirming therapy and even “gender-change” decisions by kids who are provided with potentially life-threatening hormones.

You keep using that discriminatory word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

Also, ha ha ha ha ha, fuck you.

Hormone treatments wouldn’t be “life-threatening” if we really did “pay out of the government for transgender services” like you claimed. That way we could actually work with an endocrinologist right off the bat to check in every once in a while and not have to eyeball it the best we can based on information from other transgender individuals.

Why is it that children are allowed to change their “gender identity” but not their sexual orientation?

Because of very obvious reasons that you could have easily discovered if you spent about 5 seconds on google before you wrote this steaming pile of obvious bullshit and offensive propaganda.

But hey, I guess the good state of wherever the fuck you live hasn’t legalized the right to change from an ignorant asshole to someone who’s got two brain cells to rub together.

You know why: The homosexual lobby is powerful and forceful in the world of psychology, psychiatry and counseling.

Or that. Magical super-powerful lobbies that just so happen to overpower a community with so much political pull they don’t have to pay taxes and are allowed to, in nearly every state, to provide “therapy” without either credentials or any working grasp of the current working theories in their supposed field.

Oooh, fear the scary gay lobby that’s so much more powerful than that and send all your money to us so that we can keep milking this stone for a few more years.

The homosexual movement once claimed its supreme goal was to ensure that its constituents could do what they want in the privacy of their own bedrooms. That was a lie. Now they parade their sexual proclivities in our streets and in the “gay”-friendly media.

I mean, it was one thing when they wanted the right to exist, but now they, like, want the right to exist. I mean, if we treat gay people as if they were human beings, what’s next, treating the black people as if they were people? It’s a slippery slope, people, that’s all I’m saying.

It’s no longer an alternative lifestyle; it’s quickly becoming the preferred lifestyle

(Freud hat on)Mmm…hmm! Yes, go on about how “preferred” this lifestyle is for you, how irresistible it feels. I’m sure it’ll convince everyone that your therapy worked like a charm. (Freud hat off)

the brave new lifestyle, the hip and heroic lifestyle, the affirmative-action lifestyle.

You know, for a bunch of people who claim to love the English language so much that actual living people need to suffer for it, they really love to abuse and malign the shit out of it. It’s almost like IT’S ALWAYS some sort of light emitting technology or something.

Now the homosexual movement and its allies in the popular culture, media and politics are seeking to use the police power of the state to make sure there’s no return from a “choice” made even as a child. Once “gay,” always “gay” is their credo.

Snrk. Oh, yes, queers are famous for the amount of sway they’ve held over police and law enforcement. Yup. Jesus, Farah, if you were projecting any stronger you’d actually start melting a hole in the screen.

But thanks for thoroughly demonstrating that the only defenses possible either against queer rights or for abusive industries like the “ex-gay” bullshit are either nonsensical or so full of projection to qualify for its own movie theatre franchise.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for my biweekly genital mutilation and fetus remains cocktail social I attend with all the other transwomen in the area. Today’s topic is how to turn all high school girls gay simply by showing clips of old Ellen reruns.******

*Yes, I’m working to extricate myself from that ego-destroying nightmare. No, they aren’t leaving me anything obvious I can easily sue or bring in the Transgender Law Center over. Yes, I have told them to their faces that I realize it’s happening and they have given me their half-hearted denials while continually trying to make the environment toxic enough that I just quit. No, I don’t plan to leave quietly no matter what. Yes, I know how I’m going to do that and yes, you’ll be able to help. Yes, it sucks. A lot. And if it is, as they maintain, a string of coincidences, it’s one that resembles the exact string of events that other transgender individuals being shoved out of the door at other companies in the state have reported.

**You know what gets left out of all those scare wordings about abortion or the suite of possible surgeries that can take place as part of a gender reassignment surgery? That all surgeries, and in fact most organism level biology, tends to be… well, a little icky. I mean, look at the photos of any surgery, cardiovascular, muscular, cosmetic… The ones of the procedure themselves. If you’re not used to them they can appear nightmare inducing. And a lot of that is because they require carefully going in to the parts we usually can’t see, the tissues, the organs, the blood, laying all that bare and fixing the stuff that’s gone wrong. The fact that we empathize with those images, that we don’t (usually) want to see the squishy machinery that keeps us all moving is often exploited by those who know that by carefully selecting certain surgeries for highlighting, they can create the impression that those select surgeries are somehow “mutilations” or “slaughters” while the rest are nice tidy affairs kept safely locked behind white curtains and surgical masks. They are not.

***I’m actually a little impressed to see this one make the list of fail. Most bigots have been moving away from the whole “we want the faggots and the trannies to die in the streets” angle and towards arguing that words are irrevocably harmed when girls rub titties together and so on. I’d love to see the attempted court legal defense of this one. Well, you see your honor, if I let dem queers move in to my domiciles, they’ll irrevocably fag it up so’s I can never rent to a straight couple ever again. The glitter removal costs alone would be prohibitive!

****You know, it’s kinda becoming a little obvious that for a lot of people, the purposes of having and maintaining bi-gendered bathrooms is solely to have a gendered space to enforce for signs of gender non-conformity. I mean, seriously, there are so many people, even people who consider themselves good and liberal who get verklempt about this issue and their arguments always boil down to “but it says boys here, girls there”. When the spaces are absent. When colleges have all gender safe bathrooms and shower spaces, most people use them to… shower and pee, showing no more nudity or flesh than they would have in a gendered space. And suffering no more or even less (due to it not being this whole gendered space to violate as a bonus to the actual violation) sexual assaults or rapes than gendered spaces.

*****But hey, that doesn’t stop the crazies from making it illegal to pee in certain states, because orgies, child molestation, predators and other things that have never been done by a transgender individual in a restroom in the history of the US.

******I should note that the sidebar when I was reading this “exclusive” pile of dross was as follows:

No comment.

Sir Victorious Davisson Hansonsonsonson von Hans, National Pew Pew Fantasy:
America’s Big Fat Advantage

Ha ha, America! You may have thought that you were feeling the lingering effects of that economic depression everyone tries not to talk about. If you’re lucky, you might be stuck in a job you hate (or that hates you). If you’re not, well, we just don’t like talking about you unless we can blame Obama for not single-handedly fixing that despite the fact that we keep voting down every attempt he makes. You may even be noticing that there seems to be a shit-ton of new Danish and other Scandanavian companies popping up everywhere and even pipsqueak nations like Sweden feel safe to come by and use our desperate people in the same way as we use third-world nations.

But never fear, Victor Davis Hanson, White Supremacist Extraordinaire, has come with assurance that while the system may seem broken and creaky, everything’s running just fine. No matter what problems we’re encountering, we’ll get through with all the wide-eyed optimism and pluck that defines the modern musical. Why in fact, I feel like singing!

Musical Shorter (or the last dance before the end):

• ~We all deserve to die! Even you, Mrs. Lovett, even I!~

Yes, because, see, that mysterious big fat advantage that will “save” us, is the fact that we live in the only true meritocracy, where everybody deserves the place they are stuck in, as long as we don’t do anything silly like agitate for more.

And what about those more pressing global problems or the fact that our gutted economy can’t possibly compete with new, leaner, more green, more equatable economies like those of the Scandanavian region? Or the growing reality of deadly climate change, dwindling hydrocarbon supplies, misuse of water resources, and so on that will quickly make the American way of life untenable without drastic change?

Well, we never had to worry, because, what will save us is that we’re just too gosh darn America to have to worry about any of that consequences shit.

No, really. Here’s the tagline:

Our exceptionalism will last as long as we judge people according to their achievements.

Cause, see, American Exceptionalism is literally like a magic spell. As long as everyone believes in it and claps their hands on cue and takes no efforts whatsoever to change anything for the better or more sustainable, than this magic America power will somehow make it so all the bad stuff happens to other people. But the second someone goes, hey, wait a minute, “judging people according to their achievements? Most of those fuckers have taken amazing boons and gifts we could never hope to have and squandered it by running companies into the ground or finding new ways to steal from people and the government!”, boom! It all comes crashing to the ground like so many dreams and we’re left in the wake of the Super Tsunami we would have been able to block if it wasn’t for Fucker McSeesClearly over here.

For all the Obama-era talk of decline, there is at least one reason why America probably won’t, at least not quite yet.

So let’s see here, Obama needs to be removed because he talks about how fucked we really are and what we need to change, which means he’s removing the magical spell that makes us awesome and shiny and barbeque ranch flavored. But wait, we need to get rid of Obama because he tanked the economy with his magical time travel device and has thus declined America from the coughcoughsomepresidentcoughcough high times and economic boon. Which is impossible because America can never be declining until we no longer believe that rich people are inherently better than us because of the wealth they inherited. But Obama has been destroying the rich in his secret baking powder factory, which is why the American economy can’t super recover. But that hasn’t happened yet, because rich-hoovering shitbags like Three Names McGee here are warning us off of criticizing the rich lest we destroy the prosperity we don’t have.

Confused yet?

Yeah, the rest of the post won’t help with that.

“Peak oil” and our “oil addiction” were supposed to have ensured that we ran out of either gas or the money to buy it.

Yeah. We’ll run out of oil someday and we’ll need a renewable energy source available to replace it or we’ll be left at the mercy of countries like New Zealand and Spain and their still functioning societies.

And yeah, peak oil doesn’t mean that the oil is all gone, it just means that we’ve passed the point where we’re discovering new easy oil reserves and thus must rely on more dangerous and less-cost-efficient sources. And given the increase in things like fraking and deep sea oil drilling and the massive environmental and financial costs (I mean, the various towns completely destroyed by fracking, the total contamination of the Gulf and all its sealife…), it’s hard to argue…

Oh Jeebus Christo, you’re going to argue that the fact that we haven’t run out of oil just yet means that scientists were lying and oil is an infinite resource powered by hippie tears, aren’t you?

Now, suddenly, we have more gas and oil than ever before. But the key question is: Why do we?

The oil-and-gas renaissance was brought on by horizontal drilling and fracking that opened up vast new reserves that were previously either unknown or considered unrecoverable. Both technological breakthroughs were American discoveries, largely brought on by entrepreneurial mavericks and engineers exploring on mostly private lands.

Yes, our foolhardy rush out to fuck over our environment and global financial security in order to kick the can down the road a couple of years is totally a wise long-term plan for the future and not such a stirring example of short-sighted stupidity that the only reason we’re “exceptional” in this regard is that no other country has proven themselves quite this stupid yet.

Couldn’t the Saudi, Venezuelan, or Nigerian oil industry have discovered these new methods of resource recovery, given their nations’ reliance on petroleum exportation?

Could they have decided to destroy their countries in service to the first world’s thirst for hydrocarbons to waste on powering inefficient motor vehicles? Yeah, of course. It’s not a particularly difficult technology, and not much scientific ingenuity was required to go “hey, let’s waste a huge amount of good clean water that we’ll probably need later in order to render an area completely uninhabitable but gain a laughable amount of resources in the process”. That’s like praising the scientific ingenuity of the guy who discovered you could crush a beer can on your head.

The world now wakes up to iPhone communication, Amazon online buying, social networking on Facebook, Google Internet searches, and writing and computing with Microsoft software. Why weren’t these innovations first developed in Japan, China, or Germany — all wealthy industrial countries with large, well-educated, and hard-working populations?

Well, hello, Grandpa, good to see you’ve finally entered the 21st century and realized that people use computers, the internet, and all that webiverse shit.

To answer your question, it’s because the USA actually bothered to take risks once upon a time. Our universities trained people on new developing technology and investment actually tried to chase new markets and new ideas, allowing the development and building of a strong electronics and software development industry in hot spots like the Silicon Valley that ensured that Americans were on the ground floor of the new industry and thus would always be known as the “center” of the world’s computer science development.

Sadly though, thanks to some odd obsessions with “American Exceptionalism”, companies have slowly stopped funding new R&D into new markets, universities have had their budgets slashed and been brought under the heel of new Presidents who want to funnel time and resources towards “proven profitable industries”, and old dying industries have prevented the rise of new ones.

As such, we’re going to start paying for that as we’re already falling massively behind very tiny countries in new emerging industries like green technology, biotechnology (especially regarding stem cells), public transportation infrastructure, environmental science, and robotics (to name a few).

Hell, even our much vaunted computer science dominance is starting to creak a bit. Out of the newer technology developments, those have mostly been made by college students and most of those are retreads of smaller IPs from the 90s. Some of the more impressive applications taking over have been coming from complete nobodies. Like the Estonian developers of Skype or the Swedish developer of Minecraft.

Because in such nations, young oddballs like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs more likely would have needed the proper parentage, age, family connections, or government-insider sanction to be given a fair shake.

And by eliminating the barrier of “government-insider sanction”, America continues its long tradition of just squeaking by! USA USA USA!

Yeah, no, we trained those people. They had opportunities for funding or inherited great amounts of wealth and were lucky enough to be born white and middle class enough to be given a college opportunity that is being more and more denied to people.

Also, I note that you had to include China in that list just to ignore the fact that not only is it easier for a young poor child in Japan or Germany to get the education necessary to have an idea like that, but that those countries are kicking our ever-loving ass in a number of other industries.

Even in its third century, America is still the most meritocratic nation in the world.

If you find yourself with a bootheel ground into your throat, that is only because that is what you deserve and that is your place. Do not question the idiot man-child granted his own string of companies to run into the ground while you toil multiple part-time jobs just to feed your kids though an avalanche of ideas flow through your head. He is simply better than you and worth more than you could ever be. And to question your place is to disrupt the quiet meritocratic peace.

Unlike under the caste system of India; the class considerations of Europe; the racial homogeneity of China, Japan, or Korea; the tribalism of Africa; or the religious orthodoxy of the Middle East, in America one can offer a new idea, invention, or protocol and have it be judged on its merits, rather than on the background, accent, race, age, gender, or religion of the person who offers it.

No, really, that’s basically his argument. Cause, see, if Bill Gates had been an impoverished black inner city youth from a broken family with ebonics slang, a muslim faith, and a transmale background, he totally would have had the same opportunities and aid he had when he was getting started. And the technologies he stole would have totally been equally treated as his if his name was Abdulla and she had some jheri curls.

Because, racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, religious bigotry, classism, regional bigotry just don’t exist in the magical fairy spell of America! It may seem like ideas from marginal group members are treated less seriously, performances viewed as less impressive, opportunities are less present, risks less worth taking, jobs harder to acquire, and educational opportunities too expensive, but nope, that’s just the evil Satanic haze of looking at too many Danish webcomics.

Oh hey, how many of those “innovators” you mentioned earlier were Southern, Mr. Racism Doesn’t Exist So I Don’t Know What You’re Accusing Me Of? Or black? Or female? Or trans? Or queer? Or came from poor or broken homes? How many were raised in group homes or were denied college because of financial reasons? Oh, right…yeah.

Hey, just because it’s the same result as those “oppressive” systems doesn’t at all mean we have the same restrictions, we’re just in denial about it? I’m sure there are at least like a dozen innocent reasons that could explain it that you would be happy to provide if you weren’t running so very late for your meeting with an overpromoted rich oppressor’s crotch.

Businesses evaluate proposals on the basis of what makes them lots of money.

Or who seems the most like them (i.e. white, cismale, etc…, because those other applicants just weren’t “professional looking”)? Or whoever has the best dazzle in the meeting with the bosses, because “hey, I wouldn’t have this job if I didn’t have the skills to see through flim-flam”? Or whoever comes from the right school or familial background, because if it says Harvard on the resume, I’m sure they can do any job we hand them? Or whoever is a close personal friend or golfing buddy? Or…

I could do this for hours.

Publishers want writing that a lot of people will read. Popular culture is simply a reflection of what the majority seems to want. In the long run, that bottom line leads to national wealth and power.

Which is why diverse little Scandanavian nations are kicking our ever living ass on national wealth and relative economic power and have the highest entrepreneur rates in the world. It’s almost like just sitting in the status quo and not moving, letting the same old gears move the same old product, doesn’t actually make a thriving growing economy and a lack of a strong safety net matters far more to new developers of new ideas than a bunch of bullshit about capitalism being just so gosh darn perfect.

Also, I saw your little, I have a job on the wingnut welfare circuit because I earned it self-rationalization there.

Whatever helps you sleep at night, buddy. I’m sure, the knowledge that this is the high point of your usual output totally makes your six-figure salary look earned.

If history is a guide, the most savvy Chinese citizen of Japanese descent would not make it as a high official in Beijing’s Communist Party — no more so than a brilliant Japanese citizen of Chinese descent would run Toyota or Honda. A white Croatian of enormous talent could not end up as president of Sudan.

Of course. Unlike purest America where our Fortune 500 CEO list is a cornucopia of… rich white assholes, what the hell? C’mon, Pretensions to Class Hanson, if you’re going to set up determined turds in the punch bowl like this, you could at least throw a few bones to those in your audience who still have two brain cells to rub together.

I mean, you know you want to argue that the underclasses don’t rise to these levels here because of their genetic inferiority, like you have in every other one of your posts. But I guess that argument wouldn’t let you beat up the rest of the world for supposedly having less class mobility than us.

Gosh, you know what would be terrible? If some terrible unbeliever happened to check this claim and actually found a way to measure social mobility and how likely it was for someone of a lower class to rise up the ranks by grit and hard work? That would just be awful.

Mexico has a word, Raza, that conflates race and nationality, in the way that the German word Volk used to suggest not just being German, but looking German, as well. I doubt that either country would ever elect a black head of state.

So, let’s see here, Obama is an untermenschen who is single handedly collapsing our economy with his Antichrist Kenyan-born superpowers and is too stupid to even breathe which is why he uses a teleprompter like every single television personality and the last president… unless we need a single get out of racism free card with the rest of the planet.

Oh and…Mexico, kinda sorta beat us on the whole black president thing by like… over 200 years. And Germany currently has a female chancellor when we’ve only ever had two total nominees for vice presidency available for women and the second one was one of the most cynical sexist attempts at “wooing the female vote” I’ve ever seen in my life. So I think those countries’ responses would be “Va al Infierno” and “Leck mich am Arsch” respectively.

It would be virtually impossible for the most talented Christian or Jew to be allowed to head contemporary Egypt

Possibly, in much the same way that the most talented Royalist might have had difficulty winning the first American election. They just had a revolution after a long history of manipulation and oppression often second-hand through Western Powers.

Given that we’ve never had such a history as excuse and the closest we’ve ever gotten to having either a Jew or Muslim president is Joe Fucking Lieberman’s Vice President nomination, yeah, I don’t really think we’ve got a fucking leg to stand on over Egypt’s first democratic election.

Also, how quick do the grapes sour on the Arab Revolutions when they turned out to be actual populist uprisings instead of easily controlled puppet people for Western business interests.

or for a brilliant four-star Buddhist general to run the Iranian military.

Given the centrality of pacifism to most Buddhist beliefs, I’d be rather impressed to see one a four-star general in any nation, especially one that was not predominantly Buddhist. Again, I have to point out to Venereal Disease Hanson how he’s doing this completely wrong. I mean, you were on to something by asking if countries had elected a first black president yet. That’s something we have demonstrably done. But grilling other countries about whether they’ve done something we haven’t even done despite our totally awesome meritocracy, diverse population, and complete lack of a legitimate reason to be wary? It just makes us look like total fucking idiots.

America, it’s the greatest place, anyone can be anything, like you Russia, have you elected your first gay president yet? Of course you haven’t! It’s because you are so bigoted that you could never bring yourself to… what’s that? I haven’t either? Um… er… AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM! (drop smoke bomb) And away!

For the immediate future, don’t expect a female business-school valedictorian to manage Saudi Arabia’s national oil company. Note that in all these cases, such exclusions derive from criteria other than innate talent, character, and industriousness, and can result in the lesser qualified being considered the only qualified.

See, like this, it’s a dumb example, but it’s at least based on something we’ve actually managed. By which I mean there is one. One single female CEO of an oil company. Not the national oil company. Not even one of the bigger oil companies. Just an oil company.

But hey, I guess, our good down-home American Exceptionalism couldn’t quite hold a candle to Brazil’s.

Maybe if V.D. Hasifras had prayed harder to the Meritocracy Gods…

The mixture of consumer capitalism and constitutionally protected free speech — and all sorts of races, religions, and ethnicities — sometimes means that America can be a wild place with a popular culture that appears crass and uncouth to those abroad. Our generation’s $17 trillion national debt, unfunded entitlements, and nearly 50 million people on food stamps might convince the Founding Fathers that they had spawned license rather than guaranteed liberty.

Hey, he wouldn’t be a right-wing shitbird if in the middle of his “Do Nothing” anthem he didn’t take the time to argue that the only thing that should change is making sure even more of the poor suffer and die and have even fewer opportunities to rise above their shit hill surroundings.

What’s that? Does that go against the very notion of a meritocracy, that anyone from anywhere could climb out of the gutter with some good old fashioned hard work? Well, see, undeserving members of the upper class are allowed to weld the sewer gates behind them, because by virtue of being paid way too much money to deliver poorly designed half-hearted propaganda like this, they prove that they are simply more worthwhile than other people.

Yet the upside to the wild arena of America is that almost anyone is free to enter it. Oprah Winfrey, an African-American woman, reinvents the genre of daytime talk shows and builds a media empire. Warren Buffet outpaces New York’s Wall Street — from Nebraska. A one-time five-and-dime owner from Arkansas, Sam Walton, refashions the way an entire planet buys its stuff. A Russian émigré, Sergey Brin, co-founds Google, perhaps the most indispensible site on the Internet.

Just when we read obituaries about an unruly nation of excess, unlikely nobodies pop up to pioneer fracking, the Napa wine industry, or Silicon Valley. Why? No other nation has a Constitution whose natural evolution would lead to a free, merit-based society that did not necessarily look like the privileged — and brilliant — landed white-male aristocracy that invented it.

The end of American exceptionalism will come not when we run out of gas, wheat, or computers, but when we end the freedom of the individual, and, whether for evil or supposedly noble reasons, judge people not on their achievement but on their name, class, race, sex, or religion — in other words, when we become like most places the world over.

Yeah, we’ll only fuck up the meal ticket if we start believing that rich people aren’t inherently better because they inherited companies or were given resources and safety net support that others simply don’t have. If we start to actually do stuff to prepare for a future society and actually enact the policies that gave the US such a sustained boom in the latter half of the 20th century.

Cause, see, with fraking fracking and reality TV and sweatshop goods at prohibitive profit margins, we will somehow make ourselves immune to the reality. The reality that we’re stuck, wheels spinning in the mud, while the rich finish looting what’s left of our economy before fucking off back to Europe to drain its coffers. And in the meantime we continue to pollute and destroy what little we have left as the biomes are shifting, the old resources are dwindling, the global economies are changing, and new storms wipe out once thriving cities.

VDH and other conservatives want to pray to Golden Calfs, gods of capitalism, built on delusion and the ludicrous belief that faith can literally forestall catastrophe. We have a choice. We can either react to the real consequences and motions of the world and use our remaining financial and political power to catch up and lead or we can continue praying to dead gods and holding onto quaint fictions as our land grows more and more toxic and our people are given the rich fate we deserve, to die under the bootheel of our Ikea overlords.

According to wingnuts, the latter is preferable. I suppose that’s because they think they are too old to still be alive when the bills come due. Sucks for them, that the bills are already here and not even their courtier asses will be saved from the consequences they so gleefully championed.

Also, too:

Jack Cashill, American… No. Just no.:
Why Florida Persists in the Zimmerman Persecution

…

Because he shot and killed a child in cold blood.

That’s why he’s being prosecuted. Because he killed someone. Or more importantly because he’s been accused of killing someone. Cause that’s what happens when you’re accused of committing a crime.

For someone who spends so much of his time whining about how “having a few small questions about the Satanist plot to brainrape anyone who knows about Obama’s secret Kenyan abortion doctor birth certificate” doesn’t at all make him a racist, Jack Fuckwit here is not doing himself any favors by literally boggling at the concept that the legal system isn’t actually just for keeping the niggers and the faggots down.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• I’m selling a book, so please take the time to listen to my incredibly belated attempt at white-washing and dime-store legal ninjitsu on why Trayvon Martin actually used his tentacle mindrape powers to make Al Sharpton snipers take fire on poor huddled George Zimmerman before breaking out tiny Skittle bayonets and stabbing him over and over forcing the confused and harried Zimmerman to shoot an unarmed teenage boy.

And somehow, despite his Johnny-Reb-come-lately attempt to corner the KKK bookworm market, he still manages to find a way to be more offensive than the psychopaths who turned George Zimmerman into a cult conservative hero in the first place*.

I mean, this is how the post begins, for Bob’s sake:

Prodded by a president with a weakness for racial agitation and enabled by a politically complicit media, the State of Florida persists in a prosecution that can come to no good end.

Yes, somehow, Obama used the same time-traveling magical voodoo he uses to hide his True Birth Certificate and College Transcript from Satan University & Nursery in the Late Triassic Period, to totally force George Zimmerman to shoot a kid in cold blood and then convince the racist police force to try and ineptly cover it up and fail to even put on the show of an arrest and arraignment in blatantly illegal and corrupt fashion. Then he sent a psychic message to various unrelated civil rights organizations to totally invent various unrelated negative reactions among black people to the blatant racism and neo-lynching so that he could make an innocuous statement. Cause he knew damn well that that would totally trick conservatives into making themselves look every bit the racist psychopaths they are by rallying to the child murderer and sending said murderer huge amounts of money and acting like the real tragedy was that someone who killed someone else had to like explain in court why he did it. I mean, what if he can’t keep his lies straight in the courthouse? Then he might have had to like, pay, for his crime or something. Even though everyone knows that killing black people totally doesn’t count.

The defendant is neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman.

I like how Jack Cashill puts this here like some fucking badge of honor. Yes, George Zimmerman won a Yellow Pants of Honor for bravely holding the line against a schnauzer that looked cross-eyed at him. Truly, his belonging to a paranoid twitch-curtain faux-police-force designed around harassing youths makes him America’s True Hero! And yeah, no mention of how he kinda sorta, wasn’t even that, because he turned out to be too crazy for even that bunch of panty-sniffing wanna-be fascists.

The charge is the second-degree murder.

Which is already a bit of a giant win for His Lordship Captain Child Killer right there. There is no way in the cold reaches of Hell that a race-reversed situation would have resulted in anything less than first-degree (also a trial that would last about 3.5 picoseconds if it had even a fraction of the evidence acquired for this modern lynching). Conservatives are so far removed from experiencing actual oppression that they think not having your balls fondled lovingly enough is male genital mutilation.

The potential outcomes range from major injustice, if Zimmerman is convicted, to mayhem in the streets, if he’s acquitted.

Yes, I imagine that there will be some righteous fury if and sadly, probably, when he’s acquitted (given the actions of the local law enforcement so far and the additional pressure the shit-town judge will be under now that Zimmerman is considered an honorary conservative saint in addition to the relative of another judge).

And if it’s anything like the “mayhem” exhibited by the protests when said law enforcement was refusing to even ape the motions of a trial, then it’ll be infinitely better behaved than anything conservatives have ever thrown up to and including the Annual Hoverund three wheeled race and Tea Party barbeque.

And the state plods on as though the angels were on its side. They are not.

Yeah, seeing as how The State couldn’t have been more corruptly unwilling to prosecute if it was run by actual cartoon mobsters, I can pretty well guarantee they aren’t “on the side of angels”. Unless you mean on the side of “Angel Lips” Gambheri.

[Fictional Account of Trayvon Martin slaying redacted]

What follows is 1, 2, 3… 24! paragraphs of KKK revisionism trying to play armchair lawyer about as well as wingnuts have played armchair general or Cashill personally played armchair investigative journalist in his hunt for the Secret Obama Birth Certificate Conspiracy.

It hits the usual Cashill notes of accepting every single right-wing conspiracy as indisputable fact and discarding hard reported facts as “disproved rumors”. Because if you’ve only got one shtick, you might as well milk it until the cow keels over.

What’s impressive though is the attempt to spin that with the general wingnut conspiracy of Trayvon Martin, psychic Skittles assassin, leads him to numbering various witnesses into the double digits to try and discredit all the ones that sounded blackest (but not due to racism, oh no). Which just sort of underlines how there is no way in hell that a race-reversed or even a race-matching case with that many witnesses and that clear of a sign of intentional slaughter would not be done and dusted within microseconds.

But because Trayvon Martin was unlucky enough to be a black boy in a paranoid white suburbs home to a complete fuckwit like Zimmerman, he was murdered and his mother needed to fight with every ounce of her being just to have the fucker arrested. And since then, she has been receiving death threats and all the hatred that the South Will Rise Again crowd can throw at her for doing so and probably will decades after Zimmerman ducks out of doing anything more than a couple of hours of community service or a handful of years in rich white man prison.

And people like Jack Cashill, will be producing books and probably making a decent living preying on that pain and trying to make it worse because he can not stand that a black man he hates for totally not racist freakout reasons once empathized with her.

There’s no joke there. Jack Cashill is scum incarnate and his attempt to rewrite the Trayvon Martin killing is obscene to say the least. And in true wingnut fashion, the worst part of it is the Tigers in the comment jungles who are eating up every piece of red meat on offer and arguing over exactly which black stereotype that all black people must be like explains their ninja psionic powers.

And I don’t wish him ill-will because of it. In contrary, I hope he lives a long full life. So long that he watches as his racist little band of customers slowly die off and leave him alone. And just long enough to see the first biracial lesbian elected president. It’s more than he deserves.

*Which serves as one of the starkest examples of the hero gap between liberals and conservatives. Liberals often lionize people who performed great acts of bravery in standing up against oppression and bigotry, slowly moving the gears of history forward for the betterment of their people. Conservatives instead lionize murderers, terrorists, war criminals, and rapist cult members. People who, at the very least, performed evil acts that are only deniable by the truly delusional. Maybe if conservatives want us to stop viewing them as equatable to the dog shit left smeared on the front steps, they should stop applauding every travesty of justice and stop canonizing every penny-ante child murderer and tinpot dictator that comes their way.

The trouble began when I watched Silent Running and saw that my exact model of oscilloscope was in use on the bridge of the Valley Forge, as a sensor to detect distant spacecraft.

I have been unable to use this feature on mine. There is no combination of settings that seems to detect spacecraft at any distance. Hell with you, Silent Running.

Over time, through other movies and TV episodes, I learned that my oscilloscope’s capabilities also include alien language translation, tractor-beaming, and scanning for life forms.

Needless to say, if I can’t detect spaceships, I’m not going to have any aliens to talk to whose space-gibberish needs translating. No combination of settings seems to emit tractor beams. The bushes outside could be rustling with ninjas for all I can tell, scanwise.

Plus, if that life-form-scanning function even worked, how would I know it wasn’t detecting me, earthworms, or even airborne bacteria? You might as well have a device in your home to detect atmospheric nitrogen (or gravity).

So long story short, yesterday I attempted to watch the first episode of Space:1999 only to find Barbara Bain (as Dr. Helena Russell) using my very oscilloscope to detect abnormal brainwave activity among the personnel of Moonbase Alpha.

I’m going to assume without even checking the knob settings and output jacks that this represents YET ONE MORE FRAUD perpetrated upon the science-fiction community by the oscilloscope lobby.

[PS: If the vid doesn't start at 1:20, advance the slider-thingy. KTHX! -Steiner]