I think one of many mistakes one can make when trying to pay women to fabricate sexual assault allegations against a powerful white man is to assume that even actual commitment of sexual assault would destroy the man's career.
But, leave it to rightwingers, misogynists, and other variations of anti-feminists to use false sexual assault allegations in the most cynical, projection-laden way imaginable. They constantly accuse women of wantonly lying about rape just for the fun of destroying men's careers (or of being paid to do so), but they jump at any opportunity to do exactly that. To such people, women's bodies aren't attached to human beings, we're just weapons for men to use to take down this, that, or the other political opponent.
A lot of it, too, is a perverted reversal. Women are regularly denied career opportunities for reasons far less severe than "committed sexual assault." We're too ambitious, too difficult, to devoted to our families, too emotional, too aggressive, too passive, too passive-aggressive, and, well you get the point, all-around too female.
What's funny-sad is that a lot of Russian trolls seem to understand US political nuance much better than the typical MAGA dumbass who is so used to his rightwing white-man bubble that he doesn't realize how irrational his thinking process, such as it is, is.
After all, despite many men's apparent hyper-reactive fear of being falsely smeared by conniving women, it's their man Donald Trump who helped normalize the reality that even an admitted sexual predator, like say one who has admitted on tape to grabbing women by the genitals without their consent, can rise to the very tippy-top in this nation.
You don't get to be on Team Trump n' Kavanaugh and then act like you give a fuck about women. Ever.
This cynical use of false allegations isn't going to "prove" that Democrats "don't care about sexual assault" and therefore depress voter turnout in the 2018 midterms. Rather, it's going to remind a lot of women of how desperately vile Trump and his fanboy club of deplorables are.
And yes, "Comey" is a verb now.
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
I Can't Stop Thinking About This
From The Wall Street Journal:
But, I also imagine it could be disturbing for the grieving to scatter their love one's ashes only to have them vacuumed up.
Anyway, it got me thinking, what other unusual places might people do this? State and national parks seems obvious, but I imagine some people probably surreptitiously leave ashes at sports arenas, stadiums, and fields. This probably happens much more than people realize, such as tourist attractions, favorite restaurants, and stores, right?
Oh, I'm being serious,by the way. I need actual ideas. I'm not saying this to elicit sympathy, but I have my mom's ashes and I don't know what to do with them as she didn't leave her wishes, and now enough time has passed that it's getting weird, so why not ask the Internet because what could go wrong?
"No code is kept more under wraps at Walt Disney World and Disneyland than the call for a 'HEPA cleanup.' It means that, once again, a park guest has scattered the cremated ashes of a loved one somewhere in the park, and an ultrafine (or 'HEPA') vacuum cleaner is needed to suck them up.
Disney custodians say it happens about once a month."I'm sure custodians at Disney encounter a lot of weird shit, but I'd think it would be at least somewhat traumatic to have to regularly and unexpectedly vacuum human remains during the course of one's job.
But, I also imagine it could be disturbing for the grieving to scatter their love one's ashes only to have them vacuumed up.
Anyway, it got me thinking, what other unusual places might people do this? State and national parks seems obvious, but I imagine some people probably surreptitiously leave ashes at sports arenas, stadiums, and fields. This probably happens much more than people realize, such as tourist attractions, favorite restaurants, and stores, right?
Oh, I'm being serious,by the way. I need actual ideas. I'm not saying this to elicit sympathy, but I have my mom's ashes and I don't know what to do with them as she didn't leave her wishes, and now enough time has passed that it's getting weird, so why not ask the Internet because what could go wrong?
Friday, October 26, 2018
Flashslash Friday
OH, well.
I guess this is the ship I never knew I needed in my life. Woof!
Actors in TV shows I watch saying they ship their own characters with others of the same sex is the ultimate fan service (n=me).
I guess this is the ship I never knew I needed in my life. Woof!
I ship it. pic.twitter.com/O80MWSZl9s— Stephen Amell (@StephenAmell) October 24, 2018
Actors in TV shows I watch saying they ship their own characters with others of the same sex is the ultimate fan service (n=me).
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
TFW You Realize Trump Wants Bernie To Lead the Dems
Even though self-avowed socialists and lefitsts make important distinctions between themselves and, gasp!, liberals, you can count on conservatives not to.
In response to what it deems the "comeback of socialism," the White House Council on Economic Advisers has published a report warning of the dire harm that results when nations try to implement socialism (PDF).
Some of it is silly, and some of it is not (but that would be a much longer post to parse out).
What I primarily want to observe is the following.
During the 2016 election, Donald Trump promoted the narrative that Hillary Clinton rigged the election against both himself and Bernie Sanders, the man many credit for socialism's current popularity.
Bernie himself, and his campaign leadership, had problems conceding that he lost fair and square to Clinton. Partly as a result of this lingering belief that Bernie was "robbed" of a win, Bernie (and many people's support of him) never really went away the way it's demanded that certain other, ahem, election losers go away forever. In fact, Bernie is largely treated as a 2016 winner, for purportedly pushing the Democrats leftward.
It is true that in the aftermath of the 2016 election, some high-profile Democratic politicians have publicly expressed more left-wing positions, such as supporting Medicare For All. Moving left is not necessarily a bad thing, but some of it seems to have been done in a reflexive, follow-the-white-man way in which a lot of people are taking cues from either Trump or Bernie. The mainstream media, too, has dutifully conceded that Bernie is the leader of the left and that everyone he hasn't properly anointed as a true leftist is therefore a "centrist" or "moderate."
Aside from the particularities of broad socialist policies (For instance, what happens to reproductive and trans healthcare rights when Republicans control the government that controls "healthcare for all"? And when the fuck are we going to talk about childcare?), I think many of the what I call "online socialists" simply have no clue how socialism, and particularly rightwing caricatures of it, plays in much of rural white America. I grew up in rural America in the 1980s, in a town that was about 99% working-class white people.
The teachers at my public schools told us horror stories about what happened to people in communist regimes. "Communist" was used often as a synonym for fascist, liberal, n-word, and/or Democrat. Yet, many of the men were in labor unions. And, the women had low-paying service sector jobs where unionization either couldn't happen or unions in the area didn't give a shit about them. Yeah, there was potential for .... political education, I guess. But I remember zero socialists (or Democrats or Republicans) going there and trying to organize or educate (or learn from) people.
The truth is, in the US, a lot of white guys across the political spectrum seem to fetishize violent political revolution. I don't mean that in a "both side-ism" way. I think it's far, far more prominent and worse on the right in the US, mostly because the US has been rigged for the racist, anti-woman far right since its founding. Indeed, even as they adopt hammer/sickle avatars and so forth, the Internet left-wing "revolutionaries" seem not to realize that an actual violent leftwing revolution would probably be squelched in the United States very, very quickly, as both the military and police force are more conservative than the general population.
My larger point today is that if the "online left," and even academia to an extent, spent a tenth of the time doing real-world outreach and education to the ordinary people(tm) they think are latent socialists as they did "dunking on libs," "ironically" being misogynistic rape culture racists, and having esoteric circle-the-wagons intra-left debates, I wouldn't feel so hopeless at the moment. (Because, unfortunately, toxic cishet white men often hog the best gigs, the leadership positions, and the large platforms via which they spew their versions of "socialism").
All that said, I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong for Democrats to move leftward. But that the debates we're about to see regarding socialism are going to be very, very stupid in the age of Twitter and Fox News, so Bernie and the Democrats who have kowtowed to him better have a fucking plan if they're leading this shitshow.
In response to what it deems the "comeback of socialism," the White House Council on Economic Advisers has published a report warning of the dire harm that results when nations try to implement socialism (PDF).
Some of it is silly, and some of it is not (but that would be a much longer post to parse out).
What I primarily want to observe is the following.
During the 2016 election, Donald Trump promoted the narrative that Hillary Clinton rigged the election against both himself and Bernie Sanders, the man many credit for socialism's current popularity.
What a great evening we had. So interesting that Sanders beat Crooked Hillary. The dysfunctional system is totally rigged against him!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 4, 2016
Bernie himself, and his campaign leadership, had problems conceding that he lost fair and square to Clinton. Partly as a result of this lingering belief that Bernie was "robbed" of a win, Bernie (and many people's support of him) never really went away the way it's demanded that certain other, ahem, election losers go away forever. In fact, Bernie is largely treated as a 2016 winner, for purportedly pushing the Democrats leftward.
It is true that in the aftermath of the 2016 election, some high-profile Democratic politicians have publicly expressed more left-wing positions, such as supporting Medicare For All. Moving left is not necessarily a bad thing, but some of it seems to have been done in a reflexive, follow-the-white-man way in which a lot of people are taking cues from either Trump or Bernie. The mainstream media, too, has dutifully conceded that Bernie is the leader of the left and that everyone he hasn't properly anointed as a true leftist is therefore a "centrist" or "moderate."
Aside from the particularities of broad socialist policies (For instance, what happens to reproductive and trans healthcare rights when Republicans control the government that controls "healthcare for all"? And when the fuck are we going to talk about childcare?), I think many of the what I call "online socialists" simply have no clue how socialism, and particularly rightwing caricatures of it, plays in much of rural white America. I grew up in rural America in the 1980s, in a town that was about 99% working-class white people.
The teachers at my public schools told us horror stories about what happened to people in communist regimes. "Communist" was used often as a synonym for fascist, liberal, n-word, and/or Democrat. Yet, many of the men were in labor unions. And, the women had low-paying service sector jobs where unionization either couldn't happen or unions in the area didn't give a shit about them. Yeah, there was potential for .... political education, I guess. But I remember zero socialists (or Democrats or Republicans) going there and trying to organize or educate (or learn from) people.
The truth is, in the US, a lot of white guys across the political spectrum seem to fetishize violent political revolution. I don't mean that in a "both side-ism" way. I think it's far, far more prominent and worse on the right in the US, mostly because the US has been rigged for the racist, anti-woman far right since its founding. Indeed, even as they adopt hammer/sickle avatars and so forth, the Internet left-wing "revolutionaries" seem not to realize that an actual violent leftwing revolution would probably be squelched in the United States very, very quickly, as both the military and police force are more conservative than the general population.
My larger point today is that if the "online left," and even academia to an extent, spent a tenth of the time doing real-world outreach and education to the ordinary people(tm) they think are latent socialists as they did "dunking on libs," "ironically" being misogynistic rape culture racists, and having esoteric circle-the-wagons intra-left debates, I wouldn't feel so hopeless at the moment. (Because, unfortunately, toxic cishet white men often hog the best gigs, the leadership positions, and the large platforms via which they spew their versions of "socialism").
All that said, I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong for Democrats to move leftward. But that the debates we're about to see regarding socialism are going to be very, very stupid in the age of Twitter and Fox News, so Bernie and the Democrats who have kowtowed to him better have a fucking plan if they're leading this shitshow.
Monday, October 22, 2018
Trans People Exist, Elections Matter, and Identity Politics Are Here To Stay
I have a new piece up at Shakesville today about the Trump Administration's ongoing attack on transgender and non-binary people.
Here's a snippet:
Read the whole thing.
Here's a snippet:
"Republicans know they can get away with attacking trans people partly because they know that many people on the moderate-to-left side of the political spectrum, particularly cishet white men, will give them sufficient cover.This national conversation must center the voices and perspectives of trans and non-binary individuals, and definitely not the voices of those whose prism for "identity politics" is that it's all a game.
Remember the spate of articles right after the 2016 election, those high-and-mighty 'I told you so' taunts of marginalized people: You people had this coming for obsessing about identity politics!
I think about Mark Lilla's version of this genre often. His piece was called, 'The End of Identity Liberalism.' Wishful thinking, there? It was also published at The New York Times. For sufficient balance to all those 'trans people are people' pieces, I suppose."
Read the whole thing.
Friday, October 19, 2018
Supergirl Is Back!
I know there's a lot going on in the world but I, for one, am happy to be able to watch Supergirl zoom around National City again!
I have so many questions.
Is it just me, or does Alex's hair keep getting gayer and gayer each season? Will Cat Grant ever come back to reunite with her one true soulmate, Supergirl? What will Nicole Maines' new character be like? Will Winn and James tie the knot anytime soon? Will Mon-El stay away?
What are y'all reading, watching, listening to, and/or playing?
I am officially watching the entire Alien movie canon, because I've only seen bits and pieces here and there. I also recently got the Pandemic Legacy tabletop game and am looking forward to giving it a go. I usually give various Buffy episodes a re-watch around Halloween, but the older I get the younger the Scoobies also start to seem. This year, I'm opting for The Haunting of Hill House. YIKES.
I have so many questions.
Is it just me, or does Alex's hair keep getting gayer and gayer each season? Will Cat Grant ever come back to reunite with her one true soulmate, Supergirl? What will Nicole Maines' new character be like? Will Winn and James tie the knot anytime soon? Will Mon-El stay away?
She can conquer anything. Stream the season premiere for free on The CW App: https://t.co/uO46KAYY7k #Supergirl pic.twitter.com/RTqN1kYbui— Supergirl (@TheCWSupergirl) October 16, 2018
What are y'all reading, watching, listening to, and/or playing?
I am officially watching the entire Alien movie canon, because I've only seen bits and pieces here and there. I also recently got the Pandemic Legacy tabletop game and am looking forward to giving it a go. I usually give various Buffy episodes a re-watch around Halloween, but the older I get the younger the Scoobies also start to seem. This year, I'm opting for The Haunting of Hill House. YIKES.
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