Slouching Towards Oblivion

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

The Privilege Of Privilege

Chock full of good stuff.

Stacey Patton, Dame Magazine:

There’s a scene in the film The Color Purple—based on Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer-winning novel set in 1930s-era rural Georgia—that has been coming to mind far too often lately with all the BBQ Beckys and Permit Pattys having their moment. In it, the town mayor’s wife Miss Millie, a white woman, walks up to Sofia, a Black woman who is out enjoying life with her children while her husband is pumping gas. Miss Millie, in a moment of peak caucasity, walks up to these Black children, squeezes their faces and kisses them, and compliments Sofia on how clean they are. Then she asks if Sofia would like to become her maid.



- and -

I think of Miss Millie every time I hear another story about one of these white women who has been accosting or calling cops on Black people for simply living and breathing, whether it’s mowing lawns, or selling candy, or families having barbecues, or an Ivy League student napping in the library. These Permit Pattys are living archetypes of white females lording their privilege over Black people.


- and -


These hashtagged Beckys are contemporary versions of the plantation mistress and Miss Millie from the Jim Crow era. The growing list of white women calling the police today reminds us that they feel entitled to have a say in and control over Black people’s lives, reinforcing their entitlement by calling in the law when they feel offended. While a few police officers are exhibiting a rare common sense by not attacking or arresting the Black victims, they remain the exception to the rule. The risk of danger is ever-present when a white woman takes out her entitled fingers to dial 911.

If white women decide that they feel uncomfortable, upset, or threatened—again, without any cause or provocation—they know they can always call in the white patriarchal soldiers to back up their racist suspicions. They make those calls with the expectation that they will be believed and the Black person will be “put back in his or her place.”

We’ve seen a lot of think pieces about the “angry white man” in the era of Trump. But what do these stories tells us about white women’s state of mind?

- and -

As Tommy J. Curry, author of The Man-Not explains: “Historically, white women have acted as the triggers of white male patriarchal violence. They establish the racial proxemics within societies. For centuries, the alleged hyper-vulnerability white women have had to racialized men and their discomfort around raced bodies has served as the justification for segregation and apartheid in colonized spaces the world over.”

Curry also asserts that the discrimination white women face limits their individual aspirations and controls their bodies in exchange for the safety from and superiority to racialized groups. This gives white women an extraordinary managerial power over Black lives.

But because white women today are also in this place where they don’t feel privileged because of a combination of sexism and general economic crap affecting all but the one percent, they flex what power they do have in weird ways, so they’re less inclined to imagine themselves as oppressors. Their sense of trumped-up fear and vulnerability against people of color, especially Black people, has been historically validated—rarely if ever challenged or questioned—and so if and when they call the police or the mobs to exact violence, they know they will rush to their defense.

In times of national distress, white women need Black people, especially Black women. They are longing for someone to take care of them and they resent that they can’t command that any more. These police calls are tied up with them missing their sense of power.

Today's Tweet

It's almost as if the self-described greatest negotiator in the history of all mankind is in fact a blithering dimwit, a credulous boob, a man easily overcome by inanimate objects and frequently outwitted by household appliances.
-- Rick Wilson

Monday, July 30, 2018

Commencement

Cody Keenan - 2018 at Northwestern University.


He reminds:

  • There are poor people who won't be fed because there are rich people who can't be satisfied.
  • There's a feeling of safety in being cynical.
  • Idealism is not thinking the world has to be perfect; it's insisting that we work to make it better.

A Reminder

Worth repeating.

Saturday, July 28, 2018

Today's Product Showcase

Buy this immediately:


Available in a variety of forms - T-Shirt, Wall Art, Sticker, Coffee Mug, etc.


Perfect gift idea - especially for any Display Window Christians on your Christmas card list.

Today's Tweet



Seems obvious

 

Friday, July 27, 2018

On Being An Ally

NPR:




White people policing black presence is not new. I think it's safe to say it had been tamped down a bit, but lately it seems to be making quite the comeback.

And I don't think it's just because we can be made aware of it more easily. SPLC documents a pretty significant rise in the incidence of "hate crimes", coinciding neatly with the growing popularity of  - oh, I dunno - Donald Fucking Trump(?)

Anyway, "If you see something, say something" is a favorite meme of the Daddy State. We can flip that script and use it to hold these authoritarian assholes accountable.

Today's Divide-N-Conquer

Christian Science Monitor:

If you search Twitter for the hashtag #FamiliesBelongTogether, a tag created by activists opposing the forcible separation of migrant children from their parents, you might be in for a pop proofreading quiz.

That’s because, in some locations in the United States, the top trending term, the one that Twitter automatically predicts as you type it, contains a small typo, like #FamiliesBelongTogther.

The misspelled hashtag, and others like it, have enjoyed unusual popularity on the social platform.


- and -

This is not an accident, say data scientists, but the result of a deliberate, automated misinformation campaign. The misspelled hashtags are decoys, aimed at diffusing the reach of the original by breaking the conversation into smaller groups. These decoys can dilute certain voices and distort public perception of beliefs and values.

“This is becoming more like a mind game,” says Onur Varol, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute. “If they can reach a good amount of activity, they are changing the conversation from one hashtag to another.”

It's a very old problem-solving metaphor: Try to eat the whole steak all at once, and you choke on it. So you cut in into bite-sized chunks - and enjoy your meal.



hat tip = Blue Gal

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Show Up Or Shut Up

The Brennan Center For Justice (PDF):

On April 19, 2016, thousands of eligible Brooklyn voters dutifully showed up to cast their ballots in the presidential primary, only to find their

names missing from the voter lists. An investigation by the New York state attorney general found that New York City’s Board of Elections had improperly deleted more than 200,000 names from the voter rolls.

In June 2016, the Arkansas secretary of state provided a list to the state’s 75 county clerks suggesting that more than 7,700 names be removed from the rolls because of supposed felony convictions. That roster was highly inac- curate; it included people who had never been convicted of a felony, as well as persons with past convictions whose voting rights had been restored.

And in Virginia in 2013, nearly 39,000 voters were removed from the rolls when the state relied on a faulty database to delete voters who allegedly had moved out of the commonwealth. Error rates in some counties ran as high as 17 percent.

These voters were victims of purges — the some- times-flawed process by which election officials attempt to remove ineligible names from voter registration lists. When done correctly, purges ensure the voter rolls are accurate and up-to-date. When done incorrectly, purges disenfranchise legitimate voters (often when it is too close to an election to rectify the mistake), causing confusion and delay at the polls.

Ahead of upcoming midterm elections, a new Brennan Center investigation has examined data for more than 6,600 jurisdictions that report purge rates to the Election Assistance Commission and calculated purge rates for 49 states.

We found that between 2014 and 2016, states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls, and every state in the country can and should do more to protect voters from improper purges.2
Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008.3This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent — far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).


Some of the more egregious highlights (per The Root):
  • In June 2016, the Arkansas secretary of state gave a list of 7,700 names to county clerks to be removed from the rolls because of supposed felony convictions. That list included people who had never been convicted of a felony and formerly convicted persons whose voting rights had been restored.
  • In 2013, Virginia deleted 39,000 names from its voting roster. In some counties, the mistakes on the list were as high as 17 percent.
  • A federal court halted a purge after Hurricane Katrina after justices found that one-third of the purged names came from a majority black parish in of New Orleans.
  • After the Shelby v. Holder decision, Texas purged 363,000 more voters than it did the election cycle before the case. Georgia purged 1.5 million more voters.
  • Alabama, Indiana and Maine have illegally instituted the widely ridiculed Crosscheck system (on which Charles D. Ellison previously reported on for The Root) that purges voters without federally-mandated notification.
  • In 1986, one Louisiana official remarked that a voter purge effort “could really keep the black vote down considerably.”
  • Instead of checking out inequities, Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice has been urging states to do more purging.
Making a habit of voting every chance you get is sine qua non in a democracy. Now you have to make it a habit to check to make sure some asshole Republican isn't rat-fucking you out of your right to self-government.



"Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves, and the only way they could do this is by not voting."
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt


Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Tech Update

People "in the professions" - ie: Lawyers, Doctors etc - are often notoriously Ludite-ish.

It's good to see a guy like Michael Cohen keeping up with some of these fast-moving developments.


Today's Tweet



Joe Walsh is an incompetent clown, a dead beat dad who's loudly moralized about "family values", and an all-around demagoguing schmuck, so when we find ourselves in total agreement with a guy like that - I gotta figure something's really up.

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Today's Pix

click a pic to start the show
















Today's Tweet



Sounded a little wacky to me too. But then somebody pointed out that there are more licensed yoga instructors in this country than there are coal miners - and the people practicing yoga outnumber the people watching NASCAR by a million or more.

Don't fuck with those namaste folk.

Yeah But No


It's a nice story about doing something nice for some nice lady. I especially liked the ooky-spooky angle about spirits and ghosts and shit.


The only problem is that there's a subtext that makes it actually about responsibility.

If I give credit to a supernatural force for something good that I did, then I can blame a supernatural force when I do something shitty. I can duck having to own up to whatever I do, which tells me self-infantilization is at the heart of every sky-pixie religion.

As an adult human being, you have to develop a relationship with yourself. Being faithful to a religion means you refuse to be the grownup in that relationship.

You did a good thing. Congratulations on having figured out how to be a decent person, but I do have a question:
  • You don't really need us to pat you on the back for it every fuckin' time do you?

Monday, July 23, 2018

Today's Quote

"Donald Trump, champion and avatar of the shallow state, has won power because his supporters are threatened by what they don't understand, and what they don't understand is almost everything. Indeed, from evolution to data about our economy to the science of vaccines to the threats we face in the world, they reject vast subjects rooted in fact in order to have reality conform to their worldviews. They don't dig for truth; they skim the media for anything that makes them feel better about themselves. To many of them, knowledge is not a useful tool, but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man and woman."
--David Rothkopf

That Keke Challenge Thing

My youngest just sent me a FB link that purports to show the dangers of online viral challenges.

Here's a compilation - and think maybe half of them are flim-flammed, but I dearly love the creativity no matter what is and what ain't "real".


It always brings this to mind:

The Power Of The Visual


One of the great moments in American political image-making - combining visuals (that go from pastoral to stark) with Bill Conrad's amazing voice-over to create a powerful message intended to motivate people to get together and do something about a serious problem.

And we did some pretty great things. Even with a slug like Dick Nixon in the White House.

The actor is Iron Eyes Cody, born Espera Oscar De Conti, in 1904 to parents who immigrated to this country from Italy.

The guy spent most of his adult life taking great pains to maintain the manufactured illusion of his "heritage".

As an aside - the piece also allows the inference that while American Aboriginals may be a bit peeved by European wars of conquest and that little genocide-y thing, what really gets' em is roadside litter and water pollution. White people - whaddaya gonna do?

Anyway, we did some things. We saved the bald eagle. We stopped lead and asbestos. We insisted that companies be held responsible for their actions. And we began to understand that a paycheck isn't worth much if what you're doing to earn that check is hurting - and even killing - everything and everybody you love.

If you live in the mountains because you love to fish, but your favorite stream is being killed by the runoff caused by the logging operations of the lumber company you're working for, what's the fuckin' point?

It's A Simple Question

"What the actual fuck is wrong with these people?"


WaPo:

A Georgia state representative, Republican Jason Spencer, became the latest political victim of Sacha Baron Cohen’s series “Who Is America?” on Sunday night in an episode featuring Spencer screaming obscenities, taking pictures up a Muslim actor’s robe while pretending to be a “Chinese tourist,” and exposing his bare buttocks in an attempt to “intimidate” a terrorist. “If you want to win, you show some skin,” Cohen told him.

Spencer also appeared to pretend to cut off a fake terrorist’s genitals while using the n-word and other profanities.

He told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he was led to believe the video would be used as an “educational aid to train elected officials who may be targeted by terrorists.”

Instead, it was used to provoke widespread ridicule — the New York Times asked, ‘Who Is Jason Spencer, the Unfortunate Star of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Latest Show?’ — and prompted the Republican speaker of the Georgia House to call for his resignation.

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Today's Tweet



And back we've gone - to the good old days - when men are men, and people suffer and die because they can't afford treatment for easily-manageable conditions - because some of us are just too fuckin' stoopid.


Saturday, July 21, 2018

Today's Tweet



I have no idea what to say on this one, so I'll just leave it here and maybe come back later.

Thursday, July 19, 2018

Today's Poe 😉

"You ever say something - and what comes out is treason? I do"

Brent Terhune:



Today's Pix




















Fire Ready Aim


Americans can always be counted on to do what's right - once they've tried everything else.

WaPo, Erica Werner and Kevin Seiff:


When a Mexican company bought Mid Continent Nail Corp. in 2012, workers at the factory here feared it was the beginning of the end. Their jobs, they suspected, would be given to lower-paid workers in Mexico, more casualties of the hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing driven in part by an embrace of global trade. 

Instead, Mid Continent’s factory has doubled in size since Deacero’s purchase. The company, facing fewer restrictions on steel exports after the North American Free Trade Agreement, shipped steel into Missouri, willing to pay skilled workers more to take advantage of cheaper energy costs in the United States and a location that allowed swift delivery to U.S. customers.

But President Trump has put 25 percent tariffs on steel imports, bumping production costs and prompting Deacero to reconsider this arrangement. With Mid Continent charging more for nails, orders are down 70 percent from this time a year ago despite a booming construction industry. Company officials say that without relief, the Missouri plant could be out of business by Labor Day — or that remaining production could move to Mexico or another country.


- and -


Philip Bennett, 37, a machine repairman at Mid Continent, appeared close to tears as he talked about his 5-year-old daughter, Aubree, who has a congenital heart condition that has required multiple surgeries. He has health insurance through Mid Continent that covers her.

- the money quote:

“There’s a lot of good things that he is doing. But he’s affecting me now, and I don’t appreciate it,” Bennett, a Trump supporter, said of the president.


It bothers me that Mr Bennet couldn't figure out how to be aware of the shitty things he was willing for other people to endure until those shitty things started to happen to him and his family.  

And I may be giving him more credit than he deserves - he didn't say anything about how maybe he's been wrong, so now he's going rethink his political values.

Which brings me to the notion - according to the Let's-All-Sing-Along Lefties - that I'm supposed to coddle Mr Bennet, and soothe him; and pet him; and tell him it's OK that he and millions like him have spent the last 30 years snickering at the pain and suffering being visited on the whole fucking world because of the shitty policies of shitty politicians he's been rabidly supporting, which is why we're in this fucking mess in the first fucking place.

Here's what I have a truly difficult time not saying to guys like Philip Bennet: 

"Take a flyin' fuck at a rollin' donut, you skeevy prick. This is exactly what you've been voting for. I hope you end up livin' in a refrigerator box down by the junkyard."

But no - can't do that - that's not good for any of us.

So hey - kumbaya, motherfucker.

Today's Tweet



You know it's a party when the mariachis show up.

 

My Analytics

For the second time in a month or so, I've asked Google if I should be worried about traffic from Russia.


No answer so far.

I may be paranoid, but that don't mean nobody's out to get me.

Weird Science

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

I Want This

There's no way I'd be able to use it, but I want it.

Your Minority Is Showing

Deranged conservative grifter, Ted Nugent played a "concert" in Roanoke.

The Hill:

Musician Ted Nugent, a vocal gun rights advocate, reportedly barred guns from being allowed into a venue he performed at in Virginia on Tuesday night.
A local NBC affiliate reported that Nugent's management made the decision to tell fans they could not bring their guns inside the Berglund Performing Arts Theater in Roanoke, Va.

According to the news outlet, the Berglund Center said that since it is owned by the city it is not allowed to ban guns from being carried into its facility unless a performer requests it. A sub-contract between Nugent and his promoter regarding open carry was shared with Berglund Center management right before the performance, according to NBC.

"It happened about five minutes before we opened doors, we had a security meeting before we opened doors and the subject came up and we said, 'Yes people will be bringing firearms,'" Berglund Center General Manager Robyn Schon told NBC.

According to Schon, Nugent's team said, "Uh, no, our agreement says no."
So, it's always pretty cool when the "conservative" is shown up to be a hypocrite, but there's something else.

Buried in the story is the little nugget that about 1000 fans showed up for the performance at a venue that seats 3,000+.

And I think that's instructive because "conservatives" are constantly claiming that theirs is the view shared by "The American People" - always inviting (insisting actually) on the inference that the majority of us agree with even the shittiest little notion that oozes out of the conservative id.

They can't be trusted at all. They got in line with, and voted for TRE45SON , and they continue to stand by that support. How do we not assume they're either lying to us all the time for nefarious reasons, or they just don't care?

BTW: available at cafepress.com for 5 bucks.