Eerie Parallel

From Wonkette:

Sixteen-year-old Jaelyn Rose Willey was taken off life support last night after having been shot in the head by Austin Rollins, a boy described by police as a “lovesick teen.”

Police described Austin Bomber Mark Anthony Conditt as a “very challenged young man” who was dealing with “challenges” in his personal life. “Challenges” that he was unable to find a way to deal with that did not involve killing two people and injuring five others. People he’d never met, who very likely did not have a thing to do with his “challenges.”

Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz was abusive to his girlfriend and was so obsessed with her that he threatened to kill her new boyfriend. He killed 17 people.

Guns are a problem. I’m not saying they’re not. We need gun control. But what we also need is for men, as a people, TO STOP FUCKING MURDERING PEOPLE BECAUSE THEY CAN’T GET LAID.

Women are also rejected. Women also spend their teen years pining after dreamy boys who will never love them back. You don’t see us going around murdering people over it. You don’t see us setting up internet communities for the purpose of talking about how evil and shallow men are for not taking us to pound town.
It suddenly occurs to me that sometimes, this American shooting shit looks a little too much like the "Honor Killings" that everybody loves Islam for.

Are We Dead Yet?

I remain hopeful even as optimism is held at bay.

This Is Our World - animation by Steve Cutts

New To Me

NSFW

Chrystyna Hutchinson - with today's lesson (ie: Cautionary Tale) in Relationship Management and Sexual Politics.

On Trying To Listen Better

Lili Loofbourow, The Week:

"Grace," the 23-year-old woman, was not an employee of Ansari's, meaning there were no workplace dynamics. Her repeated objections and pleas that they "slow down" were all well and good, but they did not square with the fact that she eventually gave Ansari oral sex. Finally, crucially, she was free to leave.

Why didn't she just get out of there as soon as she felt uncomfortable? many people explicitly or implicitly asked.

It's a rich question, and there are plenty of possible answers. But if you're asking in good faith, if you really want to think through why someone might have acted as she did, the most important one is this: Women are enculturated to be uncomfortable most of the time. And to ignore their discomfort.
- and -

The Aziz Ansari case hit a nerve because, as I've long feared, we're only comfortable with movements like #MeToo so long as the men in question are absolute monsters we can easily separate from the pack. Once we move past the "few bad apples" argument and start to suspect that this is more a trend than a blip, our instinct is to normalize. To insist that this is just how men are, and how sex is.
- and then -

This is what Andrew Sullivan basically proposed in his latest, startlingly unscientific column. #MeToo has gone too far, he argues, by refusing to confront the biological realities of maleness. Feminism, he says, has refused to give men their due and denied the role "nature" must play in these discussions. Ladies, he writes, if you keep denying biology, you'll watch men get defensive, react, and "fight back."

This is beyond vapid. Not only is Sullivan bafflingly confused about nature and its realities, as Colin Dickey notes in this instructive Twitter thread, he's being appallingly conventional. Sullivan claims he came to "understand the sheer and immense natural difference between being a man and being a woman" thanks to a testosterone injection he received. That is to say, he imagines maleness can be isolated to an injectable hormone and doesn't bother to imagine femaleness at all. If you want an encapsulation of the habits of mind that made #MeToo necessary, there it is. Sullivan, that would-be contrarian, is utterly representative.
Andrew Sullivan? Really?  I suspect he knows a thing or two about himself as a man, but his opinion on how men and women act and react in physically intimate encounters is not to be taken too seriously.  I could dismiss it just on the dubious merits of Man-Splaining, but throw in Gay-Splaining and you've kinda lost me altogether.

Maybe that's partly why Ms Loofbourow includes his perspective - to illustrate the problem of disconnection(?) - but I'm not sure it doesn't just cloud the really solid points she's making.

It could also be that I've chosen that particular nit to pick; and that could be not much more than my imagining the world to be a better place without Mr Sullivan in it.

Anyway, getting at the gist of it:

..."Everyone who regularly encounters the complaint of dyspareunia knows that women are inclined to continue with coitus, if necessary, with their teeth tightly clenched."

If you asked yourself why "Grace" didn't leave Ansari's apartment as soon as she felt "uncomfortable," you should be asking the same question here. If sex hurt, why didn't she stop? Why is this happening? Why are women enduring excruciating pain to make sure men have orgasms?

The answer isn't separable from our current discussion about how women have been routinely harassed, abused, and dismissed because men wanted to have erections in the workplace. It boggles the mind that Sullivan thinks we don't sufficiently consider men's biological reality when our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm. This quest has been granted total cultural centrality — with unfortunate consequences for our understanding of bodies, and pleasure, and pain.
If you asked yourself why "Grace" didn't leave Ansari's apartment as soon as she felt "uncomfortable," you should be asking the same question here. If sex hurt, why didn't she stop? Why is this happening? Why are women enduring excruciating pain to make sure men have orgasms?

The answer isn't separable from our current discussion about how women have been routinely harassed, abused, and dismissed because men wanted to have erections in the workplace. It boggles the mind that Sullivan thinks we don't sufficiently consider men's biological reality when our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm. This quest has been granted total cultural centrality — with unfortunate consequences for our understanding of bodies, and pleasure, and pain.

- and -

I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies' pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman's pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman's discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man's pleasure short.

But those aren't actually the lessons society teaches — no, not even to "entitled" millennials. Remember: Sex is always a step behind social progress in other areas because of its intimacy. Talking details is hard, and it's good we're finally starting to. But next time we're inclined to wonder why a woman didn't immediately register and fix her own discomfort, we might wonder why we spent the preceding decades instructing her to override the signals we now blame her for not recognizing.

Note to self: Be aware. See her for who she is. Appreciate it, and tell her about it.

James Baldwin

I remember being aware of Baldwin, but he wasn't a big influencer for me.

I kinda regret missing that opportunity, and I regret not listening better.

Oprah

I don't watch these things live. It's like watching baseball for me. Watch an inning, take a nap.  Watch an inning, fix a nice lunch. Watch an inning, mow the lawn.

Just gimme the hi-lights, if there are any.

Oprah brung it last night, btw.

Now, I can largely do without the Social Justice Warriors.  I think I get what their saying most of the time, but it seems like too many of them are going too far outa their way looking for a fight.

But maybe that's what needs to happen for a while.

So instead of crouching into a defensive position, maybe we could just listen - try to hear the individual story, and see if any of it lines up with our own behavior. And keep that conversation going.

If they're not talking about something you've done (are doing), there's no need to get your boxers in bunch.

If they're talking about something that rings a bell from your past, address it.

And always remember it costs you nothing to say, "I'm sorry that's happened to you - I'd like that never to happen to anyone".

It goes back to a Tim Wise idea: I may not be guilty of doing those things to you, but that doesn't mean I'm not responsible for trying to do something now - something that might make a difference.

And also too: it didn't get all fucked yesterday, and we're not gonna get it all unfucked by tomorrow.

Some Order Here Please

"We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads." --Zeynep Tufecki, UNC Chapel Hill

Globally, more than $490 Billion was spent on advertising in 2016 ($135 Billion spent by the top 200 US Brands alone).

These are smart, coldly-calculating people - they don't spend that kinda dough on shit that doesn't work.

Which makes this one even more important:

My Ayn Rand radar picked up on "...we can't abdicate our responsibilities..." - that's one of Rand's basic tenets even though her bit isn't only about responsibility - it's about reason and logic too, which makes those things are very closely related.

Anyway, I always love it when somebody uses one of the Daddy State Libertarians' favorite memes against them, and their insistence on ignoring and denying the bad shit that grows directly out of a short-sighted "philosophy" of "I'm gonna get mine and all y'all can just fuck off".

This is an old concern of course, and it goes with every big technological advancement.

What makes this instance particularly dangerous is that we don't have the kind of leadership that gets us to stop and think about what we're doing and where we're going with it.

Unfortunately, the people running this joint are in the thrall of some weird critical mass that (at best) carries us all forward into the 18th century, but this time with uncontrollable computer power and nuclear weapons.

Casualties Of War

Al Franken resigned this week.

(hoping I'm wrong about all this, BTW)

I can't stop thinking he got swift-boated. GOP went after him solely because he's been very strong on Equality issues.

It's basic Debate (and Salesmanship) training: If the opponent can knock down your strongest point, they can ignore everything else you have to say and revert to their comfortable assumptions.

There's a strong element of False Equivalence too. Kristen Gillibrand has led the charge, saying that when we argue over Degrees of Offense, we're having the wrong conversation - harassment is harassment is harassment, and we simply cannot have it.

I think I get it - we all have to be called to account, including our friends and political allies.

But this looks a lot like the GOP has played the Hypocrisy Card, and the Dems have bought in like it's Everything On Sale At Whole Foods. 

AKA: taking your strength and turning it against you. And as usual, Dems have been most obliging by going into navel-gazing mode, picking fights with their own, and imploding with self-recrimination.

Meanwhile, we are in fact very busy being drawn into having Ms Gillibrand's Wrong Conversation anyway - because when you overreact, you can lose some credibility, which means you give up the edge, which means the other side gets more control over the subject of the argument.

To wit: we're talking about why The Librul Media cropped out one of their Silence Breakers.

"It's intentional, to represent women who aren't able to come forward," Rosner wrote. "In this case, it is an actual woman with a tale of harassment who was unable to be public, but here she represents all women who remain silent (for whatever reason)."

Rosner also compared this cover to New York Magazine's July 2015 cover, which depicted the 35 women who had accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault at the time. The cover left one empty space to symbolize the women who hadn't come forward with their stories.

"When New York Magazine did their Cosby accuser cover they similarly left an empty chair — it's an elegant and powerful gesture, a visual ellipsis," she wrote.

And suddenly, we're not talking about the problems caused by harassment. The folks who need to be thinking about, and talking about harassment aren't thinking or talking about it.

So Dems, you assholes better make this work, cuz this is USAmerica Inc, where we really suck at nuance. Maybe you're trying to move against that; trying to demonstrate a stark contrast between the two parties, but the Rule Of Unintended Consequences is against you.

If you think this is a low-cost proposition, you're probably in for a rude surprise. I think you can count on a serious backlash against the perception of "Dems being Dems - always looking to tell us how to live our lives - they're a buncha pinch-faced blue-nosed prigs who just love the smell of their own farts, and the Nanny State! and blah blah blah".

If you make it about Purity, we lose the best opportunity we've had in 50 years.

Don't fuck this up.

Worth Another Look

An oldie from College Humor:

The Meme's The Thing

We get all het up because we're seeing something cool and new, and it's hard to slow it all down enough to consider what shitty things can be made to happen if the cool new thing is manipulated in an attempt to drive us in a direction not of our choosing.

Today's Tweet

Street art meets animation

When both Facebook and Instagram are down ...
visit https://t.co/fqYYW3kJ6m ;) #streetart #facebook #instagram pic.twitter.com/cVxPLXFDDI

— Street Art 360 (@StreetArt360) October 11, 2017

Dead On, Mr Fallows

James Fallows, The Atlantic:

Five years ago, after what was the horrific mass shooting of that moment, I wrote an item called “The Certainty of More Shootings.” It was about the massacre in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and after acknowledging the victims it said:

The additional sad, horrifying, and appalling point is the shared American knowledge that, beyond any doubt, this will happen again, and that it will happen in America many, many times before it occurs anywhere else.

And here we are, two days after Las Vegas, and we're being distracted by Press Poodles alternately concentrating on people's grief and/or the technical details of how the fucking gun works, and worse - the bullshit about "maybe something good can come from this senseless tragedy and blah blah blah".

No.

We choose to do nothing. We choose to listen to the passive voice - "Mistakes were made" or "Isn't it just awful" or 

Nothing will come of this enormous horror except the next (nearly-identical) enormous horror.

Something else that pops up now and again - and is purposefully ignored: "...the worst mass killing in modern American history..."

I'm not giving partial credit on this one.  It's the worst mass killing since Wounded Knee, which was the worst mass killing since Sand Creek, which was the worst mass killing since Trail of Tears...and on it goes.

But OK - we don't need to look at anything but the last 50 years to be duly impressed with our diligence when it comes to murdering each other in large numbers.

WaPo:

(Bonnie Berkowitz, Lazaro Gamio, Denise Lu, Kevin Uhrmacher and Todd Lindeman)

949 victims

Each gun was used to kill an average of four people, not counting shooters. The 949 people came from nearly every imaginable race, religion and socioeconomic background, and 145 were children or teenagers.

The oldest victim

Louise De Kler, 98, still took her pool cue and boombox to the rec room at Pinelake Health and Rehab and shot pool with the “young guys,” her daughter told the Associated Press. She was shot to death on March 29, 2009, along with seven other residents and a nurse, by a man who had come to the Carthage, N.C., nursing home looking for his estranged wife.

There's a very enlightening infographic that you need to see.

So this thing is big and ugly and complicated, and it goes in 37 different directions - sometimes all at once. But I'm not interested in hearing about how we just can't do anything about it.

We sent 14 guys to the moon - 12 of them walked on its surface - on the fucking moon. And we got 'em all back, and we did it when we were working out the math using slide rules and pencils and chalkboards - bear skins and stone knives compared with what we can do now.

We're closing in on Autism and PTSD and Alzheimer's.

Don't tell me we can't get this done.

Here's a pretty good place to start:

Overturn Citizens United

Trevor Brings It

It's wrong to do it in the streets
It's wrong to do it in the Tweets
You cannot do it on the field
You cannot do it if you kneel
And you don't do it if you're rich
You ungrateful son of a bitch
Because there's one thing that's a fact
You cannot protest if you're black

New On Comedy Central

This is kind of a variation on Colbert - on steroids - but I'm hoping they let Jordan Klepper get his feet under him and find his audience.

If they can keep it moving and not get too hung up in simple mockery, they might be making something pretty special. Fake Jesus knows they're not likely to run out of raw material any time soon.

Rerun

One from way back - Jay Smooth explains the difference:

Slightly more recent - Jay offers up the proposition that when we're trying to have the Race Conversation, we need to move away from the Tonsils Paradigm towards the Dental Hygiene Paradigm.

White Like Me

This guy reversed the old experiment (Black Like Me), by creating an online persona so he could step into the shoes of an Alt-Right knuckle-dragger.

WaPo interview with Theo Wilson:

After engaging in endless sparring matches in the comments section, Wilson began to notice something curious: His trolls seemed to speak a language unto themselves, one replete with the same twisted facts and false history. It was as if they had all passed through some “dimensional doorway,” arriving from an alternative universe where history, politics and commonly accepted facts had been turned inside out.

There was the idea that slavery was a form of charity that benefited enslaved Africans; that freed blacks owned more slaves than whites before the Civil War; that people of color make up the majority of those receiving aid from America's safety-net programs; and that investor and philanthropist George Soros is funding protest movements like Black Lives Matter.

You mention that in their forums they're also seeking “answers” to questions. What are they trying to resolve?

In today's America, they're struggling to understand why they'll have less opportunity than their father's generation. They also want answers to basic questions about race in America, such as: What's the point of multiculturalism? Why can only black people say the “N” word? How is racism not over when LeBron James and Oprah have huge bank accounts? How is affirmative action anything other than reverse racism? Why shouldn't I be proud to be white if someone else is proud to be black?

You mention that they also have some “fair points.” What are they?

I think it’s a fair point that leftists are widely tolerant of all kinds of people, but are often quite hateful to those who honestly hold conservative values. There are people who actually believe in God with all their heart. There are people who cannot cognitively resolve a guy kissing a guy. It doesn’t mean they’re seconds away from a hate crime. There is a legitimate human need to want to hold on to tradition in any culture.
Mr Wilson at Tedx Talks

One Of The Problems

Whooo yeah - sure glad I chose to be born white, and middle class, in the American suburbs.  Best decision I ever made.

I realize folks who post this crap on social media aren't consciously going outa their way to be shitty. This is not intended to be mean-spirited. Indeed, it's supposed to be a good Life Lesson for all those mopey little pity puppies out there who just need to buck up and put on their big-girl panties and lace 'em up and get in there and blah blah blah.

But the lack of intent to be shitty doesn't make it less shitty for someone not born to the dominant demographic.

We start with a (mostly) appropriate feeling of pride and gratitude where our own situations are concerned, but we end up with the kind of bullshit attitude that poor people are poor - and they have all those poor people problems - because they're somehow morally deficient.

And that ends up making us say some of the stoopidest fucking things:

How They Die

According to Pentagon data, more than 6,800 troops have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11 and more than 3,000 additional service members have taken their lives in that same time

Closing in on 10,000 dead uniforms.

And in 2012 and 2013, for the first time ever, suicide caused more military deaths than anything else.

Can we stop handing these kids every shitty problem that we don't feel like dealing with?  And cops too btw, now that I'm thinking about it.

We have to get back to some reasonable facsimile of sanity, and start figuring out how to deal with our shit without always bashing each other over the head with sticks and rocks.

We can't kill our way out of every fucking problem that comes along.

It's A Word

"That's our word now - and you can't have it back".

Oh yeah, Ice Cube gave @billmaher the talk he needed to hear pic.twitter.com/i7jYbCtm5P

— Tommy Christopher (@tommyxtopher) June 10, 2017

Pretty strong. And I think I'm straight with it now.

Thanks, Ice.

That Natural Law Thing

Sometimes, I have to let this junk outa the sewer just long enough to show it up for the dead-end bullshit it is.

"There's no equality in nature."

These guys are sure that's the whole banana. All they ever have to claim is that they're just trying to go along with "the natural order of things", and nobody can refute or rebut - there's no equality in nature.

Wanna know what else you don't find in nature, Mr Spencer? Here's one: There's no law in nature. 

In nature, there's nothing that keeps Charles Barkley from popping your fool head like a pimple.  So go play outside for a while, shortpants - the adults are trying to work.

Jesus, I hate dealin' with these shit-heels.