Time for Paint.

Finally. After what seems like a thousand coats of stinkhorror. Vala’s given up on me breaking out the paint. Black backgrounds are dramatic, but what a pain in the arse. Of course, if there is a pain in the arse way to do something, I’m sure to find it. The Simurgh is 25″ x 12″.

© C. Ford.

Targeting Twitter.

A man takes pictures of “hate tweets”, a part of the art project “#HEYTWITTER” created by Shahak Shapira, outside Twitter office in Hamburg, Germany August 4, 2017 in this picture obtained from social media. Youtube via REUTERS.

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German-Israeli artist who accuses Twitter of failing to delete hate speech tweets has taken matters into his own hands – by stencilling the offending messages on the road in front of the company’s Hamburg headquarters.

A post on video-sharing site YouTube showed Shahak Shapira and fellow activists stencilling tweets saying “Germany needs a final solution to Islam” and “Let’s gas the Jews” – clear references to the Nazi regime’s World War Two genocide of Europe’s Jews. [youtu.be/jzMTBINlLFU]

Shapira said he had reported some 300 incidents of hate speech on Twitter but had received just nine responses from the company.

“If Twitter forces me to see these things, then they should have to see it as well,” he said in the video, posted on Monday, describing the comments as violations of the social network’s community guidelines.

A very clever idea! You can read more about this at Reuters.

Sunday Facepalm.

The immaturity of so many conservative, christian white males is, at times, unbelievable. Like so many toddlers who never saw a reason to mature emotionally or intellectually, too many of them are in seats of power, or close to them, and happily enable swathes of equally immature assholes to continue in asshole behaviour and rhetoric. One leading the pack in the immaturity stakes is the ever noisy Wayne Allyn Root. Once again, he’s spitting and frothing about women, but specifically, liberal women. And liberal men, just the worst y’know.

On his Wednesday radio program, right-wing commentator, conspiracy theorist and Donald Trump–obsessed sycophant Wayne Allyn Root gushed about President Trump’s rally in Arizona the night before, rejoicing that Trump is “a real man” to whom liberals just don’t know how to respond.

Root said that he, like Trump, is also “a real guy’s guy” and was treated the same way by all the “liberal, spoiled brat, lucky sperm club pussycat” wussies he encountered while attending Columbia University.

Mr. Root never stays quiet over just how much he’s a “real man”, a “real man’s man”, and a “real guy’s guy”. Honestly, if he got himself a neon suit advertising his base insecurity, it would be more subtle. He makes sure to tell people, frequently, how efficiently he can beat people up, because that’s one of those markers of a real man. He makes sure to mention, often, that “locker room talk and vulgarity towards women is real man stuff, too. Now, those one the liberal and humanitarian side of life are assigned to people who can’t cope with a “real man.” I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, most of us know exactly how to deal with such types. They are commonly known as assholes.

“Liberal, spoiled brat, lucky sperm club pussycat” wussies. :Laughs: Sometimes, I really do think it’s a pity such men can’t genuinely hear themselves. This is almost painfully pitiful, and an old, old song.

Root said that liberal men “don’t know how to fight and they don’t know how to argue” and only pretend to care about issues “because you’re a guy and there are women in the room and you want to have sex.”

Lots of people want to have sex, it’s fun. Now, I’m privileged to know a whole lot of liberal people, many men among them, and they are excellent at argument, but I expect that wouldn’t meet Root’s definition, whatever it might be. Arguing is not compulsory in a relationship, which does or does not include sex. Lots of people don’t argue much, others do. I rather suspect that “argue” in Root’s lexicon means ‘be an obstinate asshole’. As for caring about issues, I imagine that matters on the other side of the camp, too, does it not? Those things tend to matter in whether or not people get together.

“It’s all B.S, is what it is,” he said. “All these liberal guys, they just want to win over women and look like a proud peacock in front of women because they know that liberal women want to hear this nonsense; ‘Oh my God, all I care about is poor people, that’s all I care about is poor people.’ And then they know, tonight they’re going to have sex with some stupid liberal woman who is ugly in the first place, because all liberal women are.”

:Laughs: I have never once, in all my long Hippie days, known a man who has said ‘Oh my God, all I care about is poor people, that’s all I care about is poor people.’ I have known men who do care about poor people, and that’s shown in their work and their actions, but they don’t pace a room packed with women, wringing their hands in refrain about the poor. That sort of idiocy seems to be the reserve of conservative christians, who are looking to make themselves rich while their flock gets poorer.

As for looking the proud peacock, I’d think the constant claims of being a “real man’s man, lookit my fists” and all that might just qualify, Mr. Root.

Via RWW.

The Violet Sister.

Louise Michel pictured at home in her later years, around the time she is presumed to have penned the piece translated below — Source.

A husky voice barked: “Entrez!”

Through a long, dim hallway, I followed the voice, until I reached a spare, curtained room. One empty chair stood near the entrance. Another, across the darkened space, was occupied by a slender, shadowed figure with erect posture, white hair long and flowing as in the fashion of the 1840s, in an elegant black suit, immaculate linens, a neckcloth of Persian design. A bright gaze set into a finely featured face pierced the gloom.

“Sit”, the figure commanded. As if under the influence of a powerful magnetizer, I sat without pause.

My host spoke sharply, gruffly. “Welcome, Mademoiselle. You have come to meet me, no? You wish to learn of my ideas, my thoughts. But should you not first know to whom you speak?” I nodded.

The figure straightened. “You wrote to Octave Obdurant. This is the name with which the person before you entered the Ecole Polytechnique. It is the name on my entrance papers to the Ecole de Ponts et Chaussées. It is the name with which I signed my first articles in geometry, my first statistical tables, as well as Free the Earth, which you were kind enough to notice.”

The voice was clear and occasionally guttural; there was a warmth beneath its unyielding syllables.

“But as you have certainly realized, this is not my true name.”

I felt my mind begin to spin. I was unsure of where I was, what I was doing here, in these isolated rooms. I stammered out:

“Excuse me, Monsieur. What, then, is your name?”

“I was baptized Tranchot.” Despite the pause which followed, the name meant nothing to me until it was repeated, with its prenames before it.

“Marie Violette Tranchot.”

I was moved by an emotion of shock and recognition at once. Some part of me had already realized that I was not in the presence of a great man, but rather a great woman — no wizened brother of the struggle, but a sister. Instantly, I felt myself uncannily at home, safe at last in a place I’d never been — truly at home, perhaps, for the first time in my life. This hero, epitome of the courage and intelligence the world saw as masculine, was a woman like myself.

Fascinating reading, from Louise Michel, in Le Libertaire, iii, 1895. She writes about the Scoundrel Laws, and the paucity of an overly-praised history, and her meeting with Octave Obdurant.

You can read the whole thing at The Public Domain. Highly recommended.