Fathers and baby girls and our nation of evil

I have three kids. One of them is a daughter (not that I like daughters more than sons, they’re all great, but that it’s relevant today). This is Skatje when she was a child:

Now she has a daughter. This is Iliana.

It’s a video. Go ahead, watch it. It’ll melt your heart. I check Skatje’s Instagram every morning, because nothing will cheer me up more than seeing that happy little baby. Well, maybe seeing my happy little grandson is just as heartwarming, but they’re not in competition.

Little kids are all wonderful. There’s a great big emotional trigger in those faces, and it makes me want to hug them and protect them and make the world safe for them.

You know, like a dad.

So I turn to the news today, and there’s The Picture. I’m not going to show it here, because it breaks my heart. It’s the photo of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria, drowned and dead on the banks of the Rio Grande. I can scarcely bear it.

“They wanted a better future for their girl,” María Estela Ávalos, Vanessa’s mother, told The Washington Post.

Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, Tania Vanessa Ávalos and their daughter, Valeria, on Valeria’s first birthday.

They traveled more than 1,000 miles seeking it. Once in the United States, they planned to ask for asylum, for refuge from the violence that drives many Central American migrants from their home countries every day. But the farthest the family got was an international bridge in Matamoros, Mexico. On Sunday, they were told the bridge was closed and that they should return Monday. Aid workers told The Post the line to get across the bridge was hundreds long.

The young family was desperate. Standing on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, America looked within reach. Martínez and Valeria waded in. But before they all made it to the other side, to Brownsville, Tex., the river waters pulled the 25-year-old and his daughter under and swept them away.

As a father, I see this story, and I think — let them in. Let them all in. Tear down the walls and gates and blockades and embrace these people as fellow human beings in need of help. We have an obligation to everyone that is compromised by selfishness and greed and an evil hatred of others, and if we were a humane and great good state, we would be working to help, not harm.

Instead, we exploit our neighbors and when they flee the conditions we have created, we bar the door and watch them die. We watch children drown. The ones who make it across are thrown into concentration camps, and parents and children are separated, and kept in inhumane conditions.

We are the bad guys here. Not just slightly bad, either: history is going to look back on us and call us monsters. We kill baby girls and the fathers trying to protect them.

Then we get into debates about the meanings of words, and parse out the laws in our books, and reinterpret our history, all to justify cruelty and our privileges and dehumanize desperate people. There are people on the internet right now trying to claim that that family deserved it. There are politicians who are thinking are laws are not cruel enough.

The bodies of the dead lining our border tell us, though, that we are wrong. We are an evil empire that builds prisons to control people, and maintains armies and guards to make them fear. That is not hyperbole. The corpses of children tell us it’s an understatement.

I’ll just watch Iliana some more, and hope she is better treated than other baby girls…but they all deserve better than we give them.

DING DONG THE WITCH IS…fired, anyway

I just got home from a long day of wrangling student registration and doing bureaucratic paperwork and not getting to play with spiders, and I was kind of dragging, and then I got the cheery news.

NRATV has been cancelled, and so has Dana Loesch!

…the NRA has officially shut down production of NRATV. (Though they may continue to air past content.) The organization has apparently felt the network and its operating company Ackerman McQueen have become too extreme and too far removed from their core values. Also, according to the New York Times, there’s some sort of legal dispute between the two, as the NRA began audits of their contractors in relation to its tax-exempt status, and accused Ackerman McQueen of refusing to comply.

And on top of all of that, NRATV kept their viewership numbers secret, but it’s now being reported that the site had a measly 49,000 unique visitors in January. And Ackerman McQueen has reportedly been receiving $40 million annually from the NRA.

So it’s no wonder that NRA is cutting ties with the advertising firm. And that includes Loesch, who was apparently an employee of Ackerman McQueen, not the NRA directly.

Now the worry is what vicious violent sewer will adopt her as their rat queen next.

A concentration camp by any other name is still a concentration camp

I find it hard to believe that conservatives are currently trying to argue that the USA does not have concentration camps by redefining the term to mean only camps for Jews. No, just stop it and face up to reality. The US has concentration camps. This country has always had concentration camps. We are the world’s greatest master of concentration camps and ethnic cleansing. I wrote about this in 2015.

“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history,” Toland wrote in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. “He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”

A concentration camp is “a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution.” It’s a general term. Liz Cheney is the one trying to redefine it by claiming a concentration camp doesn’t count as one unless it’s being used to persecute Jewish people.

“Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history,” Cheney wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning. “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”

Hitler used concentration camps in the Holocaust, no one is claiming he didn’t. But America used them to round up and imprison people of Japanese descent in WWII, and we’re also using them now to isolate people of Latin American descent. We are throwing people who have committed no crime into crowded, inadequate facilities on the basis of their ethnicity, and people are dying.

Learn some history, and remember: Hitler’s concentration camps were inspired by an American model.

Joe Biden, making promises he won’t keep

Do we really want a delusional old liar in the presidency again? Joe Biden is making ridiculous claims.

Speaking at a campaign stop in Ottumwa, Iowa, on Tuesday he discussed losing loved ones before making his promise.

“A lot of you understand what loss is and when loss occurs, you know that people come up to you and tell you ‘I understand’ if you lose a husband, a wife, a son, a daughter, a family member,” he said. “That’s why I’ve worked so hard in my career to make sure that — I promise you if I’m elected president, you’re going to see the single most important thing that changes America, we’re gonna cure cancer.”

No, we’re not.

I understand that cancer is an important personal issue to him, and I would approve of a candidate promising to invest more in biomedical research. If he had actually listened to doctors, if he had any understanding of cancer at all, he’d know that cancer isn’t one disease, it’s a moving target with a billion alternative strategies for evading treatment, and that by its very nature isn’t going to be susceptible to a magic bullet approach. It requires incremental improvements in management and treatment and diagnosis, and even then, sometimes the best doctors can offer is going to fail. He is promising snake oil. He isn’t paying attention to the advisors he ought to be listening to. He sure as hell isn’t personally going to deliver on that promise.

He might as well stand up on that podium and promise that he’s going to cure all viral diseases, eradicate all bacteria, end global climate change, end world hunger, emerge victorious from all wars, and colonize Mars, all between the years 2020 and 2028. No, he’s not. He looks stupid and glib and shallow doing it, too.

I wasn’t going to vote for him in the primaries anyway, but he’s doing his damnedest to make it difficult to vote for him if he wins the Democratic nomination. Which I earnestly hope he doesn’t.

Everything wrong with Twitter in one story

In their mad flailing about to defeat the bad PR about how their site is a haven for racists and misogynists, while trying carefully to avoid alienating anyone who might be bringing them buckets of money, Twitter managed to ban David Neiwert. You know, the David Neiwert, the journalist who has been carefully documenting the rise of the rabid right for decades, who is no friend to these extremists?

Neiwert shared with The Daily Beast the appeal he sent to Twitter:

“My account was suspended because of the photo of the cover of my book in my profile. This book, ‘Alt-America,’ is a history of the rise of the radical right in the United States over the past 30 years. It naturally has an illustration featuring KKK hoods because that is its subject. I am one of the nation’s leading experts on this subject, and it is insane that you would suspend my account because of this photo. I refuse to remove it on principle.”

Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump was published in 2017 and chronicled the trajectory of far-right and white supremacist groups since the 1990s. Neiwert had used the cover illustration on his Twitter profile without trouble since the book was published.

The problem here is that Twitter insists on implementing the cheapest, most superficial, most easily gamed methods to sniff out bad actors on their medium, meaning that the dishonest thrive and the forthright are silenced. This is not a good sign that they’re getting a grip on the infection they’ve enabled.

I wonder if I’ll get banned for posting the same cover image?

Maine has a state ballad?

Minnesota doesn’t seem to have one, and now Maine has gone and set the bar high with Ballad of the 20th Maine.

Some of the Republican snowflakes in that state are unhappy, though.

“I am a lover of history and especially a lover of the civil war period and regardless of what side people fought on, they were fighting for something they truly believed in,” Reed said, according to the Beacon. “Many of them were great Christian men on both sides. They fought hard and they were fighting for states’ rights as they saw them.”

Correction: slavery. They were fighting for slavery. Also, as the song say, “Go straight to hell with your rebel yell, we are the boys of Maine!”

You know, it seems to me you could make the same argument that the Nazis were Christians who were fighting for something they truly believed in.

Fortunately for the peace of the nation, no dairy products were hurled

Nothing to see here, nothing to worry about. Move along, move along.

Really, no problem at all. It’s just a few armed neo-Nazis crashing into a Pride parade.

In Detroit, an armed white supremacist group called the National Socialist Movement (NSM) descended on the annual Motor City Pride Festival, where they held placards, gave Nazi salutes and displayed armbands with swastikas.

Photos from the event, which was attended by thousands of LGBT+ supporters, showed a group of around 10 neo-Nazis marching surrounded by police officers.

Dressed in black with a number carrying firearms and shields, the NSM marchers tore apart pride flags and pushed over at least one counter-demonstrator. One even appeared to urinate on an Israeli flag.

See? They were supported by the local police, so you know it was an entirely trouble-free and socially acceptable intervention. They didn’t mean any harm, as a few quotes from the NSM show.

[The National Socialist Movement] NSM will be armed and counter-protesting the freaks, wrote Burt Colucci, the self-identified “commander” of the neo-Nazi NSM, on Russian social network VK.

NSM, lets put some boots on the ground!! I don’t really give a damn about op-sec or Antifa in this situation. We go in with Swastikas blazing and if people don’t like it, tough shit…

I might have been concerned and distressed, but no milkshakes were thrown. I repeat, there were no milkshakes. Thus was civility and order preserved.

A gathering of the broflakes

The Boston Straight Parade has faced a couple of major setbacks.

  • Tomi Lahren has endorsed it. That’s the kiss of death right there.
  • Their chosen “mascot”, Brad Pitt, has ordered them to stop using his name and image.
  • To fill the gaping void left by Pitt’s rejection, organizers asked Milo Yiannopoulos to fill in. Tomi Lahren pouts at the rejection.
  • Tragically and confusingly, desperate-for-attention Milo accepts.

    The organization later named Yiannopoulos, who is openly gay, as its grand marshal for the event.

    “I might technically be a sequined and perfectly coiffed friend of Dorothy’s, but I’ve spent my entire career advocating for the rights of America’s most brutally repressed identity — straight people — so I know a thing or two about discrimination,” Yiannopoulos said in a statement released by the group.

    “This parade is a gift to anyone, male or female, black or white—gay and transgender allies, too!—who will stand with us and celebrate the wonder and the majesty of God’s own heterosexuality. Men, bring your most toxic selves. Women, prepare to burn your briefcases! Because it’s great to be straight, and we’re not apologizing for it any more. We’re Here, Not Queer.”

  • The parade organizer, Mark Sahady, has been revealed to be a far right thug who has organized violent and anti-semitic events.

    David Neiwert, author of Alt America and a longtime observer of the US far right, believes the march is primarily opportunistic. For the Daily Kos, he described Sahady as a “street brawler” with “a history … of organizing violent events”.

    Neiwert told the Guardian: “What we know about these street-fighting gangs is that they latch on to whatever they can in order to go out and fight with the left.”

    He added: “In this case it’s so utterly juvenile that it’s like a sixth-grade taunt.”

There’s a word for these people.