I do not trust the police at all any more. The news has utterly destroyed their reputation, and it’s damned clear that they have a screwed-up idea of their mission.
Case in point: this is how Indiana police respond to a seat belt infraction. That’s right, a woman forget to fasten her seat belt when she was rushing to the hospital.
When the sides are divided, when they start making accusations, it’s always enlightening to look at what each side considers an insult. On my side, we see the other as agents of oppression, misogynists and racists, people who want to discriminate and maintain an unjust status quo. On their side…
Demonstrators intrude on St Louis Symphony Orchestra concert with a little musical interruption.
I know that Reddit is immensely popular and has some good qualities, but I’ve never been able to get into it, because it invariably happens that anything I read there will be tainted by some hideous commentary. I don’t just mean comments I disagree with; I read creationist sites for entertainment, you know. I mean comments that cause me to despair for humanity.
A few years ago, Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award. Okorafor is a Nigerian-American writer. The World Fantasy Award is a bust of HP Lovecraft. You can guess where this is going, because Lovecraft was a flamingly awful racist. How awful? Read the poem at that link and suppress your gag reflex.
Which obviously causes some conflict. Okorafor wrote to China Mieville for advice, since he’d also won the award, and he wrote back with a suggestion.
Good question.
I have been down the rabbit hole. I got sucked down into a prolonged web search on the matter of pre-WWII eugenics, which is more than a little squicky, but was fascinated to discover a thriving community of correspondents which reminded me precisely of the various flavors of blog commenters today — that is, opinionated, sometimes pretentious, and often liberally sprinkled with asses. I started picking out names and searching for their contributions.
They’re not racist, they’re just oblivious! The Daily Show confronted the fanatical advocates of a racist slur with Indian activists…and didn’t change anyone’s minds. I still think they’re freakin’ racists.
You’d think they’d have totally exhausted the lode of all possible scorn and contempt already, but no — they’re still mocking the idiocy well. I thought this was something I’d said before, only they managed to wring out much more disdain out of it than I could.
