I just discovered the Atlas of Prejudice, which maps the world according to various prejudices. Here’s Trump’s vision of Europe:
I think, maybe, that it is over-optimistically detailed. A more appropriate map would be a single blurry blob labeled “other”.
Last Friday, I went to the doctor for a few minor complaints: tinnitus and a painfully spastic trapezius muscle. I got drugs! Cetirizine to shut down those spring allergies that might be worsening the tinnitus, and cyclobenzaprine for the muscle pains. Like a good boy, I took them exactly as prescribed over the weekend.
I don’t know whether I’m just peculiarly sensitive to them, or whether there was some major synergy between the two, but that was a totally lost weekend. Both say “may cause drowsiness”…I was constantly fading out and falling asleep, and I got little done. The cyclobenzaprine warns of “dry mouth”, and I was totally parched, dry mouth, dry adenoids, dry throat, dry vocal cords. I creaked when I talked. So I stopped on Sunday, figuring that hearing cicadas everywhere I go and having my chest spasm every time I coughed or laughed was less of a bother than the drugs.
Unfortunately, it’s taking a while for them to clear from the system. Here it is Wednesday and I’ve still got dry mouth (although it’s easing) and my eyes are still a bit blurry, and I’ll probably have to take a nap later today. At least I know these drugs are potent, they’re maybe just a tad too much for what ails me. I’ll keep ’em around in case I feel the urge to have the most boring party in the universe.
We haven’t screwed with an online poll in a long time, but I think this one deserves a special bit of attention.
It’s from Arizona Wingnut Paul Gosar, DDS. It’s stupid because the wording is so flagrantly biased to the point where it shouldn’t even be a poll — if you feel that strongly about the issue, why are you asking for others’ opinions instead of standing up for your principles? I answered “no” to everything except the last one. I wonder if he gets enough votes that reject his biases, that he’ll then do an about-face?
I wasn’t even trying to be mindlessly contrary. I think “no” is the right answer to every question there but the last.
This is going to be amusing. A small group of white men are planning a “straight pride” parade for Boston in August.
“Straight people are an oppressed majority. We will fight for the right of straights everywhere to express pride in themselves without fear of judgement and hate. The day will come when straights will finally be included as equals among all of the other orientations.” – John Hugo, President of Super Happy Fun America
It’s three bros with a website who think they are oppressed. For being so diamond-hard straight, they’ve strangely chosen Brad Pitt as their “mascot”, presumably without his permission. They have made a flag.
They are so danged rigidly straight that they’ve looped all the way around to gay, themselves. I expect their parade (with floats!) will either be the campiest event in Boston, or will simply droop in pathetic impotence…which will be fine with them, since if no one joins in their limp effort, it will be evidence that they really are persecuted!
Oh, wait! They had a Straight Pride Parade in Seattle last year!
One guy showed up.
He brought balloons, though. Totally worth it for balloons.
feminism is cancer
I still get this kind of message all the time — there are ugly hordes of men (and some women) who make this flat declaration that they don’t like feminism, and they’re usually the kind of cretinous clown who doesn’t see anything wrong with Donald Trump’s behavior. So it’s good to see Sadiq Khan rebuking our jerk of a president with a short simple message.
If you’re the kind of person who likes to announce that feminism is cancer
, you get to fuck off and leave me alone now. I’ll have nothing to do with you.
Typically, when Americans arrive in a foreign country, they don’t rush to turn on the TV, do they? They’re in a new, interesting, stimulating place, and you’d think they’d be off seeing the sights and exploring the area. At least, that’s what I do.
Not our uncurious president, though. First thing he does on his trip to the UK is look for Fox News, and get distressed when he can’t find it.
Just arrived in the United Kingdom,Trump tweeted.The only problem is that @CNN is the primary source of news available from the U.S. After watching it for a short while, I turned it off. All negative & so much Fake News, very bad for U.S. Big ratings drop. Why doesn’t owner @ATT do something?
He’s in a privileged position of responsibility — he’s going to meet various political leaders and the queen, he’s got formal dinners to attend, and here he is, bitter that he can’t watch his idiot sycophants on Fox & Friends, and worse, is shouting it out on the internet to the world.
Old man, there’s a reason Fox News died in the UK: it’s the Republican Party Propaganda Channel. It’s a narrow niche, and people outside the USA and outside of your partisan worldview find it repellent and ugly. It would do you some good to acquire a different perspective, which is one of the benefits of travel. Unfortunately, you won’t get that perspective if you hide in your hotel room watching the TV and get all your meals from the local McDonalds.
I just got back from a late evening fussing over spiders, when I noticed a new sign in the hallway…or maybe it’s an old sign that’s just recently been uncovered.
OK, walking through this…on the left, an icon of a man and a woman, labeled “Your body, your choice”. Below that, some strange ontology of choices: adoption, abstinence, motherhood, and conception are “options” and also choices, while abortion is an option but not a choice. In the context of the graphic designers’ head, what is the difference between an option and a choice? They all seem like options and choices to me.
On the right, there’s a cartoon of a pregnant woman and a fetus, with a big arrow (to be honest, when I saw the sign from a distance, it looked like a fat man with a gigantic erection which first roused my curiosity) labeled “Not your body, your responsibility”, which weirded me out. So getting pregnant means it’s not your body anymore? Where’s the man from the left picture? It’s not his responsibility?
It seems to me that Option #5, which is not a choice, is the only way to get your body back. It’s a confusing poster with a whole mass of implicit assumptions somewhere in it, that I’m sure make sense to our Students for Life, but not to me. I guess that makes me a Professor for Death, as long as we’re dichotomizing everything. Fortunately, I am not responsible, because it was an option not a choice, and because I’m a man, I think..
I have to stop thinking about this, I’m just getting more tangled up in whatever they’re trying to communicate.
No, I’m not going to their Tuesday meeting. I think that would be even worse.
“Death of Spartacus,” drawn by H. Vogel. 19th-century illustration depicting the death of Spartacus, a gladiator who led a slave rebellion in Rome during the 1st century B.C.
Steve Bannon has always wallowed in the slime. He was in charge of that muckraking online tabloid, Breitbart. He was an advisor to Donald Trump. He was a co-founder of Cambridge Analytica, that data analysis firm that scraped the scum off the Facebook barrel to skew elections. He was an investment banker, the lowest of the low.
He seemed to have reached the bottom. He could go no lower. So to meet that challenge, he teamed up with the reactionary Catholics behind an organization called the Dignitatis Humanitas Institute — you can tell it’s a con by all the pretentious Latin. The motto is also a giveaway: Defending the Judaeo-Christian Foundations of Western Civilisation through the recognition that Man is made in the Image and Likeness of God
. Bite me, Bannon.
This Judaeo-Christian
nonsense is always a dead give-away that you’re dealing with frauds. They also have a Declaration that is full of arrogant pieties and annoyingly capitalized words. The deeper a guy is in the cesspit, the harder he strains to elevate himself by calling on God as his bestest buddy.
A. whereas the true nature of Man is that he is not an animal, but a human being made in the image and likeness of God, his creator,
B. whereas it is precisely the imago Dei that Man acknowledges within himself with such profound awe and respect to call human life sacred; and to which the moral sense testifies certain properties as being inalienable; indelible in every single human life from conception until natural death,
C. whereas these properties have come to be known in the modern, secular state as ‘fundamental human rights’,
D. whereas the most complete expression of human dignity is therefore to be found only in recognising Man’s true anthropological and existential nature, and that this recognition lies at the foundation of all that the world calls civilisation,
E. whereas in recognising Man’s rights as intrinsic to his being, and not the product of legal charters is essential to sustaining liberty in a free society, work done to promote such a view of human dignity thereby promotes the foundation of all human rights,
F. whereas it is impossible to deny the source of Man’s transcendent dignity, and at the same time maintain that such dignity exists, yet the school of humanism tried to do just this, and with its inevitable failure, Man has been left in the precarious state of having no inherent rights other than those which the social community deigns to confer on him,
G. whereas belief that the State is the source of our human rights might be called inauthentic human dignity,
H. whereas that which is most sacred about Man is beyond human description because it comes from God – image and likeness – who is himself ineffable, and that international charters can only leave Man diminished by the attempt to literalise the ineffable,
I. whereas these insights are needed to maintain the balance between the rights of the individual and the power of the State, and that therefore recognition of Man’s dignity affects society’s ability to organise itself in a virtuous way politically, so that this balance never crosses the tipping point,
J. whereas the proper relationship between the individual and the State is that the latter exists to serve the former, not vice versa,
K. whereas it is the recognition of the dignity of Man that is most lacking in our society, not rights, and that this imbalance must be redressed,
L. whereas the mutuality of the parallel concepts of human rights and human dignity, and their interdependence, is definitively institutionalised in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”,
Noble sentiments that rest entirely on the fiction of the Christian god. Too bad they’re paid for by a crude thug.
Anyway, Bannon was planning on buying up a medieval monastery in Italy — further attempts at desperately buying up some class, which he has always lacked — calling it a “gladiator school for culture warriors”. Oy, it sounds like Spartacus, only not the good movie by Stanley Kubrick, but the cheesy Starz series with oiled muscular bodies, naked slave girls, slow motion gore, and everyone yelling and making an “O” face. The whole thing reeks of over-compensation.
Alas, Bannon’s dream is not to be. Italy is evicting Steve Bannon. O Ignominy! The only thing left is for Bannon to strip, oil up, and fall upon his sword.
He has been driven out of Ireland.
Pastor Steven L Anderson, who founded the Faithful Word Baptist Church in 2005, in Arizona, USA, was set to deliver a sermon in Dublin on May 26 as part of a short tour of Europe.
The Minister for Justice and Equality, Charlie Flanagan, has signed an exclusion order ‘with immediate effect under Section 4 of the Immigration Act 1999 in respect of Mr Steven Anderson, aka Pastor Steven L Anderson’.
(Note: this is cruelly unfair to snakes, who are much nicer than Anderson. Also, it’s a myth that snakes were driven out of Ireland, they never took up residence there in the first place.)
It’s all about raising awareness of the wave of crime against Indian women.
For last weekend’s Washington State 1B track and field championships, Rosalie Fish painted a red handprint over her mouth, the fingers extending across her cheekbones. On her right leg, she painted the letters “MMIW,” standing for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.
It’s an epidemic right now. Imagine if a town the size of Morris, Minnesota were wiped out every year…but these deaths are scattered and spread out among a neglected population.
MMIW seeks to address the issue of the thousands of indigenous women who are missing or were murdered. According to a report by the Urban Indian Health Institute, 5,712 of these cases were reported in 2016, but only 116 were put into the U.S. Department of Justice database. With 71 cases, Washington was second only to New Mexico, which had 78 cases of murdered or missing indigenous women.
I can imagine it: the reservations in Washington state are in many ways isolated, populated with poor people, but at the same time penetrated with highways and outsiders are encouraged to visit to buy cheap cigarettes or gamble, so some of the worst people from the outside are cruising through the place. Then there’s the problem of jurisdiction…if some predator is looking for prey no one with power will care about, reservations are targets of opportunity.
Hey, Canada! You too!
The thousands of Indigenous women and girls who were murdered or disappeared across the country in recent decades are victims of a “Canadian genocide,” says the final report of the national inquiry created to probe the ongoing tragedy.
The report, obtained by CBC News and verified by sources, concludes that a genocide driven by the disproportionate level of violence faced by Indigenous women and girls occurred in Canada through “state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies.”
Colonialism isn’t over yet, it seems — it’s still exacting a toll.
