(Click to embiggen)It’s Friday! It is the first Friday in November, which means that it is National Novel Writing Month? I am spending as much of my free time as possible writing, trying to finish one of my novels.
Last weekend I posted about the mad bomber than ran off to Geek Girl Con and only learned about the mass shooting at a synagoge when I checked news later on my phone. I… I am still so angry about that. I’m not Jewish, okay, but dang it, I’m a human being and you shouldn’t have to be a member of a community to be infuriated when people murder members of that community while literally shouting things that the alleged president of the United States has said. Please scroll down and read about the eleven people who were murdered last weekend in my In Memoriam section. And please, if you can, donate to a cause that fights hatred. Even more, if you haven’t already voted, please, please, please vote. Vote for candidates who will crack down on hate crimes. Vote to take our country back from the Nazis and white supremacists who currently control the White House and both houses of Congress. This isn’t the last chance to stop the evil, this is rather the first chance to fight back at the ballot box against the evil that already controls the nation. Vote!
Welcome to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week and five videos (plus my blog post and notable obituaries).
One of many photos of the van owned by the bombing suspect. It is covered in racist, misogynist, pro-Trump stickers, including my images of prominent Democrats with gun sight crosshairs superimposed.I’m late getting out the door to Geek Girl Con, and if I had been more organized last night, I would have written this then and queued it for today. So this follow-up to some of the links in yesterday’a Friday Five will be brief. Yesterday, the U.S. Justice Department announced that they had arrested a man who they believe mailed all those pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and other critics of the alleged president of the U.S.: Cesar Sayoc Jr., Florida man, arrested in pipe bomb case; van with ‘right wing paraphernalia’ seized.
Every news site on the web was able to obtain pictures of the suspect’s van because it has been notorious since 2016 in that region. People have been taking pictures of all the hateful stickers plastered on the van and sharing the pics on social media for a couple of years. He is extremely pro-Trump and extremely anti-Obama, anti-immigrant, anti-women’s rights, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Which is exactly what anyone with any sense at all had been saying. Even at least one pundit who usually is virulently pro-Trump that I quoted yesterday: “If your first reaction to some evil person sending bombs to a variety of politicians on one side of the aisle is ‘FALSE FLAG,’ you are officially deranged.”
Voter registration in Florida is a matter of public record, and look which party the mad bomber belongs to…So, yes, the mad bomber is clearly someone who has been taking the many times that Trump has referred to locking up his opponents, encouraged is supporters to assault, suggested that someone should shoot, and so forth and finally tried to act on it. A quick search of images in any search engine using the suspects name will turn up pictures of him at Trump rallies, holding up pro-Trump signs, wearing one of those damn MAGA hats and so forth. I’m not linking or posting to any of those because, frankly, I think people who commit these kinds of crimes also get off on the attention afterward. But there are things to know about him: Suspected Mad Bomber Cesar Sayoc likes Trump, bodybuilding, scantily clad women; hates Democrats, Clintons, Obamas, immigrants. Scroll to the end of that article for a list of the many times that the suspect has been arrested in the past, always getting fines and probation, even when he threatened to blow up the local utility and kill thousands of people the second time! So, I’m not surprised that this evil man was on some watch lists. And based on how incoherent and badly spelled his many anti-immigrant and anti-progressive rants on line are, I’m not surprised that he left enough evidence on those packages for officials to trace back to him.
But don’t let any one paint him as an anomaly or a nut job. Remind people of the facts: Study shows two-thirds of U.S. terrorism tied to right-wing extremists. Two-thirds of the terrorist acts that happen in the U.S. are by republican supporters who aren’t immigrants and aren’t muslim.
The suspect is a native born U.S. citizen.
The suspect is registered Republican.
The suspect has proudly declared himself not just a Veteran for Trump, but a supporter of many of the most extreme Republican policies.
The suspect has been publicly calling for and echoing Trump’s calls for violence against liberals, immigrants, and so forth.
It’s Friday! The fourth (and final) Friday in October! Are you ready to get your spooky on? And by this time next week, will you be joining me in National Novel Writing Month?
Tomorrow will mark the one year anniversary of the first edition of Friday Five, which replaced my previous Friday Links. I have not, over the course of this last year, stuck strictly to my original redefinition of the post: only the five top stories of the week, plus notable obituaries, links to my own posts, and five videos. Some weeks I have two or three categories of links each of which contains five stories. But my goal of limiting how much time I was spending assembling a post which fewer people have been reading since the inauguration of that which has put many of us into compassion fatigue and so forth, has been obtained. So, since I find it impossible not to read the news and bookmark stories I find interesting, this is going to continue!
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week featuring good news, top five stories, top five stories of interest to queers and our allies, top five sci fi stories, the bottom five awful news stories, and five videos (plus my blog post and notable obituaries).
This one needs explaining: usually Shapiro is the one making deranged attacks on queer people, women, racial minorities, and the left in general. So I have to acknowledge when he says something good: Shapiro criticizes conspiracy theories about bomb threats to Dems.
Joachim Ronneberg: WWII hero who thwarted Nazi nuclear plant dies at 99. They parachuted into the mountains, skied to the base, blew it up, then eluded 3000 Nazi soldiers to escape to Sweden. In later years, Ronneberg liked to describe his team’s harrowing escape as “a good skiing weekend.”
Courthouse security footage shows Lewis County Judge R.W. Buzzard chase after two inmates who attempted to escape his courtroom in Chehalis, Wash., on Oct. 16, 2018:
Someone needs to look up ‘unconditional’ in a dictionary…I was the kind of kid who asked my Sunday School teachers, ministers, and anyone else set as an authority in church questions that drove them crazy. I wasn’t doing it to be difficult—I never asked if god could create a rock so heavy he couldn’t lift it—but I often found myself on the receiving end of a scolding rather than an answer. I know part of that is just being a kid. Children, their minds not quite as burdened by assumptions, expectations, and conventional thoughts, often ask difficult questions. The rest of the problem was that I was smarter than average, had an early affinity for logic, a really good memory, and I was being raised in a denomination (the Southern Baptist Convention) that didn’t have a history of rigorous academia.
Before I get further, let me get a couple of disclaimers out of the way: I have considered myself an ex-Baptist and an ex-Christian for a long time, so some people will want to dismiss anything I say on these topics out of hand. On the other hand, I learned my deep sense of social justice from that church and more specifically their holy book. I was the kind of nerd who read the Bible, on my own, cover-to-cover more than once (and had rather large swaths of it memorized). I have often said I didn’t leave the church, the church drove me (a gay man) away.
One of the big problems I had, again and again, was the many times that teachers and leaders in the church would insist that god’s love and mercy were unconditional—and then they would lay out a whole bunch of conditions that one must meet to earn that love. At first they said you had to believe in him order to get his love and mercy. And don’t forget obey him, or you won’t receive his love. And obey him in the right way, not the way other churches say to do it, or you won’t receive his love. And ignore these parts of the holy book, but these other parts you must interpret exactly as we say, or you won’t receive his love.
That’s an awful lot of conditions one must meet to qualify for supposedly unconditional divine love.
An important clue in this memo is the assertion that previous definitions of sex “allowed the Obama administration to wrongfully extend civil rights protections to people who should not have them.”
Tony Perkins mention above is the leader of the Family Research Council, an evangelical fundamentalist hate group that spends all its time an energy not on helping families, but rather on attacking gay rights and transgender rights and so forth. And he has made a very similar argument for years: gay, lesbian, and trans people don’t deserve civil rights protections.
Which means he doesn’t understand what a civil right is: rights aren’t deserved. You have them because you exist, period. They aren’t privileges. The Declaration of Independence referred to rights as “inalienable”—they can’t be transferred or removed. We can argue about what is or isn’t a right, but not who has them. Everyone has them. The moment you argue that some categories of people shouldn’t have their rights protected, well, that’s taking you a very long way down the fascist road.
And it isn’t something that Christians should be fighting for. They are commanded to love everyone, including their enemies. And as the Sermon on the Mount makes clear, love isn’t just about warm fuzzy feelings, it’s action. Love means lifting people up. Love means standing up for people. Love means doing good for people who disagree with you. Love means not just taking care of your own, but taking care of everyone who needs help.
Perkins and his ilk justify their opposition to the rights of transgender people by frequently making the claim that the Bible clear says that there are only two genders. It is true that the Bible frequently refers to two genders, but none of those references say that those two are the only possibilities, nor does it give a definition of those genders. While some portions make a big deal about what sorts of behaviors are appropriate for one gender or the other, other passages contradict those notions. And there there are a few places where the text asserts very insistently that gender is unimportant. Such as:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
—Galatians 3:28, Holy Bible, King James Version
Which seems to back the notion that god’s love really is unconditional, so maybe his so-called followers should stop trying to enforce divisions.
Note: The title comes from the hymn “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” by Charles Wesley, #2 in the 1956 Baptist Hymnal
(click to embiggen)It’s Friday! The third Friday in October. Halloween is coming fast, and I’m still nowhere near ready.
My immune system seems to have finally kicked the upper respiratory infection just in time that I didn’t have to skip another unrelated medical test that I have to undergo every few years. That was Thursday morning. Now that I’m on insulin, they insist that this procedure can’t be done in the afternoon (I have do it before taking any insulin that day), which meant that my husband and I were taking an Uber to the clinic at 6:00am (my husband doesn’t drive, and because general anesthesia is involved, I couldn’t drive for 12 hours after) and our friend Jeri Lynn picked us up when I was done. So Thursday started earlier and then I spent the majority of the day sleeping off the meds. Which all makes my usual work-from-home Friday quite convenient.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week and five videos (plus my blog post).
This has not been a great week. A second, much shorter round of antibiotics does not seem to have taken care of my respiratory infection, but my next two schedule medical appointments are within the week yet have nothing to do with that, and I’m not sure I want to try to squeeze another one in there.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, top five sci fi/fantasy/science stories, and five videos (plus my blog posts).
And once again we find ourselves at a Friday. The first Friday in October. October is the tenth month of the year, though it’s name in Latin means the eighth, all because of two Caesars who wanted to immortalize themselves in the calendar.
This has not been a great week. I can’t tell if I’m having a relapse after the antibiotics were finished, or if I’ve caught another cold. Meanwhile, we have leapt into autumn. One day the overnight lay and daytime high were just slightly higher than average for this time of year. The next, both temps were 20 degrees below that, so that our averages are more like the end of October/beginning of November. If I weren’t muzzy headed from the illness, I’d find something poetic of symbolic to infer from it. But I’m just happy the work week is nearly over.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week related to queer people, top five sci fi/fantasy stories, top five science stories, the bottom five stories related to the future of the nation ,and five videos (plus notable deaths and my blog posts).
Unfortunately, among the replies from other friends and acquaintances expressing support, sympathy, and so on, there was one guy—someone who thinks of himself as a good friend of hers—who chimed in to angrily ask why you would speak up later just for spite.
Even though I don’t know this guy myself, one reason I know that he thinks he’s a great friend of the woman who posted the original story is because, as she and other people tried to explain that spite had nothing to do with it and so forth he described himself multiple times as a friend of the woman. He also said that he believed her story, but he also thought that if she hadn’t reported it at the time, it was wrong to report it later. “Why ruin his life over one little mistake years ago?”
And he really couldn’t understand who so many of us were describing his comments as attacks.
I don’t know how to get through to people like that. Someone who views sexual assault as “a little mistake.”
But it’s just a symptom:
When you think about it, this whole “oh my god it’s a scary age to be a man we could all be accused of sexual assault at any time” is a huge gaslighting campaign. It makes the simple request to not be sexually assaulted or harassed seem like something unreasonable and absurd, like sexual abuses aren’t a serious thing in the first place.
-V
And it really annoys me that the same people who are up in arms trying to ban trans people from public bathrooms are the same folks who are screaming “fake news” and “innocent until proven guilty.” The last one really gets under my skin in connection to the Kavanaugh nomination. The presumption of innocence is an important principle, yes, because before a person is deprived of their freedom (sent to prison), the state should be forced to reach a certain standard of proof. But Kavanaugh isn’t in danger of going to prison over this. We aren’t depriving him or property or freedom or his life. We’re just saying the maybe he’s not a good candidate to be decided the fates of millions of other people under the law.
Also, the presumption of innocence doesn’t kick in until after there has been a thorough investigation of the alleged crime. And people don’t want us to do that (and no, telling the FBI to look into things for a week is not a thorough investigation).
The Republican Party has been the home of racists, misogynists, and homophobes for decades. They’re been liars and hypocrites for just as long. And they’re clearly demonstrating now that there is no bottom. There is no depth of immorality or deception they will not sink to. Just as there seems to be no limit to how much B.S. the Republican Base will eat up.
(click to embiggen)It’s the final Friday in September, the month in which superior people are born. It is also the week of my second 29th birthday—and my husband served up an awesome cake on the day.
Other parts of the week have been less fun. Especially if one has been paying attention to the news and one cares about the rights and lives of women or queer people.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week related to queer people, the bottom five stories related to the future of the nation and five videos (plus my blog post).
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With all that has been in the news lately, it should come as no surprise that I have been thinking of the many ways that we are all socialized to accept, excuse, and even enable a lot of socially aggressive behavior from guys. And also how we, as guys, are socialized to aggressively pursue what we want. So, when what a guy wants is sex, well, having been told your whole life never to take no for an answer, well, a lot of those guys are going to do some bad things to get it. And many of the rest of us will deflect, deny, or minimize the severity of what they have done, sometimes even when we witness is.
And yes, even when we are the victim.
There have been many times over the last 28 years that I have tried to write about my experience being sexually assaulted. I have stopped myself from publishing it many times. Because even now, 28 years later, I’m still ashamed. There is a part of me that still believes it was my fault. I was a grown up man, and men are supposed to be able to take care of themselves, right?
Looking at the way people talk about the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, I see that millions of people still blame the victims in these cases. They often insist that it isn’t blame, it’s disbelief. Why didn’t she say something sooner? Why didn’t she report it? They are completely unaware that this refusal to disbelieve is exactly way when one is a victim of sexual assault, we don’t say anything.
So, it’s time to share my story, including why I didn’t report it. Obvious content warning: alcohol, queer men dating, and sexual assault. Don’t click on the link unless you’re prepared…
Font Folly 