(click to embiggen)It’s the second Friday in April!
Despite being sick all week, I have also put in a LOT of over time. Which is only possible thanks to work-from-home days. My corporate overlords continue to impose insane deadlines on us, just like everyone else, and I don’t know what else to say about that. I am really looking forward to getting over this virus, how about that?
It’s Friday, and so I bring you the Friday Five: This week you get the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, plus the top five stories of interest to queer people, and top five videos (plus notable obituaries and a recap of my blog posts).
Once again, I’ve gathered a lot more images as possible illustrations of blog posts than I have managed to use. Here’s a few that need to be shared:
“When your boss’s income has risen 937% since 1978 and yours has increased by only 5.7%, it’s time to stop blaming minorities for your woes.” —David Yankovich“Quick note: your brutal honesty? Ain’t nobody asking for that. “Where is you clever honesty? Your compassionate honesty? Your insightful honesty? Uplifting? Poetic? Empowering? “Take your brutal honesty and go sit in the back with all the devil’s advocates.” —Quinn Murphy
As one friend likes to point out, everyone who claims to be brutally honesty seems much more interested in the brutality than the honesty.
“Trump Evangelicals: ‘The President’s sex life is between him and God. It’s not our business.’ “Then why is the sex, marriage, or poopy-time of LGBTQ folks your business? Why are you so fanatically engrossed in the whereabouts and goings on of other people’s pants parts?” —Silence Dugud
I become more and more convinced that no one who claims to be advocating for morality understands what morals actually are.
“Trump in West Virginia: ‘In many places, like California, the same person votes many times. You probably heard about that. They always like to so ‘oh, that’s a conspiracy theory.’ Not a conspiracy theory folks. Millions and millions of people.’ This is an insidiuous lie. Tens of millions of people now incorrectly believe voter fraud is a widespread problem. It’s not. George W. Bush’s Department of Justice studied it and found it occurs on 0.00000013% of ballots. Another recent study found 31 cases across a billion ballots from 2000 to 2014.” —Brian Klaas“My favorite part of this is they felt the need to specify which one is the President.”
I saw another person sharing the video to the President’s weird Easter comments and they noted, “My new hero is the cameraman who kept the bunny in the shot the entire time.”
This is the real reason why lawmakers won’t make it illegal for domestic abusers to have guns. IF they did that, they’d have to fire nearly half the cops in the country! (click to embiggen)It’s already April. When did that happen?
Last weekend we were at NorWesCon and it was the first time I’d taken vacation since Christmas. I had a great time at the convention. When I got back to work this week and went to log into the company network it took me a while to remember my password. I take that as a sign that the vacation fulfilled its purpose. Unfortunately the insane deadlins are still lined up ahead of my and it’s a constant scramble to hit the next one. But my boss paid me a great compliment this week—she mentioned that I was one of the members of the department who don’t actually need supervision, and specifically said that I always meet the customer deadlines no matter how impossible they look. But enough about that…
It’s Friday, and so I bring you the Friday Five: This week you get the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, plus the top five stories of interest to queer people, and top five videos (plus notable obituaries and a recap of my blog posts).
No one likes a bully, they say. But the perception of who is bullying who can go to rather ludicrous points. When Laura Ingraham, long time radio talk show host, past editor, TV talk show host, et cetera, tried to portray one of the Parkland shooting survivors as whining when he mentioned that he’s been rejected by four of the colleges he applied to, she apparently didn’t expect that comment to go viral in a negative way. She certainly didn’t expect advertisers to start pulling out of sponsoring her show. She then issues a pretty ridiculous (half-assed) apology. And then headlines started coming out some places that made the high school students she ridiculed seem like the bullies.
In related news: Black Students at Stoneman Douglas High Want Gun-Violence Solutions to Address Police Violence. While at events they had control over, the survivors of the Stonema Douglas shooting had tried to include all of their peers and present a diverse front, the media has tended to focus on a few of the white kids (and one light-skinned Latina). And lots of people have pointed out that these kids aren’t asking for anything more than the Black Lives Matters folks have been asking for all along.
So it is more than fair to ask why the killing of someone like 12-year-old Tamir Rice didn’t get the some attention as the Stoneman Douglas kids are. Part of me would like to hope that we’ve just reached a tipping point. But (particularly seeing both the racist and homophobic attacks made on Emma Gonzales) I suspect that there is more than a bit of racism in play here.
Universal background checks to buy guns (a measure supported by 97% of the general population and by 96% of gun owners!)
Licensing gun owners the way we license drivers, including requiring more rigorous testing and evaluation for different classes of guns (just as commercial driving licenses have more stringent requirements), and including periodic re-certification
Requiring gun owners to carry liability insurance, again just like we do for car owners
Voluntary gun buy back programs
That won’t prevent every shooting, obviously; just like changing drunk driving laws didn’t eliminate all drunk driving. But we’ve been able to bring down the rate of car crashes that result in death or injury in which alcohol played a factor by 35% by enacting some common sense drinking-and-driving laws. If we reduced shootings by even a fraction of that, that will still be thousands of people saved every year.
Work was insanely busy again, but right now I don’t care because I’m on vacation! My husband and I are attending the 41st Northwest Science Fiction Convention, along with a whole bunch of our friends. My husband is on staff this year, instead of doing his usual thing of volunteering in a bunch of departments, he’s just being an IT Ninja all weekend. I, meanwhile, I’m goofing off. And doing a lot of it in costume. Today, for instance, I’m wearing an upgraded version of the Social Justice Necromancer costume I debuted a friend’s Halloween party a few years ago. I’ll be handing out pocket Constitutions, Bill of Rights bookmarks, and other fun civil rights related things while supplies last.
But for now, I bring you the Friday Five: This week you get the top five (IMHO) stories of the week and top five videos (plus notable obituaries and a recap of my blog posts).
I’ve been doing housework today. I have a bunch of errands to run while my husband is off doing convention committee stuff. So I wasn’t going to post a Weekend Update. But then I saw this, so I have to share it:
Veterans For Gun Reform PSA – March For Our Lives:
Very busy at work. I and several co-workers coming down with several maladies. Impossible deadlines, as always. Meanwhile, spring appears to arrive, but is quickly overshadowing by weird unseasonable weather. Meanwhile, we still have a senile narcissist in the White House and the Republicans continue to show absolutely no spine and certainly no respect for the rule of law.
Once again I bring you the Friday Five: This week you get the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, the top five stories related to queer rights, plus five stories about white terrorists, and videos (plus notable obituaries and a recap of my blog posts).
John Oliver’s gay bunny book is a runaway success. Mike Pence’s bunny book isn’t. Also, this book’s proceeds go to charities devoted to helping gay people. Remember that Pence, when he was a governor, diverted health care funds earmarked for AIDS patients into conversion therapy. So ignore that Slate article that takes issue with this book. Even better, go comment on that Slate article about how much good this book does…
Click to embiggenIt was bad enough that mainstream U.S. media didn’t start covering the story of the exploding FedEx packages being delivered in Austin, Texas until a white person was injured. Black man killed? No big deal. Black teen-ager killed (and another black woman injured by the bomb that killed the kid)? Again, no big deal. Even after the third bomb went off, injuring a hispanic woman, what did the FBI do? They issued a request for the bomber to call them.
The asked the bomber to please call them.
Two people killed by bombs in unexpected packages in less than two weeks, with local police saying they didn’t believe the attacks were random, and the FBI just says, “Well, maybe if we ask nicely the guy will turn himself in.” The Unabomber only killed three people with his bombs (over the course of 17 years), but he warranted the “largest manhunt in FBI history”?
I realize that it they might have been doing more than that behind the scenes, but given how several federal officials said they saw no link to terrorism and otherwise made very dismissive comments, I suspect not.
And now the bomber blew himself up after a short police chase (we don’t know if he killed himself on purpose or if his next explosive went off accidentally). And authorities are making more, “There’s no more threat” in the same breath that they admit they haven’t figured out if he had accomplices, nor how he picked his victims.
And headlines and subheads are mentioning how neighbors described the bomber as a nice guy.
First of all, several of those stories also quote friends reporting that he was “rough around the edges” and that he “would be intimidating and dominate every conversation.”
Apparently headline writing editors and such don’t understand some simple facts:
Nice guys don’t intentionally kill people with bombs
Nice guys don’t put on disguises to go into FedEx centers and mail bombs that are intended to kill the unsuspecting recepients
Nice guys don’t intimidate their way into dominating every conversation
Nice guys don’t post angry bigoted screeds about gay people being evil abominations
Nice guys don’t post angry screeds about women who get abortions or who take birth control
Nice guys don’t post angry screeds that some women deserve to be raped and argue that guys who commit rape shouldn’t be labeled sex offenders for the rest of their lives
And journalists, don’t say that you’re trying to be fair, or give both sides. He was a cowardly, hateful killer. There aren’t two legitimate sides to these incidents. There are victims, and there is the killer who was obviously a bad guy.
Also, stop with the “why did he do it” laments. He was angry. He was hateful. The bombs alone prove that. When you dig into the bigoted rants he posted online, the friends who describe his bullying behavior, and so forth—all of that corroborates the initial characterization as an angry, hateful, bad guy.
In one of the stories I read, the friend who described him as intimidating and dominating every conversation during High School, opined that since then he must have “succumbed to some sort of hate.” No, buddy, that intimidation and other behaviors you describe were clear signs of anger already there.
I understand why people often wind up describing the mass shooters and other killers of this type as a nice guy. Some don’t want to speak ill of the dead. Some don’t want to hurt the feelings of the family of the killer. Some are trying to absolve themselves of not having seen him for the danger he was. We don’t want to believe someone we know is a monster. Particularly when they are someone we are obligated to spend time with (we’re students at the same school, we are co-workers, we are related to them, we are friends with someone related to him, et cetera) we will make excuses and tell ourselves he’s just “rough around the edges” but under that we’re sure he’s capable of being a nice guy.
Now, I’m not saying that every angry high school boy is going to grow up to be a multiple murderer. Some of us discover the source of all the anger and learn to be better people.
That’s right, I said us.
I don’t claim to know all the sources of this guy’s anger, but part of me was cringing when reading that description of him dominating conversations by intimidating the other people in it—because I did that a lot. And it’s a form of interaction I can easily fall into to this day. I was lucky enough to first get out of the toxic environment caused by my abusive father when my parents divorce while I was a teen, but I didn’t understand for a long time that I was still carrying all the toxicity around. I was in my early twenties when a good friend was brave enough to call me out as being a verbal bully. Making me see for the first time just how much of the abuse I had internalized. It was a couple years after that before I was ready to admit that another source of my anger (and self-loathing) was being a closeted queer man. And it was during my coming out process that I was able to identify just how toxic the evangelical churches I was raised in were. It wasn’t just my abusive dad who filled me with all that poison.
Which gets me to one of the articles that pissed me off most: the New York Times describes the killer’s family as a tight-knit, godly one. That description, plus knowing he was homeschooled—plus those anti-gay, anti-abortion (complete with the usual slut-shaming plus ignorance of biology), pro-rape posts tells me what kind of religious background he came from, and therefore at least one source of that hate.
We don’t have to ask why. We already know, it’s just mainstream America doesn’t want to admit how much hate and anger is being cultivated in this country. It isn’t about the foreign so-called extremist groups recruiting. Because we aren’t willing to recognize the extent to which fundamentalist Christian churches are engaged in manufacturing these angry young men.
Edit to add: I found more information about some of his angry rants on line, so I updated the bullet list above.
Things you find in a closet (click to embiggen:Another entry in my series on news that either came in after I posted my Friday Five, or new development in previously posted stories, or things that didn’t make the cut but deserve some commentary. This is also another in my series of posts pointing out that public figures who are most adamant about policing, judging, and criminalizing other people’s sexual behavior seem to always have some kind of immoral skeleton in their own closet.
Deputy Australian Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce resigns over sex scanda He’s a family-values politician, described as one of the “most staunch opponents of same-sex marriage” and gay rights in general, et cetera, has been having an affair with a staffer. Not only is he resigning his post, but he is leaving his wife (the mother of his four children) for the younger staffer who his pregnant. Did no one see this coming?
The headline on this one is true, but leaving out a lot: Anti-gay discrimination just cost this judge 3 years of pay Vance Day is a state judge in Oregon, and you may recall that Oregan legalized marriage equality before the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling. This guy repeatedly had his staff construct an elaborate system that included lying to any same sex couple that came in to get married that the judge wasn’t there, and so forth. As the state Supreme Court ruled when handing down the punishment: “That screening process demonstrated to respondent’s staff that, in exercising his statutory authority and judicial duty to solemnize marriages, he would not treat all couples fairly.”
But that’s not all he’s being sanctioned over. Day also had a strange relationship with a veteran suffering from PTSD whose case in Veteran Treatment Court had been presided over by Day. Despite the veteran being under orders not to have guns (because of previous felony Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol convictions), Day provided him with a gun on at least two occasions, and promised the man that Day would somehow get his other legal restrictions lifted. These details make very little sense, at the moment. Day invited the veteran to dinner at his house before this things happened, and this was after the veteran had appeared in court in front of Day, and at some point after that the gun incidents took place. One reason we don’t have details is that Day has been indicted on three criminal counts over these incidents (all separate from the judicial suspension). Until this goes to trial we won’t know what was going on. Oh, and also, after some altercations with referees of his son’s soccer games, he lied and claimed a ref assaulted him. So, the pro traditional values judge who went to extreme links to deny some gays equal treatment in his court, has been making false criminal allegations against people he disagrees with, circumventing laws to give guns to a convicted felony, and committed other yet-to-be specified in court (when those indictments are unsealed) official misconduct. Did no one see this coming?
But I have to ask, why, oh why would a vehemently anti-guy official suddenly take a peculiar interest and start offering big promises to another man? I’m just asking.
In other news, Maine House candidate who attacked 2 survivors of Florida shooting drops out of race. Leslie Gibson is (again) a so-called family values, pro-life, traditional marriage supporting politician. He had called one of the teen survivors of the Parkland shooting a skinhead lesbian (whatever that means), and another a bald-faced liar. When members of his own party called him out, he issued an apology to the young woman he called a skinhead lesbian, but left the comments about the other student standing. This all happened when he was running unopposed for reelection to his state legislative seat. A few days later, on the last day to register, a young woman registered as a democratic candidate for the seat, and another republican registered to run again him. And that’s when he dropped out of the race.
Listen: you can’t simultaneously dismiss these high school students’ protests and such as meaningless because they are merely children and don’t know anything, and also attack them as if they are public figures involved in the process. That’s super hypocritical. And an asshole move. Anyway, he did the usual claim that he’s not dropping out because he did anything wrong, but because this controversy is a distraction.
(Click to embiggen)It’s the third Friday of March!
Things have been happening in the lives of a bunch of our friends. Work is being insanely stressful. I have not been in the greatest of moods. But enough about that.
Once again I bring you the Friday Five: The top five (IMHO) stories of the week and videos (plus notable obituaries and a recap of my blog posts).
Font Folly 