The famous hat toss from the title sequence of the Mary Tyler Moore Show.There will be a longer weekend update in a few minutes, but I wanted to get all of these (some of which were meant to go into Friday Links) out there without all my nostalgic commentary:
The cover of the very first appearance in any comic of Captain America (March 1941) shows him punching out Adolf Hitler, in case there was any doubt whose side he was on. (click to embiggen)So white supremacist Richard B. Spencer (he is literally the guy who invented the term “alt-right” as an attempt to re-brand the neo-nazi and white supremacist movements) was out in public spouting his usual hatred, specifically saying that instead of talking about reparations for slavery or anti-discrimination laws, humans ought to be deciding how best to “dispose of” black people. His language wasn’t metaphorical nor was he using the usual rightwing code words for their racist beliefs. He was literally calling for genocide.
People have been up in arms about how punching a person even for saying awful things isn’t just stooping to their level, it’s somehow worse. And one of these nazi-apologists is Nick Spencer, a man currently in charge of writing the Captain America comic book (and as far as we know, no relation to Richard). I should point out that he’s the same hack writer who thought last year having a cliffhanger where Captain America appeared to have been a secret Hydra/Nazi double agent all along was a clever plot twist. Despite many people trying to explain why it was actually lazy, and something that only a person in a place of privilege would think was a shock.
Anyway, fortunately, another comic writer, Warren Ellis, has weighed in with a great reply to Nick’s apologetics.
I understand there’s been some confusion online as to whether it’s ever right to punch a Nazi in the face. There is a compelling argument that all speech is equal and we should trust to the discourse to reveal these ideas for what they are and confidently expect them to be denounced and crushed out by the mechanisms of democracy and freedom.
All I can tell you is, from my perspective as an old English socialist and cultural liberal who is probably way to the woolly left from most of you and actually has a medal for services to free speech — yes, it is always correct to punch Nazis. They lost the right to not be punched in the face when they started spouting genocidal ideologies that in living memory killed millions upon millions of people. And anyone who stands up and respectfully applauds their perfect right to say these things should probably also be punched, because they are clearly surplus to human requirements. Nazis do not need a hug. Nazis do not need to be indulged. Their world doesn’t get better until you’ve been removed from it. Your false equivalences mean nothing. Their agenda is always, always, extermination. Nazis need a punch in the face.
—Warren Ellis
There is a serious topic here, even though I’ve thus far focused on writers of comic books (but I’m a big nerd, so of course this is where I start). When is violence justified?
Most people are okay with situations of clear self-defense, but blanch at the thought of punching someone for words. But under U.S. law, at least since the 1942 Supreme Court decision of Chaplinsky v New Hampshire, we have the principle of fighting words: “words that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” It’s related to the crime of incitement. Over the years the court has narrowed the grounds under which the fighting words doctrine can be invoked, but the notion remains that some declarations are the equivalent of throwing the first punch. And that principal isn’t limited to the law.
Miss Manners, who usually justifies the idea of rules of etiquette and manners as necessary to prevent people from strangling each other over lunch, talks about statements that go beyond the pale. The person making such declarations, she argues, has “ceded their right to participate in polite society.” Which means others are under no obligation to be nice to the person. Depending on the level of the breach, she advocates expressing your belief that such conversation isn’t fit for polite conversation and walking away or asking the person to leave and so forth. She also points out that while many people believe that manners dictate that one never confront other people, the truth is that having good manners sometimes means standing up to someone, particularly if they are abusing (verbally or otherwise) other people. She has also pointed out that swallowing an insult is tantamount to admitting it’s true.
And it’s hard to classify the statement that everyone of a certain skin color deserve to be literally exterminated as less than an insult.
The very first comic book depicting Captain America shows him punching Hitler. Punching Nazis who are waging war on the world and orchestrating the genocide of entire ethnic groups ought to be a no-brainer. It particularly should be a no-brainer to someone writing Captain America comic books! And when modern day neo-Nazis advocate genocide, a punch to the jaw doesn’t seem out of line. Having the person who writes Captain America defend an actual neo-Nazi seems particularly insulting. And as the grandson of two men who fought in World War II—both of whom at different times told me that they didn’t fight so that the KKK and their ilk could pretend they are American patriots—it feels like an insult. Standing up for Nazis isn’t just an insult to my grandfathers, it is an insult to all the brave men and women who in fought for the allies in World War II.
Danuta Danielsson, a woman of Polish and Jewish descent, caught on camera in 1985 by photographer Hans Runesson, hitting a marching neo-Nazi in the the head with her handbag on the streets of Växjö, Sweden. (Click to embiggen)We shouldn’t be defending Nazis, whether they call themselves the Alt-Right, Alternative Right, America Firsters, South Park Republicans, New Right, or more honestly White Nationalists, et al. The essence of their ideology is that entire groups of people must be, to use Richard Spencer’s own words, “disposed of” simple because of the color of their skin, or their religion, or their national origin, or their sexual orientation. I disagree with those who argue that Nazis themselves are less than human—and not simply because that’s sinking to their level, though it is—because when we do that, we forget an important thing: that humans are capable of terrible things. Calling for genocide is a terrible thing. People who do that need to face consequences in society. They need to be shunned, yes. They need to be shamed, absolutely.
And sometimes they need to be punched in the face.
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” — George OrwellAfter several years attending community college part time (for reasons), I attended a Free Methodist university. The upsides were: the student-to-teacher ratios in all my classes were small, the campus was beautiful, and I got to know some wonderful people. The downsides are best summed up by pointing out that then Vice President George H.W. Bush was considered a dangerous liberal by much of the student body, while President Reagan was practically the second coming. Don’t believe me? I was one of only three people on the entire student newspaper staff who was not a Republican. Usually people expect the student newspaper to be one of the centers of radical left-wing ideology on a campus, right?
Well… comparatively, we were.
The editor-in-chief my first year there had a photo above his desk of himself presenting to President Reagan a model of Mount Rushmore he had made with Reagan’s face added. He once told me the story of a Christian conservative college prep camp he had attended in high school, where he had signed up for classes in journalism. The people running the camp pitched the journalism classes as a way to encourage Christians to take back the news industry from the evils of secularism. Anyway, at his first class he had gotten in trouble because the first assignment was a faux press conference where someone the teacher had brought in would pretend to be the spokesperson for a company that had just rolled out a new product, and the members of the class would be reporters who had been assigned to write stories promoting the new product. “I got in trouble,” he said, “because I objected right away. Reporters aren’t assigned to write stories promoting something. That’s marketing, not journalism.”
Over the course of the next several classes, he said, it became clear the teacher had no idea what news reporting was. And he eventually got the teacher to admit that he had a degree in Business Administration with a minor in Pastoral Studies, and had never taken a journalism course in his life.
I had to tell him that it didn’t surprise me. A lot of people think that journalism’s job is to promote things—never critique, never present unflattering facts, et cetera.
Unfortunately, for the last many years, a lot of those people have been journalists.
I used to subscribe to a daily newspaper as well as several news magazines. One reason I cut back was because the piles of partially read publications would accumulate around the house faster than I would read them. But another reason was that it became harder and harder for me to ignore the conservative bias of most publications. They still got accused of being the “lib-ruhl media” by a lot of people, but after I came out of the closet, learned to check my own white male privilege, and became in general more aware of how things worked in the world, I came to realize that society at large had a lot more in common with that conservative Christian campus that I had realized. The Democrats only looked liberal in comparison the the arch conservatives who held a deathgrip on the Republican party. The news media only looked liberal if you accepted that the middle ground, politically, law somewhere between those archconservatives and the Democrats.
So I haven’t subscribed to a magazine other than science fiction and fantasy ‘zines for some years.
Until now. After watching the incredibly poor job most professional news sites and publications did covering this election, I now subscribe to two publications that consistently did real journalism, asked the hard questions, and ran hard-hitting questions: Teen Vogue and Mother Jones. I’m particularly proud to now be a paid supporter of Teen Vogue, because I’m convinced, now, that if anyone can save us from this authoritarian nightmare, it will be the Millenials and Generation Z.
To be fair, since the troompa loompa had his so-called press conference where he shouted about fake news and filled the room with his own staff to applaud his ridiculing of some reporters, much of the rest of journalism has begun to remember that their job is to inform the public, not cater to the whims of people in power in hopes of retaining access. Let’s hope it isn’t too late.
I have other hopes, particularly after seeing the incredible turn-out all around the country on Saturday:
Respect existence or expect resistance. (Kind is the new sexy) – click to embiggen.Yesterday’s mostly trump-free Friday Links were a bit longer than my usual weekly round-up of news and interesting links, with about 90-links. That was without the 14 trump-related links in the companion Resistance Report post. My typical Friday round-up has either 60-some or 70-some links, if you want a comparison. I was not actively looking at the news, yesterday. For one, it was a pretty intense day at work, but I just knew if I started really checking the news I would just get depressed. And my occasional glances at Twitter throughout the day kept me in the loop enough.
Before I jump into any of the stuff that I’ve seen since posting yesterday, I have one link that I originally meant for January 13th’s round up, and then forgot again to include in this week’s, and we need good news among all the other stuff, so: This Ad Is Being Praised For Actually Portraying Diverse Plus Bodies. Go, read it! Look at the pics! Look at the ad. Yes, you can be a plus size woman and an athlete. You can be a plus size woman and beautiful. Visibility matters. And good on all the people who confronted Lane Bryant previously for it’s lack of inclusion.
Now on to other things. I was one of millions of people yesterday morning who unfollowed the official @POTUS and @VP twitter accounts, after following the accounts that Obama and Biden will be posting to now that they’ve left office: @BarackObamo and @JoeBiden. A few hours later, someone retweeted into my timeline someone else’s observation that Twitter had mysteriously reversed a lot of people’s unfollowing of the accounts that are now in control of the white nationalist administration. I checked my account, and yes! Those accounts had been added back to my following list! Twitter Forces Users To Follow POTUS Donald Trump On Twitter & People Are Freaking. Twitter has subsequently claimed that it was a glitch related to the process by which the accounts were archived and officially switched over with the change in administration.
I can see how that would happen. By law, things the president, veep, and administration officials write down in whatever medium are supposed to be archived by the National Archives and Records Administration, so they had to work with Twitter to come up with a process to archive everything about the accounts before they were turned over to the troompa loompa (can you imagine him on an angry middle of the night bender going through and deleting old tweets if they’d just turned the account over as is?). And the processes goals would have been focused on the legal archiving requirements, and not necessarily the experience of other twitter users who might had decided to unfollow just before the hand over. Still, I felt dirty seeing those accounts in my following list!
On the left, the crowd that came to celebrate the beginning of the Obama administration, on the right the crowd that came to the pre-inaugruation concert this year.In other news, we’re seeing just how vindictive the people who like to call other people snowflakes can be: National Park Service knocks Trump on Twitter. Whoever was running the Park Service account (the park service is the agency in charge of the landmarks and adjacent federal property in D.C. and has long been the source of official crowd estimates of protests and other events), re-tweeting the viral image showing the pre-inauguration concert crowd n 2009, compared to the pre-inauguration concert crowd this year. Anyway, apparently a message went out to all Park Service employees ordering everyone who had access to government own accounts to stop using them and today the account has resumed operation after posting an apology.
I’ve been hearing people say that the protest marches don’t matter. They’re just symbolic and they don’t stop the trumpkin from signing executive orders that make it harder for low and medium income people to ever own a home. But here’s the thing: back in 1993 I heard people saying the same thing about the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Particularly pundits on the right were dismissive of the event, referring to participants as freaks and poorly behaved. It’s true that most of the congress critters and other politicians who aren’t actually involved in protests leave D.C. when they happen, avoiding being confronted by real people who disagree with them. But that 1993 march was not a failure. About 100,000 people showed up, marched, listened to speeches and so forth that day. And then they went back to their homes, but they did not go back to their old lives. People networked. They got inspired. They came back home and organized local groups to fight for queer visibility and queer rights in their own towns and states. There was a change in the mood of the community as the hope and expectations raised by the event began to filter out from the people who went, or the people (like me), whose participation was to help others afford to go. And thats exactly what the people going to the women’s march hope to do: Women’s March on Washington hopes to begin a movement.
I recognize that most of my readers are just as troubled by this development as I am. And you’re probably all as tired of being outraged over it. So instead of including all of the following links in my usual Friday round-up, I’m doing separate posts. Behind the “Read More…” link below, you’ll find posts related to the new occupant of the White House and his enablers, the Congressional Republicans. On the other hand, if you want the mostly trump-free Friday Links, go there instead. Continue reading Resistance Report→
I’m already exhausted, and the corrupt reality TV star hasn’t even been sworn in, yet! I’ve decided to separate my usually Friday Links into two posts: a regular Friday Links posts with most of the usual topics, and a second Resistance Report post where I’ll put most of the links related to the corrupt one.
I don’t think I’ll do this every week, because assembling the Friday Links post is already a lot of work. But at least for now, below you will find many of the links I found interesting this week, with less outrage-inducing news.
Links of the Week
Millions in his firing squad. The Chicago Daily News published this column April 5, 1968, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The criminal neglect of detective fiction. I’m a bit skeptical when a review of academic papers looks at nothing published more recently than 40 years ago and claims to make conclusions about how academic look at the genre now.
Someone at BBC One and/or STV has a wicked sense of humor (click to embiggen)I really had intended to write some more posts about things I like rather than delve into some of the horrid things going on in the world this week, but a few of these things can’t wait for Friday links:
There’s also been a lot of churn generated over the fact that several Democratic congresspeople are not attending the inauguration. I say churn because the truth is that every inauguration has been skipped by a bunch of the congresscritters. One of Washington state’s Democratic reps admitted this week that he’s only attended two during his 20 years in office. Many have announced that they’re not attending specifically as a boycott. And the person who has been getting the most criticism for that is Georgia Representative John Lewis.
Lewis had previously skipped George W. Bush’s first inauguration. It was particularly hilarious watching trump supporters calling Lewis out on Martin Luther King Jr Day. See, Lewis worked with King, back in the day. Way back in 1960 he was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders. By 1963 he was involved in the leadership of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an early African-American civil rights organization. He participated in King’s marches. He organized marches of his own. He endured beatings, survived firebombing, and more.
So to see clueless white people, particularly clueless white D-list celebrities, try to lecture him on what Martin Luther King would do or say if he were alive today (or to see them lecture Lewis of all people in what it takes to win civil rights battles) went beyond both hilarious and pathetic.
Of course, that’s only one of the dozens of fronts that the Republicans are hoping to roll back people’s rights, take money and benefits away from ordinary Americans, and give massive tax cuts to a very small number of people and corporations that are already mega-rich.
But, part of the fight is going to involve getting Trump riled up. We can’t use ordinary tactics to deal with him. He doesn’t respond to reason, to polls, or to the usual forms of political persuasion and leverage. A couple months ago when I was having a very difficult time finding any aspects of the election outcome to be hopeful about, I re-tweeted someone’s comment about impeachment, which started a conversation with a friend who made the assertion that Trump is a control freak who will resist being manipulated by the Republicans as much as he resists other things. I think that is a serious misunderstanding of Trump’s personality.
He is absolutely not a control freak.
Control freaks work hard. Yes, I am speaking for personal experience. Control freaks actually need to be in control. Control freaks need to micromanage every aspect of things in their lives. Abusive control freaks monitor the people under their control constantly, and yes get really angry if they feel they’re being manipulated by the people who they expect to obey them. Trump is not a control freak, because all that paying attention and monitoring and micromanaging takes time and effort that Trump doesn’t want to expend. It takes effort and attention that I think he is fundamentally unable to focus on.
Trump is an attention whore who takes credit for other people’s work.
That’s a very different dynamic. There’s a reason that Trump’s son approached the various vice presidential possibilities with an offer to be “the most power veep in history” because the vice president would be in charge of all domestic and foreign policy while the president was busy “being in charge of making America great again.” Trump will make pronouncements. He loves making pronouncements. He loves barking out orders and expecting other people to do the hard work to make it happen. He loves belittling people. He loves getting applause. He really loves it when people fear him. So he will make threats. He will fire people. He will try to turn the full power of the presidency on completely outmatched targets out of petty vindictiveness. He’ll be inconsistent. He’ll change his mind on something a half dozen times.
But he’ll sign off an anything and everything that he doesn’t perceive as interfering with his real goal: which is to get all the attention he can get, while looking for ways to enrich himself. He has no shame, no empathy, and no sense of decency. He is dangerous, as much for the kinds of people he enables and empowers as for his own capabilities. He will never take the high road.
So it’s okay to feel happy when things don’t go his way. We just can’t stop at the feeling.
Quote from Martin Luther King Jr, Letter From Birmingham City Jail, 1963 (click to embiggen)I always feel a little nervous posting anything on Martin Luther King Jr Day, as I don’t want to co-opt another marginalized community’s hero, day, or message. Especially after seeing several people of color on my various social media feeds caution against talking rather than listening. But during his life, King said more than once that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and I believe we have entered a very dark time in our nation’s history where all of us who believe in equality for everyone need to stand together. So while I may be a white guy, as a queer person I have some experience with oppression and believe that I have a responsibility to use whatever gifts, privilege, and platform I have to promote justice.
A lot of people, not just the moderates that Dr. King talked about in that quote from Letter From Birmingham City Jail, rationalize and deny the existence of bigotry by making appeals to certain fallacies. Academically, we often state those myths as five fallacies:
Individualistic Fallacy: racism/homophobia/antisemiticism/etc is perceived as being only interpersonal, ignoring the systemic structural realities (such as underfunded schools)
Legalistic Fallacy: the belief that abolishing racist/homophobic/religious laws automatically ends the bigotry.
Tokenistic Fallacy: the inference that the presence of members of the marginalized class in influential positions in society proves that all bigotry has ended.
Ahistoric Fallacy: the belief that the denial of basic rights in the past has no lasting effect on subsequent generations (“but slavery is over!”).
Fixed Fallacy: assumes there is one and only one kind of discrimination, not recognizing new forms that emerge in context of societal and legal changes.
There’s an academic paper that explains all of this: WHAT IS RACIAL DOMINATION?, by Matthew Desmond & Mustafa Emirbayer of the University of Wisconsin—Madison, if you want to get into it. It’s rather long and involved, but if you open the PDF at the link and search for Five Fallacies you can jump right to their discussion of the fallacies. The paper is focused on racism, but the fallacies apply to all kinds of bigotry.
All of those fallacies contribute to that preference for an absence of tension rather than a passion for justice that Dr. King talked about. It’s the classic “Can’t You Get Past it/Live and Let Live Fallacy.” Or maybe another name could be the “Respectful Disagreement Fallacy.” It’s the belief that as long as a person isn’t physically attacking you right this moment, and is framing their critiques in polite-sounding language, than it can’t possibly be racist/homophobic/antisemitic/misogynist/etc.
So the bigot talks in dog whistles (coded language that doesn’t sound overtly like bigotry to people who don’t know the code), claims to respect or even feel love for the community targeted by their language, and if we point out that they are being racist or misogynist or antisemetic or homophobic, we’re the ones causing a problem. And people who think of themselves as moderate or enlightened turn on us. They don’t just look the other way from the bigotry and bigoted policies that the community is enduring, they actually enable it.
Which means they’re part of the problem. They’re not being neutral. They’re not seeing things from both sides. They’re not being nuanced. They’re oppressing other people.
I wish there was a simple solution. I wish I had some words of wisdom. Instead, I’m just stuck with this regrettable conclusion, having to try to educate people who don’t think they’re being an enemy.
“Over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed in the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice: who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
— Martin Luther King Jr, Letter From Birmingham City Jail (1963)
thesecurityawarenesscompany.com/I’ve got a slightly different weekend update than usual, today. Neither of these are related to specific stories I posted yesterday, they’re all stories that I came across later in the day Friday that should be shared fairly quickly. The first one is not just your typical phishing attack story, though:
Wide Impact: Highly Effective Gmail Phishing Technique Being Exploited The tl;dr version: this particular hack involves the hackers sending emails from a hacked account, to people in that account’s contact list. So it starts with you getting an email from someone you already know. But it’s much more clever than that! They take text from previous messages that person has sent, and it isn’t random. They find messages where the person has sent attachments, and they construct the new message from it. So if it’s someone you know, the phrasing of the subject and the text sound like something that person would write. The attachment in the new message is merely a screen capture, and it hides a link to their fake Google login in page. So you click on the attachment from a friend, and you’re told to view the attachment you need to log in to Google, and they get your username and password. And within seconds, they’re going through your account and sending more hacked messages to your friends.
They’ve even constructed the login page so that if you take the precaution of looking at the address bar in your browser before you start to sign in, you see “https:accounts.google.com” so you think you’re at the real Google. You’re not.
Once they’ve got your password, they can read all your email and do other things to your account.
The linked article has screenshots and advice for how to recognize this kind of attack, as well as steps for what you can do to see if you’ve already been hacked. Check it out!
And this one is less about hackers: Security backdoor found in end-to-end encryption system used in WhatsApp. The Guardian reports that security experts have found that since buying WhatsApp, Facebook has added a back door. In updates, Facebook denies that his is a backdoor to government agencies and claim they will fight any attempts from governments to access accounts.
Which is meaningless.
The existence of the backdoor means that when Facebook loses that fight (because of court orders, for instance) that the backdoor will be used to read the supposedly secure communications. The original design of WhatsApp and similar end-to-end services didn’t have a backdoor because if one exists, it will be exploited eventually. Also, Facebook’s description of the service currently lies and says that they can never read the messages. With the backdoor there, yes they can.
Joy.
While we’re on the subject of cyber security: Cellebrite, a Major Dealer of Hacking Tools, Has Itself Been Hacked. This is one of the companies that makes tools that allow people to hack your phone. After indulging in a moment of schadenfreude that these hackers have been hacked, we then have to worry about what is in that 900GB of data that was stolen from them. Since the dump “contains what appears to be evidence files from seized mobile phones” among other things, who knows whose personal information has been stolen. Supposedly Cellebrite only sells their tools to law enforcement agencies and the like, but it has been previously shown that those agencies include some very shady regimes. And in the case of their mobile hacking devices, those things could be resold or stolen from those agencies and be in anyone’s hands.
ETA: Several people are questioning the Guardian story about Whatsapp: The backdoor that never was, and how to improve your security with WhatsApp. The argument seems to be that while there is a security problem, it isn’t technically a backdoor. The article I linked has information on things you can do to avoid your Whatsapp messages being compromised. I’m going to leave it to the security experts to argue this out.
The true face of Senator McConnellIt’s Friday! The second Friday in a new year. And it’s hard to get excited when so much of the news is so outrageous
We’re having a worse than usual flu epidemic in our area. Several people I know either have pneumonia or had it over the holiday. And my husband and I are still trying to shake off the cold/flu or whatever it is we’ve been fighting for weeks.
Anyway, here are links to stories I found interesting, sorted by category.
The Future Alternative Past: this dystopian hope. Nisi Shawl, an author I greatly admire, is now doing a regular sf/f column for the Seattle Review of Books. Check out this, her third monthly column!
Font Folly 