Sometimes you just have to laugh: Owners of biblical replica of Noah’s ark sue over … rain damage (and it wasn’t even 40 days and 40 nights). In case you aren’t familiar, the Ark Encounters theme park (and Creationism Museum) in Kentucky was built with an $18,000,000 (that’s 18 million) from the taxpayers. This should have seemed an obvious violation of the U.S. Constitution’s ban on establishing a religion, but no, politicians insisted that it was really about jobs that the theme park was going to create thanks to the millions of visitors who would show up to see the park. Never mind that the park insisted not just that employees be Christian, but they have a very narrow definition of Christian: prospective employees have to declare that they adhere to a litany of anti-gay and ultra conservative doctrines to be hired.
By the way, those supposed millions of tourists have nevershownup. They dispute those numbers, yet they also have come back begging the state for more money to make up for the lack of income, so…
Anyway, they had some flood issues that caused damage to one of their roads, and their insurance companies have refused to cover more than a fraction of the cost of the repairs: Not The Onion: Ark Encounter Sues Over Rain Damage.
These are the same kind of people who insist that thoughts and prayers will end gun violence, and also claim their god will always provide and so forth. So, why the heck are they suing their insurance companies.
Irony is when people are (tragically) unaware that their perception of their situation or their actions are at odds with their actual situation. Clearly, irony is very much alive and kicking for the Ark Encounter wingnuts.
Speaking of wingnuts, Ben Shapiro is spouting off racist/facist/nazi nonsense, again. He and the alt-right are always disavowing each other, they because he’s Jewish, and he because somehow he thinks that people can’t see that he is saying all the same things they are. But don’t take my word for it, go read this incredibly good explanation: On the Right & Civilisations. “I know there’s already a thousand takedowns of this whiny crap from Ben Shapiro but good grief it is whiny crap.”
It’s definitely worth the read!
Edited to Add: Since the news about the Ark Encounter park suing its insurers over the refusal to cover all of the flood damage unleashed a million mocking headlines, they have gotten very angry and issued a counter-statment: Ark Encounter Really Hates That People Are Saying They Suffered “Flood” Damage. The statements from the Ark Encounter people declare all of those headlines fake news (they use the exact phrase) and then say that it is not flood damage, it’s rain damage—because that is totally different, and rain doesn’t have the same funny connotations as flood does when talking about Noah’s Ark.
So the places that specifically used the phrase “and it wasn’t even 40 days and 40 nights!” can totally keep the same headlines.
One more thing: I got a ping elseweb in response to this original posting that took issue with me poking fun at the Ark Encounters park because they light up the ark light a rainbow every night, making it look like a gay pride statement clearly visible from the nearest interstate. The commenter didn’t think I understood that the rainbow was a symbol from god. Ahem. As I have written before: the christianists who try to claim the gays stole the rainbow from god are the ones who don’t understand the importance of the rainbow in the story of Noah. I’ll just quote one of the times I wrote about it: “[quoting] from the end of the story of Noah in the old testament to justify his claim that queers have stolen god’s invention. I’m going to quote a bit of that: “13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.” That’s god talking to Noah, and please note what god himself says: the rainbow is a sign of a covenant between god and the entire planet. A moment later he emphasizes that it is a sign of a covenant between him and all living creatures of every kind. Gay people are part of the planet. Gay people are a kind of living creature.”
I will leave for the reader the exercise of determining just what kind of an omniscient being needs to leave himself post-it notes in the sky just to remember that he shouldn’t commit genocide.
Look at this African-American girl gleefully reading comic books in the 1940s… (click to embiggen)So, this third installment in a series about misperceptions of what diversity means and how it has occured in science fiction/fantasy has been sitting in the draft queue for a long time, in part because I needed to do some more research to shore it up. But now, thanks to Cora Buhlert, I can leverage this excellent review: The Golden Age Was More Diverse Than You Think of this year’s Retro Hugo ballot. The whole post (and her many links) are worth the read, but I’m going to steal quote an important bit:
Survivorship bias can be found doubly in the Retro Hugos, because not only do people (and the Retro Hugo nominator base is small compared to the current year Hugos) tend to nominate the famous stories, the ones that endured, they also tend to nominate and vote for writers (and editors and artists) whose names the recognise. This is why unremarkable debut stories by future stars tend to get nominated for the Retro Hugos, while better but lesser known works and authors tend to get overlooked…
But even taking the known problems with the Retro Hugos into consideration, the breadth and variety of stories on the 1944 Retro Hugo ballot is astounding (pun fully intended), as is the fact that quite a few of them don’t really fit into the prevailing image image of what Golden Age science fiction was like. And this doesn’t just apply to left-field finalists such as Das Glasperlenspiel by Hermann Hesse in the novel category or Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and The Magic Bed-Knob by Mary Norton in the novella category, neither of whom I would have expected to make the Hugo ballot in 1944, if only because US science fiction fans wouldn’t have been familiar with them. No, there also is a lot of variety in the stories which originated in US science fiction magazines.
As I said, go read her entire post, it’s worth your time.
Among the claims that is constantly put forward from some quarters are that:
until very recently, virtually all sf/f was written by straight white men,
until very recently, the vast majority of readers of sf/f were straight white men and boys,
for most of fandom’s history, the vast majority of people organizing clubs and conventions were straight white men (young and old),
even now, the vast majority of “real fans” are straight white men and boys,
…therefore any sf/f that features protagonists other than straight white men, and talks about any issues not of interest to straight white men, isn’t real science fiction or fantasy, but it is so-called message fiction.
But the truth is that all four of those claims are false. And that isn’t a matter of opinion. Go look at the 1944 Retro Hugo ballot. More than a single token woman author. And even more intriguing, a rather large number of protagonists and major characters in the works are women and people of color.
In a previous blog post, I linked to some of 1930s, 40s, and 50s sf/f fan publications, showing that some of the most prominent founders of U.S. science fiction fan clubs during the Golden Age were queer men and women (who also became active in the gay/lesbian rights movement).
Go to the staff meeting of any medium-to-large sized fan-led sf/f convention today, and take a look at just how many of the people in that room are not male. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find a disproportionate number who are queer. And that has been the case for at least three decades that I know of (I didn’t attend my first convention until the late 1970s, and didn’t start paying attention to how they were run until the late 80s, so I can’t offer personal testimony beyond that).
Look around any big convention at how many girls and women are doing cosplay, or staffing booths in the dealer’s dens, or are panelists. It’s harder to find how many are queer, but next time you’re at a convention, look for some panels whose titles mention queer topics, then go stick your head in the door of a couple and see how full the rooms are.
Listen, I’m an old literally white-bearded white guy. I grew up reading Heinlein and Clarke and Asimov in the 1960s. But I’m also gay. And I was also just as fervently a fan of Ursula Le Guin, Andre Norton, and Madeleine L’Engle back then. But more importantly, one reason I was a fan from such an early age was because my mother was one of the biggest fans of Robert Heinlein and similar sci fi of the 50s and 60s you will ever meet. I am a second generation fan, but it wasn’t my dad who was reading sci fi (he preferred spy novels and westerns), it was my mom.
I’ve written before in a different context how my mom’s old, worn copy of Dune (which she told me I had to wait until I was older before I could read it) often tantalized me on the book shelf when I was a kid. A couple of things I should add to that story: she bought the Ace paperback brand new when it first came out in 1965, and it was looking very worn around 1969 when she decided to move it to a less tempting location. It looked that way after only 4 years because she re-read it frequently.
I know that’s only one anecdotal sample, but I also remember that when we went on our regular visits to used book stores when I was a kid, my mom was never the only woman browsing the sci fi/fantasy shelves.
People of all genders read, create, watch, and love sci fi and fantasy (and comic books and horror and thrillers and weird fiction and all the other sub-genres). People of all sexual orientations read, create, watch, and love sf/f. People of all races read, create, watch, and love sf/f. People of color, queer people, women, and nonbinary people all exist, and together, they outnumber straight white men in world population (and also U.S. population, if you’re one of those people who think that the phrase “Third World Country” is objective terminology). If you’re trying to exclude people of color, queer people, women, and non-binary people, you are the one focusing on a niche market.
If you are a writer excluding any or all of those categories of people from your cast of characters, whether you mean to or not, you are serving a misogynist, racist, homophobic agenda. And that’s definitely not a non-political stance. Those stories are not non-political fun.
Science fiction was arguably created by a young woman/teen-age girl (Mary Shelley), for goodness’ sake!
Time for another post about news that broke after I posted this week’s Friday Five (or didn’t come to my attention until afterward). And as usual I have some opinions that I wish to expound upon.
First up, if ever a headline deserved the word finally: GOP Rep. Amash becomes first Republican to say Trump ‘engaged in impeachable conduct’. Representative Amash has always described himself as a Libertarian, so he’s never been lock-step with the more overtly evangelical or authoritarian wings of the Republican party. So it makes sense that he would be one of the people who would look past partisan loyalty and talk about defending liberty. The sad part is that so far none of the other self-described Libertarians have been willing to do the same thing.
If you’re wondering why so far no other single Republican has been willing to do their duty and uphold the Constitution in the face of the blatant unfitness and corruption of the Trump administration, this provides a nice explanation: Why Justin Amash stands alone. The short version: Congressional Republicans fall into roughly three camps: 1) they know he’s corrupt and unfit, but they’ll get the judges and tax laws they want until things come crashing down around him, at which point they’ll all say they were always secretly opposed to him, 2) those who recognize that they’re financial futures are tied to being about to stay in the Conservative Bubble Racket, so if they oppose Trump, they won’t get those lucrative Fox News or Think Tank jobs when they retire, 3) and then a lot of them are genuinely racist, homophobic, and otherwise hateful and actually believe in everything he’s doing.
I’m not ready to label Amash a hero, because Trump’s violation of the Emoluments Clause at the very beginning of his administration should have brought some protests from Congressional Republicans. And in various tweets and statements while trying to attack his perceived enemies, Trump admitted to the obstruction of justice about two years ago, long before the blatant refusal to respond to Congressional subpoenas now. Amash should have been making these kind of critical statements then. He was probably in Camp 1 above, though not very enthusiastically. I see Amash as more of a glimmer of hope that maybe his decision was driven by those polls showing a larger and larger number of Americans who believe Trump is guilty, and so we may be reaching the stage where the rest of Camp 1 will start peeling off.
I said was a glimmer, but a big one.
While we’re on the topic of why it matters that the Republicans in Camp 1 and Camp 2 have been derelict in their Constitutional duties for three years: Alabama’s Extremist Abortion Bill Ruins John Roberts’ Roe Plan — SCOTUS was all teed up to quietly gut America’s abortion rights. Then Alabama happened. The Alabama abortion bill is awful, and it isn’t just about abortion: it effectively outlaws a lot of medical treatments that people need. It makes the penalty for getting an abortion, even in the case of rape, more severe than the most severe penalty given to rapists! It’s just horrible. It’s also taking aim at the legal basis for the ruling that overturned sodomy laws, making it legal for gay people to have consentual sex in the privacy of their own homes.
And despite what the headline says, I don’t believe for a moment that the Supreme Court will go ahead and uphold it when it gets to them. Roberts may have hoped to destroy abortion rights in a continuing series of small steps where he could pretend that he was just allowing reasonable restrictions, but he was clearly on board with the goal. So I’m not holding out much hope.
And as I have tried to point out many times to some gay men I know who keep insisting that abortion has nothing to do with them: the exact same reasoning–a person has the right to decide what to do with their own body–that underlies the landmark abortion rights case, was also used by the justices who overturned sodomy laws, and it is part of the reasoning for the ruling the legalized marriage equality. This is just another domino in a long line of ways that some people want to take away rights from a whole lot of us.
And that’s depressing, so I’m going to switch gears and share this story about a situation that almost turned into yet another school shooting, but was stopped, not by a good man with a gun, but by an unarmed good man: Former Oregon Ducks wide receiver hailed as hero at Parkrose High School.
It sounds like the opening line of a joke, but it isn’t…This story has been a few years in the making, and until the most recent developments, hadn’t really made a ripple in the news landscape. The story of the famous anti-gay, anti-muslim, anti-abortion, anti-birth-control, anti-sex evangelist and a scandal involving a pool boy sound like a joke, rather than a serious news story. So much so that when one of the queer news sites I regularly read linked to the latest developing story, one of the first comments on that post was a bewildered long time reader asking, “This is real? I thought all these comments people have been making her about Falwell and his pool boy was a running gag…”
It all started back in 2012: Jerry Falwell Jr & his wife met a young pool boy on vacation. Then they started ‘helping’ him.. The Falwells were staying at a ritzy hotel in Miami, where 21-year-old Giancarlo Granda was working as a pool attendant. The hunky young man started mysteriously spending a lot of time with the middle-aged couple during their stay. And later he started flying with them on their private jet to various places. He was seen hanging out with the couple on many occasions, without any explanation.
Pro-Trump Pastor Jerry Falwell Gave Hot Young Pool Boy $1.8 Million & Flew Him First Class on Personal Vacations While Promoting Anti-Gay “Christian Values” as Liberty University President. Shortly after befriending the pool boy, the Falwells asks some associates to help them find a business they could buy in order to give their new friend “a good income.” They eventually settled on purchasing a “youth hostel” in Miami, providing the $1 million down payment on the mortgage (the property was valued at more than $4 million at the time), plus $800,000 to renovate the place. After the renovations, promotional material for the hostel listed the former pool boy as the owner, though later court papers list the owner as a shell company that is owned by the Falwells, their son, and one other family member.
This youth hostel was actually the first part of this whole sordid affair that came to light in 2017 when a reporter for Politico wrote: My Weekend at the Falwells’ South Beach Flophouse and Falwell, Jr. Opened ‘Gay-Friendly’ Youth Hostel With 21-Year-Old Pool Boy . The hostel offers what is described as dorm-like accommodations for $20 a night. There is a bar on the premises, a liquor store next door, and a sign on the front door that lists things not allowed inside, including both politics and religion. It is also described as veery gay friendly, with posters for cabaret shows at local gay clubs on display in the aforementioned bar, for example. In other words, it is a business making money on things that Falwell, his ministry and his university all regularly and vitriolically condemn. But you’ll notice when you read that story that most of the reporter’s concern is about possible tax-evasion that this purchase of a youth hostel may represent.
The story finally started registering when this happened: Jerry Falwell Jr and pool boy sued over business venture. Two Miami businessmen, a father and son with the names Jesus Fernandez Sr, and Jesus Fernandez, Jr. had consulted back in 2012 or 2013 with the former pool boy about possible business ventures that he could enter into with the backing of the Falwells, and they had at least one meeting with both Jerry Falwell Jr. and Granda the pool boy. They allege that they were promised shares in the business and other payments, which have not been forthcoming. It was in depositions for this trail that the amount of money the Falwells had given to the pool boy (that $1.8 million above) was revealed. Falwell claims it was a loan, but has so far not produced any proof that there is a repayment plan or that any money has been coming back to them.
Still, at these point it is all a little odd, and several people were making guesses about the nature of the relationship between the Falwells and the pool boy (I mean, why did they suddenly take an interest in a much younger pool attendant to the point of flying him around in their private jet, putting him up at their home at least once, and handing him nearly two million dollars?). Those of us who were guessing various sexual shenanigans (are the Falwells into something like a hot-wife or cuckold kink? Do they just like threeways?) weren’t being taken seriously.
So Michael Cohen (currently serving a 3 year federal prison sentence for tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations over his hush payments made to a porn star Donald Trump had an affair with in order to keep the affair secret) was asked by Jerry Falwell Jr to recover some “racy photos, the kind that should remain private between a husband and wife” that someone was trying to blackmail him with. Cohen flew to Miami, and claims that he met with the person, made some kind of offer, and that the person destroyed all of the photos–except one that Cohen himself kept. This happened just a few months before the 2015 Iowa caucuses, and crucially, just before Jerry Falwell, Jr stunned a lot of people by endorsing Donald Trump. An endorsement which, by the way, has been widely reported to have been engineered by Cohen.
Some people will ask why this whole sordid affair is newsworthy. First of all, Jerry Falwell, Jr. is a public figure who regularly endorses political candidates and causes, encouraging his large following to vote and donate in these political issues. He does with the aid of several large tax-exempt organizations (some of which are legally forbidden from advocating specific political causes, by the way). There are legitimate questions about just how much of his supposedly private for profit business ventures have been financed with tax exempt donations to the non-profit entities. In which case, these businesses are being financed illegally with taxpayer money. Among the favorite targets of Falwell’s tax-payer subsidized condemnations are the civil rights of gay people, the health and reproductive rights of women, the civil rights of muslims, et cetera and ad nauseam.
On top of all of that, it appears that his endorsement of Trump, which came at a crucial moment just before the Iowa caususes, may have been a repayment to Cohen and Trump for helping to make the sex scandal of the “racy pictures” go away.
Falwell hasn’t just railed against what he calls sexual perversion, he has actively worked to roll back laws protecting everyone’s right to decide their own reproductive health, including trying to legally regulate what consenting adults (straight and queer alike) can do in the privacy of their own relationships. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to such issues for the last several decades that someone who publicly reviles other people for their personal sexual activity has some sexual skeletons in their closet, yet here, once again, that appears to be the case.
Now, we don’t know the exact contents of these racy pictures that Cohen paid someone to destroy. We don’t know for a fact whether the pool boy engaged in some kind of kinky sex with Mr & Mrs Falwell beginning in 2012 and continuing through early 2016 when they were still regularly seen in his company (remember, he was living, attending college, and running that business in Florida, which the Falwells live in Virginia, so all the times they were seen together weren’t merely a matter of happening to bump into a neighbor). We don’t know if that is what so endeared him to them that they shelled out $1.8 million to buy him a sketchy business in 2013. We don’t yet know how much money nor where said money came from that Cohen paid out to someone in Miami in 2015 to make the racy pictures go away. Likewise we don’t yet know who it was that was using those photos.
Now, since one of the times that the pool boy stayed at the Falwells’ mansion in Virginia was after Cohen made the racy photos go away, I think it is very clear that the pool boy wasn’t the person trying to blackmail them. It is very possible that the pool boy is in some of those photos—Cohen described the pictures as “very bad,” so they clearly can’t just be pictures of Falwell and his wife having sex all on their lonesome, as is implied by the phrase “of the sort that should remain private between a husband and wife.”
I have no beef with people living a monogamish relationship. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone the right to engage in kinky sex. One of the points I frequently make when talking about the injustice of sodomy laws, restrictions in reproductive rights, and civil rights for queer people is that as long as no one is getting hurt and everyone involved is a consenting adult—what people do to get their rocks off should be their own business, and outside the review of the law.
But I do have a beef with hypocrisy from people who are actively engaged in taking those kinds of rights away from other people. Particularly if they are either making their living from the tax payer (politicians, prosecutors, police, and so on) or making their living from tax exempt activities (which means indirectly funded by tax payers). If it turns out that Falwell’s decision to endorse self-described pussy-grabber Trump in the Republican primaries in part in gratitude for trying to make the scandal of the racy photos go away, well, we enter an entirely different level. Falwell more than meets the legal definition of a public figure, and this affair—whatever the salacious details—involves public money, the outcome of political campaigns, and the subsequent assault on the rights of LGBT people, women, immigrants, people who do not subscribe to Falwell’s brand of evangelical christianism, and others.
Giancarlo Granda, now in his late twenties and attending grad school in Georgetown, has issued a number of terse replies to various reporters over the series of events. When asked whether he knew anything about the photos, his reply was that he wasn’t the person who attempted to blackmail the Falwells. Which wasn’t exactly the question that was asked. He has a few other gripes with the way the story has been reported: Jerry Falwell’s Pool Boy: Stop Calling Me “Pool Boy”. Sorry, Giancarlo, that isn’t likely to happen. You were doing your job in a skimpy swimsuit as a pool attendant at a Miami hotel when the Falwell’s met you and pulled you into their life in whatever capacity. You went on those trips with them on their private, tax-exempt jet. And I don’t know anyone who believes it was because of your business acumen. So I’m not willing to think you’re a completely innocent victim in all of this.
It will be interesting to see what comes out of the Fernandez’s lawsuit. And if Cohen really did save one of the pictures, well, who knows what will happen, next?
Meanwhile, you might enjoy this video: Rachel Maddow: Michael Cohen Said He Fixed ‘Racy Photo’ Problem For Falwell Jr (Rachel also warns you may feel the need to take a shower after hearing some of the details):
Straight, male, (mostly) white, trump-supporting Americans are committing all the domestic terrorism…It’s time for a news update. There have been, once again, some news stories that broke after my Friday Five which I want to comment on and don’t want to wait until next Friday—when there will have been at least three dozen new scandals from the current regime, alone. Because we now live in a dystopia where so many awful things happen that horrific events from a mere six days ago feel as if they are ancient history. And that sucks.
First, last night my husband and I saw Avengers: Endgame at the nearby theatre where you can get real food and drinks brought out to you. They make an nice Old Fashioned, by the way. Anyway, we had just gotten seated in the crowded theatre before the advertisements started and my phone buzzed—and before you say anything, I always shut it off before the Previews start and I put my watch into theatre mode, so I’m not one of those guys. Anyway, I check it and there is a panicked text message from one of my aunts who is scared that my husband or I are dead. Or something. Why, because she saw this news: 4 dead after construction crane crushes cars in Seattle.
I refrained from pointing out that since the greater metropolitan Seattle area has a population of about 1.5 million, the probability that Michael or I were part of an incident were four people died and three more were injured was about 0.0000046%. And statistically there is a traffic fatality in the region about once every three days. And we don’t actually live in Seattle, any more, and tend to spend our entire weekends up in Shoreline and Edmonds and the other neighboring suburbs. But I understand that it’s a very grisly image: you’re driving along, minding your own business, and several tons of steel fall out of the sky, crushing your car and several around you. As it was, the crane had fallen several hours earlier, when Michael and I were eating a late brunch in a Family Pancake restaurant in Edmonds. And at the time my aunt heard the news and panicked, we were sitting in a theatre in Mountlake Terrace—we weren’t in Seattle at all.
Today in follow-up news I learn there is kind of a connection: one of the four people killed was a student at Seattle Pacific University, where I attended years ago. I am happy to learn that the baby and mother who were among the injured were released from the hospital last night. I hope they have a speedy recovery.
Hate crimes are up since the alleged president was unduly elected. And they are being committed by angry white men who are often literally citing the pussy-grabber-in-chief during the execution of their crimes. This isn’t tragedy, this is part of an active campaign of hate and terror, encouraged by the person currently occupying the White House: Opinion: Why Poway Proves Again That Trump Has To Go. But also aided and abetted by the vast majority of the Republican Party. Yesterday I linked to a story about why Twitter doesn’t mass ban Nazis (Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too), but there’s more to it than policy. The algorithms which work perfectly fine in other parts of the world to identify and ban Nazis and Nazi sympathizers to conform with local laws, sweep up a lot of Republican politicians, including the president. Not because the algorithms are less perceptive than humans, but because those politicians are saying, promoting, and encouraging the genocidal beliefs and policies of the Nazis.
And I will say it again: this isn’t a new phenomenon. The Republican Party has been the home of white nationalism since the sixties.
And those white nationalists are just getting bolder and bolder: Self-Proclaimed Nationalists Interrupt Author, Chant ‘This Land Is Our Land’ at Politics and Prose Bookstore. They’re completely oblivious to the fact that the land all of us U.S. citizens live on was stolen from Native Americans, who were massacred and driven off. It’s stolen land. I’m also irritated at them stealing lyrics from the guy who’s guitar famously sported the slogan, “This machine kills fascists.”
They were there because Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology, medicine, and health at Vanderbilt University, as at the store to do a reading and discuss his recent book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland. The protestors are apparently all former members of Identity Evropa, another white supremacist group many of whose members were recently identified as members of the military and police officers—who began losing their jobs because of some of the illegal activities associate with the group. The new group calls itself AIM (American Identity Movement), and was insisting that they had nothing to do with the old group, but that’s already been shown to be a lie.
In another act of thievery, I have to point at the the initialism AIM is also the name of the American Indian Movement, an group that advocates for Native America civil rights and so forth. So it’s not enough that they try to assert ownership of stolen land, but they’re operating under a stolen name, too.
“We’re not going to be intimidated or deterred. Terror will not win and as Americans, we can’t and won’t cower in the face of this senseless hate… A little bit of light pushes away a lot of darkness. We need a lot of light now.”
Excerpt from “Influences on the Ideology of Eric Harris” by Peter Langman, Ph.D.,Today is the twentieth anniversary of the day that two teen-agers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered twelve of there fellow students and one teacher in Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado. The pair also injured 21 other people before their shooting spree came to an end. The pair also planted several bombs in and around the school. Some of the bombs were intended to kill their classmates and teachers, some were meant to divert emergency services so that they would have time to kill more people. Fortunately that part of the plan didn’t pan out, but the school shooting was enough of a shock that for years afterward the name of the town and school became a synonym for mass shootings and specifically shootings in schools.
At the time, the pair were depicted as the victims of bullying who might of been driven to their horrific crimes by video games or music. The truth is that they were deeply enmeshed in Nazi and white supremacist thinking. They weren’t so much the victims of bullying as they were fairly ordinary middle class white straight boys who had come to see a world that didn’t treat them as superior to people who weren’t white, male, and straight, as a form of bullying.
Yes, they were alt-right white supremacists. They weren’t poor, misunderstood victims. They were Nazis:
The day he attacked Columbine High School, Eric wore a shirt that read “Natural Selection.” Eric often wrote and spoke about survival of the fittest and natural selection. In his mind, this meant eliminating “unfit” people from the planet. This desire was similar to what Hitler and the Nazis sought to do.
In the fall of his senior year, Eric wrote a research paper on the Nazis. One of the themes he focused on was the Nazi goal of eliminating people who were deemed unfit for life. In his paper, Eric wrote about “the euthanasia program that led to the killing of approximately 100,000 lives that were ‘not worth living.’” He also wrote, “in Nazi Germany, all mentally disabled people or ‘incurable mental defectives’ were killed.” In addition, “Arithmetic was used to show how ‘wasteful’ the mentally challenged were and how much money could be saved by euthanasia.”
—Peter Langman, Ph.D., “Influences on the Ideology of Eric Harris” https://schoolshooters.info/sites/default/files/harris_influences_ideology_1.2.pdf
In the months leading up to their crime, they scribbled swastikas and SS symbols in their journals. They praised Nazis, calling the Nazi annihilation of various ethnic groups, disabled people, on so on, as a smart and efficient way to improve society. They committed their crime on the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birthday (and their journals indicated this was intentional), for goodness sake!
They were not victims. They were murderers.
They were not victims. They were domestic terrorists.
They were nor sweet innocent boys who were driven to commit their crimes. They were entitled man-babies who thought someone that freedom was a zero-sum game; that equality for others somehow took something from them that they thought rightfully was theirs.
They were precursors of the current alt-right adherents and apologists who have taken over the executive branch of government.
And we didn’t recognize the warning for what it was. Just as we continue to treat individual angry white men who burn down churches and go on shooting sprees as trouble individuals, instead of recognizing the terroristic fascist movement that it is.
The Columbine shooters were white supremacists. Their shooting was an attempt to enact a genocidal program similar to the Nazis. Don’t let anyone tell you different!
Good question (click to embiggen)Since every news site was talking about the Mueller report, it seems a bit redundant for me to include much about it in the Friday Five. So I decided to make a separate post just about what was learned the first day the report was out.
Virulently anti-gay disgraced former congressman caught making out with a guy with his hands down the guy’s pants at Coachella.
So, disgraced former Republican Congressman Aaron Shock is in the news again: Former GOP Congressman Aaron Schock spotted at Coachella making out with a guy and What Happens at Coachella Doesn’t Stay at Coachella (If You’re Hanging with a Gay Right Wing Republican). He was a public official who voted for and campaigned on anti-gay causes. He tried to make it legal for people to fire folks merely for being suspected of being gay. He voted against amending federal hate crimes laws to include crimes where the victims were targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, gender and disability. He voted against the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in December 2010. He has never renounced those positions, even after resigned from office while he was being charged with a lot of financial malfeasance.
Last month prosecutors reached an agreement with Schock where all charges against him were dropped in exchange for him paying $42,000 to the IRS (taxes owed on a fraction of the money he illegally obtained while in congress) and $68,000 to his congressional campaign fund. As part of the deal, Schock’s campaign committee pled guilty to a misdemeanor count of failing to properly report expenses.
For years rumors circulated around about the anti-gay congressmen, because of his unusual fashion choices and the years of being unmarried and wealthy but always having unmarried male “roommates.” But things hit mainstream media after someone reported that his personal Twitter account and Instagram account was following hundreds of gay models and male athletes who were always known for posting pictures of themselves scantily clad. Shock abruptly unfollowed those hundreds of accounts en mass when a major news site finally mentioned the gay rumors
Then on a taxpayer-funded trip abroad Congressman Shock had this guy who was listed as a staff photographer (but he never took pictures) put in a hotel room with a door adjoining his, get upgrades and other things using programs that are usually meant for spouses, and so on. The supposed photographer sat with Shock at banquets similarly to the spouses of other congressmen on the trip, The supposed photographed posed in pictures standing beside Shock like the spouses of other congressmen and the American service members abroad they met with on the trip. Read that again: the official staff photographer didn’t take pictures, he posed as if he was the congressman’s spouse in the pictures.
Totally normal to have your photographer (far right) pose with you in all the official photos rather than actually operating a camera. Even if the taxpayer is picking up the photographer’s tab, right?Let’s not forget the time when when he was walking around a gay neighborhood with reporters during Pride week where he was supposed to be talking about some urban issues but he kept getting distracted on camera with his eyes following the hot shirtless men who walked by. Those are among the many, many, many reasons that everyone with a lick of sense had been saying for years that the anti-gay (ex-)Congressman is probably a closeted gay man.
I’ve seen people–gay people–posting on some sites that Shock’s private life is his business, and if out gay guys want to hang with him, we shouldn’t judge.
No.
He used the power of his office to cause harm to queer people. He used the power of his office to argue that anyone should have the right to fire, evict, or refuse to give medical services if they even suspect that person might be gay. He argued that employers and private citizens should be able to pry into other queer people’s private lives and discriminate against them. Until he makes amends for that by coming out, apologizing for the harm he caused, and make some kind of significant contribution to pro-queer causes, he has forfeited any right to a private sex life of his own. And I can absolutely judge any other queer people who friends with the douche who enabled hate crimes and more.
The protestant reformation in the year 1517 was just one of literally thousands of times that some christians decided to make up their own version of christianity.So, Pete Buttigieg, openly gay mayor of South Bend, Indian has been in the news a lot. First for being an openly gay public official announcing his intention to run for president, then by raising enough money (fairly quickly) to qualify for the first Democratic Candidates’ Debate, then by kissing his husband on the campaign trail (which didn’t hurt his standing in the polls), then by refusing to back down on criticism of the blatant homophobia of Vice President Mike Pence, then by officially announcing his candidacy (and having his husband on stage, where there was another kiss while the crowd cheered). Last I counted, we have about 18 officially announced candidates, and the first primaries and caucuses are still ten months away, so it is way too early to know if Mayor Pete is going to wind up being the nominee. But all the media attention and his success so far as sure gotten some of the religious right into a tizzy: Christian College President Everett Piper Slams Pete Buttigieg’s Faith and ‘Proclivities’.
I’m not going to link to Everett Piper’s full commentary (published in the Washington Times—a small far-right newspaper not to be confused with the prestigious Washington Post), but the article above has a link, and it’s not hard to find. The title of Piper’s commentary is: “Pete Buttigieg doesn’t get to make up his own Christianity.” And that’s just hilarious!
Because Piper is a member of the Weslyan Methodist Church (and is the president of a Weslyan Methodist college), which is a denomination that form in 1843 when it split off from the Methodist Episcopal Church, which officially split from the Church of England in 1784, which was formed in 1534 with King Henry VIII split with the Roman Catholic Church. And each of those splits were over doctrinal differences (yes, there was a specific personal and political aim that Henry was going for, but it was over a doctrinal dispute about what would constitute reasons for annulling a marriage). That means that each of those splits was because someone decided to make up their own version of christianity.
Mayor Pete is a member of the Episcopal Church, an American denomination that is part of the Anglican Communion. And the Episcopal Church has been accepting of gay and lesbian members, priests, and bishops for some years now. Mayor Pete wasn’t even one of the movers and shakers in that regard, so you can’t even accuse him of having made that particular doctrinal change.
Piper’s denomination, while being a splinter from a splinter of the Anglican Communion, has far more in common with fundamentalist evangelical denominations such as the Southern Baptists, than the Episcopal Church. And many of those fundamentalist evangelical denominations which Piper considers to be practicing his version of christianity are descended from groups that split from the Roman Catholic Church back in the year 1517, after Martin Luther nailed 95 theses (proposals for reforms) to the door of his church.
Each of the thousands of denominations are the result of someone deciding to make up their own version of christianity. If Piper is going to insist that no one has the right to do that, he darn well better resign from his current church and go join the Roman Catholic Church. Of course, if anyone confronted Piper about this, he would quickly deflect, because the real issue is that Piper and his co-religionists don’t think that denominations such as the Episcopalians are “real christians.” But he doesn’t want to admit that. Instead, he tries to cast this as somehow it is Mayor Pete all by himself deciding that queer people can be out and non-celibate and be good christians at the same time.
The fact that christian denominations such as the Episcopalians, the United Church of Christ, and the Presbyterians, welcome and affirm queer members is something Piper and his ilk want to ignore. Just as they keep pretending that it is only a minority of the U.S. population that favors marriage equality and civil rights protections for queer people.
I suspect that Mayor Pete won’t actually wind up as the party’s nominee, but I hope he keeps making the haters foam at the mouth! And the more they do, the harder it is for others to ignore the bigotry
We went to the moon! (click to embiggen)Once again here we are with some stories that broke after I completed this week’s Friday Five or have had further developments since being reported in an earlier Friday Five or Weekend Update. Specifically stories that I want to editorialize a bit more about than I usually do in the Friday Five. And spoilers: it isn’t all bad news!
Let’s begin with a series of stories that are specifically relevant here in my home state of Washington.
I have occasionally written before about our local perennial anti-tax, anti-gay, anti-well-anything-decent initiative filer Tim Eyman. A man whose full-time job for a couple of decades has been running these shitty initiatives to restrict the power of the legislature to raise taxes, to make it difficult for local governments and counties to raise taxes, to stop transit projects, to repeal gay civil rights protections and so many more. He famously planned to make his official announcement of filing one anti-gay initiative dressed in a pink tutu because he somehow thought that would be funny—one of his supporters showed up with a rented Darth Vader costume and convinced him to wear that instead.
A bit over a month ago his usually operation switched gears when the Attorney General filed a lawsuit against him and one of his paid signature gathering groups for campaign finance violations including money laundering and diverting a lot of funds for Eyman’s personal use. The state elections commission had already ruled on some of his earlier campaigns that this sort of thing was frequently happening, and in a settlement of those charges some years ago, Eyman agreed to never the the treasurer of an initiative campaign or similar operation. But that apparently didn’t stop the malfeasance.
So, right after that, he sent out a whining money beg to his supporters, in which he also mentioned that he was filing for personal bankruptcy and that his wife was divorcing him. And it is mostly in the realm of that separate bankruptcy filing that he came into the news this week: Judge refuses to let Eyman back out of bankruptcy. So, when he filed for bankruptcy, his claim was that between his wife leaving him and that fundraising has become less successful (which he was blaming on the lawsuit that had just been filed—I guess his argument was that donors heard rumors of the lawsuit coming and had stopped sending in money?), plus the estimated legal fees for defending in that lawsuit, that he was going broke. He filed for Chapter 11, which allows for a reorganization and gives the bankrupt person some same in how the finances are sorted out.
The state has since asked the court to convert this to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, where all assets are liquidated and then the court decides how to parcel out to the debtors. They argued that the primary purpose of the filing was to protect his wealth from the lawsuit—in other words, to prevent any punitive action of the courts from actually, you know, punishing him. And to bolster their argument, they produced bank records showing that he is spending money and an incredible rate, among other things.
This news going public apparently is not going over well with the donors who had started sending in money for his legal defense fund. So Eyman had filed a counter motion to end the bankruptcy proceedings entirely, all but admitting that the only real point of the filing was to avoid being penalized later.
The judge didn’t let him out of the filing, but also didn’t grant the state’s request. What he did do was order that Eyman has to every month file a list of exactly what he’s spending his money on, along with an estimate of his expenses for the coming months, and that at a particular date ahead, file a budget that the court will enforce.
This comes one week after the judge in the lawsuit dealt him another blow: Tim Eyman loses in court, faces possible lifetime ban on managing political finances . The lawsuit is still in early stages. There isn’t a jury or anything, yet. But part of the process includes the state outlining the kinds of penalties they will ask the jury and the judge to consider. And one of those was a lifetime ban on having any management or control over the finances of any political campaign. Eyman countered that this would infringe on his constitution right to free speech, because the courts have ruled that political spending is a form of speech.
The judge ruled, based on Supreme Court rulings in the matter, that what the court has said that spending your own money for political reasons is protected speech, but not spending other people’s money. She also pointed out that similar lifetime bans have been handed out in various jurisdictions (such as the one forbidding him from being a treasurer of a political committee) without the courts ruling them unconstitutional. This doesn’t mean that he has been banned, it just means that it remains an option in the proceedings.
And all of this is separate from his criminal trial of stealing an office chair from a store: Watch-WA Anti Tax Zealot, Tim Eyman, Steals Office Chair from Office Supply Store- in campaign shirt. And don’t forget the follow-up: Tim Eyman films himself trying to return the chair he allegedly stole. I’m sorry, just watch the video in the first story. Tell me that was an accident! He claims that since he came back inside the store and bought other things, that he meant to tell the clerk about the chair, or that he thought he did tell the clerk. But witnesses at the scene note that he tried to decline the offer of one of the employees to carry take his heavy purchases out to his car on a handtruck, and when they wouldn’t be deterred, insisted that they stack the stuff up next to his car, then he fumbled with his keys for many minutes until the clerk went back inside.
My only regret on this story is that, since Tim is a well-to-do white guy, that he’ll only get a slap on the wrist for stealing a $70 chair.
Imagine for a minute how all of this would go down if he wasn’t white…
Now we go from anti-tax/anti-gay a-holes who troll the tax system, to another kind of troll: Online trolls hijacked a scientist’s image to attack Katie Bouman. They picked the wrong astrophysicist. So, along with the story about that image that scientists created from 5 million terrabytes of data from hundreds of telescopes around the world to finally get a look at the supermassive accretion disk around a supermassive blackhole, people were sharing images of astrophysicist Katie Bouman with the giant stack of hard drives.
A bunch of misogynist guys online started spreading the story that another scientist had done most of the work. And the put his picture and several lies into memes of their own to share. He came back at them, hard. Since these trolls are usually also anti-gay, it seems like a bit of poetic justice that the guy they tried to make into their anti-feminist hero not only wouldn’t play along, but also is openly gay. And he used the media attention to point out that we need to do more to encourage girls and women into pursuing science careers, and that his branch of study, astrophysics is especially in need of more diversity.
As both he and Bouman point out in the various stories: hundreds of scientists contributed. Many many algorithms were developed and used to pull data from the various kinds of telescopes involved. Bouman coordinated the assembly, and contributed algorithms of her own, but she never claimed to be the sole discoverer.
This kind of science takes a whole lot of people. Not just because there is a lot of data to get through, but because different people bring different perspectives, and as they interact, more interesting ideas emerge. So, we need more people in science, and we need more kinds of people in science!
Finally, I promised at least some good news, and here it is! The first official teaser for Star Wars Episode IX dropped, and it is so good! Sometimes I wish we lived in a galaxy far, far away, where evil can be defeated with courage, ingenuity, and a light sabre…
STAR WARS: EPISODE IX – THE RISE OF SKYWALKER Teaser Trailer [HD] Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher:
But then, remember, these same people decided two years ago to start lighting up the Ark with rainbow lights as an anti-gay statement. Again, I’m not kidding! They claim that they have taken the rainbow back from the queer community by lighting up this money pit like it’s a giant Pride Parade float: ‘Look at this gay boat’: Creationist’s use of ‘God’s rainbow’ colors for Ark park lighting gets hilariously mocked.
Font Folly 