Link round-up for 18 January 2015
This goofball is freaking out over Satanic brake lights on school buses (found via Mendip).
That's racist!
Watch out, somebody's come up with a new way for assholes to harass people (found via Mendip).
ZOMG Now Boehner is using Taylor Swift to try to look hip.
Why is there so much fluff on the internet? Sometimes we need it.
Here's the real reason for Obama's education plan.
Let's be very careful which videos we let them watch (found via Mendip).
Running from a bear is wasted effort.
Faye Kane looks at 2014 in porn statistics, some of them pretty startling.
Bitcoin still exists, but it's really going down the tubes now (sent by Mendip).
Check out these photos of libraries (I'm not kidding -- they're spectacular).
A pastor cancels a funeral at the last minute because the family refused to deny the reality of the deceased's lesbian relationship (found via Progressive Eruptions).
These people exist. And so does this person, I guess (found via Squatlo Rant).
Cardinal Burke knows what's wrong with the Catholic Church -- it's too female-friendly (found via Republic of Gilead).
This story of sad and bizarre prejudice may help you see why I'm increasingly turned off by categorizing and labeling people.
Republicans push to sabotage nuclear negotiations with Iran (which is the same thing the religious conservative wingnuts in the Iranian parliament want to do).
Most New Yorkers side with Mayor de Blasio against back-turning cops (found via Progressive Eruptions, which has more).
Alex Malarkey, who recently repudiated his book claiming he had gone to Heaven, had been trying to get the truth out for some time.
Which states are most and least infested with racists? (OK, Shaw, Massachusetts is way ahead of Oregon on this one.)
The right wing lies -- blatantly, knowingly, premeditatedly.
Fall out of a plane? Here's what will happen, and how to improve your odds just a bit (note: gruesome photos).
House Republicans are pushing an anti-abortion bill so extreme that Republican women are in revolt.
See a new video of the horror that surrounds us, but which we rarely think about.
This is what happens when assholes think the fact that they're protesting something gives them the right to harass random people who have nothing to do with the problem.
Think you know tanks? These are tanks (found via Mendip).
The US Christian Right ignored the lessons learned from Britain's persecution of gays in the 1950s.
For over a year Norway has followed a tough policy of deporting criminal immigrants, and crime is falling (though a 31% drop figure reported on many right-wing sites seems to be in error).
The mayor of Rotterdam in the Netherlands has some choice words for Muslims who don't like Western freedoms.
You'll be able to read the new Charlie Hebdo issue online (found via GoodShit).
Lassana Bathily, a Muslim employee at the Jewish grocery attacked in Paris this month who saved six people, gets his citizenship application fast-tracked.
Kaveh Mousavi has a round-up of links on the Charlie Hebdo attack.
An Italian ad for tolerance provokes an interesting discussion.
How much longer will American liberals be mesmerized by this vile man? Here's a request for clarification.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews use moronic censorship to delete women from reality (found via Rosa Rubicondior).
This is Afghanistan (found via GoodShit).
Turkey will ban websites that display the post-massacre Charlie Hebdo cover.
Do you want to build a snowman? Or at least make fun of a grumpy Islamotard cleric?
British researchers claim cancer can be practically eliminated by 2050.
posted by Infidel753 at 4:13 AM
9 Comments:
Didn't know that Massachusetts had such a low number of racists. It's a bit difficult to believe because I live in a neighborhood where some residents still blame all of their troubles on "those" people.
The Alan Turning link was great. I know the new movie The Imitation Game has gotten a lot of press, but I've also read that people who actually knew Turing are not so impressed.
If your readers don't want to spend the money to see the flick, here's a very good BBC documentary, starring Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing, on YouTube.
Again, thanks for the links.
The comic on biphobia and racism at Pride events broke my heart. I'll never understand why so many gays and lesbians feel threatened by bis, or how a long-oppressed group can oppress others with such ease.
The Canyonwalker Connection link was fascinating.
Shaw: The racists in your area may not be hardcore enough to actually join a site like Stormfront. Idaho and Montana seem to attract the ones among those types who want to form separate communities (well, it keeps them out of everyone else's hair). Maybe parts of Oregon are the same.
Ahab: It's very disappointing. Labeling and categorizing people inevitably leads to dehumanizing arguments about who is or isn't an "authentic" member of this or that group. We need to recognize that we're all individuals of infinite variety, not members of sharply-bounded categories.
Great roundup. I can't even wrap my head around the biphobia/racism piece. I had no idea ...
A Saudi Arabian cleric has issued a religious edict forbidding the building of snowmen, describing them as anti-Islamic.
Bah humbug, Scrooge!
George. Thanks. It's a depressing situation.
Blurber: I guess Khomeini was right -- "There is no fun in Islam".
The racists in your area may not be hardcore enough to actually join a site like Stormfront. Idaho and Montana seem to attract the ones among those types who want to form separate communities (well, it keeps them out of everyone else's hair). Maybe parts of Oregon are the same.
I've heard parts of Washington state (where I've got family living now) have lots of crazies in them too. Not even the bluest of the blue states are completely free of them, it seems! (Reminds me of a week or so I spent in Munich at the end of last year. Most of the people I ran into there were really cool, and the city as a whole seemed to have a real multicultural vibe about it. That said, I had the memorable experience of being woken up one night by a few Neo-Nazis yelling, "Sieg Heil!" outside my hotel at around 3 in the morning, and drawing swastikas in the snow on people's car windows. Takes all kinds, I suppose!)
Talking of neo-Nazis, I read an interesting book last year called Irregular Army, which described how a disturbing number of these folk are enlisting in the American armed forces, and using the training they get there to help them in their battles with the police and wider community. (That said, we periodically get reports here of far Right types joining the Australian armed forces too, so weren't not immune from that sort of thing.)
On the subject of Stormfront, I remember once checking this site out out of curiosity. Interestingly, the first thread I stumbled upon there was an intelligent discussion on European art, which led me to think, "These guys don't sound so bad!" Then I continued poking around and started seeing things like casual references to "mud people", rants about the Jews and their "evil lies" about the Holocaust, and conspiratorial mutterings about ZOG*, and thinking, "I take that back. You people are fucked up!"
*Hard to take white power types seriously when one of their main bogeymen sounds like the villain of a '50s space opera!
Re the biphobia and racism piece, I've heard a few complaints about those things here too. Indeed, I recall stumbling upon a blog a few years back (can't remember the name, unfortunately), which was written by an Australian gay guy complaining about all the racism he'd encountered in the gay scene here, as well as prejudice against more stereotypical "femme" gay men. I also hear that there's a lot of prejudice against transgenders (the T part of the LGBT abbreviation), with some gays claiming they don't want to be associated with "freaks" like that.
Talking of transgender folk, I remember becoming aware of a really weird group of bigots (who seemed to exist mainly online, thankfully) called "true transsexuals" (or "women born transsexuals"), who, as their name indicates, considered themselves "true" transsexuals, and dismissed the vast majority of other transgender folk as nothing more than mentally ill perverts. Like those MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) types who claim they want nothing to do with women, but then spend their every waking minute whining about them online, "true transsexuals" were rather notorious for claiming they wanted nothing to do with the transgender community, but then incessantly trolling every transgender blog and message board they could find, telling the rest of us how much we sucked. Very strange people! (I've described them in the past tense because I haven't seen much of their trollery lately.)
Zosimus: It makes sense that violent extremists would take advantage of the free training offered by the military. The US armed forces seem to have an infestation of Christian Right crazies too, though the government has begun at least cracking down on proselytism within the ranks. I worry sometimes that as they go on more and more definitively losing the culture war here, the Christian Right might eventually gamble everything on a desperate move like an attempted armed take-over of the country. It's probably pretty unlikely though.
Some people react to being bullied by looking for someone even weaker or more unpopular than themselves whom they can bully in turn, as a way to take out their anger and perhaps hope to win a little favor from the common oppressor. I hope such odd sub-bigotries among the victims of bigotry will fade as a new generation grows up more self-confident and less screwed up by the rejection of the broader society.
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