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Gender Reveal Disorders

“The El Dorado blaze is just the latest in a series of accidents that have been caused by gender reveal parties… an off-duty US border patrol agent… caused $8m of damage to 19,000 hectares… of Arizona forest when he shot at a target full of blue-coloured explosive… a woman was killed when a home-made device that was meant to discharge coloured powder exploded at a gender-reveal party in Iowa… an airplane crash in Texas was also attributed to a gender-reveal party, as a plan to dump 350 gallons (1,300 litres) of pink water went awry.”

Border patrol agents and Texans… how surprising that they would be among those who felt that the biological sex of a fetus was so important that they needed to blow shit up to properly announce it. Not that border patrol agents and Texans don’t disproportionately blow things up in any case…

Look at these people—this is “one of the pioneers of the gender-reveal party movement”, and her… I want to say “family”? Not sure that dress is sexy enough for a family photo, maybe go for the corset and fishnets next time, Mommy.

America: revolting people blowing shit up for idiot reasons.

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"[In order to avoid climate disaster] every one of the world’s major polluting countries [would need to] institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy."

"Vast sums of government money must be spent without wasting it and without lining the wrong pockets."

"[O]verwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death."

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"In the words of one public-health study, opioids serve ‘as a refuge from physical and psychological trauma, concentrated disadvantage, isolation, and hopelessness.’” 

“A 2017 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that when the unemployment rate rises by 1 percent, emergency-room visits increase by 7 percent and the opioid-related mortality rate rises by 3.6 percent. Two economists recently coined the phrase 'deaths of despair' to describe this loss of life."

"We need a communist politics that does not assume respectability or stability, that does not divide the world between the innocently poor and the chaotically dangerous... We need a communist politics that welcomes us all and engages us fully as whatever we are — as freaks and fuck-ups, as faggots and trannies, as wreckers and miserable wrecks, as addicts and crazies. We need a junkie communism."

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"Nothing would make me safer on the streets of New York than for the Pat Lynches of the world to determine that cracking black skulls is just not worth it anymore, hang up their jackboots, and leave the black and brown people of New York City in peace. Assalamualaikum, ‘mad' cops. I’ll gladly take my chances without you. At least then, if I’m murdered, it will be an illegal act, as opposed to a death that you all will try to justify because I once got a demerit in high school."

"Police brutality is not a fact we have to live with. It’s a fact that the predominantly white people in charge have decided I am required to live with—if I am lucky enough to actually live through any encounter with the police—because they are too scared of people like Pat Lynch and the police union."

"At the Bronx Zoo this summer, I took my eyes off my kid for a moment, and when I relocated him, he was talking to a police officer. I was not relieved. I was terrified. Most of the animal enclosures at the Zoo are safer for my 6-year-old than standing within shooting range of a New York City cop."

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A senator in West Virginia sent a letter to Mr. Trump about his "un-presidential language" after the senator's constituents complained about Trump swearing at a rally. 

Separating children from their families is bad, but SWEARING!--lord that's just “unamerican”!

However, the senator reassured Mr. Trump that he remains a supporter, even though he is a Democrat.

“Who is more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows him?” -- Mr. Ben Kenobi

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This perceived vulnerability is key to understanding the racist Right. Their strongest identity is racial identity, which is based on nonsense and lies. They feel marginalized, judged, threatened. They are finally losing some of their undeserved privilege in society, and they are reacting with the same irrationality that has always dictated their actions.

"Thanks to the unhinged mob on the left, President Trump raised $12M today, $2M more than originally expected.”

[When asked which presidential candidate he supported] "Guess: I'm white, old, they call me all kinds of names. Who do you think I would vote for? Everybody knows, [w]e're the bad people.”

Yes, you read that right, this white boy is complaining about being called names.

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“Beyond questions of justifying riots, a categorical error is made in any narrative resting on the idea of a violent 'turn' in such protests. The very idea of a demonstration like those in Ferguson 'turning violent'—as it was described in standard media parlance—mislocated and thus misframed violence in this context.”

“The error exists in the tacit suggestion that there was a situation of nonviolence, or peace, from which to turn. To be clear: any circumstance in which cops take black life with impunity, any context in which it is still necessary to state that Black Lives Matter, is a background state of constant violence.”

“Riotous protesters do not bring violence; the violence was there in the DNA Of white supremacy and our world through which it permeates. Protester violence here is counterviolence in history's unbroken dialectic of violence and counterviolence. Even a rhetoric of police turning violent during a specific protest ignores that policing, as an institution in this country, functions as a force of consistent violence against black life. And more often than not, cops' roles as violent instigators are erased from media narratives. The malignant euphemism "officer involved shooting" says it all.”

“But even in the rare moments, as during the beginning days of the Ferguson uprising, when a show of militarized policing draws public outrage, it tends to be the bellicose spectacle of tanks and smoke that draws ire. Quotidian policing is not marked as a violence, and law enforcement is praised when protests are contained and calm. When effective police crowd control—the avoidance of major property damage, the minimal disruption of business and traffic, de-escalation of intensity—gets celebrated as the maintenance of peace, the myth perpetuates that we have a baseline state of peace, peppered with violent turns. Which may ring true for America's white and privileged. But the lie is exposed, overexposed, glaring: people who have to assert that their lives matter exist in a state of constant violence. As political activist and scholar Angela Davis said in a 1972 interview, 'If you are a black person and live in the black community all your life and walk out on the street every day seeing white policemen surrounding you and when you live under a situation like that constantly, and then you ask me, you know, whether I approve of violence. I mean, that just doesn't make any sense at all.'”

“The institutions and vectors of white supremacy have never turned from structural violence. Yet the media consistently attributes the act of turning to violence to people who literally cannot turn from it; whose lives and deaths are organized by it. Why not end the cycle? A better question: is it not cruel to demand peace from those who are not permitted to live in it? I repeat here the words of late philosopher Bernard Williams, who noted that 'to say peace when there is no peace is to say nothing.' In Ferguson and Baltimore, with smashed glass and fire, something was said.”

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Researchers have created a web-based computer game which trains the player to recognize bullshit in media. Give it a try! Note: according to evidence, if you are a Conservative (or in another "vulnerable group" such as idiots, morons and the demented) you may be in particular need of this training to help you avoid continuing to be a victim of (and victimizing others with) this new form of propaganda.

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"[T]his kind of apparently inconsequential trolling from conservatives should be viewed as a kind of boot camp for greater acts of emotional depravity.” 

"So really, it's not a small thing. Bit by bit, these little troll-the-liberals stunts build and reinforce the idea that there's something ennobling and necessary about killing their own capacity for compassion or concern for others."

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“[M]arried mothers did more housework and slept less than never-married and divorced mothers[.] Never-married and cohabiting mothers reported more total and more sedentary leisure time than married mothers.”

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“Examples of potentially unlawful conduct include insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person's foreign accent or comments like, ‘Go back to where you came from,’ whether made by supervisors or by co-workers.”

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"Exploiting the less subtle expressions of white supremacist thought and practice from Republicans, the Democrats have pulled off an amazing feat – advancing a neoliberal, white supremacist program of austerity, mass incarceration, economic devastation, gentrification, and generalized state violence against the Black working class while projecting themselves as the friend of Black people."

"[T]he Obama administration – which Biden was obviously a part of – only prosecuted one killer cop in the entirety of its eight-year reign."

"[A]s a white supremacist settler-colonial state, white nationalism is 'American' nationalism…"

"Biden as a neoliberal white supremacist imperialist was always clear where he stood. His voting record and policy support for war on Iraq; the dismembering of Syria; the U.S./ NATO attack on Libya… support for Trump’s campaign to buttress the white minority oligarchy in Venezuela by implementing a regime change…. Most of the Democratic Party supported these policies."

"Really, what is this 'America' that the squad loves and claim to be a part of? AOC’s family is from the colony of Puerto Rico. Tlaib’s America is probably the most Islamophobic country on the planet. Omar’s native land of Somalia became one of the first of the so-called 'failed states,' those states where U.S. and Western imperialism plunders and then pretends that the state failed as a result of its internal weaknesses. Pressley, as an African American, is part of a captive population subjected to 243 years of enslavement, 100 years of post-slavery apartheid, and 54 years of benign neglect."

"[I]f one’s people are part of the working class and nationally oppressed, you don't beg to become part of that de-humanizing and degrading machine…. You fight and struggle for your inherent dignity, understanding that human rights are not going to be granted by the oppressor. They have to be won through ferocious struggle."

"What is certain – and what the squad and all of their supporters must understand – is that appeals to morality and undignified attempts to ingratiate oneself into this barbarism will only further embolden the extreme right represented by Trump and the even more insidious neoliberal white supremacist right of Biden, Obama and Pelosi."

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“This again raises your question of how we can look away. For ExxonMobil, the explanation is simple enough: The logic of the capitalist market rules — what Joseph Stiglitz 25 years ago called the ‘religion’ that markets know best. The same reasoning extends beyond, for example to the major banks that are pouring funds into fossil fuel extraction, including the most dangerous, like Canadian tar sands, surely in full awareness of the consequences.

CEOs face a choice: They can seek to maximize profit and market share, and (consciously) laboratory to undermine the prospects for life on earth; or they can refuse to do so, and be removed and replaced by someone who will. The problems are not just individual; they are institutional, hence much deeper and harder to overcome.”

“Something similar holds for media. In the best newspapers there are regular articles by the finest journalists applauding the fracking revolution and the opening of new areas for exploitation, driving the U.S. well ahead of Saudi Arabia in the race to destroy human civilization. Sometimes there are a few words about environmental effects: fracking in Wyoming may harm the water supplies for ranchers. But scarcely if ever is there a word on the effect on the planet — which is, surely, well understood by authors and editors.

In this case, I suppose the explanation is professionalism. The ethics of the profession requires ‘objectivity’: reporting accurately what is going on ’within the beltway’ and in executive suites, and keeping to the assigned story. To add a word about the lethal broader impact would be ’bias,’ reserved for the opinion pages.”

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"Mass shootings, defined by Mother Jones as 'indiscriminate rampages in public places resulting in four or more victims killed by the attacker,' have taken 339 people’s lives since 2015. But, within the same time period, police — who are responsible for enforcing gun laws — have shot and killed 4,355 people, 1200 percent more people than mass shooters."

"… it’s easier to compartmentalize the type of gun violence that comes from the police as 'other’ and incidents that result in the brutalizing and death of American citizens — Black, Brown or otherwise — are treated as individual instances that are not connected to a larger, overarching problem.” Police and the media exploit this divide when they describe the police violence victims’ unrelated criminal history or the victims’ possession of a gun or pocket knife, regardless of whether it was a factor during the killing. The underlying message is that the deceased deserved to die in order to keep everyone else safe."

"'More strict gun laws will harm Black and Brown communities,' he told Truthout during a phone interview. 'Invariably all laws do. All laws are arbitrary, bureaucratic, reactionary and selectively enforced. All laws. More often than not the legislation that comes out has more harmful and unintended consequences and outcomes than what they are meant to correct, or it’s just never enough because the bill is more watered down by corporate interests and other various stakeholders by the time it comes out[.]'"

"The Brennan Center’s research shows that in a city of 100,000, each new resource-providing nonprofit community organization leads to a 1.2 percent drop in the homicide rate. And income inequality is the best predictor of homicide rates. A 2018 study… found that mass shootings… were most likely to occur with high levels of income inequality and high levels of income."

"Chicago’s 2019 budget allots over 1.5 billion dollars to the police department; the city’s entire 'Community Services' infrastructure, which includes offices like the Department of Public Health and the Department of Family and Support Services, is allotted nearly $200,000 dollars."

"Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for the United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time."

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"This report lays out the findings of a large-scale national survey of Americans about the current state of civic life in the United States. It provides substantial evidence of deep polarization and growing tribalism. It shows that this polarization is rooted in something deeper than political opinions and disagreements over policy. But it also provides some evidence for optimism, showing that 77 percent of Americans believe our differences are not so great that we cannot come together."

The problem, of course, is that those 77% are wrong… perhaps not in that we could come together, but in their (unconsidered) opinion that we should. It is entirely possible that one of the "extremist" groups, either the "resentful" or the "woke" might be right--in which case we DO NOT want to "come together", but would be better moving either right or left, toward the ideology of one of these groups.

As this study and many others show, it is the progressive activists who are the more intelligent and educated, so why would we assume the views of the least educated, most hateful (the conservative "resentful" group) deserve equal consideration? This is false balance.

The establishment needs the 77% to be right. This majority is the lumpenproletariat, the grand ballast on society, keeping it from moving or progressing. They will do anything to maintain the status quo, terrified of change, particularly one they feel they would never be part of -- too uneducated, too ignorant, looked down on and challenged by the educated left -- guns and xenophobia they can understand, like any 10 year-old, but the subtleties of the progressive left standpoint of the "woke" progressives, the energy, integrity, and dedication it takes to maintain effective activism, and the self-provided education needed to fully understand the issues -- these things are hopelessly out of reach for many in that 77%, a fact that they are well aware of and sublimely sensitive to: an inferiority complex bred from poverty and ignorance is a very common characteristic of this majority. If they were to be pushed away from their safe positions, in other words, it would be much easier for them to move right, toward resentment, hatred and ignorance.

So, let's not tell ourselves that joining the majority in "coming together" is the way to go. Let's do the right thing rather than cling hysterically to the status quo for the sake of the comfort of the lumpenproletariat and in the service of the establishment: eradicate the hateful, "resentful", racist, misogynistic right by any means necessary, deny the lumpenproletariat their pacifiers and fidget spinners, and burn the establishment that depends upon them to the ground.

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“Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.”

“Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.”

“… adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.”

“Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.”

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"In many cases, regulations were specifically introduced in response to people of colour exercising their Second Amendment right to bear arms."

"After being emancipated as a result of the Civil War (1861-1865), southern states passed laws known as the 'Black Codes', which disarmed and economically disabled African Americans in order to sustain enforcing white supremacy."

"There is 'irony' in the fact that right-wing politicians and the NRA were 'definitely in favour of gun control when there was great concern among white Americans.' "

"In 2013, a group of armed men from Open Carry Texas 'trapped' four pro-gun control women inside a restaurant in Dallas… Carson said that 'few black people would survive very long' if they conducted similar protests in situations where they were likely to be confronted by police."

"The silence of the NRA following the 2016 murder of 32-year-old Philando Castile after he clearly disclosed that he had a licensed firearm to Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez during a routine traffic stop, hammered the point home for many African American gun owners."

" 'The system is rotten with bias towards people of colour … With the knowledge and power that I have with a gun on my hip, I am a protector.' "