#it's just the confirmation bias of looking at discourse posts and seeing people fighting. but those ppl are outliers

[kiefbowl]

here's something I believe that I think some people who follow me are not going to like to hear: TERFs are a moral panic, and it's going to end like a moral panic.

like 99.99% of moral panics just sort of fizzle out and then a select fringe of people still hold onto those beliefs. like there are still people living in the satanic panic heyday in their minds even today, but the normies moved on and what’s more don’t even remember participating. not to be a big bummer but that’s what’s going to happen with a lot of the terf/trans rhetoric. like those who have gone all in with trans rhetoric about sex is mutable and girl brain and w/e will probably hold on to those beliefs but get savvy about talking about it when tides shift. people who care now about feminism and homophobia are going to still care in 10 years. but people who are uncritical about the things they read about "terfs" and accept wholesale any trans activism b/c it feels liberal enough are just going to move on eventually and when news comes out about the wrongs of child transition and the regret people have about their transitions etc etc, they're not going to come out and say sorry to you. they won't remember sending you an anon when they were 14, or they won't remember the dumb comment fights they got into on stupid facebook posts about jkr or bathrooms or whatever. they're going to go "huh, wonder why no one was talking about that then, oh well. I always knew something was fishy" and then move on.

no one talks seriously about the occult anymore except extremist christians and yet some people still believe in suppressed memory and DID despite the lack of scientific evidence, and the connection between the two are not well understood by the general public because the abuse of power psychiatry took on it's patients during and because of the satanic panic has been swept under the rug.

as a feminist targeted by this moral panic, you really just have to be convicted in your own beliefs and try your best to live them out and stop expecting validation one way or the other from people. no one is going to apologize to "terfs" in 10 years. feminism has been the target of moral panics each and every new "wave." people are invested in hating feminism because they hate women. the people who still believe in women rushing the street burning their bras despite that never happening don't believe it because they have evidence, they believe it because they want to confirm the bias they already have. people have a bias about women anyway, so they are ready to believe that there are a group of women who are somehow simultaneously both the hairy man hating lesbians and 1950s housewives who just hate hate hate trans people and made up discourse to exclude them from feminist resources of which no one can define because people don't want to look further than that and don't care it doesn't make sense, they just go "see? I knew feminism has been secretly ran by bad, crazy women all these years. yes, rights for women, but do we have to be so angry and mean about it? chill out women!!" and in 10 year when Time magazine releases an award winning article about the "lost children" of transgenderism that barely mentions anything feminists did or said, people are just going to go "wow, who could have thought" and make literally 0 connection to terfs. you could probably say to them "remember terfs?" and they would be like "wow that was wild, yeah!! they were crazy feminists glad they died out" despite that not being even remotely close to what has happened since terfs aren't real and the things feminists believe won't fundamentally change in the future. they aren't keeping tabs on feminists, they're only keeping tabs on their twitter feed.

[oldtvandcomics]

I've seen some posts going around about Crowley/Aziraphale being queerbaiting in the Good Omens series. I'm afraid I will regret writing this, but I have OPINIONS, said opinions being less about Good Omens and more about Tumblr not necessarily understanding the way audiovisuel storytelling and the queer community work, and maybe it's worth taking a moment to think closer about these things.

Spoilers for Good Omens (2019) and some allusions to the Discourse below the cut. Also, long post. You have been warned.

I probably should say here that I liked Good Omens, am myself aro ace, and am of the opinion that Crowley/Arizaphale is canon. So yes, personal bias exists, although I am going to do my best to be objective. Also, I haven't read the book yet, so am only going to be talking about the series.

(Ignoring hereby that they are supposed to be agender. It is a very good series, but they really, REALLY should have found a way to include that piece of information.)

This is a surprisingly complex question, that can be boiled down to three different problems: First, the way people analyze audiovisuel stories (in this case, television, but the argument also stands for movies), second, the term “queerbaiting” not being clear enough and also used too broadly, and third, people's still too narrow view of what is and isn't queer.

In this order, I am going to start with the way tv (and movies) work. It is the least controversial.

One of the things that I love about tv so much is just how complex and layered it is. There is what is directly said and shown to happen, but than there is the music, the acting, the costumes, locations, camera angles and editing, all of which have their own language and add something to how we will see a story. If you watch Good Omens, you'll notice that the exact nature of Crowley's and Aziraphale's relationship never is directly addressed or them confirmed to be queer. However, you will also notice the way they keep looking at each other, the fact that romantic music plays in the background for an awful lot of their scenes together, that they do and say things on a regular basis that goes further than the normal limits of a friendship, and the list goes on. This show is as clear about them loving each other very, very deeply as it possibly can be without directly talking about it.

This, of course, leads us to the question: What is and isn't text? What level of queercoding counts as representation? And this is where things get a little more complicated, because there IS NO clear line. People usually say that it doesn't count, unless the correct term is used. Which makes sense, given everybody's tendency to just... Idk, make a movie about somebody fighting his ex without ever telling us that he is, in fact, his ex, and than hope that they can get away with either the queer fans doing all the hard work of reading between the lines, or just write a couple of tweets about how they're totally gay and get credit for the representation.

Seriously, people, don't do that. If there is a way to use the terms, do it.

But there is a gray area. Welcome to Night Vale never labeled Cecil's orientation, yet we still know that he's gay. That scene they cut from Thor: Ragnarok of Valkyrie leaving the room of a woman? It never said that she was bi. I mean, I haven't seen it, but from what I know, I'd bet A LOT of money that, had they included it, people still would have complained about it not being clear enough. We still act as if including it would have confirmed Valkyrie's bisexuality. What about period pieces, set in times when certain labels didn't exist yet? And, finally, what if a relationship would actually benefit from being left vague and undefined?

There is no clear answer to this. It's a gray are, so feel free to just sit around and think about your own opinion on these things.

Which leads us to queerbaiting: Creators playing up the fact that they MIGHT have a queer character or relationship in their work for publicity, without ever planning to include it. It's a thing that happens both inside and outside of the story. In practice, this usually looks like putting in a lot of subtext between two same-sex characters, including suggestive scenes in the trailers, and going in interviews “well, they could be, it's an ongoing series, you'll just have to wait and see. ;) ”.

Queerbaiting is a VERY vague and very popular term, that is used very broadly, even in cases where it isn't exactly accurate. It is not exactly easy to tell what is actual queerbaiting, and what queercoding because Higher Powers wouldn't let the creators include openly queer characters in their work. Than there is of course the cases where queer characters are kind of there, but it's a blink-and-you-miss-it thing. I've heard the term “queercatching” used for that in a video. Also, queerbaiting is an accusation people like throwing around every time a show disappoints them by not making their OTP canon. (Stop doing that, PLEASE!)

In this context, it is understandably difficult to say if a certain ship is or isn't queerbaiting. However, I would argue that Crowley and Aziraphale are not. I haven't seen all the promotional things going on, so no idea how big of a selling point their relationship was. But I do know that everyone behind the scenes seems to agree that those two love each other very, very deeply, and the show itself isn't trying to hide it. On the contrary, it goes out of it's way to draw our attention to it. To anyone who is watching halfway attentively, it is going to be very, very clear that what those two have going on is NOT straight.

Which leads us to our final point: What is and isn't queer.

Oh dear. It is a topic that is still hotly debated within the community (at least on Tumblr), mostly by people trying to exclude certain orientations or keep other people from using certain terms.

Queer is an umbrella term used for members of the LGBT+ community, meaning “not straight”. It may refer to gender identity, romantic or sexual orientation, and things that don't quite belong in any of the boxes we have. The beauty of the term “queer” is exactly that it is so huge and so vague that it exceeds all boxes and definitions. A really handy thing to have, if you want people to know what you're talking about without needing to give them an hour-long vocabulary lesson first.

Please note here that so far, I have avoided using any labels for Crowley, Arizaphale, or their relationship. Please also not that while I did say that they love each other very deeply, I never used the word “romantic”.

Because here is the thing: I really don't think that they're gay. Or bi, or pan. Or anything else, really. They, and their relationship, like the term “queer”, fall outside of any predetermined categories. It is just, really, really, really clear that what's going on isn't heteronormative.

I have seen many aces being happy and feeling seen and seeing themselves in Crowley and Aziraphale in Good Omens. I've also seen many aros think the same thing. Because here is the beauty of it: We only know that they love each other more than anything else in the world. It is never said that that love is romantic.

I've also seen many allos completely miss this point.

Asexuality and aromanticism, as is to be expected from orientations that are defined by the lack of something, are still very invisible, both in RL and in fan circles.  While we do have our own spaces and our own little community, mostly we are just there between our allo friends and... kind of stand and wait in a corner while they are busy with the sex and romance our society is constantly throwing at all of us. Being ace and/or aro is often confused with “being celibate”. We don't talk enough about what sexless or romanceless relationships could look like. No wonder so many people missed it when they saw one in Good Omens.

The queer community is STILL very strongly sexualized. And this is a problem, because while sexual attraction IS an important part of being queer, it is also not the only one. Queer people are still queer if they are not having sex. They are queer if they DON'T WANT TO have sex. They are queer if they don't enter romantic relationships. There is nothing straight about the close bonds aros can have with their friends. There is nothing straight about having a friend be the person you are emotionally closest to, close enough to openly beg them to run away together. Multiple times.

Queerplatonic or quasiplatonic relationships are the ones that are a bit difficult to define, because they are somewhere between “friendship” and “romantic relationship”. What they look like depends really on what the people involved want them to be like. Some live together, others don't. Some do things together that are usually considered to be romantic, others don't. Some kiss or have sex, others don't.

So far, I haven't really seen anybody really talk about the existence of queerplatonic relationships outside of ace and aro circles. And while I aggressively headcanon Sherlock Holmes and John Watson being queerplatonic, this was the first time that I've really seen an actual relationship onscreen that can be easily, or even best, read as being one.

But almost by definition, this means that it has to be vague, and subtle, and floating around somewhere around the lines separating friends from romantic partners. As such, I think that Good Omens did a really good job, giving us a relationship that is so obviously loving but also so beyond easy descriptions. However, this also means that it is easy to miss and end up feeling baited.

The problem is, I'm not sure that they COULD have done it better. Any explicit discussion about Crowley's and Aziraphale's relationship would have felt forced and out of place, and the term queerplatonic isn't enough known, they would have had to follow it up with an explanation of what that even is. And it isn't as if they could have made it any clearer how much they love each other as they did.

Some people say that they should have kissed onscreen.

Betty and Veronica in the Riverdale tv series kissed, and we all still know that it was only queerbaiting.

And isn't that, wouldn't that be, in the end, reducing queerness once more to the sexual bit in queer relationships?

I don't know. As I said, there is no clear answer, and in the end of the day, everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

I suppose, the best I can say is that what Good Omens did with Crowley and Aziraphale is very beautiful and well executed and also undoubtedly queer. It is, also, not enough. We still live in a time where we don't have much representation, and therefore all collectively jump on anything we can find. As long as this is the case, people will always be unsatisfied with everything. We need more. More explicit, more sexual, more romantic, yes, but also more quiet and subtle and undefined loving ones.

Anyway. I just had to write my opinion on this, because I REALLY didn't like what looked like a group of people dismissing a queer relationship because it wasn't sexual. This isn't even about Good Omens, not really, more about Tumblr being generally Tumblr and not seeing nuance and not thinking things through.

So... Please learn how to properly analyze audiovisual stories. Please be more careful and think a little before you start throwing around the term “queerbaiting”. And, please, PLEASE take a minute to think through if what you are doing isn't in fact sexualizing queer people and excluding parts of the community because of a too narrow definition of queerness.

And finally, PLEASE leave Gaiman alone. One, he has no obligation towards you whatsoever, and two, this was originally a thirty year old book that, three, he co-wrote with a now deceased friend. Being critical of media is one thing, and obviously, Good Omens isn't perfect. But... Just think about what you're doing before you do it, ok?

[cassiehui]

cassie hui - trump's truth

Trump has announced his new social media platform called TRUTH Social. Ironic, much?

This is the first project by the Trump Media & Technology Group, which also just merged with Digital World Association Corp. It plans to launch an invite-only beta version in November, and roll out wider in early 2022. You could say people are curious to see what the platform will look like and consist of, but it's really not that much of a surprise...It's a knock-off Twitter.

Visually, it's pretty on point with Twitter. But an added element to the platform is a subscription video on demand programming called TMTG+ that primarily has "non-woke" entertainment. The strategy of including this service follows the strong trend of subscription-based services, but the content itself has never had a lower demand in current days.

This move on Trump's part obviously retaliates his bans on multiple social media platforms for spreading misinformation and inciting violence. His reasoning for launching TRUTH Social is to "give a voice to all" and to fight against big tech. But the platform will clearly be a hot spot for conservatives and like-minded parties to discuss only related topics. Already established social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook are successful for giving users the ability and creativity to talk about or post whatever they want and create discourse. If TRUTH's user base already agrees with everyone, including Trump, then what is there more to discuss? The confirmation bias on the platform would soar while the platform itself would eventually crumble.

[2whatcom-blog]

The Downside Is not Sharing Misinformation On-line; It is Believing It

Fb has introduced a dedication to monitoring and lowering the influence of anti-vaccine pages. However is that this the answer to cease the unfold of unscientific and false propaganda? For misinformation round vaccines or some other controversial matter? As evidenced by a podcast that Twitter's CEO, Jack Dorsey, just lately participated in, the anti-vaxx motion can combine and garner consideration in methods we will not management and monitor. A have a look at lots of the anti-vaxx Fb pages will present that the leaders of those teams are organized and have a plan for "going underground" to proceed the unfold of their misinformation by way of different means. So, when social media platforms are merely a vessel for sharing data, one among many vessels these teams have at their disposal, what should be addressed is the "why." Why is misinformation so readily believed? The long-term resolution is not censoring the knowledge that folks share; it is educating our society to judge and decide data as scientific and factual. As scientists, we have to ask why individuals consider this false propaganda, why have they got a distrust of scientists and our science, and what can we do about it? It is not Fb's job to repair how individuals view and perceive science; that is our job as scientists. What's it in regards to the anti-vaxx platform that draws so many individuals? The emotional pull of the motion is broad, it is robust, and it is deep. Footage of "vaccine-injured children" and infographics laying out the supposed 1000's of vaccine-deaths that tug on the heartstrings of recent mother and father who merely need to shield their kids. It is an emotional argument, and never one primarily based in actual science. However for an off-the-cuff observer it may be convincing, and it may be much more convincing if that particular person already has some doubt about vaccines. How can we fight this and get to individuals earlier than doubt has an opportunity to make a foothold? Scientists want to alter the way in which we discuss to individuals. For thus lengthy we now have steered away from utilizing emotion in our arguments; it is unscientific and creates bias. However this tactic is what's convincing, that is what individuals reply to, and that is what's missing within the pro-vaccine camp. On the latest Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) assembly, there was a robust anti-vaxx presence, and of the rating of public feedback, solely two have been in assist of vaccines. As scientists, we have to arrange and partake on this public discourse. We have to share footage of all of the lives saved by vaccines and inundate Fb and different websites. We have to cease making an attempt to restrict anti-vaxx posts, however fairly overwhelm the general public with pro-vaccine posts. We won't change the minds of everybody, and maybe we might not change the minds of nearly all of the entrenched anti-vaxx inhabitants, however we are going to affect a youthful inhabitants that's simply beginning to develop their very own scientific opinion. To scientists, the fallacy behind the arguments of the anti-vaxx agenda is so apparent, it is absurd. Anti-vaxx Fb posts make references to outdated "articles" that declare vaccines have by no means been confirmed to scale back or get rid of a illness. Clearly this submit did not think about smallpox, which was eradicated in 1980 due to a vaccine. Whereas scientists clearly perceive and consider the proof, there are people who merely don't. There's a inhabitants of people which have a deeply ingrained distrust of scientists and the science they produce. This distrust stems from a lack of awareness of who we're, what we do and why we do it. How can we treatment this? We as scientists have to be intentional in our publicity and our interplay with the general public and put ourselves on the market even when it is not snug. Most individuals do not know a scientist, so skepticism and mistrust could also be a pure response to a bunch of individuals they're unfamiliar with. There are numerous alternatives for scientists to have interaction in the neighborhood, even at native science festivals and festivals as a begin. If we could be a sustained and approachable presence within the public discussion board then maybe those that have not listened to us earlier than could also be much less uncertain. Finally, we now have a device that anti-vaxxers haven't got entry to, and that is the flexibility to have an effect on change within the science classroom and influence the schooling of scholars. The long-term resolution is schooling and constructing a society that may consider the validity of sources with out Fb censorship. It begins with schooling within the science classroom: How is the scientific course of emphasised and practiced? How is science communication and peer assessment, a key a part of the scientific course of, built-in into this apply? How are we educating college students about what makes a scientific article extra credible than one from NaturalNews.com? Solely when college students, after which adults, can be taught the worth and significance of the scientific course of and peer assessment will we see a inhabitants much less vulnerable to the anti-science propaganda machine and scale back the assumption of false data. In schooling and in public discourse, we now have the perfect device obtainable. Let's not lose this benefit whereas we now have it. Read the full article

[libertariantaoist]

James T. Hodgkinson, the would-be assassin of Republican congressmen, wasn’t  a radical. If you look at his published output – a  series of letters to his local newspaper in Belleville, Illinois, as well  as the majority of his Internet postings – it’s mostly about matters nearly  every progressive cares about: taxes (the rich don’t pay enough), healthcare  (the government must provide), income inequality (it’s all a Republican plot).  All in all, a pretty unremarkable worldview that any partisan Democrat – either  a Bernie Sanders supporter, as Hodginkinson was, or a Hillary fan – could sign  on to.

So what drove him over the edge?

One of his more recent Facebook  posts was a link to a petition that called for “the legal removal of the  President and Vice-President, et. al., for Misprision of Treason.” Hodgkinson  had signed it and he was asking his readers to follow suit: “Trump is a Traitor,”  he wrote, “Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump &  Co.”  He was also a big  fan of Rachel Maddow, who – incredibly — has spent the majority  of her airtime ranting about “The Russian Connection,” as this  Intercept piece documents. Hodgkinson was also a member of a Facebook group  ominously dubbing itself “Terminate  the Republican Party,” an appellation Hodgkinson apparently took quite literally.  The group has over 13,000 members. The main  page of the Terminators is adorned with a  cartoon of Putin manipulating Trump like a puppet.

When Hodgkinson left his home and his job to travel to Alexandria, Virginia,  he told his wife he was going to “work on tax issues.” But is that what motivated  his murderous spree? Do “tax issues” really seem like something that would inspire  someone to plan and carry out an assassination attempt that, but for the presence  of Capitol police on the scene, would have certainly resulted in a massacre?

Hodgkinson clearly believed that the President of the United States was an  agent of a foreign power. He had signed on to the idea that Trump not only benefited  from a Russian campaign to discredit Hillary Clinton, but that he is engaged  in a war against his own country. As  Maddow put it in one of her more unhinged broadcasts:

“If the presidency is effectively a Russian op, right, if the American Presidency  right now is the product of collusion between the Russian Intelligence Services,  and an American campaign, I mean, that is so profoundly big. This is not part  of American politics; this is not, you know, partisan warfare between Republicans  and Democrats. This is international warfare against our country.”

“International warfare” – and Hodgkinson, a soldier in that fight, saw it as  his duty to use the sort of weapons that are commonly used in international  warfare. That’s why he sprayed that baseball field with a hail of gunfire –  over fifty rounds. And when his rifle ran out of ammunition, he took out his  handgun and continued firing. Because “this is not, you know, partisan warfare  between Republicans and Democrats. This is international warfare against our  country” – and it’s the obligation of patriotic citizens to take up that fight  and take out the enemy.

This sort of craziness is usually reserved for the farther fringes of the American  polity. Back in the 1960s, far-right groups like the  Minutemen – who believed the United States government was effectively under  the Kremlin’s control – armed themselves to prepare for the day when they would  “liberate” America. Indeed, this sort of lunacy has traditionally been a fixture  of extreme right-wing politics in this country: that it has now appeared on  the left – and not the far-left, but in the “mainstream” of the Democratic party,  which has taken up the Russia-gate conspiracy theory to the virtual exclusion  of all else — is the proximate cause of what I call Hodgkinson’s Disease: the  radicalization of formerly anodyne Democrats into a twenty-first century version  of the Weathermen.

How did this happen? Democratic party leaders, in tandem with their journalistic  camarilla, have validated an  unconvincing conspiracy theory for which not  a lick of definitive evidence has been provided: the idea that the Russians  “stole” the election on behalf of Trump, and that the Trump campaign cooperated  in this treasonous effort.

Yet that hasn’t stopped the Democratic party leadership from taking this ball  and running with it. As Jennifer Palmieri, a top official in the Clinton campaign,  put  it, Democrats should push the “collusion” issue “relentlessly and above  all else. They should talk about it in every interview.” The New York Times  writes about  this conspiracy theory as if it is uncontested fact. Democratic officeholders  have declared that the alleged “hacking” of the election was an “act  of war” – with the NeverTrump Republicans echoing  the party line – and the Twitterverse’s conspiracy theorists are having  a field day with the dangerously loony contention that we are at war with  Russia. What’s more, the wildest imaginings of the nutjob crowd are being  taken up and amplified by “respectable” people like constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe.

In this way Hodgkinson’s Disease was incubated, its toxicity penetrating the  mind of a suggestible and embittered little man until the poison had accumulated  to such an extent that it burst through to the surface in an explosion of uncontrollable  rage. Rachel Maddow is the theory: James T. Hodgkinson is the practice. The  ultimate result is civil war.

That such a conflict would be born out of a full-scale delusional system that  resembles a third-rate cold war era thriller just adds a Bizarro  World cast to the whole sorry spectacle. The “Russia-gate” conspiracy theory  that has consumed the energies of the media, the Congress, and President Trump  is an elaborate hoax. This farrago of falsehood rests on a  fallacious assumption: that the Russians necessarily “hacked” the DNC and  John Podesta’s emails. The contention is that the methods supposedly utilized  by the alleged hackers were similar to those used in the past by “suspected”  Russian hackers, and that this makes the case. Yet this argument ignores the  fact that these tools and methods were already out there, available for anyone  to use. This is a textbook example of what cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr  calls “faith-based  attribution,” which amounts to, at best, an educated guess, and at worst  is the end result of confirmation bias combined with the economic incentive  to tell a client what they want to hear. In the case of the DNC/Podesta “hacks,”  the company hired to investigate, CrowdStrike, had every reason to echo Hillary  Clinton’s contention that the Russians were the guilty party. CrowdStrike, by  the way, never gave US law enforcement authorities access to the DNC’s servers:  indeed, the FBI’s request for access was rebuffed.

The “Russia-gate” hoax has injected a pernicious and highly dangerous theme  into our political discourse: the accusation that the Trump administration is  a traitorous cabal intent on “destroying democracy,” as Hodgkinson put it, and  handing over the country to the tender mercies of a foreign power. Taken seriously,  this theme necessarily and inevitably leads to violence, which means there’s  a good chance we’ll see more Hodgkinsons in the headlines.

And standing behind it all is the Deep State – the leakers (with access to  all our communications) who are feeding disinformation to the Washington  Post and the New York Times in order to bring down this presidency.  One prong of this operation is embodied in the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller,  whose investigation was provoked and fueled by Deep State leakage. The other  prong consists of the useful idiot crowd, those who believe the propaganda and  can be mobilized to take to the streets.

The Deep State types don’t have to get in direct contact with people like Hodgkinson  in order to provoke violence against this administration or Trump’s supporters.  They have only to continue to do what they’ve been doing since before Trump  even took office, covertly spreading the idea that Trump is “Putin’s puppet,”  as Mrs. Clinton put it: radicalized useful idiots like Hodgkinson will do the  rest. It is eerily similar to the methods the CIA has used to overthrow foreign  governments: spread rumors, utilizing their journalistic sock-puppets, and indirectly  motivate and mobilize mobs to carry out their “regime-change” agenda. The only  difference now is that they’re doing what they’ve always done on the home front  instead of in, say, Lower Slobbovia.

Yes, that’s where we are right now – we’ve become Lower Slobbovia. Get used  to it, folks, because it won’t end until the Deep State is defeated and dismantled.

[sejinpk]

Shit. It’s 1:42 a.m.

So, I should’ve been in bed quite a while ago. But, I’ve been really stressed and frustrated by a lot of the political stuff that’s been going on due to Trump and his administration, as well as just the general amount of combative political discourse due to my own conflicted feelings about it (more on that later). It’s nothing compared to what the people who are more directly affected are going through, but I want to vent and get some of this out.

(More of this will be unsourced than I would like. In going back to pull up where I’ve read stuff, I realized I bookmarked fewer pages than I remembered. In addition, I freely admit up front that some of my sources are not the cream of the crop when it comes to news reporting.)

It frustrates me that people are happy about Trump’s Muslim ban. Even beyond the fact that it’s wrong and goes against core American values of diversity and non-discrimination, it doesn’t make any sense. And the reasons people give as to why it’s necessary don’t make any sense. Even its implementation is based on nonsense.

Why ban people from these particular countries? In one of the few factual tweets he’s made, Trump said that there are 40+ Muslim-majority countries. This is true. Even if you account for an error of 10%, there are still over 40 Muslim-majority countries. As has been mentioned in various news articles, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries which produced (most of?) the 9/11 hijackers, aren’t on the list. I read something saying that these are two countries Trump’s business does business in, but I haven’t confirmed it for myself.

How does that make any sense? 9/11 was easily the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. If you’re going to institute a Muslim ban, and attempt to predicate it on safety, why would you not include Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the ban? You could argue that not targeting all Muslim-majority countries is proof that the ban is legitimately focused on safety, but what I just mentioned about Saudi Arabia and Pakistan not being included in the ban invalidates that argument.

Another issue is that it targets people who had already been vetted, such as the two men mentioned in many news articles, as well as green card holders.

Why target these people with the ban? The reason I’ve seen people mention is that our vetting processes are bad or nonexistent, and that our borders are just open to a flood of immigrants and refugees. This makes no sense, and is clearly based on wildly erroneous assumptions, not reality. You don’t even need actual data or sources. You can reason through this with basic logic, like so:

One of the fears that Trump has stoked is the idea that the vast majority of Muslims are terrorists. This is completely false, but for argument’s sake, let’s assume it’s true. The U.S. has been taking in Syrian refugees for quite a while now, many of whom are Muslim, as well as accepting non-refugee immigrants from various Middle Eastern countries, many of whom are Muslim. If the vast majority of Muslims wanted to commit acts of terror, we would be hearing much more about it than we do, either from (news reports of) numerous, continuous occurrences of attacks on U.S. soil, or from reports of numerous attacks being prevented. This is the media we’re talking about. As much as they’ve been painted as having a political bias, first and foremost they operate off of ratings, and this is something they would eat up in a heartbeat due to the number of viewers it would bring. Neither of these things (a surge in attacks or in prevention of attacks) have happened.

“But what if it’s planned out? What if they’re biding their time?” you might say. From the attacks I’ve heard about, both in the U.S. and in Europe, this doesn’t appear to be the case. If they were biding their time, if there was truly a “Trojan horse” plan in the works, why plan and carry out attacks as they have? Why not do nothing, and lull your enemies into a false sense of security?

I think this disproves the idea that the vast majority of Muslims are terrorists who want to do the West harm. But, again, for argument’s sake, let’s keep pursuing this under that assumption. If the vast majority of Muslims are terrorists, and if relatively few attacks have happened over the past several years, that means that the current vetting process is doing a really damn good job. If that’s true, why replace it (this is the Trump administration’s ostensible reason for the ban--putting immigration on hold while they craft new vetting measures)? Further, this will only sow animosity towards the U.S., which can be used by terrorist groups to recruit members and inspire them. The Trump administration’s rationale makes no sense.

Another thing that I’ve seen people who support the ban say, in response to arguments about which countries were targeted, is that it’s simply using the same list that the Obama administration used in 2011. This claim could very well be false. And even if it’s not false, it still makes no sense to simply reuse Obama’s list and measures from five years ago, and not update them.

Further, Trump has stated that he intentionally did not give advance notice about the ban to the people responsible for implementing it. In addition, some of Trump’s own national security appointments weren’t made aware of what was going on until right around when Trump signed the executive order. His reasoning was, “If the ban were announced with a one week notice, the 'bad' would rush into our country during that week. A lot of bad 'dudes' out there!” This line of thinking operates on the same faulty assumptions I’ve already discussed. If there were really so many “bad dudes” out there, and if our vetting was really as poor or nonexistent as Trump and his supporters claim it is, these “bad dudes” would already be wreaking havoc. They would have done it years ago.

Even if you take it in good faith (which I don’t) that the ban is non-discriminatory, the reasoning behind it is faulty, and its implementation is sloppy at best. Even if you look at it under the assumptions Trump’s administration and supporters have, and the reasons they give, it makes no sense. It has no basis in reality, and very little, if any, planning actually went into it.

And in addition to all the difficulties it’s putting refugees and immigrants through, this ban has really soured the reputation and standing (which wasn’t terribly good to begin with) of the U.S. with the rest of the world, increasing tensions with countries that are important allies in the fight against ISIS in the Middle East. It’s increasingly seeming to me like “America first” really means “America (and really only the highly privileged few in America) only, and fuck everyone else.”

It’s immensely frustrating to me to see people who support the ban being confronted with all of the stuff I’ve mentioned above, and literally just refusing to acknowledge reality, and coming back with generalized insults about “liberals” or “Democrats” and all of that nonsense (or heaven forbid bringing up “alternative facts”). And if the other person takes that bait, and responds with generalized insults about “conservatives“ or “Republicans” or “the GOP,” then the entire thing derails completely and people start bickering about completely irrelevant technicalities and other nonsense.

I’ll go into this more in another post, but what worries me about about this sort of thing, about the combative state of political discourse right now is that many people make these generalizations, which I think leads to this perception of half the country leaning one way, and the other half leaning the other way. And when you have entire groups of people vilifying other groups in tandem with these generalizations, it really feels like the country is tearing itself apart. Since perceptions influence our views of reality, we have people thinking that people like them represent a much larger portion of the population than is actually the case. And that perception also extends to people on the “other side” thinking that same thing, viewing the opposing group as being much larger than it actually is, and so we have people on the left accusing the entire right side of the political spectrum of being bigots, and people on the right accusing the entire left side of being involved in mass information manipulation, and each group treats the other like dirt. And so you have these combative overgeneralizations, which lead each “side” to not want to work with the other “side,” which gets us to where we are now in terms of having such strong political polarization in government and in society at large. Nobody wants to come to the table. Compromise is a dirty word. This is very detrimental to the long-term stability and functionality of the country and its government.

This worry is part of why I often don’t get very combative or vehement when expressing my views on social justice issues, even if I’d probably word things more strongly otherwise. But I’m conflicted about this because I do feel like these issues are important, and that not clearly speaking and acting out against bigotry encourages it. But if you have to get the other half of the country to come to the table for the sake of a functioning government and society, how do you reconcile that? One way may be to realize that it’s not half of the country. But if many people on both sides of the political spectrum do perceive it as half the country, again, how do you reconcile that? This is what I was talking about when I said at the beginning of this post that I have very conflicted feelings about the current combative political climate.

[ocddays-blog]

Political Rant/Response: Written 19th October.

Hi John.

I disagree.

The short answer is: The system is broken, leave it! You will never get more than about 20%-30% of the people to do what you want: basic human psychology, too many vested interests, people stuck in the system etc. Basically as soon as you get any power or influence the drive is to protect the system that got you there, basic catch 22: you only want to change the system when it doesn’t work for you.

The longer answer: Five years ago I was becoming disillusioned with the state of debate and discourse on here. The general lack of critical thinking appalled me. (Due to many factors I’m sure: indoctrination, propaganda by the media, confirmation bias and other human psychology issues) I watched as people I’d once thought of as teachers, gurus, thinkers, went off the rails, or reached a dead end in their thinking, they became stuck or worse discovered conspiracy theories and completely lost the plot. The one that really gets me BTW is chemtrails, I’ve worked in the aviation industry for years, so know the bullshit is strong here – I’m not saying the technology doesn’t exist BTW, there’s just much easier ways to poison masses of people – sorry I digress … I joined council tax evasion groups after the bank bailouts when I found out about global financial structures and realised the criminality there – soon the nutters and conspiracy theorists took these groups over too – or possibly MI5 infiltration, you can never tell these days. I despaired at my left-leaning friends who should know better as they mocked the right, and the right as they mocked at the left. They all have some valid points to make and if they could stop being so outraged at the others point of views for a minute they might learn something. I joined the labour party, then left it when Corbyn didn’t get his MPs to vote for proportional representation when he had the chance. First past the post is inherently undemocratic, unfortunately those with the power to change it (Labour and the Tories) survive because of it – that catch 22 again. I joined the liberals when I met my local ex Liberal Democrat MP (who is wonderful) and went door to door with her, applied to become a councillor. Became disillusioned again when I realised just how corrupt and ineffectual local government is.

The system is completely broken (the real threat to the planet is global warming and who the fuck is doing anything serious about that?) and those at the so-called top are as much part of it and controlled by it and those at the bottom. They might be better off financially and have more power but are they really happy? Do the Tories or Labour MPs look happy to you? Do the rich seem happy to you? Some do obviously, but most I meet and see in the media seem more miserable and bitter than any of us.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that the system cannot be fixed, not practically anyway. So the only viable option is to leave it and encourage others to do the same. This used to be impossible, but fortunately we now have some tools to do this. (Whether these will stay within our power only time will tell). For example we have Bitcoin, we have the dark web, and we have a growing consciousness that there is really a problem with the current systems. Let those stuck in the old ways fight over the decreasing scraps at the table and let’s forge a new path is my advice! So channel your energies into leaving the system behind… And bring as many with you as possible, join the glorious revolution, John. Come with us … Or get stoned put your feet up and watch the world burn, that’s another option of course. The planet will be fine; aesthetically it’ll be a mess for a while, but eventually things will settle and we can get down to worshipping our new Cockroachian leaders.

[melindarowens]

Hodgkinson’s Disease: Politics And Paranoia In The Age Of Trump

Authored by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,

A would-be assassin was incited and validated by the media and the Democratic leadership

James T. Hodgkinson, the would-be assassin of Republican congressmen, wasn’t a radical. If you look at his published output – a series of letters to his local newspaper in Belleville, Illinois, as well as the majority of his Internet postings – it’s mostly about matters nearly every progressive cares about: taxes (the rich don’t pay enough), healthcare (the government must provide), income inequality (it’s all a Republican plot). All in all, a pretty unremarkable worldview that any partisan Democrat – either a Bernie Sanders supporter, as Hodginkinson was, or a Hillary fan – could sign on to.

So what drove him over the edge?

One of his more recent Facebook posts was a link to a petition that called for “the legal removal of the President and Vice-President, et. al., for Misprision of Treason.” Hodgkinson had signed it and he was asking his readers to follow suit: “Trump is a Traitor,” he wrote, “Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”  He was also a big fan of Rachel Maddow, who – incredibly — has spent the majority of her airtime ranting about “The Russian Connection,” as this Intercept piece documents. Hodgkinson was also a member of a Facebook group ominously dubbing itself “Terminate the Republican Party,” an appellation Hodgkinson apparently took quite literally. The group has over 13,000 members. The main page of the Terminators is adorned with a cartoon of Putin manipulating Trump like a puppet.

When Hodgkinson left his home and his job to travel to Alexandria, Virginia, he told his wife he was going to “work on tax issues.” But is that what motivated his murderous spree? Do “tax issues” really seem like something that would inspire someone to plan and carry out an assassination attempt that, but for the presence of Capitol police on the scene, would have certainly resulted in a massacre?

Hodgkinson clearly believed that the President of the United States was an agent of a foreign power. He had signed on to the idea that Trump not only benefited from a Russian campaign to discredit Hillary Clinton, but that he is engaged in a war against his own country.

As Maddow put it in one of her more unhinged broadcasts:

“If the presidency is effectively a Russian op, right, if the American Presidency right now is the product of collusion between the Russian Intelligence Services, and an American campaign, I mean, that is so profoundly big. This is not part of American politics; this is not, you know, partisan warfare between Republicans and Democrats. This is international warfare against our country.”

“International warfare” – and Hodgkinson, a soldier in that fight, saw it as his duty to use the sort of weapons that are commonly used in international warfare. That’s why he sprayed that baseball field with a hail of gunfire – over fifty rounds. And when his rifle ran out of ammunition, he took out his handgun and continued firing. Because “this is not, you know, partisan warfare between Republicans and Democrats. This is international warfare against our country” – and it’s the obligation of patriotic citizens to take up that fight and take out the enemy.

This sort of craziness is usually reserved for the farther fringes of the American polity. Back in the 1960s, far-right groups like the Minutemen – who believed the United States government was effectively under the Kremlin’s control – armed themselves to prepare for the day when they would “liberate” America. Indeed, this sort of lunacy has traditionally been a fixture of extreme right-wing politics in this country: that it has now appeared on the left – and not the far-left, but in the “mainstream” of the Democratic party, which has taken up the Russia-gate conspiracy theory to the virtual exclusion of all else — is the proximate cause of what I call Hodgkinson’s Disease: the radicalization of formerly anodyne Democrats into a twenty-first century version of the Weathermen.

How did this happen? Democratic party leaders, in tandem with their journalistic camarilla, have validated an unconvincing conspiracy theory for which not a lick of definitive evidence has been provided: the idea that the Russians “stole” the election on behalf of Trump, and that the Trump campaign cooperated in this treasonous effort.

Yet that hasn’t stopped the Democratic party leadership from taking this ball and running with it. As Jennifer Palmieri, a top official in the Clinton campaign, put it, Democrats should push the “collusion” issue “relentlessly and above all else. They should talk about it in every interview.” The New York Times writes about this conspiracy theory as if it is uncontested fact. Democratic officeholders have declared that the alleged “hacking” of the election was an “act of war” – with the NeverTrump Republicans echoing the party line – and the Twitterverse’s conspiracy theorists are having a field day with the dangerously loony contention that we are at war with Russia. What’s more, the wildest imaginings of the nutjob crowd are being taken up and amplified by “respectable” people like constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe.

In this way Hodgkinson’s Disease was incubated, its toxicity penetrating the mind of a suggestible and embittered little man until the poison had accumulated to such an extent that it burst through to the surface in an explosion of uncontrollable rage. Rachel Maddow is the theory: James T. Hodgkinson is the practice. The ultimate result is civil war.

That such a conflict would be born out of a full-scale delusional system that resembles a third-rate cold war era thriller just adds a Bizarro World cast to the whole sorry spectacle. The “Russia-gate” conspiracy theory that has consumed the energies of the media, the Congress, and President Trump is an elaborate hoax. This farrago of falsehood rests on a fallacious assumption: that the Russians necessarily “hacked” the DNC and John Podesta’s emails. The contention is that the methods supposedly utilized by the alleged hackers were similar to those used in the past by “suspected” Russian hackers, and that this makes the case. Yet this argument ignores the fact that these tools and methods were already out there, available for anyone to use. This is a textbook example of what cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr calls “faith-based attribution,” which amounts to, at best, an educated guess, and at worst is the end result of confirmation bias combined with the economic incentive to tell a client what they want to hear. In the case of the DNC/Podesta “hacks,” the company hired to investigate, CrowdStrike, had every reason to echo Hillary Clinton’s contention that the Russians were the guilty party. CrowdStrike, by the way, never gave US law enforcement authorities access to the DNC’s servers: indeed, the FBI’s request for access was rebuffed.

The “Russia-gate” hoax has injected a pernicious and highly dangerous theme into our political discourse: the accusation that the Trump administration is a traitorous cabal intent on “destroying democracy,” as Hodgkinson put it, and handing over the country to the tender mercies of a foreign power. Taken seriously, this theme necessarily and inevitably leads to violence, which means there’s a good chance we’ll see more Hodgkinsons in the headlines.

And standing behind it all is the Deep State – the leakers (with access to all our communications) who are feeding disinformation to the Washington Post and the New York Times in order to bring down this presidency. One prong of this operation is embodied in the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, whose investigation was provoked and fueled by Deep State leakage. The other prong consists of the useful idiot crowd, those who believe the propaganda and can be mobilized to take to the streets.

The Deep State types don’t have to get in direct contact with people like Hodgkinson in order to provoke violence against this administration or Trump’s supporters. They have only to continue to do what they’ve been doing since before Trump even took office, covertly spreading the idea that Trump is “Putin’s puppet,” as Mrs. Clinton put it: radicalized useful idiots like Hodgkinson will do the rest. It is eerily similar to the methods the CIA has used to overthrow foreign governments: spread rumors, utilizing their journalistic sock-puppets, and indirectly motivate and mobilize mobs to carry out their “regime-change” agenda. The only difference now is that they’re doing what they’ve always done on the home front instead of in, say, Lower Slobbovia.

Yes, that’s where we are right now – we’ve become Lower Slobbovia. Get used to it, folks, because it won’t end until the Deep State is defeated and dismantled.

source http://capitalisthq.com/hodgkinsons-disease-politics-and-paranoia-in-the-age-of-trump/ from CapitalistHQ http://capitalisthq.blogspot.com/2017/06/hodgkinsons-disease-politics-and.html

[everettwilkinson]

Hodgkinson’s Disease: Politics And Paranoia In The Age Of Trump

Authored by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,

A would-be assassin was incited and validated by the media and the Democratic leadership

James T. Hodgkinson, the would-be assassin of Republican congressmen, wasn’t a radical. If you look at his published output – a series of letters to his local newspaper in Belleville, Illinois, as well as the majority of his Internet postings – it’s mostly about matters nearly every progressive cares about: taxes (the rich don’t pay enough), healthcare (the government must provide), income inequality (it’s all a Republican plot). All in all, a pretty unremarkable worldview that any partisan Democrat – either a Bernie Sanders supporter, as Hodginkinson was, or a Hillary fan – could sign on to.

So what drove him over the edge?

One of his more recent Facebook posts was a link to a petition that called for “the legal removal of the President and Vice-President, et. al., for Misprision of Treason.” Hodgkinson had signed it and he was asking his readers to follow suit: “Trump is a Traitor,” he wrote, “Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”  He was also a big fan of Rachel Maddow, who – incredibly — has spent the majority of her airtime ranting about “The Russian Connection,” as this Intercept piece documents. Hodgkinson was also a member of a Facebook group ominously dubbing itself “Terminate the Republican Party,” an appellation Hodgkinson apparently took quite literally. The group has over 13,000 members. The main page of the Terminators is adorned with a cartoon of Putin manipulating Trump like a puppet.

When Hodgkinson left his home and his job to travel to Alexandria, Virginia, he told his wife he was going to “work on tax issues.” But is that what motivated his murderous spree? Do “tax issues” really seem like something that would inspire someone to plan and carry out an assassination attempt that, but for the presence of Capitol police on the scene, would have certainly resulted in a massacre?

Hodgkinson clearly believed that the President of the United States was an agent of a foreign power. He had signed on to the idea that Trump not only benefited from a Russian campaign to discredit Hillary Clinton, but that he is engaged in a war against his own country.

As Maddow put it in one of her more unhinged broadcasts:

“If the presidency is effectively a Russian op, right, if the American Presidency right now is the product of collusion between the Russian Intelligence Services, and an American campaign, I mean, that is so profoundly big. This is not part of American politics; this is not, you know, partisan warfare between Republicans and Democrats. This is international warfare against our country.”

“International warfare” – and Hodgkinson, a soldier in that fight, saw it as his duty to use the sort of weapons that are commonly used in international warfare. That’s why he sprayed that baseball field with a hail of gunfire – over fifty rounds. And when his rifle ran out of ammunition, he took out his handgun and continued firing. Because “this is not, you know, partisan warfare between Republicans and Democrats. This is international warfare against our country” – and it’s the obligation of patriotic citizens to take up that fight and take out the enemy.

This sort of craziness is usually reserved for the farther fringes of the American polity. Back in the 1960s, far-right groups like the Minutemen – who believed the United States government was effectively under the Kremlin’s control – armed themselves to prepare for the day when they would “liberate” America. Indeed, this sort of lunacy has traditionally been a fixture of extreme right-wing politics in this country: that it has now appeared on the left – and not the far-left, but in the “mainstream” of the Democratic party, which has taken up the Russia-gate conspiracy theory to the virtual exclusion of all else — is the proximate cause of what I call Hodgkinson’s Disease: the radicalization of formerly anodyne Democrats into a twenty-first century version of the Weathermen.

How did this happen? Democratic party leaders, in tandem with their journalistic camarilla, have validated an unconvincing conspiracy theory for which not a lick of definitive evidence has been provided: the idea that the Russians “stole” the election on behalf of Trump, and that the Trump campaign cooperated in this treasonous effort.

Yet that hasn’t stopped the Democratic party leadership from taking this ball and running with it. As Jennifer Palmieri, a top official in the Clinton campaign, put it, Democrats should push the “collusion” issue “relentlessly and above all else. They should talk about it in every interview.” The New York Times writes about this conspiracy theory as if it is uncontested fact. Democratic officeholders have declared that the alleged “hacking” of the election was an “act of war” – with the NeverTrump Republicans echoing the party line – and the Twitterverse’s conspiracy theorists are having a field day with the dangerously loony contention that we are at war with Russia. What’s more, the wildest imaginings of the nutjob crowd are being taken up and amplified by “respectable” people like constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe.

In this way Hodgkinson’s Disease was incubated, its toxicity penetrating the mind of a suggestible and embittered little man until the poison had accumulated to such an extent that it burst through to the surface in an explosion of uncontrollable rage. Rachel Maddow is the theory: James T. Hodgkinson is the practice. The ultimate result is civil war.

That such a conflict would be born out of a full-scale delusional system that resembles a third-rate cold war era thriller just adds a Bizarro World cast to the whole sorry spectacle. The “Russia-gate” conspiracy theory that has consumed the energies of the media, the Congress, and President Trump is an elaborate hoax. This farrago of falsehood rests on a fallacious assumption: that the Russians necessarily “hacked” the DNC and John Podesta’s emails. The contention is that the methods supposedly utilized by the alleged hackers were similar to those used in the past by “suspected” Russian hackers, and that this makes the case. Yet this argument ignores the fact that these tools and methods were already out there, available for anyone to use. This is a textbook example of what cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr calls “faith-based attribution,” which amounts to, at best, an educated guess, and at worst is the end result of confirmation bias combined with the economic incentive to tell a client what they want to hear. In the case of the DNC/Podesta “hacks,” the company hired to investigate, CrowdStrike, had every reason to echo Hillary Clinton’s contention that the Russians were the guilty party. CrowdStrike, by the way, never gave US law enforcement authorities access to the DNC’s servers: indeed, the FBI’s request for access was rebuffed.

The “Russia-gate” hoax has injected a pernicious and highly dangerous theme into our political discourse: the accusation that the Trump administration is a traitorous cabal intent on “destroying democracy,” as Hodgkinson put it, and handing over the country to the tender mercies of a foreign power. Taken seriously, this theme necessarily and inevitably leads to violence, which means there’s a good chance we’ll see more Hodgkinsons in the headlines.

And standing behind it all is the Deep State – the leakers (with access to all our communications) who are feeding disinformation to the Washington Post and the New York Times in order to bring down this presidency. One prong of this operation is embodied in the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, whose investigation was provoked and fueled by Deep State leakage. The other prong consists of the useful idiot crowd, those who believe the propaganda and can be mobilized to take to the streets.

The Deep State types don’t have to get in direct contact with people like Hodgkinson in order to provoke violence against this administration or Trump’s supporters. They have only to continue to do what they’ve been doing since before Trump even took office, covertly spreading the idea that Trump is “Putin’s puppet,” as Mrs. Clinton put it: radicalized useful idiots like Hodgkinson will do the rest. It is eerily similar to the methods the CIA has used to overthrow foreign governments: spread rumors, utilizing their journalistic sock-puppets, and indirectly motivate and mobilize mobs to carry out their “regime-change” agenda. The only difference now is that they’re doing what they’ve always done on the home front instead of in, say, Lower Slobbovia.

Yes, that’s where we are right now – we’ve become Lower Slobbovia. Get used to it, folks, because it won’t end until the Deep State is defeated and dismantled.

from CapitalistHQ.com http://capitalisthq.com/hodgkinsons-disease-politics-and-paranoia-in-the-age-of-trump/