#which white supremacists see as a threat so they convince white women that white men are protectors

[exdivine]

white supremacy and misogyny work hand-in-hand to keep patriarchal power systems in place, if you fail to acknowledge this you’re not a radical feminist

#radblr #white men at the top of the global hierarchy benefit from putting white women on a pedestal #as property and objects that must be protected from ‘savage’ men #white men don’t see white women as equals let alone human beings #white supremacy leans on the notion that women are fragile virginal infantile beings that need to be led by men #white supremacy claims black/brown women are in need of saving from ‘savage’ black/brown men #positions black/brown women as helpless and in need of a white savior #white supremacy believes black/brown women are incapable of creating their own women’s rights movements #because white supremacy views equal rights for women as a uniquely white action that only white women can take #which white supremacists see as a threat so they convince white women that white men are protectors #eliminating global female clas consciousness

[lesbianralzarek]

Do you have any headcanons about ral zarek?

oh boy, do i!

im 100% sure that he built the thaumatic compass, but i think it would be funny if he had been approached by tez about it, assumed that tez would be the one to use it, and then made it kinda finicky and awkward on purpose so that tez would try to fix it and end up breaking it and being stuck on ixalan (and out of ral's hair) forever. he would probably be a lil sorry if he learned that vraska was the one who had to use it, but only a lil

he naturally has a more olive skin tone but he never goes outside so hes just sickly pale all the time

he goes to see hekara whenever shes performing a big role but he doesnt really care about anyone else so he does paperwork until one of his assistants points out when shes on stage so he can pay attention for a minute

didnt know that blue raspberries arent real because he consumes a lot more energy drinks than fresh produce

for a long time he only hired women so that he could put his bed and shit in the men's restroom that came with his lab. this meant that he only ever saw men at, like, gay bars and kinda became a bit of a misandrist sdfghhgfds. diversity win

in our world he would say that his favorite movie is the martian, which he does like, but its really fast and furious tokyo drift

"would you fuck your clone?" is not at all a hypothetical. the izzet league has cloning. ral has absolutely already fucked his clone

understands the threat that phyrexia poses. still really wants to know what he would look like as a phyrexian

the other planeswalkers who hadnt met him before wots think that hes really nice but hes actually just nice to them because hes a planeswalker supremacist

edited this one out because it directly contradicted canon (tho that canon makes no sense but w/e)

cannibal. not in the passive "well, im not gonna ask whats in this mystery food vendor meat" way that basically every ravnican is, but in the "actively seeks out human meat when available" way

cut off his own foot during an argument about how great izzet prosthetics are. he has built-in heelies now

hates pets but tomik has a lil thrull made from the skin of his dead parents, so ral cant convince him to get rid of him. his name is mosce and he wears a lil suit and sleeps at the foot of their bed during thunderstorms. he can understand speech but cant speak, just make weird whale noises. pets arent allowed in their apartment so tomik has him registered as his accountant

that is a kamigawa tattoo but because their magic tied to the land, it doesnt really do anything on ravnica besides look cool. while he was talking to the wanderer about planeswalking he excitedly explained all about kamigawa and the whole time she was just... staring at the tattoo that clearly telegraphs how he was part of the criminal underground there

likes theros in small doses, but doesnt like having to shit outside. the entire time he was there he batted his eyelashes real pretty at the abundance of queer men there so that he didnt have to buy anything. at one point everyone started calling him a son of keranos, so given how gods on theros only work on the basis of people believing in them, he was momentarily a demigod. his inflated ego still wasnt enough to make him stay

went full crazy ex on a guy by starting a fight because he was bored, driving his car-equivalent off a cliff, planeswalking away at the last minute leaving only an item of his clothing behind so that it becomes a "wheres the rest of the body?" cold case, and then planeswalking back a decade later wearing all white so that its unclear if hes a ghost or not and the guy never knows closure

"how does someone as kind and well-behaved as tomik end up with someone like ral?" tomik is the stand-in boss for the catholic mafia. he is also a lil fucked up

ral is, like, genuinely actually nice to the people he likes. this one is canon but i just felt like reiterating. theres no weird scheme going on with him and all of his high-ranking friends (+ husband) in other guilds. sometimes bitches just have besties

he knows that vraska is dating jace. he knows that vraska fucks. for some reason he is unable to conceive of the idea that jace fucks

one time he bit off emmara's index finger and spit it back out at her. emmara says that shes willing to overlook it (lying) but ral doesnt feel like he was in the wrong there (he was) so he just gets mad every time she suggests burying the hatchet. "oh, how noble of you to demand that i forgive you for all youve done to me!" etc etc. homophobia doesnt exist on ravnica except for emmara, who invents new slurs every time she sees that man

#mtg #ral zarek

[angelsaxis]

I'm saying this as a nonbinary lesbian and someone's who's feminism is focused on Black trans women. So don't call me a T3rf.

I don't like how the transphobic feminists have claimed the most tepid basic 101 takes about feminism, to the point where they've become dog whistles for rampant and violent transphobia regardless of the intentions or social classes (ie race, gender, cis or not) of the person saying them.

Saying make up is fundamentally a gender role before its an empowering tool isn't a radical statement at all. Talking about how so much of ~womens empowerment~ still relies on women being beautiful/sexy under the cisheteropatriarchy/white supremacist gaze isn't radical. Someone stating the facts of life for women, and by extension most AFAB people, isn't a radical statement. I remember these things being in feminism 101, especially things like "why does every woman need to be empowered to feel like she's beautiful? Like her body actually does fit society's beauty standards, when the goal should be that she isn't expected to be beautiful in the first place? That she can just be?" And this one is especially insidious because I'm p sure that sentiment was started by fat activists, but now u talk too much about the most basic facets of our society and it's akin to declaring war on trans women (the body pos movement was started by fat activists, and I'm 99% sure it was to be about body neutrality. Now look what it's become). It's so incredibly harmful because I've seen literal trans women get called transphobic feminists for the most basic shit in the world.

(sometimes it makes me wonder: why is a woman who talks about her own oppression automatically viewed as a threat and oppressor herself, even if she's literally the victim of the oppression you accuse her of?)

This also goes hand in hand with how mainstream feminism I feel like has been rendered useless by capitalism and a fear of coming across too strong or aggressive (which is rooted in misogyny anyways). I remember being on here in 2013 right when feminism was becoming more popular/mainstream. Pointing out double standards for men and women for the "shallower" things of fashion and appearance and gender performance was the standard. Now I see people do it and get accused of being T3RFs. Like what's radical about it? Is it necessarily a revolutionary or extreme belief?

There's a lot of things that T3RFs will try to convince you are exclusive and unique to t3rfism, but they're not. That's how I think they recruit people, by seeming like the only ones to point out the obvious or be "reasonable" when they're not. And so many liberal feminists aren't as aware of more relevant dog whistles, like posts that reek of biological essentialism or that paint women as perma-victims. Or just the outright transphobic ideology.

I think a good way to combat this would be to realize that there's more than just two kinds of feminism. Both radfems and libfems seem to have this v black and white thinking that there's only two types of feminism. What's important to remember is that there's actually radical feminists that aren't transphobc--ive seen lots of feminist groups in other countries and anti-racist feminists here describe themselves as radical because their politics truly is radical. And it's only radical because it's anti-capitalist and anti-racist--which necessarily includes supporting trans and gnc people, especially the women, since in the US at least how we even conceive of gender and what makes a woman is based in white supremacy.

#angel posts #and christian fundamentalism but that's for another post #also not making this rebloggble for obvious reasons #last time i tried to say anything about feminism people completely ignored what i said #made assumptions #and then yelled at me for shit aint nobody said #sorry im not over it bc by god that shit was baffling and annoying

[baeddel]

speaking of trans boys. re: this post: it’s funnily enough been picked up by people i would typically consider my enemies, who tag it with #transandrophobia #transmisandry. you’ll laugh, but perhaps they’re right to tag it that way. if we have to be a theorist of transandrophobia lets at least try and do so seriously.

it’s worth reading the replies to that post from my friends. i may overemphasize the differences between the US and the UK in that post. one of the examples i use, Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, was actually published in the US and not the UK (by the far-right Regnery Publishing, built on the Regnery fortune one of the heirs to which uses his wealth to fund the activities of the white supremacist National Policy Institute and the Charles Martel Society; how do you like them apples?). but i still think it is the case, correct me if i’m wrong, that TERFs have enjoyed the most success at legal reform in the US pursuing a transmisogynist scaremongering agenda about potential predators, and that TERFs have enjoyed the most success at legal reform in the UK pursuing a #TransgenderTrend moral panic centered around the dangers posed to young cafabs (the two other major areas worth considering apart from legal reform would be medical reform and public attitudes; we wouldn’t be surprised to find the same trend in those areas, but we would also not be surprised to find a different trend).

anyway, the analysis i make about reproductive futurity (where transmascs themselves embody the Child as victims of transgender ideology who must be rescued, their fertility restored) is i think vulnerable to the same criticism made in this post. where sybil says “TERFs view you as a misguided corrupted victim”, and the rest, fig (sybil’s interlocutor) responds that what they are describing “are v much white transmasc experiences” and that black and brown transmascs are instead treated by white women “as threats, due to the intersecting views on manhood/masculinity and race.”

sybil accepts this argument and i accepted it at the time because it makes intuitive sense; this corresponds to how i understand racism to work. but i don’t really like accepting arguments on intuition like this because competing narratives would convince me equally based on the same principles. look at it this way: if we wanted to apply fig’s argument to my post we would say that transmascs of colour cannot embody the Child in this way because white women protray men of colour (even, people of colour quite generally) as dangerous, masculine, predatory, etc. we would bring up a number of examples to prove this, such as the role of ‘masculinity’ in the repressively reconstrued diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia applied to black male radicals in the 60s, the many instances where news writers refer to black 16 year old victims of police shootings as “men”, and so forth. we have a coherent story that people of colour are denied any notion of childhood and are seen to possess a sort of inaliable masculinity.

however, we could also tell the opposite story. there are many discourses where black and brown people figure as Children par excellence. i can’t find it now (frustrating!) but there is a very demonstrative old painting: it has a white woman who is meant to represent Europe nursing several children of colour (one for each ‘race’, as they saw it). this metaphor of mother Europe and her dependant colonies was very common (eg. here {warning: obscenely racist image}; common enough to be mocked in László Moholy-Nagy’s 1925 collage Mother Europe Cares for Her Colonies). further, the notion of the ‘childhood of man’ implicit in discourses about savages and primitives, important to liberal humanist evolutionism, became more than merely a discourse when deployed in eg. the reserve schools of America and Canada and the missionary schools of French Polynesia which sought to save native Children from their own indigineity—this in fact very much resembles our narrative about transmascs and their perverse salvation. in our conversation about this dev reminded me that people conflate “the capacity for self-infantilism and the use of infantilism as a means of social control.” one remembers what Eldridge Cleaver had to say about what he called the emasculation of black men, to such an extent that he analogized black men in America to court eunuchs (this is perhaps the only feature of his thought that stayed with him throughout his transition from black muslim to revolutionary communist to conservative fundamentalist).

you can see how i now have two competing stories that i might find intuitively convincing. both have historical analogues. i don’t want to arbitrarily decide one is the right version over the other without seeing good evidence and hearing good arguments. but even if i did, i should remain mindful that one might predominate in some discourses, might predominate in certain epochs, but may easily become its opposite under different conditions. if it can i’d like to know how, if it can’t i’d like to know why. in any case, it’s significant to me that personally i have never seen TERFs talk about cafabs of colour. of course they aren’t likely to talk about it to me, but this seems to be something that they acknowledge themselves (in a paraliptic way). Shrier confines her discussion to “(mostly white) girls,” by girls meaning trans men, who previously would have “[fallen] prey to anorexia and bulimia or multiple personality disorder“ (citation needed???). i can already imagine the sort of paper you could write about this parenthetical suggestion, (mostly white).

#racism tw #antiblackness tw

[militant-holy-knight]

On a 500-acre campus in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Middle East scholar Raymond Ibrahim was finally allowed to give his speech before a packed, mostly civilian audience at the U.S. Army War College's Heritage and Education Center. Based on his book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West, Ibrahim covered the 7th-century origins of Islam, its conflict with Christianity during the hundreds of years that followed, and revisionist attempts to deny Islam's history of violent warfare and supremacism.

Ibrahim, a Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow with the Middle East Forum, was on the receiving end of such an attempt in June 2019, when the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other Islamists convinced the U.S. Army War College to disinvite Ibrahim from his original appearance, fallaciously accusing the son of Egyptian immigrants of being a "bigot" and "white nationalist."

However, Ibrahim wasn't alone. In its press release, CAIR ridiculed the War College as "an academic institution run on taxpayer funds" that was "poised to exacerbate longstanding problems such as racism and human rights violations that exist within the US military."

Ibrahim explained that CAIR is "well aware how important it is to dominate the historic narrative." He pointed to his reliance on primary source material and actual quotes from jihadist and Islamists to support his view that there is "a continuity between past and present; Muslim religious leaders and jihadists see Christianity as both antithetical to the Islamic world and inherently ripe for conquest or conversion."

It took a letter signed by ten congressmen to Army War College commandant Major General John S. Kem, as well as a National Association of Scholars letter to President Trump that included 5,000 signatories, to convince Army leaders to reinstate Ibrahim's invitation.

When CAIR learned that Ibrahim was set to return to the Carlisle campus, it responded by once again suggesting that the Army War College suffers from an "internal problem with white supremacists and white nationalists within its ranks," while claiming that Ibrahim's talk would "instigate hatred against Muslims."

Undeterred by his Islamist critics, Ibrahim began his presentation by saying that "since 9/11," it has "become popular" for media and academia to whitewash the Koran's objectionable passages. "They say Mohammad may have done bad things, but so did King David and Abraham," he said. The difference, Ibrahim noted, is that the Torah acknowledges the wayward path of these leaders and advises against following them, unlike the Koran.

For argument's sake, Ibrahim offered to "put aside what the Koran says" and "see what Islamists have done." Beginning with the Islamic conquests of the Middle East and North Africa, Ibrahim argued that Islamists' consistent goal has been Western submission to Islamic supremacy. This region, which is identified today as Muslim-majority, was home to more Christians than Europe in the 7th century. What remained after the Arab Muslim invasion became "the West." Ibrahim quoted historian Franco Cardini, who wrote, "Repeated Muslim aggression against Europe in the 7th and 8th centuries and again in the 14th and 18th centuries was a violent midwife to Europe."

Ibrahim referred to the late historian of Islam Bernard Lewis, who said, "We forget that for a thousand years since the advent of Islam from the 7th century to the siege of Vienna in 1683 Christian Europe was under constant threat from Islam, the double threat of conquest and conversion violently wrested from Christendom." Ibrahim noted that modern historians often fail to acknowledge this simple truth.

He argued that Mohammad's guidance to spread Islam was the motivation behind the Islamic conquests. The only way peace could be achieved was through acceptance of Islam by conversion, enslavement, or paying the jizya — an enormous annual tribute that the caliphate levied on non-Muslims.

Short of these options, a non-believer's only recourse was to fight to the death. Ibrahim quoted what Islamist conqueror Khalid bin Walid said to a Byzantine general before the Battle of Yarmuk in 636 C.E.: "We Arabs are in the habit of drinking blood and we are told the Romans are the sweetest of its kind. Where you love life, we love death."

Unlike modern historians who identify the various inter-civilizational wars of this age as ethnic and nationalistic, Ibrahim emphasized that the primary sources clearly show that these ongoing battles were manifestations of jihad, inspired by Koranic scripture. He called this tendency "a historic fact that modern day historians censor."

Ibrahim showed that modern jihadists "belonging to groups such as ISIS are well-versed in Islamic historic military jurisprudence" and the Koran and point to historical precedents to justify their violence and brutality.

At the fall of Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II motivated his jihadists with the same instructions invoked by modern-day ISIS: "Recall the promise of our Prophet regarding fallen warriors in the Koran; the man who falls in combat will be transported bodily to Paradise [and] will dine with Mohammed in the presence of women."

Next, Ibrahim recounted the American experience with the Islamic Barbary pirates in 1785 and 1786 that attacked U.S. merchant ships and enslaved American sailors. In an effort to ransom the slaves, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams entered negotiations with Abdul Rahman, Tripoli's ambassador to Britain. The American diplomats futilely explained that they "had done them no injury" and "consider all mankind our friends."

Abdul answered that "it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, written in the Koran that all nations not acknowledging their authority were sinners, that it is their religious right and duty to make slaves of non-believers, and all Muslims slain in battle were sure to go to paradise." America's conflict with Islam did not begin on 9/11. Rather, it dates back to the time of America's Founders.

To underscore this message, Ibrahim cited Theodore Roosevelt's 1916 book, Fear God and Take Your Part, where the former president pointed out, "If the peoples of Europe in the 7th and 8th centuries, and on up to and including the 17th century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated."

The great English statesman Winston Churchill also criticized Islam for institutionalizing slavery. "The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman is the absolute property — either as a child, a wife, or a concubine — must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men."

Ibrahim rhetorically asked, if the violent history of Islam is so well documented, "so ironclad," then "why don't we know about it?" Older historians who studied Islam unprejudiced by political correctness reached conclusions that no longer comport with what the public is told. Conversely, modern historians get away with academic malpractice by reducing previous Islamic studies scholarship to outdated myths.

This is all part and parcel of what Ibrahim referred to as "propaganda as a form of jihad," misinformation of which academics and groups such as CAIR are the most vociferous defenders.

Meanwhile, CAIR, an unindicted co-conspirator in the nation's largest terrorism finance trial and an accused Hamas-supporter, engaged in "propaganda jihad "by working to suppress Ibrahim's historical review, a practice consistent with Islamist suppression of different religious beliefs.

In the end, Ibrahim gave Army service members and the community a coherent and fact-driven presentation of Islamic history that everyone in America should hear, one that dispels the many false, politically correct notions about the nature of Islam. It lays bare the inconvenient truth that Islamic ideology is what motivates Muslim jihadists to perpetrate acts of terrorism against non-believers, both domestically and abroad.

[ajaegerpilot]

idk. its been on my mind lately wrt radfe/minism assigning moral value to certain .. demographics over others. like i get that there’s some type of appeal there. to be a lesbian, one of the most oppressed groups, and then to assign moral value to your oppression. but i mean, it doesn’t actually track. we’re all just humans. for good and ill. the way the world’s been split up, it could’ve split up differently and then we’d be shitty to each other in different ways. as it is, the dice fell where they lay and i’m not going to for example champion against misa/ndry where it doesnt exist. but saying that men are inherently oppressive.. they don’t have some type of gene that makes them hurt women. or even some unbreakable socialization. some assholes historically brute-forced or slowly boiled the frog to the point where equality was no longer an option socially or economically. there’s nothing genetically unique to white ppl that had us ripping apart the world. conversely there’s nothing about women or poc that invites oppression onto them. oppression isn’t logical.. (in the sense that you could justify oppression of a group, though oppressors try and indeed some members of oppressed groups eg te/rfs agree with them) beyond the logic of abuse and the benefits oppressors reap in a social system that allows them to and does not punish them for harming their victims.

idk. my - way of relating to this world has i think been guided by my desire to reduce pain. that’s why i’m confident in interacting with ppl i disagree with. if their way turns out to reduce pain then i’ll change my mind, as i’ve done in the past. but idk. its wild to me that some people can make some leaps of logic that i just can’t see how to bridge. like i was talking to some white supremacist on fucking runescape the other night (Dont ask how ThIs Shit got started) and like idk. that guy is kind of - okay like first of all. you know what fuck it. i know his game. his game is that he’s accepted a hierarchy of races at which he’s coincidentally at the top, and thus he views equality of other races as a threat to his position (and he’s correct!). and he views degeneracy (lgbt-ness) and probably women’s rights as a threat to his hierarchical position in patriarchal heterosexuality (and he’s correct!) he thinks that people would be happier and in less pain if europe was some white heaven and all the degenerates and poc were excluded, but that has nothing to do with how poc/degenerates are fairing, because he doesnt value them as full human like himself. so for him, everyone that matters is taken care of and pain has been reduced/eliminated (i mean, white supremacy is not sustainable like - it wouldn’t work, there is no white supremacist utopia because its an inherently violent ideology that requires subjugation of SOMEBODY to function it will never stop). but for me, everyone matters, unless they’re causing others pain.

ugh this is not cohesive!! but i lit a fire under my ass because i understand this dude again. but anyway, it’s frustrating because you really cannot convince people of universal humanity when their ideology and self-worth is hinged on there being hierarchies. transphobic radfeminism or like similar types of movements (i wont get into them because i’d be sticking my ass out of my lane) of people assigning hierarchical worth to their own oppression are different but similar. for one, the end result of transphobic radfeminism is, if you follow the logic - the assignment of babies as male or female, and the elimination of all males. like - there is the understanding that men are biologically predisposed to oppressing ‘females’, and that ‘females’ are inherently more worthy because they are biological martyrs in that sense, they are not tainted by a genetic compulsion or ability to oppress (incorrect of course for a number of reasons). so the only solution is to avoid relationships with ‘males’ and if you do they will without fail mistreat you and you’ve brought on your own suffering (by being a bi or straight woman). like i literally saw some terf say ‘welp it sucks that straight women are straight lmao lets get them robot boyfriends’ like WHAT?? there’s this huge disconnect to humanity and reality there, and a huge disconnect from empathy to vast swathes of the human population. it approaches things this bizarre sort of value judgement based on happenstance of birth (birthright, so to speak) from a different angle than ur average runescape white supremacist, but i think why there are parallels b/w te/rfs and white supremacists is because they both draw the same conclusion. like te/rfs say that men are subhuman because they biologically oppress women (and i’d agree within the sense that ppl who oppress others are less humane, except that te/rfs link it to something inescapable), white supremacists will say that poc/degenerates/women are less human because again - something apparently inescapable. the results of either of these ideologies is either genocide or seperatism, the former of which is horrifying and the latter of which is not actually feasible (at least without violence). it is the attempt of a scoundrel to comfort themselves by having pride in something they had no say in rather than their actions.

liike we have to understand that humans are like all CAPABLE of good shit, AND bad shit, and the fact that men (for example) can choose to fight for equality with women and don’t is what makes them uniquely bad. this is also is the only thing that brings hope. like, there’s also the fact that it is real. we are all working with humanity here. its just very hard to argue with people i think if they can’t agree with that premise. am i unique here? did my parents do me wrong by raising me to believe in my inherent humanity and the inherent humanity of others? i don’t think this was very coherent... but basically there is no value or worth that is granted to an individual being because they are a certain race or gender or sexuality. we are all the same damn dirty human worldwide, contending with lines that were drawn to subjugate some to raise up a few. but these lines were drawn, they are artificial. time to rip it down ykwim ;3c

#misha speaks #white supremacy m #ugh. its because my name on runescape is alabuster2 so he thought i was dogwhistling whitesupremacy w 'alabaster'

[bullet-farmer]

Mass shootings in the US are almost a daily occurrence now. They happen everywhere, to anyone, and this includes public schools.

This happens for a number of reasons. An incomplete list includes: the rise of white supremacy and other far-right ideologies in the US; the ready availability of semiautomatic weapons in this country; the refusal or inability of law enforcement to take repeat warnings about potential mass shooters seriously; and, I would argue, the ease with which white supremacist groups exploit and radicalize dispossessed young white men and teenagers.

These factors, however, don’t include violent video games, movies, books, or other media—including fanfic featuring canon-typical or even canon-atypical violence.

How do we know this? Well, because in the US, we are contractually obligated to go through at least one society-wide moral panic every generation or so. In the 1980s, we all freaked out about Satanist cults abusing children. In the 1990s, it was violent movies and video games making society violent.

Despite everyone from Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, to moralizing high school journalists—like yours truly at the time—freaking out about it, no one found any provable correlation. In fact, it’s such a canard in 2018 that almost no one has paid any but the most cursory attention to our own “president” blaming video games for the Parkland shooting.

Because everyone realizes that Donald Trump’s (limited) understanding of the world ended somewhere around 1994.

Now, to be fair, I think the US’s dominant cultural forces have always been entirely too comfortable with real-world violence of all kinds. My opinions on the reasons for this are off topic and would take several posts to even start exploring. But violent video games are, at the very most, symptoms of this comfort with violence—and even then, I think that argument is oversimplified. Because as far as I understand it, no mass shooter has a history of playing Call of Duty or what have you, and none have cited an interest in violent video games as the reason they opened fire on crowds who were enjoying a concert, or trying to see a movie, or just attending classes at a high school.

And even if they did, Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto or Halo didn’t achieve sentience, buy an AR-15, and go on a shooting spree. The shooter did that. And if a shooter will, someday, blame their actions on Overwatch or what have you, then I think most of us would understand that they have far more problems than even the most violent of games or movies could have somehow caused. Because it would be clear that they can’t distinguish reality from fiction—not to mention that they also would think that murdering innocent people going about their daily business is okay.

And yet, I don’t see anyone on this website arguing that we should ban first-person shooters because of school shootings—even among high school and college students, the demographics who school shootings actually effect. Seriously. I’ve been on Tumblr since 2011. I have not seen even a single post seriously suggesting anything like this.

I also haven’t seen anyone harassing or sending violent threats to people who draw gory, violent art, or who write hyperviolent fanfiction—as long as it doesn’t involve sexuality or sex crimes, mind you. Clearly, not just fandom at large but the entirety of fandom don’t see this as a problem.

Yet people then want to turn around and argue that not just fictional depictions of sexual violence but depictions of consensual sexual acts are somehow responsible for sexual violence because “fiction affects reality uwu.”

Sexual violence. Which has been going on since humanity existed, no matter what forms of fiction they created or had access to.

Why is the first idea not something anyone seriously considers, but the second is apparently common sense?

No, seriously. If you don’t see a problem here, then you need to reevaluate your thinking.

We’ve always been uncomfortable with sex in the US, whether consensual sex between peers, or violent crimes involving sex acts—uncomfortable in a way that we aren’t with violence that doesn’t have a sexual component. Which is one of the reasons we don’t talk about sexual violence openly, don’t educate young people about how to recognize it, and don’t do anything about it in society when it happens until people band together and make so much noise that we can’t ignore it anymore—see the #MeToo movement, for example. To say nothing of why no one has any idea of what even a healthy sex life looks like! We don’t enjoy talking about that either.

I think this weird combination of silence and permission when it comes to sexual violence is part of the reason people freak out about fictional depictions of it when they don’t about any other form of violence. I also think that the prevalence of sexual violence in society makes other forms of violence seem rare and even imaginary by comparison. For example, I think most people know someone who has been raped or sexually assaulted. I think far fewer people know someone who has been shot, stabbed, robbed at gun- or knife-point, or murdered.

But that still doesn’t make Call Me by Your Name or Sally Mae’s random DVa/Soldier 76 smutfic either responsible for sexual violence or the reason sexual violence is so widespread.

I’m pretty sure that the many boys and men who have sexually assaulted me weren’t avid fanfic readers. The mere idea that schoolboys in pre-internet 1988 would have had access to smutty fic that would have somehow convinced them that assaulting me in an open classroom was okay, is so laughable that I don’t think I can actually bring myself to explain why it’s laughable. I’m also pretty sure that Harvey Weinstein didn’t decide that sexually assaulting every actress in a five mile radius was okay because he ran a Wincest archive. And I’m pretty sure that movies or books depicting sexual violence in a less-than-negative light also didn’t convince Harvey Weinstein to rape and abuse women.

US society has always had fucked-up attitudes toward sexual violence and sex in general. Fanfic and fan art that explores sexual violence didn’t cause this and isn’t exacerbating it any more than Call of Duty is causing more mass shootings. In a world where #MeToo is still struggling to be taken seriously, how could it? Especially as fan culture itself doesn’t have societal influence outside of influencing itself.

So, if you’re going to go on a moral crusade against fanfic with sexual content that you don’t like, at least be consistent in condemning fanfic that glorifies violence. Or stealing. Or manipulating people. Or any other form of abusive behavior. If you don’t, then your priorities immediately become clear, and they’re not about protecting anyone or making society better.

#long post

[loudlytransparenttrash]

Happy Holidays from Spain! My question: what are your thoughts on internalized mysoginy, homophobia, racism, etc? I've been told multiple times that I have those (homophobia and mysoginy) due to certain opinions as a lesbian woman, such as my opposition to the gay pride parade shitshow, and my belief that an unbiased meritocracy is fair and equal. To me, it sounds like a medieval accusation of witchcraft as a silencing tool, "she's posessed by evil!". Thanks, have a wonderful day!

Aw happy holidays! :) Don’t worry lovely, I’m also drowning in internalized misogyny and internalized racism. These wackos don’t see people as freethinking individuals, we are observed on our skin color, sex and sexual orientation and then placed into our designated group where we are expected to all think, believe and be outraged (or apologetic if you’re a white male) as one. 

To keep these groups segregated, they have devised spooky myths about each other, they’ve told women that men are underpaying them and 1 in 5 of them will be raped. They’ve told blacks that white people and the police are gunning them down for fun. They’ve told LGBT people that Christianity and “heteronormative” values are their greatest threat while Islam is the religion of love and peace. 

So to them, whenever someone within the group questions these fabrications, they see it as an act of treason, siding with the enemy and declaring that they want “their people” underpaid, raped, gunned down and oppressed. But how can a woman be a misogynist? How can a black person be a white supremacist? How can a gay person be homophobic? Well, it’s all internalized, the enemy has brainwashed us into thinking for ourselves, those bastards! 

We see them at their foul and hypocritical best whenever these groups gather. Conservative women were kicked out of the Women’s March. White feminists were also belittled and mocked for being too white. Gay Jewish women were kicked out of gay pride parades because their presence was harmful to Palestine sympathizers. Black conservative students were assaulted and stalked by Black Lives Matter members. These savage fucks are quick to cannibalize their own the moment they are no longer useful.

They are so desperate to keep the idea of enemies and oppression alive, not only do blacks become white supremacists, Jews become Nazis, women become misogynists and gays become homophobic the second one dares to hold an opinion which goes against the radical leftist ideology, now we have things called microaggressions, macroaggressions and invisibility aggressions, along with white privilege and male privilege, all of which are internalized, subconscious and invisible acts of oppression and murder against minorities. 

This is the tribalism and shame tactics I’ve talked about. They create identity groups and factions, they unite them with a tale of fear and outrage and then weed out and shame the dissidents. This a result of decades of dishonest and totally insane feminist theory, gender theory, conflict theory and identity politics being implemented into our textbooks and education. Notice it’s all theory. Facts become irrelevant when you’re trying to convince the most liberated, protected and supported people on Earth they’re in fact oppressed and victimized.

You’re right, the accusations of evil we have slapped across our foreheads the moment we go against society’s only allowed and acceptable opinion is a huge step back in time and it’s just as harmful for the supposed victims as it is for the supposed perpetrators. It keeps the “victims” victimized and the “perpetrators” guilty. Their dreams of socialism depend on fueling this division and mistrust. This is why I separated myself from the left. If I am only embraced because of my skin color or my sex, then everything else about me becomes irrelevant, and this is the tragedy of both identity politics and the left. Have a nice day! :) xx 

[jmrphy]

Are Americans becoming more conservative or liberal (right or left)?

Table of Contents

Summary

Not much recent change in self-identification

Policy Mood, 1952-2016

Macroideology, 1937-2012

Macropartisanship, 1952-2015

Large, long-term increases in social liberalism

What about the far-right?

Conclusion

References

Summary

There is a lot of confusion about whether we’re seeing significant ideological change in the United States. With Trump and the re-appearance of white nationalism in the public spotlight, many people are wondering if conservative (right-wing) ideology is on the rise. One can find many influential outlets endorsing this notion. CBS, BBC, Vox, and certainly others have all run articles suggesting this. On the other hand, many conservatives believe that “liberal” (left-wing in America) ideology is on the rise. There are good reasons for people to be confused, because the dynamics of ideology in the United States are confusing. To help clear up some of the confusion, I’ve written this guide to some of the basics of what political scientists know about the long-term historical dynamics of ideology in the United States. And how they shed light on what is happening, or not happening, right now.

The rest of this post presents the key data and a little bit of my own interpretation, but here is the TLDR:

If there is one substantial ideological shift in American public opinion in the post-war period, it is the dramatic and near-universal increase in social liberalism since the 1950s. There has not been a general shift to the left or right because economic conservatism has not changed much (although it has polarized on the left and right). There has been some cyclical, “thermostatic” movement in opinion (which is normal). There have been changes in symbolism (“liberalism” became stigmatized in the 1960s). And there have been some dramatic shifts in party identification (a pretty massive Republican resurgence with Reagan). Otherwise, one cannot say the American public has moved to the right or left as a whole, in any significant way, in the long-run or recently, except that it has become more socially liberal. There have been some interesting and substantial ideological shifts within groups, but that would need to be another post.

There is currently no good evidence I am aware of that overt racism or white nationalism is growing.1 It likely appears larger than it is, especially to progressives, precisely because it has never been less common in American history. This says nothing about how such stupid and malicious groups should be dealt with.

Not much recent change in self-identification

The percentage of Americans identifying as “conservative” has not changed much since 1992. “Moderates” have decreased (polarization), and “liberals” have increased somewhat. This does not say very much, in large part because of the changing fortunes of the word “liberal.” See below for more on that. This small increase in “liberals” is mostly Democrats becoming more comfortable with a word that has historically been stigmatized. There is certainly no recent increase in “conservatism” here, if anything some slight shift to “liberalism.”

Ideological Self-Identification Data from Gallup

Policy Mood, 1952-2016

Policy Mood is basically an index of aggregate public support for having the government do things. It is a statistical construct made out of a large number of survey items. Aggregate policy mood tends to be cyclical, acting as a thermostat relative to the policy being supplied at the time (Wlezien 1995). The public moved somewhat to the right through the Obama years, because he was supplying leftish policies. This is a standard finding and recent years represent normal fluctuations around the historical average.

Public Policy Mood Data from James Stimson

Macroideology, 1937-2012

Macroideology is defined as the relative amount of self-identified liberals among self-identified liberals and conservatives.

Macroideology Data from James Stimson

“Liberalism” has decreased over time substantially since the 1960s. But that’s largely symbolic. Here’s the story as told by Ellis and Stimson (2009).

“Liberal,” as a positive identification, was basically invented by FDR. He introduced the language over his famous fire-side chats. JFK was the last President to self-identify as a liberal. Around 1966, “liberal” became a bad word. There was a substantial and sudden decrease in identification with the word, but not such a change in underlying policy preferences. LBJ’s 89th Congress passed a lot of liberal policies, including Medicare and the voting rights bill. There was massive funding to urban areas and, let’s just say, a lot of conflict. Whatever happened, “liberalism” took a negative charge.

Macropartisanship, 1952-2015

Macropartisanship is “the distribution of Democrats among Democratic and Republican identifiers.” Clearly around the 1980s there was a massive decrease in Democratic identification. There are a few factors at play there.

Macropartisanship Data from James Stimson

Here is how Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson (2002) summarize the dynamics of macropartisan change at that time:

The crux of the issue is whether or not the macro and longitudinal story is fundamentally altered by knowledge of micro distinctions. In general, we would answer in the negative. It is clear that the Republican growth in the 1980s, for example, cannot be understood solely as a phenomenon of the South. Or of the male diaspora. Or the replacement of New Deal seniors with Reagan youngsters. All these factors were important, to be sure. But almost all Americans responded, for example, to the bad news of the Reagan recession and even more to the good news of the subsequent recovery, to the Iran-Contra scandal, and to the economic fortunes and misfortunes of Clinton and Bush. To find one subgroup where, for whatever reason, the response was sharper is not a convincing denial that it did not happen everywhere. Young and old, northerners and southerners, men and women all reacted to the macro-political performance of the parties, shifting their partisan dispositions to reflect success and failure.

Large, long-term increases in social liberalism

On social issues such as racial equality and gender/sexuality there has been a general and long-term increase in liberalism/leftism since the 1950s. This is pretty obvious if you think about it (de-segregation, gay marriage, marijuana, etc.), but here is some data from Atkinson et al. (2011) looking at policy mood by specific issue groups.

Racial Liberalism Data from Atkinson et al. (2011)

Gender and Sexuality Liberalism Data from Atkinson et al. (2011)

Even since 1999, the left and right have both become more socially liberal. Mostly among Democrats, but it’s even noticeable in Republicans if you subdivide the data (not shown here).

Identification with Social Liberalism Data from Gallup

There is not much recent change in economic conservatism, however, which remains relatively popular in the United States.

Identification with Economic Liberalism (Leftism) Data from Gallup

What about the far-right?

Let’s start with some basic descriptive figures for the far-right today.

One article in The Guardian reports that a recent, national neo-Nazi summit in April brought out about 150 people. The infamous tiki-torch march by white nationalists in Charlottesville, on the evening of August 11, has been numbered around 100 people at the high end of the estimates. The larger rally, including a variety of other right-wing groups with varying ideologies, was numbered at about 500 (NPR). The Southern Poverty Law Center has the number of KKK members somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 (SPLC). One recent poll suggests about 4% of Americans ‘mostly agree’ with the white supremacy movement (Economist).

What about changes over time? Here is some data from the Southern Poverty Law Center (if anything, the SPLC would should biased toward finding increases, as their raison d'etre is the white supremacist threat). There is no overall increase or decrease in KKK groups since 2000.

KKK Groups Data from SPLC

Some research by Leonardo Bursztyn of the University of Chicago suggests that Trump has made racists more willing to express their racism (Economist), but there’s no evidence Trump has increased the number of racists or the intensity of their racism.

Conclusion

Based on all of the available data, and keeping in mind the long-term historical context, here is how I would answer the question, “Is the United States becoming more conservative or liberal (leftist)?”

There is no evidence that the population is becoming more conservative or leftist in general. There is strong evidence that Americans across the board have all become significantly more socially liberal since the 1950s. This has led the increasingly outnumbered, socially illiberal factions of the right-wing to find solace in the figure of Trump. Trump has coincided with an increase in the public display of social illiberalism, ranging from merely anti-PC internet trolls to organized racist groups. But there is no evidence such social illiberalism is “on the rise.”

The American drift toward generalized social liberalism is masked in a confusing way by changes in how Americans use the term “liberal.” There is a weird tendency, especially since the 1960s, for Americans to describe themselves as more conservative than their actual policy preferences would suggest. But the socially liberal drift is even chipping away at this stigma on the term “liberal,” as lefties are now embracing the term somewhat more.

But note that you can’t really say the United States has generally moved to the left in recent decades, because economic conservatism remains more popular and the changes on this front have been polarized by party. So conservatives who say the country has been taken over by lefties would be incorrect in this crucial respect.

Finally, what about the “alt-right” and white nationalists, etc.?

The appearance of a recent surge in right-wing ideology, from “alt-right” internet trolls to neo-Nazi marches, is an artifact of the most socially liberal cultural consensus the United States has ever known. There is no evidence of a surge or rise in these types of ideologies. It only appears that with Trump, several strands of the socially unacceptable right-wing have moved from extremely marginalized silence, to extremely marginalized public display. The sudden appearance of a very small quantity of something that is at a historically all-time low is likely to appear as a substantial increase. But it’s not. In the case of explicitly racist white nationalism, this appears to be what is happening. None of this says anything about how such groups should be dealt with.

It seems fair to say that overt white racists have probably never been less numerous than they are right now. There is some risk that if Trump continues to foster this comfort among white nationalists, there could be some long-term resurgence of that ideology. But that’s only a hypothesis, and it’s not at all obvious. You could just as well hypothesize that the extreme cultural prohibition of far-right ideas has led to a long-term festering of ignorance, confusion, and resentment that is precisely what brought someone like Trump into office. You could plausibly hypothesize that letting white racists express their stupid and unconscionable viewpoints is the only real way to let them fizzle out via learning and socialization. But again, that’s only a hypothesis, too.

This post has refrained from polemics (mostly), but it seems appropriate to add just one point. If sane folks on the left and right did nothing more than separate their hypotheses from the data, it could make a huge, positive difference in the direction of contemporary politics.

References

Atkinson, M.L., Baumgartner, F.R., Coggins, K.E. and Stimson, J.A., 2011, June. “Developing policy-specific conceptions of mood: The United States.” In Annual Meeting of the Comparative Agendas Project, http://ift.tt/2vZ0yKD.

Ellis, Christopher, and James A. Stimson. 2009. “Symbolic Ideology in the American Electorate.” Electoral Studies 28(3): 388–402.

Ellis, Christopher, and James A. Stimson. 2012. Ideology in America. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Erikson, Robert, S., Michael B. MacKuen, and James A. Stimson. 2002. The Macro Polity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wlezien, Christopher. 1995. “The Public as Thermostat: Dynamics of Preferences for Spending.” American Journal of Political Science 39(4): 981.

The only exception is the data on the number of “hate groups” collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which reveals an upward climb since 1999. I am not going to say it’s wrong in a dismissive footnote, because it would deserve more attention than that. But I am excluding it from consideration here for a few reasons. First, it includes a wide variety of groups well beyond explicitly racist or white nationalist groups, including black separatist groups. So in this sense it does not reflect what I am considering in this post. But also the SPLC has come under fire for being increasingly politicized and untrustworthy as a data source. See this article from Politico, for instance. My personal view is that there has been a tendency in recent years for progressive groups to lower their bar for what counts as a hate group, and at least a few cases on the SPLC’s list suggest to me this has occurred there, at least to some degree. ↩

from Justin Murphy http://ift.tt/2vZv5I4

[alarajrogers]

Except no. Words clearly dont work anymore because words are what fucking allowed them to elect trump and rally. And every time they continue to have us use "words" they win. They win because in their eyes they are right and their rhetoric and narrative is the only right. The genuinely do not care. Words dont work on people who have no willingness to learn. Tell me that you honestly believe youre going to talk the hate out of a nazi? No. Youre not.

No, of course I don’t think you can talk the hate out of a Nazi. What I think is that our nation is full of people who are racist enough and ignorant enough that they’ll give power to people who spout racist dogwhistles, but who would draw the line at giving power to a Nazi... if they actually knew these assholes are Nazis. But the media doesn’t make that easy. Remember the recent case where white supremacist terrorists were arrested for waving guns and making death threats at a black child’s birthday party? The media reported it as if all they did was drive past with Confederate flags on their truck tooting their horn. 

That’s why words matter. We didn’t lose because we used our words against Nazis. We lost, in part, because we didn’t realize we were up against Nazis. They were emboldened by Trump’s win and they came out of the woodwork. If we’d known then about Trump being totally in Steve Bannon’s pocket, and Russian hacking, and Mike Pence’s email, we could have won. Certainly now that Trump is costing the taxpayers millions to have his wife and son live somewhere that isn’t the White House, and to go golfing every weekend after he gave Obama so much shit for occasional golf, and he’s put people in the government who want to take free lunch away from starving kids and helpless housebound elderly, we have access to a lot of powerful information that has the potential to turn all but about 20% of the country against Trump... and it’s Trump and the Republican party that allow the Nazis to come forward and exert power. They wouldn’t be dangerous if they were still a fringe group that everyone despises; they’ve come out and started committing hate crimes and publicly making their hateful ideology known because they think Trump’s win means most of the country agrees with them. The purpose of using words, and other means of protest, is to convince the rest of the country that no, most people don’t agree with the Nazis.

And... you do know that most protest movements have within them agents who try to get the protest movement to turn violent, so that the State has a good excuse to turn the full apparatus of police power against them, right? We have a movement where the majority are marginalized people, and even the white male cishets are marginalized in the sense that they’re openly seen to be aligning with the interests of women and black people and gays, and I’m sure you know by now that in a fight between well-dressed, educated white men who are evil white supremacists and Nazis, and a ragtag group of poor people, black people, Latinx people, Muslims, Jews, and gay people... which side are the police going to take? Which side are the police going to exert violence against even if we are peaceful? Which side is the police going to gleefully murder if we give them any justification whatsoever, and quite possibly if we don’t?

For the safety of our people, we cannot resort to violence except in immediate self defense, and when we do, we need to flood the area and the media with the self-defense justification for it. The police will happily shoot an antifa for punching a Nazi, and will gun down a crowd of protesters if just one of them throws a bottle at the cops, and claim it was because they were “rioting and looting”. We live in a racist society that claims to hate Nazis, but when they actually appear among us, if they are well-dressed white men, they get the benefit of the doubt and we still don’t. They want our protests to turn violent. They want the excuse to declare martial law and take away our freedom to protest... at which point violence will be our only recourse, but the State has so much more power to commit violence than we do, that we will probably have already lost by that time.

Violence is the last refuge. We have to do everything we can to prevent it from getting to the point where we really do need it, because when we do... the Nazis have the cops on their side, and the cops are nowadays essentially the military. It will be very, very hard for us to win a war of violence. But a war of ideas? Of words? A war expressed in peaceful protests, in boycotts, in letter-writing campaigns, in posting flyers? That, we can win, because our ideas are better and the majority of Americans mostly agree with us. They elected Trump in part because they were scared of Muslims and Mexicans, and in part because they were misogynistic enough to fall for the right-wing attacks on Hillary, but they don’t really want to see people rounded up and sent to camps. They don’t really want the water and air to be polluted and children to starve and old people to lose health care. They were just dumb enough not to realize that Trump stood for those things. 

And the Nazis, in particular, would love a violent fight. Because they know they can win that. But they didn’t come out of the woodwork until they thought there was enough public support for their ideas that they wouldn’t be laughed at and shamed and taunted in public. They were afraid of the court of public opinion -- and they still are. Humans are vulnerable to being named and shamed. Can you make a Nazi stop hating? No, of course not, but they didn’t just all start hating this year and last. They felt emboldened to admit to their hate only recently. Make them scared that everyone in the US disagrees with them and despises them, and they’ll shut up about their hate again, like they were doing up until 2016 or so. 

[n-o-w-is-l-a-t-e-r]

Everything is Exploited for Surival Pt. 2

In a sociological study with youth of color in Oakland, Victor Rios found that youth learned to “code switch” into this performance of “acting hard” to in order to survive in the streets and specifically to resist “the violence of the state and other institutions that criminalize and punish them” (Rios, 2006: 48). The “respect as domination” modality of masculinity is based upon intimidation and maintaining a constituted power based on hierarchal social relations and is supported by patriarchy, racism, homophobia. As such, it is often embodied by the hegemonic masculinity as practiced by men involved in law enforcement, the military, and sports teams.

Utilizing violence and psychology (fear), they learned to dominate much like their oppressors. In order to live on this planet and to avoid death (nothingness) we must learn to survive. This eventually lead to their animalistic nature as we become reliant on survival. We become bent on distinction through competition (ego). In turn, we become  paranoid. Masculine paranoia is the fear of being percieved as weak. In a white supremacist patriarchal society such as the United States of America, dominance is the realm of straight white men. When men of color embody this masculinity, it at once reinforces the patriarchy against women but creates a racial conflict because brown men cannot embody whiteness. This conflict usually requires the confinement and premature death of men of color because by embodying the dominant masculinity, they are transgressing the hegemonic order of white supremacy. This is one reason why young men of color are systematically shot to death by white law enforcement officers who fear for their safety, and why there are so many men of color who are incarcerated to keep the threat to White Supremacy at bay. The historical legacy of the reality of Lynching is a tremendous amount of confusion for young men of color about what it means to be a man.?

Pain/tension create strength. Strength = power. Power = control. Men are conditioned to not be weak. The very purpose of mind control in the military settings are to impose a means of mind control. Through conditioning, the subject loses its subjectivity in becoming a tool for a larger ideological agenda (superego). They are told how to think, act, and appear based on the authority. They are conditioned to break the threshold of pain in becoming fearless. This ultimately leads to the development of a one-track mind. To receive and obey. Thus why the greeks and romans trained young males from the earliest age possible to mitigate their fear and to stamp out weakness. In Fight Club (1999) the men are conditioned to be fearless, no longer giving into the whims of their own subjectivity. The projection of the phallus in fight club symbolizes the need for authority, for control. They become cogs in a system to destabilize the dominant mode of society. In the end, Tyler releases this need for authority (masculinity) and willingly “castrates himself” thus reuniting with Marla (Marla etymologically means = “mother”, the divine feminine – nothingness ). In closing the buildings falls in orgasmic splendor symbolizing the chaos of the material realm, the false realm. Jack and Marla, in uniting (holding hands) The quickflash cut scene of a penis at the very end of the film symbolizes projection of hegemonic masculinity in fight club (masculine – penis- ego-surface) and its fades to black symbolizes the demise of the phallus in the 4return to nothingness (chaos). American Psycho (1999) reveals the psychosis/emptiness of formality and function. The psychosis of perfection and the need to compete, compels Patrick Bateman to kill. American Psycho symbolizes the psychosis of the surface, and the hierarchy of those in power within American structures. Blackness is deemed “negative” as it is an emotional state (passivity) does not correspond with ruthlessness of whiteness. This is conveyed perfectly when Patrick interrogates the homeless black male, assuming the position that his attitude is the purpose behind his failure in society. Much like dynamics of wealth in American culture, there is always a gap between the wealthy and the poor. American Psycho is about the pointlessness of evolution. Form is empty.

In order to truly be free, we must free ourselves from these forms. Psychopathy is also complicit in domination for it allows one to conquer someone/something without fear. White people trained themselves on fear, on learning to adapt to circumstances through conquering anything in their way. An assassin/solider thrives on cold logic and an equally cold, hard shell. He is motivated only by what exists for him: survival. Humanity is an evil thing, thriving only through separation. Its inherently flawed. It's full of psychopaths. Much like Plato's Cave, humans are largely ignorant of themselves and others. Much like Suzanne Collin's The Hunger Games and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson: obey, mindlessly, and you'll “survive”. This films simulate an exaggerated reality but one not dissimilar to our own. Contestants are chosen randomly (without consent) similar to the process of birth. You are then forced to fight to the death (survival/base) to survive in a simulation. Much like the fighters in District 1, the “Careers” (military) have been trained by the empty logic of survival, only seeing enemies to be hunted. This hierarchy blends these ruthless “tributes”, with tributes from other districts, who are most likely unskilled and lacking in killer instinct, where they duel to the death. You adapt, utilising any skill available, or you die from ignorance, fear, or starvation. Compassion (divine feminine) is a vulnerability. This hierarchy is established so only the strong can survive (narcissism-ego: animal form) can win. The tribute who wins gains access to the Capital for life, safe within the illusive confines of “freedom”: wealth, sex, etc. Collins alludes to the dynamics of hetero-capitalist dichotomies, which only allow a small percentage to thrive due to competitive advantage, forcing those below them to adapt, or die. In Beastly, a recent adaption of Beauty and the Beast, the antagonist is vain, and selfish. Alex “Kingson” (son of the king-ego) is the embodiment of modern vanity. At (0:46) we are introduced to his infatuation with the surface (ego). Only building up his surface layer, (ego) nothing He embodies the flesh or the “Beast” (father-fire: narcissism). We then see his reflection superimposed onto the skyline of New York City, a place based on image-based materialism. The smatter of billboards focused on the surface preceding this introduction help in framing the narrative themes of greed. 1:27-2:36 : Alex running for Green Committee Leader emphasizes his ignorance. It is no coincidence that the color Green symbolizes Earth, it is also the color of the Heart Chakra. This is an allusion to imperialism of the Earth due to greed. 2:47- 4:10, we are introduced to the “Witch” Kendra, who, cloaked only in black garments embodies Chaos (nothingness). She is not concerned with vanity, only what exists beneath the surface. She deliberately scrawls on his campaign, “defacing” his features. Linda (etymology: Beauty, Belle) symbolizes compassion, self-awareness, and mercy. She is the embodiment of the spirit (Earth). 4:55 to we are introduced to “Kingson” interior. Pearlescent, sharp, and minimal the space devoid of vibrancy (color = Life). this interior “reflects” the vanity and coldness that exists on the surface, and helps to showcase the emptiness of the relationship between Alex and his father, and his lack of love. 6:15, cue the black “maiden” who embodies “life”, she is the caretaker of the estate. This is a racialized/gendered shallow exchange as Alex can only interrogate the surface. The maid status positions her underneath the surface, unable to fully interact with her due to the dynamics of power in place. Alex blinded by the surface of who she “appears” to be what he interprets that as being. Women are the pedestals for his ascent, for without the exploitation of women, he would be nothing. In, The Truman Show, Truman faces obstacles concerning his true nature (nothingness), he is being watched over by Christof (aka God, the creator of this realm) and his story being projected onto the consciousness of the culture of humanity through television. Truman's whole life is built around illusions. Illusions that he merely “human”. He is then forced to find his way out of the maze or he will be confronted with the limitations of his consciousness by those who wish to dissuade him. My mother settled out of fear. Instead of putting herself first she was indoctrinated to believe that she was incapable of existing on her own. She convinced herself that the mother was the only role she was capable of playing. Entrapment became a full time job for my mother as she couldn’t bear the thought of existing alone and or worse: dying alone. So she married a man out of convenience and lay'd her egg. Unfortunately, for my siblings and I, we were conditioned by the dominant Western culture forced to survive on our own terms. She made it extremely difficult for me to walk away because she projected her fear of loneliness on to me. She projected her fears/insecurities onto her children so that in turn they would latch onto her, thus creating an imbalance in their own personal lives. She provided us her damaged view of relationships. In turn, we suffered because we lacked the courage to pursue our convictions in honesty. I had poor eating habits and a general naiveté that left my vulnerable. I was truly afraid of being alone and expressing my convictions because I was afraid of dying. Parents must raise healthy individuals. The Heathers final scene involving Veronica watching JD blow himself to smithereens symbolizes his need to destabilize his ego. Veronica in turn, visibly filthy due to the fallout symbolizes her  transcendence of status-ego. She becomes Disrespect is an illusion based on fear, there is no authority. Authority is symbolic (glamour) a mask for the purpose of both concealment and visibility. It cloaks itself in form, however, this is mostly empty. The mask of gender forces us to adapt to the social expectations of others. Ruthless competitive form. A form that is only concerned with survival. Empty individualism, the exaggerated surface (phallus) is concerned with order. Compassion is considered a weakness in this masculine world. For if you are “soft” or “weak” you can be exploited my men. I am at a loss because I was not bred as a male. I was not bred to be competitive/or arrogant. I was socialized as a women: compassion, giving, and soft. My stepfather stepped in and* I am a ghost. When you become a ghost you no longer have any distinction, any purpose, any meaning. You are not tied to your ego and you have nothing. The truth of the universe lies in its emptiness. I wake up to realize how empty I am that I'm am just ‘there/their', here and now and that society casts its blanket of social roles onto to me to distinguish the separation between something and nothing. Death is freedom from distinction. Freedom from ownership. Freedom from the animal nature which haunts these forms. I've taken on a radical shape, no longer distinguished through “surface”. Once you cast radical ownership of yourself, you break through the illusion of “I” and “me” and you become aware of the nothingness that awaits us all. “Pride is an illusion of the ego, of what/whom we appear to be. The nothingness that swallows the paranoia of existing/percieving in a schism body/mind perspective. I am empty, and I will fade. My mother played the role of “mother”, she bathed, clothed, fed, and loved me but didn't understand my needs. She should of addressed my traits instead of rejecting them. In turn, I embodied my mother (because in truth I am just like her),but in actuality, her projection was for me to be obedient within a hegemonic system. However, I couldn't be disciplined within a hegemonic cis, white, het system so I was deemed an outsider. This world was not meant for me. I was meant to convey the principles that this world conveys. yet for so long I adapted to what others wanted, out of fear of being isolated. Now, I can recognize whom/what is necessary in my life. What you created I must die for or live for myself. If living, I must build an ideology around my values. I must become the beacon of light for the ideals I strive for. I must practice love, compassion, and courage constantly, for that is the only way I can survive. I must break the chain of injustice and build upon a foundation (Taurus Sun) of truth (Leo) for myself. Only when you get tossed on your ass continually will you learn to fight back. Finding your ideology The Death of the Monastery and the rise of ideological space: There has been a death of the monastery. A space where souls could exist and devote themselves to their faith within the confines of an intimate space in contemplating the divine. In turn, we have come to worship the individual-self and the materialism that it carries. We worship at the temple of the World Banks, where we exchange service for monetary value. We scour the restaurants, shopping malls, and venues of the world, both exotic and familiar, to fill the void of emptiness inside us. To feel a sensation other than pain. The ideology of capitalism always a profit to be made. In a cis/heteronormative patriarchal those at disadvantage are forced to perform. Those who have inherited traits (competitive advantage) specific to thriving within the dominant system are rewarded. Weakness of any kind, especially disobedience results in death. Much like Commander Snow in the Hunger Games, he embodies the principles of God (authority = government) and more specifically the wrath of God (military = mind control). For those tributes chosen are forced to compete in spite of personal objection because if they don’t they will suffer the pain of torture or worse: death (the fear of the unknown). To win, they must fight against the odds of inherited traits (“May the odds be ever in your favor”) in winning the wicked game.This game, symbolizes the reality of our lives. We exist at the expense of an external source which controls our development We learn to survive based on upon our environment. The ideology of tradition is emphasized, as this tradition has been established by Snow (God) and it must be tolerated, treated as  sacred. Without this tactic, the curtain vanishes and the fear along with it. This fear is outlined in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and perfectly captured in the tone conveyed by Varys in Games of Thrones: “Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” You adapt, or die. There is no in between in a white hegemonic system you are either adapt to your animal instincts, or suffer the consequences. We are the puppets of God, doing his will out of fear of severe punishment. This is the ideology of Christianity, you are obedient in faith you will receive, if not you are banished to “eternal hell”. Many people are puppets for their parents, state, and other authoritarian for doing their bidding so they can receive the benefits. They fall in line with principles that are not aligned with their intentions and they become doomed to repetition. Others are punished for their honesty. In truth, God is only an illusion, a meter for human morality projected through the consciousness of the super-ego. The mechanics of Christianity were reliant upon the basis of control so in gaining said control they created the ultimate Authoritarian. However, God is truly nothingness. Normative ideologies insist on controlling behavior of those involved. I recognize that nothing is normal. Form is evil. Evil-oution. In truth I am more than my body. The ego is taught to fear because in truth it fears pain. The spirit is free. Free from distinction. From harm. Death is the only way out or “smile, and behave”. The surface is a delusion.

[flauntpage]

Ronaldo is an Icon of Corruption in Sports

Kathryn Mayorga filed a civil lawsuit in Clark County District Court in Nevada last month in which she alleges mega-soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo raped her in 2009. At the time, she reported the rape to the police, was medically examined, and filed criminal charges. She subsequently dropped those charges on the advice of an attorney who likely had little experience with the type of legal machine she was confronting. She received $375,000 for her silence. Last year, the German magazine Der Spiegel received documents about the case from Football Leaks. They published the story, Ronaldo threatened to sue, Der Spiegel convinced Mayorga to come forward, Ronaldo threatened to sue again. Mayorga has and will continue to endure threats and scrutiny of every kind from lawyers, businessmen, detectives and legions of fans. This is not the only sexual assault charge Ronaldo has faced, but as of now it is the most serious.

It’s worth taking a step back, after the initial media cycle and before the next begins to consider why and how this subject matters. It is worth recalling the context through which Mayorga’s story has surfaced— Football Leaks is not known for exposing rape accusations. Its territory is transfer deals, sponsorship contracts, the use of shell companies in tax evasion, self-dealing, match-fixing, and money laundering.

Nested in that trove of information are records documenting the negotiations between Mayorga’s lawyer and Ronaldo’s team. These are hardly the only documents pertaining to Cristiano Ronaldo in the Football Leaks archive. In 2014, Ronaldo avoided paying $35 million euros when he diverted $63.5 million of his fortune into a British Virgin Islands tax haven. Eventually, he pled guilty to four charges of tax evasion, agreed to pay $19 million euros and accepted a two-year probationary prison sentence. Football Leaks documents the financial corruption practiced by a network of men—agents, team owners, players, and officials—swirling around in beautifully tailored suits, moving through hotel lobbies, company boardrooms and homes that look like corporate compounds.

We need to see the way that Mayorga’s complaint was handled—the way that Mayorga herself was treated—as part of the sport’s culture, as an expression of not only its patriarchy but also its corruption. When asked to comment on the resurfacing of Mayorga’s story, Ronaldo shrugged this story off as “fake news.” In March, he used this same language in response to rumors that Spanish authorities were pursuing criminal charges after they turned down his team’s initial settlement offer. In an Instagram post, he asked his fans not to pay attention to “fake news” aimed at spoiling the “beautiful moment” of his return to form.

The rush to defend Ronaldo on the part of coaches, club directors, sponsors, and fans is to be expected. Juventus lauded the player’s “professionalism and dedication” and made clear that the rape accusation does not change their opinion regarding “this great champion.” Juventus, let us remember, has its own reputation to polish: the club featured centrally in Calciopoli—the Watergate of Italian football, in which clubs were accused of match fixing and other forms of collusion. Serie A has spent more than a decade climbing its way back—over a period of years players fled Italian football because its structures were so corrupt, even for a sports institution, that it could not be trusted.

Why is it easier to question the motives of the victim rather than those of the accused?

The people around Ronaldo are deeply invested in him. Football patriarchs cannot imagine the landscape of football without Cristiano Ronaldo. In 2017, Forbes estimated that he reaped nearly $1 billion dollars just from his social media. He has 122 million Facebook fans, more than any other person. The reach he can provide a sponsor is literally beyond any one else. Nike spokespeople apparently found the rape charges “deeply concerning” and “disturbing.” Ronaldo signed a lifetime contract, worth as much as $1 billion, with Nike in 2016.

But Nike is also in the middle of re-branding—they are centering the corporate brand on athletes who stand for something more than winning. Colin Kaepernick, Serena Williams, Caster Semenya, and Mexican women’s soccer player, Nayeli Rangel, have all been held up recently as Nike icons encouraging us all to not “just do it,” but to do more. And to do more in spite of power structures that would grind us down to nothing. Nike, furthermore, has had its own confrontation with #MeToo—nearly a dozen executives were recently pushed out of the company after women employees conducted a survey about experiences with harassment and bullying, and took its results directly to the company CEO.

The agreement between Mayorga’s lawyer and Ronaldo’s team is just one more document in a mountain of documents describing arrangements and accommodations made between and around a small group of men as they shore up the fundamentally corrupt power structures they deploy in order to mine the sports universe for its resources. Given the piles of evidence documenting the corruption of Ronaldo and his management team, one ought to treat Mayorga’s charge on its face as credible, as worth taking seriously.

Cristiano Ronaldo’s fans don’t want to hear any of this. Manchester United, Real Madrid, and Juventus are some of the biggest players in that power structure, corporations that nurture and exploit fan identification with their brands and wield it like a shield. They market the sport as beyond politics. They present an escapist spectacle, which fans hunger for. The sense of Ronaldo’s superhumanity is no small part of the pleasure he offers us. His height, his perfect body, his eerily upright posture—in a sport whose most beloved icons are often oddballs (Ronaldinho, Messi, Garrincha) Cristiano Ronaldo offers himself as a monument to masculine perfection. The presentation of Ronaldo as superhuman shrouds both the athlete’s wrongdoings and the rapacity of the corporate thieves running the game. Their sophisticated advertising works to create a troubling sense of intimacy and attachment between fans and their heroes. Those fans turn on survivors of sexual assault.

Why is it easier to question the motives of the victim rather than those of the accused? On social media a common retort of these fans to anyone that chooses to believe Mayorga is, “were you in the room?” Beyond the obvious rhetorical nature of the comment, there’s something revealing about it—it expresses a wish. They picture themselves in that room. They imagine themselves as Cristiano Ronaldo’s alibi.

The passionate responses to the charges against Ronaldo have been striking. They’ve focused on his athletic achievements and talent. Focus on the figure of the sports icon and you might see this as a story about one woman’s accusation against a successful man. Focus, however, on the sports star embedded in a deeply corrupt and exploitative system, you might see this as a story about the total lack of accountability for men who really and truly do not see themselves as like the rest of us—they see themselves as above the law, with good reason. For all intents and purposes, the people running soccer are.

Ronaldo is an iconic player—but what, we ask, does he represent if not the corruption of football’s greatest talents by its most sinister institutions?

Corruption is so normalized in sports institutions it is hard to imagine what sports would be were this not true. What is the NCAA without the big, self-serving lie of amateurism? What is the NFL without its history of minimizing and disavowing player suffering? What do we do with the ubiquity of sexual assault in college football culture? With domestic violence in men’s professional sports culture? What do we do with MSU, USA Gymnastics, and the IOC—organizations which dismissed athletes complaints and nurtured athlete abuse? With the former Ohio State athletes who are demanding accountability from their own community?

What happened to Kathryn Mayorga matters. For us to really appreciate how it matters, we need to understand that sexual violence does not happen in a vacuum.

The outrage expressed at a woman daring to press charges against Cristiano Ronaldo for sexual assault is part of the same indignity felt by Brett Kavanaugh. For the very few men who benefit from these corporate pyramid schemes, it is unthinkable that the way they treat women should be indicative of anything important about them. More men and women than we wish are also invested in this fantasy—they have sunk their sense of fairness and justice into institutions that require them to keep their own mouths shut, to not do the math, to not see what is right in front of them. White supremacist, patriarchal formations are by definition corrupt.

Let us remember, this system is bad for all of us. To date, in the UK, for example, over 800 boys and men have come forward as victims of sexual abuse at the hands of men working within clubs there. In its review of institutional failings the FA did not find evidence of a pedophile ring or deliberate cover-up. That people running football clubs did not see anything to cover-up is hardly reassuring. If anything, it is a reminder that in these institutions sexually abusive behavior is a defining aspect of their professional culture.

For years, a good number of us have pointed out and detailed FIFA and the IOC’s abusive relationship to women—as athletes, fans, coaches, referees, consumers and as members of sporting communities. Women soccer players have reported ongoing harassment and homophobic abuse by their coaches and administration. Athletes in a wide range of sports are calling out abusive coaching as an abuse of power with dangerous consequences. One team after another protests the exploitation of their sport by grifters, incompetents and creeps. Women’s teams are trotted out every now and again by clubs and federations as if to say “we aren’t all bad—see, we have a women’s team.”

The shambolic administration of women’s football, however, is a raw expression of misogyny and corruption in soccer. As resources are poured into men’s sides, women have been told they are a burden for clubs, an embarrassment, and unmarketable. Fans of women’s soccer see the national teams of powerhouse federations like Brazil and Spain struggle against the active hobbling of their development, training and marketing. Although FIFA is happy to use its support for the Women’s World Cup as evidence of its good intentions, it recently scheduled two major men’s tournament finals on the same day as the women’s final. During the 2015 indictments against FIFA, it’s half-hearted support for the Women’s World Cup in Canada looked very much like putting lipstick on a pig.

If people around a high-profile athlete are eager to pay off victims of sexual harassment and assault, it is because they are used to these kinds of arrangements, which amount to little more than bribes covering for each other’s failings. They do not see women as colleagues, as members of their community to whom they are accountable—they see women as alibis and evidence.

To confront sexism and sexual violence in school and in the workplace is to confront the presence of corruption in the institutions which purport to govern us. Where our relationship to school and work feels compulsory, our relationship to sport feels voluntary. As fans, we choose this world every time we tune in to a match broadcast or put on our favorite player’s shirt. Yes, Cristiano Ronaldo is an iconic player—but what, we ask, does he represent if not the corruption of football’s greatest talents by its most sinister institutions?

Women soccer players have resisted being neglected, and sporadically paraded around, by these organizations. Over the past few years, direct actions, such as strikes and unionization have forced the hand of federations. For example, the national Argentine women’s team refused to convene in 2017 until the federation agreed to pay their promised stipends, and it worked. Around the region, women have broadcast and supported one another in the efforts to change the way football organizations treat them. At times, male players have shown themselves to be allies, such as when the Norwegian men’s team agreed to a slight pay cut to achieve pay equity for its women’s side.

That is not nothing—it is, in fact, something—and speaks to the existence of another sports world. There is the feeling of community and joy which invited so many of us to the court, the track, the field in the first place. This is the sports world committed to the kind of competition which brings out the best in us—the world we make in our weekly pick-up games, in our high school track meets, in our neighborhood gyms. The grassroots world we actually live in. While we demand more of our icons, we can, in the here and now, do more for and with each other. We can listen to the stories people are sharing with us; we can listen to the individuals who are working through their experiences of sexual violation in and around sports. The accusation against Cristiano Ronaldo is not “just” a story about sex: it’s a story about sports. Let us turn our attention away from the icon just long enough so that we can see the world which produces him as untouchable.

Jennifer Doyle is a professor of English at UC Riverside. She writes about art, sports, and gender. She is the author of Campus Sex/Campus Security.

Brenda Elsey is associate professor of History at Hofstra University. She researches and writes on popular culture and politics, particularly sport in Latin America. She is co-author of Futbolera: A History of Women and Sport in Latin America with Josh Nadel. She is co-host of the weekly sport and feminism podcast Burn It All Down.

Ronaldo is an Icon of Corruption in Sports published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[politicaltheatre]

Shame

Shame.

It drives our decisions more than any other emotion, more than love, more than hate. At times, it drives us towards action; at others, it drives us away. It compels us to look inward, and seeing what we cannot bear to see it leads us to harm ourselves and, inevitably, to harm others.

It is, of course, a kind of hate: hatred of the self. Specifically, it is a hatred of perceived failures, a judgment made on actions taken or not taken, on how we are able or not able, and, important for a social animal such as ourselves, on our accountability to those with whom we share our world.

Bullies understand shame quite well. They live with it everyday. It is a constant in their lives. They recognize a weakness within themselves, a fear that they will fail, that resources will be taken away from them, and that they are powerless to control either beyond a few fleeting moments. They hate this weakness. They would do anything to rid themselves of it., or even just the awareness of it.

They, alas, are short term thinkers, able to see wants, needs, and threats close to them, but unable to understand needs or threats, or, crucially, consequences as the short term grows to the long term. Their solutions, therefore, are always short term. Even as a short term problem grows and escalates and lasts, and threatens to go on doing so, they jump from one short term solution to another, hoping to push that problem away until they can find a way to push it away again. Inevitably, it fails. They fail.

Aggression is a short term solution, at best. Those who use it retreat into it. It does more than make them feel safe, though, it makes them feel justified in harming others. To have the power to harm, they want to convince themselves and others, makes one superior. To be superior is to be able to exploit, to harm others in order to gain and keep more for oneself.

We are plagued with examples of this. They define this age. In the last week alone we saw a young man drive a car into soldiers in Paris, we saw another young man attempt to explain how women are less capable than men and should not be allowed to take "man" jobs, and just yesterday we saw yet another young man drive another car into a crowd of non-violent protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The terrorist attack in Paris was, mercifully, inept. No one was killed. It appears to have been the act of a troubled, lone, and perhaps lonely man who was inspired by the violence of others to embrace his own. He did not appear to have been directed to do what he did by anyone, not that ISIS or Al Qaeda or whoever wants to claim credit for inspiring him cares. To them, he is a success story, a recruiting tool to draw more lost young men and women to their cause, along with the money and power those lost souls bring with them.

Terrorism feeds on shame, The young men and women killing others and often themselves are trying to crush down an amount of shame most of us will thankfully never know. They feel lost in the modern world, lacking not only the ability to succeed amid the chaos and constant change but also the ability to love who they are when they are alone.

Those who recruit them and train them and cultivate the myth that an act of violence will make the shame go away, they know this and exploit it. They seek out shame and offer membership in a community that will accept them and encourage them in their rage. Without shame, few if any would kill or die for these leaders. Without it, they would have no power.

The sexist attack at Google was not technically violent. This young man's weapons, ill used, were the written language. As much as he tried to justify his outrage that one group - the Young, White, American-born Male, which is to say, his group - was being made to suffer in order for the company to effect, to his mind, some kind of ineffectively conceived, artificial diversity, all he seems to have accomplished, beyond reinventing himself as a poster boy for "alt-right" victimization, is to expose his own inadequacies as an engineer, which is likely the weakness within himself he dared not see.

His shame is clear. Rather than accept the idea that he might not be good enough for promotion, he looked outwards and found scapegoats, as bullies do. His scapegoats are not the weak, ineffective women at Google, of course - they have merely profited, passively, from his misfortune - but the weak, ineffective men at the top, who in their international, "cosmopolitan" world view have undermined the values of what once made America great.

No doubt, many of the white supremacists in Charlottesville, including the young man who murdered Heather Heyer, felt a great deal of sympathy for the now ex-Googler. No doubt, they spoke with righteous indignation about free speech and equal rights, even as they violently attacked anti-white-supremacist protesters for trying to exercise theirs. They see no irony in this, anymore than they see irony in embracing Nazi symbols and terrorist means to achieve what they claim as All-American ends.

The white supremacist protests that provoked violence this weekend were hoping to perpetuate the mythology of noble "Southern" heritage, one anchored by statues and street names of the "noble" Civil War leaders who only fought for their own rights. The true heritage of that South, the one they fetishize with their Stars and Bars flags, hats, and t-shirts, was an economy built on one group exploiting and harming another to get what it wanted. The Confederacy that flew that flag in battle was founded, nakedly, on the need to justify and protect that exploitation and harm. The enduring racist legacy of the past 150 years has been not less than a continuation of that need.

Racism and other forms of bigotry are as much the result of shame as the cause of it. The need to harm an innocent in order to acquire and/or hold onto what we want generates an enormous amount of shame. This is because we know, instinctively, that to do so is wrong, that it is evil. However much we deny it, something in us just knows.

Bigotry is also a reflection of short term thinking, a series of short term solutions applied to long term problems, such as uncertain economic prospects and failures in education, that they never want to have to think about. White supremacists' retreat into affectation and fetish is for them about safety and justification, safety in numbers, safety in ritualized behavior, safety in not have to be accountable for any action on one's own, and a twisted justification in ethno-social self-defense.

How, then, can we put ourselves in the place of such weak, evil young men? How can we understand the shame that compelled them to try to destroy other men and women, to take from them what they desperately wanted for themselves? How can understand the shame that, in a very real sense, has led them to try to destroy themselves in the act?

To start, we have two choices. The first is whether or not to go ahead. We'd like to believe we wouldn't, but we need food and shelter and the comforts of life, and we need the money to provide it. We face economic uncertainty, with the next paycheck seemingly so far out of reach. We face social uncertainty, with the loss of standing and with it, we fear, opportunity to reach that next paycheck.

So, we give in. We do that thing that harms another, an innocent, an equal, and we face the second bad choice: do we turn our shame inward and destroy ourselves or outward and destroy those who remind us of our shame. Either choice represents failure. Each one demands harming someone we desperately want not to harm, and this creates more shame.

The cycle continues, this time with us hurting ourselves and the next with us hurting another. Feel enough shame, hurting one innocent person is no longer enough to chase it away. Groups must be harmed. Groups of groups. Our survival depends on it.

So, we identify with a group that we hope will protect us as we harm others. We hope it will help us harm them, taking the burden of it and the shame it gives us, if only a little. We stand with them. They look like us. They sound like us. They say the things we desperately want to hear. We support them. We elect them to represent us and our hopes and our fears. They’ll take us back - always back - to a simpler, easier time when everything felt in control. The shame seems so light. It seems so far away.

It doesn't last. It can't. We were promised quick, easy solutions to all of our problems and not only are we not getting those but our problems seem to getting worse. The people we wanted to be silent and to fail are speaking and succeeding. We are being silenced. We are failing.

And then we face those people, the ones we need to harm to get what we want, them and the ones who refuse to harm them, who refuse to let us harm them. We attack, using our words, our chants and belittling epithets. It makes us feel big. It is all we can do. There is nothing we can defend, not that we would allow ourselves to admit that we have anything to defend. To do that would be to admit to our shame. We can't do that. We mustn't do that. That leaves violence.

We find a weapon to shut those people up, to keep them from reminding us of our shame, to remove them. We act. For just a moment we feel vindicated, we feel triumphant, we have silenced them and the world is ours again. We are great again.

For just a moment this lasts. Then comes the shame, again, waves of it, one bigger than the other, until we are overwhelmed with shame. We might shout our denials, using whatever resources we have left in some tortured explosion of hatred like a sun going nova, but there is no escape. Once those resources are exhausted, it will be gone and all we will have left is the shame. All that we can see of ourselves is the shame.

That, I imagine, is where that last young man is right now. He is alone in his cell in Virginia, still clinging to the fantasies that led him to this place, but awakening to the reality of the damage he has done and the inescapable shame that comes with it. It may well be the only emotion he ever truly knows.

- Daniel Ward

#heather heyer #charlottesville #terrorism #domestic terrorism #white supremecists #neo-nazis #kkk #david duke #donald trump #racism #bullying #shame #aggressive selfishness #reactionary #reactionaries #slavery #politics #long reads #accountability #jim crow #segregation #civil war #robert e lee #the confederacy #the confederate flag

[mdye]

"What does it mean that the lout in the white house got there despite boasting about his sexual misdeeds while two fox news misogynists behind his rise have now been brought down by theirs i don rsquo t know but it vexes me perhaps culture rides ahead of politics nonetheless let s celebrate the end of the career of bill o rsquo reilly bully alleged serial sexual harasser and creepy hypocrite who preached against sexual liberation gender equality and racial justice while possibly harassing an entire rainbow generation of women together o rsquo reilly and his former boss roger ailes created a white patriarchal television oasis for the aging holdouts against a rapidly diversifying america one where white men were again safely in charge and women even talented ones were for decoration most of them leggy blonde and deferential the two shaped a paranoid right wing political culture that demanded the creation of a character like ldquo president donald trump rdquo ndash even if ailes was said to be anxious about his creature rsquo s rise in the gop last year and o rsquo reilly supportive while also a bit condescending and paternalistic sometimes seemed jealous of him but ailes is gone and today o rsquo reilly is getting the door slammed on his ass fox finally dumped them both after spending tens of millions of dollars paying the multiple women who came forth with accounts of harassment including the latest mdash an african american clerical worker who says o reilly called her quot hot chocolate quot and would never speak to her except to grunt at her like a wild boar but even as we mark o rsquo reilly rsquo s downfall let rsquo s grapple with the damage he s done in greasing a path to the white house for trump of course but also in the lives of individual people in the culture of bullying and violence he leaves behind i rsquo ve faced a lot of criticism even abuse on social media over the years but the only time i was genuinely afraid for my own safety and my daughter rsquo s was after i debated o rsquo reilly in june 2009 about the murder of dr george tiller mdash lutheran deacon husband father grandfather and abortion provider mdash in the hallway of his wichita kansas church o rsquo reilly had trashed tiller usually as ldquo tiller the baby killer rdquo in 29 segments of the o rsquo reilly factor over four years i rsquo d suggested on msnbc that o rsquo reilly ought to ask whether his violent rhetoric might have contributed to tiller rsquo s murder he had said that tiller ldquo destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for 5 000 rdquo was guilty of ldquo nazi stuff rdquo and that anyone who prevented the state of kansas from stopping tiller ldquo has blood on their hands quot i stupidly went on o rsquo reilly rsquo s show to defend myself i rsquo m just going to leave the link here i just watched it for the first time in seven years and it was still harrowing his mounting rage plus the repetition that i had blood on my hands too at the time at first it was all in a day rsquo s work for me mdash i rsquo ve debated a lot of misogynists on msnbc then the emails poured in and the snail mail too many men had violent suggestions as to what i might do with myself they had many creative ways to dispense with me and with my daughter too that was my first experience with the underground of men who were mobilizing against women rsquo s freedom all of them apparently galvanized by the election of barack obama which made little sense unless you knew the history of racist misogyny that came together in fear of miscegenation in the 19th century there was new danger on the loose i had noticed the guns at obama rallies i had seen a black man murdered by a white supremacist at the holocaust museum in washington d c i had heard about the pittsburgh police shootings by a white supremacist whose friends told reporters ldquo rich like myself loved glenn beck rdquo the obama hating fox host who rose to right wing glory that year i had written about all of it but it had never before been aimed at me nothing happened i lived mdash thrived in fact as did my daughter but nothing acquaints you with the notion that your ideas are more than just intellectually dangerous than people telling you they want to hurt you i did have to learn that what i got weren rsquo t ldquo death threats rdquo in order for something to be a death threat i was told they have to say they intend to kill you not merely that they want you dead the powers that be at twitter have essentially told me the same thing when i report violent tweets to them but still tweets of violence don rsquo t feel as threatening as either email to your personal inbox or snail mail to your office no one ever wrote these threats to my home for which i am grateful and as i write that i realize i rsquo m wanting to minimize the threat i felt or should have felt at the time i didn rsquo t calm myself by saying none of this violent male mail came to my home at the time i was scared my friends told me to call the police and alert them instead i went on vacation to arizona where my daughter worried at the airport ldquo mom this is a sort of conservative state do you think someone will recognize you rdquo no one did there are a lot of democrats in arizona too and not all republicans are o rsquo reilly reactionaries and even of those very few of them are violent still i stayed a little bit on alert that week here i am almost eight years later if i didn rsquo t have plans tonight i rsquo d go celebrate outside of fox news in midtown i can observe however that the aforementioned glenn beck hung on to his show at fox spewing poison to retirees at 5 pm even after advertisers ditched him because alleged serial sexual harasser roger ailes did not want to give his critics the satisfaction of seeing beck canned mdash until he finally had to can him the murdochs took one look mdash or maybe two mdash at their loss of more than 50 major advertisers plus more sexual harassment complaints we should acknowledge and concluded that o rsquo reilly rsquo s april vacation should be permanent ailes protected o rsquo reilly too of course i rsquo ll never forget the night salon rsquo s beloved executive editor gary kamiya came out of his office reading the deposition of former o rsquo reilly employee andrea mackris about the loofahs and the falafels and o rsquo reilly rsquo s abhorrent abuse mdash until we told him to write it up as a story and i was the one who had to read it to him in 2004 we didn rsquo t have scanners or any way to just lift the passages from the smoking gun i still won rsquo t use a loofah so we have been watching this serial misogynist and alleged sexual harasser this angry white patriarch for a long long time ailes protected him even after he dumped beck even after gawker revealed o rsquo reilly had lost custody of his children when his ex wife showed evidence that his son and daughter watched him drag her downstairs by the throat mdash and understandably the kids didn rsquo t want to spend time with him anymore ailes dumped beck but o rsquo reilly got to stay it rsquo s clear there was a double standard beck lost his show because his overall crazy hurt the brand but o rsquo reilly rsquo s angry white man shtick mdash including his abuse of women and children mdash in fact was the brand now the younger murdochs are trying to change the brand and they are about to cut o rsquo reilly loose political activists outside and to their credit women inside fox have made both this and ailes rsquo s departure happen the ever knowing fox chronicler gabriel sherman at new york magazine had earlier reported that rupert murdoch and his son lachlan were against dumping o rsquo reilly while lachlan rsquo s brother james wanted the high rating bully to cease darkening the doors of 21st century fox but now sherman reports ldquo lachlan murdoch rsquo s wife helped convince her husband that o rsquo reilly needed to go which moved lachlan into james rsquo s corner rdquo so women have prevailed against o rsquo reilly and earlier against ailes we failed to stop trump mdash especially we white women as i rsquo ve mourned since november 9 trump must be next but for now let rsquo s celebrate the departure of his enablers trump now has power ailes and o rsquo reilly never did but women mdash and men of conscience mdash now know what the stakes are o rsquo reilly taught some of us the hard way but many of us have learned from those lessons let rsquo s make sure we all take in the danger of the white male patriarchal paradise ailes and o rsquo reilly created so we can make sure trump can rsquo t spread it beyond the confines of one loathsome cable channel Keep on reading: Bye-bye Bill O’Reilly

[carolingcreations]

I’ve got something to say that I know I’m gonna catch a fuckton of heat for but I’m going to say it anyway.

More white people in the Agents of SHIELD fandom need to take more ownership of Grant Ward.  Here’s why.

When you look at Muslim communities and you look at radicalization and ISIS religious and community leaders have plans in place to reach out to at risk youth in their communities.  They actually work with anti-white radicalization in Europe combating nazi behavior.  

Fact.

Nazis are very real. They’re in power and they’re in the US government and throwing around the word as a descriptor is fine but using it to describe Brett Dalton and not making that explicitly clear is gross because it affects real people.

I propose however that Stand With Ward actually actively own that the guy is a nazi and there are thousands of at risk young men, possibly young women, and families who should be given an opportunity to see something better.

Let me tell you who I trust most in this world run by Donald Trump. Minorities and people who have come out as former nazis who want to do better.  You want to know why? Minorities are being oppressed day to day in and out and they need to take care of themselves but they thrive and work together.  They know what oppression looks like. Now the big one.  Why do I trust FORMER nazis? 

Because it takes balls of steel to admit that you were an oppressive fuckwit who abused and tortured innocent people and they STAY IN THEIR LANE trying to convince people that Hitler is garbage and nazism is bullshit.  They don’t go into minority spaces and try and influence people, they don’t virtue signal and say “WELL I HAVE BLACK FRIENDS/AM GAY/WHATEVER” they stay in their lane and try and work on positive white identity and if anything the sheer BULLSHIT that comes with Scarlett Johansson’s Ghost in the Shell casting which is wrong on multiple levels proves that white people need to start recognizing that there’s a white identity.

It is not all encompassing.

It must be addressed that the majority of it is related to hatred.

Look. Let’s face facts.

Nobody wants to admit they’re wrong.

So here’s a thought while we all go into this last half of Agents of SHIELD 4C.

IF YOU’RE THINKING THAT YOU WANT TO CALL WARD A NAZI - 

Fucking do it. The dude is. They made decisions with that character that made him a rat bastard.  Maybe preface it with the idea that Brett Dalton is not a nazi and if you think he is, if you HONESTLY believe that Brett Patrick Dalton is a Nazi here’s the southern poverty law center’s website:

https://www.splcenter.org/

Please report him to the authorities. Nazis are real. Nazis are sending out bomb threats.  You can’t throw around calling an actor a fucking nazi unless you’re prepared to back it up.

IF YOU’RE THINKING THAT YOU WANT TO JUST FORGET NAZISM AND JUST CALL IT BAD AND NOT INVOLVE YOURSELF.

Okay. Sure Jan.  I’m gonna come back to that.

IF YOU’RE THROWING OUT HATE BECAUSE OF HYDRA, DEFENDING HYDRA’S POSITION, OR JUST FEEL LIKE CALLING EACH OTHER NAZIS.

again. report anyone you think is a nazi to southern poverty law center in the US. Straight up. Cut this fucking shit out. 

IF YOU’RE THINKING YOU WANT TO JUST FORGET NAZISM AND JUST CALL IT BAD AND NOT INVOLVE YOURSELF.

You thought about it right? ok. Ask yourself this. Are you a member of a minority group? A person of color?

If you answered yes to this but you are not a person of color.  proceed to question two. If you are, have a nice day.

Are you Jewish?

If you answered no please proceed to question three.  Otherwise stop here and have a nice life, this post is not for you, all my best and god bless.

Are you white and non-jewish, still a member of a minority (Disabled, Queer?) and calling yourself “liberal.” or are you simply white and on this website.

You don’t get to ignore this.  Once you’ve punched nazis in the face it’s time to face facts. Your parents fucked up. Your mommy and daddy fucked up. Marvel fucked up and there are nazis. What do you do once you’ve punched them in the face? do you 

A- Say “well I did my part. I did violence against a person. It’s time to pass them into a justice system where WHITE SUPREMACISTS HAVE BEEN QUIETLY INVADING LAW ENFORCEMENT FOR OVER A DECADE and where the prison industrial complex enslaves black Americans and will probably make white prisoners into overseers and further black oppression...

(no really it’s true. look it up: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/fbi-white-supremacists-in-law-enforcement/)

B - I don’t know what to do with this why are you yelling at me I need a hug box I’m triggered!

Face facts. People are dying because of nazis in America and around the world. Persons of color are being oppressed. LGBTQ individuals are being killed. You do not get to pass this by and if you want to call yourself a fucking ally then you don’t just get to look at this and say “this makes me uncomfortable” or invade minority spaces in the hope that they’ll comfort you.

That’s what Get Out is all about friends. People wanting to be minorities cause they don’t own being white.

Here’s reasons why you need to be concerned about White Radicalization

https://afrosapiophile.com/2016/12/10/white-radicalization/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/15/alt-right-manosphere-mainstream-politics-breitbart

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/magazine/we-dont-talk-about-radicalization-when-an-attacker-isnt-muslim-we-should.html?_r=0

Grant Ward, Kylo Ren, Loki, Fandom has a history of problematic white men whose existence is excused purely because people either think they’re hot or they think they need to be pitied or people get angry and don’t think that they need to get involved when the concept of white radicalization and white terror comes up.  Whatever side of the argument you’re on, seeing them as human beings who have fallen and lost their way or seeing them as angry monsters, white people, we need to own them and we need to own their issues and their mistakes.

Face facts. If you’re anti-ward you need to own what he represents. If you’re pro-ward you need to own what he represents.  Instead of tossing around the word nazi  or living in a delusional fantasy wonderland maybe instead take five minutes to not just post angry shit about Nick Spencer or be very confused about Agents of shield (ith one WOC showrunner in a room full of white men?...still doesn’t excuse the white men bringing this shit back....)

I’m making plans to donate the cover cause of every issue of captain america that I bought to the holocaust museum and not buying anymore.  Me making this post is a reminder to myself to do that. I’m also donating to these organizations/volunteering when I have a chance.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/02/facism-alt-right-activists-trump-milo-yiannopoulos

https://www.facebook.com/Anti-Fascist-America-138942436283079/

There are DOZENS of organizations in the UK as well that promote this. As Americans - given the sheer number of white terrorists who have shot up everything from a school to a movie theater to other places it’s time to own there’s a fucking problem.  We put a hitler wannabe in the white house and we’re going to get him out but if we don’t acknowledge the dozens of Grant wards baking in Reddit chatrooms or simmering and cooking on 4chan then there’s no fucking point in getting Der trumpkin out of office cause eventually he’ll come back.

Persons of color have their struggles. They know their communities. The first person who responds to this with “I don’t see color I just wanna listen to them” is gonna get their ass fucking smacked six ways to sunday. Why the fuck are you putting the burden on their shoulders after all they’ve been through? Own your issues. Either you sit down and get with the program that white people are sick and need help (and I say this as a white german american) or you allow nazism to linger and if you allow that to linger then sorry but I’m revoking your “I wanna bitch about HYDRA weeeh” card. HYDRA’s not real. Nazis are real and they’re out there and I’m fucking exhausted by all of you BITCHING about this.

So. Take the time. Volunteer and donate. If you hate grant ward take five minutes then come back and realize that there are probably five real Grant wards out there right now that you can actually HELP by donating to these organizations, getting out and marching, squashing their platform, and funding those people with balls of goddamn steel who own that they were a part of a hate group and are working to get others out.  Wasting your time harassing others for a fictional character and a fictional thing when there are real ways you could help people is fucking stupid. If you’re pissed about Nick Spencer volunteer and donate.  If you cut off the head two more will take it’s place but if you stab this shit in the heart then it’s gonna go away forever.

If you’re a Grant Ward fan don’t force your gross and creepy beliefs on other people, stop trying to beat a dead horse and let’s band together to do something GOOD to make this world a better place if we were that affected by this character.  I get what it’s like to want to pity the guy.  I’ve been there. I was abused. I was a rape victim. I was jailed and I fucking saw shit but coming out and seeing ward LOSE taught me two things. 1) there needs to be better representation for people who suffer from abuse and jail and it needs to encompass everyone not just cishet white dudes 2) I need to own that there but for the grace of god go I. Go we. Go ALL  of us.  Go every self-righteous white person who doesn’t feel connected and doesn’t have a solid family footing.

So take five minutes. Read about this. Acknowledge Ward’s a white terrorist but instead of just going about your day actually DO something about this because other communities.

I’m reminded of something Samantha Bee said the day after the election. “If Muslims have to take responsibility for all muslims then white people have to take responsibility for all the bad white people.”

So Coulson Fans, So FitzSimmons Fans, So Daisy Fans, So all y’all fans who are white - like it or not. Grant ward may not be your “Trash Son” but he’s your angry cousin who’s come home and it’s time for you to sit down at the dinner table with him and recognize what he represents.  A real systemic problem in this world that we can defeat if we work together.

So let me ask you. are you going to do what minorities have been asking us white folk to do for YEARS and have these uncomfortable conversations about what this character represents, what people like this represent and how we can stop it? 

Or are you going to bitch and ignore the issue. 

Before you do consider one thing. Shout out to my  fellow Americans. A lot of the people who are Ward fans are Germans from germany.

Take a look at what the US did to Germany after Hitler was in power. pause. reflect on that “digging up the mass graves of concentration camp survivors.” fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification

Recognize that they don’t want to see this repeated.  They’re maybe just going about this the wrong way.  That they’re thinking about shit we as Americans haven’t been taught to think of yet like that white people aren’t the center of the universe.  Think of all those Reddit folks who will drag the rest of us to hell simply for pepe and the lolz. You want to dig up mass graves of whoever Cheeto Jesus and his weird pal hate?

So I’m gonna ask again. Are you really a committed ally and ready to work to build something better and ask yourself these tough questions...

Or are you a liberal from Get Out.

Cause I have zero time for that shit.

And now it’s time for a brief Q&A:

Q: Where did this post come from?

A: Chloe Bennet’s right. Like it or not Grant Ward followed a nazi organization’s ideals. People should try and be better. What’s not right is the sheer number of people taking this as an opportunity to harass and belittle fans who liked the character.  Both sides of this debate are fucking ridiculous and neither are acknowledging the real problem.  Chloe’s got her own battles to fight and her own things she’s passionate about but people acting on behalf of one person’s idea of what a person should do without thinking for themselves is an awful lot like Hitler if you ask me.

Q: Did you just call me Hitler?!

A: Are you co-opting the spaces of minorities for your own personal gain? Are you leaning on your black friends or your minority friends when they need a space of their own? Do you bitch about 45 and not do anything about him or his followers? Are you following Bennet’s ideas because you “love her and want to be just like her physically or do you want to follow her ideals?” Do you just pick out Skyeward people because it makes you feel good to see other 15 year old sad sacks of shit on the internet cry like bitches? do you dislike Ward because it reminds you of an old boyfriend and everytime you post something hateful about an actor it’s like you’re kicking that ex BF in the crouch?

Give it a think.  I’m not in a mood to pussyfoot around.

Q: Do you donate and volunteer?

A: This is as much of a call to action for myself and others. I start here:

https://www.safetypinbox.com/

I sit and listen in minority communities and elevate those voices then go back to my community and own. my shit.

Q: You’re a horrible person and all of this is wrong.

A: Cool. At Me. Tell me I’m shit. I’m good with it. Doesn’t change the fact that this is a real issue.

Q: But I love Skyeward.

A: Accept that it’s wrong. Make a joke out if it. Laugh uproariously. Also Skyeward is dead.  This is another fake ratings grab on a TV show taking advantage of a pairing that really pisses people off on BOTH sides of the aisle. Skyeward is the donald trump of the marvel universe.  some people LOVE it. some people HATE it. Either way it’s divisive and tearing what should be a fun place apart.

Q: but I’m woke -

A: no white person is woke. We’re just fighting not to sleep deeper.

Q: I genuinely hate all the shit you’re doing kill yourself.

A: I used to be a lot like you. I sent hate. not in this fandom but in other places. get yourself right with god and examine why you’re so angry about this. Write angry letters, touch grass, go outside. If you’re that oppressed that you need to deal with others then cool. girl bye.

Q: I’m a Person of Color/Jewish and I’m offended by this.

A: I deeply apologize for offending you. I felt this was an issue that needed to be discussed beyond just spewing gobs of hatred about a stupid issue.  To be perfectly honest Ms. Bennet’s post, while correct, needed to be said and it hurt.  I’m working on de-centering my whiteness and my sense of self, can’t do that without acknowledging a community.  I don’t like that I liked a nazi.  In fact it bothers me that my favorite character turned out to be the kind of person that led the US Army to not let my grandpa carry a gun and actually fight evil.  nazism is evil. It oppresses me (I’m gay and disabled) and it has oppressed your communities since your conception.

I’m also American and our president is a shit stick turd and it’s time to fight back.  I do that by owning this. HYDRA is fiction. It’s not real. but the ideals it represents are real and I’d rather punch back against that because the more you try and push people like Nick Spencer or this framework idea the .....more it’s gonna stay put.

I’m done with cutting off heads. I want to stab this shit in the heart where it hurts.

Q: I’m a person of color/jewish and I don’t know what to make of this.

A: Please, feel free to share your opinions. This is the last I’m going to post on this but fucking hell I’m tired and I’m sorry that you have to go through Spencer’s shit and Marvel’s shit. Again, one WOC showrunner in a room full of white guys. I still wanna hold those white guys accountable for this crap.

This is the last I’m gonna post to this post. I don’t know if I’ll read anything (or if any of you will give a shit) but hopefully this might make an impact on at least one person and if it does? I’ll count myself lucky.  There’s a lot in play here that doesn’t have to do with this very real issue.  Egotistical fan groups, Angry social justice warriors who don’t fucking do jack shit.  I’m tired and I’m done with all y’all and this is step one of me breaking up with this pain that I have lived with for 3 goddamn years.

This is shit. I’m owning it. I’m gonna work to clean it up.  Will you join me? 

#grant ward #anti-grant ward #donald trump #agents of shield #marvel #hydra #fuck hydra #hail hydra #white radicalization #phil coulson #fitzsimmons #daisy johnson #cw: nazis #nazis

[nothingman]

Back in early January, during the confirmation hearings for now-embattled Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Senator Orrin Hatch posed a question about obscenity, an issue that has always obsessed him. If appointed, would Sessions consider bringing back obscenity prosecutions and cracking down on the porn industry? "Would you consider reestablishing a specific unit dedicated to prosecuting this category of crime?" asked Hatch.

Sessions — who said he wasn’t fully aware that the Obama administration had shut down the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in the first place — noted that obscenity prosecutions have long been a part of the work of the Department of Justice, and that he’d happily consider bringing the task force back, were he to head up the department.

In many ways, this was an expected answer, typical of the Republican Party’s long-standing claim to be the nation’s protectors of morality and decency. When Sessions’ Republican predecessor, John Ashcroft, took office, he notoriously covered up the exposed nipples of statues like Spirit of Justice. Even in these more permissive times, the Republican Party has repeatedly declared porn a “public health crisis.” Attacks on “obscenity” — a vaguely defined category of speech that, due to being prurient, explicit, and lacking redeeming social value, isn’t considered protected by the First Amendment — are of a piece with this mindset.

But the man who nominated Sessions for attorney general is hardly a typical Republican. As many outlets have noted, President Trump once appeared on the cover of Playboy, and has had cameos in a few softcore porn flicks. Add to that the fact that Trump’s most ardent and vocal supporters — the shitposters of 4chan and Reddit’s /r/The_Donald, “free speech” warriors like Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes — are themselves obsessed with pushing the boundaries of community standards of decency, and the situation becomes very odd indeed. Racist memes; violent, aggressive trolling; and repeated rape threats hardly seem in line with the goals of a party that claims to stand for family values and decency. (In an extreme example of cognitive dissonance, former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos even once hired a porn performer as a bodyguard.)

Photo by Win McNamee / Getty Images

Jeff Sessions at the White House for his swearing-in ceremony as attorney general.

How did we get to a place where champions of the obscene and offensive are in league with someone who claims to want to crack down on those things?

Potentially prurient content presents a tricky political situation that often results in strange bedfellows. Viewed from one angle, pornography and obscenity put creators on the front lines of the progressive fight for free speech, because they’re challenging social norms and fighting for the right to express themselves however they wish. Viewed from another angle, though, the same content may be upholding those social norms, by oppressing and dehumanizing women, people of color, and other marginalized communities. Feminism’s “porn wars” of the 1970s and ‘80s saw anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin allying with the right wing because their goals aligned, even though their reasons didn’t. In some ways, the Trump administration, which has brought the racist, white-nationalist fringe with traditional Republicans, inverts that decades-old alliance.

The champions of obscenity are in league with its enemies

But to what end? What would drive someone like provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to align with a traditional conservative like Sessions? As the Trump coalition has settled into power, some hints have begun to appear.

The answer certainly isn’t a genuine advocacy for free speech. For all the talk of “free speech” many Trump supporters use to defend their most vicious trolling — including the president’s habit of insulting anyone who dares to disagree with him — few people in this shaky alliance seem to have the stomach for freedom of speech when it’s coming from the other side. White House chief strategist Steve Bannon habitually refers to the media as “the opposition party.” Trump has declared that a slew of media outlets that have questioned his version of reality are “the enemy of the American people.” And even supposed free-speech warrior Yiannopoulos, who’s known for hurling quips like “Fuck your feelings” at anyone who protests him, demanded an apology after the mayor of Berkeley referred to him as a white supremacist. The most dedicated shitposters aren’t even guaranteed defenders of the porn industry: there’s plenty of overlap between the alt-right and the “no fap” movement, and posts within /r/The_Donald offer a wide range of views over how protected the work of pornographers really needs to be.

The real unifying factor behind this spin on free speech, as is often a case in oddball team-ups, is a mutual enemy. For many in the Trump camp, the fight to push the boundaries of decency only seems to be worthwhile when it ultimately upholds their conservative goals. It’s notable that the “controversial” ideas the conservative fringe’s shitposters want to be free to express aren’t new or novel. They’re advocating for a consequence-free opportunity to continue the oppressive orders of the past, remixed with more Pepes, explicitly racist imagery, and rape threats. For the anti-obscenity wing of the Republican Party, calls to Trump That Bitch, Grab America By the Pussy, and bombard any woman who advocates for her personhood with violent, explicit rape threats are ultimately tolerable, no matter how crass or obscene they are. And that’s because they’re essentially upholding the same power structure the Republicans have been protecting for decades.

The mutual enemy? The left, of course

Yiannopoulos, one of the alt-right’s most visible forces of obscenity, has been the clearest sign that this alliance has limits. His declaration of his status as a “dangerous faggot” was upheld and embraced, so long as he used his platform to mock women, people of color, immigrants, and trans people. When he actually ventured into truly controversial territory — noting that isolated queer teenagers might find affirmation of their identity in relationships with more experienced queer adults — the community swiftly cut him loose. The neo-Nazi right values its ability to be offensive when the end goal is to subjugate marginalized groups like immigrants, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. When those views are challenged, resisting the status quo becomes a form of obscenity that must be shut down.

Which is why when conservative ideology is out of favor, free speech, and the ability to advocate for the oppression of anyone who isn’t a straight, white man, feels important. But when conservatives are at the helm, there’s a renewed interest in authoritarianism, a damn-all-conventions attitude toward getting their way. Michael Malice, an Observer columnist who frequently covers the alt-right, tells me this: “A lot of [Trump fans] are very big on authoritarianism” when it means silencing the liberals they see as threatening their way of life. Even a Sessions-led crackdown on obscenity might be welcomed if it was “part and parcel of a broader crackdown on social liberalism,” one that would harken a return to a time when men had total control over women’s bodies.

The infighting seems inevitable

And in spite of some obvious ideological differences, it seems Sessions already has the support of many of those obscenity-loving shitposters. A Reddit post celebrating his confirmation met with a great deal of approval from Trump fans convinced the Alabaman will help return law and order to America. (The one recurring reservation there, of course, being Sessions’ on-the-record opposition to marijuana.)

Time will tell whether the alliance will hold. Feminists and conservatives united in their hatred of pornography didn’t manage to get it banned. The infighting that’s already emerged within the Trump administration (as well as the alt-right itself) suggests that the Trump coalition may be equally doomed. The appeal of authoritarianism, and the reassertion of white male privilege, may be seductive enough to unite the agents of obscenity with those who’ve dedicated themselves to fighting it. But it seems unlikely that it’ll be able to keep them together for the long haul.

via The Verge

#IFTTT #Feedly #Nothingman uses feedly