All entries by this author

Kevin Trump

May 27th, 2020 4:24 pm | By

Oh no, the game is up, Trump is going to sign an executive order “on social media companies” so they will all have to salute and say “Sir yes sir!” and do what he says.

U.S. President Donald Trump will sign an executive order shortly regarding social media companies, a White House spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

Spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany made the remark to reporters aboard Air Force One, traveling with Trump to Washington from Florida a day after Twitter Inc attached a warning to some of his tweets prompting readers to fact-check the president’s claims.

Read the rest


!

May 27th, 2020 3:45 pm | By

Twitter’s new plan for dealing with Don the Liar’s tweets:

Sadly, it’s a joke, but it should be the reality.… Read the rest



That will work out well for him

May 27th, 2020 12:23 pm | By

Oh good, another one. Smart move, gym dude.

https://twitter.com/anisalrh/status/1265510620285239297

This utter bozo demands to know what office they’re in, and then announces he’s calling 911 now.

I have to say, though, I don’t see anyone calling him a Bob or a Joe or a Kevin. It’s almost as if there is no generic name for a racist white guy who calls the manager.… Read the rest



No right to a peaceful existence

May 27th, 2020 12:01 pm | By

Oh nothing, just declaring a set of people outside the law, as one does.

TERF’s, like all Nazis, have no right to a peaceful existence or steady employment. They have declared their support of fascism and have therefore declared their intent to directly harm the trans community wherever they’re found. They threaten the safety and dignity of others and therefore deserve none themselves until they choose to be human once more.

The usual caveats to the direct action approach apply. Be careful of misidentifying people. Attacking bystanders just makes TERF’s look sympathetic. Don’t do anything you can’t handle the consequences of.

Don’t kill them unless you’re sure they’re radical feminists.

Doxxing is another effective tool against fascists, just as

Read the rest


Moments

May 27th, 2020 11:09 am | By

Now people are making death threats to Amy Cooper, and Christian Cooper is saying please stop that immediately.

Christian Cooper told CNN that he recently learned that Amy Cooper, who is unrelated, has been receiving death threats following her call — and he wants them to stop.

“I am told there has been death threats and that is wholly inappropriate and abhorrent and should stop immediately,” he said. “I find it strange that people who were upset that … that she tried to bring death by cop down on my head, would then turn around and try to put death threats on her head. Where is the logic in that? Where does that make any kind of sense?”

No death … Read the rest



Equal justice?

May 27th, 2020 10:28 am | By

Uh oh, protests:

Hundreds of protesters lined a south Minneapolis intersection Tuesday night calling for justice in the Memorial Day death of George Floyd after a video surfaced showing a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck as the man told the officer repeatedly he couldn’t breathe.

The video sparked outrage across the country, and led to the firing of four officers tied to the incident. It also set triggered waves of anger that led to violent clashes in the rain Tuesday night between cops and protesters in south Minneapolis.

Protesters, some carrying signs saying “I can’t breathe,” spilled onto the street in front of Cup Foods, in 3700 block of Chicago Avenue South, where police were called about

Read the rest


We’ll show them!

May 27th, 2020 9:55 am | By

So basically they’re working hard to…raise their own body count?

In perhaps his most overt effort to shun the wearing of masks, Trump retweeted a tweet from Fox News analyst Brit Hume ridiculing Joe Biden for appearing with a face mask during a Memorial Day ceremony in Delaware.

Trump hates the masks, Trump refuses to wear the mask, Trump keeps telling everyone the masks are voluntary. Last week he even made a point of saying he didn’t wear a mask in public view on his visit to the Ford plant because he didn’t want to give … Read the rest



Birders unite

May 26th, 2020 6:03 pm | By

Audubon Society statement on Incident in Central Park’s Ramble:

“Black Americans often face terrible daily dangers in outdoor spaces, where they are subjected to unwarranted suspicion, confrontation, and violence,” said Audubon SVP for State Programs Rebeccah Sanders, who is white. “The outdoors – and the joy of birds – should be safe and welcoming for all people. That’s the reality Audubon and our partners are working hard to achieve. We unequivocally condemn racist sentiments, behavior, and systems that undermine the humanity, rights, and freedom of Black people. We are grateful Christian Cooper is safe. He takes great delight in sharing New York City’s birds with others and serves as a board member of the New York City Audubon

Read the rest


Oh that kind of medical distress

May 26th, 2020 3:56 pm | By

The other horror yesterday was the police murder of George Floyd.

Four Minneapolis police officers have been fired after a black man was restrained by the neck and died in custody on Monday night. Bystander video captured a white police officer kneeling on the man’s neck for several minutes, despite the man’s pleas that he could not breathe. The man has been identified as George Floyd by an attorney for his family.

Kneeling on someone’s neck. Wtfffff.

The account from Darnella Frazier, who filmed the now-viral video showing part of the police encounter and said she watched Floyd being suffocated, differs from that of the police, who said Floyd was stopped because he matched the description of a

Read the rest


Outside Verona

May 26th, 2020 3:22 pm | By

Zowie!

H/t Rob… Read the rest



What first made you realize?

May 26th, 2020 3:05 pm | By
What first made you realize?

Graham Linehan asked a question.

It was this, on a post about women and abortion rights.

Yes, if you’re going to talk about abortion rights please keep in mind that not all women are women and not all men are not-women.

Glinner goes on:

Read the rest


Penalty

May 26th, 2020 12:08 pm | By

Franklin Templeton has now fired Amy Cooper.

“I don’t think there’s an African American person in America who hasn’t experienced something like this at some point,” Christian Cooper, a 57-year-old science editor, told The Washington Post in an interview. “I don’t shy away from confronting the scofflaw when I see it. Otherwise, the park would be unusable — not just to us birders but to anybody who enjoys the beauty.”

Christian Cooper — who is not related to Amy — had gotten up early on Memorial Day to head to the Ramble, a heavily wooded section of Central Park designed to resemble a wild garden. With its rocky outcrops and thick canopy, the area makes for an especially inviting

Read the rest


New York City Audubon

May 26th, 2020 11:31 am | By

Who is Christian Cooper? This guy.

Read the rest



Twitter refused

May 26th, 2020 11:20 am | By

Now there’s a headline:

He asked Twitter to remove Trump’s false tweets about his dead wife. Twitter refused.

Six times this month, in a vile attempt to punish a political rival, President Trump has tweeted about a decades-old conspiracy theory about MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.

Twitter (TWTR) has come under increasing pressure to remove the tweets, but the company is not bending, despite being called out by some of the people personally hurt by the posts.

This is the same Twitter that summarily bans women who say on Twitter that men are not women. Saying men are not women not only gets tweets deleted, it gets the women who say it permanently banished from the platform. That’s worth … Read the rest



Department of wack definitions

May 26th, 2020 10:33 am | By

Is that a fact.

https://twitter.com/uolsupport/status/1265226517933690880

It’s not an “idea” that humans are sexually dimorphic, it’s a fact. It’s an idea that humans are not sexually dimorphic and that there’s a joyous rich tapestry of sexes open to us: a silly, childish, fantasy-based idea.

It’s not any kind of phobia to refuse orders to agree with and endorse and submit to fantasy-based ideas, especially ones as sweeping and fundamental as that.… Read the rest



In the Ramble

May 26th, 2020 9:53 am | By

I watched this unfolding on Twitter yesterday afternoon and didn’t post about it because…skatey-eight million people already were posting about it, and some of the facts were unclear at the time. But given the lynching “in effigy” of the governor of Kentucky on Sunday, and the death by cop of yet another black guy in Minneapolis last night, and the facts that have been clarified by now – there are things worth saying.

The tweet that everyone was talking about yesterday:

https://twitter.com/melodyMcooper/status/1264965252866641920

Slate tells the story:

An interaction between a black male birder and a white woman walking her dog in Central Park early Monday morning went viral after the woman called the police on the man when he

Read the rest


Evil in action

May 25th, 2020 4:44 pm | By

This is horrifying to watch – more so than I expected. It’s “in effigy” so I didn’t think it would be all that disturbing, but I was wrong.

The song is deeply ironic. We are ashamed to be American right now.

Read the rest



Guest post: He articulates their misplaced rage

May 25th, 2020 3:20 pm | By

Originally a comment by Claire on Marcus Aurelius he isn’t.

I grew up amongst these people too, albeit in the UK not the US. But the working class man who toils down the pit or on the docks or the steelworks etc, tough, salt of the earth types who don’t tolerate anything they regard as weakness (with a special focus on “womanly” behaviors) are the same there too.

I’m from the northeast of England, where once there were jobs aplenty in those industrialized industries. The men whose fathers and grandfathers and so on worked down the pit, they work down the pit and they expect their sons to do so as well. Except they didn’t because the collieries, the … Read the rest



Marcus Aurelius he isn’t

May 25th, 2020 11:50 am | By

Tom Nichols in the Atlantic asks a question many of us have asked and asked and asked – why do working class men love Trump when he’s so “unmanly”?

Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of masculinity. The president’s inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more

Read the rest


An abundance of caution

May 25th, 2020 11:05 am | By

Dominic Cummings’s perfectly reasonable not at all crazy explanation for that little side trip to Barnard Castle is that his eyes were wonky from his bout with COVID-19 so before driving himself and wife and child back to London from Durham he would take a little test drive (with child) to find out if he could see well enough to drive. As one does.

https://twitter.com/HadleyFreeman/status/1264974277545267205

https://twitter.com/Simon_Pegg/status/1264966247894126597 … Read the rest