The Anti-Trump Hotel.

Oh, this place sounds fabulous! From what I’ve read, I might want to live there. :D

The first thing you’ll see when you walk into Eaton Workshop, a hotel opening in late spring 2018 in Washington, is a custom-commissioned video art installation by AJ Schnack, shown on a series of vintage-style television screens. All day long, it’ll broadcast a montage of footage from the presidential elections of 2012 and 2016 that’s built around one pointed question: How did our country get where it is today?

It’s not a subtle statement, and it’s not meant to be.

In Trump’s Washington, Eaton is planting a clear flag as a haven for Democrats. It’s the world’s first politically motivated hotel, the flagship for a global brand that’s built around social activism and community engagement. And it comes with a pedigree: As the daughter of Ka Shui Lo, the creator and executive chairman of Hong Kong-based Langham Hospitality Group Ltd., founder Katherine Lo knows a thing or two about luxury hotels and world-class service.

Lo firmly believes that hotels ought to be catalysts for good. In a world where we can be conscious consumers—of everything from clothing to food to baby products—she argues there’s a place for conscious hotels, too. This isn’t a revolutionary idea: Already, 1 Hotels has built a small collection of luxury properties entirely around the idea of sustainability, and Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts has made a significant, brand-wide commitment to bolster community programming for disadvantaged children in all of its destinations. It’s one of many five-star brands that have a conscious ethos but choose not to flaunt it.

Eaton Workshop is different. With a premise that’s built around liberal activism and civic engagement, the brand will weave a liberal philosophy into every aspect of the guest experience, some more obvious than others.

[…]

Among the Washington location’s programming signatures will be a sort of TED talk series driven by the liberal agenda, consisting of fireside chats and rooftop lectures that Lo hopes will be free, open to the public, and streamable as Eaton-branded podcasts. Then comes the art program, which—aside from the political statement piece at check-in—will include commissions from at least a half-dozen up-and-coming local artists and a street-facing exhibition window curated in partnership with local museums and institutions. A co-working space will prioritize memberships for progressive startups, activists, and artists, while a wellness program will offer “inner-health-focused treatments” such as Reiki and sound baths, rather than facials and massages. (Some of these features will roll out a few months after the hotel opens.)

Just as important, partners and staff will be brought on board, both for their skills in the food and beverage worlds and their activist track records. For instance, Lo saw the cocktail director of the famed Columbia Room, Derek Brown, as a perfect fit to be the hotel’s beverage director—not just because he’s won such awards as Imbibe magazine’s Bartender of the Year but because he “cares deeply about social justice.” To wit, Brown actively champions policies that fight sexual harassment in the bartending industry and acts as chief spirit advisor for the National Archives.

Similarly, Lo says that the “amazing life story” of house chef Tim Ma “perfectly expresses our brand ethos.” The Chinese-American culinary up-and-comer was an engineer at the National Security Agency for years before discovering his true passion in food. At Eaton’s to-be-named restaurant, Ma is planning a menu with a heavy focus on vegetables from an on-site garden.

A guest who does nothing other than check in, sleep atop Eaton’s organic mattresses, and check out will still have a sense of the hotel’s mission, says Lo. “We plan to have new ideas in the minibar—an activist toolkit, for example, that includes sheets with information to help you call your congresspeople. And if we’d been open during this year’s Women’s March, I could have seen us putting poster boards and markers in the rooms!”

Political statements such as these will be tailored to each property. In Hong Kong, for instance, Lo says she’d like to replace Bibles in the nightstand drawers with copies of the United Nations Declaration for Human Rights.

Raw Story and Bloomberg have this story.  Eaton Workshop.

“It’s all just girls, girls, girls playing politics,”

The conservatears of rage and bewilderment are flowing over recent election results. Naturally, it’s all us evil female types who are to blame, and the wimpy excuses for men who allow us to vote. It’s the ruination of Amerikka! Really truly.

CRTV commentator Gavin McInnes, who also leads the bizarre, misogynistic “Proud Boys”* fraternity, said that the historic electionof several openly transgender people to state and local offices earlier this week can be blamed on men allowing women to vote.

More on this absurd Proud Boy nonsense later.

On yesterday’s episode of “Get Off My Lawn,” McInnes was joined by Gateway Pundit’s White House reporter Lucian Wintrich, who joined him in attributing major Republican losses to Democrats campaigning on “identity politics” by putting forward diverse candidates. They went on to attribute the election of transgender people, including Virginia state assembly candidate Danica Roem, to women’s ability to vote.

“The liberals say, ‘Maybe we should give up on identity politics,’ but you look at all the Sikhs and black people and trans who won in this election and all these unprecedented cases. It had nothing to do with policy. It was all identity politics,” McInnes said.

No, it’s not liberals who are all tangled up in “identity politics”. You’re confusing us inclusive types with the white nationalist nazis. Very different groups, so try to get it right. Sikhs, black people, transgender people, oh my! Why the sky will fall any moment, I’m sure. This would be known as having representatives on all levels who actually reflect the make up of our society. Old white men don’t represent most of us, and if they are going to faint at having to work with people of colour and women, perhaps they should retire. Go fishin’ or something.

He continued, “I was looking at those two trannies who won. There’s no substance there at all. And I think it’s because we let women vote. Women have been voting now based on their ‘feels’ for many years. They brought us Obama, no substance.”

Just have to be disrespectful, don’t you? Transgender people. Or y’know, just people. Or women. Or, and this is really radical – the descriptor of their choice. This woman votes on issues, and emotion is not dirty word, you fucking idiot. Perhaps you wouldn’t be so hung up if you allowed your self to feel something other than anger and aggrieved entitlement, Mr. McInnes. No substance? Hahahahahahahahaha. Oh, I think we know where all the substanceless hot air is residing.

“It’s all just girls, girls, girls playing politics,” McInnes said.

And loving it. You’re just going to have to suck it up, Mr. McInnes, we aren’t leaving the playing field now.  So you know though, it’s women. We aren’t children.

Wintrich said he wanted to know when liberals would realize that “playing the intersectionality game to elect people” results in “terrible people that are ruining the country.”

We aren’t playing a game. It’s a hell of a lot of work, getting people woke, and using their vote to accomplish progress and positive change. Intersectionality is not a game, it’s vital to having a healthy society. So is inclusion. Granted, this ‘1950s ideal’ you morons clutch might be finally staked into its grave, and that’s a good thing. A very good thing.

“I’m excited to see how badly this tranny actually fucks up Virginia,” Wintrich said.

We don’t need to know what gives you a boner, Mr. Wintrich. Truly. I have no doubt Ms. Roem will not fuck up Virginia in the least, and will probably help Virginia a great deal. As I recall, she was focused on traffic issues, which the citizens of Virginia are also concerned with, so let her get on with her job, you nasty little doucheweasel.

The full mess, with video, is at RWW. Now, about that Proud Boy nonsense…

[Read more…]

“It’s Okay To Be White.”

(Screenshot/4Chan.org).

All us lefties are going to start foaming at the mouth, wilt, and just give up in the face of It’s Okay To Be White. Odd, but I don’t feel a swoon coming one, and my monocle is unpopped.

In right-wing internet message boards, users are encouraging one another to print and hang posters that state simply “It’s OK to be white” with the goal of exposing what they claim is anti-white racism in liberal communities and on college campuses.

Creators of the signs were first inspired by a news report that police were investigating fliers hung at Boston College that depicted Uncle Sam and the text, “I want you to love who you are” and “Don’t apologize for being white.” Reporters noted that the signs were posted near the planned location of an anti-racism rally on campus.

Earlier this week, 4chan users called on one another to hang fliers in their own communities with a more succinct spin on the Boston signs, making the statement “It’s Okay To Be White” in large easy-to-read font with no other context. One post detailing the plan explained the goal was to make liberals go “completely berserk” and ruin their credibility, marking a “massive victory for the right in the culture war.” [The linked post actually says media will go berserk.]

The campaign also urges participants to use adhesives that are non-permanent in order to avoid violating any laws and to conceal the signs’ connections to “racists or the alt-right.” One campaign graphic reads: “The simplicity is the point. It’s working.”

Right-wing YouTube creators have also taken notice, including Infowars editor-in-chief Paul Joseph Watson and white nationalist Paul Ramsey. Alt-right video bloggers James Allsup and Nick Fuentes even launched their own spin-off of the signs that read “Make your ancestors proud. Never feel guilty for who you are,” and solicited donations to produce and distribute their posters.

Oooh, be proud of your ancestors! Okay, I am. Funny how my pride amounts to “you stupid Indians, shut up! Pipelines are good!” and the like. That’s the problem with white pride, it excludes everyone else. Of course, exclusion is what white colonial pride is all about: “white people masters, everyone else, lay down to be trodden on.” This little campaign is hardly different from all the other shite supremacy, so it’s not a shock, it’s not even a surprise. White people being suuuuuper assholes simply has zero shock value.

There’s more to the story, RWW has it.

The Christian Contagion: Globalizing Hate.

Good old American style Christian hate, it’s never enough, it must be contagious, on a pestilential level.

In the latest sign that the U.S. Religious Right increasingly views its anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice activism as part of a global culture war, American activists will be part of the training team at next month’s European Advocacy Academy, which is designed to make European advocates for “traditional” views on sex, gender and family more effective—and to make them “part of an international network that transcends country borders.” U.S.-based Religious Right groups have actively promoted anti-LGBTQ equality measures in Europe under the banner of protecting the family.

It’s bad enough that the Religious Reich has the amount of power they do in uStates, without it spreading the message of its diseased thinking elsewhere. All societies have their problems, but most of the ones in Europe are light years ahead of uStates, progressively speaking. These Americans are very bad news, and should be considered to be a contagion in the proper sense, and turned away.  The worst dregs of societies everywhere embrace this poisonous hate, drinking down the toxic kool-aid with nary a thought. Fascists of all stripes grab onto such venomous thinking like it was a lifeline, and it does provide them with even more excuses for their particular brand of hatred.

The European Advocacy Academy is organized by European Dignity Watch, a Brussels-based nonprofit group founded in 2010 that says it “defends the most vital foundations of a free society: fundamental freedoms and responsibility, marriage and the family, and the protection of life from conception to natural death.”

Oy. Short form: we don’t give a damn about you, or what you believe, you must live your life the way we say!” RWW has the full story, along with details on some of the speakers.

Trick or Tweet!

© C. Ford.

Oh, the right wing. So very gullible. You can make up anything, and they will swallow it whole so quickly, you wouldn’t have time to blink. There is such a twitchy desperation to believe anything negative about their self-defined enemies, they lie in wait, ready to pounce, on anything.

An anonymous but popular comedian on Twitter who tweets under the username “Krang T Nelson”—an homage to a cartoon character in “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”—was suspended from Twitter after posting a satirical status mocking conservative fearmongering around a series of demonstrations organized by Refuse Fascism, a group separate from Antifa, scheduled for November 4. The user tweeted:

Screengrab.

Twitter suspended the Krang T Nelson account after the post was reported by conservatives who believed the tweet was serious. Fellow Twitter comedian Tom Bloke then copied and pasted the since-removed tweet to his own profile to show solidarity. It didn’t take long for the worst right-wing pundits to seize the opportunity to embarrass themselves.

The Gateway Pundit’s White House reporter Lucian Wintrich reported on the satirical tweet reposted by Bloke as if it was a serious threat of “anti-white racism” against “white parents” and “small business owners.”  Wintrich also identified Bloke as “one of the leaders of the domestic terrorist group ANTIFA,” which is a lie.

The Gateway Pundit went on and on about Antifa, not caring one whit that they were taken in. They have a graphic comparing Nazis to Antifa, and note:

Primarily comprised of white, pale-skinned, stick-thin men, and obese pimple-ridden women, Antifa hide behind masks to both disguise their grotesque appearances and to feel “united” with the others in their group.

Not only gullible, ignorant, and mis-informed, but so very juvenile, too.

Pro-Trump sycophant radio host Bill Mitchell shared the Gateway Pundit article with his followers:

Screengrab.

Ian Miles Cheong got in on the re-tweet panic, too, and defended his panic when he was informed he was panicking over nothing at all. You can read about the whole mess at RWW, and they also provide a link to the new account of Krang.

Oh, So That’s What It Took.

Robert Galbraith/Reuters.

Reddit announced on Wednesday evening that it was shutting down several neo-Nazi forums that promote violence — just hours after it was revealed that a Trump-loving Redditor had fatally stabbed his own father.

In an announcement posted on its website, Reddit said it was cracking down on violent content in a way that it hadn’t done before.

“Going forward, we will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people,” the website wrote. “Likewise, we will also take action against content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals. This applies to ALL content on Reddit, including memes, CSS/community styling, flair, subreddit names, and usernames.”

Among other neo-Nazi communities, Reddit has shut down /r/pol,/r/nazi, and /r/DylannRoofInnocent.

Reddit didn’t discover their ethics until after the Daily Beast exposé, so it’s a bit difficult to give them so much as one point for doing the right thing. They have had one very long time indeed to clean their forums up; they’ve certainly received enough complaints over the years from users as well as outside criticism. It will be interesting to see if they actually follow through this time, and stand against their former stance of ‘hey, sewers are alright, we’re making a lot of money!”

Via Daily Beast and Raw Story.

You Can’t Free My Slaves!

Steve Prattor, Sheriff of Caddo Parish in Louisiana, addresses reporters (Screen cap).

Apparently, Sheriff Steve Prattor is not the least abashed in hollering out his displeasure over non-violent convicts being released early.

Steve Prattor, the Sheriff of Caddo Parish in Louisiana, is not a fan of his state’s new criminal justice reforms that will free many prisoners convicted of nonviolent offenses earlier than they had been scheduled to be released.

In a press conference held this week, Prattor said that keeping some of the “good” prisoners in jail was necessary for the prisons to keep functioning because they could provide needed labor that you couldn’t get out of more violent and dangerous prisoners.

“The [prisoners] that you can work, the ones that can pick up trash, the work release programs — but guess what? Those are the ones that they’re releasing!” Prattor fumed in his attack against criminal justice reforms. “In addition to the bad ones… they’re releasing some good ones that we use every day to wash cars, to change the oil in our cars, to cook in the kitchen… well, they’re going to let them out!”

My, my, you’re going to lose your slaves, what a pity. Perhaps you should learn to wash your own cars, how to change the oil in them, and strap an apron on, Sheriff, and get your arse to work.

Via Raw Story.

Happy Indigenous Peoples Day.

In celebration of Indigenous Peoples Day, have a book! Nothing like some good reading. Give As We Have Always Done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson a read, you won’t be sorry! Ms. Simpson’s site is here, Peter d’Errico reviewed here, and the book can be purchased direct from UMN press.

Repeating: 6 Banal Defenses of Columbus Day, And How You Should Respond to the Moron.

Photo courtesy starpulse.com

Photo courtesy starpulse.com

We’re going to go back in time a bit, to an article Simon Moya-Smith wrote in January this year. He’ll help you out with Columbus apologists. Happy Indigenous Peoples Day!

Glaring contradictions. Stupid fucking lies, and good ol’ American bullshit.

Yes, folks today we are talking U.S. history, and there’s nothing more politically correct than American History. It’s RIFE with soft language to spare the feelings of fuckers who desperately want to believe their homesteading great-grand-pappy wasn’t a murdering, raping, thief.

OK. So today let’s hit on the numbskullery surrounding Columbus Day. “Why in January?” you ask. Well because Colorado State House Representative Joseph Salazar, a democrat, is currently working to repeal the foul thing from the state’s list of recognized holidays. And lately he has received an onslaught of hate mail from dipshits who don’t seem to understand the seemingly elusive concept of logic and facts.

Recently, Rep. Salazar has been forwarding me these messages, and they range from fucking hilarious to seriously fucking delusional. They’re more on the seriously fucking delusional side, though.

So, I thought I’d share with you some responses you can use against the common, hackneyed pro-Columbus Day arguments you will surely continue to encounter for as long as you engage the willfully blind. Feel free to share the following with your friends or family, or maybe just that fucker who sits at the end of the bar incessantly defending the bullshit American narrative as written. (Remember: The American narrative HATES to be fact-checked. So fact-check that goddamn thing any time you can.)

Okey dokey, here’s what you can say to those dullards spewing trite claims and arguments about Columbus and Columbus Day, and let us start with the most common and least accurate:

[Read more…]

Repeating: The Lie That Is Columbus Day.

ict_editoon_100716-2

© Marty Two Bulls

Other posts from last year:

The why of the “holiday”.

A Rapist, A Murderer, Deserves No Holiday.

Columbus Didn’t Kill Us All: Taino Daca.

For Indigenous Peoples Day, Write to Columbus.

Moron Bingo!

Well Said.

Jacob Worrell: As a former “troop”, I give you permission to kneel during the National Anthem. And I give myself permission to give the finger to any asshole who invokes the dead bodies of my brothers and sisters to shut down dissent. Want to honor their sacrifice? Make fewer dead bodies.

It’s a fucking flag. It’s a fucking song. If you don’t like it, change the fucking channel and slap another yellow ribbon on the back of your jeep. #VeteransForKaepernick

Jacob Worrell: No holding back on this one. Public profanity is warranted.

Sunday Facepalm: Vox Day, Comic Saviour.

Vox Day, screengrab.

Get those palms ready for some facin’, people. Whatever you do, no headdesking, you’ll kill yourself. Vox Day has decided to rescue comics from the horrible SJW hell they have become, because everyone hates them, and besides, Vox is sure he has hit on the perfect way to make all us lefties wail and gnash our teef.

Beale told his fans that major comic makers are “methodically, purposefully, absolutely attempting to destroy every value—every American value, every Western value, every Christian value that they can get their hands on” by creating spinoffs of popular comic series that depict classic characters as black, female and Muslim. Beale’s answer to that perceived attack is to fund the creation of a comic series that features “triggering” white characters that smoke cigarettes, wear Confederate flag costumes and combat left-wing protesters.

Hmmm. Well, I smoke, so I don’t think that will press the trigger. Every day, there are photos of assholes wandering about in Nazi regalia and waving confederate flags, and I haven’t swooned yet. I have an idea this won’t work the way ol’ Vox thinks it will, especially as us lefties aren’t exactly in the market for asshole comix.

The series promises “storylines, not social justice” and revolves around a collection of superhuman heroes that defy a United Nations “Superhuman Protection Council” and act as vigilante crime fighters who apparently use their rogue status to target undocumented immigrants and left-wing protesters.

Ooooh, gotta say, that’s right…boring.

What I found the most interesting was the idea that anything short of an undefined “success”, which as we all know will be redefined and re-redefined as Alt⭐️Hero meets with the usual metrics of success over time, is tantamount to “sad humilation”. Think about how twisted one’s psyche has to be to make that connection, and what a crushing fear of failure one would have to have in order to think that way.

That is the heart of the SJW, which is not only terrified of failure, but is terrified that someone, somewhere, will be successful doing something of which the SJW does not approve.

Of course, SJWs have good reason to be terrified of Alt⭐️Hero. Because they know they are the true villains and the enemy in the cultural war.

Hahahahaha oh my. I’m afraid sad puppy Vox is setting himself up for  sad humiliation. (I have no idea if humiliation is the same thing as humilation, someone can ask Vox for me.) Is everyone ready?

You can read much more at RWW.