Oh, The Irony.

Ryan Roy, a former Pizzeria Uno cook who was fired for attending a white nationalist rally (Screen cap).

Ryan Roy, the charmin’ gent pictured above, was outed as a participant in the nazi mess in Charlottesville. He was identified by activists who don’t think nazis marching around is a great idea, and his employers (a South Burlington Pizzeria Uno), to their credit, promptly fired him. Naturally, Mr. Roy is being incredibly whiny about it all. Perhaps you shouldn’t choose asshole nazi as a lifestyle, given that it has consequences. Unfortunately, the massive overload of irony doesn’t seem to have impacted Mr. Roy at all. My head, on the other hand, feels right caved in.

In an interview with the Free Press, Roy decried the liberal activists who got him fired from his job and alleged they weren’t tolerant of his belief that white Americans should have their own country that is separate from all racial minorities.

Oh, well, open a beer, Mr. Roy, I’m a liberal who is happy to support you wanting your own country – get the fuck out of this one, and find one. I’ll drink to your good riddance. It’s my understanding that there are often islands for sale. Perhaps you could start there, and I’m sure in no time you could have Whitesylvania or whatever.

“I think it kind of just proves my point, proves a lot of what I think, not that I needed further proof,” Roy said. “I think it’s group think.”

Oh, rats below. You were the one in a large group, carrying torches, and chanting “blood and soil” and “Jews won’t replace us”, and you want to accuse others of group think.

Roy freely admitted to attending the rally, which he said was designed to advocate turning the United States back into a “white” country.

“Obviously I would advocate for racial separation and racial nationalism or repatriation or even a return to — our country was a white country up until the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act,” he said.

“Our country”.  You can fuck right off, Mr. Roy. This isn’t your fucking country, and it most certainly was not white when you colonial thieves showed up and starting slaughtering everything in sight. You want white? Fine, march yourself off and find a place you can be deliriously white. It will not be this country, who has no use for fucking nazis.

Via Raw Story.

Oh, That Evil Science!

Members of the National Socialist Movement (Neo-Nazis) during a 2010 march to the Phoenix Federal building (John Kittelsrud/Flickr).

Do you remember when asshole extraordinaire, Craig Cobb got genetically tested? He’s the nazi who tried to set up NaziTown here in nDakota. Mr. Cobb wasn’t terribly pleased with his results, only 86% European. Ooops. He immediately dismissed the remaining 14% as “statistical noise”, and ran to Stormfront to dispute the results. Stormfront’s heyday was quite a number of years back, but it’s still populated with scads of delusional white people, many of whom have turned to genetic testing to affirm their whiteness. That evil science though, it just doesn’t care about a nazi’s sensibilities, and the results have had some interesting results.

With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s a trend of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity, and then using online forums to discuss the results.

But like Cobb, many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is not as “white” as they’d hoped. In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years’ worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.

It’s striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results online at all. After all, as Panofsky put it, “they will basically say if you want to be a member of Stormfront you have to be 100 percent white European, not Jewish.”

But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said, the conversations are “overwhelmingly” focused on helping the person to rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques – while emerging from deep-seated racism – are close to scientists’ own qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.

[…]

The team winnowed their results down to 70 discussion threads in which 153 users posted their genetic ancestry test results, with over 3,000 individual posts.

About a third of the people posting their results were pleased with what they found. “Pretty damn pure blood,” said a user with the username Sloth. But the majority didn’t find themselves in that situation. Instead, the community often helped them reject the test, or argue with its results.

Some rejected the tests entirely, saying that an individual’s knowledge about his or her own genealogy is better than whatever a genetic test can reveal. “They will talk about the mirror test,” said Panofsky, who is a sociologist of science at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. “They will say things like, ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.'” Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don’t matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy “that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry,” Panofsky said.

[…]

For the study authors, what was most interesting was to watch this online community negotiating its own boundaries, rethinking who counts as “white.” That involved plenty of contradictions. They saw people excluded for their genetic test results, often in very nasty (and unquotable) ways, but that tended to happen for newer members of the anonymous online community, Panofsky said, and not so much for longtime, trusted members. Others were told that they could remain part of white nationalist groups, in spite of the ancestry they revealed, as long as they didn’t “mate,” or only had children with certain ethnic groups. Still others used these test results to put forth a twisted notion of diversity, one “that allows them to say, ‘No, we’re really diverse and we don’t need non-white people to have a diverse society,'” said Panofsky.

It really wouldn’t take much for the ranks of wannabe nazis to implode. The full story is here.

Michele Bachmann, Pastor to United Nations.

Screengrab.

The Jefferson Gathering, a group of fanatical, conservative christians who have a lock on a good portion of Congress, have decided in their compleat lack of wisdom to “appoint” Michele Bachmann as the new pastor to The United Nations. I imagine this is basically more the ‘aimed prayer’ crap they have going now, or at least I hope so. I can’t imagine Ms. Bachmann being welcomed with open arms by the UN, especially in light of her feelings about that organisation.

The Jefferson Gathering, a project of right-wing pastor Jim Garlow’s Skyline Church through which Pastor Dan Cummings regularly preaches to members of Congress in an effort to drive Satan out of the Capitol.

Last weekend, Garlow announced to his congregation that Skyline will be expanding its prayer efforts to the United Nations with a ministry that will be led by former Rep. Michele Bachmann.

“What if you wanted to disciple all nations and you wanted to reach the whole world?” Garlow asked during his Sunday service. “So God did you a favor, he simply arranged so all the world came to one place at one time so you could reach them all at once. What would you call it? You’d call it the United Nations and that would be the most economical way that you could possible reach the leaders.”

Yabbut y’all think the UN is evil, but you’re gonna go with goddidit?

After discussing the assistance he had received in establishing this ministry from the Religious Right group C-Fam and revealing that Fox News reporter Jon Decker will be working pro bono as its communications director, Garlow proudly introduced “Skyline’s new pastor to the United Nations, Michele Bachmann.”

Bachmann was thrilled by her new mission and told the congregation that this “audacious step” was needed now more than ever.

I rather doubt this is limelight enough for Ms. Bachmann, but I’m sure she’ll maneuver it into something better, perhaps a spot at Fox.

“I don’t know a darker, more deceived place on earth than the U.N.,” she said. “Because as we saw at the Tower of Babel, that’s probably the last time when we saw all the nations of the earth come together in a moment of deception … Their goal has been from the very beginning, the creation of a one-world order; but not a one-world order under the umbrella of the Holy Spirit, a man’s attempt at a one-world order that only brings about chaos, confusion, deception, delusion, pain. And that’s where, rather than cursing the darkness, Skyline Church is about to light a candle.”

Ummmm, did I miss something? “As we saw at the Tower of Babel”? No, no one saw such a thing, for good reason, too. Oh, the spectre of the ecumenical church again! Gad, that was the big bogeyman back in my Jesus Freak days, and that was a long time back. I often wonder how these assholes tread such a fine mental line – they must be all enthusiastic about the apocalypse nonsense, and try to help Jehovah pull that one off, while at the same time, they want to be seen as the only people holding back Jehovah’s will in regard to the terrible apocalypse. Lots of chaos, confusion, deception, and delusion there, to be sure. It will be interesting to see if Ms. Bachmann reaches a point where she thinks it is her right to barge into a UN session and start preaching.

RWW has the story, and video.

Word Wednesday.

Incantation

 
Noun: a use of spells or verbal charms spoken or sung as a part of a ritual of magic; also: a written or recited formula of words designed to produce a particular effect.

Incantational – adjective.

Incantatory – adjective.

[Origin: Middle English incantacioun, from Middle French incantation, from Late Latin incantation-, incantatio, from Latin incantare to enchant.]

(14th Century)

“It seems to me that the menu lies close to the heart of the human impulse to order, to beauty, to pattern. It draws on the original chthonic upwelling that underlies all art. A menu can embody the anthropology of a culture or the psychology of the individual; it can be a biography, a cultural history, a lexicon; it speaks to the sociology, psychology, and biology of its creator and its audience, and of course to their geographical location; it can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a shaping, a manifestation, a talisman, an injunction, a memory, a fantasy, a consolation, an allusion, an illusion, an evasion, an assertion, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark.” – The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester.

Book Note: In all my decades of reading, I’ve read a great many books which could be described as creepy. The Debt to Pleasure is, hands down, the creepiest damn book I have ever read. It’s a compelling read, in spite of the fact that the main character is one without a single redeeming feature. This book gets into your head, and leaves a rather disturbing taste in the brain.

Need Another Reason to Denounce Nazis?

Here you go:

SCOOP: “Weev”, the system administrator for The Daily Stormer is planning on sending Nazis to #HeatherHeyer funeral. #Charlottesville.

“Yo, I need some research done,” Weev wrote. “What’s the location of this fat skank’s funeral.”

“Get on it, e-sleuths,” he added. “I want to get people on the ground there.”

This is appalling and shocking behaviour. Have we all become so damned weary and jaded that this too, is normalised? We cannot let this be. We cannot dare to enter the silence of complicity. We must keep standing up, we must fight, we must yell back. This cannot become acceptable. This cannot become tolerable, in any way.

Via Raw Story.

Denouncing Nazis.

Pearce Tefft recently wrote an open letter to his son. The other day, PZ posted about the fanatical racist relative he had. I grew up with a rabid John Bircher and bigot extraordinaire. While I was not completely silent in the face of that bigotry, I certainly did not speak up as often or as loudly as I should have done. It’s past time we stop playing all these little games with ourselves, pretending that these bigots aren’t really terrible people, because they are so and so’s Auntie Martha, or Uncle John, and so forth. It’s past time to stop pretending that all the nazis aren’t a problem. They are, and they have now descended into open murder. Conservative Christians are raging in their defense of nazism, and frantically attempting to pin blame everywhere except where it belongs. It’s past time for us all to gather our courage, and speak out. And to keep on speaking out. The more of this we do, the more will join in, finding support. Siobhan has an excellent reason to start yelling at the top of your voice.

My name is Pearce Tefft, and I am writing to all, with regards to my youngest son, Peter Tefft, an avowed white nationalist who has been featured in a number of local news stories over the last several months.

On Friday night, my son traveled to Charlottesville, Va., and was interviewed by a national news outlet while marching with reported white nationalists, who allegedly went on to kill a person.

I, along with all of his siblings and his entire family, wish to loudly repudiate my son’s vile, hateful and racist rhetoric and actions. We do not know specifically where he learned these beliefs. He did not learn them at home.

I have shared my home and hearth with friends and acquaintances of every race, gender and creed. I have taught all of my children that all men and women are created equal. That we must love each other all the same.

Evidently Peter has chosen to unlearn these lessons, much to my and his family’s heartbreak and distress. We have been silent up until now, but now we see that this was a mistake. It was the silence of good people that allowed the Nazis to flourish the first time around, and it is the silence of good people that is allowing them to flourish now.

You can read the rest of Mr. Tefft’s letter here.