but it wouldn’t have been much of a party without all you wonderful people who bother to read and comment here. You are what keeps me going, and you have provided a great deal of support through many dark days. You have also provided me with a wealth of content, my profuse thanks for that, too! So…
And Happy Anniversary to us all!
:D
A long exposure of ‘Ocean Wave’.
This is a stunning art piece, and watching the video, oh, there’s immense joy and delight in it. Watch, then go over to The Creators Project to read all about it!
Joe Baker, Room 101.
…Part of 1984‘s appeal is the language Orwell developed for identifying fascist control methods that are increasingly visible today. Power structures like the Ministries of Truth, Peace, Plenty, and Love—each of which represents the opposite of its title—are reflected in an Environmental Protection Agency led by a climate change denier, and an education department run by someone who prefers “charter” to public education. Conway’s “alternative facts” sound a lot like the book’s “Newspeak,” the simplification and rebranding of common language, and “Doublethink,” whereby the government controls historical records and the news, sounds an awful lot like Breitbart retellings of current events.
With 1984‘s popularity, the constant debate about whether our current world is more like Orwell’s dystopia or the one described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World has resurfaced as well. Both books warn of the dangers their authors perceived was on the horizon, but the living legacy of 1984 is its mark on language, so Creators asked artists to illustrate the terms and concepts from the book that they see reflected in today’s society.
Alex Gamsu Jenkins, Two Minutes of Hate.
You can see the rest of the fabulous artwork, along with each artist’s statement at The Creators Project. Fantastic work!
Downy Woodpecker, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
All the Nazis have a brand new hero, Rep. Steve King. King finally stopped dancing around his white supremacist beliefs, and all the Nazis are jubilant, as reported by Think Progress.
CREDIT: Screenshot, Daily Stormer.
“Steve King is basically an open white nationalist at this point,” Andrew Anglin wrote on Sunday. Anglin is the founder of The Daily Stormer, a meme-heavy, far-right site that takes its name from an English translation of a Nazi tabloid. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently reported The Daily Stormer has become the most popular English-language, far-right site on the internet.
“OUR civilization and SOMEBODY ELSE’S babies. Not really any nuance there,” Anglin wrote. “Steve King should be Speaker of the House. Period. There [sic] is as plain as the nose on your face. He is /ourguy/.”
[…]
And that, from a sitting congressman, is part of what has internet racists excited — both about the comments themselves, and what they suggest regarding the prominence of white nationalism under Trump.
“King is more /ourguy/ than Trump has ever been, but would he be saying these kinds of things without Trump? We can only hope these kinds of statements serve to embolden more of our people, as they see that people like themselves are in positions of power,” begins an article on Altright.com, Richard Spencer’s new site.
[…]
Spencer himself also praised the comments, saying in a YouTube video that he’s “proud” of King and musing, “if this is a signal that conservatives are moving in the right direction under Trump, that they are getting at something real, then I am very happy.”
That line was echoed on Gab, which became the favored messaging platform of white nationalists after Twitter started cracking down on hate speech.
“If Trump’s presidency has emboldened members of Congress to speak up against our destruction, the success or failure of Trump’s policies will be a mere footnote in his legacy,” one use wrote.
David Duke, former leader of the KKK, went on a Twitter tear praising King, urging supporters to move to Iowa, and floating King as a successor to Trump who would “finish the job.”
[…]
King also drew praise on Stormfront, a neo-Nazi web forum founded by a former Alabama Klan boss. The SPLC calls Stormfront “the first major hate site on the Internet,” and, until it was overtaken by the Daily Stormer, it was the most prominent.
“Congressman King has always stood up to the anti-white establishment but lately he seems to have manned up to his full power level,” one user wrote, praising King for not walking back on Monday. “When they get our back we need to get theirs. A U.S. Congressman is not just some smuck [sic]. BUGS, Alt-Right, 4Chan, Pepe Task Force…you guys already own most of the internet. Maybe help out the Congressman?”
Other users at Stormfront were thrilled at the new platform for their ideas.
“At least the idea is being talked about in the news,” one user wrote, ending their post “88” — which is shorthand among neo-Nazis for “Heil Hitler.”
[…]
“It’s time for KING STEVE to take his place below the throne of the GOD EMPEROR,” he wrote. The “god emperor” is a far-right pet name for President Trump. “We need Steve King memes ASAP. Make them, spread them. We already memed a man President, we can meme a man Speaker.”
It remains to be seen whether or not King will stand firm in his white supremacism after the inevitable backlash. So far, he’s doubled down and been unapologetic in the face of criticism. I don’t really need to point out how bad this is, do I?
Full story at Think Progress.
Shutterstock.
Oh gods, Kellyanne Conway. Who on earth let her back on television? In attempts to wave aside the whole “President Obama wiretapped me!” delusions of Mr. Tweet, she brings up ‘an article’ about surveillance, which sounds like it either came out of Breitbart or The Tin Hat Times. To People in general: NO, your microwave oven is not watching you. It’s not taking your photo. It’s not recording you, either.
Q: Do you know if Trump Tower was wiretapped?
Kellyanne: There was an article this week—you can be spied on via a camera in your microwave pic.twitter.com/rObFkIrLGG
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) March 13, 2017
Q: Do you know if Trump Tower was wiretapped?
Kellyanne: There was an article this week – you can be spied on via a camera in your microwave.
Though Trump initially accused Obama of “tapping my phones in October,” Conway suggested the surveillance might have gone much further than that. Asked by The Bergen Record if she “know[s] whether Trump Tower was wiretapped?” Conway replied, “What I can say is that there are many ways to surveil each other now, unfortunately. There was an article this week that talked about how you can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets, any number of different ways. Microwaves that turn into cameras, etcetera.”
Microwaves that turn into cameras. Earlier, Ms. Conway deflected questions by stating that she wasn’t Inspector Gadget. I think perhaps she’s been watching too much Inspector Gadget.
(WikiLeaks’ recent dump of CIA documents indicates some microwaves have the capability to be used as cameras. It appears Conway’s claim was based on that.)
I don’t think that would be much of a concern in the Trump household, would it? Do they ever actually set foot in a kitchen, or know what anything is for, and how to use it? I’d think a microwave would be out of the question, because it would be difficult to have one gold plated. (If there is a gold plated microwave out there, I beg of you, please let me live in ignorance.)
Later, on Good Morning America, host George Stephanopoulos asked Conway was asked why she would suggest Obama using high-tech microwaves to surveil her boss “without any evidence.” Conway responded by saying she was actually referring to surveillance capabilities in general, not what did or did not happen in Trump Tower specifically, and acknowledged she has no evidence that Trump was surveilled whatsoever.
“No, of course I don’t have evidence for these allegations,” Conway said.
That rather sums up the whole fuckin’ regime. The full story is at Think Progress.
Trump l’oeil: the atrium of Trump Towers.
Peter York has a fascinating essay over at Politico, about the shared aesthetics of dictators. Florid, overblown, excessive, and so on. Within this rather limited aesthetic, York identifies 10 defining dictator chic rules obeyed by most dictators, and he wrote a book about Dictator Chic. Just a bit here:
After my book Dictator Style came out, friends and editors would call me to alert me to the latest tranche of pictures to be released: unverified photos of Robert Mugabe’s plutocratic-looking house in Zimbabwe, the sacked Qadhafi compound in Tripoli and the Yanukovych palace in Kiev. Each time, I felt as if I could predict every last chair cover and golden heroic beast. Come on, I’d think, surprise me!
Then, in late 2015, I came across a set of pictures with no identifying text. They appeared to show a gigantic apartment in what looked, from the windows, very much like New York. But I know Manhattan and its sophisticated style pretty well, and at first glance, you would think the place didn’t belong to an American but to a Russian oligarch, or possibly a Saudi prince with a second home in the United States. There were overscaled rooms, and obviously incorrect-looking historical detailing and proportions. The home had lots of gilded French furniture and the strange impersonal look of a hotel lobby, with chairs and sofas placed uncomfortably far from one another. There were masses of gold; there were the usual huge chandeliers, branded relics of famous sportsmen like Muhammad Ali, and mushroom-colored marble floors. There was relatively little in the way of paintings, but otherwise, the place reeked of dictator chic.
As it turned out, this familiar yet unfamiliar apartment—a familiar style to me by then, but in an unlikely location—belonged to Donald Trump, who by then was running for president. This was the penthouse of the potential leader of the free world. The design work, I have since learned, was started by the late Angelo Donghia, a decorator better known for a chic Manhattan look. But the substantive current design had been done by one Henry Conversano, who designed extensively—and perhaps unsurprisingly—for casinos. No matter how you looked at it, the main thing this apartment said was, “I am tremendously rich and unthinkably powerful.” This was the visual language of public, not private, space. It was the language of the Eastern European and Middle Eastern nouveau riche.
Why does all of this matter? Domestic interiors reveal how people want to be seen. But they also reveal something about the owners’ inner lives, their cultural reference points and how they relate to other people.
Head over to Politico for the full article, recommended!
CREDIT: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall.
Rep. Steve King (R-IA), that massive knob of white supremacy combined with super-stupidity, is at it again, this time tweeting about the badness of “someone else’s babies”, by which of course, he means any non-white babies. I’ll be going between two articles here, one from Raw Story [RS], and one from Think Progress [TP].
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) has long been a friend to the European far right.
He’s hobnobbed with the leaders of hardline anti-immigrant parties across Western and Central Europe. He’s touted his “friendship” with Norbert Hofer, the 2016 Austrian presidential candidate for the Freedom Party, which was founded in 1956 by a former Nazi officer. And he’s made no secret of his support for French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, leader of the nativist party National Front.
After meeting with Geert Wilders and Frauke Petry — anti-immigrant demagogues from the Netherlands and Germany, respectively — in September 2016, King even tweeted a photo with the aphorism, “Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end.”
@FraukePetry Wishing you successful vote. Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end. @geertwilderspvv pic.twitter.com/Kp6uieaMDG
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) September 18, 2016
@FraukePetry Wishing you successful vote. Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end. @geertwilderspvv 18/9/16.
But on Sunday of this week, King embraced language that is incendiary even by his corroded standards. In a tweet once again supporting Wilders — who is in the final days of his latest bid to become prime minister of the Netherlands — King said: “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
The tweet also quoted from “Voice of Europe,” an “Anti EU / Pro Europe / MAGA” account that frequently promulgates messages deriding Muslim immigration and endorsing far-right European leaders such as Wilders.
Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) March 12, 2017
Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies. [TP]
Rep. Ted Lieu shot right back:
Dear Representative Steve King: These are my two babies. –Representative Ted Lieu pic.twitter.com/MHU21jJUrY
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) March 12, 2017
Dear Representative Steve King: These are my two babies. –Representative Ted Lieu. 12/3/17.
After King posted the tweet — and former KKK leader David Duke retweeted it — Twitter moved in to mock, deride and chastise the congressman for spreading propaganda from one of Europe’s most virulently racist public figures. [RS]
You can read much more at Think Progress and Raw Story.
Aaaaaand, we have an update, in the water is wet and Steve King is still a white supremacist knob category! He has now defended his Nazism on television:
Asked by New Day host Chris Cuomo to defend the comments on Monday, King doubled down on his view that “western civilization” must be defended. Pressed on whether he believes “a Muslim American, an Italian American, Jewish American, [are] all equal, all the same thing,” King hesitated.
“They contribute differently to our culture and civilization.” the Iowa Republican responded. “Individuals will contribute differently, not equally to this civilization and society. Certain groups of people will do more from a productive side than other groups of people will.”
@beeredblackman via Instagram.
Really? FFS. I’ll let Michael Harriot at The Root do the talking.
In the latest case of tone-deaf whiteness, a craft-beer lover in Birmingham, Ala., posted the above picture to Instagram.
Really?
Some people believe (and by “some people” I mean me) that most white people—and people in general—have tasteless jokes and stereotypes that they are comfortable enough to perpetuate in private or around their friends. But someone went out and brewed a beer, had labels printed up and bottled a beer whose name appropriates a movement meant to save lives. Even worse, some brave retailer looked at all of this and said, “Yeah, I’ll sell it for you.”
Regardless of one’s position on the #BlackLivesMatter movement, it is indicative of the reality of toxic privilege that we live in a world where people are comfortable enough to do this unchecked. Ralph Marion is the guy who shared the pic to Instagram on Feb. 15, and to his credit, he thought the name was uncalled for. He explained to Mic:
“They made a parody of a very serious issue,” Marion said, explaining that there are a lot of beers that “sometimes toe the line of being insensitive but are still funny.” …
“I just find this being clueless of the times that we are living in right now and how it could make people feel,” Marion said of the #Black Stouts Matter beer name.
[…]
OK, my beloved Caucasians, I will explain it one more time. This time, I’ll say it slowly:
You. Don’t. Get. To. Have. Everything.
I know the conquering, pillaging spirit embedded in many of you won’t allow you to hear this, but there are some things in the world that are off-limits, and this is one of them. There are dead sons and daughters in your jovial little joke. There are 400 years of tears entangled in your cute pun. If you call it anything else, it will taste the same, and if it’s good, people will still buy it. Aren’t those the “free market” principles you so proudly declare?
Or maybe you can just call it white tears, which is what you’d cry if a black person did anything equally offensive.
I’ll add that this is a callous attempt to make money off off other peoples’ grief and misery, while appealing to evil bigots. That does not make you clever, and it certainly doesn’t make you smart. Some white people (you know who you are) are a complete and utter embarrassment. Stop that shit.
Summer Peters is hoping to inspire other Indigenous women to push the boundaries of Native art. (Andrea Noline).
Summer Peters, an Ojibway artist, recently won an award for her piece, Decolonize Your Gitch. I have to say, I quite like it, there’s a joyous assertiveness to it, and a bit of happy, rebellious fuck off in there as well. The piece has come under fire from some, there are people who say it promotes violence against native women, but I think those arguments can be consigned to the same old rape culture arguments women always hear, that for some reason or other, it’s totally our fault if we end up raped, beaten or murdered. There are also a number of people, usually not native, who object to any modernization of traditional Indigenous arts.
An Ojibway artist is taking a feminist stand against online critics, who say she should be ashamed of her recent award-winning piece called Decolonize Your Gitch.
Summer Peters recently won a judge’s choice award at a U.S. art festival for her artwork, a bra and thong beaded with traditional floral designs.
After she posted it to social media, “I would say 99% of the people liked it,” Peters said.
But others objected to the piece, accusing her of “promoting violence towards native women.”
“There was a guy that said I should be ashamed of myself, my family should be ashamed of me, that I was nuts, that I was crazy, that my beadwork was shitty,” said Peters.
In response to her critics, Peters wrote in an Instagram post:
“I will take all the negative criticism so that Native lady artists in the future will maybe have an easier time … women should not be told what to do, what to wear in attempts to avoid sexual violation, we should not have to cover up and/or NOT wear a pretty bra & panty set or bikini because we might be violated and it would be all of our faults.”
You can read more here.
Blue Jay, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
Excitement!