Movimento Brasil Livre Shuts Down Queer Art Exhibit.

Danillo Villa, “Fuck” (2016).

Conservative assholes everywhere are getting their way anymore. In this case, a bunch of conservative asshole libertarians got an art show shut down a month early.

Santander Cultural, a gallery space sponsored by the eponymous Spanish bank, decided to close Queermuseum after receiving an onslaught of vitriolic criticism on social media and from gallery visitors last week. People have accused the artwork of being offensive as well as harmful to children, citing blasphemy, pedophilia, and bestiality. One of Santander’s buildings was recently tagged with the phrases “the Santander Bank supports pedophilia” and “they are antichrists.” Behind these protests is the libertarian group Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL), which has gained traction throughout the country ever since it drew mass support of former President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment. “Pedophilia, zoophilia, and the sexualization of children definitely do NOT represent the LGBT universe,” the group wrote earlier today on its Facebook page.

In an interview with Hyperallergic, Fidelis, the curator, said he hadn’t been consulted by Santander and was caught off-guard by its decision. According to Fidelis, during the 25 days that the exhibition had been up, there had been no complaints. It wasn’t until last Wednesday that members of MBL began infiltrating the exhibition, assaulting visitors, and taking videos of the exhibition and posting them to Facebook.

In one video, three men pan over the artworks, exclaiming, “See for yourself whether this is art!” Among the images they linger on are Adriana Varejão’s 1994 painting depicting gay and interracial sex and Antonio Obá’s “Et Verbum” (2011), where communion wafers are scrawled with words such as “vulva,” “tongue,” and “asshole.” “This guy should be in jail,” one of the men says, referring to Fidelis. “They are perverting the notions of family.” 

Amid intensifying online debate on Sunday, Santander announced on Facebook its decision to take down the exhibition. In the statement, it apologizes to those who felt disrespected and ultimately concludes that Queermuseum was “not in line with our view of the world.” Ironically, Santander critiques the exhibition, which celebrated marginalized artists, for not being “inclusive” and not “generating positive reflection.” The statement, which is worth reading in its entirety, is translated in full below: …

Fernando Baril, “Cruzando Jesus Cristo com Deusa Schiva” (1996) (photo by F.Zago Studio Z).

You can read all about this, and see more at Hyperallergic.

All Lives Splatter.

A Chelan County emergency services worker posted a disturbing joke to the county’s Facebook account, kidding about protesters being rammed three weeks after a Virginia protester was killed by a driver who did so.

The worker managing the county’s emergency services Facebook account posted a crude cartoon with an illustration captioned, “All lives splatter … nobody cares about your protest / Keep your ass out of the Road”

The as-yet unidentified poster included the note: “I don’t wish harm on anyone … but protesters don’t belong in the road!”

Mmm, you don’t wish harm on anyone, but you show a depiction of people being harmed because, “hey, it’s funny, and those libtards deserve it, lol!” I imagine if such was directed at you, emergency services worker, you wouldn’t find it so gosh darn amusing. I sure as fuck don’t. Handing J. Q. Public license to murder is not funny. It’s not funny that open murder is being written into law, because of course, dissent is evil, so you better do all your dissenting someplace legal, like your closet, where you can’t help to effect any change at all.

Chelan County Sheriff Brian Burnett apologized for the post on Monday, saying the non-commissioned employee intended to share it only on a personal account.

“Staff at Chelan County Emergency Management feel terrible that this inappropriate and hurtful post made it onto the Facebook page,” Burnett wrote in the news release. “Changes have already been made in procedure to assure nothing like this will ever occur in the future.”

Oh, and that makes it okay, does it, to change things so this sort of evil shit can’t make it to the official page? Naturally, having employees posting this vile poison on their personal accounts, that’s just dandy! Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think I’d want Chelan County emergency services anywhere near me. Your asshole employees would be just as prone to killing me as helping me, right, Sheriff Burnett?

In recent months, law enforcement workers around the country have been called out for posting the meme and similar statements.

A Slate examination of the trend in August – “Run Them Down”: Driving into crowds of protesters was a right-wing fantasy long before the violence in Charlottesville – highlighted three police officers and one firefighter who were caught urging vehicle attacks on protesters. One Oregon cop was fired for suggesting that drivers “push the right” pedal when facing Black Lives Matter protesters.

Pigs will be pigs, won’t they? This is what happens when cops shops refuse to hire intelligent people. This is what happens when cops shops happily hire white supremacists and assorted dumbshit bigots. Then gives them a license to be homicidal prickshits.

Via Seattle PI.

Sunday Facepalm.

Oh Kevin Swanson, the religious extremist’s extremist. He’s at it again, pouring down Jehovah’s wrath in the form of hurricanes, natch. Mr. Swanson has a solution to Hurricane Irma eating Florida, though!

Kevin Swanson declared on his radio program today that the Supreme Court should immediately reverse its Roe v. Wade and Obergefell decisions before God unleashes his judgment on America in the form of Hurricane Irma.

Swanson, who just last week said that Hurricane Harvey was the judgment of God on Houston, said that these “God-ordained disasters” are a warning to this nation to repent for its myriad of sins.

Now, Swanson said this on the 7th this month, and I have to say, it would be a fun experiment, if you could get the Supreme Court to say, okay, the law is suspended until such and such a date, and see if it would magically wither Irma. We all know it wouldn’t have the slightest effect, and the religious reich would claim that Jehovah got all sniffy ’cause it wasn’t a permanent reversal. Of course, it doesn’t take much to make Jehovah all sniffy and pissy.

“God is in control of what is going on,” he said, “and whether or not Irma is going to do $200 billion worth of damage in Miami … is all in the hands of God. Those winds are going to blow where they are going to blow, but they’re going to blow in the direction that God ordains them to go. Friends, God is in complete control and utter control of what is going on with these hurricanes.”

Well, the wind is gonna go where it goes, but Jehovah is in control, you betcha! So, that’s why Mar-a-Lago and other overblown McMansions of conservative assholes are right in the path, and that’s why we’re all getting taxed for the federal coverage of Pres. Pinchpork’s palace. So, one could go with the assumption that Jehovah isn’t upset about gay people, but conservative assholes. Unfortunately, Jehovah’s aim has always been notoriously bad, so a lot of good people are gonna get screwed over here, but Jehovah has never been one to care about ‘collateral damage’.

“The wrath of God against this nation is intense,” Swanson continued. “I wish that American leaders would sit up and pay attention … The Supreme Court of the United States needs to reverse Roe v. Wade and Obergefell now, this afternoon, before Irma does her damage. It would be a good thing if the Supreme Court of the United States understood that God is in control of these things and God is a personality and God is offended by the sins of this nation.”

Oooh, Jehovah is a personality. A psychopathic one. Yeah, I’m not shaking in my boots over your non-existent psychopath, Mr. Swanson. Climate change, on the other hand, there’s reason to be scared shitless.

Via RWW.

A New White Excuse: “I Was At Standing Rock!”

Courtesy Wind Over Fire Healing Arts Center/Facebook
A New Age “ghost dance” held in southwestern Minnesota has many indigenous people wondering just when the cultural appropriation will end.

White “aggrieved entitlement” people. They never seem to run out of excuses for their bloated sense of entitlement, of helping themselves to the least little thing; of exploiting marginalized peoples. It’s damn near a way of life for many white people. When it comes to “new age” rites, seems to me there’s a wealth of pagan history to mine, gosh, you might even find some you’re related to in some way.

Towards the later days at the No DAPL camp, I wasn’t quiet about all the entitlement-minded white people there, who had no use for the rules laid down by the people running things. Because of course, rules, they are never for white people are they? I wasn’t quiet about all the white protest/event tourists, either. People who were there to honestly provide support and help, no problem. As usual though, they weren’t the ones making a fuss or making it all about them, because they knew it wasn’t about them. They knew that in the end, they would go home, and not have to deal with it all.

In Minnesota, there’s a group who recently held their 2nd annual “Ghost Dance”. When called on this, they denied it was a ghost dance. They said it was a “Ten Moons” dance. Then they decided to go with “Ghost Dance isn’t exclusive to Indigenous people! Lots of cultures had ancestor dances! China! Africa! So it isn’t indigenous in nature.” Oddly enough, their not indigenous at all dance is decidedly indigenous in appearance, and specifically so. The history of the Ghost Dance is a dark one, once the colonials got terrified and started up more wholesale slaughter, and brutally oppressed indigenous peoples all the more out of fear. It’s not a toy for white people to play pagan. It’s not yours. It’s not your culture, it’s not your history. If non-indigenous people ever wonder why various rites and dances have been closed to outsiders, look no further.

“It would be great if everyone just joined together,” said Laven, discontented by the scrutiny of their ceremony and the charges of cultural appropriation. “We have enough crap. I was at Standing Rock, and I hear the Native Americans, and I had heard them.”

Oh my. What a fine example of white entitlement. There’s really nothing else like it. Golly, white people have had enough crap! It’s just like everything indigenous people have gone through! And now, Standing Rock is the latest excuse. Fuck you, Ms. Laven. A universe of fuck yous. You have not heard one godsdamn thing. You don’t give one little shit about indigenous people or their struggles. All you care about is exploiting them to make money. I hope you are bad-mouthed from here to the end of the galaxy, because that’s the very least of what you deserve.

Full story at ICTMN.

Yeah, about that Charlie Hebdo cover…

Mano Singham has a good post up about all the upset. As for me, this was my comment there:

Y’know, I don’t really see how this is different from noisy christian assholes saying ‘god’ was punishing Texas for having a gay mayor and allowing abortion. Yet that’s acceptable, and the mockery on the part of Hebdo isn’t.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/kevin-swanson-hurricane-harvey-is-gods-judgment-on-houston-for-having-a-very-aggressively-pro-homosexual-mayor/

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/dave-daubenmire-hurricane-harvey-is-judgment-on-houston-for-abortion-and-having-had-a-lesbian-mayor/

They are saying it’s the victims’ fault, too. No one is yelling about that.

I can’t get all that worked up about the cover. Is it nice to mock victims of a not so natural (climate change) disaster? No. Are there lots of people in Texas, who while they may not be outright nazis, share many a view with them? Probably. Is the United States swirling down the drain of fascism fair game? Yeah, I think it is. When you’re presenting a HUGE fucked-upness on the world stage, you have to learn to take it now and then, and before reacting, at least give yourself a few moments for thinking.

I gave two examples of people who consider themselves to be patriots, conservatives, and christian. They are pointing their minatory finger, and that of Jehovah straight at Texas, and all those victims of the flood. Oh yes, goddidit, and it’s all their fault. They are unabashedly placing the blame on the victims, and yet, not even a whimper of protest, let alone a roar. Until all those fine, outraged Americans find enough spine to spit in the face of their fellow christians hollering judgment, I think you should sit down and be quiet. Look to home, and deal with all the assholes and wannabe terrorists right here. They are everywhere, all around you. Try to have something to say about that.

ETA: Oh, we have another fine example! Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos (R-TX):

Quebec’s Minister of International Relations Christine St-Pierre called Pablos to express her sorrow and condolences on behalf of the people of the Canadian province. She also offered equipment and manpower.

Pablos turned it down. Instead he asked for “prayers from the people of Quebec,” the minister relayed.

Understandably, the neighbor to the north was shocked.

“It was a conversation about how devastating the situation is and we want to express our support to the people of Texas,” she told CBC News in an interview.

Isn’t that just splendid, Americans? Goodness, how those republicans do look after your best interests. We deserve every drop of fucking mockery directed our way. Via Raw Story.

Targeting Twitter.

A man takes pictures of “hate tweets”, a part of the art project “#HEYTWITTER” created by Shahak Shapira, outside Twitter office in Hamburg, Germany August 4, 2017 in this picture obtained from social media. Youtube via REUTERS.

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German-Israeli artist who accuses Twitter of failing to delete hate speech tweets has taken matters into his own hands – by stencilling the offending messages on the road in front of the company’s Hamburg headquarters.

A post on video-sharing site YouTube showed Shahak Shapira and fellow activists stencilling tweets saying “Germany needs a final solution to Islam” and “Let’s gas the Jews” – clear references to the Nazi regime’s World War Two genocide of Europe’s Jews. [youtu.be/jzMTBINlLFU]

Shapira said he had reported some 300 incidents of hate speech on Twitter but had received just nine responses from the company.

“If Twitter forces me to see these things, then they should have to see it as well,” he said in the video, posted on Monday, describing the comments as violations of the social network’s community guidelines.

A very clever idea! You can read more about this at Reuters.

Adopt-a-Nazi (Not Really)!

In this Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017 file photo, white nationalist demonstrators walk into the entrance of Lee Park surrounded by counter demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va. (Credit: AP Photo/Steve Helber).

Leave it to lawyers to figure out a brilliant troll, which will help to fight hate and bigotry.

A group of Jewish lawyers in San Francisco has discovered a clever new way to fight white supremacy: adoption.

Of course, the Jewish Bar Association isn’t actually encouraging anyone to adopt or sponsor white supremacists. Instead, the group is asking the public to donate to its “Adopt-a-Nazi (Not Really)” GoFundMe campaign, which is being used to raise funds for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit legal advocacy organization that monitors hate groups across the country and litigates on behalf of marginalized groups. So far, the campaign has raised more than $92,000—far beyond its original goal of $10,000.

The strategy is simple: according to the GoFundMe page, donors are encouraged to give some amount of money for each of the 300 expected attendees at an upcoming “free speech” rally put on by the right-wing Patriot Prayer group at Crissy Field on August 26. Many of the attendees will likely be white nationalists or members of similar hate groups.

According to the Adopt-a-Nazi campaign, no donation is too small.

“Two cents per attendee is a $6 donation,” organizers wrote. “A dime is $30. Why not a quarter? That’s only $75.”

You can read more about this at Think Progress, or just head over to the fund to donate or share. Yep, I donated, and now I’m sharing. :)

White Supremacy: Just Background Noise.

Tucker Viemeister.

It’s a forlorn hope, that republicans might stumble over a conscience, discover their humanity and embrace that of others. It really does not seem to matter what the Tiny Tyrant does, there are those who will squink all over, in an attempt to cover over the massive piles of shit left in the wake of the Tiny Tyrant. As we have all been witness to, Trump gets worse, week by week, day by day.

As CNN noted on Friday, in the last four weeks alone, President Trump has fired chief strategist Steve Bannon, fired Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, hired and fired communications director Anthony Scaramucci, publicly shamed his own attorney general and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, banned transgender troops via twitter, made up two phone calls, thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for expelling American diplomats from the country, threatened nuclear war with North Korea, and defended attendees of a white supremacy rally.

And that’s not even half of it.

But Steve Cortes, a member of Trump’s Hispanic Advisory Council, said on Fox News Sunday morning that if Republicans just cut taxes, all of that will be background noise.

“Clearly, he had a tough week. There’s no way around that,” Cortes said.

“All presidents have tough weeks,” Cortes said Sunday. “I believe that will become background noise once we get taxes done, and once this economy starts growing the way it’s capable of.”

Yes, a tough week, brought on by the defense of fucking nazis being “fine people”. You opened your mouth, and Trump obligingly shit in it, and you decided to swallow it. Nice.

[…]

“The economy’s already accelerating. There’s a lot of optimism out there in the country,” Cortes said. “If we can throw tax cuts into the mix, I think this economy can absolutely take off, and then I think we’d see those poll numbers rebound very, very quickly for the president.”

There’s a lot of optimism out and about? Where? Oh, yes, in the crowds of nazis, sure. Everywhere else, not so much. Perhaps you should get outside once in a while. People are not optimistic about an idiotic, ignorant, maniacal bigot being in control of things, for a given value of control. People are not optimistic about not being nuked. People are not optimistic about not getting into yet another fucking war. People are not optimistic about bigotry being elevated to “great america” status. People are not optimistic about the blatant slaughter of all things which could help us avoid the worst disasters of climate change. People are not optimistic about the economy. The list goes on and on.

Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) made similar comments last week, telling Bloomberg that Trump’s comments about white supremacists were “frustrating” because he wanted to start focusing on tax reform.

“[It’s] very frustrating for those of us who want to start focusing on the issues ahead—tax reform, infrastructure, the debt ceiling,” Ross said. “I wished we would start focusing on those issues, and we need to start healing and bringing people together—instead of peeling back the scabs.”

Right. Your idea of tax reform is handing tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires, and you’ve made sure there are zero safety nets for everyone else. That will cheer everyone up for sure. You don’t start healing and bringing people together by announcing that nazis are “fine people” and everything was really the fault of those filthy liberals. The reason those scabs peel back so easily is that there is a massive wound underneath, still oozing blood, covered over, but certainly not healed. Healing does not take place by ignoring a wound. Now the Tiny Tyrant and his henchidiots, like you, Rep. Ross, have dumped toxic wasted in the wound, and you want to talk healing. Isolation, genocide, and subjugation are not things which heal. They do not unite. And those things are what you stand for, handwaving reality, because those people, they don’t actually matter to you.

Think Progress has the full story.

Sunday Facepalm.

Wallnau, again. Lance is the gift of never-ending eyerolls. Now it’s Jehovah playing with the stock market, just to fuck about with a few people.

Wallnau was outraged by the fact that several business leaders had resigned from presidential advisory councils in protest of Trump’s comments in the wake of the violence that had occurred at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend, which ultimately forced Trump to disband the councils entirely.

“They insulted the president and his base,” Wallnau declared. “It doesn’t surprise me [that] the stock market had its first setback today. That’s not a coincidence. That’s not a coincidence, that’s a prophetic response to the uprising and insult that came from these CEOs.”

Uprising? Really? I wouldn’t characterize resigning as an uprising, those are different things, Lance. How is this a prophetic response? Has someone had a nifty prophecy about this, and what, just forgot to say? If there’s insult to be had, it’s on the part of the Tiny Tyrant and his base, asshole bigots, nazis, and your garden variety evil fuckers. Every single one of you is an insult to humanity, and to anyone with actual morals. You have all the benefit of a boil on the arse.

“When those CEOs mocked Trump and made this a political issue, the judgment would come where their pocketbooks are,” he continued. “How fast does God sometimes settle accounts.”

They didn’t make this a political issue, Lance. They simply could not walk past the “presidential” standard of hey, nazis are fine people! Naturally, the Tiny Tyrant could have kept his mouth shut, but no, he had come out with just how awful all those people of colour and their allies are, persecuting those poor nazis. I expect the stock market will be fine, it’s the nature of the beast to fluctuate. As for Jehovah being all speedy and stuff, I guess you don’t subscribe to The Mills of God. That, and the very old concept of ancestral sin is more Jehovah’s thing, y’know, just read your book of psychopathy. Not that any of it originated with your particular god, but it was certainly adopted with enthusiasm.

There’s video at RWW.

Squinkery.

I fell in love with a new word: Squink. It’s onomatopoeically delicious! I had expressed a desire to use this wonderful word, and PZ provided:

Here’s another good use that you’ll find opportunities for all the time: when someone throws out a cloud of incoherent obfuscations for something stupid they’ve just said, they’re squinking. Creationists, MRAs, and Republicans do it all the time — Just watch Jack Kingston or Jeffrey Lord or Kellyann Conway sometime. Nonstop squinking.

The conservative christians propping up the Tiny Tyrant are still busy squinking over the Charlottesville statement:

“I do not believe he was speaking of people giving a Nazi salute or giving racist chants,” Suarez, who is also an advocate for immigration reform, said. “I believe he was speaking of a few who sincerely would not like to see a monument removed, and were not participating in racist activities.”

[…]

Robert Jeffress — who made waves last week by making the highly disputed claim that God has given Trump the authority to “take out” North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Trump “doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” and that the uproar over his press conference is “just more a style issue.”

Ah, a style issue. Right. It seems that the Tiny Tyrant’s style is to have a few Nazi uniforms hiding in his closet. You can read the full article at Think Progress.

Don Boys at Barbwire is squinking so hard you could hear him a mile away:

…I understand that sensitive Blacks might be offended at Confederate monuments; however, many of us are often offended by many things including their apparent desire to be offended, but we always get over it. They will too. However, they are being encouraged in their insanity by local and federal officials.

[…]

And once again, I will remind everyone that Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression against the genteel southland was not to free the slaves as Lincoln admitted, but he used it later as a “sales job” to prosecute the war. Taxes, tariffs, and states’ rights to nullification were the original reasons brother fought brother with over 600,000 dead. However, uninformed or dishonest people keep saying otherwise.

Hmmm, from where I sit, I see a white man with an acute sensitivity problem. No worries, Don, you’ll get over it. If you can stomach it, the full column is here.

Charting Confederate Symbols Alongside Social Movements.

150 Years of Iconography, courtesy of Southern Poverty Law Center. Sourced from their story, Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy (click to enlarge).

[…] The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) began to catalog Confederate symbols around the country, stating: “There was no comprehensive database of such symbols…In an effort to assist the efforts of local communities to re-examine these symbols, the SPLC launched a catalog to study them.”

[…]

There were two major periods during which the dedication of Confederate monuments and other symbols spiked: the first two decades of the 20th century and, later, the Civil Rights movement. As they explain:

[T]wo distinct periods saw a significant rise in the dedication of monuments and other symbols. The first began around 1900, amid the period in which states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise the newly freed African Americans and re-segregate society. This spike lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

The second spike began in the early 1950s and lasted through the 1960s, as the civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists. These two periods also coincided with the 50th and 100th anniversaries of the Civil War.

Take a look at the infographic. Note the massive cluster of dedications of monuments around the time the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was being formed, and the dedications’ continued persistence during the KKK’s resurgence. Check out the sudden rise in the dedication of schools, named in honor of Confederate soldiers, almost immediately following Brown v. Board of Education. Note that there were less dedications of Confederate symbols during race riots, even a significant dip during the Detroit uprising of 1943.

You can trace a clear spike in the dedication of Confederate monuments whenever black Americans organized in a concrete way; when they were made visibly vulnerable — such as in the instance of uprisings — the commitment to Confederate symbolism tapered off.

According to this data, it’s clear that once black Americans sought their own agency or publicly defended their rights, white supremacists and Confederate apologists became eager to crowd around these monuments in tender affection and homage, to espouse this history. The monuments had a purpose, newly reinstated again and again, to revive and cherish white history each time minorities, especially black people, made themselves visible. The common refrain in support of the Confederate flag (“heritage, not hate”) quickly dies on its own sword. There’s no pride, except for the kind rooted in a fear of white erasure.

After mining the data, it’s clear white panic is real.

The full article is at Hyperallergic, and it’s excellent, and necessary reading, as many people seem to not know the full history of these monuments to hate. Recommended reading.

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.