So the brownshirts are here

What strikes me immediately is that they’re being organized by people who have been caught on film, rather unambiguously, assaulting people.

I mean the police were more than happy to arrest and charge 230 people on inauguration day with felony rioting for the actions of 4 identified vandals but they can’t pursue assault charges on the most open and closed case that could possibly be served on their desk?

A new fight-club “fraternity” of young white, pro-Trump men is being formed, its organizers claim, to defend free-speech rights by “Alt-Right” leaders and engage in street fighting.

Kyle Chapman, a California activist arrested earlier this month in a clash in Berkeley between anti-fascist protesters and pro-Trump demonstrators, announced this week he is forming the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights (cleverly called “FOAK).

Chapman, who uses the Internet meme “Based Stick Man,” says his new militant, highly-masculine group will be the “tactical defensive arm” of the Proud Boys, another group that shows up at pro-Trump rallies looking to rumble with counter-protesters.

“We don’t fear the fight. We are the fight,” Chapman said in a recent social media post announcing FOAK’s formation.

“I’m proud to announce that my newly created Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights will be partnering with Proud Boys,” Chapman said, with the “full-approval” of its founder, Gavin McInnes.

McInnes is a co-founder of Vice (although he and the magazine severed ties 10 years ago) and more recently has been a frequent guest on FOX News and a contributor for the racist site VDARE where he denigrated Muslims and called Asian Americans “slopes” and “riceballs.”

Now described as a “neo-masculine reactionary,” McInnes calls his Proud Boys a “pro-West fraternal organization.”

Others describe it as the military arm of the Alt-Right.

I’m sure law enforcement is on the case with just as much enthusiasm as the antifa crackdown, right? [Edit April 28, 2017: Scratch that. Those same defendants have all had an additional 7 felonies added to their charges. All 210 of them. Just a reminder–they connected 4 people to the actual acts of vandalism.]

-Shiv

The Guardian’s readership continues to depress me

“Sisterhood” discourse is deader-than-dead, yet The Guardian‘s readership clings to it like a fucking life raft.

On the topic of cis and trans women “having differences.”

To say we are the same is ridiculous.

Paging all cis people. I repeat: paging all cis people.

Nobody is making this argument.

 

Will somebody help me tell The Guardian’s readers to smarten the fuck up already? I mean, kudos for keeping straw farmers in business, I guess, but this shit is getting tiresome.

-Shiv

“The Church hasn’t been targeted by threats of violence”

…but that’s not going to stop them from starting their very own morality police:

A church in Alabama is well on its way to having its own police force. On Tuesday, Alabama state senators voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill that would allow Briarwood Presbyterian in suburban Birmingham to have its own cops. Now the proposed legislation heads to the desk of Governor Kay Ivey, who was sworn in days ago after Robert Brentley resigned in disgrace over a sex scandal.

Alabama SB 193 is sponsored by Republican Majority Leader J.T. “Jabo” Waggoner, who has represented the district for nearly 30 years, making him one of the longest-serving and most powerful senators in the state legislature. The bill would endow the church with the power to “appoint and employ one or more persons to act as police officers,” and would give members of the church police department “all of the powers of law enforcement officers in this state.”

And my “favourite” part–they’re not even responding to any measurable, actual threats:

Briarwood administrators have admitted that the megachurch hasn’t been targeted by threats or violence, such as that endured by mosques around the country.

Man, how many white people need to worry about “Sharia” with churches like these?

Perhaps the cherry on top–if the queer community organized in its own defense to account for police incompetence, we’d be called vigilantes. It’s not like minorities have had to do that before.

-Shiv

Don’t get *too* optimistic, there

Abby Brockman strikes me is a bit too optimistic despite catching a critical detail in this scoop: The United States’ border patrol agencies are bleeding out employees faster than they can hire. However, it’s not because the employees in question are having crises of conscience--it’s because the conditions in which they work are shitty.

Trump has ordered the agency to add 5,000 agents to beef up patrols and surveillance in advance of his proposed border wall. But its current 19,000-strong force is already 2,000 shy of a target set during the Obama administration.

Officials said tough screening, especially a lie-detector test, rejected many qualified candidates, and that tough conditions such as living in remote, rugged areas prompted more than 1,000 agents to quit every year.

“Some people just don’t want to live there,” said Randolph “Tex” Alles, acting deputy commissioner of CBP, a 60,000-strong agency that includes Border Patrol. “Hiring challenges are not new. Attracting and recruiting high quality individuals is a challenge for us.”

I wish I could claim optimism and say more people are becoming aware of the imperialist functions required by a state like the USA and consider said functions morally unconscionable, but those functions typically attract the bullies and sociopaths anyways. Boredom definitely strikes me as a much likelier culprit than the sudden discovery of a moral compass.

As ever, authoritarians give us a glimpse into their mindset with delightful(?) Freudian slips: (emphasis mine)

Tony Crowder, the executive director of Air and Marine Operations, told the Guardian his agency was struggling to retain and recruit enough pilots.

Commercial airlines were luring pilots who in some cases were expected to work in remote areas and participate in arrests. “They pay more and it’s a different type of work.”

Another problem is the attitude of young people, especially those for whom 9/11 is distant history. “They have a different view of public service. I don’t want to indict an entire generation but it’s harder to sell self-sacrifice for the common good.”

I would argue the reverse, Mr. Crowder. Millenials are more likely to accept that the brown people you’re abusing count as part of the “common good.” To say nothing of how the Mexicans and South Americans brutalized by your practices had sweet fuck all to do with 9/11. That my generation is less willing to blindly accept authority is in my estimate a virtue we must desperately cling to. By the time we’re your age, the coastal cities will be flooded and we’ll need to start electing politicians governments who can think farther ahead than 4 years.

-Shiv

Wait, the AFA is still continuing this nonsense?

The American Fuckwad Association wants you to know that their limp-dicked boycott of Target is approximately maybe kinda slightly 0.1% less flaccid than it was this time last year.

We are VERY close to reaching the 1.5 million signature goal on the Target boycott. Your help is critical as we approach the one-year anniversary since we launched the boycott.

At the time I send you this email, 1,484,630 people have pledged to boycott Target until it reverses its dangerous policy of allowing men into women’s restrooms and dressing rooms. You can see the very latest count here. Once we reach 1.5 million, I will personally deliver the signatures to Target’s headquarters in Minneapolis, MN.

Of course, as Zack Ford reported, their signature process is far from rigorous:

But here’s what AFA doesn’t list on its site: who signed the pledge. It’s completely anonymous. There is no way of tracking the validity of the number of signers.

In fact, ThinkProgress successfully “signed” it three different times from the same web browser using the names “I disagree With this,” “I really think this is stupid,” and “This isn’t A real email.” All that it required was using a different email address each time. As the last name suggests, it was also possible to sign the pledge using a gmail.com address that does not even exist. Thus, there’s nothing stopping anyone else from doing the same to inflate the numbers, or even for AFA to do so to generate further buzz.

As per usual, the AFA’s appeal to gather more “signatures” involves instructing cis men to act in predatory ways to somehow prove that trans women act in predatory ways. Because, hey, if you have no evidence to substantiate your beliefs, why not fucking fabricate some?

-Shiv

Silver-lining-in-genocide Senator doesn’t know the first rule of holes

“When you find yourself in one, stop digging.”

Early last month, in a speech focused on highlighting the need to track federal spending on indigenous issues, Beyak said “good deeds” came out of Canada’s residential schools.

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission spent six years examining the legacy of the government-funded, church-operated schools, infamous hotbeds of abuse and mistreatment that operated from the 1870s to 1996.

The senator’s comments touched off a firestorm inside and outside the upper chamber that divided her own caucus, which ultimately decided to remove her from the Senate committee on Aboriginal Peoples.

READ MORE: Senator who defended residential schools urged to leave committee

Beyak said in her statement that she believes this experience has revealed to her how difficult it is to have a “balanced, truthful discussion about all issues affecting Canadians.”

Here’s your balance, Lynn Beyak: European colonials committed genocide against the First Nations. Canada, the institution that arose from that atrocity, continued that genocide through the residential school system.

We’re the bad guys. You don’t get to claim credit for the good shit Canada did while eschewing credit for our bad shit. We own that history, you hare-brained narcissistic twit.

-Shiv

Poor Persecuted Peterson

Quick! The conservative persecution media circuit has gone like, an entire month without mentioning Jordan Peterson! WE NEED TO FIX THIS!

Jordan Peterson–who, by the way, is making close to $250,000 per year on his Patreon–immediately went to the news to whinge about his latest grant funding application, which was recently denied.

TORONTO — University of Toronto psychology professor Dr. Jordan Peterson has had a federal research grant application denied for the first time in his long and distinguished academic career.

And he’s certain that the rejection from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the government agency that supports post-secondary research, is linked to the controversy surrounding his stand on gender-neutral pronouns such as “zie” and “zher,” and the modern notion of gender as being fluid.

That his application was also rated so poorly is telling, he said, meaning that if the proposal had just missed the mark, it might have been a credible critique, but the proposal failed abysmally.

Julia Gualtieri, spokeswoman for the council, said in an email Monday that grants are awarded through a merit review process, and that “past funding is not a guarantee of further funding.” Names of the peer review committee members will be publicly posted once all applicants have been fully notified, she said.

Were this any other academic, they would likely be disappointed, take a few moments to rant to their peers before rallying, and move the fuck on.

But Poor Persecuted Peterson isn’t just any academic.

“I think that it’s (the controversy) provided someone with a convenient opportunity to make their displeasure with what I’m doing known,” he told Postmedia in a recent phone interview. “I can’t shake the suspicion.”

Just to remind you–this man is a personality psychologist, not exactly a field renown for its watertight methodology. I mean, a reasonable person might just assume that they’ve swung and missed–it’s fine, we’re all human, it happens to all of us. But NO! It’s all part of the ebul freeze peach hatin librultard conspiracy!!! because the only reason anyone could object to his argument is that they’re ess jay double yoo beta cucks and not because he’s literally pulling it from his nether quarters.

Maybe I should consider a career in nailing myself to the cross for profit.

-Shiv

 

Silver-lining-in-genocide Senator: “binders of letters”

Lynn Beyak, in continuance with her proceedings to divorce from reality, has defended her statements by saying she could make a binder full of women letters in support of the genocidal residential schools Canada ran until 1996.

“I’ve suffered with them up there. I appreciate their suffering more than they’ll ever know,” she said. “The best way to heal is to move forward together. Not to blame, not to point fingers, not to live in the past.”

Beyak, who sits as a member of the Senate’s Aboriginal Peoples committee, said she has received hundreds of positive remarks after she delivered a speech in which she chastised the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for not “focusing on the good” of the “well-intentioned” institutions.

“There were two sides to every story. We have 700 letters, we’ll make it a binder, we’ll make it all available,” she said Monday. “Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters.”

Somebody get this leaky bagpipe all the god damn seats.

-Shiv