Buying Child Porn on iTunes

The title of this post is an extremely tasteless joke, but it fits the foulness of my mood on this subject. In the last few months I’ve become aware that Apple has, through ignorance ineptitude or uncaring, allowed its iTunes gift cards to become a prime currency of the black market, which means most assuredly that people are using those things to pay for child pornography, weapons, drugs, prostitution, and soooo many stolen things. Not to mention the money laundering. So my question for Apple: If you’re allowing this to happen, why not sell the contraband directly through your corporate platform? And fuck y’all evil asses.

For any naive old folks in my readership, never do any business involving iTunes cards on any end. They’re employed in a number of cons these days. Heard about this deal where they try to get you to deposit a check for $3000, spend $2700 of it on iTunes cards which you return to them, and keep the $300. Do not bite.

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More Tumblin’

Random things I’ve seen on tumblr. I’m on hiatus with all my tumblrz, but that’s just from reblogging, and the attendant chore of sorting / tagging content. But these should be shared anyhow. First some tweets which I encountered on tumbl because fuck having to see the comments on twitter:

tweet by ryanlcooper

ryanlcooper: “don’t have a strong take but worth remembering the whole point of fascism is to leverage liberal tolerance to dissolve the liberal state”

tweet by ryanlcooper

ryanlcooper: “fascists will be whining about free speech and being bullied right up to the point they overturn democracy and start the purges”

tweet by rosesurnow

rosesurnow: “I guess my favorite thing about the @BarackObama administration was being able to sleep at night.”

Then “fandomsandfeminism” on tumblr had this to say about why things were fucked even before we had fascism looming this large:

Every human being inherently deserves safe food, clean water, and adequate medical care.

The greatest moral failure of capitalism is that it turned these necessities into commodities.

The greatest moral failure of capitalists is finding ways to justify withholding what we need to live while it is in abundance for the sake of profit.

Nothing to add to that.

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from Xeni Jardin

As Trump appoints one white supremacist after another to his staff, a brilliant (& only slightly grammatically typo’d) tweet from Xeni Jardin:

“Ever wonder what it’d be like to go back in time and help fight nazis? Support Civil Rights Era? Resist Native genocide? Now’s your chance” –Xeni Jardin

The soup is on. It’s nothing but war from now into the foreseeable future. Good luck, warriors.

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Welcome to Your White Supremacy – Ijeoma Oluo

From Ijeoma Oluo at The Stranger,

Good Morning, America. Welcome To Your White Supremacy

Just yesterday, I was saying that we should be looking at the post-reconstruction South in order to understand what has been happening with Trump voters. But when I wrote those words yesterday morning, I was writing them with more than a little hope that when we got together to discuss this, it would be with a sense of relief of the tragedy we had just narrowly avoided. But we did not avoid that tragedy. We did not even swerve. We stayed on that road that we paved hundreds of years ago and we gunned it.

And here we are. Good morning. Welcome to your White Supremacist Patriarchy.

There will be a lot of hand-wringing and excuse-giving and scapegoating in the upcoming days as we try to grapple with what just happened. But let’s not get it twisted: Trump will be our next president, not because Hillary is unlikeable, not because of third-party voters, not because of an enthusiasm gap in black voters. We have elected violent white supremacist patriarchy into office because the vast majority of white American voters chose to elect violent white supremacist patriarchy into office.

This has been building from the moment Barack Obama was elected to the presidency eight years ago. That was when the white supremacist patriarchy realized that they were losing a very important war. Equal marriage rights, Black Lives Matter and then, a female presidential candidate–-everything that the white supremacist patriarchy relies upon for its core identity has been under attack. And we have been gaining ground at lightning-fast speed, leaving white supremacist patriarchy demoralized, bitter, and afraid.

…Do not think that you woke up today in a different world. You woke up in the same white supremacist patriarchy that you’ve been waking up to your entire life. Know that this is why our country is the way it is. This is why our black men are in prison. This is why we have a gender wage gap. This is why our Indigenous American brothers and sisters are currently being pepper sprayed and attacked by dogs for trying to protect our environment. This is why our women are being raped at a rate of one in five. This is why white households have 12 times the wealth of black households and 10 times the wealth of Hispanic households. Because we live in a country that is so scared of change that it would elect Donald Trump for president. And we’ve always lived in that country.

So now it’s in the open. Now there is no denying that we live in a White Supremacist Patriarchy that the majority of white people in just about every demographic in America voted for. Now we know that the problem isn’t personal preference, it is not the economy, it is not lack of education. Now we know that there is no middle ground. Now we know that it is our very liberation that is the threat. So we can’t give up. We must fight, we must continue the progress that has made the majority of white America so scared, and we must fight for that progress harder than ever before. Because there is only freedom or oppression; now is a time for each of us to decide which of the two we will define ourselves by.

Read the whole thing, if you will.

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Blithe Incitement to Hate Crimes

Richard Dawkins has been a real piece of shit to women, but at least, amid all his glowing approval of internet misogyny, he took time out to say that really for real, he condemns anyone who threatens women. Golly gee, that’s swell of ya.

Meanwhile, someone has taken up a very similar position in the field of being a real piece of shit to trans people, inciting hate mobs through dehumanizing and fear-mongering language while pretending his views are purely about some vaunted moral stance (freeze peach of course, background from Shiv: here, here, here). Jordan Peterson has not, as far as I’ve heard, condemned the doxxing and death threats and assaults perpetrated by his faithful against transgender students, so Dawk is one moral rung up on him.

But then, if he did issue such a condemnation, I’d be unlikely to hear it because I have been avoiding depressing news as much as I can lately. More importantly, the condemnation would do Fuck All to dissuade the violent among his fandom – just as Dawkins’ stern admonition to misogynist abusers was ultimately inconsequential.

I could talk more about that, but I slept less than three hours last night and was on my feet all day workin’ the retail grind. Just, fuck Jordan Peterson and his slimy hateful horseshit.