Let’s take a look at a particularly awesome video, shall we? Content warning for brief sexualized assault and then a serious, physical takedown.
Pervert Justice
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Let’s take a look at a particularly awesome video, shall we? Content warning for brief sexualized assault and then a serious, physical takedown.
Portland has an awkward history of Pride overlapping with Juneteenth, and this year it happened again. If you had a choice of going to a Pride celebration or a Juneteenth celebration but couldn’t be a part of both, which would you attend? Why?
For me it’s a bit academic, living in Canada where Juneteenth isn’t celebrated (for obvious reasons) and Pride is on a different weekend anyway. But it’s still a chance to look at important issues of how we prioritize our lives and the causes that we value. I think right now I’d prioritize Juneteenth if for no other reason than the Canadian kids have been to lots of Prides and zero Juneteenths, but it would get harder to answer if we’d been to both the same number of times.
Over on PZ’s thread on the AAP’s opposition to Trump’s monstrous child isolation policy, commenter whywhywhy asked,
How is this different than state institutionalized torture?
Let’s find out!
My settings require the first comment by any commenter to be approved, regardless of content. I approve most of the comments that reach me, and then folks’ comments are almost always automatically approved thereafter unless they trip the spam trap. The exceptions are rare, and so far they’ve always end up approved after I read them. Because of that, I’ve never yet needed to create a specific comment policy. Today though, in response to the Aaron Persky post, someone decided to wish rape on someone else in a comment:
guilty in a forcible rape for which he served 3 months? i devoutly hope his white ass is no longer virgin. and the judge should be deeply deeply ashamed. i wonder how he can look his daughter or grand daughters in the eye. for shame. for you too. the job is bad at his job. he needs to be fired, which in an instance like this, is a recall. bye felicia! [emphasis added – cd]
I understand the outrage. I obviously share it. Here at Pervert Justice, though, wishing rape on someone will get your comments circular-filed every single time.
Over on Pharyngula, a discussion has been started about the propriety of using “accomplice” as a better word to describe the people that we have sometimes described as “allies” when discussing people that are not targeted by a specific form of oppression but nonetheless choose to work against it.
I started to write a comment over there about why I believe accomplice is appropriate, but it ended up becoming a treatise*1 about a woman named Irene Morgan*2. I decided that the thread shouldn’t be cluttered by a comment quite as long as I was writing, but that Morgan deserved better than cutting that treatise short. So I’ve moved it to Pervert Justice as a post for your reading pleasure.
I swear, I find it amazing that they even half know what they’re saying, but they do. They know exactly what they’re saying, and for some bizarre reason they think it speaks well of them and their religion.
Who am I babbling about, you wonder? After all, that statement might be true of any number of persons, maybe even all of us at different points in time. So who, given the human ability to spout nonsense with confidence, might have done so to such a degree that Crip Dyke would be moved to post? Shocker: it isn’t anyone from the Trump administration.
This time.
For those who don’t know, CNN has terminated their contract with commentator Jeffrey Lord. CNN itself describes the termination as directly in response to Lord tweeting “Sieg Heil” at a progressive who asked that Lord’s recent American Spectator article mentioning him be revised to spell his name correctly.
Media Matters, not a disinterested party (though neither is CNN) described the run-up to the tweet this way:
On August 10, the American Spectator published an attack piece by Jeffrey Lord against Media Matters. The screed lashed out at what Lord describes as “Media Matters Fascists.” Lord then tweeted the article to Media Matters President Angelo Carusone. When Carusone pointed out that his name was misspelled in the headline of the piece, Lord responded with the Nazi salute “Sieg Heil!”
I’ve struggled over the last four weeks with a post bashing around inside my skull. It seems unable to escape but also unable to calm down. I’ve wanted to write a rather lengthy post about language and the problems that I see with certain tendencies in trans* advocacy these days around language. But every time I go long-form, there’s so much that I can’t find a place to stop. So then I tried to go short-form, but that didn’t convey the real difficulty of the topic I wanted to engage. So now I’m going in a completely different direction, with a seemingly unrelated introduction and then, probably, a short-form take on the topic itself, allowing you all to take from it what you will, given the context provided by the introduction/preface.
So a good, long time ago, the internationally celebrated center of learning that is UMM ran into a spot of difficulty: apparently some right wing jerks were being right wing jerks. Whodathunkit. Usernames are Smart, a longtime commenter whose work and thoughts I remember as generally respectable and valuable*1, disagreed with PZ Myers suggestion that Morris residents treat as trash any scattered copies of the Young Republican rag “The North Star”. (Yes, they deliberately stole the name from the abolitionist newspaper of Frederick Douglas, which famously included one of the only ads promoting the Seneca Falls “convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman” to run outside of the State of New York).
I disagreed with Usernames’ disagreement, and said so. The crux was that while I agree that white people should be accountable to people of color when attempting to address racism in the US, I disagreed that suggesting actions (like trashing any “scattered” copies of The North Star that weren’t in their designated paper-piles) was the same as telling people from other groups what experiences define their groups. I also disagreed that waiting for people of color to plan a response is the right course of action when a white person is confronted with racism in that person’s presence. This doesn’t mean that white folk should be praise for anything they do, just for taking action. No, this is merely the natural consequence of refusing to put people of color on the spot, to make people of color responsible for ending racism.