The NY Times version of spin isn’t at all subtle

When the New York Times got around to reporting Ted Yoho’s vicious outburst at Ocasio-Cortez, they put all the emphasis on the woman’s anger, as if Yoho was in a boys will be boys moment, and Ocasio-Cortez was over-sensitive. Rebecca Traister explains what the Times was up to.

The Times’ story on the speech bore the headline “A.O.C. Unleashes a Viral Condemnation of Sexism in Congress” and kicked off by noting that Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman in Congress, who arrived there in 2019, “has upended traditions.” It called her speech on Thursday “norm-shattering” and described supporting speeches made by her colleagues — including one in which Pramila Jayapal recalled being referred to as a “young lady” who did not “know a damn thing” by Alaska representative Don Young — as a moment of “cultural upheaval.”

All these words somehow cast Ocasio-Cortez and her female colleagues as the disruptive and chaotic forces unleashed in this scenario, suggesting that they shattered norms in a way that Representative Yoho’s original, profane outburst apparently did not. (Perhaps Yoho’s words weren’t understood as eruptive and norm-shattering because calling women nasty names, in your head or with your friends or on the steps of your workplace, is much more of a norm than most want to acknowledge).

As Mark Harris pointed out on Twitter, the Times only printed the full epithet in a piece about Ocasio-Cortez reading it into the House record, after declining to print the words in an earlier story, when they would have been attributed to Yoho. This offered the faint impression that the only person who actually said the actual words “fucking bitch” was AOC herself, and not the man who aimed them at her. What’s more, the paper described her as “punching each syllable in the vulgarity,” reinforcing a view of Ocasio-Cortez’s utterances as pugilistic, without acknowledgment that while she enunciated clearly, she delivered her speech in the calmest and most genial tones imaginable. (An earlier Times story on Yoho’s non-apology and Ocasio-Cortez’s initial response to it described her as having “upbraided” him, and opened with a description of how she “forcefully rejected” his apology.)

This is a perfect summary.

In describing her team’s decisions about how to respond, the Times put scare quotes around their plans “to discuss how she ‘was accosted and publicly ridiculed,’” rather than simply reporting that she had been … accosted and publicly ridiculed. The whole thing suggests that she had somehow connived to set this all in motion; that her actions were the active and self-serving ones, while Yoho was a passive actor, his only contribution to the situation providing the platform from which she might spring. As the Times put it: “Republicans have long labored to cast Ms. Ocasio-Cortez as an avatar of the evils of the Democratic Party, a move that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has used to bolster her own cheeky, suffer-no-fools reputation.”

The Times has long been a master of framing, whether it’s the he-said-she-said style of reporting, or this, pandering to the conservative businessman in a suit reading the paper in his limousine, aghast at the fact that women are in the workplace, the boardroom, even in the halls of power.

As we read commentators tell the story of women’s ambition and savvy and drive, all of which are surely politically animating forces — as they have been for all the many men who have preceded them in American politics — I hope people can remember that the analysis is not wrong, exactly, but that it is woefully incomplete. Because until we can see how white men have taken advantage of sexism and racism for their own gain — how they’ve built their own “brand,” the American brand — on the backs of the fucking bitches forever, we’re not really reading a full story.

Remember this: The NY Times is and always has been an agent of the status quo, working to build and reinforce the “American brand”. We won’t be able to rebuild our country by letting “the newspaper of record” tell the story.

If only he’d shot himself a day earlier

I can’t imagine working at home, and having one of my kids getting murdered for answering the door by some angry asshole who was gunning for me. That’s what happened to federal judge Esther Salas, whose 20 year old son Daniel Anderl was shot through the heart by a men’s rights coward, Roy Den Hollander, who had a long history of anti-feminist bullshit. I suppose I should say “alleged” murderer, but he had recently written hate-filled screeds against Salas, and his dead body (by suicide) was found with a package addressed to Salas. He has been featured on We Hunted the Mammoth several times for his irrational MRA obsession.

Anyone who rages against women generically is a danger to the world. The pain they cause with their self-righteous bigotry is intolerable.

Capitalism and sexism wrecks comic books now

I remember when comic books were synonymous with weekends at my grandmother’s, buying 10 for a dollar, swapping old comics with my cousins, picking up a paper sack full of tattered, coverless copies at the Goodwill store. It was all innocence and fun times. Maybe not so much now.

The month of June saw the comics industry rocked by successive waves of predatory conduct allegations, amid similar reckonings around sexual harassment in the affiliated worlds of video games, twitch streaming, tabletop games, professional wrestling, and professional illustration. Some of the allegations, as with superstar writer Warren Ellis, were new. Others brought renewed scrutiny to lingering problems like the allegations against Dark Horse editor Scott Allie and DC writer Scott Lobdell. Most of the stories came from marginalized creators who’d previously been silent for fear of being blacklisted. In June, that wall of silence cracked, and what showed beneath was red and raw and deeply, viscerally angry.

“A huge reason why abusive, predatory, and discriminatory practices go unchecked in the comics industry is this: the impetus is always put on the victims to come forward,” Maï wrote in an email to The Daily Beast. “Victims are expected to speak out at great personal cost—at risk of losing jobs and damaging their financial livelihood, at detriment to their mental health and threats to their personal safety… For every story you hear, there is also an unimaginable amount more that are not heard.” (Stewart did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.)

Maybe not so much when I was a kid, either.

The comics industry has long been synonymous with exploitation. The early comics publishers were wheeler-dealers and back-room grifters, with their hands in everything from the pulps to softcore pornography. They cut vague handshake deals, crushed attempts to collectively organize and built their industry almost entirely on “work for hire” contracts and freelance labor. The result is a history of dirty dealing that has, over time, been reduced to a litany of names, a Mount Rushmore of the fucked: DC’s mistreatment and neglect of Superman creators Siegel and Shuster; Jack Kirby’s struggle for his original artwork and equal credit for his work with Stan Lee; Alan Moore being screwed out of the rights for Watchmen; Steve Gerber’s long-running battle with Marvel over Howard the Duck.

The modern industry is almost entirely made up of freelancers: writers, artists, colorists and letterers. “Freelancers and people trying to break in are incredibly vulnerable,” writer Devin Grayson (Nightwing, Black Widow, Gotham Nights) told The Daily Beast, particularly when it comes to people working for companies centered around the comics direct market—DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse, Oni, and the like. That senior editors hold the power to hire and fire is true across most industries, she said. “But then add in factors like freelancers having zero job security, no health insurance, no access to HR departments or higher-ups, no union. If we’re talking mainstream superhero comics, [there are] essentially two large companies—so two chances, period—to get their foot in the door. What happens to you if you piss off just one person in one of those companies, much less voice your concerns in a wider arena?”

If it was so awful in the 50s and 60s, and it’s getting worse now, and they’re screwing over the labor, where is all the money going? Marvel is making bank right now with their movies, and none of that is benefiting the talent that brought them to where they are? It sounds like an industry taken over by amoral profiteers.

Cultivating a British flavor of narrow-mindedness

Trying to figure out why so many TERFs are British, I think this answer hits the nail on the head.

The answer lies in part to the coalescence of a certain set of ideas in a very specific circle of voices in the early 21st century — voices that later went on to hold high profile positions in much of the U.K.’s print and broadcast media.

I’m referring here to the U.K. Skeptics movement of the early 2000s. Despite the fact that it was basically a loose network of people who were far too impressed with themselves for not believing in astrology and homeopathy, they have an outsized legacy. The movement consisted largely of groups meeting in pubs and organising talks promoting a specific brand of scientific skepticism and concerned primarily with the “debunking” of alternative medicine and pseudoscience. So far, so niche, but there is compelling evidence that suggests that both the ideological basis and some of the specific proponents of U.K. skepticism in the noughties are implicated in the spread of transphobic thinking into the mainstream media in this country.

While claiming to be the country’s foremost critical thinkers, the group was riddled with anti-humanities bias and a fetish for a certain kind of “science” that it held to reveal a set of immutable principles upon which the world was built with almost no regard whatsoever for interpretative analysis based on social or historical factors. Part of this mode of thinking was an especially reductivist biologism: the idea that there are immutable realities to be found in our DNA, and if we just paid enough attention to Science and stopped trying to split hairs and discover meaning over in the superfluous disciplines of the humanities, then everything would be much simpler. It’s precisely this kind of biological essentialism — which skirts dangerously close to eugenics — that leads people to think they can “debunk” a person’s claim to their gender identity, or that it should be subjected to rigorous testing by someone in a lab coat before we can believe the subject is who they say they are.

I saw the same thing in US skeptics, of course. But there was something fundamental going on that is also reflected in the British school of evolutionary biology, represented by Maynard Smith and Dawkins, that totally embraced reductive explanations and adaptationism, vs. the American subset led by Lewontin and Gould, who fiercely opposed eugenics and detested the arrogance of thinking biology could be reduced to a catalog of alleles. My experience may also be colored by the fact that there were several prominent UK skeptics (at least, I was told over and over that they were big names) who I had to ban here because they were persistently obnoxious and insistent that there are only two sexes/genders because “biology”.

Then there’s the outcome of all this activity by bigots claiming the mantle of science — some people actually believed them.

Tracey King, a skeptic activist who credits herself with establishing American-style organized skepticism in the U.K., has pointed out that the movement collapsed in the last decade. She attributes this to some good reasons (turns out it was full of sexists, which the rise of social justice concerns helped bring to light.) But these voices did not go away; many of the figures who made up the movement are now prominent voices at one level or another. Helen Lewis, for example, is the deputy editor of the center-left political magazine the New Statesman, and has promoted a barrage of anti-trans articles. Julie Bindel at the Guardian and elsewhere has a well-documented history of transphobia.

Then there’s Graham Linehan, a formerly beloved high-profile comedy writer who has recently been given a warning by police for directly harassing trans women online. Imagine if Larry David or Jerry Seinfeld suddenly started a social media hate campaign against a particular group of people that took up most of their time and you had to accept that was just part of your reality now. It feels a bit like that.

I met Linehan — he came to one of my talks in Dublin. Then, I was quite pleased to see him, but now…oh god what kind of wanker was I inspiring/being inspired by?

By the way, Seinfeld has been a loud voice whining about PC culture on college campuses — if I were him, I’d be wondering why smart young people no longer find him funny, rather than blaming it on a contrived slogan like “political correctness” — but at least he hasn’t carried his obsession as far as Linehan has.

Christian vs. Christian

It’s always good to see internal schisms within Christianity, but not so great when the guy with a $100 million+ fake boat has all the money and power in the argument. You know, like Ken Ham.

In honor of so-called “Pride Month,” “progressive” Christian author Jen Hatmaker published an episode of her podcast featuring her daughter, Sydney, announcing that Sydney is a homosexual. Her family, apparently, has known for some time and decided that it was time to celebrate this with this world.

Such an announcement should break the heart of Christians. The admission that this young woman has embraced a sinful identity will only bring hurt, brokenness, and pain as she rebels against her Creator and his Word, but also distressing is that her mother—a professing believer—has decided this is something good, to be proud of, and to celebrate. (Really this is Romans 1:32 coming to life.)

If you didn’t know it already, tolerance and acceptance aren’t Christian values in Ken Ham’s brand of religion. I only wish all their hearts would literally break, so we could be rid of them.

Start your weekend with some happy news

Graham Linehan, the ‘noxious transphobe and serial harasser of trans folk, has finally been banned from Twitter.

This is a remarkable turn of events because all of the big social media companies have been remarkably resistant to actually doing anything about the trolls and haters and racists and misogynists that dwell happily within their services. They just spewing and spewing, their targets report them, and the companies come back with some feeble comment that Nazis and bigots don’t “violate their terms of service.”

So what’s going on? It would be nice to believe that corporate executives were hit by a lightning bolt, reflected on their misspent lives, and decided to put up a facade of human decency. This is not the case, however. They’re just looking at their spreadsheets and seeing that their blinkered neglect of civilized behavior is projected to cause them to lose lots of money. They won’t be “cool” anymore.

Facebook leads the way.

Zuck’s social network continues to hemorrhage users, new research suggests.

Facebook has an estimated 15 million fewer U.S. users today than it did in 2017, according to a study released Wednesday by Edison Research and Triton Digital. The share of people 12 and over using Facebook was 67% in 2017, but declined to 62% in 2018 and 61% this year.

Zuckerberg probably has nightmares about his cash cow becoming the MySpace of the 2020s. It could happen.

Facebook on Thursday posted the largest one-day loss in market value by any company in U.S. stock market history after releasing a disastrous quarterly report.

The social media giant’s market capitalization plummeted by $119 billion to $510 billion as its stock price plummeted by 19 percent. At Wednesday’s close, Facebook’s market cap had totaled nearly $630 billion, according to FactSet.

Don’t cry for them, they’re still worth $500 billion. They’re not the future, though, and Twitter is probably glancing nervously at Facebook, wondering if they’re next, hence the sudden interest in cleaning up the shambolic mess of their service. They’re probably also looking to differentiate themselves from their new “competitor”, Parler, where all the right-wingers are flocking.

Parler sounds lovely, if you like wallowing in anti-semitism while pretending to be a bold independent spirit standing up for liberty, like most right-wingers.

The Parler website even has a “Declaration Of Internet Independence” slamming the “Technofascism” of Silicon Valley and Twitter and claiming that “millions”—yes, millions—have been banned for their political ideology. “We The People have had enough!” they cry, demanding “Free Speech” and “Liberties” and other good things with Randomly Capitalized Letters.

Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful company?

In reality, the largest group of accounts targeted for suspension from Twitter have been bots and terrorists, like the tens of millions of fake accounts removed after the scale of Russian interference in the 2016 election became clear, or the roughly 250,000 accounts associated with ISIS/ISIL removed after the 2015 terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.

Graham Linehan is just the latest victim of an effort to clean up the rubbish. Maybe he should set up a Parler account?

The spectacle of Republican cannibalism is always entertaining

Ah, the country is swirling down the crapper thanks to toxic conservatives, but at least we can savor the desperate clawing of the terrible people responsible at each other. I give you the Illinois Patriarchy Institute, which is mightily enraged at a recent Supreme Court decision that says employers can’t punish people for being gay.

I and others have been shouting from our virtual rooftops for over a decade that there is no greater threat to First Amendment protections than that posed by the subversive “LGBTQ” movement. Can conservatives not yet see the end of the short pier toward which GOP leaders have long been pushing them? Really?

(Im)moderate Republicans, Libertarian-leaning Republicans, Republicans with dollar signs rather than Scripture reflected in their myopic eyes have been pushing conservatives toward the end of the short pier, hoping that either spines will crumble or conservatives will tumble into the dark waters. Supremacist Court Justice/lawmaker Neil-the-Usurper-Gorsuch just gave conservatives a huge shove toward the watery abyss.

Also, there are gays in the Republican party!

Conservatives get all giddy with chills running up their legs when homosexuals like Guy Benson, Dave Rubin, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Brandon Straka express Republican-ish views. “Oh gosh, the cool kids like us, they really like us!”

Meanwhile, those smart, articulate, good-looking homosexuals seek to change the Republican Party from within—like a cancer or a Guinea worm (am I allowed to call it the Guinea worm any longer?). We welcome camels into the tent at our peril.

The author suggests that all these Republicans ought to join the Democratic party. No, thanks, they’re awful people, and we are already full up on them. You keep ’em.

Brainwashed!

I have been informed that the following video of a British children’s entertainer on YouTube from a few years ago is a ghastly attempt to indoctrinate children into accepting the trans agenda. How dare they! So I watched it to see what it was all about.

I should warn you that it is extraordinarily powerful brainwashing. I watched it, and found myself thinking, “Gosh, this all seems perfectly reasonable — it’s about tolerance and acceptance.” That just goes to show you how insidious and evil those trans people are, because damn, it’s so effective. Beware! They want you to teach children to be egalitarian!

Does anyone on FtB think Rowling has a point? No.

The Geeky Humanist has weighed in on l’affaire Rowling, and comes to the same conclusion most people have: Rowling is wrong about everything. I warned Sarah that posts about Rowling are a magnet for obnoxious trolls, but you know how it goes: Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, it must be addressed.

You know, HJ and Brinkman and GAS have also been punching up at a certain rich TERF, and then I noticed that Rhiannon was on the case before the Screed was published, and Caine had Rowling pegged 3 years ago.