I closed comments and new posting, but The Atheist Experience was still left up here at FtB. Despite requesting some recommendations from the Atheist Community of Austin, what’s left of it, for what to do with the blog, I’ve heard nothing from them. So this evening a removed it from FtB’s roster for good.
What a freakin’ mess. Matt and his transphobic crew really did a great job of flushing a fine organization down the tubes.
Two white guys, Benioff and Weiss, were the show-runners for Game of Thrones, and they made a total botch of the last season because they were in such a rush to move on to brand new exciting projects, which I can understand…GoT really went on forever, and the author of that series was slowly, interminably expanding the books to a point they’re getting kind of unreadable.
Unfortunately, the HBO show they were eager to do was Confederate, an alternate-history series in which they postulate a victorious Confederacy and the aftermath. The alt-right good ol’ boys were salivating over that, the rest of us were cringing, and everyone was wondering if the two guys who recklessly crashed HBO’s biggest cash cow had adequate sensitivity and nuance to handle that kind of story.
The answer is “no”. HBO has killed the project. Good.
I like these alternative alternative history suggestions, though.
This kind of story, even when well-meaning, is always just very meh, because in the end, we may live in a society in which slavery is illegal, but the ramifications of slavery are still ever present in modern life. Why not create an alternative universe where the Reformation was allowed to be tough on the South and allowed Black citizens to have more legal protections so they could govern themselves fully? Why not a story where chattel slavery never happened? Why do we need to bring up the Confederacy and open up a bag of worms that this country has never been comfortable enough to pick through?
Why hire a couple of hacks to do it no matter how good the idea is?
I didn’t know him personally (which may have been for the best), but I followed his work. He did what a satirist is supposed to do, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and he was especially expert at the latter. Now Murphy has died.
Friends and colleagues of journalist and satirist Ian Murphy, former editor of the recently revived Buffalo Beast, an alternative online news site in Buffalo, NY, report that Murphy has died. Murphy passed away on July 17, 2019, Buffalo Beast staff said. He was 40 years old. The cause of death has not been confirmed.
In life, he was a professional weirdo.
Ian Murphy is the editor of The BEAST (buffalobeast.com), a half-satirical news and opinion website dedicated to militant rationalism and quasi-journalistic hijinks, which was founded in 2002 as a Buffalo, NY biweekly rag by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. Murphy is best known for prank calling Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wherein he posed as arch-libertarian moneybags David Koch. He’s also infiltrated the grand opening of Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum” by posing as a Christian reporter afflicted with “Asperger’s Syndrome by proxy,” gone undercover in the Church of Scientology while on hallucinogens, canoed to Canada to expose ineffective and profit-driven post-9/11 border security, and proudly received hundreds of death threats. In the spring of 2011, Murphy ran as the Green Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives to fill the seat vacated by disgraced “Craigslist Congressman” Chris Lee. While reaping a pathetic one percent of the vote, Murphy nonetheless scored a comedic victory, and national press, for creating a scathing parody of his Republican opponent’s website. Murphy has also been published by Alternet, Crooks & Liars, The Daily Beast, Free Inquiry, and The Progressive. And as of this writing, Murphy is standing trial for “disruption of a religious service” with a dildo. In reality, he was arrested for filming a police officer while covering a National Organization for Marriage anti-gay marriage rally. So if he doesn’t show up, he’s probably in jail.
He was the gonzo commentator for our era, and now he’s gone. He was a better reporter than the sad fumbledums working for the 24 hour news networks, that’s for sure — we’d be living in a better world if he’d been hired to replace Chris Cilliza. Actually, we’d be better off if the corpse of Ian Murphy replaced Cilliza — it’s not too late!
Uh-oh. How did this happen?
Jeffrey Epstein, the financier facing charges of sex trafficking involving dozens of underage girls, was found unconscious in a Manhattan jail cell with injuries to his neck, US media reported late on Wednesday, citing unidentified sources.
Epstein was found by guards sprawled on the floor of his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Wednesday, it was reported.
The billionaire financier was taken to hospital, according to the New York Post, but it was unclear where he was taken or what his condition was. It was not clear how he suffered his injuries.
That’s a lot of unclear stuff for a guy who has a lot of enemies, who is suspected of possibly blackmailing people, and has a lot of powerful people terrified about what he might say. At least one major bank, Deutsche Bank, is scrambling to cover up their connections to his money.
I want him to live because I want him to talk, some people might want him dead because they don’t want him to talk. Or maybe it’s sunk into Epstein’s mind that his lifestyle has met its end and he’ll never go back to raping schoolgirls.
I’ll be in an online chat in about an hour. I have no idea what we’re going to talk about, except for perhaps one little thing.
I’ve emailed the president of ACA, the vice president, and the board, and have received no response. We’ve discussed the matter on the FtB backchannel, and the comments there so far have been unanimous: the ACA is now incompatible with the mission of Freethoughtblogs. Therefore, and regretfully, I have disabled comments on the AXP blog and demoted all of their administrators. Nothing is irreversible yet, but I can’t imagine what kind of defense they could put up that would reverse our decision.
Ideally, they’ll contact me soon and we can make arrangements to transfer all of their blog content elsewhere. If the silence continues, I’ll simply archive everything and remove references to them from our main page by the end of this week.
There are many things we will not tolerate on any of the blogs here: racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia are all grounds for ejection from the network. The ACA is guilty of the last.
The last restaurant in that ice cream chain has closed. It was popular on the west coast when I was growing up, and was best known for the dishes of legendary size they would serve.
I can’t say that I went there very often, but I do remember that my friends took me there on my 21st birthday, because although I was now old enough, I couldn’t drink, since I had a biochemistry final the next day. Damn, but I was stodgy and responsible. Also, damn biochemistry, that was a tough course.
We have arrived in Duluth a few days before a big air show, and the Blue Angels are practicing all around our hotel. It would be terrible if we were trying to sleep, but right now the frequent “whooooshes” are entertaining.
Unfortunately, I only brought my macro lens kit with me, none of my long lenses, so this was the best I could do, even when they were doing low altitude flyovers of the hotel parking lot.
Mary and I are going to spend a few lazy days near a big lake, and we’re also going to hang out for a bit with Iris. She’s been offline for a year and a half, for a good reason. Anyone have any questions, best wishes, etc., that they’d like to pass along?
I might also do a little spider hunting. A Great Lake must have Great Spiders, right?
