What if bigots were all inadvertently honest about their bigotry…like THIS guy?
Yes, that’s right: He bravely admitted that the “Straight Pride” people are in fact a racist group. Not that we hadn’t already guessed, but there’s your confirmation, straight from the horse’s ass.Whoopsie!
And the best part, for me, was that one city councilwoman (you can see her in the foreground), doing a facepalm as soon as the laughter breaks out. She may not be as dramatic about it as Green Shirt Guy here…
…or Plaid Shirt Guy here…
…but, like those guys, her reaction pretty much says it all. For EVERYONE. She is our Hero for Today.
Can we give that priceless Facepalm Lady some viral internet love, please? PLEASE?
Hey, everybody. Sorry I’ve been incommunicada these last few days, but shit has gone DOWN. I lost a good friend to cancer (Thinking Man Neil, greatly and terribly missed even though we both knew it was going to happen eventually…just, maybe, not so damn soon.) A few days later, I also had a birthday, sadly clouded by the loss of my dear friend (who, thoughtful to the end, left me some of his most cherished possessions and a simple message of love in a card, thus cementing the sad coincidence between his untimely passing and the regularly scheduled event of me marking another year of looping ’round the Sun).
And THEN, right on time for said birthday, THIS shit happened:
And THIS shit also happened, the next day:
In both cases, the motivation behind the massacre was the same: It was RACISM. And that rules out leftism as a motivator, categorically, because the left has always historically been opposed to racism, whereas the right has historically been conducive to it. Who but racists could continue to support “gun rights” over HUMAN rights?
And it seems that something is changing on the Internet, at last, because Cloudflare has no-platformed one of the major sources of far-right radicalization — namely 8chan. A forum which another of my friends aptly called an “incel cloning vat”. They wrote:
The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.
[…]
We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. 8chan has crossed that line. It will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services.
So, finally, SOMEBODY is admitting that hate speech is NOT free speech. And that hate speech is not just shitposting for shitposting’s sake, nor is it just harmless, victimless fun; it has far-reaching real-world consequences. Real people are killing other real people as a result of that speech. Edgelords are literally driving each other over the edge. And the worst part is, even if one service provider stops them, others are still willing to step into the breach, because CAPITALISM:
Unfortunately, we have seen this situation before and so we have a good sense of what will play out. Almost exactly two years ago we made the determination to kick another disgusting site off Cloudflare’s network: the Daily Stormer. That caused a brief interruption in the site’s operations but they quickly came back online using a Cloudflare competitor. That competitor at the time promoted as a feature the fact that they didn’t respond to legal process. Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting. They have bragged that they have more readers than ever. They are no longer Cloudflare’s problem, but they remain the Internet’s problem.
I have little doubt we’ll see the same happen with 8chan. While removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online. It does nothing to address why mass shootings occur. It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted they turn to hate. In taking this action we’ve solved our own problem, but we haven’t solved the Internet’s.
In the two years since the Daily Stormer what we have done to try and solve the Internet’s deeper problem is engage with law enforcement and civil society organizations to try and find solutions. Among other things, that resulted in us cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained an indication of potential violence. We will continue to work within the legal process to share information when we can to hopefully prevent horrific acts of violence. We believe this is our responsibility and, given Cloudflare’s scale and reach, we are hopeful we will continue to make progress toward solving the deeper problem.
It’s commendable that Cloudflare is at least doing something about it on their own platform (and even more so that they are calling on governments to do something about it as well), but the fact that the whole Internet hasn’t yet come together to stop fascism is worrisome. It is precisely this hands-off approach, this unwillingness to slaughter the sacred cow of Freeze Peach, that enables the worst to flourish. It is the willingness of service providers to take hatemongers’ money that continues to fuel the hate machine. It is capitalism that is enabling fascism.
Meanwhile, on other platforms, the racism — some more covert than others — goes on. The question is: Who’s going to no-platform FUX Snooze? And motherfucking, daughter-letching Donnie? Is anyone going to bother?
The obvious answer is no. Of course not. Hate drives FUX’s ratings, and Twitter’s traffic. It greases the wheels of the NRA’s murder machine, and keeps the gun-wanks buying and their victims dying, so the vicious cycle never ends. It’s all about the eyeballs. Every viewer is more money for the advertisers who feed the hatemongers, and every taker of what’s being peddled — be it racism or guns — puts more money in the pockets of the gunmakers who keep the NRA’s lights on.
Once again: Crapitalism at work. Crapitalism doesn’t care who gets hurt, or who kills whom, as long as money gets made, and that money keeps getting suctioned right to the top, where too much of it is resting already, and virtually nothing is trickling down to those in need.
And that is a cancer even more malignant than the one that took my dear and thoughtful friend Neil from this world far too soon.
In Nigeria, the Islamist terror group Boko Haram tried to attack the communities of Aatagara and Kawuri, but was instantly repulsed by a group of armed women.
Almost immediately, the community rallied to apprehend the insurgents. At least three of the terrorists succeeded in fleeing, but seven were arrested and executed. Local residents said that the initial attack occurred when the Boko Haram terrorists arrived in their villages on motorcycles.
History was already made on the morning after the victory, as some residents stated that the men were paralyzed by local talismans which protect women and children.
The first women came to fetch their local militia, which contained a number of armed women, who ran quickly to the scene, fought back, and executed the attackers. Mama Yakubu, a young woman who participated in the resistance, said that they had killed the terrorists, because the Boko Haram members didn’t talk when they were interrogated.
This is not the only time Boko Haram was repulsed by local resistance. Last month, about 200 militants were killed in combat in the Kala-Balge region of the State of Borno.
Translation mine.
Borno, you may recall, has been a site of intense fighting between insurgents and locals. Five years ago, a massacre took place there in the village of Konduga, when Boko Haram went about slaughtering Christians.
It is also the state in which the abduction of the schoolgirls of Chibok took place that same year. Many of those girls escaped and are now back with their families, but others were forcibly married off or killed, and are still missing. Some have since given birth to their abductors’ children.
So it seems a fitting, and downright karmic, turn of events when armed local women manage to do better at halting Boko Haram in a single day than the government and the army have done in five years.
So, the unthinkable has apparently happened, and the dumbest politician in Britain (not even barring the one who preceded him) is now PM of the UK.
He wasn’t elected, unless you consider his party’s arcane leadership selection process to be an election (and I strongly suggest you don’t). He was appointed, essentially, and rubber-stamped by the Queen (definitely not dear old Lilibet’s finest hour, was it?).
Ash Sarkar’s analysis here is on point:
BTW, Ash is the woman who told off that pompous twat Piers Morgan, on camera, as a literal communist. And if you’re not subscribed to the Novara Media channel on YouTube (as well as Democracy Now!), what are you even doing with your life?
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Posted inMerry Old England|Comments Off on Perambulating haystack somehow becomes Britain’s PM
Uh oh, it looks like a certain aging shameboy has a very thin skin under that grizzled beard:
Touchy, touchy, touchy.
Somehow, I doubt very much that Gammon got a hundred thousand new (PAID!) subscribers yesterday just from being trashed by three progressive show hosts who saw through his cringey gambit. I suspect this is really a self-promoting bluff on his part, as well as a face-saver. Ana, Sam, and David all made him look desperate and sad. So of course he’s going to pretend that he didn’t really need them to legitimize him after all. And of course he’s hoping that this will pay off in actual, paying customers for all his dreck.
And of course, that bid for legitimacy will fail just like all the others did. Why? Because Gammon has already been cucked by his own cowardice. Nobody on the far right wants to see a proven chickenshit, much less pay just to watch him sodomize himself. And also because grifters are all, by their nature, illegitimate. That goes double for right-wing grifters in general.
And triple for those like Gammon, namely neo-Nazi grifters who are too cowardly to just come on out and strap on the damn swastikas already.
So this makes three progressive show hosts now who’ve openly rejected Gammon’s “invitations” (and offers of thousand-dollar payments) to appear on his show. And Ana got the biggest-dollar offer so far — $7000 (compared to the $5000 that was offered to David Pakman).
And is it really any wonder that no one with any integrity wants to dignify his idiotic show with their presence? This is a Little Hitler who calls for overt violence from the right while hanging back himself. I doubt very much that he’s truly changed his stripes since “distancing” himself from the Proud Boys. He’s still a shitty, mean, ugly person; every word out of his mouth may as well be a turd. He’s also a coward, as shown by his stochastic terrorism against Vic Berger, his willingness to brandish a fake samurai kitsch sword and urging his attack dogs on while doing nothing, and also by his speedy back-pedal when it looked like even THAT wussy act of incitement was going to bear legal consequences for him as an instigator. He doesn’t have the courage of his professed convictions. So who would dignify his opinions by pitting their own against them? Who would waste that much time for any amount of money?
And how the hell does he even HAVE a show, STILL? He’s not a terribly talented or entertaining guy — except, maybe, when shoving dildoes up his ass or waving his unimpressive willy on camera. But that’s because those are actually pratfalls, and he is one hell of a prat. His only real talent, in short, is for making an ass of himself. But that’s not really saying much, because he’s an ass already.
So who is giving this ass all that money to lure progressives to his show? That’s what Ana wants to know, and so do I. Who’s yer sugardaddy, Gammon? Maybe, if you came clean and talked about who’s paying you to fly your vile flag, and why, you might have the germ of a show worth watching.
Until then, mockery is all the attention any progressive is going to pay you, and all you will deserve.
…not that he ever actually left us, more’s the pity. And with or without a visible hairline, his face is even more punchable than ever:
I really hate to give a far-right FUX Snoozer like Chris Wallace props here, but full credit where due: He tried, he really tried, to rub Widdle Stevie’s schnoz in the actual words that were said, not only by AOC and the Squad, but by his own boss, Donnie himself.
BTW, that wasn’t even the worst thing he said. Here’s the worst:
I didn’t think it was possible to be both a Jew AND a Nazi, but Stevie has proved me wrong. On the one hand, he finds it awfully convenient to pull out the old “You’re diminishing the Holocaust” card and slap people on the mouth with it; on the other, he’s only too happy to praise and promote real, bona-fide, fascism with everything but the swastikas. He is far more a white supremacist than he is an affronted Jew, because if he were actually offended as a Jew, he would understand that history’s ugliest chapters are repeating themselves here, and would be scrambling to denounce it, as other Jews (who have NOT forgotten) are doing. His cynicism is fucking breathtaking.
AOC is right; the border detention facilities ARE concentration camps, and they’re killing people already. His “as a Jew, I am profoundly outraged” pose is just that: a POSE. An empty, cynical, outrageous and profoundly ridiculous POSE.
And of course, he WOULD drag Venezuela into it. The very country that his own government, both now and through at least two previous administrations, has been trying to destabilize and reconvert to “neoliberal”, corporatist, banana-republican fascism, like it was in the bad old days leading up to the Caracazo. Donnie is diverting massive amounts of “aid” money to the support of an actual fascist puppet-dictator wannabe. Where is Stevie’s outrage about THAT? Nowhere. In fact, he’s all too happy to let it happen and gloss it over as “humanitarian aid”, even though there’s not a humanitarian nickel in it, because its end effect is to bolster his own bullshit. It gives him a “bad” country to point to, without once mentioning just what his not-so-great country has done to MAKE that country unlivable.
And then he gets “outraged” that people are fleeing from there (and all the other Latin American countries the US of Amnesia has converted to fascist banana republics over the decades), and are landing up on the southern border, not to colonize the US but to seek refuge there, only to be treated to direct and unmistakable (and ironically, VERY banana-republican) fascism, right there in the country that caused (and continues to cause) THEIR home countries’ collective misery?
Back in the early 1980s, a video cracked the CHUM 30 chart that was unlike all the rest of the pop parade of the day. It featured strong Zulu chants, references to Olduvai Gorge and Phelamanga (“the place where the lies end”), and a shaggy, bearded white guy dancing right along with the natives in perfect step:
That white guy was the late Johnny Clegg, who was not only the singer of a band (then called Juluka, later Savuka), but an anthropologist, and an anti-apartheid activist from South Africa just pointing out the obvious: that ancient ancestral bones show how we all came from Africa before we scattered over the globe, and that therefore, it was (and still is) a crime against humanity for the white colonial apartheid state to make “scatterlings” (i.e. displaced persons) of the local blacks. In a further fuck-you to white supremacy and separatism, he donned native dress, sang native chants, and danced like one of them, not in front of them or apart from them, but in the same line. He became, in effect, a white Zulu. For this effrontery, he faced persecution and censorship at home, but won international fame that went well beyond a charted hit.
Johnny’s efforts were not only shunted to the sidelines by a government determined to keep them out of the spotlight; they were also poorly understood by the political left of his day and land. He once said: “I hacked my own way and my own road…I was called a crypto-tribalist by the Left. I was promoting tribal values in a time that we should be promoting universal, counterculture values … But I was inside a migrant culture and I was living it and I was dressing it and I was eating it. I was a complete devotee. There was something that they knew about life that my people didn’t know.”
It was not just a simple, shallow gesture of rebellion. He became one of the Zulus in order to integrate — not by imposing a new culture from without, but by lifting up an existing one out of “the dust of Olduvai” and holding it high before the world. He harmonized African chants with his own music in English. He was saying, in effect, that indigenous cultures are not inimical to those of outsiders, nor are they “exotic” — they are how real people have lived for thousands of years, and are still in place, still functioning, and very much alive today. If a white person could learn to live at one with Zulu comrades, then there was no excuse for apartheid, nor for the murder, repression, and displacement it brought with it.
This, then, is the not-so-hidden message of “Scatterlings”, which got worldwide airplay at a time when the international community and popular culture were finally waking up to the horrors of apartheid and starting to mobilize against it, even as governments continued to do business with the South African régime and turned a blind eye to its systemic racism and human rights abuses. Things changed in the wake of “Scatterlings”, and they are still changing. It is still as relevant today, in an age of neofascism, as it was when first recorded in 1982, and when it broke the Canadian charts in 1983.
Thank you, Johnny, for teaching us all so much. Dance on!
Stickers being distributed by the Gazeta Polska for businesses to stick in their windows to declare the premises an “LGBT+-free zone”. Or, more correctly, as a business catering to Nazis…and those who have forgotten their history lessons:
A magazine in Poland is going to be distributing “LGBT-free zone” stickers to their readers. Gazeta Polska is a far-right nationalist weekly magazine in Poland that supports the Law and Justice Party, which is anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant.
The magazine said that it will be distributing stickers that say “LGBT-FREE ZONE” and show a rainbow flag with an “X” through it in next week’s issue.
Pavel Rabiej, deputy president of Warsaw and a centrist, said on Twitter that he would file a complaint with the prosecutor’s office.
“The Germans created zones free of Jews,” Rabiej tweeted.
Poland’s hate speech law does not include sexual orientation, but Instagram blocked a picture of the sticker, according to Gazeta Polska editor Tomasz Sakiewicz.
“Censorship was typical of Nazism, imposing ideology, too,” Sakiewicz told another paper.
With all due respect, Herr Sakiewicz (i.e., NONE) — GO FUCK YOURSELF.
You don’t get to cry “censorship”. Instagram is a private entity, not a state organ. They have terms of service, and are within their rights to turf out a violator, which the Gazeta Polska most certainly is.
You also don’t get to cry “Nazism” here, since your shitty fascist rag is doing the exact same thing the Nazis did to queers…
…and Jews:
THAT’s what actual censorship and state terrorism look like, in case anyone forgets.
But of course, in Poland, they do forget, and keep forgetting. Poland keeps forgetting Poland.
It would appear that Poland is doomed to keep on forgetting Poland until the end of time.
Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory's truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next.
--Arthur Miller, "Why I Wrote 'The Crucible'", The New Yorker, October 21, 1996
All opinions here are the brain-wrackings of Sabina C. Becker, unless otherwise credited. If you cite them, please give credit where due.
