- Ponies | Popehat
The Ponies category at Popehat is awesome. You will learn more about the pony threat then you ever imagined. (Thanks Mandolin!) - Why Trump wants to get rid of the “Johnson Amendment”
If Churches can become tax-free political campaigning organizations, that gives them an enormous advantage over orgs like Planned Parenthood. It’s also a way for political donors to hide their identities. - U.S. judge finds that Aetna misled the public about its reasons for quitting Obamacare – LA Times
Calling them assholes seems so inadequate. - Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl – The New York Times
- At least 300 people form barrier to shield Portland churchgoers from harassment | OregonLive.com
Three “Alas” folks – Charles, Ben and myself – were there for this. - AP: Trump’s voter fraud expert registered to vote in 3 states
There’s no indication that he’s ever double-voted, but this is still notable, since Trump has cited double-registrations as evidence of voter fraud. - TransGriot: Boy Scouts To Allow Transmasculine Boys To Join
- At GOP leaders’ urging, Texas Supreme Court will consider undoing gay spousal rights | LGBT | Dallas News
- The White Nationalists Come to Washington | New Republic
- Feral Bunnies Are Taking Over Las Vegas | Atlas Obscura
I can’t understand why they don’t make trapping and eating the adorable little things legal. - South Dakota lawmakers declare state of ’emergency’ to force repeal of voter-imposed ethics law
“The bill guts all of the Act’s provisions, including creation of an independent ethics commission, limits on lobbyists gifts to politicians, tougher penalties for bribery, stronger transparency, and a two-year ban on politicians becoming lobbyists when they leave office.” There are parts of the law which should be modified or clarified, but wholesale repeal? They just want to be corrupt. - The Myth of the Well-Behaved Women’s March | New Republic
“Bad behavior is enough to lead to arrests, but good behavior isn’t enough to avoid it. If the cops didn’t arrest anyone, it’s because they didn’t want to.” - Report: hundreds of US hospitals follow Catholic rules on reproductive care | Society | The Guardian
Which leads to cases like what happened to Mindy Swank. - Repealing the Affordable Care Act will kill more than 43,000 people annually – The Washington Post
- Democrats Want To Pick Their Battles With Trump. Their Base Wants All-Out War. | The Huffington Post
- President Trump’s illegal-voter paranoia is a fantasy. But the consequences are real. – Vox
- This Stat Will Make Your EPOP | The American Conservative
Thanks to Harlequin for this link, about the prime-age EPOP: “The employment-to-population ratio for adults between the ages of 25 and 54.” This is a good statistic to look at, not instead of but beside the unemployment rate. The EPOP has mostly recovered since the 2008 recession, but there’s still a ways to go. - Why Donald Trump Has Made American Less Safe From Terrorism
- Are Factory Jobs Good Jobs? – Lawyers, Guns & Money
Not if they’re not union jobs. - Sentencing Law and Policy: The hardest of cases for death penalty abolitionists: convicted murderer who keeps murdering while in prison
- On Male Feminists | Thing of Things
- Montreal’s Car-Free Street Network Gets Bigger All the Time – Streetsblog USA
- Trump to CIA: We now have 2nd Chance to take Iraq’s Oil
- German court rules that firebombing a synagogue is not anti-Semitic – Vox
- NAFTA Has Been Awesome for Mexico???? – Lawyers, Guns & Money
Not so much. - heron61 | Thoughts on 2 Films – Passengers (2016) & The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959)
- The Lesson of 2016: Rabid Congressional Investigations Work | Mother Jones
- Graphic essay: What the Civil Rights Movement can teach us about surviving Trump | Fusion
- How Louis CK Tells A Joke – YouTube
- You’re Fired: Political discourse in the age of Trump | Liza Featherstone
I wish I could cut the final sentence – which is yet another iteration of the “it’s because of liberals I disagree with that Trump was elected!” cliche – but other than that, this essay criticizing the left for calling for people to be fired is spot-on, and by spot-on I mean it says things I agree with. - Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, wasn’t black. But here’s why so many people think he was.
- Quebec City imam’s profoundly magnanimous eulogy includes white gunman in list of victims.
Thanks to Closetpuritan for this and the previous two links. - Arkansas passes law allowing rapists to sue victims who want an abortion | The Independent
Specifically, the law allows a husband to sue his wife’s doctor to prevent her from getting an abortion, even in cases where the husband raped the wife. That headline-grabbing news is disgusting and noteworthy, but the broader principle in the law – that a husband has an ownership stake in his wife’s body – is also disgusting. - Partisan Redistricting Goes To Court | The American Conservative
- Resistance, and Being a "Sore Loser" – Greta Christina’s Blog
- Milo and the Violent, Well-Funded Right-Wing Attacks on Academic Freedom
- Anarchists, NOT Cal students, responsible for violence in UC Berkeley protests – California Golden Blogs
- The Debate Link: Berkeley’s Partially Pregnant Protests
Very good points from David Schraub: “The fact of the matter is that there were three speeches scheduled at Berkeley last night.” Thanks to Harlequin for the link. - Carl Beijer: Nazi punching probably doesn’t matter either way
- On Punching Nazis | Popehat
- The Long History of "Nazi Punching" | Mother Jones
I have to say, I really dislike the “Anarchists, not Cal students, were responsible for…” framing. First, what, these are supposed to be mutually exclusive categories? Cal is a big school, I would bet nontrivial-for-me money on there being anarchists at Cal. Second, it’s fearmongering about anarchists, which has consequences for real people – it leads to anarchists and people who are perceived as anarchists being targeted at protests, and targeted by police outside of protests (FBI agents knocking on their doors before large protests, police parking cars outside their houses, tracking their activities, stalking and harassing them, trying to entrap them, etc). At the RNC protests, street medics were profiled as “anarchist troublemakers” by police and treated with suspicion, to the point of having bags searched and treated as the villains when we were hassled by Trump supporters (and many street medics are anarchists, though I am not, so this is not about “Oh, the poor street medics were scapegoated for being anarchists,” it’s about “This is the kind of thing that happens when people fearmonger about anarchists”).
Okay, probably many people saw this one back when it was fresh, but it’s new to me and gave me a belly laugh–or, well, something somewhere between a belly laugh and a scream of pure outrage, anyway–this morning, so I thought I’d share.
Obama’s sentence…commuting (brain is not supplying me with proper nounifying, sorry) of Chelsea Manning, back in January, inspired someone to tweet in outrage: “Obama commutes sentence of Chelsea Manning. How many people died because of manning’ leak?”
That someone?
Judith Miller.
Happy Tuesday!
That rabbit situation is bizarre. Like, just poison them or shoot them? I was hoping the article would say *why* that is illegal, but if it did I missed it. Presumably because rabbits are somehow classified as pets and not wild animals? Like, I am pretty sure it would be illegal here to shoot or poison a stray or feral cat or dog, even though you can kill as many rabbits as you’d like.
(Also, isn’t this a fascinating sentence structure with 3 “or”s in it: “to shoot or poison a stray or feral cat or dog”)
Oh, yes. Judith Miller has no sense of irony. No. That’s not the words I’m looking for. No self awareness? Not quite right. No conscience? That seems better.
And it did make my brain all splodey when I first saw it. Now I just wish her a quick vanishing from public view forever.
No shame, perhaps?
For me, the fact that her username is “JMfreespeech” was the cherry on the brain-asplodey sundae. No parodist would have dared go that far if writing this up as fiction. They would have been all “No…no, gotta leave that bit out. That’s just totally overegging it.”
My book is coming out in paperback!!!!
Lirael, I have the greatest of respect for you, but I disagree.
First, just because “black bloc” and “Berkeley student protesters” are not mutually exclusive categories, doesn’t mean it’s wrong to make the distinction.
Two groups that overlap are not the same as two groups that are interchangeable. And when people speak as if the two groups are interchangeable – and many people, including the President, have been speaking about Berkeley protesters and black bloc activists as if they were interchangeable – it’s reasonable to point out that they are not.
Second of all, if that article – which mainly pointed out that the student protestors and the black bloc were two separate groups – counts as “fearmongering,” then I think the definition of “fearmongering” must be unreasonably broad.
I don’t deny that some people fearmonger about anarchists – for instance, I’d say that right-wing rhetoric that makes it sound as if no Trump fan can wear their MAGA caps in public without being physically assaulted counts as fearmongering. So I’m not denying that fearmongering happens. And that it’s a bad thing. But I don’t think that the article I linked to was fearmongering.
Third, people who are deliberately violent are also fearmongerers. The reason that people think that groups of young (mostly) men in black masks throwing rocks and fireworks and breaking windows and punching/macing people are fearful isn’t (only) that they’ve been getting bad newspaper coverage; it’s that groups of young (mostly) men in black masks throwing rocks and fireworks and breaking windows and punching/macing people are genuinely frightening to most people. And that fear is reasonable.
To a great extent, that ordinary people are fearful of black bloc activism is a result of deliberate choices made by the black bloc people themselves.
Fourth, I definitely don’t condone police abuse and violence. But the logical endpoint of your argument seems to be that no one should criticize black bloc activism – or point out that the block bloc activists at Berkeley were almost certainly outsiders, and not a group of Berkeley students – for fear of encouraging police abuse. I don’t think that’s reasonable.
There has to be a distinction between saying “people shouldn’t fearmonger about black bloc activists” and saying “people shouldn’t criticize black bloc activists.” And I don’t think your argument maintains that distinction.
Congratulations, Kate! That’s great news.
For folks who didn’t click through:
kate,
Congratulations!
Thanks!! I’m so excited!
Wow! Love that video! Must be an amazing experience to do that.
Congratulations, Kate!
I’ve been at dozens of protests that had a black bloc presence, in five different states that come to mind. The number in which black blockers directed physical violence toward anyone who didn’t attack protesters first is…one, I think. By contrast, the number that have behaved in a protective way toward fellow protesters is a lot more than one (and the one is included, strongly, in that second set).
Bandannas are common protective gear and lots of people who aren’t black blockers have them at protests (it’s pretty easy to find photos of e.g. Standing Rock water protectors or Black Lives Matter protesters who are clearly not black blocking with bandanas on their faces). I understand the concerns about them, both that they scare some people and that they can provide cover for provocateurs, which is why I don’t pull mine over my face unless I think a chemical attack is imminent (the one I carry these days is green, my favorite color, and has the steps of a wilderness medicine patient assessment system on it – you can spot me with it around my neck at the left of the “Trump supporters push their way past…” photo here). But a wet bandana does also help against chemical attack, and there’s a long tradition of people telling me that any kind of protective gear (like my swim goggles, also around my neck in that photo) is bad because it scares people, that informs my reaction. And a lot of antifa protesters in particular fear being doxed and targeted by Nazis, because it’s the nature of antifa work.
There’s a larger conversation to be had, I think, about how bandanas at protests are kind of like Internet anonymity/pseudonymity – they provide cover for the malicious, and are seen as scary by some people and are the object of a lot of concern, and are also extremely useful protection for the vulnerable or for those doing risky work. Not an easy subject.
This gets, of course, to part of my criticism of your first panel in your recent comic. Another part of my criticism is the implication that people who would break windows or wear masks don’t do difficult, important organizing. Antifa work is rigorous. Organizing protests – and if you don’t think anyone who would break a window also organizes protests, you’re incorrect – is rigorous. It’s a cheap shot. Finally, it seemed unnecessary to include a panel about the left in there at all when most of the people complaining about “liberals” use the word “liberal” to mean “everyone left of center” rather than intra-left-squabble definitions.
Black blocs are not above criticism, but right now there’s no shortage of criticism, some good, mostly bad, and a dearth of people looking at black blocs as an instrument for anything other than tactics they don’t approve of. Meanwhile, a friend of a friend (who was protesting in the parking garage, a relatively isolated area, and had already been punched by a Milo supporter without provocation) had a knife pulled on him by a Nazi at the Berkeley protest, and black blockers disarmed the Nazi, possibly saving the life of the innocent protester, at risk to their own. And you’ve seen my post about what black blockers were doing in DC besides smashing a couple of windows – running into danger to rescue people, flagging down medics, protecting working medics from aggression, shielding protesters with their bodies. They shielded peaceful BLM protesters there from Bikers for Trump and other aggressors. They’re not doing that in spite of being black blockers, they’re doing that as black blockers, it’s a common role.
There are many people, people with large platforms, people with influence, criticizing black blocs right now. There are very few making the points that I’m making. I’m filling a gap.
Congratulations, Kate! Routledge is a wonderful press.
Checks and balances for the win!
Hey! Page 25 gives points to this non-lawyer.