Bloom County 2015: Closeted Trumper

Always appreciated the plain-speaking of (the probably far-more intelligent than Trump) Jeremy Clarkson*.  And found him...usually...entertaining.  But vote for the fucker ?

* Or the character he played on teevee.

Paging the Taliban

Well, we can't fold this up and stick it in a museum.  Time to break out the dynamite I guess...

Campaign Zero and BLM

This

could be the start of something interesting.  But I can't help noticing two things:

1. That most media-outlets are uncritically associating this with #blacklivesmatter, without differentiating between this and the official Black Lives Matter group.
2. That certain phrases such as 'institutional racism'*, and 'white supremacy' seem to be absent.

The page http://www.joincampaignzero.org/problem/, outlining the apparent problem, doesn't in fact use the word 'race' in any form at all.  It talks about police-violence, the fact that most victims were unarmed, and the fact that other countries don't kill civilians the way the US does, without mentioning race even once.  The racial disparity in the deaths is so blatant in the US, that I'd almost suspect the absence of that word as deliberate.

More than one thousand people are killed by police every year in America

Nearly sixty percent of victims did not have a gun or were involved in activities that should not require police intervention such as harmless "quality of life" behaviors or mental health crises.

This year is no different. There have only been nine days this year when the police have not killed somebody. Last month alone, the police killed 125 people. This must stop. We must end police violence so we can live and feel safe in this country.

We can live in an America where the police do not kill people. Police in England, Germany, Australia, Japan, and even cities like Newark, NJ, and Richmond, CA, demonstrate that public safety can be ensured without killing civilians. By implementing the right policy changes, we can end police killings and other forms of police violence in the United States.

At any rate, the framing does seem quite distinct from that of official BLM**:

#BlackLivesMatter was created in 2012 after Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted for his crime, and dead 17-year old Trayvon was post-humously placed on trial for his own murder. Rooted in the experiences of Black people in this country who actively resist our de-humanization, #BlackLivesMatter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society.Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes. 

It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all.  Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.  It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.  It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.

When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state.  We are talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity.  How Black poverty and genocide is state violence.  How 2.8 million Black people are locked in cages in this country is state violence.  How Black women bearing the burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families is state violence.  How Black queer and trans folks bear a unique burden from a hetero-patriarchal society that disposes of us like garbage and simultaneously fetishizes us and profits off of us, and that is state violence.  How 500,000 Black people in the US are undocumented immigrants and relegated to the shadows. How Black girls are used as negotiating chips during times of conflict and war.  How Black folks living with disabilities and different abilities bear the burden of state sponsored Darwinian experiments that attempt to squeeze us into boxes of normality defined by white supremacy, and that is state violence.

#BlackLivesMatter is working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.  We affirm our contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.  We have put our sweat equity and love for Black people into creating a political project–taking the hashtag off of social media and into the streets. The call for Black lives to matter is a rallying cry for ALL Black lives striving for liberation.

It's almost as if*** we're talking about (at least) two completely different groups, one focused upon practical solutions to police-violence, in the context of race, and the other, looking for some sort of outright revolution (against a patriarchal cis-normative hetero-white supremacy natch).  Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that.

I've yet to see what the more official BLM reaction to this effort is**** (interesting timing to release something over a weekend, isn't it ?), but I'm genuinely curious how this will play out, and to what degree the two groups will find common cause or cause for competition.

* Did see 'systemic racism'  a few times, and also 'racial' & 'racism' several times.

** Emphasis mine

*** Almost as if all black people don't think the same.  I know, who knew, right ?

**** If any -- The attention of the mainstream white media doesn't necessarily mean anything after all.

***** And I didn't even mention MLK or Malcolm X once...Yay me !  /snark.

Finally...

The inevitable stupid sellout happens.

Vomit.

Probably better for Tory Clarkson, able to provide shittier, more (for him) remunerative shows free of the constraints of the BBC, to an ever-more circumscribed audience.

...and...

better for the lefty politically-correct idiots at the BBC, who can conveniently shrink the audience for Top Gear as was, just in time for the Conservatives to push for its cancellation...much to their relief.

Ev'rybody wins !!! Except for fans of Top Gear...or the BBC.  Or civilisation generally.

So Many Stupid Flag Stories

Walmart Apologizes for Making ISIS Cake for Man Denied Confederate Flag Design

Jun 29, 2015, 1:23 PM ET
By SUSANNA KIM

A man in Louisiana is asking for an explanation from Walmart after his request for a Confederate flag cake at one of its bakeries was rejected, but a design with the ISIS flag was accepted.

Chuck Netzhammer said he ordered the image of the Confederate flag on a cake with the words, "Heritage Not Hate," on Thursday at a Walmart in Slidell, Louisiana. But the bakery denied his request, he said. At some point later, he ordered the image of the ISIS flag that represents the terrorist group.

"I went back yesterday and managed to get an ISIS battleflag printed. ISIS happens to be somebody who we're fighting against right now who are killing our men and boys overseas and are beheading Christians," Netzhammer said. 

A spokesman for Walmart told ABC News, "An associate in a local store did not know what the design meant* and made a mistake. The cake should not have been made and we apologize."

What are they apologising for exactly ?  Other than letting themselves be made fools of.

Let's just ban everything.  All visual expressions that might conceivably offend someone somewhere somehow.  Although maybe we could add a tiny exemption for repeating geometrical patterns and verses of the...


* 'Did not know what the design meant' ?  You're shitting me, surely ?

Guardian: In more innocent days, you could write about cocks and not be misunderstood

The brave and resourceful small girl in Arthur Ransome’s 1930 classic, Swallows and Amazons, is called Titty. But not, we learn, in the new film version being made by the BBC. There she will be renamed Tatty, to avoid “too many sniggers”.

It’s not the first time this indignity has befallen Titty, who was named after the traditional English fairytale, Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse, in a more innocent age. (According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the word “tits” only started being associated with breasts in about 1928.) She was rechristened Kitty when the story was televised by the BBC in 1963, though she re-emerged with her original name in the 1974 film adaptation, and in a later radio broadcast in 2012.

Names have long been a hazard in children’s literature. ...

“Ejaculate”, another potentially troublesome word, was at one time popular with authors as an alternative to “exclaimed”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – not quite a children’s author but always loved by young readers – used it 23 times in his Sherlock Holmes stories, most arrestingly in The Man with the Twisted Lip (1891), when Watson, after dozing off in the great detective’s study, reports that “a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up”.

As a doctor, Doyle would have known the term in its sexual context, but at a time when open discussion of such matters was reserved for medical textbooks, could have thought that its use in another sense was perfectly justified. More probably, he simply missed the double meaning altogether. This was also true years later of the young Dr Seuss, whose first publications in the 1930s, Boners, More Boners, Still More Boners and The Pocketbook of Boners are now collectors’ items.

“Cock” as slang for the male member has been current since 1610. Yet in the chapter headed Aunt Jane’s Treat in Richmal Crompton’s 1924 novel, William the Fourth, one of William’s respectable maiden aunts accompanies him to a fair, where she rides on a merry-go-round, mounting – as the author puts it – “a giant cock” … “It seemed to give her a joy that all her blameless life had so far failed to produce,” it says.

Something similar, again involving a cockerell-shaped fairground attraction, takes place in Angela Thirkell’s 1939 novel The Brandons. This example of light fiction was aimed not at children but at a largely female, middle-class audience whose ultra-respectability amounted to another form of assumed literary innocence.

...

Today, double entendres are the regular stuff of comedy, even when writing for children. When AA Milne referred to Pooh “poohing in the sun” in a poem in The House at Pooh Corner, he unleashed decades of quiet merriment among parents and grandparents aware of how the meaning had changed since they were six. But perhaps the most devoted Milne fans reading to children now would draw the line at two American spin-offs, both picture books: Marlene Brown’s Cooking with Pooh (1995) and Isabel Gaines’s Pooh Gets Stuck (1998). Those earlier, unconscious verbal slips were so much funnier.

Ugh...

And from the earlier, related story:

This is not the first time the character’s name has been modified to avoid smirks: in a 1963 film adaptation, she became Kitty. And book publishers have made similar adjustments to children’s books in recent years: Fanny in Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree is now Frannie, and cousin Dick is now cousin Rick, while Nobby in Five Go Off in a Caravan is now Ned.

Maybe, just maybe, authors wrote in the past using perfectly normal English words and perfectly normal names, and readers read their works without breaking out into fits of giggles every five seconds because...they weren't sex-obsessed potty-brained idiots.

Personally I'm against censorship of any kind of past works, without the author's own explicit permission, which if they're dead, they obviously can't now give, but some reasons make more sense than others.

Image: http://tygertale.com/2014/02/11/the-black-dossier-return-of-the-golliwogg/

The removal of the golliwogs from Blyton for example, is understandable insofar as they were based upon traditional racist stereotypes.  The offence there makes sense.  But Dick ?  Dick is only offensive if we choose to make it offensive.  And just what are we telling children by stripping this perfectly innocent language from their literature ?  And most of these usages historically were innocent, whatever the Guardian's writer may want to infer.

Just grow the fuck up people, and stop destroying our language.

Rammstein: Du Hast

Fantasies of a few years ago are at this point less terrifying than the day-to-day reality of ordinary politics.  And from the United States to the United Kingdom, we find ourselves celebrating what was once the right-wing as liberal emancipators.  We are so very fucked.

Please, Make it Stop...

TBogg Goes There

Dude's got a reputation to maintain.  Edgy...

I get that we are supposed to have opinions on everything– or else why have Twitter — but sometimes a joke is a just joke, or, as Stephen King once said: “Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story’s just a story.”

Noah’s jokes aren’t the Holocaust — and I’m sure by now someone is upset that I used ‘shoah” in the headline because that is how the Internet rolls — and endless discussions by well-meaning people who argue that humor and comedy exist as tools for the greater social welfare … well, they’re doing it wrong.

TBogg is based on the west coast of the US (San Diego) BTW, in case you were thinking this was some April Fools Prank.

Top Gear

Lots of nonsense written lately about Top Gear and Jeremy's latest 'fracas', such as the call in The Guardian, for an 'eco-feminist Top Gear'.  And now, apparently Jeremy's spoken out, and it sounds like he actually agrees with Ms. Williams about his being 'on the wrong side of history'.

I THINK it's fair to say that nature made a mistake when it invented the dinosaur.

It was too big, too violent and with such small and puny arms it was never going to be able to operate heavy machinery or even enjoy a bit of special "me" time.

So one day all the dinosaurs died — and now, many years later, no one mourns their passing.

...

But let's be honest. These big, imposing creatures have no place in a world that has moved on.

And honestly, it probably is time for a change, because, let's face it, the show has been lagging the last few years.  This last series especially -- The most entertaining episode so far was probably the one that relied on the joke of Clarkson and May apparently sociopathically leaving Hammond stranded in the frozen Canadian wilderness whilst they casually toured one eatery after another in their giant pickups.  Ha.  Clarkson & Co. have kept the world entertained with the exotic cars, with their pranks and stunts, with their gloriously sophomoric and politically incorrect humour for well over a decade, but any show would tend to get stale with the same crew after that long.  And for all the excitement Ms. Williams might find in our automotive future, an electric car just isn't as sexy as a V8, and driverless cars, well...  It was a good run.

And despite what Ms. Williams may think about Clarkson (psst...Zoe...he's playing a character...it's teevee...), Clarkson's no idiot, and he'll be writing columns, touring the panel show circuit, and like as not, running other shows for years to come, not that he needs to with the tens of millions of pounds he's been paid over the years.  May will be just fine as well.  And Hammond, er...

As for the four-million viewer-shaped hole in the lineup, and the lost international revenue, well the Beeb'll find some other shiny bauble, most likely in the form of yet more reality bullshit.  Never mind the fact that, psst...BBC...You're supposed to be a national broadcaster, funded by the licence fee.  Chasing ratings against ITV isn't in your remit.

Just do us a favour and release the remaining episodes already.  Who are you really punishing by withholding them ?  The multi-millionaire presenters ?

The Arquettegate Intersectionality

So, Patricia Arquette made some comments backstage at the Oscars, à propos of her call for pay-equality for women, that were perhaps not best calculated, and apparently people took it badly, and argued about it on Twitter, as people will.  Whatever, don't care, move on.  Having read a transcript of Arquette's comments, and not following Twitter, I naively assumed that the cause of offence was the implication that somehow the fights for equality for racial minorities and the 'gay community' were already and fully won, and that now it was the time to focus on women.  But, no.

Being fool enough to listen to a certain podcast (rhymes with rib lime), I am reliably informed that the problem was 'Intersectionality'.  Okay, let's take a look-see on the old wiki, and ah, fuck me.  Scroll, scroll, scroll...'a Marxist-feminist critical theory'...ugh.  I'm remembering now why I never liked liberals when I was younger.  Yeah, I get it, the experience of a black lesbian is different from that of say a black man or a white woman, and people can be oppressed along multiple axes of identity.  Yeah, no shit.

Coke meets Social Media meets Gawker meets Adolf Hitler

So apparently, Coca Cola came up with a cutesy social media campaign to turn hateful tweets into cutesy ASCII re-tweets of the same, and the geniuses at Gawker decided to test whether they could get Coca Cola to retweet extracts from Adolf Hitler's Great Austrian Novel Mein Kampf, and, well...
turns out, sure 'nuff, they could...  And thus ended one of the great social media campaigns of this particular mayfly era.  Perhaps in future, Coke could take advice from one of their transnational peers before engaging on a cutesy but ultimately untested and not-totally-thought-out marketing campaign ?  How about...McDonalds, say ?  They'd surely know how to navigate this sort of landscape securely and safely, free of the threat of humiliating mockery...er...