Culture Warriors category archive
Facebook Frolics, Fomenting Fear and Begetting Bigotry Dept. 0
Der Spiegel explores how the German right uses Facebook and other forms of “social” media to spread lies about Syrian refugees. Here’s a bit; follow the link for the rest:
“Utter nonsense,” says the director of the Halberstadt zoo, Marina Breitschuh. No one plundered the zoo, she adds, and all the animals, including the goats, are doing just fine. There are also no right-wingers threatened with termination among the zookeepers, she says. Breitschuh was, however, familiar with the rumor of the slaughtered goats, but the story she heard allegedly took place in Erfurt. One call to the Thuringian capital was all it took to confirm: no missing animals.
“This is a very common pattern,” says Andre Wolf from Mimikama, an online platform in Austria that fights Internet abuse. Once a fabricated story is clearly refuted, those behind it will often uproot it to another location and begin spreading the rumor there. “Some stories are like old acquaintances,” says Wolf. “They resurface every few weeks or months from the depths of the Internet.”
Sound familiar?
None Dare Call It Terrorism 0
Meet the terrorists in Oregon. It’s a calvacade of crazy.
“Off We Go a-Caroling . . . .” 0
John Romano composes new carols for this holiday season.
Likely they will still be timely a year from now.
The War on “Happy Holidays” 0
Its heritage might surprise you. A bit:
It then lay dormant until around 2004, when Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and a handful of Christian conservatives created the war on Christmas that we know today. They spun corporate America’s profit-driven tendency to wish consumers an inclusive “happy holidays” into a plot by godless liberals to banish Christianity from our holy shopping malls.
Making a Hashtag of It 0
Elie Mystal comments on the Mall of America’s attempt to prevent a #BlackLivesMatters protest. A snippet (emphasis added):
And Mall of America certainly can’t ban black people from coming into it. They can’t restrict the activity of protesting until, at the very least, people actually start doing it. Otherwise you are just banning black people for something they might do, which is pretty damn racist.
Of course, Mall of America doesn’t want to ban black people. Black people can spend money too! They just don’t want black people to voice… anything of substance inside the mall, or disrupt other people’s attempts to spend money in the mall.
The concept that a mall is private space is morally, if not legally, flawed. In many communities, malls are for all practical purposes the downtowns of yesteryear, at least in the relatively few places where they have not yet been supplanted by big boxes. They want to be seen as public spaces, with shops and restaurants and recreation sometimes even exhibits of various types, as long as the public remains docile and compliant. Otherwise, otherwise.
And now for the rest of the story.
“Nobody Ever Expects the Spanish Inquisition” 0
Virginia Tech Professor Matthew Gabriele points out that it’s happened before. Here’s a snippet from his piece on the recent panic over a calligraphy assignment in Augusta County, Virginia (emphasis added).
There is not so much distance between Bernard Gui’s 14th-century Manual for Inquisitors and the “indoctrination” that Herndon and others are, still, so worried about in Augusta County, Virginia.
Follow the link for the full discussion.
An Apple Is Not an Orange, Even Though Both Are Round 0
In a fantastickal leap of bothsiderism, Dick Meyer argues that right-wingers who demand license for bigotry are somehow the same as (insert “whiny” here) college students who wish to be treated without bigotry.
Similar fears and social anxieties, I suggest, are driving the current style of student activism.
It is preoccupied with safety and protection, physical but, even more, emotional. It seems more driven by insecurity than idealism. Colleges are asked to issue “trigger warnings” when presenting material that might be upsetting to students — for any imaginable reason. Commonplace words, phrases and behaviors are called out as offensive micro-aggressions even if there is no whiff of malice.
This is a case of trying to claim that hitting someone with a bowling ball is the same as hitting him or her with a ping-pong ball. It’s not. If you doubt me, I’ll happily hit you with my bowling ball upon receipt of a signed, witnessed, and notarized consent form.
The analogy breaks down when one realizes that none of the whiny college students that Meyer decries has yet tried to blow up a mosque or beat up a professor for being.
Granted, there have been a few instances of silliness on campus, but the examples of campus silliness are, frankly, relatively few and decidedly meek, though the Meyers of the world magnify them relentlessly.
Dennis Parker gets much closer to what is actually going on.
One more time, those who complain of “political correctness” desire permission to offend with impunity.
Follow the links to read the full articles.
Twits on Twitter 0
As Elon James White is fond of pointing out, sometimes the best thing to say is nothing.
Plus Ca Change 0
China Hand points out an uncomfortable truth. A snippet:
T’aint so, unfortunately. It’s more like “this was us and, apparently, still is at least some of us and maybe a lot of us.”
And maybe “us” isn’t just anxious blue-collar xenophobes. Maybe “us” includes a big chunk of the political elite and the strategists who guide them.
Trump seizes upon the implicit and makes it explicit; that’s his offense. And his strength.
A history of the synergy between popular bigotry, political calculation, and institutionalized discrimination is enlightening.
The storyline isn’t “It Can’t Happen Here”; try “It Does Happen Here, and with Depressing Frequency”.
Follow the link for some of the real Murican history, the bits you won’t get taught in school.
They ain’t purty.
The Ammosexual Impulse 0
Chauncey Devega, in a typically long and tightly reasoned post, traces the thread of ammosexuality through American history. Here’s a bit; follow the link for the rest.
There are many examples of this at present. Armed white people, mostly men, have been brandishing weapons to intimidate Muslims in Texas. White, mostly male, open carry advocates, march in public with guns, intimidating the general public and those who disagree with them. After mass shooting incidents, Republican politicians suggest that gun violence is somehow the price for the “freedom” and “liberty” of gun ownership in America. For them, a country awash with guns and gun violence is inseparable from American Exceptionalism. This is a macabre and sick understanding of what makes America “great.” That gun violence apologists on the American Right-wing cannot think of some greater motivation for their worship of “American Exceptionalism” is a devastating indictment of the country’s civic health.
Profiles in Courage 0
Now ain’t these forces just special?
None Dare Call It Terrorism 0
Dennis Chinoy dares to ask the question:
Consider this: The mass shootings in Colorado by Christian fanatic Robert Lewis Dear followed his Internet proclamation, “Turn to JESUS or burn in hell […] WAKE UP SINNERS U CANT SAVE YOURSELF U WILL DIE AN WORMS SHALL EAT YOUR FLESH” (emphasis his). His terrorist act is the most recent of a series of assassinations and mass killings perpetrated in Christianity’s name, heinous crimes that should repulse us all.
(snip)
If Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and their ilk crying “Radical Islamic Terrorism” at the top of their lungs object to this substitution of Christian for Muslim, Bible for Koran, Old Testament injunctions for Sharia Law, then they are obliged to tell us how Muslim, Christian or Jewish zealots are any different from each other.
Follow the link for more.
Stray Thought 0
You do not have to look into someone’s heart to know what he or she is like.
If a person’s actions are full of hate, so too is that person’s heart, regardless of what that person may say about his or her motives.