Culture Warriors category archive
Facebook Frolics 0
“I don’t understand how Facebook works” is not an excuse for stupid. It’s an admission of stupid.
Really, now, if you don’t know what you’re doing, that’s sort of an indication that maybe you shouldn’t do it.
A Desperate Cry for Attention? 0
Leonard Pitts, Jr, asks, “What if you throw a tantrum and no one seems to care?“
“In the Good Old Mummertime . . . .” 0
I lived in the Greater Philadelphia Co-Prosperity Sphere for over two decades.
Philadelphia is one of the nation’s great cities and I do miss it, for all that it has faults; having lived there, I know that my current location of residence, for all that it is legally a city, is no city; it is a resort town surrounded by endless suburbs with delusions of city, Rehobeth Beach with dreams of grandeur, if you will.
During the time I lived in the Philly area, I was never moved to watch the Mummers parade. I didn’t have a position on it, one way or the other; I just couldn’t be bothered to get up at five and shiver my way through the day on Broad Street.
The Mummers are very much a Philly thing, for good or ill. In the most recent parade, though, the ill seems to have triumphed in a series of incidents of hate-full and bigoted actions on the part of the paraders.
Philly is moving, however fitfully, into the 21st Century.
The Mummers look back wistfully to the 19th.
Welfare Cowboys, Reprise 0
Regarding the government’s apparent decision to wait out this situation, the Bangor Daily News’s David Farmer has this to say:
When the siege ends, and hopefully it ends soon and without injury, these men who broke the law should be held accountable and face significant criminal charges for their actions.
Just as law enforcement learned from Ruby Ridge and Waco, it’s time we learn from Tamir Rice. Armed extremists bent on overthrowing the federal government should have more to fear from the police than a 12-year-old black boy.
Video via Raw Story.
Afterthought:
One of the more puzzling accomplishments of the right-wing echo chamber is enabling the Bundy Bund and others of their ilk to convince themselves that there is a simmering mass of the populace poised to join their cause.
They are their own little simmering mass, all by themselves alone.
Trump’s Chumps 2
In an excellent editorial yesterday, the Roanoke Times editorial board tried to understand the appeal of Donald Trump, in particular, why some persons think that he’s a “strong” leader.* Here’s a bit:
It’s always hard to separate style from substance when it comes to people’s political views, but is it possible that there is something about Trump’s mere style that conveys strength?
_________________
*In my view, he’s seen as “strong” for the same reasons that A Christmas Story’s Scut Farkus was seen as strong.
Welfare Cowboys 0
In related news, Elie Mystal has some thoughts on how to react to what Josh Marshall calls “white privilege performance art.” Here’s a nugget:
White people occupying federal land has been met with less resistance from the police than black people occupying a CVS. I think race is playing a factor here.
The National Guard has been federalized and deployed to Oregon. As no civilians have been taken hostage, authorities are contemplating missile strikes against the compound. President Obama will address the nation tonight… oh wait, no he won’t. No troops have been deployed. No news helicopters are circling. Did I mention that the malcontents are white?Meanwhile, PoliticalProf tries to explain the intellectual (I use the term very loosely) underpinnings of the Bundy Bund.
Image via Balloon Juice.
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.