Better late than never:
Is anyone here in the path of Hurricane Nate? Looks like it might be a little stronger than they figured at first, so stay safe.
Thread open for all topics.
This post is in: How about that weather?, Open Threads, Sports
Better late than never:
Is anyone here in the path of Hurricane Nate? Looks like it might be a little stronger than they figured at first, so stay safe.
Thread open for all topics.
This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, Glibertarianism, Go Fuck Yourself, Going Galt, Just Shut the Fuck Up
Being a libertarian at Reason means never knowing anything other than whatever the left is doing, they are wrong. Here is the latest:
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is angrily condemning a memo released today by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that it describes as “an all-out assault on LGBTQ people” creating “a sweeping ‘license to discriminate'” in furtherance of President Donald Trump’s “cynical and hateful agenda.” The memo does this via provocative language such as “freedom of religion is a fundamental right of paramount importance” and “government may not interfere with the autonomy of a religious organization” by, for example, forcing an Orthodox yeshiva to accept female rabbinical students.
Don’t get me wrong—we’re not exactly fans of Sessions here at Reason. But today’s memo shouldn’t make your list of reasons to dislike the man, who is much more fittingly criticized for being a lover of asset forfeiture and a drug warrior extraordinaire.
Haters of the religious liberty memo seem to believe (or, perhaps more accurately, want you to believe) that it establishes a new right for businesses and government agencies to turn people away on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. They should be comforted, then, by the revelation that virtually everything in the document is merely a restating of existing law and Supreme Court precedent.
Ok (hold on to your hats folks, but a glibertarian is wrong), this is not true:
Today, HRC responded to the Trump-Pence Administration’s latest attack against the transgender community. At the direction of Jeff Sessions, the Department of Justice (DOJ) rescinded a memo issued by the Obama Administration. Sessions replaced the important instructions with a discriminatory memo, arguing that anti-discrimination protections under Title VII do not apply to transgender people. DOJ instructed all U.S. attorneys to adopt this dangerous position in all pending and future matters.
But let’s pretend this idiot is correct, and nothing has changed. Then why did they release a memo that, in her words “does little more than reiterate what federal law has been for years.” And let’s note that the weaselly “little more” nonsense, which is an admission that her entire premise that nothing has changed is, umm, a fucking lie.
The answer is because after consulting with Christianist extremists to help craft this memo (which, again, does more than just restate federal law), is that they are sending a message that the Justice Department and the weight of the government is open for business for bullshit religious grievances and eager to advance case law trashing minority parties for the benefit of religious lunatics. It’s “hey guys, we’re stacking the courts, you have a Justice Department that isn’t going to do shit to defend the rights of all Americans, and we’ll have the Supreme Court soon, so start getting these cases into the pipeline. It’s go time for religious bigotry.”
Because that’s how this shit works in America. No one is going to successfully introduce and pass a bill that says all gay people need to be stoned in the public square (well, at least not yet). So what they do is slowly chip away at constitutional protections afforded all individuals, eroding their rights, and creating a separate second class of American citizens which has the added benefit of making the lives of LGBT people miserable. On top of the overt actions in the memo, that’s what is really happening.
And the assorted douchebags at Reason either know this but their kneejerk hatred of “teh left” trumps that knowledge, or they don’t understand what the fuck is going on out side their myopic Randian universe. Either way, they should probably shut the fuck up until they know something.
You’re Wrong and They’re Also Sending a Message, You Clueless NumptyPost + Comments (182)
This post is in: I'm With Her, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Woman in the Whitehouse 2016, Daydream Believers
Watch as women writers for Jimmy Fallon, and guest Miley Cyrus, write thank you notes to Hillary Clinton: pic.twitter.com/3dTmVNNo9A
— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 5, 2017
I kept it together until Miley started sniffling. Young women like her are why Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t going away — even though she’ll probably never run for office again.
… Fallon asked if Clinton would have felt differently about losing the election if her opponent had been someone other than Trump.
“I would have. Yeah, I’ve thought about that a lot,” she said. “If I had lost to another Republican — somebody who I disagreed with, but who I thought was temperamentally capable of being president, who would take the job, and the awesome responsibility seriously — of course I’d be disappointed, but I wouldn’t be so worried about my country and the world as I am now.”…
*****
“You may not lose a presidential election, but you may lose somebody close to you. You may lose a job you want,” she continued. “There’s all kinds of challenges in life, and so I want not only individuals — and so many of them as they’re coming to my events are telling me that it has helped them — but I want our country to understand how resilient we are. We are such an extraordinary collection of people, and energy and all sorts of great potential. And I don’t want people to get depressed, and worn out, and tired because they see things they disagree with that are contrary to who we are. There is something for everybody to do.”…
***********
Apart from keeping faith in the #Resistance, what’s on the agenda for the day?
When my father lost, we prayed, hiked, grilled a lot of red meat….and then he went back to work and completely moved on. https://t.co/TtnyVnCHl1
— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) October 5, 2017
maybe if your father had "lost" by getting 3M more votes instead of losing by 9M votes the way he did, you would've had different reax https://t.co/qP92jtx9qb
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) October 5, 2017
She's not hiding, and women don't have to shame her for having a voice that inspired over 65 million Americans.
— Bess Kalb (@bessbell) October 5, 2017
by John Cole| 52 Comments
This post is in: John Cole Presents "This Fucking Old House"
This weekend, Gerald (the guy who did a lot of the work on my house and who is always coming over and doing things) is getting married in my dad’s back yard. They chose the date because his brother died on this date, and his fiance’s dad died on this date, so they decided to turn it into something positive. At any rate, it’s a big deal- dad is baking the wedding cake and doing all the cooking, so my bff Tammy came up and she is helping dad all day tomorrow.
At any rate, last night, we went to a dinner at the Harry and Chatman’s (my friends who run the Barn With Inn) newly restored Sarah Miller House. It’s a bimonthly event, and last night’s dinner was great:
The opener was a polenta with sausage and a bunch of other things going down:
That was followed by a salad:
The main course was broccoli rabe with cannellini beans and a braised rolled stuffed porK:
There is no picture of the dessert because it was Chatman’s famous sugar cream pie with blueberries and we ate it before we remembered to take a photograph. At any rate, it was a very nice time, and we sat next to two wonderful women who ran an antique store and consignment house called Sibs in Wheeling that I did not know about.
We stopped by this afternoon after running errands, and I found two nice little pickups:
They really had a lot of very interesting items. I really had to control myself and was proud I only spent 30.00 on those two. At any rate, we chatted with the owner again and we agreed we are going to go to another dinner together in November, we had such a good time.
At any rate, someone is already snoring on the couch, so I need to be quiet.
This post is in: domestic terrorists, Excellent Links, Glibertarianism, Assholes, Decline and Fall, Our Failed Media Experiment
We can all stop pretending that Bannon and Milo aren't Nazis. https://t.co/vQ5rd718I7
— Zedward Tweeterhands (@ZeddRebel) October 5, 2017
Per Mic, the blowback has begun:
Vice has cut ties with a senior writer from its feminist vertical Broadly after a BuzzFeed report revealed that the writer pitched story ideas to then-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos, and once requested that Yiannopoulos mock a “fat feminist” writer.
Mitchell Sunderland, who at the time he sent emails to Yiannopoulos was managing editor of Broadly, was spotted departing Vice’s offices with a box of his belongings. (Mic saw a photo of Sunderland departing.)
A Vice spokesperson confirmed to Mic that Sunderland was let go Friday, and that Vice is continuing to look into the matter…
I’m sure that Mr. Sunderland would never encourage genocide, euthanasia of the disabled, or the invasion of Poland. But, c’mon — doesn’t “everybody” hate those “fat feminist” SJWs?
If you didn’t have a chance to read that Buzzfeed report when Cole posted about it earlier today, it’s well worth your time this weekend:
… During the 2016 presidential campaign, under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right — the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”…
It’s a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings “America the Beautiful” in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes.
These documents chart the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website — and, in particular, Yiannopoulos — links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate.
They capture what Bannon calls his “killing machine” in action, as it dredges up the resentments of people around the world, sifts through these grievances for ideas and content, and propels them from the unsavory parts of the internet up to TrumpWorld, collecting advertisers’ checks all along the way…
Milo is definitely not a Nazi. https://t.co/YWtZ9etXfL pic.twitter.com/FIEpJ5RDFM
— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) October 5, 2017
For the record, Yiannopoulos claims he didn’t see those Nazi salutes, because of his “severe myopia.” (Murphy the Trickster God remains an unsubtle scripter.)
… A year and a half ago, Milo Yiannopoulos set himself a difficult task: to define the alt-right. It was five months before Hillary Clinton named the alt-right in a campaign speech, 10 months before the alt-right’s great hope became president, and 17 months before Charlottesville clinched the alt-right as a stalking horse for violent white nationalism. The movement had just begun its explosive emergence into the country’s politics and culture.
At the time, Yiannopoulos, who would later describe himself as a “fellow traveler” of the alt-right, was the tech editor of Breitbart. In summer 2015, after spending a year gathering momentum through GamerGate — the opening salvo of the new culture wars — he convinced Breitbart upper management to give him his own section. And for four months, he helped Bannon wage what the Breitbart boss called in emails to staff “#war.” It was a war, fought story by story, against the perceived forces of liberal activism on every conceivable battleground in American life…
“Finally doing my big feature on the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a March 9, 2016, email to Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, a hacker who is the system administrator of the neo-Nazi hub the Daily Stormer, and who would later ask his followers to disrupt the funeral of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer. “Fancy braindumping some thoughts for me.”
“It’s time for me to do my big definitive guide to the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote four hours later to Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer who under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug helped create the “neoreactionary” movement, which holds that Enlightenment democracy has failed and that a return to feudalism and authoritarian rule is in order. “Which is my whorish way of asking if you have anything you’d like to make sure I include.”
“Alt r feature, figured you’d have some thoughts,” Yiannopoulos wrote the same day to Devin Saucier, who helps edit the online white nationalist magazine American Renaissance under the pseudonym Henry Wolff, and who wrote a story in June 2017 called “Why I Am (Among Other Things) a White Nationalist.”…
…Breitbart published “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” It quickly became a touchstone, cited in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, CNN, and New York Magazine, among others. And its influence is still being felt. This past July, in a speech in Warsaw that was celebrated by the alt-right, President Trump echoed a line from the story — a story written by a “brown-sounding” amanuensis, all but line-edited by a white nationalist, laundered for racism by Breitbart’s editors, and supervised by the man who would in short order become the president’s chief strategist…
As you read (again) about hate at Breitbart here's me talking about Politico/NY Times writers backing them https://t.co/2ACm9JrrmP pic.twitter.com/HX56pxplqs
— Oliver Willis (@owillis) October 6, 2017
Given what we now know, everyone involved in the publication of this NYT magazine piece should resign. Also, what a bunch of rubes. pic.twitter.com/esuBm6TVgp
— sean. ?? (@SeanMcElwee) October 5, 2017
On July 22, 2016, Rebekah Mercer — Robert’s powerful daughter — emailed Steve Bannon from her Stanford alumni account. She wanted the Breitbart executive chairman, whom she introduced as “one of the greatest living defenders of Liberty,” to meet an app developer she knew. Apple had rejected the man’s game (Capitol HillAwry, in which players delete emails à la Hillary Clinton) from the App Store, and the younger Mercer wondered “if we could put an article up detailing his 1st amendment political persecution.”…
Bannon, Milo, and Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson met the Mercers aboard their yacht Sea Owl in Cannes in May 2016. https://t.co/IIFn9Jfdxe pic.twitter.com/oscKAlSruK
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) October 5, 2017
Proof that the Mercers bankrolled Milo’s “Dangerous” tour and provided him with their personal security team because he was “scared”. 12/ pic.twitter.com/scbndzqaRA
— Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) October 5, 2017
…Bannon wrote. “We want you to stir up more. Milo: for your eyes only we r going to use the mercers private security company.”
Copied on the email was Dan Fleuette, Bannon’s coproducer at Glittering Steel and the man who acted for months as the go-between for Yiannopoulos and the Mercers. As Yiannopoulos made the transition in summer 2016 from being a writer to becoming largely the star of a traveling stage show, Fleuette was enlisted to process and wrangle the legion of young assistants, managers, trainers, and other talent the Breitbart tech editor demanded be brought along for the ride.
First came Tim Gionet, the former BuzzFeed social media strategist who goes by “Baked Alaska” on Twitter, whom Yiannopoulos pitched to Fleuette as a tour manager in late May. Gionet accompanied Yiannopoulos to Florida after the June 2016 Pulse nightclub killings in Orlando. The two planned a press conference outside a mosque attended by the shooter, Omar Mateen. (“Brilliant,” Bannon emailed. “Btw they are ALL ‘factories of hate.’”)…
[Yiannopoulos] also heard, with frequency, from accomplished people in predominantly liberal industries — entertainment, tech, academia, fashion, and media — who resented what they felt was a censorious coastal cultural orthodoxy. Taken together, they represent something like a network of sleeper James Damores, vexed but silent for fear of losing their jobs or friends, kvetching to Yiannopoulos as a pressure valve. For Yiannopoulos, these emails weren’t just validation, though they were obviously that. They sometimes became more ammunition for the culture war…Indeed, a major part of Yiannopoulos’s role within Breitbart was aggressively testing limits around racial and anti-Semitic discourse. As far as this went, his opaque organization-with-an-organization structure and crowdsourced ideation and writing processes served Breitbart’s purposes perfectly: They offered upper management a veil of plausible deniability — as long as no one saw the emails BuzzFeed News obtained. In August 2016, a Yiannopoulos staffer sent a “Milo” story by Bokhari directly to Bannon and Marlow for approval.
“Please don’t forward chains like that showing the sausage being made,” Yiannopoulos wrote back. “Everyone knows; but they don’t have to be reminded every time.”…
alt-right (n.): old bigots pay young idiots millions to write jibberish and dress like Legos https://t.co/zvjIJCDPkb
— Owen Ellickson (@onlxn) October 6, 2017
This post is in: Meetups and social events, Readership Capture
From well-known commentor Yutsano:
Greetings and Salutations!
I will be in the Seattle area once again October 14-17. The only real planned activity I have is my appointment on Tuesday at 1 so I am pretty wide open otherwise. Could I get a post on this please?
If you’re interested / have venue suggestions, leave a comment below. Lurkers & plus-ones always welcome!
by Betty Cracker| 180 Comments
This post is in: Birdwatching, Open Threads
Anyone know what kind of bird this is?
It sure is a beauty. It is even now perched on the light pole in my yard. I think it made some faint whistling noises, but I can’t be sure.
ETA: Some folks on Twitter, including our own Cheryl, ID’d it as a starling. I shall call her “Clarice.”
Open thread!