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auroraluciferi · 4 years ago

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if anyone in this time of deep concern of his health is interested about what a worthless piece of shit Prince Philip is, here is a very brief list of 90 racist, sexist, and incredibly ignorant things the man has said in the last century:

1. "Ghastly." Prince Philip's opinion of Beijing, during a 1986 tour of China.

2. "Ghastly." Prince Philip's opinion of Stoke-on-Trent, as offered to the city's Labour MP Joan Walley at Buckingham Palace in 1997.

3. "Deaf? If you're near there, no wonder you are deaf." Said to a group of deaf children standing near a Caribbean steel drum band in 2000.

4. "If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes." To 21-year-old British student Simon Kerby during a visit to China in 1986.

5. "You managed not to get eaten then?" To a British student who had trekked in Papua New Guinea, during an official visit in 1998.

6. "You can't have been here that long – you haven't got a pot belly." To a British tourist during a tour of Budapest in Hungary. 1993.

7. "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?" Asked of a Scottish driving instructor in 1995.

8. "Damn fool question!" To BBC journalist Caroline Wyatt at a banquet at the Elysée Palace after she asked Queen Elizabeth if she was enjoying her stay in Paris in 2006.

9. "It looks as though it was put in by an Indian." The Prince's verdict of a fuse box during a tour of a Scottish factory in August 1999. He later clarified his comment: "I meant to say cowboys. "I just got my cowboys and Indians mixed up."

10. "People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still drying out Windsor Castle." To survivors of the Lockerbie bombings in 1993.

11. "We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves." During a trip to Canada in 1976.

12. "A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure, everyone's working too much. Now that everybody's got more leisure time they are complaining they are unemployed. People don't seem to make up their minds what they want." A man of the people shares insight into the recession that gripped Britain in 1981.

13. "British women can't cook." Winning the hearts of the Scottish Women's Institute in 1961.

14. "It was part of the fortunes of war. We didn't have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking 'Are you all right - are you sure you don't have a ghastly problem?' You just got on with it!" On the issue of stress counselling for servicemen in a TV documentary marking the 50th Anniversary of V-J Day in 1995.

15. "What do you gargle with – pebbles?" To Tom Jones, after the Royal Variety Performance, 1969. He added the following day: "It is very difficult at all to see how it is possible to become immensely valuable by singing what I think are the most hideous songs."

16. "It's a vast waste of space." Philip entertained guests in 2000 at the reception of a new £18m British Embassy in Berlin, which the Queen had just opened.

17. "There's a lot of your family in tonight." After glancing at business chief Atul Patel's name badge during a 2009 Buckingham Palace reception for 400 influential British Indians to meet the Royal couple.

18. "If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." Said to a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986.

19. "You ARE a woman, aren't you?" To a woman in Kenya in 1984, after accepting a gift.

20. "Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?" To a wheelchair-bound Susan Edwards, and her guide dog Natalie in 2002.

21. "Get me a beer. I don't care what kind it is, just get me a beer!" On being offered the finest Italian wines by PM Giuliano Amato at a dinner in Rome in 2000.

22. "I would like to go to Russia very much – although the bastards murdered half my family." In 1967, asked if he would like to visit the Soviet Union.

23. "If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?" In a Radio 4 interview shortly after the Dunblane shootings in 1996. He said to the interviewer off-air afterwards: "That will really set the cat among the pigeons, won't it?"

24. "Oh, it's you that owns that ghastly car is it? We often see it when driving to Windsor Castle." To neighbour Elton John after hearing he had sold his Watford FC-themed Aston Martin in 2001.

25. "The problem with London is the tourists. They cause the congestion. If we could just stop the tourism, we could stop the congestion." At the opening of City Hall in 2002.

26. "A pissometer?" The Prince sees the renames the piezometer water gauge demonstrated by Australian farmer Steve Filelti in 2000.

27. "Don't feed your rabbits pawpaw fruit – it acts as a contraceptive. Then again, it might not work on rabbits." Giving advice to a Caribbean rabbit breeder in Anguilla in 1994.

28. "You must be out of your minds." To Solomon Islanders, on being told that their population growth was 5 per cent a year, in 1982.

29. "Young people are the same as they always were. They are just as ignorant." At the 50th anniversary of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme.

30. "Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species." Accepting a conservation award in Thailand in 1991.

31. "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" In the Cayman Islands, 1994.

32. "You bloody silly fool!" To an elderly car park attendant who made the mistake of not recognising him at Cambridge University in 1997.

33. "Oh! You are the people ruining the rivers and the environment." To three young employees of a Scottish fish farm at Holyrood Palace in 1999.

34. "If you travel as much as we do you appreciate the improvements in aircraft design of less noise and more comfort – provided you don't travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly." To the Aircraft Research Association in 2002.

35. "The French don't know how to cook breakfast." After a breakfast of bacon, eggs, smoked salmon, kedgeree, croissants and pain au chocolat – from Gallic chef Regis Crépy – in 2002.

36. "And what exotic part of the world do you come from?" Asked in 1999 of Tory politician Lord Taylor of Warwick, whose parents are Jamaican. He replied: "Birmingham."

37. "Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease." On a visit to Australia in 1992, when asked if he wanted to stroke a koala bear.

38. "It doesn't look like much work goes on at this University." Overheard at Bristol University's engineering facility. It had been closed so that he and the Queen could officially open it in 2005.

39. "I wish he'd turn the microphone off!" The Prince expresses his opinion of Elton John's performance at the 73rd Royal Variety Show, 2001.

40. "Do you still throw spears at each other?" Prince Philip shocks Aboriginal leader William Brin at the Aboriginal Cultural Park in Queensland, 2002.

41. "Where's the Southern Comfort?" On being presented with a hamper of southern goods by the American ambassador in London in 1999.

42. "Were you here in the bad old days? ... That's why you can't read and write then!" To parents during a visit to Fir Vale Comprehensive School in Sheffield, which had suffered poor academic reputation.

43. "Ah you're the one who wrote the letter. So you can write then? Ha, ha! Well done." Meeting 14-year old George Barlow, whose invited to the Queen to visit Romford, Essex, in 2003.

44. "So who's on drugs here?... HE looks as if he's on drugs." To a 14-year-old member of a Bangladeshi youth club in 2002.

45. "You could do with losing a little bit of weight." To hopeful astronaut, 13-year-old Andrew Adams.

46. "You have mosquitoes. I have the Press." To the matron of a hospital in the Caribbean in 1966.

47. "The man who invented the red carpet needed his head examined." While hosts made effort to greet a state visit to Brazil, 1968.

48. "During the Blitz a lot of shops had their windows blown in and sometimes they put up notices saying, 'More open than usual.' I now declare this place more open than usual." Unveiling a plaque at the University of Hertfordshire's new Hatfield campus in November 2003.

49 . Philip: "Who are you?"

Simon Kelner: "I'm the editor-in-chief of The Independent, Sir."

Philip: "What are you doing here?"

Kelner: "You invited me."

Philip: "Well, you didn't have to come!"

An exchange at a press reception to mark the Golden Jubilee in 2002.

50. "No, I would probably end up spitting it out over everybody." Prince Philip declines the offer of some fish from Rick Stein's seafood deli in 2000.

51. "Any bloody fool can lay a wreath at the thingamy." Discussing his role in an interview with Jeremy Paxman.

52. "Holidays are curious things, aren't they? You send children to school to get them out of your hair. Then they come back and make life difficult for parents. That is why holidays are set so they are just about the limit of your endurance." At the opening of a school in 2000.

53. "People think there's a rigid class system here, but dukes have even been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans." In 2000.

54. "Can you tell the difference between them?" On being told by President Obama that he'd had breakfast with the leaders of the UK, China and Russia.

55. "I don't know how they are going to integrate in places like Glasgow and Sheffield." After meeting students from Brunei coming to Britain to study in 1998.

56. "Do people trip over you?" Meeting a wheelchair-bound nursing-home resident in 2002.

57. "That's a nice tie... Do you have any knickers in that material?" Discussing the tartan designed for the Papal visit with then-Scottish Tory leader Annabel Goldie last year.

58. "I have never been noticeably reticent about talking on subjects about which I know nothing." Addressing a group of industrialists in 1961.

59. "It's not a very big one, but at least it's dead and it took an awful lot of killing!" Speaking about a crocodile he shot in Gambia in 1957.

60. "Well, you didn't design your beard too well, did you? You really must try better with your beard." To a young fashion designer at a Buckingham Palace in 2009.

61. "So you're responsible for the kind of crap Channel Four produces!" Speaking to then chairman of the channel, Michael Bishop, in 1962.

62. "Dontopedalogy is the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it, a science which I have practiced for a good many years." Address to the General Dental Council, quoted in Time in 1960.

63. "Tolerance is the one essential ingredient ... You can take it from me that the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance." Advice for a successful marriage in 1997.

64. "I never see any home cooking – all I get is fancy stuff." Commiserating about the standard of Buckingham Palace cuisine in 1962.

65. "I suppose I would get in a lot of trouble if I were to melt them down." On being shown Nottingham Forest FC's trophy collection in 1999.

66. "It makes you all look like Dracula's daughters!" To pupils at Queen Anne's School in Reading, who wear blood-red uniforms, in 1998.

67. "I don't think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing." Dismissing claims that those who sell slaughtered meat have greater moral authority than those who participate in blood sports, in 1988.

68. "Ah, so this is feminist corner then." Joining a group of female Labour MPs, who were wearing name badges reading "Ms", at a Buckingham Palace drinks party in 2000.

69. "Cats kill far more birds than men. Why don't you have a slogan: 'Kill a cat and save a bird?'" On being told of a project to protect turtle doves in Anguilla in 1965.

70. "All money nowadays seems to be produced with a natural homing instinct for the Treasury." Bemoaning the rate of British tax in 1963.

71. "It is my invariable custom to say something flattering to begin with so that I shall be excused if by any chance I put my foot in it later on." Full marks for honesty, from a speech in 1956.

72. "Why don't you go and live in a hostel to save cash?" Asked of a penniless student.

73. "In education, if in nothing else, the Scotsman knows what is best for him. Indeed, only a Scotsman can really survive a Scottish education." Said when he was made Chancellor of Edinburgh University in November 1953.

74. "If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she isn't interested." Of his daughter, Princess Anne.

75. "They're not mating are they?" Spotting two robots bumping in to one another at the Science Museum in 2000.

76. "I must be in the only person in Britain glad to see the back of that plane." Philip did not approve of the noise Concorde made while flying over the Buckingham Palace.

77. "The only active sport, which I follow, is polo – and most of the work's done by the pony!" 1965

78. "It looks like a tart's bedroom." On seeing plans for the Duke and then Duchess of York's house at Sunninghill Park.

79. "Reichskanzler." Prince Philip used Hitler's title to address German chancellor Helmut Kohl during a speech in Hanover in 1997.

80. "We go into the red next year... I shall probably have to give up polo." Comment on US television in 1969 about the Royal Family's finances.

81. "Bugger the table plan, give me my dinner!" Showing his impatience to be fed at a dinner party in 2004.

82. "I thought it was against the law these days for a woman to solicit." Said to a woman solicitor.

83. "You're just a silly little Whitehall twit: you don't trust me and I don't trust you." Said to Sir Rennie Maudslay, Keeper of the Privy Purse, in the 1970s.

84. "What about Tom Jones? He's made a million and he's a bloody awful singer." Response to a comment at a small-business lunch about how difficult it is in Britain to get rich.

85. "This could only happen in a technical college." On getting stuck in a lift between two floors at the Heriot Watt University, 1958.

86. "I'd much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly." When asked what he felt about his life in 1992.

87. "It looks like the kind of thing my daughter would bring back from her school art lessons" On being shown "primitive" Ethiopian art in 1965.

88. "You're not wearing mink knickers, are you?" Philip charms fashion writer Serena French at a World Wildlife Fund gathering in 1993.

89. "My son...er...owns them." On being asked on a Canadian tour whether he knew the Scilly Isles.

90. "Well, that's more than you know about anything else then." Speaking, a touch condescendingly, to Michael Buerk, after being told by the BBC newsreader that he did know about the Duke of Edinburgh's Gold Awards in 2004.

#uk #united kingdom #royal #royals #prince philip #queen elizabeth #meghan markle #prince harry #corruption #racism #sexism #monarchy #seriously #what planet do you live on

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ummadum · 4 years ago

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Why José Mourinho is problematic

I’m not a fan of José Mourinho and whilst I can come around to his tactics, I really doubt I will ever like him as a person.

Football is a very misogynistic, homophobic, racist and generally disrespectful place where people, especially powerful people, are not held accountable for their actions and words. This post is an accumulation of some of the very worrying things Jose has said and done over the years, that he has never acknowledged nor apologised for. I think that it’s important to keep these things in mind especially now, because the “José is a great person” idea is on the rise again. Whilst someone like Sergè, who also said some really disrespectful things, but someone who apologised for them and was willing to learn from his mistake, has his mistakes constantly brought up again, we are ignoring and burying all the things that are really wrong with our manager.

And if the club have asked Sergé to acknowledge and apologise for his statements (the right move), then we should do the same with Mourinho, who was much older when he said those things and had and has a lot more power and reach.

Homophobic

In 2012, as Real Madrid manager, Mourinho was caught on camera using “marocones” (which means faggot in English) to refer to the referees pre champion league match agains CSKA Moscow.

This is a link to the video [x] it’s about 20 seconds in.

The European Gay and Lesbian Sports Federation (EGLSF) released a statement [x] calling for action, which includes this:

Louise Englefield, Co-president of the EGLSF, an organisation representing over 17,000 lesbian gay bisexual and trans (LGBT) athletes across Europe, said: “Homophobia is unacceptable from anyone in football, much less from one of the game’s most senior figures. We are deeply disappointed that Mr Mourinho is casually using homophobic terms of abuse in his workplace. It is especially sad that these comments have been made during the International Football v Homophobia campaign week. This is a time during which the European football community should be joining forces to tackle discrimination and prejudice against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people . As long-standing partners of the FARE network, we call on UEFA to take action and impose appropriate sanctions.”

And yet nothing ever happened, no apology, no acknowledgment and no sanctions.

Racist

Josés stance on racism is an interesting one, because he has publicly stated that he is opposed to direct racism, yet does apparently not believe that there is an underlying structural racism problem in the world and in football.

About coaching opportiunities for black coaches

In 2014, when questioned whether football needs a Rooney rule, which in the NFL ensures that ethnic minority candidates are adequately represented in the interview process for head coaching positions, he said this:

When asked if he felt football was doing enough to bring in black managers and whether he felt a quota should be introduced, Mourinho said: “There is no racism in football. If you are good, you are good. If you are good, you get the job.” “If you are good, you prove that you deserve the job. Football is not stupid to close the doors to top people. If you are top, you are top.” [x]

At the moment of publication of this article, only two of 92 clubs in the top four divisions in English football had a black manager. And only four black managers have ever worked in the premier league.

His statement warranted this lengthy response from the then FIFA Vice-President Jeffrey Webb. [x] Who points to a much larger problem of lack of enthnic people in power in football in general.

About Hair

“I want to push the young players on my team to have a proper haircut, not the Rastafarian or the others they have.”

I don't have the exact source but it’s mentioned in multiple “best of José quotes articles [x] [x]

Misogyny

Dr. Carniero

The most obvious place to start talking about Mourinho and his issues with misogyny is his treatment of Dr. Eva Carneiro who was the Chelsea first team doctor from 2009 until september 2015. During the first Game of the 15/16 season against Swansea Dr. Carneiro and chief physiotherapist Jon Fearn were called into the pitch by the referee to attend to Eden Hazard who had gone down. It was towards the end of the match and Chelsea had already had Courtois sent off and were therefore down to 9 men. Under the laws of the game, the medical staff is only allowed on the pitch if the referee summons them and once they have been summoned it's their duty to attend to the player. Mourinho took an issue with both of them rushing onto the field, because it left his team temporarily with 8 outfield players and so he allegedly called Dr. Carniero “filha da puta” which translates to “daughter of a bitch/whore”. He says he didn’t use the female version, but that he said “filho da puta” and that “swearing is a part of football”. This then led to a lot of discourse about whether it was actually abusive language towards a woman or not.

The more damning thing happened later in the press conference.

“I wasn't happy with my medical staff because even if you are a medical doctor or secretary on the bench, you have to understand the game.If you go to the pitch to assist a player, then you must be sure that a player has a serious problem. I was sure that Eden didn't have a serious problem. He had a knock and was very tired.My medical department left me with eight fit outfield players in a counter attack after a set piece and we were worried we didn't have enough players left.”

“You have to understand the game”, especially when aimed at a woman already comes with enough negative and misogynistic connotations. And there was no lack of “understanding of the game” in this instance, it was their duty to attend to the player according to the rules. Maybe he should have had a word with Eden Hazard about not feigning injuries instead.

But this is not where this ends. Following this incidence, Fearn (a Man) was removed from first team matches and Dr. Carniero was removed from all first team duties such as training sessions, matches and even entering the team hotel. And as Duncan Castles, one of Josés mouthpieces in the british press then reported:

Mourinho is said to have held reservations about Carneiro’s role within the first-team squad since at least last year. While there is no question about her professional abilities, the Portuguese coach was concerned that the dressing room dynamic was affected by the presence of a female. According to a source, some players had expressed misgivings to the coaching staff about the set-up, arguing that it forced them to alter their usual behavior in a team environment. [x]

The same women that had worked with Chelsea's first team for 6 years and under 4 different managers just suddenly became a problem with Josés arrival. Maybe there were some players that complained about her, but José should have told them to get over it. Sadly, I can’t link you to the original source of these quotes because the website does not exist anymore but here are some more articles referring to the same quotes. [x] [x]

Her dismissal went to court and she and Chelsea ended up settling the case.

This whole thing ties into the larger issue of misogyny in football, this is an interesting article about how 2/3 s of the women in football face sexist discrimination. [x]

Montse Benitez

Rafael Benitez’ wife Montse Benitez made a joke, in 2015, about Rafa cleaning up Josés messes because Rafa just got the Real Madrid Job and she said “we tidy up his messes”, but afterwards added that it was understandable because there are only so many top clubs out there.

The first part of his response is very much ok:

“The lady is a bit confused, with all respect. The only club where her husband [directly] replaced me was at Inter Milan, where in six months he destroyed the best team in Europe at the time.”

The second part however wasn’t:

“And for her to think about me and to speak about me, I think she needs to occupy her time — and if she takes care of her husband’s diet, she will have less time to speak about me.”

He told her to get back into the kitchen and that is such a backwards thing to say to women. [x]

Generally Women

In 2013, whilst complaining about Arsenal players complaining to the officials he said

“ you know they like to cry” and then added “Football is for men, or for women with fantastic attitude.”

José mourinho used being a woman as an insult to emasculate Arsenal players. Which is incredibly sexist.

His post match tirade also includes some lovely xenophobia for good measure, which is a bit hypocritical coming from José. (I want to remind all Spurs fans that there was massive outrage after the United match, when similar criticism was aimed at Lamela)

"You know, they like to cry," Mourinho said. "That's tradition. But I prefer to say, and I was telling it to the fourth official, that English people – Frank Lampard, for example – would never provoke a situation like that. "Players from other countries, especially some countries, have that in their blood. So, if there is contact or an opponent is aggressive, they don't keep going. But this is English football. Foreign players are bringing lots of good things. They come here because they are talented. But I prefer English blood in football. English blood in this situation is: 'Come on, let's go.' Mikel's tackle is hard and aggressive but football is for men or for women with fantastic attitude. It's true."

[x]

Generally problematic things he has said

Him calling Wenger a voyeur is not included but he did end up actually apologising for that.

2006: "Sometimes you see beautiful people with no brains. Sometimes you have ugly people who are intelligent, like scientists," [x]

Me being a scientist probably makes me even more annoyed with this statement, but honestly can we get rid of this stupid idea.

2005: “Ricardo Carvalho seems to have problems understanding things, maybe he should have an IQ test, or go to a mental hospital or something.” [x]

Statements against him that he took to court

A journalist for spanish newspaper Marca wrote about José during his time at chelsea:

“the type of person who would flee after knocking someone down"

A letter from Mourinho's lawyers then read:

"In our eyes this phrase is... degrading and was used in a manner which was completely unnecessary in the critique."

Chelsea also took action against a former Barcelona director after he posted the following on twitter during a match against Manchester City.

"It's lamentable the psychopath celebrating goals as if he was a player."

[x]

Which is utterly ironic when taking all the things he has said about others into account.

A lot of these quotes are older, but judging from his recent choice of words, the constant emasculation of his players also shown in a documentary meant to make him look good, he might not be saying these things publicly anymore but the subtext and undertones still remain, therefore not really making it look like he has learned from his past mistakes and has become a better person in the slightest. Also, these quotes are just the tip of the iceberg of what kind of a human being José Mourinho really is. He is an incredibly manipulative individual that chooses all of his words, especially those to the press, really carefully and if these quotes are things that he chose to say deliberately, then I’m worried about what other opinions he has that he does not voice to the public. But if someone treats him like he does others he has an issue with it.

He can be an interesting individual to watch and his amount of arrogance can be fairly entertaining, but his general lack of respect for his players and staff shouldn't be overlooked especially in a world which is trying to move towards the future. And a footballing world at least saying that they are trying to remove discrimination from the game.

I don’t want him to be sacked, but I would really like to remind people of the kind of person he is and for him to acknowledge these statements and apologise for it. But because this is football and Agueros actions with the lines-woman were dismissed because he is “a good person” I doubt that that will ever happen.

#jose mourinho #spurs #my dislike for this man is rooted in real life issues #just because he is nice to your fave does not mean that he is a good person #can we please just not rewrite history and forget about his problematic past when he has showed zero signs of having learnt #Yes he says some funny things #but he also says some really really bad things that shouldn't be forgotten!

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tifarobles · 6 years ago

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The Pressures of Being a Millennial (and a Parent)

I’ll admit, I am not an expert on the topics I’d like to explore today. However, it’s important to me to explore some thoughts with you about what it feels like as a parent in today’s society as someone who just turned 30. I will be speaking mostly from my anecdotal experience and personal theories. I will not link to anything and encourage you to do your own Googling if you have questions about the “facts” I claim.

Let’s start by exploring some of the negative stereotypes associated with being a millennial.

Millennials are thought to be narcissistic and some studies have backed this up. I blame two things for this stereotype - the highly competitive job market and the demand of having a social media presence. We are pushed to have confidence in order to succeed in interviews and often given the advice to fake it until you make it. If you are too confident, you are considered cocky and full of yourself. Not confident enough and people don’t think you have what it takes to make it in the cutthroat corporate world.

Why is the job market more competitive? Lots of reasons. To simply name a few - there is a higher average level of education, a higher age of retirement, more job switching between places of employment, and more women in the workforce. This competition drives a lot of stress into every aspect of our lives, from our career choice to what level of unhappiness is acceptable at a place of work (including being overworked, underpaid, yelled at, sexually harassed and dealing with racist, sexist, or homophobic attitudes).

Women, in particular, grow up with the pressures to look a certain way based on distorted versions of reality in magazines, on commercials, and in pornography. We are given the option to work very hard and spend lots of money to try to reach this unattainable ideal of what a powerful woman looks like in order to exude confidence or we can choose the non-conformity route and deal with the consequences of that. Either way, people will take your appearance into their consideration of how they view you, judge you, and determine how they guestimate your self-esteem level and worth.

Diving deeper into what I’m referring to with the social media demand, social media is always on. Unlike the days before the internet existed, there is no off time. People are always online. Everyone you are connected with in life views your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, etc to see how you are doing. There is a certain expectation now in our culture to utilize these tools for social communication. This has added a lot of benefits to society, but it’s also exhausting to keep up with. If someone is any sort of a public figure or community leader, this becomes a full-time job on top of your full-time job. Being a parent becomes a third full-time job! In many careers, you have to interact with these forums. In almost every career, you have to at the very least engage with computers and emails on a daily basis.

There is a level of technological involvement with everything we do that didn’t exist before and this technology is now the place where the vast majority of social interactions take place as well. Most millennials are always connected online, through work, hobbies, talking to friends, playing games, reading, shopping, and more. This is a major change for humans and is changing society in ways I’m sure we haven’t even begun to understand. Yet millennials are judged for the use of this new technology when there is no real education surrounding the potential disadvantages of constant screen time. Instead, we are rewarded for being connected longer and more often.

As a parent, how do I ensure my child is tech-savvy while also not overexposed to screens? How do I ensure he knows how to engage in meaningful face-to-face interactions if all of his interests end up being related to television, video games, social media, and computers? How do I teach him that his self-worth isn’t reliant on how many likes he gets or followers he has? I have concerns that the next generation (or even ours, honestly) engage exponentially more online than offline and what effect this has on real emotional connections and emotional intelligence. At the same time, I want Xander to experience movies, TV shows, video games and know how to communicate well over text, emails, blogs, social media, etc.

As far as the stereotype related to millennials feeling “special” I actually think this is related to our generation being more aware that all humans have basic human rights and the easiest way to fight for this is through your own experience. Yes, I believe I deserve the right of choice when it comes to my own health and family planning. Yes, I believe that birth control should be accessed for free. Yes, I believe every human has the right to enter our country for safety reasons. Yes, I believe every human has the right to free health care and education. Do these beliefs make me seem entitled because I think I’m a special snowflake?

I’m not sure how to raise Xander to be the “right” level of confidence that people feel our generations’ parents failed at. I’m hoping that his natural charm will help, but I also hope people don’t view him poorly for his good looks assuming he didn’t have to work for anything. I want him to have good self-esteem, but I don’t want him to feel superior to others. I think I can strike this balance, but I also feel like society is working against these goals with contradictory messages.

In the workplace, it’s said that millennials have an increased importance of work-life balance. This is viewed as us wanting to be spoiled. I’d like to point out that this is likely related to a few different factors - the need for two-income households, the competitiveness in the job market, the average wage to the cost of living ratio, and the ability to always work when you are home on off hours.

Related to this, there is also a desire for direct feedback from employers more than in previous generations and this creates a false stereotype that we need more hand-holding than older generations. Nowadays, most people do not stay in one job for their entire career. The majority of my friends switch jobs every 2-3 years, and not always by choice. This is a huge change. Your job could be taken away from you at any given minute through no fault of your own. Entire teams get axed all the time, wages for contractor roles have dropped in the last 5 years, and stability isn’t a word I think many 30 years olds feel like they have in their career. On top of this, housing prices and rent costs have skyrocketed during the years since I graduated college in 2011. Having some established feedback channel helps to determine if you are safe in your current job.

I could get into the statistics of layoffs, unemployment rates, average wage by age compared to cost of living, etc, but that could go on for a long time and would require a great deal of research and probably lead to some debates. This is not the point of this post...

Turning to the point of my post. As a parent, this is incredibly stressful. The option to have a stay-at-home parent is now considered a luxury. This used to be the norm. I’m not saying that women should be forced to stay at home with their kids, not at all. I just wish there was the option of choice for families to decide what is best for them, whether that be daycare and two full-time parents, a stay-at-home dad, a nanny, or something else. Being a stay-at-home parent nowadays essentially means that one parent has to make the average salary of two people or that you will have to learn to completely change your budgeting style, not just to account for the cost of raising a child, but for basic everyday things. I will say that the recommendation of spending 30% of your paycheck on housing is no longer realistic. Millennials now spend up to 45% of their income on housing before they are 30 (there’s a link for that one!). Add a kid to the equation and both parents pretty much have to work unless one makes bank. This adds an additional cost of childcare in addition to less time with family and potentially an overall more stressful home environment.

Mothers, in particular, have it incredibly difficult. We are expected to be the emotional support structure of our home, one of the income providers, the person who ensures everyone is fed, dressed, and cleaned, we are expected to keep our house clean, the laundry put away, the dishes not stacked up in the sink, ensuring we have our own self-care and time with friends scheduled, all while maintaining a strong (but not too strong) attitude at work. We are expected to be sensitive to our children, yet thick-skinned at work. We are expected to be willing and able to listen to customers and coworkers complain, but not be able to complain ourselves or we will be seen as nagging. If we have bold opinions, we will be viewed as someone who overexaggerates or overreacts. If we are quiet, we are thought to not have ideas. We get talked over in meetings, are told we are too loud when we talk over others and are viewed as someone to walk on eggshells around if we call out this sexist behavior.

At work alone, there is a lot to deal with. At home, there is a great sense of responsibility. At the end of the day, I care more about being a good mom than any of these other things. Being a working mom I felt like I was constantly at war with myself over what to prioritize between my own health, my son’s happiness, being there for my husband, and my ability to give 100% at work. At a certain point, my sanity broke under the pressures. I had to stop working to figure out how to balance properly. Stopping working led to a slew of other issues in our house financially. The work I did take up took up time I’d normally be sleeping, so that is still something I’m learning to fit into my days.

Yet, I am afraid to even write about these feelings. What if a potential employer reads this post and thinks I can’t handle the job they want me to do?

I don’t have an answer on how to solve this problem. I just think this problem, much like mental health, needs to be discussed, largely because the two go hand in hand. I just hope that by the time my son is starting a family (or choosing not to), that these pressures won’t be as great. I hope that whatever his choice is it is his choice because it is what he wants, not because he feels like he can’t have a family and a career. I hope he doesn’t have to spend half of his paycheck on putting a roof over his head. I hope he doesn’t get laid off from multiple jobs in a span of 5 years due to reorgs, job descriptions suddenly changing, and companies going out of business like Mike and I have faced. I hope he isn’t constantly job searching in case the worst is to happen or because he wants to find a job that will actually pay the bills and have a little that can go into savings.

I hope that by the time he is our age there won’t still be a war over who can use what bathroom. I hope there won’t be children being gassed because they need a safer place to live. I hope there won’t be a war on women’s bodies that includes taking away their choice and taking away their ability to protect their own bodies from an unwanted pregnancy. I hope his future generation includes the importance of understanding consent and excludes blaming victims.

Part of the human condition is that we will never get everything right. There will probably always be war. There will probably always be people that use other people in terrible ways. I just hope that things can get easier than they are now. At least we now have working toilets, lighting, central heating, air conditioning, the ability to travel around the world, and many other huge benefits from our technological evolution. At least slavery is illegal and women are allowed to vote. I just hope that the future has a better outlook for equality for all, and that is very related to the economy. As they say, the rich keep getting richer and the poor get poorer. I’m afraid the middle class is vanishing and marginalized groups will be the ones to suffer the most.

Xander, I will do all I can to prepare you for this world and to help you be ready to impact the needed change. At the same time, I’ll try to keep the house reasonably clean, healthy and delicious food on the table, stylish clothes on your back, and find time to play with you and give you snuggles every day that I can.

#parenting #liberal #millennials

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andranikolayi · 5 years ago

Text

Gxrls Can’t Mix - misogyny and discrimination in the electronic music world

originally appeared online in Romanian for Revista Cutra

A brief note about this translation

I initially wrote this text in July for Romanian intersectional feminist mag CUTRA and they published it mid September. The focus was supposed to be on events that did take place locally, however, this summer there’s been a constant stream of tweets from female-identified and enby djs/producers about their horrendous Boiler Room experiences.

I wanted to shine a light on that and the endemic kind of sexism that boiler room is constantly facilitating and refuses to take any responsibility towards, as well as share some of the horrors from the Romania scene that nobody wants to talk about because we still live in a very homophobic, racist and sexist environment. As a local queer artist myself, I do believe it is our duty to speak up on these issues even if it may negatively affect our social/professional life. The local community leaders do know what they need to do in order to create safer, more inclusive spaces yet prefer to use a superficially woke discourse that looks good online, yet they would never take direct action or present an unpopular opinion.

Having spoken to Ceci after their Boiler Room and their scary bad experience (including receiving multiple death threats), it became increasingly clear that this text needed to exist in the world. Also running into Lakuti last week in Berlin and hearing how traumatized she still is after her experience playing in Romania, I was all the more motivated to translate it into English and make this available for everyone.

It may be sprawling at times, but I think it’s important to present a translation of the original published material, as it appears on the CUTRA website. Please keep in mind that CUTRA is not a music/dj-specific publication so certain aspects of the industry come with very ELI5 explanations.

First I thought she was just messing with us, but now i m starting to think that this girl doesn’t know what she’s doing

This is boring room not boiler room

Are they trying to put us to bed and broadcasting Schumann resonances?

She would have been better at spinning pizzas than records

Go back to the kitchen!

These are just a select few from the over 2000 comments of the very first Boiler Room live stream taking place in Romania. Said comments appeared on the initial Facebook live post. The event took place in July 2016. At the time of writing this article [na – july 2019], all the comments are still publicly visible on their page.

I could probably write a thesis on misogyny in electronic music, but for this particular piece I’d like to focus on the following question: why do we saying that gxrls can’t mix?

I would also like to ask the follow up questions: should we be surprised that colleagues from the Romanian club industry would say that a female-identified person is a sick DJ but „a little too homely” to play a certain club? Or that another person I used to consider a close friend would tell me during a b2b set that because he just took some MDMA I looked like „a juicy piece of meat” to him? Or how when Electronic Beats Romania did their first feature on local producer Admina and they didn’t even know who to contact from the magazine to moderate the deluge of hateful comments? Or how nobody even bats an eye at the way industry men here always tend to grab you by the lower waist when talking to you in the club as if it were the most natural thing in the world? Try to explicitly say something and you would be instantly labelled an „unchill bitch”.

The answer is a resounding yes. We should be surprised, as well as angry and concerned enough to start actively doing something about this.

Miss I’s Boiler Room

On July 6th, 2016, the promoters behind the Interval event and festival series put together the very first Boiler Room in Romania. For those of you less familiar with the club world, Boiler Room is a platform that organizes events specifically designed to broadcast a live video stream of the club experience. Think DJs mixing or musicians doing live sets, while also making a point in filming the audience and their reactions to the music. Since its inception in 2010, Boiler Room has become a global phenomenon, with immense pull in the industry. The project is equally revered and reviled to the point that there are parody YouTube channels (see People of Boiler Room). For most artists, being on Boiler Room is a make or break moment, sort of like a calling card highlighting your skill as a DJ.

Promoters, fellow DJs, agents and ravers all follow Boiler Room religiously. The platform’s increased popularity and growing volume of videos produced per week may have slightly decreased its influence due to sheer oversaturation, being on BR is still the highlight of many up-and-coming artists’ career. Unlike a mix, the BR videos don’t just physically show off your mixing skills, but they also document the audience’s reaction in real time. Oh, and as a DJ you only get 60 minutes to give it your best. Or, as with Miss I in the following example, you’ve just been asked to open the very first BR broadcast ever from your country. Miss I is one of the most beloved local female DJs, also responsible for opening the first vinyl only record store in Romania and highly appreciated in the minimal/deep house scene, so you know there’s gonna be eyeballs. But no pressure, u do u grrrrl.

For every Boiler Room event, the broadcast is livestreaming on their website and Facebook page. Reading the live reactions on the chatroom and Facebook comments is intricately related to the experience. On that humid summer afternoon in a rooftop garden in Rahova, the comments that started pouring just a few minutes into her set were absolutely shocking. The level and volume of vitriol had greatly surpassed the BR staff’s expectations. About 40 minutes in, the host publicly posted a call out comment.

However, while researching this article, I was surprised to discover that most of said harmful and sexist comments were still up online. There were no attempts on behalf of the BR team to warn or ban users. Hell, there was no moderation. But maybe there should have been.

The Boiler Room Effect

Part I - San Francisco Pride, 2019

This story took place in 2016. We could easily justify what had happened by claiming we don’t like to talk about gender politics at the club or how, generally speaking, the Eurominimal/tech-house scene the event was catering to is notoriously populated by aggro cishet bros who worship Villalobos. Unfortunately (surprise surprise!), this has not been the first, nor the last online scandal Boiler Room has been responsible for.

During the writing process for this material, initially meant to focus mainly on Romanian issues, I started paying attention to the comments on recent BR livestreams. This process, coupled with the increased number of artist friends talking about the backlash in the comments following their BR streams I was seeing on Twitter lead me to believe in the dire necessity of live moderators for the entire BR social media. These comments are not just mean spirited or unfunny trolling, they can be incredibly harmful and have a lasting negative effect.

On June 1st 2019, Boiler Room organized a Pride-related event in San Francisco where an artist I not only appreciate but happen to occasionally work with made their debut. Ceci aka CCL is a DJ, producer, co-founder of queer collective TUF and [at the time of publishing] agent working for Discwoman, an NYC-based talent agency created to boost womxn and non-binary artists. CCL identifies as non-binary and uses only they/them pronouns. Being AFAB and feminine presenting, they are often misgendered due to their presentation, even after clearly stating their preferences.

In the beginning of the video, the host does use their correct pronouns, but most people in the comments were still referring to them by using she/her pronouns. This might seem like a minor inconvenience compared to the bulk of the discourse happening below the stream, mostly comprised of people complaining about the music, ranging from how weird the selection is, whether or not that sound is a faulty cable and how bad their technical skills were. Later Ceci confessed they even received actual death threats. All this was happening at a Pride-related event in one of the gayest cities in the world and with a line-up specifically tailored for the occasion.

Being misgendered is always a bad experience, but when it happens during what is supposed to be a career-defining moment, the effect is even more traumatic. Besides, a torrent of sexist and negative comments cannot have a positive effect on anyone, regardless of their gender or sexual identity. Especially with BR, this only seems to happen when female-identified or non-binary artists are concerned. In CCL’s case, the misgendering may have not been the most atrocious part of the online response, however we do need to start implementing such habits as not assuming one’s gender or choice of pronouns. It may seem like a small step, but it does make a world of difference.

What Boiler Room continuously refuse to do is acknowledge the influence it carries in the industry and the responsibility that comes with that. BR could have avoided causing a lot of damage by simply adding a little blurb about the artist’s preferred pronouns in the description of the Facebook live video, for the users tuning in later or not familiar with their work.

It’s this kind of thoughtfulness and concern for the actual scenes they feature that is consistently lacking from their approach.

Part II - The Sherelle Incident

In March 2019, a different incident took over both the online and offline music discourse – for approximately two whole weeks, all you could see on Techno Twitter were reactions to Sherelle’s Boiler Room. In short, there was clip of a POC female-identified DJ from the UK playing bass and jungle to a packed room going totally berserk until someone from the audience touches the CDJs and the music stops. This unwanted intervention coming from an unidentified hand created a meme-worthy WTF reaction. To nobody’s surprise, this snipped was the one Boiler Room chose to use as their preview advertising her set online. All of a sudden, her startled face in the clip was all anyone could think of, not the incredible atmosphere she created. Yewande Adeniran wrote a thoughtful piece on the implications and how said “accident” took the discourse away from a moment that was supposed to be just about Sherelle and her skills as a DJ.

Following the incident, the Twitter community managed to ID the person who caused the hubbub, who turned out to be infamous UK DJ Riz la Teef, who was also playing the event. Online, he’s been bombarded with accusations of racism and misogyny to the point of having to delete his account. However, a wave of reputed DJs and producers jumped to his defense and justified his action. Keeping in mind that most of what we call Techno Twitter is comprised of people from/who live in North American, their argument was that his unwarranted intrusion was in fact a very common practice from the UK grime/bass culture.

Known as a wheel up or to turn up, it consists on moving the jog (the little CDJ wheelie thingie) to rewind the track playing and increase the hype. It’s traditionally considered a sign of appreciation and supposed to be very flattering when your friends/fellow DJs perform it. Think of it as a hands-on rewind. Only in this case his attempt failed and the only thing he managed to accomplish was create a whole lot of confusion. Plus, they were friends and earlier in the clip you can see him come say hi and hug her. In true Internet fashion, think pieces from major publications followed, educating the poor American kids on the wheel up, as well as photos with the two hugging and making peace, telling everyone it’s time to chill out. As for Sherelle’s part, I’m actually curious what else was she supposed to do than say something along the lines of “OK, fine, let’s move on”? It’s already hard enough to break through in the industry as a queer black woman, the last thing you want to do is be that unchill bitch who can’t take a joke.

Our Daily Misogyny

Going back the shitty things that happened in Romania chapter, I want to talk about an incident that happened in October 2016 at a Queer Night party in Guesthouse. To give you a little context, Queer Night is a series of queer parties, the first of its kind, co-run by local choreographer/dancer Paul Dunca and DJ/singer Cosima von Bulowe for over a decade. Guesthouse is a club mainly associated with the Rominimal/tech-house cult, with a pretty cishet, homophobic audience. However, they occasionally host the odd underground event, like DJ Stingray or Lena Willikens. This particular event was a collaborative effort between Queer Night and the Interval (the people responsible for the Romanian Boiler Rooms – na) curatorial teams, who invited queer womxn DJ couple Lakuti and Tama Sumo to do an extended back to back set. Lerato Khathi aka Lakuti is an incredibly talented DJ from South Africa, who also runs the label and talent agency Uzuri and Tama Sumo has an extensive DJ career and also books for Panoramabar.

As Lerato was mixing, a guy standing in front of the booth reaches towards the turntables and touches the record that was playing and the music glitches. Lerato simply froze for a second but continues to carry on mixing. A few minutes later, said guy suddenly appears behind the booth (access to the booth and the backstage area requires a separate bracelet) and tries to get her attention and starts touching her. In that moment, Tama rushes in and extracts the person from the booth. In spite of his highly inappropriate conduct at event that promotes safe spaces, the security staff refused to kick him out of the club for a fuzzy array of reasons – friends with the owner, being a “house regulars” and my favorite “he didn’t beat up anyone” line. Considering the organizers’ credo and position as community leaders, they could have done more than simply trying to minimize the incident.

The rest of the night went well and their set was lovely, but talking to them the next morning, the entire experience didn’t sound like just a minor incident of a someone being an asshole: Lerato confessed that even though she traveled and played all across the globe, she’s never experienced anything remotely similar.

I’d love to be able to say that these stories are just rare occurrences. Unfortunately, being in the music industry reflects a much more grim reality of endemic sexism. Let me suggest a little exercise – take for example any Boiler Room video on Youtube where there are female-identified performers and within the first dozen comments you might something along the lines of “she can’t mix”, “great selection but her technique is lacking” or “X guy did this so much better in the ‘90s”.

Perhaps we all know by now that commenting on a womxn’s appearance is a no-no. Yet I still constantly hear various industry men making comments that womxn like Peggy Gou or Jayda G only got where they are now just because they’re hot. (How come nobody calls out Marcel Dettman for looking like a model I ask you?). Unlike jabs at someone’s looks which are easy to dismiss as harmful, commenting on someone’s “skill” and “technique” are seemly OK because they refer to an objective (they say) variable, easy to judge and quantify. I ask you this – doesn’t this all sound terribly familiar? Perhaps using the same arguments as those right wing Youtube personalities that post videos with titles such as „X DESTROYS feminists with FACTS and LOGIC”?

Consequences of the systemic sexism are starting to pop up everywhere, from Resident Advisor closing down their comments section due to the amount of harassment related to their recent focus on female artists to the petition against Giegling’s Konstantin. For a quick reminder, German DJ Konstantin used a bunch of “biological determinism” arguments in an interview trying to explain why he believes women don’t have the right kind of brain for mixing. In 2018, Konstantin was booked to perform at three major parties during Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE), a key annual gathering for the electronic music industry. A petition signed by thousands of fellow DJs, music journalists and electronic music artists circulated online to have him blackballed due to his comments and half-assed apology that followed. Unfortunately, the only result was the ADE organizers offering him even more exposure by inviting him to talk about his actions on a live panel.

This kind of discourse is very dangerous, as by accepting and normalizing it we’re offering it unwarranted legitimacy to the point that opinions such as Konstantin’s start being reiterated by the press. After this year’s Movement festival in Detroit (the birthplace of techno), a journalist in a local newspaper writing a piece on the women’s rising visibility in electronic music, cited a “veteran DJ” who claimed women lack the technical capabilities to mix and rely on laptops and software in order to do their job. Despite this not being the author’s argument, he chose to offer a platform to a blatantly misogynistic opinion. These positions are not just wrong and should be called out for their obvious sexism, but perpetuating them in the press further increases their destructive power. The more we will continue to validate them, the more present they will become.

And still, why do we keep saying gxrls can’t mix?

Are girls really all lacking in the rhythm department? Commenting on one’s ability to mix is still one of the most widespread forms of criticism that AFAB and female-identified persons get. Why is it so widespread?

Through mixing, the art that defines the modern dance music DJ, most people understand creating a story through a continuous body of variegated music but particularly having no pause between the tracks. When industry people talk about mixing, they usually refer to beatmatching, which is usually means blending two or more tracks, often of different tempos or keys. The overall tempo of the DJ’s mix can remain constant or experience subtle increases across their set. This style of mixing, using long transitions, no tempo changes and working within the same musical subgenre throughout is particularly appreciated in Eurominimal and tech-house, which is also the most lucrative part of the industry in places like France, Germany and Romania. As many talented DJs have proven over the years, from legends like Larry Lavan or David Mancuso and their cosmic or loft deeply personal, eclectic styles, the perfect blends same tempo school is by no means the only “right” way to think about a dancefloor.

At a time when dance music has exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry, the “perfect mix” paradigm became the dominant style. In this climate, to be a DJ is synonymous with knowing how to mix, otherwise you don’t exist. Or at least that’s the androcentric perspective. And once you frame things like this, the comments on womxn’s “technical skills” stem from the same sexist pool as saying womxn are not good at math/science/driving or other “men’s” activities. After all, they’re just being objective, right? “Oh my god it’s not like I said she was fat or something!”

Mixing is a learned skill that requires practice to be perfected. The portion of the population who is encouraged to learn skills that involve music and technology, who is not discriminated against and has access to often costly equipment (be it controllers, CDJs or turntables) is overwhelmingly cis, straight and male. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the “I don’t have a mix online/nowhere to practice because my ex bf had all the equipment” story. Or gxrls saying they never learned how to mix because they didn’t have access to equipment. Or the supportive “nice guy” story who invites you over to “teach you how to mix” but quickly loses his interest once you reject his sexual advances.

It’s refreshing to see groups like Room 4 Resistance, No Shade or Discwoman not only organizing events, but also putting together free mixing workshops for womxn and non-binary people. People are also trying to change things in Romania, with groups like Corp. or Queer Night trying to tilt the gender imbalance locally, only unfortunately their efforts are lacking the infrastructure, institutional support and ideological consistency.

Where to Now?

We’re in 2019. DJs like The Black Madona, Josey Rebelle or Octo Octa and Eris Drew are some of the most in-demand people in the circuit. They all approach the dancefloor differently and bring unique views of what a DJ set can be. Yet straight white boys are feeling threatened by their success and are constantly looking for arguments to delegitimize their success. “Yeah, but this person is getting booked everywhere just because it’s cool to be trans now” – as if anyone would go through the intense process of forever altering your body just because queer is “in”! “Oh if I had tits I would get more gigs” – another male DJ I used to call a friend told me when I started playing more in Bucharest. I’ve heard phrases like “but why do women only book other women?” or “how can the super talented boys ever breakthrough in this environment if women are getting all the attention?” more times than I can recount.

Straight white boys need to shut the fuck up! For decades, the vast majority of people in charge of running/booking clubs were straight white men who would only book other straight white men. Yes, there we certainly do see more womxn in line ups, but just as female:pressure cares to remind us periodically, the percentage is still predominantly male. The healthiest path towards building a more diverse and inclusive music world is not having the old gatekeepers trying to educate themselves and perform acts of tokenism, but make space for marginalized people in decision-making positions, because nobody could make more informed, coherent and inspired choices than a person who is deeply involved in the community. Just see Discwoman’s Frankie miracle work over at Bossa Nova Civic in NYC. And it is very likely that with the right people running the show, incidents of abuse and harassment will diminish as well.

Womxn have been so used to be touched without consent and constantly harassed that we’ve been programmed to dismiss such indiscretions as minor inconveniences, something that “comes with the territory”. In order to see an improvement of this state of affairs we have to become more radical in our attitudes against sexism and discrimination. We absolutely need to learn to speak up whenever we encounter misogyny, racism, homo and transphobia and, most importantly, believe womxn when they come forward with a story of abuse of boundaries crossing because whenever we brush it off with things like “he was drunk”, “it was just a joke” or “there are two sides to every story”, we become complicit and contribute to this toxic culture.

The good news is that we can all contribute to changing things. And no, you don’t have to go to a march or join an organization if you want to help out. Change starts in your own immediate community by simply calling out your friends when they say something sexist, not supporting the known abusers and problematic people in the industry and just coming out to see one of the local womxn artists.

We will continue to play, to defend the DJ booth as sometimes the only safe space we might have at the club, to record our music however we can and become ten times better than all male DJs who told us we don’t know, we can’t or we “don’t have the necessary biological conformation”. But, most importantly, we’ll keep making people dance.

images, in order of appearance

queer night at apollo 111, 2017

miss i boiler room, 2016

edited screengrab from comments in the miss i boiler room facebook stream

crowd at miss i boiler room, 2016

ccl at rewire, 2019

all photos courtesy of the author

#gxrls cant mix #cutra #boiler room #sexism

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acephysicskarkat · 7 years ago

Note

crab boy what is gamergate and why is it controversial

I’M GONNA PUT THIS UNDER A READMORE BECAUSE IT’S PRETTY LONG AND SHOUTY AND REFERENCES SOME PRETTY SHITTY THINGS, OKAY?

IN BRIEF, A FEW YEARS AGO, A SHITHEEL NAMED ERON GJONI DECIDED, IN A PRETTY COLDLY PREMEDITATED FASHION, TO RUIN THE LIFE OF HIS EX, A GAME DEVELOPER NAMED ZOE QUINN. IN HIS SHITTY LITTLE BID FOR REVENGE HE HANDCRAFTED, FOR MAXIMUM OUTRAGE, A POST ABOUT HOW SHE DID A BUNCH OF STUFF THAT SHE DIDN’T ACTUALLY DO, AND DROPPED IT INTO THE OPEN SEWER THAT IS CHAN CULTURE. IT PICKED UP A LOT OF MOMENTUM WHEN ADAM BALDWIN PICKED IT UP AND COINED THE NAME “#GAMERGATE”.

THIS KICKED OFF A MASSIVE INTERNET WITCH HUNT THAT USED “ETHICS IN VIDEOGAME JOURNALISM” AS AN EXCUSE TO BEHAVE TERRIBLY UNETHICALLY TOWARDS FEMALE AND MINORITY INDIE DEVELOPERS AND GAME CRITICS - NOT JUST QUINN, BUT ALSO BRIANNA WU, ANITA SARKEESIAN (BECAUSE OF FUCKING COURSE SEXIST NERDBROS WOULD FREAK OUT ABOUT ANITA SARKEESIAN, IT WAS AFTER ALL A YEAR WITH NUMBERS IN IT), VEERENDER JUBBAL AND COUNTLESS OTHERS. THIS WENT ON FOR AGES. PEOPLE ARE STILL GIVING ZOE QUINN SHIT TODAY.

THERE WAS AN AWFUL LOT OF NOISE TO ANY SEMBLANCE OF SIGNAL, BUT THEIR ARGUMENTS BOILED DOWN TO AN ELABORATE AND DISCONNECTED ARRAY OF INDIVIDUAL PIECES OF COMPLETE AND UTTER HORSESHIT, IN BRIEF:

THE IDEA THAT FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF A VIDEOGAME WAS THE SAME THING AS A DEMAND FOR GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP FOR THE ENTIRE GAMES MEDIUM;

THE IDEA THAT GAME REVIEWS SHOULD BE “OBJECTIVE”, OR IN OTHER WORDS THAT THEY SHOULD NEVER DISCUSS SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES OR PERSONAL PREFERENCES (A TRULY OBJECTIVE REVIEW IS IDENTICAL TO THE TECHNICAL SPECS);

THE IDEA THAT DEVELOPERS TYING THE SALARIES OF DEVELOPERS TO THEIR PRODUCT’S METACRITIC SCORE MEANT REVIEWERS WERE OBLIGATED TO NEVER SAY BAD THINGS ABOUT AAA GAMES;

THE IDEA THAT THE BIGGEST THREAT TO ETHICAL VIDEOGAMES JOURNALISM WAS NOT ALL THE ADVERTISING MONEY BEING PUMPED INTO THE GAMES PRESS BY FANTASTICALLY WEALTHY AAA PUBLISHERS, BUT INDIVIDUAL INDIE DEVELOPERS USING THEIR MAGICAL TIME-SHIFTING SEXINESS TO BRAINWASH INDIVIDUAL JOURNOS INTO GIVING THEM POSITIVE REVIEWS;

THE IDEA THAT VIDEOGAMES WERE “ART”, NOT IN THE SENSE OF “A THING WORTHY OF CRITICAL ANALYSIS TO THINK ABOUT”, BUT IN THE SENSE OF “A THING YOU PUT ON A PEDESTAL AND PEOPLE NOD AND SAY IS GOOD”;

THE IDEA THAT IT WAS SOME HORRIBLE AFFRONT TO THEIR FREE SPEECH FOR PEOPLE TO PREEMPTIVELY BLOCK THEM ON TWITTER;

THE IDEA THAT INDIE GAMES MADE BY WOMEN, ESPECIALLY ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVE GAMES AND GAMES MADE IN TWINE, “DIDN’T COUNT” AND “WEREN’T REAL GAMES”;

THE IDEA THAT “GAMER” WAS THE EQUIVALENT OF A GENDER, AND A BUNCH OF OTHER CLUMSY ATTEMPTS TO CO-OPT CARGO CULT SOCIAL JUSTICE TERMINOLOGY TO PRESENT “KEEP THOSE ICKY GIRLS OUT OF MY CLUBHOUSE” AS SOME SORT OF CRY FOR JUSTICE;

THE IDEA THAT WOMEN AND MINORITIES WERE BEING USED AS A “SHIELD” FOR PEOPLE MAKING SOCIAL JUSTICE CRITIQUE, LEADING TO THE “#NOTYOURSHIELD” HASHTAG, WHICH WAS PRETTY IRONICALLY AND PRETTY CONSISTENTLY USED AS A SHIELD FOR #GG’S TERRIBLE BEHAVIOUR - ESSENTIALLY, AN ENTIRE HASHTAG FOR “I AM HIS BLACK FRIEND SO HE’S NOT RACIST”;

MIXED WITH THE ABOVE, SOME INCREDIBLY BLATANT SEXISM AND TRANSPHOBIA;

THE IDEA THAT WHEN #GG-TINGED HARASSMENT HAPPENED IT WAS SIMULTANEOUSLY OKAY BECAUSE ~BOTH SIDES~, AND A HOAX THAT THE ~PROFESSIONAL VICTIM~ WHO WAS RECEIVING IT WAS SENDING TO THEMSELVES;

THE IDEA THAT IT WAS OKAY FOR 8CHAN, THE WEBSITE THEY CONGREGATED ON AFTER 4CHAN THREW THEM OUT, TO HOST SOFTCORE CHILD PORNOGRAPHY, BUT A MAN WHO LET EVERYONE KNOW IT HOSTED CHILD PORNOGRAPHY NEEDED TO BE REPORTED TO THE POLICE;

A WHOLE BUNCH OF ~IRONIC~ NAZISM AND HOLOCAUST DENIAL, COMPLETE WITH AN ENDORSEMENT FROM STORMFRONT;

THE IDEA THAT BEING WILLING TO ACCEPT THE ABOVE MADE THEM “MORE TOLERANT” TO THOSE EVIL SJW’S WHO *AREN’T* WILLING TO ACCEPT OUTSPOKEN NEO-NAZIS WITH OPEN ARMS, BECAUSE MUMBLEMUMBLE WHY WON’T YOU TOLERATE MY INTOLERANCE;

THE IDEA THAT IT WAS “UNFAIR” WHEN PEOPLE WENT INTO THE PUBLICLY OPEN, IF SHITTY, FORUMS WHERE THEY CONGREGATED TO PLAN THIS SHIT, TOOK SCREENCAPS AND TOLD THEIR TARGETS WHAT WAS GOING DOWN, BECAUSE AS WE ALL KNOW TURNING DOWN THE BRIGHTNESS ON YOUR MONITOR MEANS YOU’RE ON THE DARKNET.

IT WAS BASICALLY THE VERY WORST OF NERD CULTURE - THE ENTITLEMENT, THE RESENTMENT OF WOMEN, THE BIGOTRY, THE GATEKEEPING IMPULSE, THE REFUSAL TO CONSIDER - ON OPEN DISPLAY, AND FOR A PERIOD OF A YEAR AND A HALF OR SO IT WAS EVERYWHERE, SPURRED BY A COUPLE OF EARLY SUCCESSES (SUCH AS GETTING SOME ADS PULLED FROM A WEBSITE THAT HOSTED AN ARTICLE THEY DIDN’T READ).

AFTER A WHILE THEY STOPPED USING THE HASHTAG, ALTHOUGH THEIR INFLUENCE LINGERS ON IN MORE FOCUSED SHITHEEL BRIGADES LIKE THE RABID PUPPIES, WHATEVER POINTLESS SHIT ZOE QUINN AND ANITA SARKEESIAN ARE HAVING TO DEAL WITH TODAY, ALL THOSE PEOPLE WHO SHIT UP ONLINE DISCUSSIONS OF LGBT ISSUES, RACE OR SEXISM BECAUSE OF “IDENTITY POLITICS” OR “CULTURAL MARXISM”, AND JUST GENERALLY EVERY DISPLAY OF NERD-CULTURE TOXICITY AND BIGOTRY - IT WAS HAPPENING BEFORE, A LOT, BUT #GG TAUGHT ITS PRACTITIONERS THAT IT WAS “ETHICAL”.

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putris-et-mulier · 8 years ago

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Marvel's diversity is a problem because it doesn't represent enough white conservative able-bodied straight cis males

White conservative able-bodied straight cis males are technically a minority you guys

sick All in the Family reference

So, someone sent me this guy's argument and you can read it here for yourself. I'm just going to hit the big points because I could write for the rest of my life and still not cover everything that's wrong with this.

This gentleman, Jon Del Arroz, is upset that Disney is being too politically correct (they only own the Avengers movie franchise so what has to do with the comics I don't know) and it super sucks because he already got kicked out of sci-fi fandom and conventions (there is definitely a story there)

I don't have to explain why this is hilarious, right? If this were a tweet it would say "Disney is the reason I get kicked out of conventions" and also awwwwwwwwwwwww.

So, he suggests that the diversity Marvel (he never addresses Disney again) needs is in political and social philosophies so they can put out a variety of books preaching an array of propaganda.

And I'm with him on the classification of what Marvel Comics and Disney separately put out is their own propaganda. Propaganda simply means information released that is biased or misleading. Both Disney and Marvel Comics are corporations so of course they are going to use propaganda to do whatever they can to get their audience to stay loyal. What I'm writing now is propaganda. Jon Del Arroz is using propaganda. Everyone is biased and no one has all of the information. The problem with propaganda is if you don't know where it's coming from and can't contextualize the bias.

The assertion that "social justice propaganda…is dangerous when it comes to creating art" is a little too ridiculous for me to address in whole so I'll just say: You're right bro, art has never been used as a social and political platform and any that has never ever becomes a piece of classical art. Frida Kahlo totally loved white people.

On that note, let's talk about the writers and artists. This gentleman contends that Marvel (again, where is Disney?) only hires social justice warriors. He looked up all of the current writers and investigated their twitters to give you proof of their liberalism and every single one of them has unequivocally stated that they are anti-Trump. He says that like it's a bad thing. Hhere are some of my favorites

Gerry Duggan – Constant Anti-Trump posts, retweets Bernie (he can still win!)

Al Ewing – British, and doesn’t seem to post a lot of American politics, but very heavily steeped in globalism in immigration “rights” in his posts. Anti-Western civilization

Kate Leth – Regular anti-Trump posts. Constant complaints about some boogeyman “privilege”, rambles at racist, sexist, etc., “white dudes”. Rants about queer issues

Greg Pak – Complains about “representation” of different races. Lots of anti-Trump posts

Dan Slott – Anti-trump rants all the time

a-Nehisi Coats – brand new to twitter, most of his posts anti-trump. Writes fake news articles for the Atlantic on “micro-aggressions”

Jason Latour – anti-trump tweets regularly, regularly makes fun of Christian culture

Sean Ryan – Anti-American tweets, Women’s March tweets, ran podcast “horrifically misinformed” which championed left-wing causes

Mariko Tamaki – not many posts, but encouraging fans who speak of him as “homophobic, misogynistic and racist”, social justice posts, anti fox-news posts

G.Willow Wilson – “Muslim” Ms. Marvel writer, rants anti-Trump posts all the time

I'm honestly not sure what he means about Mariko Tamaki (she writes Hulk) and he uses incorrect pronouns so I'm doubly confused.

I do agree with him on one, Gerry Conway calls himself a “passionate libtard” in his profile. Stop using that word and variations of it, Gerry, but continue complaining about the government.

"18/18 Marvel writers, 100%, are extreme left wing ideologues who hate half of the country, have nothing nice to say about the USA or its president ever" (he went back and added the 12 he forgot and the percentage remained at 100)

It should be no surprise that people in the art industry, especially ones who freelance and publish independently, tend to be into activism and not very into conservationism.

You can make an argument that publishers intentions can be analyzed based on who they hire but at the end of the day these people are themselves, not Marvel. They work on commission. I don't think I could pick out anyone who only writes for Marvel.

He also argues that no one reads Marvel comics that aren't long-term dedicated fans and that even they are not reading as much. Source?

Take Spider-Man/Deadpool for example. The series was created based on the interest of the two of them and specifically how popular their ship is. From my personal experience most of the readers are brand-new to comics and the cells have been astronomical, especially on fan markets for first printings.

It stars Deadpool, one of the queerest characters at Marvel, and the premise revolves around his romantic pursuit of Spider-Man. It's pretty out there, they now have a child together and the sells numbers haven't been below 45,000

And just look at the sales numbers for comics in general. 2002–2006 they were making over $300 million, 2007–2012 they were making over $400 million, and 2013 through the present they've consistently been over $500 million. That's just North America and those are just the numbers for the ones published by Diamond, no one knows how much is being made by digital comics yet but it's a lot.

Source, it's apparently extremely hard for you to take two seconds and Google that information.

"This is why your sales are in the toilet, Axel Alonso (Editor in chief)"

That's the opposite of how math works.

“heeeeey maybe we shouldn’t, in every single book we publish, stick middle fingers up at our overwhelmingly primary audience of 18-35 year old white males who buy comics, as about 2/3 of them voted in a way that is contrary to the social narratives we’re pushing”

Don't judge him, he's not allowed to go to conventions so he doesn't actually know how diverse the audience is. And it should be noted that a target audience is separate from an actual audience. A great example of this is

Young Justice on the Cartoon Network had great ratings but the ratings weren't from their target, 18–30 white straight men, so it got canceled. The reason? They didn't want to sell merchandise to them despite the fact that sexual and gender minorities overwhelmingly keep this industry afloat in the majority of their purchases are merchandise. Remember when only 18–30 white men were buying comics in the 90s and everyone had to file multiple bankruptcies?

46.67% of comic book readers are women. We don't know the percentage of non-binary readers but it's safe to say that cis men are the minority and you hate minorities! I guess?

This is weird but he tries to back up his points by explaining that his wife would never buy Iron Man comics again because the current character using that legacy title looks like this:

Muslims "think American pop-culture is evil" so they would prefer not to have representation in comics

Don't get offended because in his web comic "I have a Female, half-Asian protagonist. I didn’t do so out of any desire for representation or to show that she can be just as physically strong as men"

And this: "Peter Parker doesn’t sound like Peter Parker when he’s sitting there fretting about beating up an actual criminal because of their race (seriously, it’s in a bleeding cool preview)"

Peter Parker, well known racist? I don't remember ever seeing those particular issues but I'm a girl so I wouldn't know.

I agree that there should be comic books of all types, even ones that might even offend the shit out of me but that's what we have different publishers for. If you don't like liberalism, don't read Marvel or DC. You have many other options. More so now than ever because web comics and digital comics are only gaining in popularity and because of that it's incredibly easy for anyone to put out a comic that is listed right alongside Marvel's.

Read these:

#Christy creare #Racism #Homophobia #ableism #xenophobia

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femcurrent · 8 years ago

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Ensembles You Love to Hate: A Comparison of Mad Men and GIRLS

by Caity

I consume a lot of media. Movies, books, podcasts, video games—I’m all about a good story. My favorite form of storytelling is the serialized, character driven television show. Thankfully, I live in a time of “peak tv” so I’ve got plenty of quality shows to choose from. I’m not really picky on drama/comedy, as long as there are characters for me to love or hate and dialogue that isn’t so distractingly bad that I’m removed from the world. I just got off spring break (I know—something most adults don’t get anymore), so I decided to catch up on the controversial HBO comedy—GIRLS just in time for the series finale which aired on Sunday, April 16. And while I was watching, I couldn’t help but find myself drawing comparisons to another very popular, award winning, long running series: Mad Men.

The two shows have a lot in common. They both take place mostly in New York with various other locations as side plots throughout the seasons. They both center around a protagonist who, despite being an awful person, continually finds success both in their work and sexual relationships and who is continually unhappy, thus spending their show searching for fulfillment. They both have ensemble casts full of complex characters who make a lot of mistakes—some of which they learn from and others they just try to forget about—all the while you as a viewer are somehow still rooting for their happy ending.

They both are more focused on character development and growth rather than being plot driven. They both show the problems associated with drug abuse and unhealthy relationships. They both analyze a very specific time period and subset of people living then (generally upper middle class white people, but that’s a common issue in television heavily discussed on the internet.) But where Mad Men focuses on the silent generation in the 60s, GIRLS focuses on millennials in modern day. And then there is the overwhelmingly obvious difference: GIRLS is female led whereas Mad Men is not.

Now that isn’t a good or bad thing. Mad Men has some amazing female leads—I wish I could hang out with Peggy and Joan and learn how to be a badass while still remaining professional. And the men in GIRLS are some of the best characters. Ray is probably the only one on the show I would feel confident describing as a good human being (but I could also go to bat to justify a lot of Elijah and Shoshana’s actions. That’s another topic for a different day.) But GIRLS focuses on what it’s like as a young woman today, and Mad Men showed us the life of an ad man in the past.

So why didn’t Mad Men get as much hate? I don’t remember seeing buzz pieces about how Don Draper just needed to grow up. No one complained it was unrealistic that Vincent Kartheiser’s character continued to hookup with women despite his appearance becoming less conventionally attractive as the show went on. (The fact that the hair/makeup team intentionally gave him an increasingly more intense receding hairline is actually one of my favorite details of the show’s production.)

No one argued that the characters needed to change professions to actually contribute to society. Part of this is probably that working at Sterling Cooper is the epitome of a “real job” for many people’s metrics, but I really don’t see how their work gave back in anyway. Their whole objective was to convince masses of people to spend money on things they don’t actually need. Ray at least became a community board member. Hannah turned to education (however bad she was at a high school level, she was trying to do good and probably succeeds in some ways at the college where she ends up). Jessa was working on becoming a therapist to help other addicts, though her career path perhaps fell through. But most of the characters on GIRLS don’t have 401Ks, so obviously they aren’t successful.

Believe me, I fully recognize how “meta” this might be for a young woman to be analyzing potential sexism in pop culture by writing a blog about...a woman who analyzes sexism in pop culture by writing blogs. But season six’s “American Bitch” was one of the most profoundly complex episodes of television—analyzing consent and power dynamics between men and women, and I fear many people will never see it because they wrote off the show as being all about self centered, immature, well, girls. And that just didn’t happen with Mad Men, despite our lead man continually cheating on his wife with both prostitutes and women he meets throughout the show, yelling at his children for little to no reason, controlling his second wife’s career due to jealousy, spiraling into alcoholism and drug abuse, bailing on his professional commitments, and, consistent with the time, being a bit racist, sexist, and anti semitic. But all of Don Draper’s negative character traits are excused because of the time period or perhaps more specifically because they are expectations of men during this time period.

In contrast, Hannah’s negative character traits are generally the opposite of expectations for women. She’s loud and a tad abrasive. She’s unashamed and unapologetic of her “unconventional” body. She has a lot of sex with different people and doesn’t care who knows it. She’s selfish and narcissistic. She doesn’t really take responsibility for her actions. She’s not often a good friend. These are things we aren’t used to seeing in women in television—especially not women we’re supposed to be empathizing and rooting for. It’s no surprise that some people cannot handle her.

I also think it’s important to note that it is impossible to separate GIRLS from Lena Dunham. Jon Hamm—while a talented actor and arguably the heart of the success of his show—was not the main creator/writer/showrunner. And for various reasons, people have decided they hate this 30 year old writer/producer/actress/director, and so perhaps that’s why they hate the show. But both shows have been critically successful and won awards (specifically the Golden Globe for best television series in their respective categories), so the incredibly different public reception baffles me.

I have many friends who identify as television connoisseurs who loved Mad Men, but whenever I bring up GIRLS to my fellow pretentious viewers, I usually get, “Ugh, I just couldn’t handle it. They’re all so annoying.” You could argue that with a longer episode length and just more episodes overall, Mad Men was able to tell a more complex story over time. You could also argue that because it was a period drama, it made the viewer reflect on humanity as a whole and how it has progressed in some ways, but not so much in others. And you might even be able to argue that with GIRLS being a comedy that thrives on revealing the awkwardness of real life on a channel that happily shows more nudity, it just isn’t for everyone.

But if you are reading this and hate GIRLS but have no problem with Mad Men, I want you to seriously consider why. Would Hannah be more forgivable if she were a man? And would you have stuck with Don if he were a woman? That’s what’s tricky about calling out sexism in today’s society: it’s hard to tell.

#girls #lena dunham #madmen #don draper #tv #hannah horvath

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neptunecreek · 4 years ago

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How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse

Long before the pandemic crisis, there was widespread concern over the impact that tech was having on the quality of our discourse, from disinformation campaigns to influence campaigns to polarization.

It's true that the way we talk to each other and about the world has changed, both in form (thanks to the migration of discourse to online platforms) and in kind, whether that's the rise of nonverbal elements in our written discourse (emojis, memes, ASCII art and emoticons) or the kinds of online harassment and brigading campaigns that have grown with the Internet.

A common explanation for the change in our discourse is that the biggest tech platforms use surveillance, data-collection, and machine learning to manipulate us, either to increase "engagement" (and thus pageviews and thus advertising revenues) or to persuade us of things that aren't true, for example, to convince us to buy something we don't want or support a politician we would otherwise oppose.

There's a simple story about that relationship: by gathering a lot of data about us, and by applying self-modifying machine-learning algorithms to that data, Big Tech can target us with messages that slip past our critical faculties, changing our minds not with reason, but with a kind of technological mesmerism.

This story originates with Big Tech itself. Marketing claims for programmatic advertising and targeted marketing (including political marketing) promise prospective clients that they can buy audiences for their ideas through Big Tech, which will mix its vast data-repositories with machine learning and overwhelm our cognitive defenses to convert us into customers for products or ideas.

We should always be skeptical of marketing claims. These aren't peer-reviewed journal articles, they're commercial puffery. The fact that the claims convince marketers to give billions of dollars to Big Tech is no guarantee that the claims are true. After all, powerful decision-makers in business have a long history of believing things that turned out to be false.

It's clear that our discourse is changing. Ideas that were on the fringe for years have gained new centrality. Some of these ideas are ones that we like (gender inclusivity, racial justice, anti-monopolistic sentiment) and some are ideas we dislike (xenophobia, conspiracy theories, and denial of the science of climate change and vaccines).

Our world is also dominated by technology, so any change to our world probably involves technology. Untangling the causal relationships between technology and discourse is a thorny problem, but it's an important one.

It's possible that Big Tech has invented a high-tech form of mesmerism, but whether you believe in that or not, there are many less controversial, more obvious ways in which Big Tech is influencing (and distorting) our discourse.

Locating Precise Audiences

Obviously, Big Tech is incredibly good at targeting precise audiences, this being value proposition of the whole ad-tech industry. Do you need to reach overseas students from the Pacific Rim doing graduate studies in Physics or Chemistry in the midwest? No problem. Advertisers value this feature, but so does anyone hoping to influence our discourse.

Locating people goes beyond "buying an audience" for an ad. Activists who want to reach people who care about their issues can use this feature to mobilize them in support of their causes. Queer people who don't know anyone who is out can find online communities to help them understand and develop their own identities. People living with chronic diseases can talk about their illnesses with others who share their problems.

This precision is good for anyone who's got a view that outside of the mainstream, including people who have views we don't agree with or causes we oppose. Big Tech can help you find people to cooperate with you on racist or sexist harassment campaigns, or to foment hateful political movements.

A discourse requires participants: if you can't find anyone interesting in discussing an esoteric subject with you, you can't discuss it. Big Tech has radically altered our discourse by making it easy for people who want to talk about obscure subjects to find discussants, enabling conversations that literally never could have happened otherwise. Sometimes that's good and sometimes it's terrible, but it's absolutely different from any other time.

Secrecy

Some conversations are risky. Talking about your queer sexuality in an intolerant culture can get you ostracized or subject you to harassment and violence. Talking about your affinity for cannabis in a place where it isn't legal to consume can get you fired or even imprisoned.

The fact that many online conversations take place in private spaces means that people can say things they would otherwise keep to themselves for fear of retribution.

Not all of these things are good. Being caught producing deceptive political ads can get you in trouble with an election regulator and also send supporters to your opponents. Advertising that your business discriminates on the basis of race or gender or sexuality can get you boycotted or sued, but if you can find loopholes that allow you to target certain groups that agree with your discriminatory agenda, you can win their business.

Secrecy allows people to say both illegal and socially unacceptable things to people who agree with them, greatly reducing the consequences for such speech. This is why private speech is essential for social progress, and it’s why private speech is beneficial to people fomenting hatred and violence. We believe in private speech and have fought for it for 30 years because we believe in its benefits—but we don't deny its costs.

Combined with targeting, secrecy allows for a very persuasive form of discourse, not just because you can commit immoral acts with impunity, but also because disfavored minorities can whisper ideas that are too dangerous to speak aloud.

Lying and/or Being Wrong

The concentration of the tech industry has produced a monoculture of answers. For many people, Google is an oracle, and its answers— the top search results—are definitive.

There's a good reason for that: Google is almost always right. Type "How long is the Brooklyn Bridge" into the search box and you'll get an answer that accords with both Wikipedia, and its underlying source, the 1967 report of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Sometimes, though, Google is tricked into lying by people who want to push falsehoods onto the rest of us. By systematically exploring Google's search-ranking system (a system bathed in secrecy and subjected to constant analysis by the Search Engine Optimization industry), bad actors can and do change the top results on Google, tricking the system into returning misinformation (and sometimes, it's just a stupid mistake).

This can be a very effective means of shifting our discourse. False answers from a reliable source are naturally taken at face value, especially when the false answer is plausible (adding or removing a few yards from the Brooklyn Bridge's length), or where the questioner doesn't really have any idea what the answer should be (adding tens of thousands of miles per second to the speed of light).

Even when Google isn't deliberately tricked into giving wrong answers, it can still give wrong answers. For example, when a quote is widely misattributed and later corrected, Google can take months or even years to stop serving up the misattribution in its top results. Indeed, sometimes Google never gets it right in cases like this, because the people who get the wrong answer from Google repeat it on their own posts, increasing the number of sources where Google finds the wrong answer.

This isn't limited to just Google, either. The narrow search verticals that Google doesn't control—dating sites, professional networking sites, some online marketplaces—generally dominate their fields, and are likewise relied upon by searchers who treat them as infallible, even though they might acknowledge that it's always wise to do so.

The upshot is that what we talk about, and how we talk about it, is heavily dependent on what Google tells us when we ask it questions. But this doesn't rely on Google changing our existing beliefs: if you know exactly what the speed of light is, or how long the Brooklyn Bridge is, a bad Google search result won't change your mind. Rather, this is about Google filling a void in our knowledge.

There's a secondary, related problem of "distinctive, disjunct idioms." Searching for "climate hoax" yields different results from searching for "climate crisis" and different results still from "climate change." Though all three refer to the same underlying phenomenon, they reflect very different beliefs about it. The term you use to initiate your search will lead you into a different collection of resources.

This is a longstanding problem in discourse, but it is exacerbated by the digital world.

"Sort by Controversial"

Ad-supported websites make their money from pageviews. The more pages they serve to you, the more ads they can show you and the more likely it is that they will show you an ad that you will click on. Ads aren't very effective, even when they're highly targeted, and the more ads you see, the more inured you become to their pitches, so it takes a lot of pageviews to generate a sustaining volume of clicks, and the number of pageviews needed to maintain steady revenue tends to go up over time.

Increasing the number of pageviews is hard: people have fixed time-budgets. Platforms can increase your "engagement" by giving you suggestions for things that will please you, but this is hard (think of Netflix's recommendation engine).

But platforms can also increase engagement by making you angry, anxious, or outraged, and these emotions are much easier to engender with automated processes. Injecting enervating comments, shocking images, or outlandish claims into your online sessions may turn you off in the long term, but in the short term, these are a reliable source of excess clicks.

This has an obvious impact on our discourse, magnifying the natural human tendency to want to weigh in on controversies about subjects that matter to you. It promotes angry, unproductive discussions. It's not mind control—people can choose to ignore these "recommendations" or step away from controversy—but platforms that deploy this tactic often take on a discordant, angry character.

Deliberate Censorship

Content moderation is very hard. Anyone who's ever attempted to create rules for what can and can't be posted quickly discovers that these rules can never be complete—for example, if you class certain conduct as "harassment," then you may discover that conduct that is just a little less severe than you've specified is also experienced as harassment by people on its receiving end.

As hard as this is, it gets much harder at scale, particularly when services cross-cultural and linguistic lines: as hard as it is to decide whether someone crosses the line when that person is from the same culture as you and is speaking your native language, it's much harder to interpret contributions from people of differing backgrounds, and language barriers add another layer of incredible complexity.

The rise of monolithic platforms with hundreds of millions (or even billions) of users means that a substantial portion of our public discourse is conducted under the shadow of moderation policies that are not—and cannot— be complete or well-administered.

Even if these policies have extremely low error rates—even if only one in a thousand deleted comments or posts is the victim of overzealous enforcement— systems with billions of users generate hundreds of billions of posts per day, and that adds up to many millions of acts of censorship every day.

Of course, not all moderation policies are good, and sometimes, moderation policies are worsened by bad legal regimes. For example, SESTA/FOSTA, a bill notionally aimed at ending human sexual trafficking, was overbroad and vague to begin with, and the moderation policies it has spawned have all but ended certain kinds of discussions of human sexuality in public forums, including some that achieved SESTA/FOSTA's nominal aim of improving safety for sex workers (for example, forums where sex workers kept lists of dangerous potential clients). These subjects were always subject to arbitrary moderation standards, but SESTA/FOSTA made the already difficult job of talking about sexuality virtually impossible.

Likewise, the Communications Decency Act's requirement for blacklists of adult materials on federally subsidized Internet connections (such as those in public schools and libraries) has foreclosed on access to a wealth of legitimate materials, including websites that offer information on sexual health and wellbeing, and on dealing with sexual harassment and assault.

Accidental Censorship

In addition to badly considered moderation policies, platforms are also prone to badly executed enforcement errors, in other words. Famously, Tumblr installed an automatic filter intended to block all "adult content" and this filter blocked innumerable innocuous images, from images of suggestive root vegetables to Tumblr's own examples of images that contained nudity but did not constitute adult content and would thus be ignored by its filters. Errors are made by both human and automated content moderators.

Sometimes, errors are random and weird, but some topics are more likely to give rise to accidental censorship than others: human sexuality, discussions by survivors of abuse and violence (especially sexual violence), and even people whose names or homes sound or look like words that have been banned by filters (Vietnamese people named Phuc were plagued by AOL's chat-filters, as were Britons who lived in Scunthorpe).

The systematic nature of this accidental censorship means that whole fields of discourse are hard or even impossible to undertake on digital platforms. These topics are the victims of a kind of machine superstition, a computer gone haywire that has banned them without the approval or intent of its human programmers, whose oversights, frailties and shortsightedness caused them to program in a bad rule, after which they simply disappeared from the scene, leaving the machine behind to repeat their error at scale.

Third-Party Censorship

Since the earliest days of digital networks, world governments have struggled with when and whether online services should be liable for what their users do. Depending on which country an online provider serves, they may be expected to block, or pre-emptively remove, copyright infringement, nudity, sexually explicit material, material that insults the royal family, libel, hate speech, harassment, incitements to terrorism or sectarian violence, plans to commit crimes, blasphemy, heresy, and a host of other difficult to define forms of communication.

These policies are hard for moderation teams to enforce consistently and correctly, but that job is made much, much harder by deliberate attempts by third parties to harass or silence others by making false claims about them.

In the simplest case, would-be censors merely submit false reports to platforms in hopes of slipping past a lazy or tired or confused moderator in order to get someone barred or speech removed.

However, as platforms institute ever-finer-grained rules about what is, and is not, grounds for removal or deletion, trolls gain a new weapon: an encyclopedic knowledge of these rules.

People who want to use platforms for good-faith discussions are at a disadvantage relative to "rules lawyers" who want to disrupt this discourse. The former have interests and jobs about which they want to communicate. The latter's interest and job is disrupting the discourse.

The more complex the rules become, the easier it is for bad-faith actors to find in them a reason to report their opponents, and the harder it is for good-faith actors to avoid crossing one of the ruleset's myriad lines.

Conclusion

The idea that Big Tech can mold discourse through bypassing our critical faculties by spying on and analyzing us is both self-serving (inasmuch as it helps Big Tech sell ads and influence services) and implausible, and should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

But you don't have to accept extraordinary claims to find ways in which Big Tech is distorting and degrading our public discourse. The scale of Big Tech makes it opaque and error-prone, even as it makes the job of maintaining a civil and productive space for discussion and debate impossible.

Big Tech's monopolies—with their attendant lock-in mechanisms that hold users' data and social relations hostage—remove any accountability that might come from the fear that unhappy users might switch to competitors.

The emphasis on curbing Big Tech's manipulation tactics through regulatory measures has the paradoxical effect of making it more expensive and difficult to enter the market with a Big Tech competitor. A regulation designed to curb Big Tech will come with costs that little tech can't possibly afford, and becomes a license to dominate the digital world disguised as a regulatory punishment for lax standards.

The scale—and dominance— of tech firms results in unequivocal, obvious, toxic public discourse. The good news is that we have tools to deal with this: breakups, merger scrutiny, limits on vertical integration. Perhaps after Big Tech has been cut down to size, we'll still find that there's some kind of machine-learning mesmerism that we'll have to address, but if that's the case, our job will be infinitely easier when Big Tech has been stripped of the monopoly rents it uses to defend itself from attempts to alter its conduct through policy and law.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2ZNudcm

#Deeplinks

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patientc · 8 years ago

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A few years ago, my family had a falling out with what we thought were good, solid family friends. Family conversation often turns to subjects of social justice in our home, and most guests are not only used to it but appreciate the ad hoc safe space we host. But these friends were sulking at every visit. Turns out, they hated us because we reminded them that oppression still existed, were propagating issues by addressing them, or some such bullshit and grew more resentful and angry at every visit.

I wrote a lot during it and about it, and a lot of the discussion about language is extremely applicable here. The names, etc, have been obscured to protect those that have yet to actually develop the personal evolution they think they have achieved. Editing for clarity of thought has also been attempted, Dear Reader.

See below for description and request.

Description: this is a pink US flag design saying the following: In Our America all people are equal, black lives matter, immigrants and refugees are welcome, disabilities are respected, women are in charge of their own bodies, people and planet are valued over profit. Diversity is celebrated. "Of Dogs and Lizards" was frequently cited during the original conversation, I want to credit it here. If you know the credit for the graphic above, I would be thankful for letting me know so I can give due credit. ______ It took a while to put together what happened, in a bigger picture sort of way. The story: I posted a link that stated using the word "lame" was not only inconsiderate or mean, but discriminatory and prejudiced. For having the audacity to reinforce the idea that people with handicaps are indeed humans worthy of decent treatment, I was isolated and shamed. I was the card while others scored about seven Bingos (disability and some sexist and racist bingo, too). What this lead to, the point I am getting to is incredibly hard to think, let alone put to words on a screen or say out loud: I was discriminated against. I was treated with prejudice... by people I love. These people had standing invitations to our home. They supped with us. They were around our children. NOTE: Dear Reader, this list could be much longer but then starts to get both tedious and very specific, which is not intended. The intent is to share the thoughts I generated during this mess. This was a little thing. Such a little thing generated such intense shame and anger and embarrassment and humiliation from me, such rage, hate, and discontent at me. I am not looking away. I will not forget. I will not withdraw. I will use this experience to kick myself back to the things I want to do - to actively fight exactly this sort of thing. I will be more empathic when someone else talks about facing bigotry. I will insist to myself and others that I am not less human than they. There is a simple reason to talk about "politically correct" language. Every time there is a language & hate issue in US culture, we talk about it for maybe a few days and think we are done, that we did our collective penance. USians are usually free to say what we like. Other people are also free to think what they like and say what they like about what we say. Advising someone not to use offensive language serves a purpose: to separate the assholes from the ignorant or unwitting. Flailing about your right to express yourself while trying to take that right away from someone else is Palin-esque at best. If you know that the use of some language hurts someone else and you still use it - you are an asshole. You are, of course, free to be an asshole. But if you actually care about how other people think and feel, you will stop. This lets the rest of us know whether you were simply uninformed, or a jerk-ass. When told that you are using language considered racist, sexist, cis-ist, heteronormative or homophobic, able-ist, class-ist, or otherwise offensive to someone, please take a moment to think. If you are not sexist, racist, or otherwise deliberately offending, then just stop it. Sit down so we can see who the real assholes are, please. Or keep standing, if appropriate, it is appreciated. The same benefit is not denied to you, but rather explicitly given. I simply do not see trying to be human to my fellow humans as the burden that some do. Yes, it is hard to keep track of all the things that folks say to one another to hurt, demean, humiliate, taunt, disgrace... So when you do hurt someone by accident or ignorance, apologize with some grace, make a note of it and move the fuck on without complaint. If you want to be seen as that sort of person instead. I do not suggest that I or anyone else tell anyone what to think or say, so I do not know where the jack-booted Thought Police accusation originates although it comes up time and time again by those wishing to do and say what they wish without allowing others to do the same. Why is one cherished freedom and the other so damn oppressive?!? They are the same right, just in different hands. "All language is oppressive to someone" is both a fallacy and a cop out. As long as one subscribes to that, then one never has to care or try. I am better than that. Dear Reader, I am already sure you are better than that. But if the idea that one may say "that thing you said or did hurt me in real ways" drives you to monk-ish silence or a career as a mime, you do you! An "ally" that constantly steps on your foot and blames you for hurting, or for having the audacity to say "OUCH!" is no ally. They just want the warm fuzzy of thinking they are an ally with none of the effort.

No one blames anyone for having privilege. None of us get to choose the circumstances of our birth, our families, or pick the culture we were born into. Sometimes it really is just that simple. Political correctness holds us responsible for what we say and do, and is avoided by those that cannot stomach being responsible in that way. No one is immune from accountability. There is nothing about talking and learning and advocating for racial justice that makes us exempt from saying something racially hurtful. Hell, there is nothing about my currently disabled status that means I am exempt from saying some shit that someone with another disability may find offensive. (It happens.) That was part of the point - we are all going to occasionally fuck up. We all have some privilege, and we are all personally responsible for doing our best not to oppress our fellow human beings. There is nothing about being a woman that makes me immune to internalizing hateful messages and using them to hurt someone. There is nothing, but my knowledge that we are all in the same soup and need to stay vigilant about the ideas we allow to roost in the rafters of our world view.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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outcastsguide · 8 years ago

Text

I’ve been thinking so much recently about discourse. Or the supposed lack thereof, in political discussions, or just in discussions today in general. I don't really want to use terms like “the left” and "the right", because the more I think about it, even using terms like that now is only making things worse, and adding fire to the flames of an over-all divided western society, and it’s sort of irrelevant because, as I hope to show, association with either side has little to do with the current issues facing public discourse. But for the sake of simplicity I’m going to use them here.

On the right, you have so many outspoken figure’s, harping on about how the left are now strangling free speech. And the massive hypocrisy in how they respond to opinions they don’t like, regarding whether or not, someone is being racist, or sexist, or whatever. And in many cases they have a serious point.

And on the left you see a huge frustration among people just trying to bring to light the injustices that happen every day, but that’s made incredibly difficult when basic statistics, and facts are completely ignored by many right-thinking individuals, who tell the left that, although they may think there’s a problem, that problem doesn’t exist because they say so.

And in the middle of all this, you have the internet. Which has, it seems, ruined discourse. But how? At the simplest level it has allowed people to be completely removed emotionally from the person they are talking to. When having a face to face conversation it is impossible to remain unaffected by the emotions of the person you’re speaking with. That’s what so much of what discourse is. Being guided, often subconsciously, by empathy towards whoever it is you’re talking to.

How is it possible to meet a middle ground with a person, when you have no interest in the thoughts and feelings of that person, in the moment, when they are talking with you. The moment to moment emotional effect someone else can have on you, and effect it has on the outcome of an argument is astounding. Human beings, unfortunately, don’t work off facts, figures, and reason. We are emotion driven monkeys that happened to learn how to use the internet, and so here we are.

This is also a bit of a double edged sword, because the internet has now given us access to unlimited statistics, facts, and figures, but a complete unwillingness to check up on the sometimes 100% inaccurate statements made by either random posts on Facebook, or by world leaders, because in the end, the statistics and figures don’t matter, all that matters is what “feels right”.

So this is what has made discourse on the internet almost impossible, because empathy has been allowed to be completely removed from everyday discussions, so both sides are now driven purely by their own emotional goals. Disagreement means instant insult to our intelligence.

But how do we fix this? I would like to make a few suggestions.

Step One: Don’t get mad

When someone makes a ridiculous statement on the internet, just take a moment, relax, and breath. This person is probably, not a bad person. Most of us are, in fact, good people. We want the same things, but sometimes our pursuits of those goals may differ.

Step Two: Investigate claims made by both sides.

I know I said facts and figures don’t matter much of the time in what people believe, but if we’re going to start throwing them around, they might as well have some validity. If someone makes a claim you disagree with, google it. Look into the probable sources they are using. If the source has an obvious agenda, then you’ll know what you’re dealing with. Try and inform whoever you’re talking to that their source might not be incredibly trustworthy. But also just as important, google any claim you are about to make yourself, because sometimes facts you think you know, are in fact, not true.

Step Three: Try and hold on to the idea, for one moment, that there might not be any real conservative, or liberal agenda. There are only people, trying to do what they think is right.

Step Four: Never forget, there are assholes everywhere. It doesn’t matter if you’re a right wing fascist, centralist yuppie, or bolsheviks communist, if someone sounds like an asshole, then maybe they’re just an asshole, and no amount of discussion is going to change their minds. So don’t waste your time or energy. And often more importantly, maybe it’s you that’s being the asshole.

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beaver-time-blog · 8 years ago

Text

RTBC #11

Here’s a good Reason to be Canadian

You Have The Right To Be Canadian II

Welcome to 2017, where feminism mean elitism (nothing new), racism means safety (an oldie but a goodie), and irony is a dear departed memory of our past (Like compassion, trust, and rationality). Now we could dwell on the socio-political nonsense the previous year had been, but that would be a bigger waste of time than the governor general pretending to not adore thick black cock. SO! Let us do our finest imitation of a 69-ing Tom Cruise and look forward… to the future… not David Miscavige’s alien-probed butthole. Today we take a trip down south to Canada’s biggest neighbor, the United States of America! Yes the land of the brave and the home of the free, or whatever, is Canada’s biggest trade partner, and very much our social sister. Take any Canadian, and simply remove everything altruistic and neighborly about them. Ta-Da! Instant American. Now I’ve had many people claim that our differences are obsolete and irrelevant, but I��ve also had Tom Mulcair look me dead and the eye and say his favorite food group wasn’t cum, so I have trust issues. Now I bring up the U.S. because of an incredible moment that was overlooked by some during the 2016 presidential election, which may well have defined the fate of both countries occupying North America. Before we bring up that subject, however, please allow a message from our sponsors…

Quick ad read then to the laughs...

Today’s reason to be Canadian is brought to you in part by “Shutting the fuck up!”. Are you full of rage and tears over the electoral decision of your country? Do you perhaps toss and turn every night over something somebody said that wasn’t perfectly in line with your predetermined beliefs? Are you by chance someone who identifies as a feminist? Are you Jenny McCarthy? Try “Shutting the fuck up!”!! “Shutting the fuck up” will provide you with all the time in the world to do things like; Checking the mail! Educating yourself on an issue! Appreciating how good you have it! Getting the fuck off of my twenty-dollar bill! “Shutting the fuck up” is the only service which will let you calm down and respect other peoples opinions! Try free today, or use the promo code “Hey, just because somebody disagrees with me doesn’t mean they’re evil” To receive the added benefit of no longer being a dick. Now I hate ad reads as much as the next guy, but this is a service I truly believe in. Across the united states of America, there has emerged a group of people determined to de-throne the currently elected President, Daffy Trump. Daffy here has infuriated countless classes of clowns with his language and laughable political intent, causing many to protest and refute his right as an elected official. These guys we’ll call the Bald Eagles. Forewarning though, If you want to read in depth about the choices Daffy has made to create the Eagles, go watch John Oliver. I won’t lampoon Daffy for the same reason I won’t hunt an unarmed man. No Sport. If something is easy, it’s not worth doing. Ever jerked off? Easiest thing in the fucking world. Probably not going to share it at the dinner table. Ever fucked Justin Trudeau? No you haven’t because that shit is impressive and you would have told EVERYONE, and you wouldn’t have walked right for a week. Guys is packing heat. Seriously ask anybody, taking that dude is like playing ring toss with a hula hoop and the Eiffel tower. No way bud.

Everyone’s their own protagonist.

Back on track to the Bald Eagles though, there is some comedy that wrote itself I’d like to point out. During his campaign, Daffy spoke how if the vote came out against him, he would not accept its results. Naturally this pissed off every self-respecting Bald Eagle living south of our border, as it should. A politician disregarding the very system designed to elect them is more dangerous than an armed Hillary Clinton on her period. Not that her love cave has cried red tears since 1984, but that’s irrelevant. Now the comical part of all of this is that Daffy won the election, and never needed to cast doubt on voting reliability at all! But what happens next? Bald eagles took to the streets and their Tumblr’s to repeatedly shout things like: “not my president!”, which was meant to resist and deny their new elected leader. If you haven’t noticed the irony yet, I hear buzzfeed has a new top ten list, maybe that’s more your reading level? I’ll spell it out though; Refuting the results of the election moments after you had judged a politician for doing just that is evidence enough to suggest you seek only an opponent to fight, not a cause worth fighting for. IF at this point you STILL haven’t picked up on the irony, let me then be the first to welcome you to Beaver-Time, Mike Pence. Fuck you, Mike Pence. This unfortunate trait of the Bald Eagles is not unique to them however. Look at what goes for feminism today; a bunch of glue sniffing self-identified “Victims” of the patriarchy. For fucks sake. There too, along with the “black lives matter” community (a bunch of chimpanzees that make even Martin Luther King blush) you can find hordes of people that fight careless to the cause. Don’t believe me? Go to any coffee shop within two kilometers of a university, and wait for somebody (ANYBODY) to voice an opinion, ANY opinion, and deny it for as long as you can without laughing. So that bitch thinks bunnies are cute? Take her down. Your mother was RAPED by a bunny god damnit. I mean all the bunny did was accidentally make eye contact while he was eating a carrot, but sill that is RAPE! Watch what happens. Their entire existence is now committed to how evil you are, how you are definable as negative as Hitler. Be sure to wear sunglasses and part your hair differently, because you are now the star of their blog. Oh my god aren’t you that guy form Allmenarepigs.org? Can I have an autograph?

Onward to reality.

I specify then rationalize the poor judgement of the bald eagles to be as fair to them as possible, because despite my jokes and jabs, they are incredibly important to me. Alex Jones knows how I feel, the guy is always having to bash the faggot community on his show, but tell me… have you ever seen him and Chaz Bono in the same room? I’m onto you Jones… Truth is, these bald eagles are going to help shape Canada in the years to come, which brings us to that fateful day in November. Once the vote began to turn toward the favor of Daffy’s republican Party, the Canadian government website dedicated to immigration crashed from over use. In that beautiful moment, bald eagles everywhere decided that their best bet was to flee the scene, and fly north for the winter. While these birds were publicly shamed across numerous sources of media, truth is, that was the right decision. If you live in a democratic state, you only have two options when a politician you don’t like is elected: deal with it, or fuck off. Canada says, for better results, fuck on. But spare a thought for the long-term ramifications of these migrants coming to Canada. Those infuriated by the election were the same people who valued equality and freedom. They may be confused about the best way to achieve these ideals, yet still they remain their central influences. So, these progressive, equality minded eagles come north, and what happens? Well, less and less of these great birds will occupy their native country, so more and more racist and sexist legislation will be allowed to exist. This will in turn provoke more eagles to come out of hiding and make the trip to Cancukville, and by now you can see the pattern. Within a decade, the divide between the progressive eagles and the regressive pigeons will no longer be a civil matter, but rather one dividing Canada, and the U.S.. Just as the lack of progressive minded people will slow the evolution of American politics, the surplus of these forward-thinking eagles will speed up Canada’s evolution. Daffy may be the final nail in the American coffin, but he alone will transform July 1st into an international holiday. But wait there’s more… The one real positive aspect Daffy provides is economic reform. He has promised to reset and kick-start the American financial system, yet this benefit is not exclusive to the states! Canada’s own market directly mirrors Americas own financial success. When they’re good, we’re good. When they’re bad, we’re still ok. So come to Canada, where you can enjoy every benefit, yet no punishment, from Daffy Duck’s administration. And don’t worry about all of this creating a country populated exclusively by people from 1945, if they get too rowdy, we’ll just build a wall on our southern border.

But can people just come on over?

Oh yah, and travel will be a piece of cake. You know why? Even if for whatever reason you get turned down as an immigrant (you won’t) you can still get in as a refugee! How’s this? Well I’ll tell yah. American Government is like the strap on dildo Meryl Streep would use to butt fuck Bill O’Reilley. Looks like a dick… feels like a dick… makes him cum like a howler monkey….like a dick…but that aint no dick. I won’t go into detail, but here’s the problem: American government does not elect its leader based on the popular vote. When an American votes, they vote for who the STATE should vote for. If the majority of the state votes democratic, then the entire state is labeled as democratic, and a number of what’s called Electoral College Votes are given to the person who won that states majority. The problem here is each state has a different number of votes to give out, and the number of these votes IS NOT dependent on population. Meaning, that your vote means a lot less than somebody form a different state. Because of this system, Daffy was elected yes, but he lost the popular majority to his opponent. This means you hail from an oppressed country, and you can file for refugee immigration! Yay! If America was a true democracy, the white house would be staffed by a washed up half dead housewife that couldn’t even suck dick properly. But because of this unfairness, the leader of the country who thinks they are the leaders of the free world (they’re not), Is a sexist, racist, hypocritical liar. Please, come to Canada. You can do so much good here.

Not that we’re perfect...

I throw these stones from the relative comfort of my glass house. Canada is no more democratic than the U.S. Remember, we have the Senate. A group of cunts, who was elected by this one cunt, who in turn was elected only by this other cunt, who only has power because she was born into the right family. Now, it is legally treason for me to suggest that if anybody ever has the chance to give her the cobweb cleaning she deserves, to contract HIV first, so I won’t suggest it. Nor can I or anybody else ask that the next time she waddles out onto the taxpayer-funded palace gardens, that the closest person there do us all a favor and bounce a rock off her skull. Seriously, it’s illegal for me to ask you to do it! So please don’t hurt the queen. Besides, if you really wanted to kill her, you could just run for MP, put in a private member bill to separate from England, and at the ceremony that will be held to say goodbye, as you shake her hand, lean in and whisper, “Downtown Abbey isn’t very good”. Bitch will keel over right there.

Welcome to the tribe!

But enough of that dick-breathed sex-demon the union calls a queen (only queen I respect wants to ride their bicycle), and focus on the eagles immigrating. Like Kanye West’s first attempt at prostate probing, there will be some tension at first. The Bald Eagles themselves will feel intimidated, until they realize that even though they were always a symbol of America, Canada has way fucking more. Welcome home guys. There will be of course, Canadian tensions as well. We haven’t forgotten that these new additions are still the annoying as shit causeless rebels that haunt many attempts at progression, despite being progressively minded themselves. However, there is a fast and simple solution to instill some logic and empathy into our American friends. Try “Shutting the fuck up” free today.

Things to take back to the dam... 1. Utilize difference in opinion to make friends, not enemies. 2. Democratically elected officials should be respected. 3. Non-democratic elected officials should get off the twenty dollar bill. 4. Shut the fuck up a minute.

#trump #canada #feminism #equality #rapedbybunny

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