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the-desolated-quill · 6 years ago

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We Need To Talk About James Gunn - Quill’s Scribbles

This could prove to be the most controversial Scribble I’ve ever written on this blog, and the sad thing is it really shouldn’t be, in my opinion.

First off, a couple of disclaimers because I know some people are going to accuse me of ‘bias’. I’ve never been very fond of James Gunn as a filmmaker, it’s true. I thought the first Guardians Of The Galaxy movie was okay at best and I absolutely hated the sequel, but I confess that’s less to do with any inherent flaws in the films themselves and more to do with the fact that I just don’t like Gunn’s style of humour. Oh don’t get me wrong. There are still legitimate problems, which I’ll go into later when they become relevant, but I’m big enough to admit that my dislike for his brand of comedy and storytelling is merely due to my own subjective tastes (the same is true of Taika Waititi and Thor: Ragnarok).

Okay. So. Let’s talk about James Gunn.

As I’m sure most of you know, in July 2018, an alt-right conspiracy theorist called Mike Cernovich unearthed tweets made by Gunn between 2008 and 2012 where he made offensive jokes and remarks about sensitive topics such as rape, child abuse and paedophilia. While James Gunn did apologise and vowed to ‘do better,’ Disney, fearing the public backlash, fired Gunn as director of Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 and dismissed him from any role in producing and expanding Marvel’s planned ‘Cosmic Universe.’ The result was the public backlash Disney were trying to avoid in the first place. They received a lot of criticism from various entertainers and filmmakers, as well as many media outlets such as Collider and The Independent, the cast of Guardians wrote a letter urging Disney to reconsider their decision with Dave Bautista in particular being very vocal in his criticism, and there was a massive outcry from fans who petitioned for Gunn to be rehired. Guy Lodge, writing for The Guardian, asked the question ‘Was James Gunn the first undeserving victim of Hollywood’s new zero tolerance policy?’ Now I’d argue the answer to that question is a definitive no, but apparently, and surprisingly, that’s not a very popular opinion among liberals. So I’d very much like to challenge them as we explore James Gunn’s moral character and ask ourselves why he’s being defended so passionately.

Before we go any further, I think it would be a good idea for me to show you some of the tweets that we’re talking about, just to remind everyone what we’re dealing with here.

Now I hope we can all agree that this is objectively disgusting. Only an amoral, depraved and utterly moronic individual would find offensive tweets like these even remotely funny. But I should make it clear that, by James Gunn’s own admission, these tweets represent who he was rather than who he is. In his apology, he described himself as a ‘provocateur’ during the early days of his career, making shocking statements for the purposes of ‘satire.’ But it’s okay because he’s a better person who has grown and matured fully and will never do this again. Fair enough, you’d think. He admitted what he did was wrong and apologised profusely. That was a very honourable and decent thing to do.

Except we’ve seen this song and dance before.

In 2012, roundabout when Marvel announced they were making a Guardians Of The Galaxy movie with James Gunn directing, an old blog post of Gunn’s resurfaced entitled ‘The 50 Superheroes You Most Want To Have Sex With.’ The original post has since been deleted, but cached versions still exist here and there around the internet if you know where to look. Here are a few quotes from said blog:

[on natasha romanoff, the highest ~debut] “considering she’s fucked half the guys in the marvel universe, that’s quite a feat”

[on batwoman] “i’m hoping for a dc-marvel crossover so that tony stark can turn her; she could also have sex with nightwing and still be a lesbian”

”Many of the people who voted for the Flash were gay men. I have no idea why this is. But I do know if I was going to get fucked in the butt I too would want it to be by someone who would get it over with quick.”

Needless to say, this was quite offensive and causing bad PR, so James Gunn issued an apology:

“A couple of years ago I wrote a blog that was meant to be satirical and funny. In rereading it over the past day I don’t think it’s funny. The attempted humor in the blog does not represent my actual feelings. However, I can see where statements were poorly worded and offensive to many. I’m sorry and regret making them at all.

People who are familiar with me as evidenced by my Facebook page and other mediums know that I’m an outspoken proponent for the rights of the gay and lesbian community, women and anyone who feels disenfranchised, and it kills me that some other outsider like myself, despite his or her gender or sexuality, might feel hurt or attacked by something I said. We’re all in the same camp, and I want to do my best to make this world a better place for all of us. I’m learning all the time. I promise to be more careful with my words in the future. And I will do my best to be funnier as well. Much love to all – James”

Sound familiar?

Now of course it’s unfair to judge the man based on past actions that he himself apologised for. What matters is the present. Whether or not he has demonstrated to a reasonable standard that his work has grown and matured and that his offensive idiocy is a thing of the past. So let’s look at the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies.

While the first movie received critical acclaim, a few people (particularly fans of the source material) complained about how Gamora was treated. The so called ‘most powerful woman in the galaxy’ was reduced to a love interest, an occasional damsel in distress and there were a few odd occasions where she was objectified and degraded based on her sexual history. The most prominent example of which is when Drax describes her as ‘a green whore.’ The context being that he was ignorant of how offensive he was being despite trying to compliment her and call her a friend, and this was played for laughs in the movie. The second movie has more examples. Gamora’s role still paled in comparison to the role she played in the comics, and a new female character called Mantis was introduced whose power level from the comics was also significantly reduced for the movie and whose character was effectively reduced to be a punchline/punching bag. There’s also a scene involving Drax where he frequently describes her as ugly, saying that "when you're ugly and someone loves you, you know they love you for who you are. Beautiful people never know who to trust." Again this is played for laughs. Except I’d argue that an adult man constantly fixating on a woman’s appearance isn’t even remotely funny.

Another disturbing aspect of the Guardians 2 was the way it seemed to romanticise and excuse abusive relationships. Obviously there’s Drax and Mantis, but the biggest example is Star Lord and Yondu. The first movie did a reasonably good job establishing what drew Star Lord and Gamora together. They were both trying to escape from abusive father figures. The second film does a complete U-turn, calling Yondu Star Lord’s ‘David Hasselhoff’ and giving him a gratuitous and overly sentimental funeral as though he were a noble hero. While I’m sure the death of Yondu would emotionally impact Star Lord to a certain extent (he did raise the kid after all), to say that he’s like ‘David Hasselhoff’ because he’s a better dad than Ego the Living Planet was seems like a very low bar to clear. By that logic, Hitler was a good person because he didn’t kill as many people as Stalin did. It’s tone deaf, lacking in nuance and just a little bit insulting.

Bearing all this in mind, has James Gunn grown and matured since the period between 2008 and 2012? That’s for you to judge. I’d personally argue he hasn’t. Sure he’s no longer as extreme or provocative as he once was, but that’s not necessarily proof that he’s matured. Rather he’s just gotten better at hiding his immaturity. And in my own subjective opinion, based on his work, I think Disney made the right decision in sacking him. Now let me be clear, I don’t think Disney sacked him in order to take a moral stand as a lot of the problematic elements in the Guardians films have carried over into other MCU films. Gamora is still treated like shit in Avengers: Infinity War, and Thanos, who, like Yondu, was clearly established in the first Guardians movie as an abusive father figure, has been woobified and turned into a kind of sympathetic anti villain who actually cared about his daughter and only killed her because he had no other choice (as opposed to, you know, because he is a maniacal despot who’s a few Oompa Loompas short of a chocolate factory). The reason Gunn was fired was because of bad PR. Disney had dealt with this shit before in 2012 and they weren’t prepared to deal with it again, so they dropped the baggage, as it were. It’s a very common occurrence in Hollywood. Which is what makes the public backlash against this decision so puzzling to me.

I can understand being upset that the director of your favourite franchise has been fired, but can we try to get some perspective here? What happened to Gunn is nothing unique. This kind of thing happens all the time. A filmmaker does something controversial or has been revealed to have done something controversial in the past, the studio sacks them in an attempt to save face and everyone gets on with their lives. The situation with James Gunn is no different. The only reason I can see why people are so passionately against this is because of how these tweets were unearthed in the first place. Because the discoverer of the tweets, Mike Cernovich, is a member of the alt-right, the liberal community seem predisposed to dismiss this out of hand, which I think is incredibly dangerous. Okay, yes, Cernovich is a Nazi and almost certainly didn’t do this out of the goodness of his heart, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. It doesn’t change the fact that the tweets still exist and that they’re still incredibly offensive. And all the things I’ve heard people say in defence of James Gunn sound very similar to things the right would say about the likes of Brett Cavanaugh and Donald Trump. ‘It was x number of years ago.’ ‘It’s not relevant to who he is now.’ ‘He’s changed.’ ‘You can’t judge someone based on their past mistakes.’ I mean... come on guys! Either everyone should be held to the same standard or nobody should be held to standards at all. You can’t just change tact just because the person in question has the same political ideals as you. What are we saying? It’s okay for liberals to hold conservatives accountable for past actions and behaviour, but the right can’t do it to the left because apparently it’s not as funny when they do it? It’s classic ‘them and us’ mentality and it’s got to stop.

So, why am I bringing all this up, you may be asking? This happened over six months ago Quill. Aren’t you a little late to the party? Well a couple of days ago, it was announced that Warner Bros and DC Films had hired James Gunn to write and direct a sequel to Suicide Squad.

Well... sequel isn’t quite the right word. Apparently it’s more along the lines of a reimagining. Titled ‘The Suicide Squad’, the film is going to follow a whole new cast of characters and effectively start from scratch. No doubt this is part of WB and DC’s attempts to salvage the DC Extended Universe after the critical and financial disaster that was Justice League, as well as a response to people’s criticisms of the previous Suicide Squad film.

Writer/director David Ayer’s version of Suicide Squad was... let’s be charitable and call it problematic. Many people criticised the film for being misogynistic, borderline racist due to the one dimensional characterisation, and particular outrage was directed toward Ayer’s attempts to romanticise the relationship between the Joker and Harley Quinn. So it’s quite ironic that WB and DC are relying on James Gunn - James Gunn?!?! - to fix Suicide Squad when similar criticisms have been made toward the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies. That’s like hiring Harvey Weinstein to investigate sexual harassment claims.

And do you know what the funny thing is? We’ve been in this exact same situation before. In February 2017, news media started to report that WB and DC were eyeing Mel Gibson, the Oscar nominated director of Hawksaw Ridge and professional arsehole, to direct Suicide Squad 2. I even wrote a Scribble on it then. I heavily criticised WB and DC for caring more about snagging an Oscar nominated director to bolster their failing franchise than about holding certain ethical standards of decency within the industry. Oh, sure, Gibson has said many sexist, homophobic and antisemitic comments for years and has never at any point showed any hint of remorse for the amount of offence he’s caused, but he just made a good movie about Spider-Man fighting in World War II, so it all balances out, doesn’t it? We’re good, right? We’re cool. Gibson’s cool now. Yeah?

And now here we are seeing this play out again. James Gunn, a man who has said some incredibly offensive things over the years, is being hired by WB and DC to helm a new Suicide Squad movie and conveniently ignoring all the problematic shit surrounding him because he’s the guy that made those sci-fi films about the talking raccoon. People love those films. Let’s get him on board.

I’m getting so sick to death of actors and filmmakers getting away with shit and avoiding the consequences of their actions. James Gunn and his offensive tweets, Mel Gibson and his shitty behaviour, Kevin Hart and his temper tantrum when he was expected to apologise for being a homophobic prick. And the few times there are consequences for said actions, people of influence within the industry end up undermining it. WB and DC hiring James Gunn so soon after he was sacked by Disney, and Ellen fucking Degeneres ringing the Academy and persuading them to let Kevin Hart host the Oscars. Thankfully, and to his genuine credit, Hart turned it down, but seriously, what the actual fuck Ellen?! You’re LGBT, aren’t you? Why are you giving him a free pass? Do you have short term memory loss like the fish you voice in Finding fucking Nemo? Jesus Christ!

Finally, to people saying that Disney treated James Gunn too harshly for the tweets, may I remind you that when ‘The 50 Superheroes You Most Want To Have Sex With’ resurfaced in 2012, Disney still kept him on! He still got to write and direct two Marvel movies before finally getting the sack. And he was in talks to lead production in all future ‘Cosmic’ Marvel movies going forward before the resurfaced tweets made that impossible. Too harshly? I think he got off extremely lightly, frankly. I think he’s grotesquely lucky he’s still got a job at all. Let alone a job where he continues to direct tentpole blockbusters. For someone who was treated ‘too harshly’, he’s sure done alright for himself, hasn’t he? He’s not Oliver Twist begging movie studios to give him a film, cap in hand, ‘please sir, may I have some more?’ His position hasn’t changed one iota. That’s what we should be pissed off at. Not that he’s being unfairly punished. That he’s not being punished enough roughly seven years after the fact.

So what should we take away from all this? That we need to hold everyone accountable for their past actions and behaviour, regardless of whether they share our political beliefs or whether they were involved in films we actually like, and that the industry needs to do a better job of upholding the consequences of said actions. And regardless of whether you thought Disney were right to sack James Gunn, it cannot be denied that WB and DC handing the keys of another profitable franchise over to him so soon after this controversy is an incredibly irresponsible thing to do.

#anti james gunn #suicide squad #the suicide squad #guardians of the galaxy #dc extended universe #marvel cinematic universe #disney #quill's scribbles

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desroundtree · 6 years ago

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This Administration

It is interesting to watch what we have become under this presidency. The modernity of this country seems to slip from our grasp, little by little, then all at the same time. We seem to be fighting things that we never thought we would have to again, rights that we have earned are up for grabs in a fight no normal person feels like they could win. From a mental health standpoint, it is exhausting and sometimes anxiety-inducing. Never mind the other mental health issues people are battling because of not only the things inside them but the things outside them too.

We are sitting in a place which feels like waiting, for every bit of breaking news that seems to attack the citizens of this country, as well as the people trying to come here for a break from what seems like the worst things that could ever happen to them, but just beyond those gates exists a different kind of hell.

Americans struggle to battle some of the worst things we have seen in a long time. The things some of us have experienced is mind-blowing. Things that were once forced to be kept in the dark have been given a spotlight, and every ugly face grins into it. Confederate flags fly in the wind with pride. Bumper stickers in support of a man who doesn’t believe in a woman’s right to choose, in the right to seek asylum, in the responsibility to pay taxes, in common sense gun laws, or even in the Constitution. I think it is hard to swallow seeing people pledging love for America but not what America stands for, or did stand for at one time. We have taken giant leaps backward, and it seems like it’s ok to some but damning to most. The part that feels the worst is the helplessness in it all, and the allowance of fear and anger to enter our daily lives.

I feel sorry for what our children are seeing every day, what they have experienced already at such young ages. The drills that they have been taught to survive a day in school if something horrible happens, and how we as parents have lost the ability to feel like we can protect our children, and like school is a safe place to be. They believed that for a long time, and so did we. Now, we worry about their lives more than we already had to.

My daughter already knows more about loss than any child should. Her friends have lost their grandparents, some have lost their parents to these horrible laws that have deported them and sent them back to countries that persecute them, abuse them and violate their human rights. Even as people seek a path to legal citizenship, that is still not enough.

She knows about children being torn from their parent's arms and sleeping in cages. Not because I told her (a soft talk was given but worrying a child that already exhibits anxious tendencies is not something any parent wants to do). She is aware and understands the world around her. Children talk to one another, and I don’t think as adults give them as much credit as maybe we should. Being open with your children is important, but what they see right now is chaos even we don’t understand. Some things I feel like even I can’t explain.

There are days I think I want to try to understand what is happening and why people feel the way they feel. It makes me curious because I don’t share the same morals or values and maybe that’s where the block is. I know people who believe in him, in what he has done and what he claims to be doing. Hell, they voted for him. They believe in his tweets, his blasphemous nonsense, his inability to see something other than his base. They want his wall, to keep out people who work hard in this country and only want a chance. They believe what he spews on a daily basis. It has become something the whole World must deal with and something Americans see as their real life.

The truth is this makes me not want to understand. It makes a lot of people feel like they have to approach people as they approach them, and they have to respond accordingly. It is hard to understand racism when you aren’t racist, just like it is hard to accept racism as a way of life that is acceptable for anyone when you are not racist. You can refuse to be subjected to someone’s behavior, and they can do the same, but having to prove every day that this is not normal or acceptable or even legal to someone that doesn’t care is exhausting.

It is also unnecessary. Or rather it should be.

What this administration has taught me is to try let go. It is teaching me not to ingest everything and to really understand what issues bother me and stay focused on those for now, and even though this post many issues we face, we need to concentrate and unite in order to get the things we not only want but need.

We can’t take on every battle at once, and I am not the only person that has to learn that.

Some people will hold on to an idea like a starving dog eating a t-bone steak. There is no reasoning with someone who believes abortion is wrong, or child abuse as someone told me, or infanticide. Religion should not play a part in women’s healthcare, but it seems as though separation of Church and State is something that has gone down the drain like other things that make America the country it is.

The idea that such misinformation is actually being repeated by this administration is not only scary, but it is dangerous. Instead of thinking of controlling women, this administration should think about the doctors, nurses, and caregivers it has put in danger on a daily basis. It stops their ability to perform necessary healthcare procedures. People who go to work every day to help women choose what is right for them, who sit with them before every procedure and explain what is going to happen, and who allow them to change their minds if they wish. The decision is hard for some, and necessary for others. I am sure there are women who abuse this right, but I am also sure this number is much less than women that are in need of the help and services these places offer. These are important decisions that should be made by women on a case by case basis and passing sweeping laws in states to outlaw, or make this procedure more difficult than it already is heartless and cruel.

During this administration, I have learned now more than ever that it is a man’s world. Men are still controlling the blood, sweat and tears of women, we are still viewed as lesser and treated as such no matter how much we fight. We can march, we can scream, we can petition, we can sit in, play dead, and raise our fists and voices. We can vote, but that doesn’t seem to work for women because we did that and ended up in this situation anyway. Still we marched, because at times it’s hard to understand that there really is no way out of the situation. We are pretty much useless unless we try again.

It’s hard to convince women of color that they need to, that we need them to come out in full force for a candidate they might not agree with or support. But the truth is, in order not to be the subject of more repeals of women’s rights, more human rights violations, more attacks on our planet - we need to do it all over again. It’s hard for some to agree with, and to swallow.

Finding a way through this has been difficult, not arguing your way through is even more of a task. We are still fighting - organizations are taking on cases I am sure they never thought they would prosecute. Suing an administration for the rights of immigrants, women and even children, fighting against the poison water they expect people to drink, and working to secure the correct amount of funding to repair the devastation of an island filled with American citizens. It begins to feel like we are constantly fighting.

I hope we have the strength to continue.

There has to be a way to end this administration’s ridiculous show of power, and its grab at something America never needed until he sat in the office. We were diplomatic and almost regal in the eyes of most, and now, we aren’t and it is apparently clear. I hope we can find our place back there, where women had the right to choose, and children aren’t separated from their parents. I hope we can find our way back to an administration that cares about the wants and needs of all, not just some. I hope for our future, for our children, that we are able to move on from this, and back toward something we can all be proud of. I hope we can still make changes for the better of everyone, and to understand the disparity that still exists. I hope we change it - and I hope we do it soon.

#this administration #women's rights #abortion is legal #abortion is healthcare #immigrants #asylum seekers #refugees #hope for the future #keep fighting #resist #not my president #organize #mobilize #strategize #protest #protect our children #common sense gun laws #clean water #human rights

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antoine-roquentin · 6 years ago

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You and your colleagues trace the “populist” upsurges of 2016 in both major parties to the runaway growth of a “dual economy” in America and the failure of our money-driven political system to do anything about this but talk. Yet among liberal commentators in the mainstream media it’s now all but axiomatic that economics cannot explain the election. They pin its outcome on racial resentment and gender prejudices. What’s your take on this line of argument?

The short answer is that these folks are running a perfectly good point into the ground. From the day he announced — indeed, even before then, when he kept questioning where Obama was really born — Trump and his campaign hammered away on racial and gender-related themes. I doubt there was any dog whistle he and the campaign didn’t try out.

But Trump was also making noises that no other major Republican challenger had in many years. Parts of his critique of international finance, globalization, outsourcing, and free trade overlapped with Sanders’s. Also like Sanders, instead of burying his listeners in a blizzard of four-point plans and policy-speak like Clinton did, he forthrightly talked about the need to restore prosperity, bring jobs back to the US, and to “drain the swamp.” He criticized Goldman Sachs, raised the prospect of repealing the carried-interest tax deduction beloved of Wall Street, and mocked Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. He also questioned the value of NATO to the US and the continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while pushing to reduce tensions with Russia.

This is not to say he was a carbon copy of Sanders; he wasn’t, as anyone who read between the lines of his comments about blue collar workers vs. unions or paid attention to what he has done since taking office on taxes, labor policy, and immigration.

But the economic appeals were clear and powerful.

In the days after the election, I was astounded how fast the Clinton campaign’s notion that it was all due to the “deplorables” crystallized into “common sense” in so many quarters. Or the parallel wave of assertions that the electorate’s rejection of her was a convulsive reaction to the election of the first black president in American history. That one seemed to me quite implausible: why should the reaction be so much stronger in 2016 than in 2012, when Obama was running for reelection?

Trump’s boasting about his sexual conquests and tirades about women’s rights and roles and his volte face on abortion to please the Right were all obvious, but even newspaper polls suggested that the story had to be more complicated in regard to white women and possibly even Hispanics.

What about the post-election academic studies that everyone keeps citing in support of the conclusion, though?

If you look closely, you will see a kind of schizophrenia pervades these. Studies by Shannon Monnat and other scholars that analyze aggregate county-level voting returns suggest that Trump’s appeals resonated especially strongly in poorer areas left out of the painfully slow recovery of the Obama years. The force of the dual economy explanation is plain in these.

But the big studies of individual voters do not show this pattern. One problem with them is that the economic variables that you would really like to have — for example, vulnerability to imports, but above all longer-run trends in economic growth — are just not to be found in the data these studies collect. They can only be added at enormous time and expense and sometimes not at all. Statistical software for relating complex surveys of individuals to local growth patterns over time is also imperfectly developed.

But you can’t beat something with nothing. If you don’t like those studies, what’s your answer?

Exactly. So my old colleague Ben Page and I set out to analyze the American National Election Survey data afresh. We compiled a lot of data about congressional districts and related this to the survey data. My colleague Jie Chan and several of Ben’s students eventually joined us. Our first, somewhat preliminary, paper is now out as a working paper.

We agree completely with the studies that find racial resentment and gender considerations played substantial roles in the election outcome. We also concur that the political discussion and reception of the Affordable Care Act was heavily racialized — that really stands out when you study the survey data.

But we also find compelling evidence of the importance of economic issues. In the Republican primaries, for example, Trump’s support for import restrictions clearly distinguished him from the rest of the Republican field and helped gain him votes. The importance of feelings about the US being on the “wrong track” is also apparent. That likely reflects some economic considerations, though economics alone hardly exhausts its content.

When we analyze voting by congressional districts, especially changes in the presidential vote from 2012 to 2016, the importance of economic issues also stands out. Some of these factors are not obvious, unless you are familiar with recent studies of Brexit and German voting in the early 1930s, such as the importance of fiscal austerity in pushing voters to the right.

We find that economic considerations played a major role in the decisions of “switchers” — people who voted for Obama in 2012 but then voted for Trump; 2012 non-voters who came in from the cold to vote for the real-estate mogul; and last, 2012 Obama voters who didn’t vote in 2016. Limits on imports and, in the case of non-voters in 2012 who ended up casting ballots for Trump, beliefs that the government should take a more active role in sustaining peoples’ income both played a role.

We also find very direct evidence that the Clinton campaign’s relatively weak emphasis on policy as opposed to candidate qualifications cost it the votes of 2012 Obama voters. Many just did not perceive a meaningful difference between the major parties. Disappointment with the meager aid the Affordable Care Act actually provided individuals also appears to have influenced many of these dropouts.

We also discovered something else that has really interesting implications. In the earlier paper on money and the election that Paul Jorgensen, Jie Chen, and I wrote, we pointed out that in the final weeks of the campaign a wave of Republican spending on endangered Senate races dramatically turned many around, preserving Republican control of the Senate. The striking result was that for the first time in American history the party that won the Senate races also won the state’s presidential vote — with no exceptions.

Conventional election analysts barely noticed. If they did, they made nothing of it. But this led us to suggest that strong correlated efforts (often led by statewide parties) helped pull Trump across the finish line in some states where he was close.

Wait a minute: you mean that the efforts by the Kochs and other interests cool to Trump who poured resources into Senate races to hedge against loss of the White House may have provided Trump with the razer’s edge?

Yes, precisely: reverse coattails. And the survey evidence confirms this. Among both those who switched from Obama to Trump and those who finally decided not to vote, it appears Senate races had major effects. The probability of either voting for Trump or not voting for Clinton rose substantially in those states but not elsewhere.

We take this as evidence for the commanding role political money played in the election outcomes. In effect a dual wave of money (Trump also spent fairly lavishly toward the end, as we showed), floated the Republicans to victory in both spheres.

Where does that leave all the claims that Russian interference handed the election to Trump?

Unless you are prepared to argue that Vladimir Putin was in league with the Kochs and company to secure Mitch McConnell’s perch as leader of the Senate, and that they concentrated on states with Senate races, you need to think afresh about those claims.

We were clear that we had no pretensions to inside knowledge about things like Trump’s relations with the Deutsche Bank or what Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, or anyone else in his entourage may have said or not said to WikiLeaks, the Russians, or anyone else. For that, everyone will have to wait for the special prosecutor. We also said directly that we doubted that Facebook and other internet concerns had been forthcoming about all that they did and knew at the time and later. The various investigations have certainly confirmed that.

But nothing that has come out fundamentally changes the evidence that the mighty Wurlitzers of the Trump campaign and the domestic right-wing messaging infrastructure centered on Breitbart dwarfed Russian efforts. Russian efforts were not targeted with anything like the precision they should have been to be very effective, no matter how many people claim the opposite.

Russian or Russian-linked entities spent very little in key battleground states and, as we pointed out in our earlier paper, researchers who claimed the opposite relied on a poor statistical test. When you reanalyzed their data with a more appropriate test, their case evaporated. The Russians, for example, did foolish things like focusing tweets on states like West Virginia, which was a lock for Trump.

There’s more. Scholars have presented evidence that the Republican share of the vote in 2016 rose proportionately at least as high among people who used the internet the least. Past warning about empirical evidence on what would be required for high rates of belief change also remains relevant. I think a new Harvard study probably has it exactly right when they observe that the Russian efforts pale “in comparison to the directed efforts of the Trump campaign working with Facebook’s political marketing team.” No foreign operation can sow chaos like Steven Bannon and company. 2016’s madness was most likely made in America.

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sinrau · 4 years ago

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“So I ask you to do me a favor. Suburban women: will you please like me? Please. Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK? The other thing: I don’t have that much time to be that nice. You know, I can do it, but I gotta go quickly.” — President Donald J. Trump

Welcome to the Countdown Journal. There are 20 days until Election Day and then 78 until the Inauguration.

Let’s start with this: The president retweeted a story suggesting that Barack Obama had Seal Team 6 murdered. And it hardly made a ripple in the news cycle, three weeks before the election.

As Bill Kristol notes in this morning’s Bulwark, “Deviancy has been defined so far down that President Donald Trump’s retweet at mid-day Tuesday was barely noticed.”

After all, what’s new? And who cares?

So what if the president of the United States brought to prominence an insane conspiracy theory that his predecessor, Barack Obama, arranged for four Americans to be killed at Benghazi to cover up an even bigger intentional blood-sacrifice of Navy SEALs—which in turn covered up the fact that Osama Bin Laden was still alive. Since it was a body-double who was in fact killed in 2011.

Or at least I think that’s the story Trump was amplifying. You’ll forgive me if I got some twists in the plot wrong.

Anyway, what’s the big deal? It’s just Trump being Trump. The important things were happening elsewhere, in the back and forth between Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett and various senators on Capitol Hill. That’s what serious conservatives were focused on. That’s what’s going to make a difference. If crazy tweets are the price we pay for an originalist justice, these people tell us, then it’s well worth it.

Speaking of crazy. Olivia Nuzzi reports that America’s Mayor “was in Philadelphia sounding like Livia Soprano.”

After claiming that Democrats used the pandemic to take away gun rights, which did not happen, he mentioned the McCloskeys, the couple who wielded guns on the porch of their St. Louis mansion in front of Black Lives Matter demonstrators who were passing by. Giuliani claimed, falsely, that the protesters had yelled, “ ’We want to rape your wife! We want to rape your wife! We want this for reparations! This is number one for reparations! Biggest house here! Reparations!’” He added, “Nobody knows this, but at the time, their daughter was upstairs under the bed because she was afraid they’re going to come in and they’re talking about rape and they’re going to rape the wife and they’re going to find the daughter.”

None of that was true.

And now we learn that Trump has chosen Rudy and Jay Sekulow to run his post-election operation. What could possibly go wrong?

How is Trump’s final act playing with women? Not well, apparently.

A reporter from the Economist who watched the focus group:

Easy questions. On balance, Amy Coney Barrett is doing as well as could be expected in the kabuki-theater hearings over her nomination. Senators bloviate and ask questions she won’t answer. She doesn’t use notes. We know how it ends.

But the thing about easy questions is that they are easy.

Questions like: Can the president unilaterally move the date of the election? The easy answer is no, he can’t. That requires an act of congress. It’s the law.

ACB’s answer:

“Well, Senator, if that question ever came before me, I’d need to hear arguments from the litigants and read briefs and consult with my law clerks and talk to my colleagues and go through the opinion-writing process,” she said. “So, you know, if I give off the cuff answers, then I would be basically a legal pundit, and I don’t think we want judges to be legal pundits. I think we want judges to approach cases thoughtfully and with an open mind.”

Here’s another one.

I’m not not a lawyer, but shouldn’t a constitutional “originalist” believe that the constitution requires a peaceful transfer of power? And that the founders kind of thought it was important? When did that become “political controversy”?

And, then there was this question about voter intimidation. “Sen. Amy Klobuchar brought up efforts by President Trump to get his supporters to the polls to observe voting activity and asked Judge Amy Coney Barrett if under federal law it is illegal to intimidate voters at the polls. “

“I can’t characterize the facts in a hypothetical situation, and I can’t apply the law to a hypothetical set of facts.”

She continued: “I can only decide cases as they come to me litigated by parties on a full record after fully engaging precedent, talking to colleagues, writing an opinion, and so I can’t answer questions like that.”

Easy answer: it is against the law to intimidate voters, and as a judge I believe in upholding the law.

Why is this so hard? (And, yes, that is a rhetorical question.)

Well, how about that. Biden says that he is “not a fan of court packing.”

“I’ve already spoken on — I’m not a fan of court packing, but I don’t want to get off on that whole issue. I want to keep focused,” the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee said in an interview with Cincinnati’s WKRC.

We are now free to get back to Hillary’s emails.

Not with a bang or even a whimper. “‘Unmasking’ probe commissioned by Barr concludes without charges or any public report.”

Or, as Tim Miller puts it in today’s Bulwark, “Another ‘Deep State’ non-scandal goes down the memory hole.”

Guess we can close the file on that one.

William Barr has quietly ended the probe into the supposed “unmasking” scandal which was only opened as fan service for Republican elected officials and conservative media in the first place. (Trump had suggested to Maria Bartiromo that the perpetrators be given 50 year sentences on Fox.)

I suspect that Barr had hoped that maybe, with a little luck, his investigation might snare somebody in some tangential wrongdoing. Or be able to do some strategic leaking. Or at least keep the issue open until after the election.

Alas, the president’s lawyer daddy struck out. Again. Thus bringing to a close a matter that—in a saner world—would have been the stupidest fake scandal in decade.

Romney sort of goes there. I blame myself a bit for this, because the other day I highlighted Keith Olbermann’s deranged rant. But I was just taking a cheap shot, not attempting to weigh the comparative insanity of the two sides of our political divide.

Which brings me to Romney, who put this out yesterday:

My thoughts on the current state of our politics:

This is good, sort of. This is the strongest denunciation of Trump’s toxic crackpottery from any Republican. (It may be the only one?) But what caught the most attention was Romney’s suggestions that there was some rough moral equivalency between comments by the president of the United States and a washed up sports guy on a YouTube video.

Both were bad. One has the nuclear codes.

So, unfortunately, this falls into the category of:Meant Well, But Actually Missed the Point.

Mitt Romney doesn’t want that to be his epitaph.

A final off-ramp for the GOP establishment?

As I mentioned on yesterday’s podcast, Politico’s Tim Alberta suggests that the GOP might still break with Trump… after the election. If the election is a blowout, he writes, “and Trump is flinging wild accusations about wide-scale fraud and deep-state conspiracies to take him down, Republicans will be forced to choose a side.

“They will either stand with a battered soon-to-be-former president whose days in office are numbered whether he likes it or not, or they will stand with the democratic norms that have guided the nation for 244 years.”

I suspect that he’s at least partly right. Some members of the GOP Old Guard might be willing to tell Trump to go. But Ted Cruz? Josh Hawley? Marco Rubio? Nikki Haley? Lindsey Graham? Forget about it.

Instead, backing Trump is more likely to become the new litmus test of tribal loyalty.

Foxconn turns out to be a massive boondoggle. Who knew?

Oh wait.

Something for the bedwetters. We’ve seen way too much hope and optimism lately, so I wanted to pass on this piece from Thomas Edsall, who warns that Biden is not yet out of the woods.

Here are some of the things causing anxiety among Democratic partisans, particularly political professionals.

One way to measure voter enthusiasm is to compare voter registration trends for each party. A Democratic strategist who closely follows the data on a day-to-day basis wrote in a privately circulated newsletter:

Since last week, the share of white non-college over 30 registrations in the battleground states has increased by 10 points compared to September 2016, and the Democratic margin dropped 10 points to just 6 points. And there are serious signs of political engagement by white non-college voters who had not cast ballots in previous elections.

But, but, but… Biden is now leading in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Arizona and the Economist Forecast gives him a 91 percent chance of winning the election. The FiveThirty Forecast has Biden at 87 percent.

The RealClearPolitics average now puts Biden’s lead at 10 points.

There are 20 days to go.

Quick Hits

Ok, sorry about the downer item above. As an antidote, make sure you read this piece by Mona Charen in today’s Bulwark.

We devote a lot of mental energy to things that are going wrong or could go wrong. It’s human nature. As the sociobiologists teach us, our ancestors were not the ones who heard a rustling in the grass and figured, “Eh, it’s probably nothing.” We are descended from the ones who said “ What the hell was that? Could be a cobra. Better run the other way.” Vigilance is our default mode.

But seven months after the start of this plague, we shouldn’t lose sight of the things that went more right than we expected for two reasons: 1) gratitude is good for the spirit and the soul, and 2) we must guard against catastrophizing.

Nicholas Grossman in today’s Bulwark:

Leaders, especially in law enforcement positions, can counter the president’s effort to stir up voter intimidation by making it clear they’ll prosecute election-related crimes, as Nevada Attorney General Aaron D. Ford did after the debate.

Police should prepare for the possibility of armed intimidation at polling places. And concerned citizens should prepare for the unlikely, but not impossible, scenario in which some police are overwhelmed — or choose to look the other way — by being ready to calmly, peacefully escort any intimidated voters into polling places.

Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection recommends documenting what you see—if uniformed militia show up, photograph or take note of any insignias—and offers fact sheets on the relevant laws in 50 states, which you can find here.

Cheap Shots

Give a gift subscription

Deep Thoughts

Josh Kraushaar in the National Journal:

Republicans are now bracing for a punishing Election Night, resigned to losing the presidency, alarmed that Democrats will pad their House majority, and growing increasingly concerned that Chuck Schumer will be the next Senate majority leader. Most are hoping for a mere blue-wave election, rather than a potential tsunami that would wipe out some GOP members of Congress in reliably red states and districts. “He’s losing older Republicans over COVID,” said one alarmed senior Republican strategist. “They take their health seriously, and they see the nonsense out of the White House and it’s off-putting.”

So today’s column is something of a scorecard that will indicate just how bad the Election Night environment will be for Republicans. These are all races that, in normal times, should be fairly safe seats for the Republican Party. But they’re shaping up to be uncomfortably close. If Democrats win even one of these four races, it’s a sign of a big blue political wipeout.

A Tsunami of Trumpian Crazy

#IFTTT #WordPress

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womenofcolor15 · 4 years ago

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Ice Cube Responds To Folks Who Want To Cancel Him For Working With Trump On That 'Platinum Plan' For Black Americans

When Trump advisor Katrina Pierson announced Ice Cube helped the administration with this last minute “Platinum Plan” for Black Americans, folks began to drag him online. Soon after, Cube clarified his involvement with the plan. Deets inside…

N.W.A. to….MAGA?

Ice Cube previously developed a "Contract With Black America" plan, which we're still not clear on how it will help black women specifically. It seems Cube believes the Trump campaign when they said they would take it in, despite the fact we see barely any of his initiatives in the finalized "Platinum Plan."

Trump advisor Katrina Pierson hopped on Twitter to shoutout rapper/producer/actor Ice Cube for his involvement in developing the “Platinum Plan” alongside the Trump administration. And it caused a sh*t load of controversy on social media. The White House advisor thanked Cube for “his willingness to step up and work with” Trump on the “Platinum Plan,” which promises to help black businesses.

Shoutout to @icecube for his willingness to step up and work with @realDonaldTrump Administration to help develop the #PlatinumPlan

ICYMI: https://t.co/V0qOAp0lwR

Leaders gonna lead, haters gonna hate. Thank you for leading!

— Katrina Pierson (@KatrinaPierson) October 13, 2020

"Shoutout to @icecube for his willingness to step up and work with @realDonaldTrump Administration to help develop the #PlatinumPlan ICYMI: https://cdn.donaldjtrump.com/public-files/press_assets/president-trump-p... Leaders gonna lead, haters gonna hate. Thank you for leading!,” she tweeted.

It's interesting who the Trump Administration chooses to "listen to" and who they chose to ignore, as multiple black people from academia and politics attempted to Work with Trump early on in his candidacy and Presidency. All have been ignored except for entertainers who don't come tot he table with experience and academic expertise in the areas they speak on.

Trump’s “Platinum Plan” promises to “increase access to capital in black communities by almost $500 billion” by creating 500,000 black-owned businesses and 3 million new jobs for the black community. It also claims to give the black community “access to better education and job training.” The Platinum Plan pledges to strengthen Trump’s immigration and policing policies in order to protect jobs and communities. It's important to note, this is not $500B of new money. This is almost all money that is already in place for various roads to help certain groups, and Trump's administration has yet to use it for what it is there for. But, suddenly, a month before the election, he suddenly remembered it's there.

You can read the full plan here.

Cancel culture didn’t waste any time on calling Cube out for working with Trump on the “Platinum Plan,” so he took to Twitter to explain. He said he reached out to both the Republicans and the Democrats to discuss the development of policy plans to aide the black community. He said Republicans responded while Dems said they would address his "Contract with Black America" after the election.

Facts: I put out the CWBA. Both parties contacted me. Dems said we’ll address the CWBA after the election. Trump campaign made some adjustments to their plan after talking to us about the CWBA.

— Ice Cube (@icecube) October 14, 2020

“Facts: I put out the [Contract with Black America],” Cube tweeted. “Both parties contacted me. Dems said we’ll address the CWBA after the election. Trump campaign made some adjustments to their plan after talking to us about the CWBA.”

It's also important to note, the Biden Harris platform (WHICH HAS BEEN AVAILABLE HERE SINCE EARLIER THIS YEAR) already addresses much of what Cube is asking for. The rapper/actor continued to explain himself on Twitter, responding to fans who questioned why he would align himself with the Trump administration who has proven to be liars and proven to use black people for photo ops and smoke screens to prove they're not racist. People also have been pointing out that Trump gives them nothing they ask for in the end.

Peep the tweets:

Every side is the Darkside for us here in America. They’re all the same until something changes for us. They all lie and they all cheat but we can’t afford not to negotiate with whoever is in power or our condition in this country will never change. Our justice is bipartisan. https://t.co/xFIXXpOs8B

— Ice Cube (@icecube) October 14, 2020

Black progress is a bipartisan issue. When we created the Contract With Black America we excepted to talk to both sides of the isle. Talking truth to power is part of the process.

— Ice Cube (@icecube) October 15, 2020

Cube said he did it for the betterment of the black community:

I will advise anybody on the planet who has the power to help Black Americans close the enormous wealth gap. https://t.co/l0HylC5JCV

— Ice Cube (@icecube) October 15, 2020

And he made it clear he didn’t endorse anyone:

I haven’t endorsed anybody. https://t.co/kmP99DdZug

— Ice Cube (@icecube) October 15, 2020

We're playing semantics with the word endorse. If you're saying you want an administration to incorporate your platform, and you claim they did, you certainly aren't going to disavow people from voting from them to enact your plan like they promised. Cube, by the wway, was encouraging people NOT to vote at all just a few motnhs ago. We guess it's ok to vote now that a set of demands he came up with to speak on behalf of the black community is being "looked at" by Trump? Even though these demands are already in the Biden harris plan in far more detail?

A few days before the controversy, he shared a video talking about his “agenda for black Americans” with his “Contract with Black America” and said he was pushing it on everybody.

“The problems facing America are too deep and wide to simply reform one area or another,” the contract said. “Long-lasting solutions demand a comprehensive thorough ‘rethink’ of America so that each new approach in each area supports the success of the others. This Contract with Black America will provide conceptual approaches in several areas.”

The contract details 13 areas of improvement, including prison reform, bank lending, police reform and the elimination of all confederate monuments.

DON'T KILL THE MESSENGER #CWBA #ContractWithBlackAmerica pic.twitter.com/8NqthXp268

— Ice Cube (@icecube) October 11, 2020

Again, almost all of this is directly and better addressed by the Biden Harris plan.

Political commentator Bakari Sellers said Cube got tricked by the Trump administration:

Biden has a black agenda & a racial equity agenda.

He has a black female VP who will help oversee COVID recovery for a virus which from a health & economic POV devastated black communities.

He will appoint a black woman to the SCOTUS.

& @icecube fell for something shiny.

— Bakari Sellers (@Bakari_Sellers) October 14, 2020

"Biden has a black agenda & a racial equity agenda," he tweeted. "He has a black female VP who will help oversee COVID recovery for a virus which from a health & economic POV devastated black communities. He will appoint a black woman to the SCOTUS."

Civil rights activist Shaun King hopped on Twitter to point out Cube never endorsed Trump:

Ice Cube didn’t endorse Donald Trump. Period.

Never has. Never would.

— Shaun King (@shaunking) October 15, 2020

Black Americans have expressed their thoughts about Cube working with the Trump administration on the policy plan. Here are some reactions below:

The wild thing is that Eazy E went to a fundraiser at the George HW Bush White House in 1991 and got criticized about *for the rest of his life.* Ice Cube apparently forgot about that when he decided to collaborate with an infinitely worse administration.

— jelani cobb (@jelani9) October 15, 2020

Black men are breaking my heart with this caping for Cube-cum-Trump. Apparently y’all want to be to 2020 what white women were to 2016. And this is why to be Black+Woman is to have to serious consider DAILY, what it means to get too close to either group. Traitorous MFs.

— Brittney Cooper (@ProfessorCrunk) October 15, 2020

I am anti Trump. I believe he’s an existential threat to the nation.

I’m sure he’s giving Ice Cube @icecube nothing more than lip service to siphon Black votes.

But it’s not Cube’s fault Dems don’t want to talk specifics about Black people until after they get our votes. https://t.co/CGlWJ1IEJc

— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) October 15, 2020

The Tr*mp administration gave people rent money for one month in the midst of a pandemic as unemployment skyrocketed and Ice Cube thinks he about to aid black people in the fight for economic liberation cause he said so?.... THIS IS WHY HARRIET COULD NOT FREE ALL OF THE SLAVES.

— jiggaman (@jiggyjayy2) October 15, 2020

Ice Cube dissed Eazy E on "No Vaseline" for having dinner with HW Bush. Nearly 30 years later, here he is palling around with a massively worse and more racist President. It's pretty damn shameful to see... https://t.co/XPPKKQIWrX

— Kevin D. Grüssing (pronounced Grew-Sing) (@KevDGrussing) October 14, 2020

We already knew Ice Cube was working for donald trump, it's only official now.

— Black Professor (@WonderKing82) October 14, 2020

What's fucked up about this Ice Cube situation, he didn't have the courage to say he was working with Trump, he used BLACKNESS as his platform to speak on Trump behalf. He's a coward, we had to learn about his partnership with Trump from a white woman 20 days before an election.

— Black Professor (@WonderKing82) October 14, 2020

3 weeks ago Ice Cube acted as if he was still vacillating between Biden and Trump while quietly working with Trump. I called it manipulation of the Black Male Vote and I was right.

— . (@shOoObz) October 14, 2020

Anyone else find the timing of the release of the “Platinum Plan”…sketchy? Trump has been in office for the last four years and Black Americans are just now being presented with a policy plan days before the presidential election? And none of this plan was enacted these previous 4 years?

Yeah, this milk isn’t clean at all. Thoughts?

Photo: Tinseltown/Shutterstock.com

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2020/10/15/ice-cube-responds-to-folks-who-want-to-cancel-him-for-advising-trump-on-platinum-plan-for

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junker-town · 5 years ago

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Relationship drama rules the day on ‘The Challenge: Total Madness’

Plus, did someone use good strategy this week?!

We picked up this week where we left off last week: wondering if Jay was alive or not. He was, in fact, alive, and had the wind knocked out of him when Rogan body slammed him into an alternate dimension. After medics finally tended to Jay, they determined that he should be fine to keep going. So, keep going he did. Jay amended his strategy on the next two attempts at getting the flaming ball into the bucket by shooting it basketball style, but is way off both times.

Then it was Rogan’s turn to try and score. Before TJ Lavin could even light the game ball on fire, however, Jay asked for some clarification on the rules from a producer.

Jay: Can you explain to me the rules again?

Producer: Your job is to knock the ball out of his hand.

Jay: Ok.

Producer: If the ball hits the ground, it’s a reset. Just like what you just did, it’s three resets. After the third — after it hits the ground...

Jay: What are the rules?

Producer: What are the rules?

It’s at this point we all realize that something is very, very wrong and Jay absolutely SHOULD NOT be competing anymore. He proceeds to ask the producer if he went three times, because he can only remember two of them. Yikes.

Jay once again (thankfully) meets with the medics who determine that yes, he should absolutely go to the hospital.

MTV

As you can probably guess, Jay was medically DQ’d and had to go home, which is a shame because I was really starting to like him. Rogan took over the spot of being the lone male competitor with a Red Skull, but his delight in the whole situation was unsettling.

The rest of the pre-competition episode was draining. Bananas and Wes decided to pour gasoline on the Kailah and Bear situation, resulting in the former duo decorating Bear’s bed with hearts, towel swans, and a basket of grapes. They, of course, take it way too far by taking Kailah’s pictures of her and her (now ex-)boyfriend and taping them to the ceiling above the bed.

Look, I get it. Pranks happen nonstop in the house, and if you’re going to be kissing Bear in the bathroom and think 1) he’s not going to tell anyone and 2) the house won’t tease you, you’re delusional. But woof, that was tough to watch. Kailah realizes that the bad decision she made by even entertaining Bear’s flirting was actually a horrible decision, and it’s tougher to watch knowing it legitimately ruins her relationship.

Then there’s Zach and Jenna. The couple has had a non-stop on-again, off-again relationship since they met six years ago on The Challenge. This season, Jenna and Zach are dating, but only she came on the show. He apparently found some old DMs between Jenna and someone she dated during one of their off-again spells in the relationship, and it doesn’t go well.

He wants her to come home, and it seems like an overreaction of epic proportions. Thanks to some internet sleuthing (read: unsubstantiated tweets), it seems that one of the reasons Zach could want Jenna to come home is that the DMs are between her and Corey, another member of the Challenge bunker.

Jenna decides to stay and becomes the third member of the Tribunal, but we’ll see if she either goes into the elimination or removes herself.

Physical challenge

It’s [checks notes] Fast and the Furious Week! Sure, why not. Competitors are split into teams of two — a guy and a girl — and have to collect 10 puzzle pieces while hanging off the side of a huge, moving truck. They’re tethered together, making it much more difficult to reach the pieces. Once they get all of the pieces, the duo has to put the puzzle together. There’s a time limit of seven minutes, and fastest time wins. Easy, right?

MTV

Wrong. Only three teams completed it: Nany and Jordan, Bananas and Melissa, and Bear and Kaycee. A handful of teams were disqualified for dropping pieces, and a bunch of the teams just couldn’t reach some of the pieces as they battled against the tension of the tether.

Winners: Jordan and Nany

Most ridiculous moment

For the challenge, super-vet Aneesa is paired with loud-mouthed Nelson. How do you feel about that partnership, Aneesa?

MTV

“That’s how I feel about being partnered with Nelson.” — Aneesa

Her feelings are validated very shortly after as he loses his mind when he thinks Aneesa throws the challenge.

Nelson, dude. What’s going on? During the competition, Aneesa dropped a puzzle piece, leading Nelson to believe that she threw the competition so she could ... go in against Jenna? His logic (loose term here) is that everyone thinks that Jenna is a layup because of her relationship woes back home, which, fair. It just doesn’t make any sense why she would throw the challenge. Does he think Nany and Jordan would put her in the Tribunal? That she was hoping she’d get picked by them to compete? That the house was automatically going to vote Jenna in, setting Aneesa up for a chance to go against her?

Ok, a lot of moving parts, but fine. Let’s say that all happens. Why does Nelson care? It’s a women’s week for elimination. Does he not want her to get a Red Skull? Is this just some stand over the integrity of the game?

His blow up does nothing but make the rest of the house annoyed because it’s so blown out of proportion, and no one but Nelson thinks she threw the challenge. Can’t wait for him to get voted in next week!

Episode MVP

Shout out to Jordan for actually seeming to use some good strategy this week. He had the benefit of being the one guy that had to complete the challenge twice as a result of the uneven numbers, and he and his first partner Nany crushed it (things weren’t as smooth on his second run with Bayleigh). They were in the first wave, completed the event, and finished with the fastest time. As mentioned above, Nany picked her BFF Jenna to be in the Tribunal with them.

At first, I thought it was super weird that he didn’t pick his fiancé, Tori, to be the third member. But after his explanation it makes a little bit of sense. If someone weak is voted in, the Tribunal could vote Tori in to get her Skull (if Nany or Jenna don’t want to risk it). If Tori is voted in by the house, Jordan has more say over who she faces as a member of the Tribunal. I ... don’t hate it?

Red Skulls

With his win over Jay, Rogan became the lone guy with a Red Skull. Dee and Jenny have Red Skulls for the women’s side.

Power Rankings

5. Nany

4. Kaycee

3. Johnny

2. Jordan

1. Jenny

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progressiveparty · 5 years ago

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Trump made 56 false claims last week

Trump calls women he doesn't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.

President Donald Trump made 56 false claims last week, delivering his usual assortment of dishonesty about immigration, his popularity and his record.

Do you accept or reject Trump's lies?

That was down from 78 false claims the week prior and 61 false claims the week before that. Where he made the biggest numbers: Trump made 26 false claims at his campaign rally in Cincinnati, 13 more in various exchanges with the media, seven on Twitter, five in an interview with C-SPAN. Top categories: Eighteen false claims were about the economy or trade; 10 were about Trump's popularity, his crowds or others' crowds; 10 were about immigration; eight were about former President Barack Obama's record. The most egregious false claim: Support from African Americans Trump's stories are peppered with unnamed validators -- "many people" who say he's right about something, "tough guys" backstage who break down crying in his presence, a "friend" who just called him to say something dramatic. Last week, as he faced accusations of racism for his attack on Baltimore as "disgusting, rat and rodent infested" and unfit for human habitation, he turned the black community into a validator. "What I've done for African Americans, no president, I would say, has done," he told reporters, citing his criminal justice legislation, the low black unemployment rate and the criticism of Baltimore itself. "Now, I'll say this: They are so happy, because I get the calls." Though Trump does have African American supporters, all the available evidence suggests African American voters are overwhelmingly unhappy with him. In one poll the week before last, he had a 6% approval rating with black voters; 80% of them said he is racist. We can't fact-check the existence of phone calls to him. We can note that he has invented phone calls before. The most revealing false claim: A Veterans Choice fable Trump has made a concerted effort to erase and distort Obama's record. He has claimed more than 75 times as President that he was the one who got the Veterans Choice health care program passed, though Obama signed it into law in 2014. Most of the time Trump talks about Veterans Choice, he simply asserts that he was the one responsible for doing what previous presidents couldn't. Sometimes, like at his rally last week, he invents an entire elaborate story. He said he was thinking about the problem of veterans' health care "during the campaign," and he approached "experts" with a "great idea" he thought made him "the smartest guy": Veterans, he had decided, should be allowed to see private doctors if they are facing long waits in the VA system. (Note: That is what the Obama program already allowed them to do.) As it turned out, he said, the "experts" had something remarkable to tell him: They had this same idea long before, but could never get it implemented. "Sir," Trump said the experts told him, "we've known about it for about 40 years, but we've never been able." Note the "sir," one of the most surefire signs Trump is making something up. The most absurd false claim: Hot air on wind When Trump uses his campaign rallies to rile up his supporters over issues like immigration, we say he is throwing them red meat. We need a phrase for when he uses his rallies to rant about a personal grievance that his supporters don't seem to be interested in at all. Green meat? One such issue is wind turbines, a longtime bugbear for him. Again and again, Trump has returned to the subject even as the people in his crowds have demonstrated little apparent excitement. At the rally last week, he did not repeat his infamous false claim that wind turbines cause cancer. He did, however, claim that wind turbines being built near your house means your house becomes "practically worthless." Not true, studies show. Here is this week's full list of 56: Crowds and popularity Empty seats "...I've never had an empty seat. ... I don't think we've had an empty seat. I don't think you've seen an empty seat, with thousands of people outside. ... We'll have a 22,000-seat arena, including like a basketball -- an NBA -- arena, or even bigger stadiums, we've never had an empty seat." -- July 30 interview with C-SPAN "I'm going to Cincinnati. The arena is a very large one. And we've sold it out. We could sell it out probably 10 times, from what I hear. The applications for seats, as you know -- never had an empty seat. ..." -- August 1 exchange with reporters Facts First: There have been empty seats at various Trump events, including a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, just two weeks prior to these remarks. Bloomberg News reporter Josh Wingrove tweeted a photo of what he described as a "smattering" of empty seats in the almost-full 8,000-capacity venue in Greenville. The Dallas News said of Trump's October 18 rally in Houston: "Many hundreds of seats were empty, including all of the boxes on both tiers of the mezzanine." At Trump's Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, rally in April 2017, Philadelphia Inquirer journalist Jonathan Tamari tweeted a photo of rows of empty seats in the upper deck. Support among religious voters When Trump was asked about recent criticism from Wilton Gregory, archbishop of Washington, who said the President's recent remarks had "deepened divisions and diminished our national life," he said he was unaware of the archbishop's remarks but that he is highly popular with "the church." He continued, "The church has loved me and I love them. You know, we've got about 84% of the vote. And the churches love Donald Trump and I love them." -- August 1 exchange with reporters Facts First: Trump did not get anywhere close to 84% of the vote from Catholics in the 2016 election. Exit polls had him winning 50% of the Catholic vote to Hillary Clinton's 46%. Data from the American National Election Study had Clinton winning 48% to Trump's 45%. Trump might have been referring imprecisely to his level of support from white evangelical Christians. Exit polls found 80% of that particular group voted for Trump. Support among African Americans "What I've done for African Americans, no president, I would say, has done. Now, I'll say this: They are so happy, because I get the calls." And: "The African American people have been calling the White House. They have never been so happy as what a president has done." -- July 30 exchange with reporters Facts First: African Americans are overwhelmingly unhappy with Trump's job performance, polls have consistently shown. Trump began talking negatively about Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings and Baltimore in a series of tweets on July 27. In a Quinnipiac University poll conducted from July 25 to July 28 -- two days before the tweets, the day of the tweets and one day after the tweets -- Trump had a 6% approval rating and 84% disapproval rating with black voters. Eighty percent of black voters said Trump is racist, while just 11% said he is not. A Fox News poll conducted from July 21 to July 23 had Trump at 75% disapproval among black registered voters, with 22% approval. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted June 28 to July 1, 81% of African Americans said they disapproved; 18% approved. Both of those approval numbers were substantially better than the one in the new Quinnipiac poll, but still: On the whole, large majorities of African Americans were displeased with him. 'Morning Joe' "Wow! Morning Joe & Psycho ratings have really crashed. Very small audience. People are tired of hearing Fake News delivered with an anger that is not to be believed. Sad, when the show was sane, they helped get me elected. Thanks! Was on all the time. Lost all of its juice!" -- July 30 tweet Facts First: The ratings for the MSNBC show "Morning Joe" have not "crashed." The show's viewership in the second quarter of 2019 was nearly identical to its viewership in the second quarter of 2018 and the second quarter of 2017 -- and significantly higher than its ratings in the second quarter of 2016, during the presidential election. "Morning Joe" averaged 1.03 million viewers in the second quarter of this year. That was down very slightly from 1.06 million viewers in the same quarter in 2018 and up very slightly from 997,000 viewers in the same quarter in 2017. All of these figures were higher than the 608,000 viewers "Morning Joe" averaged in the second quarter of 2016. Joe Biden's crowd size "I saw Biden's opening, where he couldn't get 150 people to an opening in a little basketball, high school gymnasium." -- July 30 interview with C-SPAN Facts First: About 600 people attended Biden's first speech after he announced his candidacy -- which was held at a union hall, not a high school gymnasium. Trump had previously claimed that Biden's launch event was attended by 150 people, not the reported 600. This time, the President claimed it was not even 150. The Atlantic reported that journalists occupied 100 of the 600 spots at the hall in Pittsburgh, but that is still 500 non-journalists. Biden did hold an event at a community center gym in South Carolina that same week, but he drew a crowd of 700, The New York Times reported. The crowd in Cincinnati "l'll tell you what: This is some crowd, some turnout. We've sold tens of thousands of tickets, and you know, at the sale prices, we keep it nice and low, but keep it nice and low." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnat Facts First: Tickets to Trump's rallies are not "sold" by the campaign. Contrary to Trump's suggestion that people had paid to attend this rally, attendance was, as always, free. It's possible Trump was making a joke, but that wasn't clear. The 2016 election "I say it all the time: never happened before. There's never been a movement like this. They've had movements, they never went -- they won a state, they did well in a state. We won 32 states, there's never been anything like it." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: Trump won 30 states, not 32. Also, this was far from a historic number: Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 each won 49 states; James Monroe won every statein the uncontested election of 1820. "There have been 45 presidential elections in which the winning candidate won a larger share of the electoral vote," The New York Times reported. Ohio in 2016 "We ended up winning Ohio by close to 9 points, which is unheard-of. ..." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: Trump exaggerated very slightly. He won 51.7% to 43.6%, a margin of just over 8 points. That was the biggest margin in Ohio since George H.W. Bush's 11-point win in 1988, but not an unprecedented margin for the state. Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon all won the state by 20 points or more. Florida in 2016 "So we have a great governor in the state of Florida. Ron DeSantis. Calls me up -- doing a great job, Ron DeSantis. He was at 3 and he went to 70. That's a pretty good increase." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: DeSantis did experience a spike in support after Trump endorsed him, but he never came close to 70% in the polls. He won the Republican primary with 56.5% of the vote. We also could not find any public polls in which DeSantis was as low as 3%, though he was indeed polling poorly before Trump expressed support for him in December 2017 and before the President issued a "full" endorsement in June 2018. He was at 17% in a Fox News poll just before the endorsement. Immigration Immigration judges Talking about immigration, Trump said, "We're the only country in the world, or just about, where people come in, Bill, they come in and they get a trial, so we hire Perry Mason. And it's a big deal. And the trial we say, 'Come back in four years.' It is so crazy. But we're the -- nobody else has judges. They come in -- other countries, they come and they say, 'Sorry, you have to get out.' And in this country they come in, it's 'Welcome to litigation.' " -- August 1 interview with Bill Cunningham of 700WLW Cincinnati Facts First: The US is far from the only country to grant asylum claimants the right to a legal process. In Canada, for example, refugee claimants who pass an initial eligibility test are given hearings before a tribunal called the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada; if their applications are rejected by the board, they have the right to seek reviews by the Federal Court of Canada. In Germany, claimants who are rejected by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees also have the right to file appeals in court. "This statement is patently false," James Hathaway, law professor and director of the program in refugee and asylum law at the University of Michigan, said in an email in response to a previous version of Trump's claim. "It is completely routine in other countries that, like the U.S., have signed the UN refugee treaties for asylum-seekers to have access to the domestic legal system to make a protection claim (and to be allowed in while the claim is pending)." If Trump was talking about undocumented immigrants who do not make asylum claims, it is not true that these people are welcomed in and granted a trial years down the road. Under a system of "expedited removal," people who are apprehended within 100 miles of a land border and within 14 days of arrival can be quickly deported without seeing a judge. (The Trump administration announced in July that it plans to expand expedited removal to include undocumented immigrants anywhere in the country who can't prove they have been in the US continuously for two years or more.) Democrats and the border "Despite the Democrats wanting very unsafe Open Borders. ..." -- July 30 tweet "But what we have to do is fix the loopholes, and the Democrats don't want. The reason is the Democrats want open borders." -- July 31 exchange with reporters "The greatest betrayal committed by the Democrats is their support for open borders. And these open borders would overwhelm schools and hospitals, drain public services and flood communities with poisonous drugs." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati "But I watched (the Democratic debates) and I guess it's probably four or five (contenders). It's down to four or five. I can't imagine somebody else coming up. But I don't think it's what our country represents, number one. And when you look at open borders, how about the open borders, where everybody can just come in. ... But I'm just watching, and it's incredible to think people come up -- many of these people are not good people. They're convicted of lots of bad crimes, and they want open borders where they just flow into our country." -- August 1 interview with Bill Cunningham of 700WLW Cincinnati Facts First: Some Democrats, including presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Julián Castro, have advocated a significant loosening of immigration law, including a decriminalization of the act of illegally crossing the border. But none of them have proposed literally opening the border to unrestricted migration. During the Trump era, Democrats have voted for billions of dollars' worth of fencing and other border security measures. In 2018, Democratic leaders offered Trump $25 billion for border security in exchange for a path to citizenship for the "Dreamers," young undocumented immigrants brought to the US illegally as children. Family separation "The cages for kids were built by the Obama Administration in 2014. He had the policy of child separation. I ended it even as I realized that more families would then come to the Border! @CNN" -- July 31 tweet Facts First: Trump was correct that Obama's administration built chain-link "cages" to detain migrants. But Trump did not inherit an Obama policy of routinely separating migrant children from their parents. Separations were rare under Obama; Trump made them standard. In March 2017, John Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security, told CNN that he was thinking about implementing a separation program "to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network." In April 2018, Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, announced a new "zero tolerance" policy in which everybody caught crossing the border illegally would be criminally prosecuted -- a change he explicitly noted would result in regular separations. Separations did sometimes occur under Obama, but they were non-routine and much less frequent, according to immigration experts and former Obama officials. They occurred in exceptional cases, such as those where the parent was being criminally prosecuted for carrying drugs across the border or other serious crimes aside from simple illegal crossing, those where human trafficking was suspected and those where the authorities could not confirm the connection between the child and the adult. It is technically true that Trump is the one who ended the separation policy: In June 2018, he signed an executive order to detain families together. But he was ending his own policy, not Obama's, and he signed the order only after a furious public outcry. The wall "We're building the wall faster and better than ever." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati "... Crossings are way down and the Wall is being built). Even with zero Dem help, Border getting strong!" -- July 29 tweet Facts First: Nothing resembling the wall Trump campaigned on has been built at any speed. Zero additional miles of border barriers had been erected as of mid-June. About 50 miles have been built over his two-and-a-half years in office, but all of them are replacement barriers rather than additional miles. According to Customs and Border Protection, 47 miles "of new border barriers in place of dilapidated design" had been completed as of June 14. The Washington Examiner reported July 20 that the total was up to 51 miles of such replacement barriers, but that no additional miles had been built. (Customs and Border Protection did not respond to our request for updated information in the wake of the Examiner story.) Trump has started arguing since this spring that replacement fencing should be counted by the media as his "wall," since he is replacing ineffective old barriers with effective modern ones. This is subjective, but we think it's fair to focus on the new barriers he promised during his campaign. Lottery system "We're replacing random migration and we're replacing the lottery system. How about the lottery system? How about lotteries? This was Chuck Schumer: You put the name in a basket. The country puts the name in the basket. And you pick people out of the lottery. 'Well, let's see, this one's a murderer. This one robbed four banks, this one ... I'd better not say ... this one, another murderer, ladies and gentlemen, another murderer.' " -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: Almost everything Trump said here was inaccurate. Foreign countries don't enter people into the green card lottery conducted by the State Department, let alone deliberately enter their criminals and problem citizens. Individuals enter on their own because they want to immigrate. The people whose names are selected are subjected to an extensive vetting process that includes a criminal background check. Court hearings "It's time for Democrats to end sanctuary cities, end catch and release. You know what you do: You catch 'em and then you release 'em and you say, 'Would you please report back in four years from now?' But only 2% come back." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: While it's unclear what subset of migrants Trump was referring to, the majority of migrants appear in court. In 2017, 89% of asylum seekers appeared in court to receive decisions on their cases. Among all kinds of migrants, 72% appeared in court. Foreign affairs China and nuclear arms "But I will say this: With Russia, if we could get a pact where they reduce and we reduce nuclear, that would be a great thing for the world. And I do believe — I do believe that will happen. We've — we have discussed it. I've also discussed it with China. I've discussed it with President Putin. I've also discussed it with China. And I will tell you, China was very, very excited about talking about it, and so is Russia. So I think we'll have a deal at some point." -- August 2 exchange with reporters Facts First: We don't know what a Chinese official might have said to Trump in private, but China is not "excited" about the prospect of an arms control agreement with the United States. After Trump first suggested that China wanted to participate in a trilateral deal with the US and Russia, a spokesperson for the Chinese government said: "We oppose any country's attempt to make an issue out of China on arms control and will not participate in any negotiation for a trilateral nuclear disarmament agreement." Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, noted that two days before Trump's new remark, Zhou Bo, a senior colonel in China's People's Liberation Army, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which he wrote, "To Chinese ears, Mr. Trump's claims make no sense. Between them, the U.S. and Russia possess 90% of the world's nuclear weapons. China has fewer nuclear warheads (290) than France (300), according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. No wonder China's Ministry of National Defense essentially laughed at the idea of a three-way deal on arms control involving the U.S. and Russia." Reif told CNN: "The Chinese reaction is not surprising. China, which is estimated to possess a total of about 300 nuclear warheads, has never been party to any agreement limiting the size and configuration of its nuclear arsenal. Beijing is highly unlikely to engage in any such talks until the United States and Russia further cut their far larger arsenals, estimated at over 6,000 warheads each." The European Union "We are competing with other countries that know how to play the game against the U.S. That's actually why the E.U. was formed. ..." -- July 29 tweet Facts First: Competing with the United States economically was not a key reason for the formation of the European Union. "The President's claims are preposterous. The European Communities (forerunner of the EU) were formed in the 1950s as part of a joint US-Western European plan to stabilize and secure Western Europe and promote prosperity, by means of trade liberalization and economic growth, throughout the shared transatlantic space," Desmond Dinan, a public policy professor at George Mason University who is an expert in the history of European integration, said in response to a previous version of this claim. US presidents have consistently supported European integration efforts. "The EU was launched in 1993, on the shoulders of the European Communities, to promote peace and prosperity in the post-Cold War era, an era also of rapid globalization. American officials may have had their doubts about the feasibility of monetary union, and about the possibility of a Common (European) Security and Defense Policy, but the US Administration strongly supported further European integration in the 1990s," Dinan said. The war in Afghanistan "With respect to Afghanistan, we've made a lot of progress. We're talking, but we've also made a lot of progress. We're reducing it. We've been there for 19 years. " -- August 2 exchange with reporters Facts First: This was a small exaggeration. The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 -- less than 18 years ago, though Trump habitually says "19 years." Iran "To protect America's security I withdrew the United States from the horrible Iran nuclear deal, a horrible stupid deal. We gave Iran $150 billion." Trump went on to claim that the US also gave Iran $1.8 billion "in cash." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: The second figure is roughly correct, but the first is exaggerated. The Iran nuclear deal allowed the country to access tens of billions in its own assets that had been frozen in foreign financial institutions because of sanctions; experts say the total was significantly lower than $150 billion. Trump did not invent the $150 billion figure out of thin air: Obama himself mused in a 2015 interview about Iran having "$150 billion parked outside the country." But experts on Iran policy, and Obama's own administration, said that the quantity of assets the agreement actually made available to Iran was much lower. In 2015, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew put the number at $56 billion. PolitiFact reported that Garbis Iradian, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, put it at about $60 billion. Adam Szubin, a senior Treasury Department official, testified to Congress in 2015 that the "usable liquid assets" would total "a little more than $50 billion." The rest of Iran's foreign assets, he said, were either tied up in "illiquid" projects "that cannot be monetized quickly, if at all, or are composed of outstanding loans to Iranian entities that cannot repay them." As Trump regularly notes, the Obama administration did send Iran $1.7 billion to settle a decades-old dispute over a purchase of US military goods Iran made before its government was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The Russia investigation "Treason" "Such a great victory in court yesterday on the Russian Hoax, the greatest political scam in the history of our Country. TREASON! Hopefully, the Attorney Generel of the United States, and all of those working with him, will find out, in great detail, what happened. NEVER AGAIN!!!!" -- July 31 tweet Facts First: Nothing about the Russia investigation comes close to meeting the definition of treason. Under the Constitution, treason is narrowly defined: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed and supervised by a Republican whom Trump appointed as deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. There is no evidence of any behavior that could even possibly qualify as treason. Mueller and obstruction "Well, I watched Mueller. I'm not sure Mueller knows what's going on, if you want to know the truth. But all I do know is he said, 'No collusion with us. No collusion,' and ultimately 'no obstruction,' because it led to no obstruction by a very smart group of people, including our attorney general. " -- August 1 exchange with reporters Facts First: Mueller's report did not say "no obstruction" in any way. Mueller laid out a case that Trump may have committed obstruction, but he explained that he would abide by a Justice Department policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted. "... If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him," the report said. As Trump said, Attorney General William Barr then determined that the evidence laid out by Mueller was "not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense." So Trump was basically correct when he described what Barr concluded -- but he was incorrect in suggesting that Mueller himself had said "no obstruction." Mueller also did not use the words "no collusion"; his report explained that he was investigating the issue of conspiracy, since collusion does not have a precise legal meaning. With that said, "no collusion" is a much fairer paraphrase of Mueller's findings than "no obstruction" is. The economy and trade Steel plants before the tariffs After listing recent plant investments by American steel companies, Trump said, "And this was unthinkable, because four years ago, steel plants were closing, they weren't expanding and they weren't building." Facts First: While some steel plants were closing, being idled or otherwise doing poorly four years ago, some other plants were being built or expanding at the time. Investment was not "unthinkable." A simple Google search brings up numerous 2015 announcements about planned investments in steel plants. For example, Steel Dynamics announced a $100 million expansion at a mill in Mississippi. Commercial Metals announced a $250 million investment to build a micro-mill in Oklahoma. Nucor and a partner announced a $75 million investment in improvements at a mill in Arkansas. Ferrous CAL announced a $53 million investment in a Michigan plant to make steel for automotive companies. There were also multiple stories about US Steel and other companies idling plants and laying off workers at the time. But it's not true that it was "unthinkable" four years ago for plants to be built or expanded. Steel companies before the tariffs "... but they were dumping tremendous quantities of steel, and what was happening is United States Steel and all of our companies were going virtually out of business, and I stopped it. I put on a 25% tariff." Facts First: It is not true that "all" American steel companies were "going virtually out of business" before Trump imposed his steel tariffs last year. Though US Steel had significantly declined from its heyday and had faltered for much of the decade, it had earned a profit in 2017. Other American steel companies, notably Nucor, were thriving before the tariffs. US Steel earned $387 million in 2017, the year before Trump imposed the tariffs. The company had struggled so badly in the years prior that it was dropped in 2014 from the S&P 500 stock index, but it was not on the verge of quickly vanishing before the tariffs came into effect. Other steelmakers were faring much better than US Steel. Nucor, for example, reported consolidated net earnings of $1.3 billion for 2017 and $796 million for 2016. Steel Dynamics earned $813 million in 2017 and $382 million in 2016. Bloomberg reported in an October 2018 fact check: "In fact, US steelmakers Nucor Corp. and Steel Dynamics Inc. were two of the healthiest commodity companies in the world before Trump took office." Unemployment, part 1 "We need good people. We're down to 3.5% unemployment." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: The unemployment rate for June was 3.7%. The rate for July, released the morning after the rally, was unchanged, holding at 3.7%, well above the record 2.5% set in 1953. The rate has not hit 3.5% at any point in Trump's presidency. It was 3.6% in April and May. So Trump was close, but this is not a figure that is usually rounded to the nearest half-point. Unemployment, part 2 "Unemployment has reached the lowest rate in over half a century." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: This was close to true, but Trump was exaggerating. The unemployment rate over this spring and summer -- 3.7% each month in July and June, 3.6% each month in May and April -- has been the lowest since December 1969, slightly less than 50 years ago. We might be inclined to ignore this one if it seemed like a one-time slip, but it was not. Trump, a serial exaggerator, habitually turns "almost" into "over" and "more than." Employment in Ohio "One hundred and twenty three thousand more Ohio workers are employed today than when I was elected." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: Trump was exaggerating. As of the most recent jobs numbers at the time Trump spoke, for June, the increase from the month of Trump's election was 77,600 people. Who is paying for tariffs on Chinese products "We're taking in billions and billions of dollars from China in the form of tariffs. Our people are not paying for it." -- July 30 exchange with reporters "And it's been proven that our people are not paying for those tariffs." And: "They're paying for these tariffs; we're not." -- August 1 exchange with reporters "And don't let them tell you -- the fact is, China devalues their currency. They pour money into their system, they pour it in and because they do that you're not paying for those tariffs, China's paying for those tariffs." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati "The tariffs are not being paid for by our people; it's being paid for by China because of devaluation and because they're pumping money in." -- August 2 exchange with reporters Facts First: American importers make the actual tariff payments, and economic studies have found that Americans, not people and companies in China, have borne most of the cost. A March paper from economists at Columbia, Princeton and the New York Federal Reserve found that the "full incidence" of Trump's tariffs has fallen on domestic companies and consumers -- costing them $3 billion a month by the end of 2018. The paper also found that the tariffs led to a reduction in US income, by $1.4 billion a month. A separate academic paper also found that the tariffs led to higher consumer prices. It estimated that the tariffs will result in a $7.8 billion-per-year decline in income. The White House's Economic Report of the President also acknowledged that American consumers do pay some of the cost of these tariffs. Domestic producers, according to the report, benefit from price increases from the tariffs, but "offsetting these benefits are the costs paid by consumers in the form of higher prices and reduced consumption." Some Chinese suppliers might take on some of the burden of the tariff by reducing their prices to maintain a market in the United States, but these studies show that the burden heavily falls on US consumers and companies. The history of tariffs on China "Remember this: Our country is taking in billions and billions of dollars from China. We never took in 10 cents from China." -- August 2 exchange with reporters Facts First: The US government has been charging tariffs on imported Chinese goods for more than two centuries, and it took in hefty sums from such tariffs long before Trump's own tariffs. (Again, it is US importers, not China, who have paid these tariffs.) The Treasury received $14 billion from tariffs on China in 2014, to look at one pre-Trump year. Highest agricultural spending by China "And I will say that the farmers are very grateful. The most they've ever spent on agricultural product is $16 billion. So when they pulled out, I took just a small part of the money that China is paying us, and I gave it toward the farmers and the farmers are very happy." -- July 30 exchange with reporters Facts First: Sixteen billion dollars is not the most China has ever spent on US agricultural products in a year. As we noted above, studies have found that Americans, not China, are bearing the majority of the cost of the tariffs. And Trump's aid to affected farmers has required much more than "a small part" of the tariff revenue. China spent a record $29.6 billion on US agricultural products in 2014, according to government figures. The New York Times reported July 15 that Trump's tariffs on China had generated about $21 billion as of July 10. As Trump noted later last week, he has promised a total of $28 billion in aid to farmers over the last two years -- so the tariff revenue so far does not even cover the cost of his pledge. Baltimore Baltimore and corruption "What Elijah Cummings should do is he should take his Oversight Committee, bring them down to Baltimore, and invest all of it, and really study the billions and billions of dollars that's been stolen. It's been wasted; it's been stolen." And: "But the people of Baltimore are very thankful — they have let us know by the thousands of people — because of the fact that finally somebody is pointing out how corrupt Baltimore is, how billions and billions of dollars have been stolen." -- July 30 exchange with reporters Facts First: Though Baltimore has had a series of corruption scandals in recent years, there is no evidence that anywhere near "billions and billions" has been "stolen." We can't definitively fact-check Trump's claim that billions have been "wasted"; he is entitled to his opinion on the effectiveness of spending. But an allegation of billions in actual theft requires proof, and Trump has not provided any. "He has no idea what he's talking about," said Matthew Crenson, professor emeritus of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a scholar of Baltimore's political history. "I'd like to see those billions and billions." Corruption convictions or cases involving alleged corruption in Baltimore have tended to involve sums of money much smaller than "billions." In 2009, Mayor Sheila Dixon was convicted of stealing about $1,500 worth of gift cards meant for low-income residents. Mayor Catherine Pugh resigned in May of this year over a scandal involving payments from the University of Maryland Medical System. Pugh, who sat on the nonprofit company's board of directors, received $500,000 for 100,000 copies of a children's book she wrote. (She called the deal a "regrettable mistake.") Baltimore's economy "Baltimore's numbers are the worst in the United States on Crime and the Economy. Billions of dollars have been pumped in over the years, but to no avail. The money was stolen or wasted. Ask Elijah Cummings where it went. He should investigate himself with his Oversight Committee!" -- July 29 tweet Facts First: Baltimore does not have the worst economic numbers in the United States, though it does rank poorly by several measures. Baltimore had the fourth-worst unemployment rate of major cities in 2018, but its 5.7% rate was substantially better than that of last-place Detroit, which was at 9.0%. In 2017, the Baltimore metropolitan area (which includes more than the city of Baltimore, on which Trump was focusing his attacks) ranked 19th in the country in gross domestic product out of 383 areas studied. The city of Baltimore had a 22.4% poverty rate over the 2013-2017 period, well ahead of such cities as Detroit (37.9%), Bloomington, Indiana (37.5%), and Laredo, Texas (30.6%). Baltimore did have the highest homicide rate of any major city in 2017, so Trump was accurate in his claim about crime. Obama's record Obama and energy "The previous administration tried to shut down American energy..." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: Obama did encourage the use of renewable energy sources rather than fossil fuels, but he didn't try to "shut down" fossil fuel production -- which increased significantly during his tenure. For example, field production of crude oil increased in each of Obama's first seven years in office before declining in his last year, reversing a steady decline that had begun in the mid-1980s. CNN reported in 2015: "The greatest oil boom in this nation's history has occurred during the tenure of self-proclaimed environmentalist Barack Obama." Obama also presided over a significant increase in natural gas production, which hit a record high in 2015 before declining in 2016. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Obama called for the US to go "all in on clean energy," but he immediately added, "Now, in the meantime, the natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence. We need to encourage that. And that's why my administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits. That's got to be part of an all-of-the-above plan." Coal Trump said the Obama administration tried to end the use of "American, clean, beautiful coal." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: Obama did try to reduce the use of coal -- but nothing about coal is "clean." "Clean coal" is an industry term for particular technologies that attempt to reduce the many environmental harms caused by coal, a particularly dirty source of power. The term is not meant to be used to broadly describe coal itself, though that is what Trump generally does. Manufacturing While criticizing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, from which he withdrew the US, Trump claimed Obama had said that "you can't produce manufacturing jobs anymore in the United States." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati "President Obama said that manufacturing jobs are gone." -- August 1 interview with Bill Cunningham of 700WLW Cincinnati Facts First: Obama didn't say you can't produce manufacturing jobs in the United States. At a town hall event on PBS in 2016, he said some manufacturing jobs were gone for good, in part because of automation, but he boasted of how many were being created and his administration's investment in new technologies to attempt to create new manufacturing sectors. Obama mocked Trump for not specifying how he would bring back the jobs that had been lost to other countries. But Obama was not saying that it was impossible to produce manufacturing jobs at all. He said: "Well, in fact, we've seen more manufacturing jobs created since I've been President than any time since the 1990s. That's a fact. And you know, if you look at just the auto industry as an example, they've had record sales and they've hired back more people over the last five years than they have for a very long, long time. We actually make more stuff, have a bigger manufacturing base today than we've had in most of our history." His tweet about Obama Talking about his tweeting habits, Trump said, "I sent the one about the 'wiretapping' in quotes, and that turned out to be true. Remember the big deal that was? I heard like about a minute after I sent that, I was called by my people, 'Sir, did you say --' I said, 'Yeah, I did, what's the big deal?' And the reason it was such a big deal is it turned out to be true." -- July 30 interview with C-SPAN Facts First: Trump's tweet about Obama allegedly wiretapping his phones has not been proved true. Trump was referring to the 2017 tweet in which he said, "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!" (He repeated the allegation in additional tweets the same day, saying, for example, "I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!") There is still no evidence that Trump was wiretapped, let alone that Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump. The Justice Department said in a 2017 court filing that there are no records related to wiretaps like the ones Trump described. Then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress in 2017 that "we have no information to support those tweets." Paul Manafort, who served as Trump's campaign chairman, was wiretapped before and after the election, CNN has reported, and Manafort had a residence in Trump Tower. But a wiretap of someone living in Trump's apartment building is not the same as a wiretap of Trump himself. And there remains no public evidence that Obama was personally involved even in the Manafort wiretaps. Wind turbines "The previous administration, they liked windmills. You know windmills: If a windmill is within 2 miles of your house, your house is practically worthless." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: While some homes might fall in value when turbines are erected close by, studies in the US have not found that homes generally become anywhere close to "practically worthless" in such cases -- and some have found no significant decline at all. A 2016 study published in the Journal of Real Estate Research, for example, analyzed "more than 122,000 home sales, between 1998 and 2012, that occurred near (within 10 miles) 41 turbines in densely populated Massachusetts communities." The study found "no unique impact on the rate of home sales near wind turbines." Judicial vacancies Trump said of vacancies on federal courts: "And I came in, I had 148 openings. I said -- you're supposed to have none. I said, 'How many do we have?' '148.' I said, 'You've got to be kidding.' " -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: Trump did not enter office with 148 judicial vacancies, and it is not normal for incoming presidents to be told they have "none." Like Trump, his predecessors entered office with dozens of vacancies. According to Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who tracks judicial appointments, there were 103 vacancies on district and appeals courts on Jan. 1, 2017, just before Trump took office; 53 vacancies on Jan. 1, 2009, just before Barack Obama took office; 80 vacancies on Jan. 1, 2001, just before George W. Bush took office; 107 vacancies on Jan. 1, 1993, just before Bill Clinton took office. So Trump had the most judges to appoint since Clinton, but, clearly, other presidents also had appointing to do. Promises and accomplishments Veterans Choice "We passed VA Choice and VA Accountability on behalf of our great veterans. They've been trying to pass VA Choice for four decades. They couldn't get it done, we got it done, we got it." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati "But with all of the things that we've got -- I mean think of VA Choice, think of all of the things that we've got, you would think that that would make people happy." -- July 30 interview with C-SPAN Facts First: Trump did not get the Veterans Choice program passed, nor had there been an unsuccessful 40-year effort to get it passed. The program was signed into law by Obama in 2014. In 2018, Trump signed the VA MISSION Act, which expanded and changed the Choice program. What Veterans Choice does "Trump contrasted the Choice program with the previous situation, in which he noted that veterans had to wait for health care for "three, four, five, six days, for three weeks, for five weeks." Trump suggested that this is no longer the case, saying that he had the idea to "let them go outside, go to a private doctor. We'll pay the bill, they'll be fixed up all perfect and they can do it immediately.'" -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: Neither the Obama version nor the Trump version of this program allows veterans to avoid waiting days or weeks to see a VA doctor. At present, most veterans can get reimbursed for private care only if they are facing waits of more than 20 days at the VA. Under the current version of the program, there is an exception to the 20-day rule for people who live more than a 30-minute drive from a VA facility. But people who live within a 30-minute zone are still forced to stay within the VA system if they are facing waits of just under three weeks. As we noted in the previous fact check, the program was not Trump's idea. It was created in 2014 under Obama. Firing people at the VA "You couldn't fire anybody. If they were treating our vets badly, you couldn't fire him for anything. People could steal, they could be sadistic to our vets. ... You couldn't fire anybody for almost anything." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: While Trump might have been exaggerating here for effect, it's not true that "you couldn't fire anybody" prior to the Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act he signed into law in 2017. The VA fired on average approximately 2,300 employees annually from 2005 to 2016, based on data collected by the Office of Personnel Management. However, the Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Mississippi did find several instances where VA employees who were registered sex offenders or had been indicted for killing patients, for example, retained their jobs. The legislation Trump signed simplified and expedited the process of terminating VA employees. Confirmed judges "You know we've been doing very well in the courts, by the way. ... We've been winning a lot of cases, a lot of cases, we really have. We really have been. You know, we've now appointed 148, think of this, federal judges, 148." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: This was a slight exaggeration. There were 144 judges confirmed during the Trump presidency as of the day Trump made this statement, said Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who tracks judicial appointments. It was 99 district court judges, 43 appeals court judges and two Supreme Court justices, Wheeler said. Debt and spending Asked about the increase in debt during his tenure, and told that spending under his watch has been higher than spending under Obama, Trump said, "Sure, but the difference is, he wasn't building up the military. The military was getting depleted. I have to build it up, and I have to build it up from both Bush and from Obama, because with Bush, you know we were in these wars all over the place, and with Obama the same thing, they just never ended." -- July 30 interview with C-SPAN Facts First: Military spending is not the primary contributor to the increase in debt under Trump. According to a July analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, legislation signed by Trump will produce a $4.1 trillion increase in the debt between 2017 and 2029. Of that $4.1 trillion, senior vice president Marc Goldwein said, approximately a quarter is attributable to the increase in military spending. Trump's tax cuts are responsible for a much bigger share of the $4.1 trillion: about $1.8 trillion. "There's been across-the board-increases in the deficit, and defense is certainly a piece of it. But to use it as an excuse for the other three-quarters doesn't make a lot of sense to me," Goldwein said. Drug prices "Last year was the first time in 51 years that drug pricing for prescription drugs actually came down." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: This was a slight exaggeration. Prescription drug prices declined last year for the first time in 46 years, according to one of several measures. The Consumer Price Index for prescription drugs showed a 0.6% decline between December 2017 and December 2018, the first calendar-year decline since 1972. As The Washington Post pointed out in its own recent fact check, some experts say the Consumer Price Index is a flawed measure of trends in drug prices, since it doesn't include rebates that drug companies pay to insurers. The IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, which studies drug prices, found that "net drug prices in the United States increased at an estimated 1.5% in 2018." Trump can reasonably cite the Consumer Price Index. He was just off on the number of years. Preexisting conditions "... We will always protect patients with preexisting conditions, always." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: This claim is undercut by Trump's actions and those of congressional Republicans during his presidency. We usually don't fact-check promises, but this one has already proved untrue. Trump's administration and congressional Republicans have repeatedly put forward bills and lawsuits that would weaken Obamacare's protections for people with preexisting conditions. Trump is currently supporting a Republican lawsuit that is seeking to get all of Obamacare declared void. He has not issued a plan to reinstate the law's protections for people with preexisting conditions if the suit succeeds. Right to Try "They had no hope. For 44 years, they've been trying to get Right to Try. ... I got it approved, and it wasn't easy." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: There had not been a 44-year push for a federal Right to Try law, experts said. The law tries to make it easier for terminally ill patients to access experimental medications that have not received Food and Drug Administration approval for widespread use. Similar laws have been passed at the state level only since 2014, after the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank, began pushing for them. "I have no idea what 'they've been trying to get' for 44 years. The Right to Try law was a creation of the Goldwater Institute, and it first became state law in 2014 (in Colorado), relatively soon after it was first conceived of," said Alison Bateman-House, assistant professor of medical ethics at New York University's Langone Health. Before Right to Try Trump said that, before the Right to Try program came into effect, terminally ill patients "couldn't get medicine." He said, "They couldn't get anything -- they'd travel to Asia, if they had money. They'd travel to Europe, they'd travel all over the world hoping for a cure. If they had no money, they'd just go home, they'd die. They had no hope." -- August 1 rally in Cincinnati Facts First: It is not true that terminally ill patients "couldn't get anything" or would simply have to go home and die until Trump signed the Right to Try law in 2018. Prior to the law, patients did have to ask the federal government for permission to access experimental medications -- but the government almost always said yes. Scott Gottlieb, who served as Trump's FDA commissioner until April, told Congress in 2017 that the FDA had approved 99% of patient requests. "Emergency requests for individual patients are usually granted immediately over the phone and non-emergency requests are generally processed within a few days," he testified. This Piece Originally Appeared in CNN Read the full article

#claims #False #lie #Lies #Misleading #Sexist #Trump

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pratattheback · 8 years ago

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Being a Female Gamer – A Response

This is a response essay to Samantha Stockin’s blog post “Being a Female Gamer” [1] , a blog post about being a woman with an interest in geek culture (video, board and war-gaming specifically). I will not be posting it directly back on her blog post as a comment, I will not be sending it to her as an email or tweeting it at her. This is not for her benefit. It is mostly written for the benefit of a friend, and partly to make a point.

I am not responding to the whole article, indeed the majority of it is mainly based on subjective experiences which as I have never met Samantha I can neither confirm nor debunk, I will simply take her word on these. Listen and Believe, if you will. I am also not responding to her analysis of geek culture – there are others who play far more video games than I who can discuss the over-sexualisation of female video game characters for example. All I’ll ask is when was the last time a fat bloke was a Triple A video game protagonist?

What I will respond to is her characterisation of GamerGate and the rhetoric mainly evident in paragraphs 4 and 11 regarding inclusivity.

Let’s begin (finally) with Samantha’s description of GamerGate as “a movement of people who seem to harass women for no other reason than to discredit and demoralise them” (paragraph 9). This seems to be one of those zombie lies that just will not die.

A brief history of GamerGate then (although, given how convoluted the timeline is this could very well take a while). We begin on the 16th August 2014 with a blog post by Aaron, the ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn, known as the ZoePost [2]. He accused Quinn of cheating on him with 5 guys while she was with him, all of whom turned out to be reporters for prominent online video gaming news and review sites. These 5 guy, in particular a reporter for kotaku called Nathan Grayson, had helped her in her career by giving her “game”, Depression Quest, very good reviews and helping to force it through Steam Green-Light.

This got a few people annoyed. The audiences of sites such as Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun and The Escapist had seen for a few years previously the rising frequency of articles that had nothing to do with video gaming and had more to do with Social Justice, Feminism and generally calling their audiences racist, sexist and homophobic, and they were not happy with this theme. The Zoe Quinn incident served to highlight that indie developers, gaming journalists and other industry figures were all working together and colluding in a way that all but shouted “corruption”, and people were getting angry about this. Hashtag Gamergate was trending.

Then, on the 28th and the 29th August 2014, articles appeared on Kotaku, Ars Technica, Buzzfeed, Polygon, Rock Paper Shotgun and pretty much every other online news outlet with the same message and tagline – Gamers are Dead [3]. The articles basically made the argument that all gamers, no matter who they were, are all sexist, racist and bigoted, that they harass women and that gaming culture is basically evil. All the gaming websites. In 2 days. Something was up. One month after the original ZoePost was uploaded, Gamergate would still be going strong. On the internet, any news story is lucky to hold people’s attention for more than a day. And this had been going on for several weeks.

On 17th September 2014, Milo Yiannopoulos, then reporter for Breitbart London, posted “Exposed: The Secret Mailing List of the Gaming Journalism Elite” [4]. In his article, he detailed a private Google Groups mailing list called “GameJournoPros”. This was a list to which the head writers and editors of the top online video gaming media outlets were subscribed, and the archives of which showed conclusive proof that the Gamers are Dead articles had been planned beforehand, industry wide, and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the gaming media was rotten to its core.

Gamergate exploded. Everybody was talking about it. The media kept up the narrative of gamers being sexist but the entire show had moved on. Nobody cared about Zoe Quinn any more. They all wanted to hold the gaming press accountable for their actions, and the gaming press were not going to go quietly. The elite in the circle of feminists and internet celebrities tried to collude to shut the whole thing down – twitter shadow-banned the use of the hashtag, reddit mods were deleting gamergate threads left right and centre and even 4chan was perma-banning anybody who used it, but to no avail, this was the anti-corruption movement that rivals Watergate in its size.

Indeed it was so big that 3 years later it is still not gone. Gamergate is still a force on the internet, trying to expose the corruption in journalism wherever it finds it, but it is still referred to by those who do not understand it as “trying to drive women out of video games”. Personally, I find it a little bit strange that such a movement would use Vyvian James as its mascot, but I’m just a random tumblr account who was 2 years late to the party.

If you want to know more, the Youtuber Internet Aristocrat published a video series called “Quinnspiracy Theory” which was started 3 days after the ZoePost first dropped and provides a snapshot of how the movement became what it is today. Due to the Internet Aristocrat having deleted his account after getting it got too big for him and moving on to Mister Metokur, the best place to find it is the compilation video “Internet Aristocrat - Quinnspiracy Theory [Mirror]” [5] by GamerGaters on Steam.

The language used in this article, particularly in paragraphs 4 and 11, points it squarely at the “white, heterosexual, male” demographic. It makes the argument that the attitudes of said demographic need to change to be more accepting of the LGBT, non-white, disabled or people of faith, and seems to suggest that anybody who is not a white straight male is going to made to feel unwelcome.

Now, nobody can speak for an entire demographic. Indeed, assuming somebody thinks the same way you do or holds the same political beliefs just because you identify the same way sounds like a bad idea, despite what today’s identity politics driven discourse seems to say.

However, I feel that I can speak on behalf of, if not all then certainly a large majority of the white, cis, heterosexual male demographic when I say this:

I am sorry for being born wrong.

I apologise that I was born the wrong skin colour. I beg your forgiveness for having a penis, liking having that penis and being sexually attracted to those who have a vagina and breasts. I didn’t ask to be born like this.

I don’t look at a black guy and think “should be picking cotton in a field”, and I don’t look at women and think “make me a sandwich” (unless of course they work at Subway), but apparently I’m a horrific racist, misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic bigot purely due to my skin colour, genitals and sexual orientation.

(You may take this apology with as much sarcasm as you feel is necessary.)

Please don’t try to blame an entire demographic for your subjective experiences. We don’t like being told we’re second class citizens by everybody in positions of power over us. We weren’t alive during the slave trade, we never told women that they weren’t allowed to vote, the vast majority couldn’t give less of a toss what you stick in whom so long as you both enjoy it. All we ask is that you afford us the same courtesy.

Bibleography

[1] Being A Female Gamer - Samantha Stockin - Wordpress 16/07/2017 - https://thisisaboutblog.wordpress.com/2017/07/16/being-a-female-gamer/

[2] thezoepost - Wordpress 16/08/2014 - https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/

[3] We Might Be Witnessing The 'Death of An Identity' - Luke Plunkett - Kotaku 28/08/2017 - http://kotaku.com/we-might-be-witnessing-the-death-of-an-identity-1628203079

[4] Exposed: The Secret Mailing List of the Gaming Journalism Elite - Milo Yiannopoulos - Breitbart 17/09/2014 - http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/17/exposed-the-secret-mailing-list-of-the-gaming-journalism-elite/

[5] Internet Aristocrat - Quinnspiracy Theory [Mirror] - GamerGaters on Steam - Youtube 06/12/2014 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz--i3M4PVk

#Long Form Essay #Gamergate #vyvian james

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ruminativerabbi · 6 years ago

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Jews. And Pacific Islanders. And Gay People. And Hispanics....

As everybody surely knows by now, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution last week that condemned more or less every conceivable kind of prejudice imaginable…including anti-Semitism. It was, admittedly, a bold move forward for our courageous Congresspeople. But this is only the beginning! Reliable sources have informed me (yes, me personally) that Congress is thinking of granting women the vote within the next few weeks. And then, possibly, of outlawing chattel slavery as well in our great land. Who knows where this could all end? Eventually, they might even repeal Prohibition. Hardy-har-har!

I’m not really laughing. And neither is anyone who takes the moral foundation of the republic seriously and worries, as any thoughtful homeowner should, about cracks and fissures in the once-rock-solid foundation of democratic ideals and republican principles upon which the structure yet stands. It would be impossible to say that the resolution was not a good thing. But the background against which that good thing was accomplished is suggestive of harsh winds blowing through our land and our nation’s capital. And that part of the story is extremely worrying to me.

The resolution was originally formulated as a single-barreled rebuke specifically of anti-Semitism and was widely understood to constitute an effort by the Democrats in the House of Representatives to distance themselves from the anti-Semitic tweets of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota). She herself was delicately left unmentioned in the text of the resolution. But that seems not much to have mattered, as her supporters all understood easily whom this was all about. And so, feeling unable publicly to oppose anti-Semitism, they opted for Plan B…and ended up insisting that the resolution be rewritten to condemn not only irrational prejudice against Jews, but also against Sikhs. And Hindus. And black people. And non-black people of color. And Hispanic people. And Muslims. And Pacific Islanders. (Is that even a thing, prejudice against people born in the Pacific?) And the LGBTQ community. And Asian Americans. To read the resolution, which is seven pages long, click here. Or, read ahead and let me talk you through it.

The resolution duly mentions some non-anti-Semitic incidents and makes specific reference to the horrific attack in 2015 on the church in Charleston in which nine innocent black worshipers were murdered. But mostly it was about anti-Semitism. The text makes specific reference to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. And it makes mention of the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last October in which eleven people were killed by a shooter who declared openly that his ultimate wish was for “all Jews to die.” The text then goes on to take note of a truly unbelievable statistic, that a stunning 58.1% of all “religious-based” hate crimes are directed against Jewish people or institutions. (Pretty good for a group that makes up something like 2.1% of the national population!) Even I, whom no one could possibly accuse of excessive optimism, was shocked by that statistic. Maybe there really is more of a problem here than any of us wants to admit.

The resolution defines anti-Semitism in an interesting way too, specifically noting that anti-Jewish prejudice includes “blaming Jews as Jews when things go wrong; calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or extremist view of religion; or making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotyped allegations about Jews.” I’m not sure who wrote those words, but it all sounds right to me. Still, it’s the first clause that seems the worthiest of taking seriously: blaming Jews as Jews when things go wrong was precisely what the Nazis did to garner public support in the 1930s and it is, of all the specific versions of anti-Jewish prejudice mentioned, probably—at least in the long run—the most pernicious. Good for the House to have recognized that!

The text goes on to talk briefly about the appearance of anti-Semitic tropes of various sorts in the media, the public promotion of the bizarre fantasy that American Jews control the U.S. government or seek world domination, and the scapegoating of Jews by racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the America First Committee. And then, finally, we get down right to it as the text of the resolution leaves the general and focuses specifically on the matter at hand, rebuking Ilhan Omar’s tweets without mentioning their source by name.

This is the crux of the matter because, by unmistakably referencing the tweets, the resolution is equally clearly addressing the (unnamed) tweeter when it unambiguously condemns the practice of “accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel or to the Jewish community than to the United States” and specifically categorizes that as constituting anti-Semitism “because it suggests that Jewish citizens cannot be patriotic Americans and trusted neighbors,” which opinion, we read, is particularly offensive given the fact that “Jews have loyally served our Nation every day since its founding, whether in public or community life or in military service.”

And then the text, again without mentioning names, turns to a different congressperson, Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) and addresses the topic of dual loyalty. (To access my letter about Representative Tlaib and her willingness to raise the dual loyalty canard, click here.) First, we are given a number of instances in which the dual loyalty canard has been brought out by people eager to malign one or many who belonged to a minority faith. Specific mention is made of Alfred Dreyfus and John F. Kennedy, of the interment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War and instances of anti-Muslim prejudice. (Some of the statistics in that regard are also shocking: a 99% increase in hate crimes directed against Muslim Americans between 2014 and 2016, mosque bombings in three different states, and, most alarming of all, actual planned mass attacks against Muslims in Kansas in 2016, Florida in 2017, and New York in 2019.)

When the resolution finally gets to say what it is actually proposing, it returns to the dual loyalty issue by formally rejecting “the perpetuation of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the U.S. and around the world, including the pernicious myth of dual loyalty and foreign allegiance, especially in the context of support for the United States-Israel alliance.” Special reference is made to the fact that the United States government maintains an individual designated as the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. And the document wraps up with a call to all public officials to live up to the “transcendent principles of tolerance, religious freedom, and equal protection as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the first and 14th amendments to the Constitution.” (The Fourteenth Amendment is the one that guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law and protects against the deprivation of life, liberty or property, without the due process of law.)

That all sounds almost intensely uncontroversial. So why was the resolution not unanimously adopted? Yes, it passed handily. But twenty-three members of Congress voted against it, all Republicans. A twenty-fourth, Steven King (R-Iowa), who was stripped of his committee assignments following comments endorsing white supremacy, voted “present.” A quick survey of the nay-sayers’ websites yields the conclusion that none voted against it because he or she is in favor of bigotry or prejudice, but because of a sense that there was something peculiar and intensely worrisome about the inability of the House just to condemn anti-Semitism without feeling obliged concomitantly to condemn every other conceivable form of prejudice they could think of. (To see an interesting survey of the twenty-three by Ewan Palmer that was published on the Newsweek website earlier this week, click here.) Is anti-Semitism not something worth condemning without reference to other forms of prejudice? Would any decent person ever say that about racism directed against black people, that it feels somehow wrong just to condemn it on its own demerits without buttressing the sentiment with reference to other kinds of prejudice as well? No one would! Nor should anyone. And yet…we had people saying precisely that last week about a resolution condemning just anti-Semitism.

I find myself on both sides of that argument. On the one hand, I feel eager to find good in a resolution that, after all, loudly and clearly condemns anti-Jewish sentiment and the violence such sentiment all too often breeds. But I am also made extremely uneasy by the apparent fact that the Democratic leadership in the house felt it impossible to condemn anti-Semitism at all unless the condemnation included references to what reads like a list of every other kind of bigotry imaginable.

Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman at the center of the controversy, seems to spend her day sending out anti-Semitic tweets and then apologizing for inadvertently offending anyone. She responds to criticism, including sharp criticism by members of her own party, by presenting herself as a naïf who keeps accidentally using anti-Semitic tropes to make the point that Israel’s supporters in the Congress are the unwitting dupes of their masters at AIPAC (standing in here for the Elders of Zion in more traditional anti-Semitic literature) rather than accepting that people of intelligence, moral maturity, and political insight choose to stand with Israel because it is our only reliable ally in the Middle East and, even more to the point, because the right of Jewish people to chart their own destiny forward in a Jewish state in their own Jewish homeland is reasonable and just. Israel has more vicious enemies to deal with than Ilhan Omar. But the fact that it was deemed impolitic to bring a resolution featuring a simple, forceful condemnation of anti-Semitism to the floor of the House is a troubling comment on how things are in these United States as we move past the eightieth anniversary of Kristallnacht and ask ourselves, yet again, why the Jews of Germany didn’t respond more vigorously to the tides that would eventually engulf them utterly.

#Ilhan Omar #Anti-Semitism #Rashida Tlaib

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aridara · 8 years ago

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Part 2 of my reply to @literally--hitler. To recap: I’ve asked people who defend the Nazis’ right to “free speech” -

Can you name one single group (a workplace, a political party, a website, an entire culture…) where hate speech and harassment was permitted because “FREEZE PEACH”, that did NOT quickly became overrun by bigotry, with said bigotry getting more present and more aggressive?

- L--H wrote a bullshit answer, and I’m replying to it.

Part 1 is here.

...marxists who advocate for violence against huge portions of the population get a pass.

"Stalinists". L--H meant "Stalinists".

And since bigots - especially Nazi and alt-right-leaning bigots - love to label any opposition as “cultural marxism”: no, this isn’t enough to make me hate all left-wingers.

it doesnt even do much about actual neo-nazis...

Unbelievably, L--H got one thing correct.

& only occasionally focuses on anti-sjws & alt-righters who have gotten too popular instead.

Let me guess three names of such anti-sjws and/or alt-righters that got banned for being “too popular": cultureshift, takashi0, your-uncle-dave.

By the way: the alt-right is literally steeped in and/or colludes with white supremacists, anti-semites, Neo-Nazis, Islamophobies, homophobies, white nationalists, and anti-feminists.

& yet, for all the toxic aspects of tumblr & for all we joke about what a “hellsite” it is, those people are in the minority.

I seriously boggle at this part, because L--H has just spent painting multiple groups as raging bigots that go completely unstopped, and that therefore should be opposed... and then deny it to be a problem. Like, pick one - either it’s a problem, or it isn’t.

Here's the thing: Tumblr took a long time implementing a decent reporting and blocking system; in that time, guess what happened?! The bigotry steadily increased, with bigots continuing to spread lies about, threaten and attack their targets, and driving said targets to leave the website. Even though the "report" function is still mostly useless except in the most blatant cases, the block function helped a whole fucking lot in cutting the bigotry away from its targets. Hell, just by judging by how the bigots turned from "If you don't like what I'm telling you, just ignore me" to "If you block me, you're a coward" indicates that they do know that the blocking is a tool that actually helps the victims of bigotry.

& of course thats how it works. most people arent neo-nazis or “kill all men” types. or do you think they are?

That's not what I've said. I've said that bigots, if left unchecked, tend to drive away everyone else. This isn't rocket science.

I’ve cutted out the rest of L--H’s paragraph, since it was, in my own words, "someone having sex with a strawman of their own creation”. I hope at least it was consensual.

inb4 “muh third reich”. shut up & read some actual history on the subject. the nazis didnt come to power by civil debate. they came to power because violence had been normalized as a part of politics at that point in german history.

Question: how, pray, did the bigotry of Nazis became normalized?

Answer: Because Nazis were allowed a platform DESPITE their violence; the Nazis then used said platform to normalize their violence against minorities such as Jews and the disabled, and allow it to enter the institutions.

Here, have a couple of articles on the matter.

now, just to put what this assclown is asking for in perspective, lets take a look at some of the things that have been called “hate speech” recently, since hes already pulled the “muh slippery slope dont real” argument:

criticizing of the actions of a protest movement (womens march, blm, antifa)-

This tidbit was accompained by pictures of a couple of tweets from “Jon Jafari”, where said Jon literally referred to multiple pacific mass protests of an U.S. President as an "insurrection". Not "protest", "insurrection".

Note that L--H seems to believe that declaring the women’s march - which was absolutely pacific (mostly because the police has more problems justifying violence against a group mostly composed by white women, than justifying violence against a group mostly composed by black people) - to be an “insurrection” is absolutely A-OK. That confirms it: bigots don’t take offense to oppressed people protesting their oppression in the wrong way. They take offense to oppressed people protesting their oppression in any way, including “Could you please not do that?”.

Not to mention that it doesn't matter that, regardless of the fact that Trumaraparaparapompappah was democratically elected*, he still is a masssively racist and bigoted individual with zero self-control towards any attack to his ego. (*: Despite the fact that he lost the popolar vote by the biggest amount in history.)

criticizing a large, powerful political movement (feminism)-

This was accompained by a slice of an article that called out Sargon of Akkad for his relation with the Alt-Right. Feminism isn’t mentioned anywhere in said slice.

The "alt-right" is steeped in neo-Nazism. Hell, its founder Richard Spencer believes that White people need to take back America via "peaceful ethnic cleansing*" and once published uncritically an essay named "Is Black Genocide Right?"**, among other things. (*: There has never been a “peaceful” ethnic cleansing in history.) (**: According to said essay, the genocide of black people does have positive points.)

As for Sargon of Akkad, despite having some genuinely progressive and/or liberal positions, also pulled shit like claiming that racism and sexism do not exist in the West despite any evidence of the contrary, or supporting the harassment campaign GamerGate.

numerous political speeches on college campuses, including by a speaker who has specifically denounced white nationalism

This specifically refers to Milo Yiannopolous, who is a fucking transphobe who tried to appease to neo-Nazis multiple times. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, but claims to not be a duck, it's still a fucking duck.

a man wearing a medal his father was awarded for resisting soviet occupation of hungary

So, I've actually checked this one, and apparently people assumed that Gorka was a Nazi sympathizer on the basis of the following:

The medal is the Order of Vitéz, or Order of the Valiant. During the WW2 period, there had been a schism in the Order, with some members opposing the Nazis and others collaboring with them.

Gorka is a far-right-leaning Islamophobe.

He explicitly stated that he and the Trump staff will keep using the "fake news" accusation - regardless of whether those news are actually false or not - until the media stops attacking Trump.

offensive jokes, or more accurately, jokes that someone took offense to, since taking offense is a choice-

This coming from someone who takes offense at "down with cis". Nah, dipshit, if the audience doesn't laugh, it's because you made a shitty joke.

But anyway, this tidbit in particular is about Disney deciding to sever ties with PewDiePie after he made a video where he paid two unsuspecting guys to make a "Death to All Jews" "joke". Because apparently, private companies have no right to decide "Nah, we don't want to do this anymore" even if they have no legal obligation to actually "do this". </sarcasm> Newsflash: "right to free speech" is not "right to force a private person/company to give you their platform".

having a livestream with the wrong sort of person

I honestly have no idea what L--H is talking about, mostly because they do a fucking shitty job at gathering sources. But given the levels of honesty so far, I guess it was something along the lines of "X had a livestream with Y who is an asshole; people pointed Y's assholery to X; X doesn't care".

actually enforcing the current united states immigration laws

I'm counting this as a double lie. First lie: Trump didn't enforce the current US laws, he made new laws on top of the old ones (which, I remind you, are already one of the strictest immigration laws in the entire world). Second lie: L--H is assuming that those laws were reasonable. They weren’t - those laws were massively bullshit* and have been rightfully declared uncostitutional.

*: Some examples of said bullshit: If you were already in the system and asking for a visa or a green card, but didn't get it yet, you're fucked. If you got a visa/green card, but no US citizenship yet, you're fucked. If you had a double citizenship where at least one country is one of the banned ones, you're still fucked. It doesn't matter if you never ever saw that banned country.

supporting the current president of the united states

Here's the thing: Trump is racist, sexist, and overly bigoted. That was evident well before the election, and was made abundantly clear during the electoral race. Which means that anyone who willingly voted for Trump belongs to one of these categories:

Knew about Trump's bigotry, and thought it was a point in his favor. These voters were bigots.

Knew about Trump's bigotry, and thought it was a point against him, but still voted for him because of the other stuff he promised. These voters were willing to ignore blatant bigotry in order to get a President that they liked.

Knew about Trump's bigotry, but thought that he only did so because “he only does that to convince people to vote for him”. These voters were willing to vote for someone who thought being a blatant bigot was justified. Also, these voters had no idea whatsoever what Trump's "real" policies were. If you couldn't trust Trump when he said bigoted things because "he only said that so that people will vote him", then you couldn't trust Trump when he said "reasonable" things, because he might've done that solely so that people would've voted him.

Didn’t know about Trump’s bigotry, despite it being absolutely evident and documented. These voters were massively ignorant.

sharing pictures of a cartoon frog

This ones refers to Pepe le Frog. Specifically, it refers to when Wendy’s reblogged a Pepe meme without realizing it was connected to the Alt-Right. It almost certainly wasn’t done because Wendy’s is neo-Nazi, but sure as heck their staff didn’t bother to learn about the meme.

Fun fact: that the Pepe le Frog meme is now absolutely connected to alt-right movements is not up to debate.

drinking milk

How niceexpected of L--H to not give any context to whatever the fuck they're saying. Unfortunately for L--H, I am not nice to bigots, therefore I’ve decided to give said context:

Some white supremacists think white ethnic identity has a geographic, historical correlation with the body's tolerance for milk — specifically, the production of the lactase enzyme that allows humans to break down lactose. On 4chan, the internet's hate speech hit factory, one anonymous poster laid this thesis out using the following graphic from a study in Nature, showing hotspots of where certain populations have higher milk tolerances. The discussion thread also contained references to seemingly benign academic studies of "Lactose tolerance in a Slavic population," conversations about whether modern industry has tainted the purity of milk, and several milk-based poems about white pride.

There are numerous threads where white supremacy claims milk-drinking as a new staple of ethnic purity. Source: 4chan

When the brigade of trolls at the LaBeouf installation were accused on camera of racism by Paperboy Prince, a famous Washington Wizards fan and entertainer who has since become a top target of 4chan derision, they claimed it was actually a stance against the "vegan agenda." Judging from the eugenicist rhetoric across online hate speech communities like 4chan and 8chan, it appears that the "vegan agenda" is a potential proxy term for conspiracy theories about a globalist Jewish agenda. But given the sheer mass of alt-right accounts spewing out calls of "Down with the vegan agenda," it could refer to any number of right-wing targets. The whole milk-chugging, anti-vegan narrative is complicated by a number of factors, not least of which being that Adolf Hitler was possibly vegetarian for a short time, or that there are many places in Africa where milk is a dietary staple. Then again, white racial purity is a fragile pseudo-science, so trying to find a sound explanation is a tall order anyway.

...& if you think no journal out there will publish an article about how a famous person is sending secret white supremacist messages by drinking milk because that famous person said something they disagreed with, or because it was a slow news day, you clearly havent been paying attention. not being interested in a crappy looking remake made you a sexist last year.

Not liking a remake solely because there are now women in the main roles does make you a misogynist. Deal with it.

making a video sarcastically depicting yourself as a nazi to mock the fact that people keep calling you a nazi

No, people called out PewDiePie because he thought that making Holocaust jokes was funny. By the way: do you think the Holocaust to be funny?

...and then we have this gem:

[A snippet of an image that states "Apologies can camouflage messages that may still be received and celebrated by hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center says."]

that just says it all. apologies are hate. war is peace. freedom is slavery. ignorance is strength.

Fun fact: there is no trace of that quote from the original source (supposedly, the SPLC). Which means that is quite likely that quote was completely made up, and L--H believed it to be a real thing that the SPLC said. Congratulations.

I’ve cutted out the last paragraph, which can be summed up with "Insults, insults, insults, and a drawn picture of a vomiting girl for some reason".

#debunking a lot of bullshit #antifeminism #racism #tw neo-nazism

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billcoberly · 8 years ago

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The Silliest Take of the Week: 1/29/17

Three weeks going! I’m already beating the odds I gave myself in my description of this project.

Let’s get right to it! We’ve got some nice, spicy takes here this week.

Silliest Twitter Meltdown, Unless It’s Ironic Performance Art, In Which Case: Best Twitter Ironic Performance Art

Tim Marchman, A Short Series of Tweets, Twitter, 1/24/2017

This probably isn’t technically a Silly Take, but given that it exists at the intersection of Silly Internet Things; Political Nonsense; and Internet Tough Guy Posturing, I think it’s well within the #STOW ambit.

Apparently Senator Ted Cruz has organized a weekly-ish basketball game with some other Senators. Ex-Gawker sportsblog Deadspin thought this was funny, and asked for photographic proof of Ted Cruz playing basketball, which is a very Deadspin thing to do. Ted Cruz (or a social media manager working for Ted Cruz, but who cares) responded to a tweet about this with a picture of Duke University basketball player Grayson Allen, who looks sort of like Cruz. Deadspin’s social media person responded in typical Deadspin style:

Ted Cruz in turn responded with an Anchorman gif (”Boy, that escalated quickly!”) and that should probably have been it.

But for Deadspin editor Tim Marchman, this was Too Much, Too Far, and Not Acceptable. (Please note that Marchman is not the one who drafted the initial call for pictures of Senator Cruz playing basketball). Instead, Tim Marchman gave us a series of nine tweets, the most important of which are below:

Now, a part of me hopes that this is Mr. Marchman being deliberately ridiculous in order to take the heat off of a woman (Ms. Feinberg, who drafted the original call for pictures) who was undoubtedly getting a disproportionate and awful amount of hate from Dudes on the Internet, who are, let there be no mistake, The Worst. If that’s the case, then good work, Mr. Marchman, and I apologize.

But I just want to revel for a moment in the gloriousness of “Unsurprising that not one Ted Cruz-supporting cuck/Twitter user is willing to face me in the UFC octagon.” I don’t know if I could find a better way to distill the silliness that is Internet Tough Guy Posturing into <140 characters. If Marchman is being ironic, then I admire his precision. My guess is that he’s not being ironic, given that 100% of the 11 tweets on his twitter feed consist of him whining about this dustup and two contextless RTs of weird things Curt Schilling once said.

Also, as always happens with Internet Tough Guy Posturing, and as several right-wing websites were happy to point out, some people who are apparently Actual Soldiers And/Or UFC Fighters and who like Ted Cruz have offered to take Marchman up on his challenge.

Don’t engage in Internet Tough Guy Posturing, folks. You look silly, and there’s always somebody out there who is bigger than you are and willing to call your bluff.

Most Predictably Tiresome Response to Angry Protests

David French, “This Is What Post-Christian Dissent Looks Like,” National Review, 1/27/2017.

People on the Left are very mad about Donald Trump. Previously, people on the Left were comically excited about Barack Obama. This, according to David French, has something to do with the fact that we’re not very Christian any more:

“This is post-Christian politics to its core. This is the politics one gets when this world is our only home, and no one is in charge but us. There is no sense of proportion.”

Finally:

“Eight years ago, all too many on the left thought that light had come into the darkness. Now they believe the darkness has overcome the light. In reality, the false dawn preceded the false dusk. Our Republic is still built to last, and the hysterical reaction threatens to be worse than the man who triggered it.”

I’ve tried to reread this a few times to figure out the connections French wants to make between protests and whatever the hell “post-Christian dissent” is, but all I can get out of this piece is a long, wet raspberry noise. So, in conclusion: shut up, David.

See also George Will, “Trump and academia actually have a lot in common,” The Washington Post, 1/27/2017.

Most Cringe-Inducing Set of Editorial Retractions

Moira Wegel, “How Ultrasound Became Political,” The Atlantic, 1/24/2017

I’m not willing to suggest that this whole article is really a Silly Take -- its thesis is that the development of ultrasound technology was a useful tool for pro-life advocates and lawmakers, particularly in the context of those condescending laws that require doctors to show women ultrasounds of their fetuses before they have an abortion. There may well be some value in this train of thought, and I certainly learned some things reading this article.

That is, I thought I learned some things, until I saw the amazing and ever-growing list of corrections that had to be made to this article after it was published. Now I’m not sure I learned anything from this article, because I’m not sure the author of this article can be trusted to be sure what color the sky is:

“*This article originally stated that there is "no heart to speak of" in a 6-week-old fetus. In fact, the heart has already begun to form by that point in a pregnancy. The article also originally stated that an expectant mother participating in a study decided to carry her pregnancy to term even after learning that the fetus was suffering from a genetic disorder, when in fact the fetus was only at high risk for a genetic disorder. The article originally stated, as well, that Bernard Nathanson headed the National Right-to-Life Committee and became a born-again Christian. Nathanson was active in, but did not head the committee, and was never a born-again Christian, but rather a Roman Catholic. The article originally stated that many doctors in 1985 claimed fetuses had no reflexive responses to medical instruments at 12 weeks. Finally, the article originally stated that John Kasich vetoed a bill from Indiana's legislature, instead of Ohio's legislature, after which the article was incorrectly amended to state that Mike Pence had vetoed the bill. We regret the errors.“

It’s not every day that an article for The Atlantic manages to mix up “born-again” Christians with Roman Catholics, misstate facts about fetal development, and get royally confused about who the governor of Ohio is. A little bit of fact-checking goes a long way, folks.

Biggest Grudge Against an Anodyne Celebrity

Amy Zimmerman, “Taylor Swift’s Spineless Feminism,” The Daily Beast, 1/23/2017

Taylor Swift mostly doesn’t have public political opinions, and Amy Zimmerman has gotten weirdly mad about this before for The Daily Beast. I think about Taylor Swift about as often as I think about throw pillows -- they seem nice enough, and some people seem to have surprisingly strong opinions about them, but I can’t see a lot of need for them in my life. But for Amy Zimmerman, the fact that Taylor Swift hasn’t taken a public position on Donald Trump is a Big Problem that must be Written About At Length.

Look, I have read some legit critiques about Swift’s brand of feminism before, and I’m not really looking to come out swinging for T-Swift. But it’s weird to get this worked up about a pop star��s apparent lack of opinions:

“Courtesy of the Instagram, we learned that Swift endorses democracy and cold-shoulder blouses. But in terms of candidates, it was impossible to deduce if she’d voted for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, or Jill freaking Stein.”

who cares who taylor swift voted for, amy

After citing the fact that T-Swift has a small group of neo-Nazi fans who like her because she looks like their ideal woman, Zimmerman says:

“If you’re not overtly on board with the resistance, then you’re tacitly chill with being proclaimed an Aryan goddess.”

Other good moments are when she gets confused about Swift ex-boyfriend Tom Hiddleston’s acting career:

“Tom Hiddleston has played many roles, from Thor to Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.”

And look, this doesn’t matter, but Tom Hiddleston didn’t play Thor. Snark about anodyne celebrities looks even more petty if you can’t be bothered to get basic facts right.

Finally:

“In hindsight, [Hiddleston’s speech] proves that HiddleSwift may have been more compatible than we ever thought. Can’t you just picture the face of watered-down feminism and 2017’s proudest white savior, taking a break from swapping spit to congratulate one another on staying so woke?”

Blech.

The Silliest Take of the Week: 1/29/2017

Filip Bondy, “How Vital Are Women? This Town Found Out as They Left to March,” The New York Times, 1/22/2017.

Here’s the pitch: Filip Bondy wants to show that women are important. This is a good thing: women are important.

Here’s the problem: Filip Bondy wants to show that women are important by highlighting the plights of their poor, abandoned husbands who had to take care of the kids by themselves for --

listen, if you need to take a moment to collect yourself, that’s fine, this is pretty shocking --

these husbands had to take care of their kids for twelve full hours while the women went away to march for some weird chick thing. Can you imagine? Really goes to show how important women are.

Do you think I’m overstating things? Here is the thesis paragraph:

“In their wake, they left behind a progressive bedroom community with suddenly skewed demographics. Routines were radically altered, and many fathers tried to meet weekend demands alone for a change. By participating in the marches and highlighting the importance of women’s rights, the women also demonstrated, in towns like Montclair, their importance just by their absence.”

those poor bastards, having to meet weekend demands alone

“Usually, these chores and deliveries were shared by both parents, in a thoroughly modern way. On this day, many dads were left to juggle schedules on their own.”

the humanity

“Steve Politi, a sports columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, missed the Rutgers men’s basketball game on Saturday to stay home with his two children. He did the soccer-game thing, set up play dates (arguably, cheating a bit) and warmed up some leftover pizza for lunch. He also cleaned the refrigerator.”

the refrigerator, Linda, the refrigerator -- I cleaned the goddamn refrigerator while you were marching for uteruses or whatever, I deserve more respect around here

“After his dutiful Saturday, Mr. Coyle went off to play tennis on Sunday morning. It was part of the deal he had struck with his wife.”

a fair and equitable bargain. Mr. Coyle is truly a just sovereign over his household.

“The buses returned late Saturday night from Washington to a quiet, heartfelt welcome. By Sunday morning, most of the women were back to their routines in Montclair. The JaiPure Yoga Studio reported full attendance, and many fathers exhaled in relief.”

“and in that instant, all returned to normal. the seas ceased to boil, the locusts retreated over the horizon, and the wailing of children could no longer be heard. the villagers mourned their dead, but exulted in the knowledge that the women were home, and finally, all would be well again.”

Maybe, just maybe, if you’re trying to write an article about how women are cool and neat and important and Trump is bad, don’t manage to make it sound like men having to stay with their kids for a Saturday is some kind of Great, Heroic Sacrifice.

Thanks for reading! And thanks to Braden, Amanda, Tim, and Joel for submitting Silly Takes. As always, don’t forget to send your favorite ridiculous takes to [email protected], and have a great week!

#STOW #Silliest Take of the Week

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