Wednesday, June 07, 2023

Today's News: Fighting Back


I am seeing some positive signs that people are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore. Specifically, I mean that people are realizing that we cannot continue to politely tolerate anti-gay anti-trans bashing while we wait for conservatives to come to their senses. 
Nope, its time to fight back. 
Click here for the Pride Defense Guide and a two-page Pride Defense Handout:
Pride defence is the act of going to any Pride event to protect the 2SLGBTQ+community from far-right activists who show up.
Pride Defenders are the brave people who show up to counter the far-right, using many different tactics. Some have used spectacle and created a party-like atmosphere with dancing and music to keep the far-right out, while others have blocked them from accessing events using their bodies.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s better to take one action than freeze up because doing everything feels impossible. With that in mind, we’ve organized this guide into three parts—Before Pride, During Pride, and After Pride—and within each section, we’ve highlighted the one or two points we would suggest prioritizing. We recognize not everyone will be able to participate in the on-the-ground action on the day of the event, so we have taken care to include points that folks can participate in from home.
While this guide specifically refers to Pride events and defences, the information can be used to prepare you for many kinds of defences or counters against the far-right.
The guide is just in time, because violence and right-wing rage appear to be increasing:
The federal government is stepping up:
"Hate is on the rise and our communities are scared. It speaks volumes that we're at a point where we have to come here and announce unprecedented safety precautions… But we shouldn't have to be here at all," said LGBTQ2S+ advocacy group Momentum president Fae Johnstone during Monday's announcement, calling for all levels of government to take note and respond accordingly.
Asked what the federal government attributes this rise to, Boissonnault pointed directly to ideologically- motivated violent extremism taking root in Canada.
"Something has taken hold post-pandemic. There is an anchor, there's a rancor, there's a rage, there's an anger that we have to step up against, and defend against," he said.
Other commentary: 
Oliver Willis writes The Right's Anti-Trans Playbook Was Used Against Blacks And Others Before: They're Always Wrong And We Have To Fight Them Until We Win
...On every single battle for equal and human rights in the entire history of the United States and the world, conservative forces have been on the wrong side of the equation.
...They’re intellectually bankrupt, small-minded bigots.
But what needs to be understood is that the wrongness of conservatism is not self-evident. That is the mistake that liberalism makes far too often. We assume because it is clearly wrong and because it has failed in the past that it will just fail and collapse under its own weight.
This is a mistake. Women’s rights didn’t just happen. The civil rights movement had to exist and it suffered a horrific death toll. The battle for gay and lesbian equality is not yet concluded.
A war of ideology has to be fought and to sit on the sidelines, assuming victory, is to provide aid and comfort to the darkest forces in society.
George Takei writes an open letter to Target:
Look, we get it.
As a big retailer, you have never encountered a situation like this, where a small but vicious group of haters have come after you directly. They’ve even filmed themselves trashing Pride merchandise inside your stores. Truly horrifying.
Meanwhile, right wing influencers have egged these bullies on. And it has escalated quickly—with cowardly bomb threats called into your stores—all because you wanted to show your support for the LGBTQ+ community.
You were hurting no one, standing up for what you believe, but now you’re under attack.
We get it because, well, welcome to our lives.
LGBTQ+ people are facing attacks and threats as never before.
...Pride is about standing up and standing authentically. Pride does not move to the far corner, out of sight....
....Bullies are the same the world round, and they must be dealt with the same.
You cannot give them what they want, because they will only come back, demanding more.
But here is the good news—it is not too late.
Every friendship hits obstacles, when there are betrayals and hurt, but the important thing is to turn around and do the right thing for your friends, and as soon as possible. If the bonds are strong to begin with, forgiveness and a re-embrace can soon follow once the right steps are taken.
We do not believe Target to be only a fair-weather friend, ready to abandon our community the minute things get tough for us.
It is understandable that, when faced with such hate and vitriol for the first time, your first instinct was to recoil and withdraw. We have been there, and we get it. And we know this is especially true when a company wants to protect its employees from harm and abuse.
It is our hope that, upon reflection, the true mettle and values of your company will shine through....
Media-watcher Dan Froomkin writes During this Pride month, journalists should be ashamed
It’s bad enough that our elite newsrooms normalize book banning, teacher gagging, history erasing and other clear signs of incipient fascism. It’s bad enough they falsely equate hostages and hostage-takers.
What’s even worse is the calm and measured coverage of the ongoing assault on the personhood of a significant portion of the American population.
After decades of progress, there is now an all-out war on queerness. Where, any normal person must ask, is the outrage? ...
The short answer is that elite newsroom leaders feel that outrage about anything is unseemly – because it would appear to be “taking sides.”
Sustained outrage is even more unacceptable. To the people who consider unflappability the ultimate journalistic achievement, sustained outrage is a symptom of hysteria....
As the Republican “culture war” has turned into a full-fledged battle against basic human rights, the political media’s continued insistence on covering it like just another political tactic is enabling it.
That’s right: Journalistic restraint is aiding and abetting the dehumanizing of gay and trans people by a bunch of evil fanatics.
Guardian media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote recently that “transgender individuals… are continually portrayed – including too often in the media — as some sort of dreaded societal problem about which something must be done.” And, she wrote, “The mainstream news media, far too often, plays along – running wide-eyed stories that fail to identify what’s really happening here.”...
Defector is starting a series called Histories of Transition:
In 2008, I went to see a doctor far out in the suburbs. Her website was devoid of transgender anything, and the design was stuck in 1998—scrolling text, visit counter—but the Internet message boards said she was a good doctor for hormones. Funnily enough, I still wasn't even ready to take the stuff. I just wanted information! I think I wanted to talk to a real-life human who wouldn't tell me I was a freak.
...“I can definitely answer some questions about hormones,” the doctor said. “I’ve worked with transsexuals for years, I’ve had hundreds of transsexual patients. I am one. Most people don’t know that.”
I didn’t.
She looked beautiful.
I thought, I'll never look like that....
..."If you don’t smoke and you take a baby aspirin every day, most people do pretty well. And then you’ll just be another dumb woman.”
The point of Defector's series, I think, is to introduce trans people as people -- someone that anybody could know, nothing unusual or odd or exotic, just people trying to live their lives like everybody else.

Moving on, here's a good point made by Parker Molloy in his substack newsletter The Present Age that I must highlight -- it illustrates the kind of absurd false equivalence we see in journalism all the time.
First, Molloy quotes from a recent Washington Post article where he highlights what political reporter Michael Scherer is saying about Washington "conspiracy theories":
The conspiratorial style of politics — the idea that the powerful secretly shape events with malevolent goals — runs like white noise through American history, ... Trump blames “the deep state” for his troubles. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) points to the “ultrarich.” DeSantis describes a corporate, regulatory, academic and media elite surreptitiously spreading the “woke mind virus.”
Molloy continues:
Hmmm…
One of these things is not like the others / One of these things doesn’t belong / Can you tell which thing is not like the other / By the time I finish this song?
So, the three “conspiracies” expressed here are:
  • Donald Trump believes there is a nefarious “deep state” that worked to undermine his presidency from within the government.
  • Ron DeSantis believes there is a “woke mind virus” that is infecting people and institutions, getting them to adopt left-wing beliefs they wouldn’t otherwise hold.
  • Bernie Sanders believes that the extraordinarily wealthy are responsible for shaping society in important ways, making themselves richer at the expense of everyday people.
This, friends, is an example of false equivalency.
I imagine that as Scherer sat down to write this piece, he realized that if his only two examples of conspiracy theories were Republicans, then people on the right would claim he was biased.
So, in service of appearing unbiased, he plugged in an example of someone on the left saying something so well-documented and uncontroversial to the point of being boring, framing it as a “conspiracy” on par with the two reality-lacking examples he planned to cite.
Either that or he genuinely believes the idea that people like Jeff Bezos (who just so happens to own the Post — golly, what a coincidence) use their wealth to try to shape society and enrich themselves is just as plausible as there being a “woke mind virus” that is “infecting” people and institutions.
Either way, this is just shoddy journalism and demonstrates a bias in favor of the right. Not good!
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1 comment:

e.a.f. said...

"America is falling apart", Yes, so is Canada. In Hope, B.C. they have had a Pride crosswalk for 4 years. This year it was painted again and defaced. The next day people were out repainting it.

Some people think its O.K. to violate the rights of others, but at some point they may come for you and yours over something else. As a society we need to protect everyone's rights as outlined in our Constituion. If we don't things will get ugly and it might be too late to correct things.

Great idea, fighting back is the only way to send a message. Fighting doesn't have to be a physical thing, it can be writing, boycotting, etc.
As some one once said, we can't control how people think, but we sure can control how people act. Its why we have drunk driving laws, laws against stealing, etc.

LGBTQ, 2 people have the right to enjoy their lives just like other Canadians, withot harassment, violence, etc.

Its like we are going back to the 70s, 60's, 50s, etc.

8:19 pm

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