Back from Netroots Nation, and while I'm still a little tired, I'm energized as usual after the conference. As many of you no doubt know, the pathetic shadow conference Right Online was closer than ever this year. And by "pathetic shadow conference", I mean it. Every year, Right Online finds out where Netroots Nation is and schedules near there, because there's something about being conservative that requires being childish and petulant. This year, it was especially ugly, because the Right Online was closer than ever to Netroots Nation, and they were in fact in the Hilton that many of us---including myself---were staying at. Which means that the childish, petulant behavior kept spilling over. And also that I ran into Andrew Breitbart downtown and took a picture of him standing with a friend (with his permission, of course!). Breitbart showed up at Netroots Nation, which is irritating because while the vast majority of attendees react to such behavior the way you should---with scorn bordering on indifference---a handful of people got provoked and taped themselves yelling stupid shit at him. Which is what he no doubt hoped would happen, and leave media with the assumption that "both sides" are bad, even though only one side schedules an entire conference for the sole purpose of irritating their opponents.
False equivalence is particularly a problem when you consider that the one incident that everyone heard about was a Right Online attendee harassing some Netroots attendees. The main victim of the harassment told her story in a panel about fighting Islamaphobia (which was, by the way, a great panel that I learned a lot from). She was wearing a hijab while standing outside a bar that was having a Netroots event, talking to some friends, and at least one of her friends was also wearing a hijab, and some dude from a shitty right wing blog rolled up and started to harass her and her friend. When they told him to kindly fuck off, he started taking their pictures. (For what purpose, I'm not sure---he seemed to be under the impression that someone could use the photos as some sort of expose of Netroots Nation, or maybe he thought the police would somehow stop free Americans from wearing what they like as they stand around on the streets of Minneapolis.) At this point, a number of people at the party came to the women's defense, and he was arrested. Marc and I walked up to the club right as the man was being shoved into a cop car, and I said something about it, since something about the situation seemed like it was more than a drunk-asshole-getting-arrested situation. Indeed, it was. And of course, someone got video of much of the confrontation between the man who was harassing the women and the Netroots folks who pushed back. You can see the confrontation (with my Texas buddy Matt Glazer!) starting at 4:30.
I want to highlight that the guy in question is threatening to call Andrew Breitbart, which again I don't completely understand. Does he think Breitbart has some legal authority to stop people from standing in the streets wearing clothing items he disapproves of? I suppose I can see how you'd get confused, since all this happened the day Anthony Weiner resigned. But it's unsettling to see how at least one of Breitbart's fans imbues the man with nearly god-like powers. I'm inclined to think the guy is bluffing, by the way, and was just hoping the threat of calling the Breitbart cops who would make the women pay for wearing hijabs would make them, I don't know, stop or something.
Anyway, the incident was understandably upsetting, and some people reacted by organizing a flash mob at the Hilton. I stood on the second floor and watched it; it was mainly a bunch of people milling around, many in hijabs. But it worked as intended, getting coverage for the incident and giving the protestors a chance to explain their point of view:
Jesse and I got in the elevator with some protestors after the incident and spoke briefly to them; they were excited and a little scared about everything that happened, but felt like they had made their point.
Of course, you can predict the right wing reaction, considering that what happened was a woman claiming a man harassed her: immediately hide behind claims that women are liars and not to be believed. John Hawkins of Right Wing News went straight to that strategy. Believe it or not, I was one of the liberal bloggers he was talking to, as was Jesse. I don't recall if I explained to him that I had seen the guy getting arrested, but you know, if he was so skeptical, he could have asked if we knew anything. By the way, the characterization of Netroots as "90-95% white" is really laughable from someone who was there with Right Online, since when we were talking to him the entire conference was moving from one location to another. But I wouldn't characterize them as 90-95% white, since that figure is way too low.
Hopefully, the right wingers won't be as close next year. While it did provide from some really amusing encounters (liberals are apparently very frightening to ride elevators with!), it's also scary, since there is the unhinged element of conservative activists, and a willingness to make casual death threats, as Melissa Clouthier did on Twitter, when she said, "Bunch of #nn11 folks in the elevator called me the enemy. I reminded that folks on the right pack heat. #ro11."
The Twitter hashtag #mooreandme decidedly and quickly changed tone last night after Michael Moore’s appearance on “Rachel Maddow”. Now it’s becoming an education and reconciliation kind of place, though troll smacking is still going on and Keith Olbermann can’t help but poking his head in. (I can relate.) I think we have all let go of any hope that Naomi Wolf will continue to be anything but a grade A asshole over this; I think she is still unaware how many people who, probably because they don’t know how far she drifted off the farm years ago, she has run off from liking her forever. Now it’s time to regroup and reassess. With links and comments.
To start with, I want to push my own stuff. I have an article up at Slate about the reasons that feminists were/are so angry, and why the information in the Swedish police documents that were leaked demonstrates that the accusations are credible. I use the example of a rape that happened to me 13 years ago to explain exactly why claims about the accusers behavior during and after the alleged rapes do not discredit the allegations. If Texas can think it’s rape, so can Naomi Wolf.
Michael Moore acknowledged Sady Doyle and the fact that she’s the one who made him come around on this issue. I like him a whole lot better now, especially after he made the auditorium sing a song from “The Sound of Music” during commercial break last night, which was close to an unforgiveable offense. But I forgive him, because he actually thanked Sady, instead of just busting out some begrudging apology.
I really enjoyed this post breaking down the way that Twitter functioned as a protest tool in all of this. It has a million great points, but I was especially intrigued by these thoughts, banking off a screenshot of one of Olbermann’s stranger gambits.
Which brings me to the second advantage Twitter affords women: comparative invisibility. In the example above, Keith Olbermann demonstrates a kneejerk (and often quite effective) response to a female opponent—scour her image for something to criticize. Olbermann did his best, but he didn’t have much to work with. Twitter actually offers precious little fodder to those who, if provided with a physical image, would immediately criticize their weight, size, demeanor, etc.
The blogger also notes that women’s voices are hard to use against them. But this made me think in larger terms about how the one quirk of Twitter that’s been much-noted but little understood is how it’s more popular with people from traditionally disenfranchised groups—-women and racial minorities—-than with white dudes, who usually dominate the ranks of these sorts of things. And I wonder if these quirks of Twitter that make this shift towards dialogue and links and away from image empower people who otherwise find themselves subconsciously censoring themselves precisely because they know they’re judged more on the basis of identity? Maybe. Certainly in politics, you see a lot of people mastering the form of Twitter that perhaps don’t feel as empowered in other spaces. I’m open to theories, though!
So, last night on Formspring, someone asked me about the Penny Arcade controversy. I like Penny Arcade, but I confess I don’t read it regularly, because my life as a gamer is a shadow existence mostly built around Rock Band and occasional forays into Mario. So, I was unaware of the controversy, and had to be educated by Jesse. (Thanks, Jesse!) So, the timeline I’ve constructed is this.
1) Penny Arcade writes a comic where the joke is about contrasting the demands of a video game with the moral precepts of the real world. The comic involved the line, “raped to sleep by the dickwolves”. I personally found this joke hilarious, because I’ve played enough video games that I’ve also gone down the path of finding humor in the contrast between the game world and the real world. For those who don’t get it, the humor comes from the fact that video games raise the stakes a lot of the time by having the hero do things like rescue slaves from hell, but the goals often undermine these stakes by having you only save, say, five slaves. “Raped by dickwolves” didn’t bother me—-it’s obviously a play on the long history of imaginative tortures of hell that everyone from Dante to video game writers have come up with.
I did not think this was a “rape joke” in the classic sense of the term, which is a joke where the punch line expresses the idea that raping is awesome. The joke of the comic was that the moral universes painted in video games are often horrific in a way that contrasts with the light-hearted nature of gaming. That strikes me as a perfectly appropriate thing to make fun of, tame even.
2) Someone at Shakesville takes offense. I found the blog post an annoying rationalization for disliking humor in general, which the blogger admits she does. I find the “but rape is real!” argument against jokes of this nature to be a disingenuous one. Slavery is also real, as is murder and general violence. But there’s no way that the blogger would have gotten mad about jokes in those veins, but a joke about a form of torture that is supposed to sound over the top and mystical got her into offended mode.
I’m reporting from NYC at the 2010 BlogHer convention, and it’s my first time attending this event, held this year at the New York Hilton. It is HUGE; it’s like an explosion of women from all walks of blogging life - mom bloggers, young newbies, seasoned women full of energy and activism, lifestyle bloggers, etc.
I’ve yet to attend any sessions; I’ve been so busy with offline networking - there are many areas for just chatting and meeting up. I also had a number of other appointments outside of the con, so that complicated matters a bit.
Welcome Swag
The welcome bag is an enormous burlap bag holding many goodies and promotions, but wow - really heavy on stuff for kids - toys, alarm clocks, grow-a-plants… The item holding 3 cans of Play-Doh was the most amusing - and heaviest goodie by far.
What was really nice is that there was a Swag Exchange room where you could recycle (i.e. dump) the items you didn’t want and pick up ones you liked that others discarded. Well what did you know—the tubbie containing the Play-Doh was overflowing. Note to vendors—bag-dragging goodies that need to travel aren’t popular, even if fun and useful for kids.
Exhibits and atmosphere: this is NOT Netroots Nation
One of the fascinating aspects of BlogHer is that it’s fairly non-political on the surface, but highly political once you scratch that surface. The conference is very mom/kid/family-focused when it comes to the market that the vendors and sponsors target - there are kid-accommodating eco-friendly cars, toys, learning projects…and a whole lot of food, from Hillshire Farms, Jimmy Dean, Healthy Choice…I lost track. You could basically graze the hall and leave full. Also, I have to go back today to check out the skin care and other lifestyle vendors. There was one exhibit with some feminine protection items. I joked on Twitter with Lizz Winstead:
Pam_Spaulding: #blogher10 sponsors: food, everything for baby, autos, lifestyle products…def not #nn10. Totally different feel.
6:07pm, Aug 06 from HootSuite
lizzwinstead: @Pam_Spaulding I’ll be there tomorrow. Curious to compare and contrast. #blogher10 #nn10
6:08pm, Aug 06 from TweetDeck
Pam_Spaulding: @lizzwinstead @Pam_Spaulding A mind-blowing difference. You didn’t see a tampon of the future @ #NN10.
lizzwinstead: @Pam_Spaulding And I don’t have much of a future in the Tampon dept…. #NN10
In all seriousness, the number and variety of corporate sponsors at BlogHer dwarfs those at Netroots Nation. Of course, when you think about it, the level of PC at Netroots—concerns over union issues, corporate responsibility, etc., I would think one advocacy group or another attending NN would have some problem with some of these companies, making it difficult to please everyone.
All of these sponsors are dying to get to the technically adept, wired moms and other women who have a lot of spending power that are attending BlogHer. It’s an aggressive presence of a wide .
There’s no specific targeting of the LBT market at BlogHer; it’s not that there aren’t lesbians here and I’ve seen no trans folk; I’ve spoken to several lesbians, but they are there as moms, which means they fit that target market. So if you’re a child-free, not-straight woman, BlogHer may feel like an odd experience, a dip into a very hetero-centric pool. That said, there’s no homophobic vibe at all; in fact the sisterhood of living in a man’s world is quite powerful politically, and that’s a common thread in the discussions. Women still earn only 77 cents to the dollar that men earn, with women of color earning way less than that. The need for more political involvement and organizing is essential, something Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said during her Q&A (more on that later).
It would be great to see more women of color at BlogHer as well. Netroots Nation has bolstered its POC and LGBT presence (and content) significantly over its five-year existence; women’s issues not so much. Of course these conferences are not equivalent in purpose, but it’s hard not to analyze the differences and similarities in programming and exhibits and what it says about target audiences.
My good friend Joe Sudbay of Americablog and I were interviewed by former Air America radio host Sam Seder while we were at Netroots Nation (you can see me in the background, but my vid isn’t available so far). Joe’s is up, so take a peek.
BTW, I also just put up a FB album called NN 2010 The Homosexual Agenda, “An album of activists, bloggers, and allies gathering to collude on how to overthrow the enablers of the equality status quo.”
It’s a stream of photos from one of the parties that Greg Rae of Living Liberally and Mike Rogers, organizer of the National Blogger and Citizen Journalist Initiative, threw for LGBT bloggers and allies while at Netroots.
It may look like just a party, but think about the LGBT online political power in the room. We’ve been meeting in groups offline for some time, with this conference being one of the most prominent non-LGBT related ones. It dispels the notion that we’re all just a bunch of online armchair critics sitting in Cheetos-stained PJs spouting off. Nearly every person in that room is on the same page strategically (and we know exactly who isn’t), and believe the approaches we are taking are compatible.
Right: With Palm Springs, CA Mayor Steve Pougnet (who is challenging and will defeat Mary Bono Mack), Mike Rogers, Rep. Jared Schutz Polis.
We are human beings who do care about the LGBT and progressive movements, and our roles to play in helping move equality forward. Our progressive colleagues at NN certainly recognized the unprecendented LGBT attendance and cross-pollenation of ideas that Netroots Nation provides, and that we are committed to pushing the envelope. It’s sad we have to with a self-proclaimed LGBT-friendly administration and Congress, but there you have it. Sitting back and waiting for change isn’t cutting it.
And because of the work of Mike Rogers with the National Blogger and Citizen Journalist Initiative pre-conference this year, we had representation from a wide variety of LGBT Beltway legacy orgs and news orgs who sat down with bloggers to bridge some of the communication gaps that are painfully apparent as everyone tries to navigate the new power and communication structures that have quickly emerged and continue to evolve. We’re past the head-in-the-sand time. Now perhaps the White House might think about sending someone to attend next time around.
One of the feminist bloggers who attended my panel on electing more progressive women to office approached me afterwards and was crestfallen that there was only one panel on women in politics and noted how prominent LGBT issues were at this NN. I told her that I’ve been to all but the first NN, and have seen tremendous growth in LGBT influence at NN after starting with just a handful of attendees and no panels on our issues. Building the coalitions and actively pushing your way in the door is the only way to be heard above the many voices and inertia the progressive movement has had toward LGBT (and women’s) issues to date.
***
One last note: I get mobbed by fans/readers at this event; my fellow bloggers call me a “rock star” (ahem, Joe Sudbay). The rock star thing is hilarious.
I do get fan mobbed at NN. Maybe not like Markos, but it’s true that I cannot make it down any corridor without several people wanting a photo of/ with me or an interview. I am very appreciative of being able to meet readers, many of them are lurkers, not commenters. It’s quite humbling when many of these people are actually pols, other bloggers and activists much more important than I am (IMHO). I still don’t get it. That whole ‘imposter syndrome” thing, I guess. But since I am really just an average person working an average job in the real world, it is disconcerting to recognize how popular my online work is to so many. So thank you all; I enjoy meeting and speaking with you.
I can at least report to my wife that no one hit on me in Vegas. I don’t think she has anything to worry about; I’m a rock star without the sex appeal, LOLOLOL.
Having been the victim of not one, but two of the absolute most passive-aggressive tweets I have read in many moons (though not, apparently, the most of Emily Gould’s day!), I thought I would politely decline Emily’s suggestion to subject myself to more of this in private and at greater length than 140 characters, and instead address the actual issue at hand—-her annoying concern trolling of Jezebel . Her argument is, well, let’s start with what she’s really saying and then go with the concern troll gloss. Her main argument is, “Feminists are just jealous that they aren’t hot like Olivia Munn, and they pretend that’s sexism.” Which is, of course, Rush Limbaugh’s definition of feminism, reworked into a less clever formation. But she’s polished up that ancient turd with some concern troll shine. See, she’s just worried that it’s bad for women that Jezebel has a lot of posts talking about the relentless stream of impossible-to-achieve beauty standards. Of course, the only real problem that she seems to have with said impossible-to-achieve beauty standards is that they make other women act like jealous bitches.
Instead of mimicking the old directly anxiety-making model—for example, by posting weight-loss tips and photos of impossibly thin models like a traditional women’s magazine—Jezebel and the Slate and Salon “lady-blogs” post a critique of a rail-thin model’s physique, explaining how her attractiveness hurts women.
This, of course, is a straight-up mischaracterization of Jezebel’s commenting and blogging policies, as Michelle Dean explains.
Gould’s giving a pretty vague gloss on what it is that those blogs do, in my experience—Jezebel’s anti-”bodysnarking” rule is Internet-famous, and just yesterday they had a post explaining why Crystal Renn oughtn’t to be criticized for losing weight. Also, in general I think it’s important to be skeptical of grand theses based on sampling of Internet comments. Internet commenters (and I’ve been one! Still am!) are assholes; on this I think we can all agree.
Indeed, the original post that’s inspiring Emily is the one (sing it with me now) about “The Daily Show”, something I doubt Irin realized was going to be such a massive shit-starter when she wrote it. Let’s see how Irin supposedly slagged on Olivia Munn and said that Munn is somehow a bad person and bad for women because she’s got such stellar physical measurements.
According to Nielsen, the Daily Show’s audience does lean male—about 60 percent. That’s who producers seemed to have in mind when they hired Olivia Munn. Though it’s far to early to assess Munn’s performance based on her few seconds onscreen so far, her previous career path has led some to criticize The Daily Show for hiring someone better known for suggestively putting things in her mouth on a video game show (seen here) and being on the covers of Playboy and Maxim than for her comedic chops.
Munn was hired after an exhaustive search for a female correspondent that included many professional comedians. (Kristen Schaal is already an occasional contributor, but not a regular correspondent.) Executive producer Rory Albanese told the Daily Beast that producers were previously unaware of Olivia’s drooling fanboy base: “We’re stuck in a hard news cycle and we’re nerdy. If she was on the cover of The Economist, we would have been like, ‘Yes! Of course!’” It’s hard not to conclude that looks mattered more for women than for men. Silverman jokes of Munn’s hiring, “I just hope it encourages Wyatt Cenac to take his top off more often.”
One female comedian who has auditioned multiple times for the show says, “Looking back, it was ridiculous of me to even prepare! Should I have gone to the gym more? Done Playboy? It’s such a joke.”
Oh, butt hurtness. It’s a perennial problem on the internets, and there’s probably a number of reasons for it. One is that people can’t read body language and tone, and so subtle cues that X may not be taken in the same way as Y are lost. A lot of it has to do with the mix of people, and miscommunication due to people not quite understanding each others’ frame of reference. A lot of it, especially in the wake of feminist blog posts, has to do with “Not my Nigel” and variations of it. And a lot of it has to do with people insisting that even though the post in question doesn’t probably apply to them, they’re going to dig around and insist it does, causing readers to wonder if they’re just “Not my Nigel”-ing at you. I think a lot of this has to do with the epic levels of butt hurtness that erupted from the coining of the phrase “Dude Rock”, though of course, the butt hurtness in this instance has nothing to do with the comically elevated levels of it that erupted with “mansplaining” was invented, or the alarming and sad way butt hurtness erupts in feminist blog posts about rape that attract irate men demanding, demanding, that the feminist tell them how much coercion they get away with before it’s officially rape.
In comparison to those kinds of butt hurtness, the butt hurtness at “Dude Rock” can’t even hold a candle, really. It barely counts as butt hurtness. It’s more like upper thigh hurtness.
But it did make me think about how much of butt hurtness on the internet tends to erupt when the discourse can be boiled down to definitional debates. What is “rape”? When is a man “mansplaining” at you, and how is that different than when meanie bloggers make fun of trolls for being stupid?
Part of the problem is that there’s two ways to define a phenomenon like “mansplaining” or “Dude Rock”, or anything at all. There’s defining it by the ideal and defining it by its borders. Call the first one the idealistic, like the Platonic ideal, and the latter legalistic. Most people tend to work with both methods, but when butt hurtness erupts, it’s because people start demanding that a idealistic definition be held to legalistic standards.
Most people are aware of the tension between these kinds of definitions. The legendary one is the debate over what exactly constitutes “porn”? It’s hard to define it at the margins—-when is an image erotic or not?—-but it’s easy as fuck to define it as an ideal. We all immediately have an idea of what the Platonic ideal of porn looks like. You’re thinking of it right now, I’d bet. You know it when you see it is a way of saying, “I’m talking about stuff that immediately and unquestionably goes in to my mental file labeled ‘examples thereof’”.
Defining from the center is a really excellent way for people who’ve had the experience of being marginalized to name the problem. Which is why so many women went nuts for Silvana’s post about sexism in music, and the boringness of what she deemed “Dude Rock”. It was such a relief to have this problem named. Women who related have suffered from being brow-beaten by bands whose aggressive macho stance is alienating to women and creates safe spaces for sexism, but which we were guilted into pretending we liked by men who used virtuosity or whatever measure to make us feel like the only reason that this music could bore us is that we are dumb women. Very few women enjoy being treated like they’re dumb women, so there’s an epic problem across the nation of women standing in clubs bored out of their fucking skulls by a band that their male companion/s find endearing in no small part because the band’s over-the-top masculinity makes them feel their own isn’t in question. The day that you decide you are bored with Dude Rock and you’re not afraid to say it is very liberating for many women, and Silvana’s post captured that sense of liberation. I was reminded of the day I said to myself that I wasn’t going to another show when I knew damn well that the crowd was going to be a sausage fest, the music was going to bore me out of my skull, and the men I did speak to seemed surprised that a woman of some intelligence was opening her mouth in that space. Bless my good-hearted friends who like that shit for whatever reason, but I wasn’t going to torture myself just because I like my friends. Honestly, I think a lot of men are oblivious to how toxic that environment can feel for women.
Dude Rock—-it’s hard to define by a sound, but you know it when you see it. It crosses genres. But if you define it from the center, you have a good idea of what’s going on—-their shows will mostly be male, and female intelligence will not be taken seriously in that space. What few women there will mostly be girlfriends. The space will be a safe one for overt sexism. And like Silvana said, everyone who finds it tiresome probably has a band or two they like that they know is pure Dude Rock, and I’m not exception. I like Ween, which no doubt annoys my Dude Rock-hating friends. I’m a little ashamed myself.
Of course, the butt hurtness takes the form of demanding that this be defined by the margins. What are the exceptions? What is the line? How do you know? Let’s chip away at this legalistically until we’ve gone down a mental hole in to Wonderland, and the original experience and raw emotion it dredges up is erased under a tidal wave of demands for an “objective”, legalistic definition of what Dude Rock is.
So, one day, the President of These United States was talking to the Vice President of same. A photographer of said President’s court took a photograph of them talking, and it was posted to the Presidential Internet. Here is the picture.
This picture communicates many things to me. It communicates that Barack Obama believes that walls are a vital part of his leaning strategy. It also communicates that he is a couple of inches taller than Joe Biden. Both men also own tuxedos.
However, I am missing something vital in my analysis. It is apparently because I don’t see what others see, which is never quite said outright. Ann Althouse, however, is not afraid to say it, and I trust her interpretation of pictures like I trust Chris Farley’s interpretation of cocaine and morphine.
People who like Obama are blinded to the way other people see him. This picture strongly says cool to people who love him, but it doesn’t read that way to others… including the many, many people who don’t even want a cool President.
Photo via Instapundit, who has a closeup of the facial expression. The main thing I see when I look at that face is: He’s tired.
Wouldn’t it be funny, Barack, if, after all of this, you wake up one morning, and you think: I hate my job?
What’s he thinking now? Oh, my God, I’m only one-quarter through this thing. And they’re going to expect me to campaign again too? Bleh!
Prediction (longshot): Obama will not run for reelection. How can he do it?
You see? He looks cool. And tired. And maybe like he’s checking Joe Biden’s tie to make sure it’s straight, because Joe Biden is a blubbering manboy who is currently asking Barack Obama for a corn dog, which Barack Obama is tired of hearing, because the place they’re going doesn’t have corn dogs.
Now, it might be that people who don’t like Barack Obama are inclined to believe that a neutral facial expression and a wall lean are signs of his deep and abiding contempt not just for Biden, but for his job itself and perhaps even his own life (Muslims are suiciders, after all). Other people will look at this and believe that Barack Obama licked his thumb, wiped a smudge off of Joe Biden’s face, and told him that he loved him like a brother immediately after this picture was taken, and then they rode wish-powered unicorns into the dinner hall to thunderous applause from all of the forest elves in their kingdom.
There are no other options, by the way. Just those two.
Let’s test out a theory here. I contend that Professors Reynolds and Althouse are disingenuous hacks who lack anything even resembling a rational context through which they could interpret a picture of Barack Obama, and that the picture above was an effort by the White House to show some legitimate downtime between the two most powerful people in America where they weren’t gladhanding and making small talk. We shall test this…by looking at another picture.
1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)
2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)
3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)
4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)
5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)
6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)
7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)
8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.)
9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)
10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)
And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.
I won’t be going over the cliff with them.
It’s up to nearly 1278 comments at the time of this post, and I hate to break it to Mr. Johnson, but the Goldwater conservatives and moderates have been put six feet under by the theocrats and know-nothings. I don’t know how you can wrest the GOP back from the crazies. I am under no illusion that Charles Johnson is now progressive or agrees with the Obama admin on policy (heaven knows we have enough beefs with the admin); I actually feel for him.
These low-brow conservatives that coo over Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush are sheep—no critical thinking whatsoever, in denial about how they are shilling for policies that hurt them, instead they focus on blaming on the “other”—that doesn’t look like them, worship like them, believe in reproductive freedom or isn’t heterosexual. With fumes that weak, how can that movement sustain itself? It’s an incredible feat.
Yet it also reminds me that this administration and Congress would need the 100% control on the Hill and a completely impotent GOP to find the spine to do anything of consequence without selling the whole farm to cover their political posteriors. It’s all a mess.
The Washington Post writes a story today about the terrible incivility of today’s viral world (read: bloggers). And the opening anecdote shows the fundamental problem with the way they’re looking at this:
Late last month, Charisse Carney-Nunes fired up the computer at her home in Northeast Washington to check her e-mail. Her brain already was on morning drive time: breakfast for the kids, her day’s work at a government agency. She glanced down at her screen, then froze.
“Ms. Carney-Nunes,” began the e-mail from Michelle Malkin, a best-selling and often inflammatory conservative writer with a heavily trafficked Web site. “I understand that you uploaded the video of schoolchildren reciting a Barack Obama song/rap at Bernice Young elementary school in June. I have a few quick questions. Did you help write the song/rap and teach it to the children? Are you an educator/guest lecturer at the school? Did you teach about your book, ‘I am Barack Obama’ at the school? Your bio says you are a schoolmate of Obama. How well-acquainted are you with the president?”
Carney-Nunes looked at the time stamp—6:47 a.m.—and closed the file without replying. She knew Malkin had driven criticism of President Obama’s back-to-school speech, streamed nationwide, as an attempt to indoctrinate students. Now Malkin was asking about a YouTube video of New Jersey public school children singing and enthusiastically chanting about Obama from a Black History Month presentation.
It takes another six paragraphs before they actually get to the point of the story:
Carney-Nunes, swept up in a viral tornado of vitriol, had nothing to do with the children’s song. She was doing an author’s reading in the school that day.
...And then the story goes back to the “everyone’s so meeeeeean” story for another two and a half pages.
Yes, a great number of conservative bloggers and demagogues are terribly, stupidly mean, like cavemen who can’t understand why the rock doesn’t have delicious meat inside. But more importantly, they’re terribly, stupidly dishonest, and it’s the dishonesty that’s the real danger. The Washington Post spent eight paragraphs writing about a conservative scandal and only managed to toss in a single fact-checking line in paragraph nine, at which point they went back to being observant scolds of the political discourse.
I understand that us bloggers use cursewords and invective and sometimes call reporters mud-flinging slapfucks (or we do now!), but the entire point of the conservative anger is that it allows them to push forward complete and total lies and yell down anyone who debates against them. One of my favorite continually-told conservative stories is, “I just argued a liberal into complete and total submission using nothing but my facts, which are like a brain penis. And a big one.” And usually, if you break down the debate, it went in three parts. The first is the conservative asking a fatally flawed question based on factually incorrect assumptions. The second is the liberal attempting to answer. The third is an explosion of conservative smugness so overwhelming that the liberal must escape out of fear for their own lives and weed stash.
The reason conservatives are so able to build up lies is because, by being nasty about it, they know that the dreaded MSM will only focus on the nastiness. Eventually, the entire thing turns into a series of op-eds by Davids Broder and Brooks excoriating both sides for lowering the discourse, asking where President Obama’s promise of postpartisanship went, and then endorsing the three elected Republican officials who haven’t accused Obama of flouridating our children’s water supply as a method of mind control as the new centrist way forward.
But they totally called out Michelle Malkin for being bad, so there! She only needs to be on Meet the Press a few more times to get the message, I think.
This thread at Chicago Boys is one of the best things I’ve ever read. Oh, and I use the word “best” quite often to mean “eye searingly terrible”. It starts off with our intrepid hero, Shannon Love, buying into the discredited “two million teabaggers OMGZ best protest ever” line. Then, he says this:
Getting hundreds of thousands of kids, the professionally unemployed and government workers to show up isn’t that hard (especially if someone buys the bus tickets). Getting two million middle-class, middle-aged people with jobs, careers, children and businesses is way, way more impressive.
We can safely assume that for every individual who made it to the protest that there are dozens of people whose grown-up obligations prevented them from attending.
So even if it wasn’t two million, it was at least four hundred bajillion, because all conservatives are grownups who just couldn’t make it because they had to take their children to football practice, go grocery shopping and then sign a contract for a hundred thousand parts and a new storefront. Also, completely pointless generalizations are fun, as all the Presbyterians who love grape juice tell me all the time. It is remarkable how in a properly functioning free market, conservatives maintain full self-employment until taxes are raised even a tenth of a percent, at which point they all turn into destitute welfare recipients. I think I see a solution here…
Next, commenter Pam K opines that perhaps advertisers should start courting these responsible, business-owning, child-rearing conservatives. Although, if they all left all of those weighty obligations behind to go halfheartedly wave Gadsden flags around while you talk about getting revenge on Barack Obama like he gave you a swirly, are they really that awesome?
It is true that these people look like they have jobs and are paying for family purchases. Why are the major networks ignoring this story or minimizing it? If I was an advertiser on one of those networks, those photos would start me reconsidering how to direct my advertising budget.
Nobody appeals to middle-class white people with kids and jobs…nobody!
Even better, via Jonathan, there was absolutely no coordination in getting people to this rally, especially not on behalf of a nationwide cable network or a well-financed political organization:
I don’t see why the “people with jobs” comment is offensive. Leftist demonstrations tend to be dominated by organized agitators, often professionals (Acorn, ANSWER, union groups, etc.). I don’t see any comparable organized participation by conservative or Republican groups in conservative demos. I see, on the contrary, widespread promotion of these events among unaffiliated individuals. Certainly, t-shirt uniforms, mass-printed signs and obvious orchestration by extremist groups — all prevalent at leftist demos — are absent at the tea parties.
Also absent: trash. I shit you not - one of the talking points coming out of this is that conservative activists are so respectful and so amazing that they left not even a speck of trash behind, even though there were so many of them that Washington, D.C. temporarily became the most populated city on Earth.
Brett says that as far as political speech goes, actually showing up and protesting is the most important thing ever. Except not in the case of the Iraq War, because as we’ve determined, all of those people were unemployed, and we apportion votes based on earnings and such:
People with jobs travelling from all over the country would represent a pretty high factor in this calculus. Since this was clearly the largest rally in Washington in decades (according to police), that would represent a big chunk of the electorate.
The police released no official estimate. As such, I contend that the police said there were 14 people there, and three of those were blind dates.
On Thursday, Ron Reagan was broadcasting his show from Netroots Nation and Megan Carpentier, one of the behind-the-scenes people at Air America came up to me during an earlier panel and asked if I do a segment with Ron Reagan about LGBT issues later in the day. Of course I was surprised that I was a first pick for this, considering the many great peeps in attendance. Anyway, I said sure, and showed up early since it was hard to find the radio row.
So I’m standing around chatting and all of a sudden his producer comes up and says that I was going to go on right now because the slotted guest was late. YIPES. So before I knew it, I was in the hot seat with the headphones on and doing the interview with Ron, who is a really nice guy who works well in this challenging environment with a wide variety of guests who are here.
It was a fun interview (radio is infinitely easier than doing TV) we talked about Prop 8 repeal, the Maine ballot initiative to roll back marriage equality, allly support, and minority outreach.
I’ll be doing my best to stay away from the Internet entirely, the first time in as long as I can remember that that will happen. We’ve arranged a team of guest-bloggers—one for each day next week—that is truly great and which will, I’m certain, provide much provocative and fulfilling commentary:
That should be a very eclectic mix of writing, as some of them write primarily about the issues that I cover most here (Marcy and Daphne), others write about those issues as well as a whole slew of unrelated topics (Digby and Darren), while Pam writes about gay and race issues, and their intersection, as well as anyone in the country. Most of all, they’re all very independent and critical analysts who I read regularly, and I’m really glad we were able to arrange for such an excellent group to fill in here while I’m gone.
Come on Glenn, not even EMAIL?! Right. Well, he’s a stronger propeller head than I. Tuesday was the only day that I was able to do it since I’m not getting back into town until late Sunday and have to go to work on Monday, leaving me only late Mon/early, early Tuesday AM to write. On Wednesday I leave for Pittsburgh to attend Netroots Nation (I’ll have a post on that later), so the window was tight this time around.
I still haven’t decided what I’m going to write about yet. Of course if there is something breaking LGBT story of note that I would normally write about that I can translate for that audience, it will be all up in the air. I was thinking about writing about health care in the oddball, layperson common-sense POV that I do to see if it draws out a few Salon trolls and psychos who live in their mom’s basement in their Cheetos-stained pjs and live for that sort of thing. Or I could lob a race-related bomb into Salon that will challenge people to actually comment. Or maybe the freepers will provide some blogworthy bullsh*t to exploit. Who knows. Suggestions? (Oh, and I really do have a propeller beanie—it’s hanging in my office).
Ed Whelan eventually apologized for the outing, but it strikes me that someone in a position to enact an agenda of state-sanctioned execution for invoking the Constitution should maybe have their cloak of anonymity debated a bit more strenuously than a guy who said mean things on the Internet? Perhaps, Rich Lowry?
People of a certain blog-reading vintage will remember the good old days of Tom Maguire, proprietor of Just One Minute. He (along with folks like “libertarian” Glenn Reynolds) was promoted as a “reasonable” conservative with whom efforts should be made to reach out; this open letter from Crooked Timber is indicative of the efforts of which Maguire was thought worthy. I was never smitten with such love for him. The more wrong he is, the more snide he gets - it’s like Protein Wisdom, but without the same desperate need to prove that his penis is the Nietzschean ubermensch. Over the years, this has led to a few interactions in which Maguire uses his acceptance as a “reasonable” conservative to attempt to halt criticism of himself. After all, if even such wild-eyed liberals as that one guy and someone else who writes for TNR think he’s reasonable, you must Che Guevara!
Anyway, turns out the dickbag is a birther, and wholly mystified as to why people think birthers are racist, calling such claims “absurd and inflammatory”.
It’s not so much that the question “Does Obama have a valid birth certificate?” is racist, it’s that it’s a gateway to saying every fucking racist thing in the world about the man without apology. It was the same thing with the Pledge of Allegiance flap, the oath on the Qu’ran flap, the Jeremiah Wright flap, the “he’s not really all black” line, the “he’s actually Indonesian” line, and pretty much every conspiracy theory that’s been wrapped up into this birther insanity.
By the way, does anyone know a black birther? Even the biggest black sellouts in the conservative movement haven’t touched this with a ten foot pole.
The Twitter hashtag 
BTW, I also just put up a FB album called 
Right: With Palm Springs, CA Mayor Steve Pougnet (who is challenging and will defeat Mary Bono Mack), Mike Rogers, Rep. Jared Schutz Polis.
Having been the victim of 
The Washington Post writes a story today about 
Come on Glenn, not even EMAIL?! Right. Well, he’s a stronger propeller head than I. 
Tuesday was the only day that I was able to do it since I’m not getting back into town until late Sunday and have to go to work on Monday, leaving me only late Mon/early, early Tuesday AM to write. On Wednesday I leave for Pittsburgh to attend Netroots Nation (I’ll have a post on that later), so the window was tight this time around.