Lynsi Burton, for SeattlePI.com:
A 32-year-old man is accused of following a pair of women on Capitol Hill, holding his exposed penis, before knocking one of them unconscious.
Police reports say that Derron Wiggins then tried to run from cops but was caught while appearing to shove cocaine into his mouth.
#resist
![Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring (@MarkHerringVA): "The violence, chaos, and apparent loss of life in Charlottesville is not the fault of 'many sides.' It is racists and white supremacists." [via Twitter, 12 August 2017]](https://bdthisis.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/herring-20170812-tweet-charlottesvilleviolence-detail-bw.png?w=620&h=329)
So … yeah. Any questions on this one?
We might call these people “alt-right”, but they are the American hardline right wing, and they’ve been here the whole time. In recent decades, Republicans have pandered to them in hopes of cultivating a permanent conservative majority. What happened in Charlottesville is not an accident. Nor was the conservative effort to take it this far.
Many prominent Republicans have stepped forward to say what needs to be said in the vital minutes and hours following the terror attack, and then President Trump’s attempt to spread the blame. We need not ask where Republicans were before this happened: They were busy stirring supremacists against people of color, women, homosexuals, and non-Christians.
Heather Heyer died yesterday. May her family and friends find peace, and may she please find justice. We shall carry her name until then, and, you know how it goes, we probably won’t ever want to put it down.
And we need to recognize that she will not be the last.
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@MarkHerringVA. “The violence, chaos, and apparent loss of life in Charlottesville is not the fault of ‘many sides.’ It is racists and white supremacists.” Twitter. 12 August 2017.
#trumpswindle | #GOP
This is a bit worrisome:
I am not surprised by President Donald Trump’s antics this week. Not by the big splashy pronouncements such as announcing a wall that he would force Mexico to pay for, even as the Mexican foreign minister held talks with American officials in Washington. Not by the quiet, but no less dangerous bureaucratic orders, such as kicking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of meetings of the Principals’ Committee, the senior foreign-policy decision-making group below the president, while inserting his chief ideologist, Steve Bannon, into them. Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character.
We were right. And friends who urged us to tone it down, to make our peace with him, to stop saying as loudly as we could ‘this is abnormal,’ to accommodate him, to show loyalty to the Republican Party, to think that he and his advisers could be tamed, were wrong. In an epic week beginning with a dark and divisive inaugural speech, extraordinary attacks on a free press, a visit to the CIA that dishonored a monument to anonymous heroes who paid the ultimate price, and now an attempt to ban selected groups of Muslims (including interpreters who served with our forces in Iraq and those with green cards, though not those from countries with Trump hotels, or from really indispensable states like Saudi Arabia), he has lived down to expectations.
Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity—substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have.
Eliot A. Cohen is a former Bush administration lawyer under Condoleezza Rice at the State Department. By no means should we disregard his analysis, but it is from the outset nearly stereotypical in its partisan and personal interest: Good for him, you know, because he is not surprised. And, hey, pat him and his friends on the back, because they were right: The problem is not President Trump’s policies, but his temperament, as his policies demonstrate. It is not his program, but his character, as his program makes clear.
Harrowing charm? How about charmingly harrowing?
I kept hearing this statistic that struck me as terrifying and ludicrous when transphobic violence was peaking over the summer. The statistic said the average life expectancy for a trans woman of color is 35. As an otherwise healthy TWOC who turned 31 this year, this tragicomic countdown to my imminent death at least warranted further investigation.
Gravity will as gravity does, and Trav Pittman’s reflection on the intersection of violence and transgender women of color really isn’t charming, despite the author’s brave façade.
This is a disaster.
Yes, yes, there are myriad disasters going on every day. But, you know, think of a disaster like the number of people hungry or homeless, out in wicked cold tonight, and all for the sake of a post-capitalist distribution system that functionally requires this manner of suffering.
The disaster harrowing the transgender community is happening for even dumber reasons.
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Pittman, Trav. Four Years to Live: On Violence Against Trans Women of Color”. The Huffington Post. 24 November 2015.
A-ha! Shoot! Let’s get this thing started!
Oh, right.
Don’t ask.
Just, well, you know how it goes, right?
Blame Adam.
For my own part, I need a new escape punch line.
____________________
Image note: Detail of Bug Martini by Adam Huber, 28 July 2015.
File under Stupid:
Green River Community College went into lockdown Monday morning after a threat was made against the school, Auburn police said.
Cmdr. Steve Stocker of the Auburn police said an unknown person made the threat to a faculty member at about 10:15 a.m., saying something to the effect that there was going to be a shooting.
Perhaps a number of factors are coincidental. We do, in our society, have a problem with misogyny that reached a dramatic height at GeekGirlCon earlier this month, when someone issued a bomb threat against the convention; apparently the mixing of females and technology is a mortal offense? And the deadly violence at Marysville-Pilchuck High School seems, ostensibly, to have been about a girl.
But we don’t really know what pushed the GRCC terror threat, and that is important to note.
Yes, we need to address misogyny, but there are also a number of other factors to consider.
The thing is that each part of the issue has a way of spilling over its banks and soaking the others. This sort of overlap causes confusion for many people; indeed, we at This Is have a good friend who is bright and rational and all of those nice things we appreciate about people, but he is by nature incapable of comprehending what guns have to do with anything.
Not that we need to campaign against guns, specifically, but it does make some sort of point to acknowledge that there are people in this world who wonder what guns have to do with mass murder by firearm. It happens. To wit, he says, “Don’t make new laws, enforce the ones we have!” But there are some laws he believes exist everywhere despite observable reality.
And, you know, it might be kind of a low blow, but he also wonders why anyone would ever prosecute someone who negligently shot his own son to death with a handgun he was prohibited by law from carrying. And while that tragedy out of Pennsylvania has seemingly little to do with what has been going on around the Seattle area of late, there is also more there than it seems.
I need to step out of any pretense of character, but it is most important to stress that this is not supposed to be about me.
If you have five minutes to spare, I would ask that you take a bit over four and a half of them to watch Rachel Maddow’s report and commentary about the shooting at Marysville-Pilchuck High School. There is a bit to take in, but the segment includes a point about readiness, and regardless of what you think about how Maddow makes the point—I’m aware many just flat don’t like what she has to say, or how she says it, and so on—the key word is readiness.
Geographic proximity is always a bit rattling when these atrocities occur. And this time it was really close; my daughter does not attend Marysville schools, but that is beside the point. The only reason the two-town hop to Marysville seems like a long drive is because traffic through Everett is often plain obnoxious.
But this is not about fear. This is just the horror and revulsion, and yes, it seems a fairly reliable human behavior that proximity increases the magnitude of those sickening sensations. Let that say what it will.
But this is where it gets weird.
There are a handful of people in this area for whom this was the second jolt in a week.
Nobody died, but this was Wednesday for anyone who reads The Stranger, a weekly newspaper in Seattle:
Who the fuck calls in a bomb threat at GeekGirlCon?
And then one might wonder, “I’m sorry, what? How is it only now that I’m hearing about this?”
For BoingBoing readers, the news came a day earlier:
I didn’t feel safe going into GeekGirlCon. Hours earlier, Game developer Brianna Wu had tweeted about the threats she’d received, about calling the police, about sleeping somewhere else.
Just thinking about it made it hard to sleep. The next day, I was almost late to game critic Anita Sarkeesian’s opening panel, and was one of the last to be let in. There had been a bomb threat, of course, though we wouldn’t know about it until afterwards. They searched our bags.
Either way, there are a few people who experienced a very strange silence in their chests: My daughter was there, damn it!
And it is possible to skip denial, fleeing desperately into rationalization. It is not mine to suggest the threat was treated lightly. True, #GamerGate and its merry miscreant tagalongsα have yet to actually muster the will to follow through on their threats, but that really is not a fate worth tempting. It is enough to know the issue was handled well by conference personnel and local law enforcement. Something about readiness probably goes here.
In the end, it is tempting to skip anger according to the principle of whether it is really worth it to waste the energy of being angry.
Which in turn would seem to leave but a few basic questions that one might dare hope would have some useful purpose:
• What, exactly, is going on here?
• Why is this happening?
• How is this happening?
• What needs to happen in order to change what is happening?
• Please?
The worst thing that could happen now is that we don’t learn anything.
This is going to keep happening. What are we going to do about that?
Please?
____________________
α The dust that followed the dog that followed the horse they rode in on.
Broom, Jack. “Wounded girls identified in Marysville-Pilchuck High School shooting”. The Seattle Times. 25 October 2014.
Maddow, Rachel. “Gun-wielding student shocks Washington school”. The Rachel maddow Show. 24 October 2014.
Anonymous. “You Can’t Keep a GeekGirl Down”. The Stranger. 22 October 2014.
Dieker, Nicole. “GeekGirlCon is an oasis of acceptance”. BoingBoing. 21 October 2014.
Bishop R. Walker Nickless, of the Diocese of Sioux City, on health insurance access to birth control for women:
The power of evil is going to try any way that it can to get a hook into our world and the values we hold as so dear and so important as believing people. And the power of evil, the Devil, can certainly look—is looking—everywhere to find places where they can, where the power of evil can make a difference. To tear us apart. To get us to look at just the worldy values and forget about, you know, that there is something more important than just the values of the world. And that’s why we’ve got to stand up and violently oppose this. We cannot let Darkness overshadow us. We’ve got to be men and women who proclaim the Light. And we’ve got to tell the truth. And we’ve got to be transparent. And we’ve got to say that government cannot do this to us.
This Is 