By David Futrelle
It’s like a regular Peyton Place, but with Nazis. Violent Alt-Nazi doofus Matthew Heimbach, leader of the so-called Traditionalist Worker Party, has gotten himself into a little bit of trouble with the law, and his followers, and perhaps most of all his extended family after allegedly assaulting his wife and father-in-law after allegedly being caught in flagrante delicto with, er, his mother-in-law.
It’s a novel way to try to fulfill the Traditional Worker Party’s mission of “defending Faith, Family, and Folk,” I’ll grant you that, but Heimbach had apparently been honoring Family pretty enthusiastically with his mother-in-law for several months, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
According to the police report on the incident (which you can find here, courtesy of the Southern Poverty Law Center), Heimbach’s wife and father in law (now ex-TWP spokesman Matt Parrot) discovered the affair last week, and after being confronted with this, young Mr. Heimbach and not-quite-as-young Mrs. Parrott said they had broken it off.
But dad and daughter didn’t believe it, so they decided to spy on the star-crossed couple to see if they could really manage the difficult task of not boinking each other. The amateur spies snuck up on the trailer where the two had gone — did I mention that they all live in the same trailer park? — and peered in a window only to find that, well, the affair wasn’t quite over. Matt Parrott literally watched himself get cucked by the leader of the organization he had sworn loyalty to.
At this point, the police report notes, Heimbach’s wife
got scared and ran away while [Matt Parrot] stayed behind watching the encounter on a box through a window. While doing this the box broke and he ran around the trailer to confront Matthew.
It’s like a fucking Coen brothers movie.
In the scuffle that ensued, the report continues, the lovely lad allegedly choked his father-in-law twice, leaving him briefly unconscious both times. Matthew H. fled to his trailer, where he was later arrested for the alleged assault on Matt Parrott and for allegedly assaulting his wife in front of their young children.
In case you’re having trouble following all this, one Twitterer has prepared a chart:
https://twitter.com/itsadamntragedy/status/973786599556354048
On the police report, all those involved declared that their occupation was “white naitonalist.”
When a reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center called papa Parrott to ask him about the whole weird thing, the not-so-proud papa-in-law bitterly declared that
I’m done. I’m out. SPLC has won. Matt Parrott is out of the game. Y’all have a nice life.
He’s not the only one quitting, evidently. The TWP web site is currently down and the future of the group (or whatever emerges from all this mishegoss) is in doubt.
Over on Gab — the social media site that Twitter-banned Nazis have made their home — some mourned the TWP implosion.
A few hoped that something could be salvaged from the wreckage FOR THE SAKE OF THE (WHITE) CHILDREN.
Others gloated.
A parody TWP account offered a new slogan for the now apparently non-existent group.
Still others riffed on the same theme.
And of course there were the memes.
This fellow, meanwhile, knows who the real villain in all of this is: WHITE WOMEN.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that the current troubles of the Alt-Right have a lot less to do with female betrayal than they do with the fact that it’s a movement full of macho shithead losers overflowing with hate and rage and bitterness and ego.
Also the fact that people have been standing up to them every time they try to organize anything.
With all the horrific crap that’s going on these days, it’s sort of nice to see some of the world’s worst humans bickering and demoralized.
@Nequam
Yup….i try to not be super mean about them. But the religion pisses me off sometimes. Maybe it’s part of me being resigned before I would probably get excommunicated IDK
@Rhuu, there is a Canadian version of iHeartRadio, but it’s a licensed branding run by Bell Media, who operate it and provide content from their media holdings.
As far as billboard advertising goes Pattison Group does hold a large share of the market, but there are other companies in the field, like Outfront Media Canada(which used to be CBS Outdoor).
Jim Pattison donated 50 million bucks last year to the currently under construction Children’s Hospital of Saskatchewan, and its been renamed in his honour. Pattison was born here in Saskatoon, his parents residing in the town of Luseland at the time.
Yep.
@ Female Y**
I’m also Jewish and don’t appreciate you trying to “reclaim” a super offensive term all on your own. So please stop claiming to speak for all of us
thank you horror fan, you understood and said exactly what I think too.
and @ female y*d, even other black people are not happy with n word, one doesn’t speak for all. and for me I am very uncomfortable that I must see y*d again and again. you don’t speak for all Jewish people. and when someone tells you slur makes them uncomfortable you should stop. there is no reason to use it, especially when it hurts people and they tell you it hurts them. I know is not a safe space here but there is no reason to see this word everywhere in the comments section. you say you care for Jewish people and tell stories of anti-Semitism but you have anti-Semitic slur in your name and many times already you told it is hurting other people but you ignore and selfishly claim that you reclaim it. it is more important that you reclaim it than you hurt other people?
To add, you said a lot of Jewish people were reclaiming that word. Do you have any proof? I haven’t heard anyone irl or in meatspace using it. If I’m wrong, please correct me.
Sorry I meant online or in meatspace. It’s very late and being angry/tired/tipsy makes me a bit sloppy
I only hear people use it to abuse. English version and similar version in my language.
Okay this one is a bit of hm, should I post it, but I promise it is lighter than the discusion with FY:
Words have power. One of the points is that language can be pretty sexist. (The German one is pretty sexist)
Now should that sexist language be fought even if no consequence is there exept chance in language?
Two cases happened in Germany soon:
1. First our national anthem: I copy the translation here of the verse that are in question:
Unity and justice and freedom
For the German fatherland!
For these let us all strive
Brotherly with heart and hand!
The problems are fatherland and Brotherly. One of the problems is that for fatherland the sugestion was homeland. (We had this discusion in another tread, why this is problematic)
2. Was the case about discrimination because of neutral male form.
A bank has on his formular only writen client and no female form.
A woman went to the highest court to have this chanced because of discrimination.
The court sad no, the bank doesn’t have to use both forms everywhere.
Note nearly everyone in Germany has a bank account, that women are not welcome is somethink that is so far from reality that it would occure to anyone.
Both got reactions that were pretictable. People were angry. In the first case because well its the national anthem and there is allways a reluctance to chance it and this is my personal opinion the new versions sounded horrible.
But a lot of people (and to make it clear in the first I remember a lot of women) attacked that because they felt that it was a waste of time and politicans (in the first case) should do somethink against the real problems and not somethink that unnecessary.
Really interesting how people here would see this cases.
We call that “pissing around the edges” where I come from. Doing something useless (if not actually counterproductive) but highly visible and controversial to attempt to avoid doing the meaningful work needed.
Politicians of all stripes excel at this.
As for thoughts – not a fan of changing anthems around by rewording them. Need a new one – write a new one. History does count for something, and removing the past – it’s criminal.
The bank forms though – gender neutral titles should be the standard – neither male nor female – on any forms or records where gender is irrelevant (You’d not take it off medical records, for example).
I understand that it is difficult if not impossible to write completely gender neutral sentences in German or French or Italian, but a gender neutral title? Every language has one already – it’s just a switch in habit.
When men are treated as the default humans and women are treated like they don’t exist by the existing language, changing the language does have an effect, though.
@Female Y*d
The aggression is expected.
The cowardice is new, though.
@Who?
Canada recently changed its anthem lyrics for that reason!
“True patriot love / in all thy sons command”
was changed to
“True patriot love / in all of us command”
Oh gosh, the wailing and the gnashing of teeth from the conservative wing has been intense. And ridiculous! The original form of that line was “in all us dost command;” this change brings us closer to the original! And it’s more inclusive! The only reason to disapprove is sexism. It’s really quite brilliant.
@ scildfreja
That’s sounds suspiciously like you’re doubling the size of your potential invasion force. You’re not taking this NAFTA thing lying down are you?
@kupo
Agreed. Gender neutral MUST MEAN gender neutral. Not default gender = male (or female, though I can’t think of any cases of that outside of fiction) 🙁 .
@Shadowplay
Sometimes I’ll go through a lesson where they use solely she/her to refer to the unknown user/developer/manager/what-have-you and it feels so forced and somehow even worse.
@Who
Time is a limited resource, but it ain’t that limited. Someone will say literally anything is a ‘waste of time’ or a ‘distraction from the real issues’. Fuck em, do the thing, they’ll complain anyway
As far as the anthem, and not to be that guy (but lemme be that guy, I guess), but y’all really should just scrap that shit. I get the whole ‘but, like, let’s just sing that last, less awkward part’ thing. Still, that’s just not a good look for pretty major historical reasons, and, if it’s sexist too, then 2 birds with 1 stone honestly
Full disclosure: I’m Murican. So, my national anthem is an overt glorification of war against our most important modern ally. And slaves. There’s reasons for the slavery bit in the later stanzas, it makes sense, but fuck… Just in case anyone thought I was asking the German people to do some work in their house I wouldn’t be willing to do in mine
@Alan, we take NAFTA very seriously.
Let the maple flow where it may
@Kupo
I mostly see it in sci-fi (read a lot of sci-fi) and it seems the same there. Very forced for human based societies, at least, and not a whole lot better for alien societies. Probably done best by Weber and Ringo (Think it were Alan as mentioned the Mardukans from their Empire of Man series before and the confusion it caused) and worst by Weber in his Honor Harrington series – stands out like a flare in a cave there.
Hi Axe! I agree pretty much that national anthems are sorta garbage, all about fighting and defending the pure pristine land from evil foreign people. An exercise in hubris. I’d be much happier if our anthem was purely orchestral, no lyrics. “Flight of a Greyjay” or something would be nice, I think. Not that that song exists, but it should.
Scildfreja Unnyðnes:
Yeah, Austria did the same think a year ago.
In my opinion there is a difference here: Both national anthems did praise the sons but not the daughters of the country aka make the men more important for the country than the women.
The German national anthem doesn’t do that.
The whole discusion is about the words Fatherland and brotherly.
For me that makes a difference.
First about the anathem:
Okay the new anathem is a complete new one, the discusion is only about the chances or not.
The idea comes from a politican whose job it is to look at discriminations and fight them.
So I hope that makes the part why people were angry more clear.
Of course we could just abolish our national anathem and haven’t got one but I don’t think this is a realistic expectation.
Yes we are I think the only country were a lot of its population think there national anathem is forbidden but I don’t think that will chance soon.
About the bank:
Okay gender neutral (and not just default) would be better.
But would you really take 5 years + (10-20 are probably more realistic) to fight for this?
Which takes a lot of money?
And would you force as a judge the bank to make new formulars?
Well we don’t have titels in every form, would be everywere Kunde/Kundin (a 3rd really neutral one doesn’t exist)
So, in today’s news so far we have Trump being about to officially propose the death penalty for drug dealing and Stormy Daniels’ lawyer says she was physically threatened.
This is a president white evangelicals are steadfastly behind. A man who threatens his mistress (or maybe rape victim?) with physical harm to keep her quiet. Tell me again that “traditional” conservative patriarchal types just want to protect women and that’s where their sexism comes from. Tell me they aren’t every bit as misogynistic as 8chan shitlords and Daily Stormers.
I’ve also got to say, this is why we were not exaggerating and Godwinning when we compare right now to 1930’s Germany. Who will Trump propose we give the death penalty next? Protesters? Journalists? Drug users? Shoplifters? Litterers?
Sometimes I feel numb because there are new outrages every single fucking day under the Trump regime. Not today though. Today I’m pissed.
Yes. Women are important. Language matters.
@Who, up here in Canada it took a long while to get the lyric change, but it also spent most of its time in committee or just waiting. It didn’t actually spend a whole lot of hours under discussion, beyond the usual Question Period games. I think it was worthwhile.
As for not having gender neutral titles – English doesn’t have many of those either! That’s a good thing to talk about, because that’s a language problem which can and should be solved. Most of the time here we will use “he/she”, though there is beginning to be a trend of using “they”. I could see a German bank using “Kunde/in” until something better comes along. That’s just my dumb outsider opinion though, I’m sure what you folks come up with over there will be better!
It’s worth it, though, really.
@WWTH, I just heard about the Duterte-lovin’ asshole and his death-penalty-for-drug-dealers garbage. And now CNN and NBC and all those TV assholes are going to talk about it like it’s a serious worthy-of-consideration idea instead of a reprehensible-autocratic-police-state idea. For a time there I thought the discussions of whether waterboarding people was a good idea would be the worst of it, but God no. Fucking Wolf Blitzer better spit fuckin’ nails at this one, but we all know he won’t.
And I’d bet money that Stormy Daniels was raped, yeah. Coercion is the only thing Trump knows. I hope she takes him to the cleaners and gets the most vicious interpretation of justice.
Also I just wanna say that I appreciate your attention to diversity in Hulk gifs. Every medium!
I’m pretty fond of England’s unofficial anthem Jerusalem, despite it’s lack of mentions of rain. 😛 Not bombastic in the least. Just stubborn.
@Who
Is it worth 5 years? Not only yes, but HELL YES!
The smarter ones here can explain it better, but your language heavily influences how you think. Your language has no word for lie, you can’t lie. Your language has more directions than left and right – you don’t know how to get lost since you always know how to orient yourself (those are just two real world examples I know off the top of my head). Your language assumes the default gender is male, women become afterthoughts in discourse.
You want to make equality as natural as breathing for people – it has to start with the language. That’s worth investing time in.
@ shadowplay
I love that you can respond to every single line of that song with “No”.
Can’t get more quintessentially English than that! 😛
Also a very English thing
:3
Mm. This is an interesting one! We know of monkeys that can deceive, and they do so without the concept of language. So it’s a bit more complicated than that! But I’m about to go into a work meeting so will have to leave it till later.
Ravens can deceive too. If you give them food, they’ll ‘hide’ it in a particular spot whilst all the other ravens are watching; then when the other ravens go away they’ll move it.
Monkeys do have language. It’s mostly non verbal, but it’s certainly there. Jane Goodall wouldn’t lie. 😛 (you know my interest in non verbal communication across cultures. It took me into looking at primates as well – rough AF in parts, but about the closest we can get to the origin of communication for us)
And … goody! Were hoping you’d throw out some brain food.
That’s my favorite raven fun fact.
I don’t know if it counts as deception or not, but cats and dogs definitely pretend like they are soooooo much hungrier than they are. As anyone who’s lived with one or both creatures know, they learn so many tricks to solicit food from us.
I like the raven’s (and crows) tool making abilities. Shows definite signs of analytical thought.
@Who?
“Political Framing” by Elisabeth Wehling is a book that made language issues a lot clearer for me. It’s pretty easy to read and it uses examples from German political language and their effects, which was nice.
http://www.elisabethwehling.com/books/
@Scild
I’ll settle for ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ aka ‘the black anthem’ for down here. There’s a ‘fathers’ in the 2nd stanza and the 3rd is chock fulla ‘God’, but I’ll take it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oejB706RXJ0
Hey, y’all got any First Nations spirituals or some such up there? I dunno, might be cool to have summat like that as the national anthem 😇
wwth said
I think it must! I’ve had my new kitty beasts since December and we’re still hashing out the feeding* thing. The one thing I know is that they both are keen to convince me they’re starving at all hours of the day and night.
Kitty TMI follows:
*I’ve got “Jack Sprat” and his “wife” in that the baby (baby tank now!) was a starved waif and will probably always tend to overeat and the “runway model” who was skinnier than svelte when he finally left the safety of our closet really needs to free feed. My best solution so far is to keep Stoffy closed off in the bedroom at night with a full bowl while I feed Des twice daily (and Stoffy gets two additional meals while Des eats or else he’ll shove Des aside and eat his kitten chow.) Stoffy has filled out some and Des has lost most of the paunch he developed before I figured out he was snarfing up a lot of Stoffy’s kibble.
@Axe, I’m obviously not one to say what sort of First Nations song our anthem should be, but I like the Sunrise Song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdYlFIR13PE
waniskâ! pêtâpan ôma
âsay piyêsîsak kî-nikamowak
ê-miyonâkwan kitaskînaw
Wake up! The sun is coming.
The birds are already singing
How beautiful this land of ours is.
It’s a simple little song, but I like the idea of our anthem being just a greeting for the sun. Not about borders or pride or history, about birds and sunlight. I think that’s a better idea.
@Who?
This isn’t praising men, that is true. It instead excluding everyone who isn’t men, which is the same thing as ‘in all our sons command’. It only speaks to part of the population, and doesn’t bother with the rest.
I don’t really see any difference, tbh. Anthems were written once, and that version will always exist. but if we want to keep them, they need to grow and change as our understanding of our national cultures and how we interact with each other and the world changes.
(I’m always hoping it changes for the better, btw.)
Hambeast,
I go through the same thing with Dracarys, the kitty in my avatar. She was two when I adopted her and all I know about her life is that she was picked up as a stray and bounced around a couple of shelters. She was very skinny. She will just eat anything she can get. She’s calmed down a bit but at first I wouldn’t even be able to stop and take my coat and shoes off after coming home from grocery shopping because she’d jump up on the counter and bite into the bread right through the wrapper. You put cat food in her dish, she eats every morsel. But Darrow is a free feeder and he refused to defend his food from her. The only way I could keep him from starving was to shut her in my bedroom while he ate. It’s not safe to leave meat, cheese, cookies, donuts or bread out as long as she’s around. If I make a tuna sandwich I have to shut her in the bedroom because she will not wait for me to dish some out for her. She’ll jump up on the counter and steal. A couple times she’s thrown herself against the door trying to break it down and get to the tuna.
Her name means dragonfire and it’s appropriate. She’s got a fiery temper and like a dragon will always swoop in and take any food she can get!
My personal opinion is that the text as a whole is actually quite alright. It seems not so much like we just sing the unproblematic part but instead that we got rid of the problematic stuff that’s not who we wanted to be anymore and kept the part that reflects who we want to be: Unity (we were a divided country for most of the time this was our anthem), Freedom and the rule of law as the cornerstone to a good life for everyone. I can still get behind that, today. And I like that it’s inward focused. It’s no longer: We’re so much better and we’re claiming all your lands. It’s a commitment to what we have to do here to make this a good place to live for everyone. Would probably be better to change the music if anything, since most people won’t understand the text while the music might bring back some … unfortunate memories.
I wasn’t aware of there being any big discussion about changing it, to be honest. Brotherly can perhaps be argued to be exclusive and fatherland is a word that’s already dead everywhere else, so having “father” in it, is really not it’s biggest problem. It’s one of those right-wing words, too. You say “my country” not “my fatherland”. Neither of those sound exclusive to me personally – as in I don’t feel excluded, mainly because the immediate associations I have with the words are not “brother” and “father” but “in friendship together” and “my country/archaic artifact word”. Which of course does not mean they don’t provoke that association for a lot of other people (I really don’t know this), in which case it would connote the exclusion of half the population to them, and be problematic because of that.
@Axe and Rhuu
I don’t mean to say that you don’t make good points or that I’m right and you’re wrong. Just wanted to add my thoughts as this has got me thinking a bit.
Glad your anthems are getting changed to something more inclusive. Unfortunately my country went backwards in that regard. President Alan Garcia managed to promote a sneak change to it, back in 2010, to pander to evangelicals.
The lyrics that expressly recognized slavery were taken out and instead replaced with lyrics which explicitly exalted “Jacob’s God”.
I refuse to sing that drivel and feel particularly excluded by it.
@Scild
If I wanted to be really cheeky, I’d suggest we just replace O Canada entirely with Maple Leaf Forever. It’s totally gender neutral! (It just takes pokes at the French.) XP
…I go to a lotta baseball games (Jays opening weekend in two weeks!) and they play the bilingual version of O Canada, where the bridge lapses into French, then turns back to English in the final chorus, but I read the lyrics to the French version and holy hell is it ever different. Way more militaristic and religious. This is the translated French version:
So yeah. Swords and crosses. O.o
The Finnish national anthem is pretty much gender neutral (the last line of the first verse is “dear land of our fathers”, other than that it’s perfectly gender neutral), but then again the Finnish language doesn’t have gendered pronouns. It’s also worth it to mention that Finland was the first country in the world to give all people of sufficient age the right to vote, without any bias towards gender or race or language or creed in 1906. Of course, around that time Finland was pretty isolated, but still… (It should be noted that you have to be 18 years old and a citizen of Finland to vote in national elections, although for local and parish elections you just have to resident in the area of question for at least a year.) If anyone is interested, here’s the first verse of “Our Land”, the Finnish national anthem (translated by me, the Finnish name is “Maamme”, the Swedish name “Vårt land”):
Oh our land,
Finland, our country of birth!
Ring out, oh golden word!
There’s no valley, no hill,
No water, no beach more dear to me.
Than this northern homeland
Dear land of our fathers!
Off topic: I’m still around, though I am deeply stressed out. There’s work being done in my apartment building again. They’re building a new elevator/lift for the building which means that there are building noises from around 8 am until 4 pm. I’m pretty much confined in my apartment now during the day, but I try to go out in the sunshine after 4 pm. The days are about to become longer than the nights, so that’s a good thing. Plus, the roads around here are slowly becoming free from snow and ice thanks to the temperatures becoming a bit more manageable. Oh, and I should probably mention that I may be getting a bit of translation work. I may be translating a book on autism into Finnish, for an autism support group that’s helping me out with my Asperger’s Syndrome and the attendant issues (hence why I can’t function while I’m stressed). Wish me luck! 🙂
Good luck!
Last baseball game I went to, the Jays came down to play the Twins. Twins won. It was a good time. I should go more often.
It seems like Bluejay fans travel a lot? Cause there were a ton of their fans there.
And good luck, Monzach
WWTH, the Blue Jays TV broadcast team (Buck Martinez and Pat Tabler) frequently comment on how many Jays fans they meet at road games. Of course in some places they see more than others. Games in Seattle often seem more like Jays home games than Mariner games because of all the Jays fans who come down from Vancouver.
It’s definitely more involved than this. I’ve seen the claims before that if your language doesn’t have a word for a color you can’t distinguish that color. That’s not true at all. The study that’s referencing showed a better correct recollection of color if the language has a word for it. That’s an example of what’s going on here. It’s easier to remember things if you have words for them. But it’s not the only component. And not having a way of communicating a concept doesn’t make you unable to grasp the concept. So you can still lie if you don’t have a word for it (We wouldn’t need to invent a word for it if it didn’t first exist!). You might be less likely to think up the concept on your own if it wasn’t a thing in your culture, though!
Re anthems: remembering the past is essential; preserving it is not always (Confederate statues, anyone?).
Re alt-right problems: in addition to the subject of this post, plus Southern (& McCarthy?) being barred from the UK (there’s also some chat that the paperwork she shared could be fake), there’s been a blow-up around another alt-right person that honestly I’d never heard of until now.
CW: while some of this story is just horribly, hilariously awful, there’s a lot of disturbing and nasty detail, too.
e.g. of the hilariously awful: Gariepy apparently said he’d be a great stay-at-home dad because he’d worked with lab monkeys at university
Good luck, and good translating, Monzach!
Definitive different opinions thanks.
I still think that other problems are more important. (equal pay to name one that was in the news)
I don’t think there is a big movement to tackle either topic:
Bank or National Anathem.
Thanks for LittleLurker who did voice it better than I did.
Can we have another discusion instead of the one that I had with my mother today why the sentence “Islam is not part of Germany” was bad/wrong.
i know i’m a bit late to this party but re: anthems: in a recent facebook discussion a bunch of friends of mine came to the not-entirely-sarcastic conclusion that paul simon’s “american tune” should replace our current u.s. national anthem. (a quick google of the lyrics, if you’re unfamiliar with them, will give you a bit of insight into the particular level of cynicsm my friends and i harbor. also, the melody is drawn directly from bach’s st matthew passion, and it’s gorgeous.)
@Hippodameia
Maybe. It’s not like there’s a shortage of assholes in the world. Y*d doesn’t seem to be here to have a conversation, either way.