I am nervous as hell. How about you?
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Midterms: Open Thread
Author: David Futrelle
The rhetoric of the anti-trans movement — and Republican politicians — is getting more apocalyptic and eliminationist by the day. And anti-trans violence is getting worse. Last week, a man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, firebombed a donut shop after it held a drag event.
So I’ve been using DALL-E, the AI art software, to create pictures of mammoths to use as graphics. The only problem is that DALL-E can’t always remember what a mammoth is supposed to look like and has terrible problems with both trunks and tusks, rendering most of the art it produces unusable.
A new theory from the incels:
Luis Ramirez has a new theory about school shootings: they’re caused by a lack of testosterone. The freelance journalist, writing in the Tucker-Carlson-founded Daily Caller, offers a confused and confusing theory of mass shootings as the result not of toxic masculinity or the easy availability of guns but of wimpy, testosterone-starved kids gone wrong. “[T]here seems to be a correlation between the diminishing of testosterone volumes,” he writes, “and rise in mass shootings.”
Bounding into Comics, one of the more boneheaded of the culture war blogs, which routinely blasts what it sees as excessive “wokeness” in comic books and films, has turned its attention to the latest comic book version of Star Trek, demonstrating in the process that it has completely missed the point of the whole franchise.
Less than a week away from the midterm elections, and things are looking dire for the Democrats — who could lose both House and Senate in a possible “red wave.” And if the Dems lose on both a national and a state and local level, things could be even more dire for trans people and their allies, who face a plethora of bills that could curtail their rights to free speech and, some warn, possibly even their rights to live as trans in public.
A new study finds that college students can relieve stress through the simple act of petting a cat. It’s not exactly a revolutionary discovery — lots of studies have found that pets can relax people, which is part of the reason we let them live in our houses in the first place and why there are programs to bring dogs to campuses to help students chill out. Now maybe cats will be included in such programs, too.
Many political publications demonize their opponents, but few do it as literally as Gateway Pundit. The fact-challenged, frequently hysterical, conspiracy-minded far-right site that has been known to get more traffic than USA Today just loves calling their assorted enemies, from Democrats to the media, “demonic.” And by this, they seem to mean that literal minions of Satan are infesting or at least advising all these antagonists of theirs.
I get mail, some of it nice, some of it not so nice. And people try to leave comments that are insipid or vile, which I don’t let through moderation.
But once in a while, I like to share some of these with you all because they are quite special in their own way.