Last night was just the beginning. Here’s a list of the dozens of protests scheduled for TODAY, from Birmingham, Alabama to Seattle Washington.
This info in this list comes from GetGroundGame.com, and only includes protests taking place today; there are some scheduled for the days ahead that I have not listed.
The list at GetGroundGame will be updated throughout the day; my list here will not. So check there for the latest info and to see what protests have been added, as well as for protests scheduled in the coming days. If you have a protest to add to the list, contact @JessLivMo. on Twitter, not me.
If your city isn’t listed, see @JessLivMo‘s Twitter feed, which has info on it that hasn’t yet made it onto her big list.
Oogly,
And for me, I have issues with depression in the winter. I get so lethargic sometimes that working a 40 hour work week saps just about all my energy away. I don’t have the spoons to make calls and attend marches every single day right now. I wish that I did. I admire those who do. But I just can’t.
But what I can do every single day is speak out when I hear people say shitty things and keep people informed who don’t keep themselves informed. The combination of the smart and knowledgeable commenters and the troll smackdowns have kept that portion of my brain sharp. It may be a small thing to speak out at work or family gatherings. It doesn’t compare to what the most dedicated activists do. But at least it’s something and this site helps me with it.
I also felt that mockery was great for community building. I never contributed much beyond cracking jokes, and now joking feels inappropriate most of the time.
I don’t actually create political cartoons, but recently I had this random idea in my head:
Lady Liberty walks up to an old-timey farm worker who’s stacking hay or something. She’s holding her torch in one hand, but the other hand is free.
“I’m going to get my book back. Will you borrow that pitchfork?”
I’m a lurker since about a year back, and this is the second time I post a comment. I would just like to say that I agree with wwth. Lately this site has felt a little like “we don’t have time for feminism right now, there are more important battles”. I’m 100% that’s not David’s intention, but that’s how it feels to me personally, a little.
On the issue re why there are less people commenting, one thing that usually makes this site so much fun to read is that the commenters are a really international bunch and the subjects and people covered are international too. Lately so many of the blog posts have been about stricly American politics, and as a foreigner there’s not a lot I can do to #Resist Trump that might actually make a difference. I can do other things in my own country to counter/protest racism and right-wing-ism, but maybe it’s harder for a non-american to opine about calling “your congressman” about nominations than it is to voice an opinion about online harassment.
Just my 0.02€.
@WWTH
If it makes you feel any better I can’t go to school or work at the moment. My dad decided to send me to my grandmother’s place for a couple months. She broke her arm a while ago so I got to take care of her when my other relatives aren’t available, which is quite often. Well it’s a good thing I know enough Mandarin to know what she wants. Even if my other relatives try to guilt trip me by saying that the reason she broke her arm was because of the shock of my failures or some other load of lies, at least she cares.
@WWTH: Wondering if you’ve had your thyroid checked. You probably have.
WWTH, Ooglyboggles, etc: I know what you mean…I miss the levity, and the international commenters, too. It’s good to get the different perspectives from people overseas.
I didn’t comment for a good 10 months, because my heart just wasn’t in it. I’m going to make an effort to be more active. For me, it’s self-care. I get to feeling very isolated at times.
I can’t even with this. Oogly, you have my deepest sympathies.
Hang in there. Make a plan to escape, and then implement it. Even if it takes a year, or four years, at least have a light at the end of the tunnel, dude.
I hope that some day you’re able to look at all your awful relatives and realize that they are in your past, not your present or your future.
re: what wwth said
I can’t do marches myself, and my ability to agitate is limited. So I have little to contribute to the agitation posts, like this one, except cheerleading. That’s not a lot.
I think David is Trump-centric at the moment because he’s committed himself to this “resist Trump” daily post thing, which puts everything else on the back burner. I’m not sure why he made that commitment, but it’s a really ambitious one, and I think we need to remember that even able people have a limited number of spoons. As long as David is doing daily Trump, I think we have to expect non-Trump posts to be fewer, and deal with that as is appropriate to each of us individually.
At the Pensacola protest. They seem to be going through all the classic chants. Almost all people at the airport are supportive, a few not so much but those just get ignored.
For me I got nothing to add to the discussion, so I silently read the anecdotes, the political intrigue (including the links to articles), and the troll smackdowns. I still get anecdotes from these trump posts (praise to all of you who converse on here), but it wouldn’t hurt to entertain myself on reading some choice picks of really awful MRA/Red Pill/ Machismo garbage again. There’s some meme-worthy stuff that arises out of the temper-tantrums from 329 year-old engineers and 9/11 truthers that try and defend the nonsense they cling to.
[CW : links to the Daily Stormer, so the usual warnings apply]
So the nazis are super angry at Ann Donnelly.
They want Trump to have her arrested and send the National Guard against protesters to “shut them down quickly”.
The funny part is how they believe it would accomplish anything other than sparking more acts of dissent all over the place. The scary part is that he’s as dumb as them and might actually do it.
@Lysystrata Looks like all of Canada’s Sikh community is getting in on the act. Here’s our local bhangra instructor Gurdeep Pandher teaching Whitehorse’s mayor how to put on a turban and dance bhangra. 🙂
Howdy folks,
With regard to the status of this community and its viewership:
I’ve commented here a few times but I’ve never properly introduced myself. I’ve been lurking around for about two years now, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the MRA mockery.
I made my first post the night of the election. I have a problem when it comes to Trump: I’m an active-duty U.S. military officer. That status entails certain restrictions on my freedom of speech with regard to such things as criticizing the Commander in Chief (granted, plenty of people did that when Obama was President and I found them to be…deplorable. I refuse to sink to their level). Unlike many of the commenters here, I can’t say that he’s “not my President” unless I want to resign first. I’ve honestly considered doing that, but I’m adopting the position of “wait and see what Secretary Mattis does first.”
I guess what I’m trying to say is I spend most of my time around conservatives and Trump supporters and it’s nice to be able to listen to some like-minded people occasionally. I appreciate both flavors of WHTM posts and will continue to be a frequent visitor if not a frequent poster. While I personally can’t ridicule Trump, there’s nothing that says I can’t enjoy watching others do it.
I’m sorry your family are being so horrible, Oogly.
Not that it will ever happen, but if I ever come into a large sum of money via a lottery win or an unexpected inheritance, I would so buy a huge house and let mammotheers who are stuck in shitty living situations move in for free.
Sad news
Reuters Top News Verified account
@Reuters
Five dead in Quebec City mosque shooting: mosque president
I was just coming to link this too.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-mosque-shooting-idUSKBN15E04S
@Leda Atomica
Nice to hear from you again!
Sorry that you’ve been going through a tough time.
Internet hugs if you want them.
@the shooting
well, fuck
@weirwoodtreehugger and others
I don’t venture to the sites David does for his manosphere stuff. Isn’t everything all about Trump, even them, these days? I legit don’t know. I do miss the more active comments as well.
The Protest
I went today. I have foot problems and I couldn’t manage last week. But I went today. Lots of people. Lots of chants. The highlight for me was when the crowd tried to sing and kind of failed at “This Land is Your Land” and a woman I didn’t know and I stood there and sang the whole entire thing in our little corner. We got a good cheer, gave each other a high five. I’m glad I went. I heard there was a good support crowd at the mosque near my house and I’m in deep, deep Trump land.
@Oogly
I hate the situation you are in so much. I’m in the situation now where, after my mother had me trapped in my bedroom trying to break down the door in a drunken rage on New Years Day, that I am secretly saving to get away and break contact. It’s going to take a while and a lot of strength. I wish you the best and you don’t deserve any of this.
I started coming here about 3.5 years ago — I was looking for a way to understand the Elliot Rodger shooting. I read about his his affiliation with PUAhate. Now every man has seen those “we’ll tell you how to bed any woman you fancy” ads, but it always seemed to me that they were so ridiculous that nobody could possibly believe them. I always chuckled and flipped the page. But here was a guy who was angry enough to commit mass murder when this obviously silly shit didn’t work. So I started googling and ended up here.
I’ve been a pro-feminist since even before the modern feminist movement started. I grew up confused because I felt a visceral revulsion toward violence, but society told me that men were supposed to enjoy violence, and most of my peers wanted nothing more than to get out of school and go into the service. (I graduated from high school in 1964.) I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. Then, as a sophomore in college, i happened across the most influential book in my life — Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This book, of course, talks about women and “femininity” as a social construct, but it was obvious to me that you could make the same case for “masculinity” as a social construct.
I ended up spending a year and a half in Federal prison as a Vietnam-era draft resister. I was married and had one child when I went to prison, and we had another child after I got out. My wife was schizophrenic and her mental condition deteriorated, so I found myself taking more and more responsibility for the children. (My father-in-law later accused me of trying to deliberately drive her crazy by “taking away her job.”) Eventually her parents decided that she’d be better off living with them and we divorced. (That’s a very short version of a very long story.) I had always had trouble getting anything but low-paid factory jobs and keeping them because of my criminal record and because HR people tend to give the side-eye to a Harvard grad who isn’t a huge success. But I had become pretty good with my children and enjoyed them.
I was fortunate enough to meet a smart young woman — she was the first female Physics major at Amherst College — who had taken her father as a role model and wanted to have a family without giving up her career. So we’ve been married for 33 years and have two millennial children. I was better at child care and she was much better as a breadwinner. If we had accepted society’s stereotyped roles we would be poor and fairly miserable.
So I ended up a WHTM. I had sort of lost touch with feminism because of the demands of parenthood and because I wasn’t really interested in a lot of the pseudo-Marxist academic “theory”. As I say, I’m male, and I am a rather large and possibly somewhat intimidating person — 6’4″. I’ve been a pro-feminist most of my life, but what I found here was a very diverse group of (mostly) women who were unabashed feminists and willing to talk about their lived experience as women in a way that they never would in meatspace. Obviously I don’t have a lot of direct experience with the lived experience of women. (My wife has had an unusual life; she took her father as a role model, she went to his college the first year they admitted women, she has found good jobs easily with companies who were looking for women with not-traditionally-female skills; she is not deferential to men and hasn’t suffered for it, and she thinks that men who think that men are smarter than women are simply too stupid to bother with.) And WHTM had smart, funny woman and cats (we have 7 at the moment).
The thing is, WHTM has become significantly less interesting since a lot of people left after two blowups over trans issues about two years ago, and more have drifted away since. The trans issues are things that CANNOT be safely discussed here because they inevitably cause these blowups. People like me, who started from the idea that gender is a social construct that nobody fits perfectly and some fit very poorly, and that there is no such thing as a “male brain” or a “female brain”, have no trouble empathizing with people who feel that they match their gender stereotype poorly — I myself fall into that group — but we have trouble with the idea that you can be born into the wrong body, because we believe you are what you are and anatomy doesn’t rule over everything you are. But any discussion of this will inevitable lead to more people leaving.
I am going to make this next comment with trepidation, because it is unquestionably mansplaining. I am not necessarily convinced that we need daily doses of the manosphere, because all they ever do is rehash the same old shit in uglier and more malodorous verbiage. But I do think that the core of this blog is feminism and thinking about gender. I sometimes get bit irritated by the repetitiveness of it all, but I happen to believe that what we call toxic masculinity — and the belligerence that accompanies it — is the single most serious threat to the continued existence of our species. Trump is awful, but he hasn’t done anything that I didn’t expect, and there are lots of places to attack him. And attacking him is very important. But I don’t think we have to give up ridiculing directly the toxic masculinity that is so obvious a part of his ugliness.
I just saw the news too. QC is my almost-hometown, I’m disgusted and ashamed. And at the same time, I’m not surprised at all. It’s the nation capital of trash radio, people’s worst tendencies have been flattered and validated for decades. Not everyone, not even a majority, fall for such extreme hate, but it doesn’t take all that many to convince killers that they’re carrying the will of the people rather than acting on their own murderous desires.
The previous threats and vandalism against that mosque were met with laugher and justifications, each time haters escalated, the local media and a loud fraction of the population cheered and defended it, so they knew they had permission to push the boundaries a little further again, and again, and again.
Yep. I saw that.
I s’pose while people are talking about reasons for posting/ not posting here, I should ‘fess up. I spent the first 14 days of the year in hospital with a virulent infection. Being allergic to penicillins and tetracyclines restricts treatment options a bit. I’m yet to finish my (hopefully) last prescription for antibiotics. We have nurses coming to the house a couple of times a week for professional dressings of my “wounds” as well as a weekly clinic visit for ‘wound management’.
I now have a walking frame to help with the back and hip problems and I’ve spent a whole heap of money (by my standards anyway) on an exercise device which should hopefully help with various problems without involving any of the prohibited swimming, cycling, stairs-steps movements that cripple my pelvis-hip region. If it works, then stronger muscles and – eventually – reduced weight stress on important joints might make life generally easier.
However, this infection seems to have kicked my ‘ordinary’ arthritis and other problems into a higher, more painful, more swollen gear than I’ve ever had before. I’ve been totally confuzzled, dopey, addled by rather large doses of pain medications. Even then, the pain in my hands and the confusion in my head has meant I’ve had to stop and delete a lot of half-hearted but completely bonkers comments I began and gave up on.
I’m seeing a general physician next week rather than doing the interminable rounds of endocrinology, rheumatology, immunology, allergy, dermatologist that would otherwise be involved. Haven’t yet had a firm booking from the chronic pain clinic people yet.
Most annoying of all, I can’t drive. If my hands are feeling OK to manage steering and so on, my head’s full of cottonwool so I’d be a danger on the roads regardless. And I just can’t get everything to be OK all at once – not yet anyway.
One thing struck me with all the references to Niemoller’s poem, one that’s closer to the core of what we normally do here when looking at rape and harassment of women. That fantastic speech from General Morrison –
The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaqpoeVgr8U
Might be worth a few members of the border services having a long hard look at themselves when their fellow officers defy a court order from a properly constituted American court about what their duties involve and how they should and should not be carried out.
@Oogly — from an old guy’s point of view — the most important thing for you at your stage of life is to figure out WHO you are, and what sort of person YOU want to be. My view as a parent of four was that it was my job not to mold my children into some preconceived ideal, but to help them develop their strengths and work to correct their (mostly self-perceived) weaknesses so that they would have successful happy lives. It sounds like your family is trying to mold you into something you are not (and trying to blame you for it), and your father in particular is actively sapping your mental energy. I can’t see any solution for you that does not require getting away from them. Chinese families do have a reputation for promoting high achievement, but there is a cost to that, and it tends to fall most heavily on those who don’t fit the mold. You are a unique person, and you are not required to tailor yourself to your family’s arbitrary image of who you should be. Remember that it’s who you ARE that matters.
Sorry. That comment was responding to Kat.
Oh great. Brain fluff again – I wrote that an hour ago.
There’s been a major convergence in the blogs I read: climate change, indigenous affairs, economics, atheism, and social justice issues.
That’s because increasingly it’s the same people taking all the shitty stuff as a package. Every blog is part of the resistance against the neonazis.
I do intend to get back to the regular posts. But to be perfectly honest, literally all I think about these days is Trump. And I think that is in fact a reasonable response to what’s happening in the world.
Trump is an existential threat to American democracy and a threat to the safety of the entire world. And I don’t think I’m being paranoid here. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently moved their doomsday closer to midnight than it has been since the early 50s, largely because of Trump.
This last week has been one of the most bizarre in American history and next week will likely be even more bizarre. I studied American history for 4 years in college and 5 years in grad school and this is not normal.
Democratic countries can slide into authoritarianism FAST. So we need to do everything we can to stop this. We have two things on our side: Trump’s massive unpopularity and the grassroots resistance that has sprung up so quickly.
At the moment, unfortunately, I have a limited amount of energy, both physical and mental. I’m dealing with chronic migraines and constant sleep issues that leave me wiped out most of the time. This weekend was particularly shitty on both fronts. Right now I think the most important thing I can do is to support the resistance to Trump as best I can.
When I have enough energy for 2 posts or more a day, I can work in the regular posts alongside the Trump ones. When I only have the energy for one, it’s going to be a Trump one, unless things change radically and resistance is no longer so crucial. But right now we’re in an emergency and I feel I need to treat it as such. Things are moving so quickly.
Yes, burnout is a problem. I have to take time off from all things Trump on a regular basis, and I know you all need to do that as well. It’s just hard to do when things are moving this quickly. There’s so much shit going on that this past week has felt like a month.
I would love to post funny posts to provide some respite from the Trump stuff but it’s hard to write funny posts when I’m feeling terrified and depressed about the danger Trump poses to all of us. I don’t particularly even enjoy writing the Trump activism posts, but I have a little bit of a platform and I feel like I need to use it to help in the fight against Trump.
At this particular historical moment, writing about anything other than Trump can feel pointless to me. Trying to find ridiculous misogyny stuff to write about can actually be really depressing. At least when I’m writing about Trump I feel like I’m doing something positive.
I hope that the Trumpocalypse slows down a little bit so I can get back to the regular posts.
Interesting tidbit about media coverage of the terrorist attack in Quebec City: the francophone press calls it terrorism. The Anglo press calls it a shooting.
The francophone press bases its call on the fact that inter-agency counter-terrorism mechanisms have been activated. Which is to say, the government is acting under the assumption it’s terrorism.
The anglo press is probably waiting to see the skin colour of the suspects.
Quebec French culture is deeply steeped in islamaphobia. The very first thing written in old French is about bravely fighting off the evil Muslim hordes; this goes way, way back. It gets worse every election cycle, but has been kind of quiet lately.
Oh, the Anglo press now calls it terrorism too. They were waiting for an official to say it outright.
The CBC has been doing a series on the far-right in Quebec lately. Seems timely.