John McCain says no: Today in Tweets

Maybe,I think the only reason that all the haters tolerated Sulu,Uhura and Chekhov is because they were under the command of a white man who was the main character.

Certainly there wouldn’t have been anything other than a white male captain in the 1960s, and the female first officer in the original 1964 pilot was one of the ideas that was cut before the series premiered in 1966. But the reaction to Discovery may be a sign of how hypersensitive white male nerds have become to “SJWs” in recent years.

As far as I’m aware, the casting of Sisko on Deep Space Nine or Janeway on Voyager wasn’t attacked as political correctness run amok. People disliked those shows on other grounds, and the terribly inconsistent writing on Voyager provides cover for a lot of sexist Janeway-hate, but I don’t remember anybody coming out and saying that it was wrong to have a black or female captain. It tended to be treated as a natural extension of Star Trek’s ideals. Of course, I might simply not have been aware of remarks like that, considering how young I was at the time.

Yes, more OT

Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: I miss the Earth so much

By Mark Sumner

Trump doesn’t care about domestic policy. He doesn’t care about foreign policy. He cares about Trump and about how many times he can get the people to say and write the word Tru… that word. And since he has absolutely no idea how to engage people’s hopes and aspirations, how to lift up and encourage, how to stir people to positive action and greater ambitions … he does this.

He knows how to demean. How to belittle and mock. His natural expression is a sneer, his first instinct to deride. Because, to lift a few words off a film, he’s a little man, a silly man, greedy, barbarous, and cruel—and he thinks everyone else is the same. . . .

[C]omplaining about football is also Trump’s way of distracting you from the fact that it increasingly seems like Robert Mueller is going to come along and say “Get that son of a bitch out of that office, right now.” Which is going to make Mueller the most popular person in the world.

https://www.dailykos.com

I.cannot.wait. With any luck, we’ll start the holiday season early!

OT

Meanwhile, Merkel wins reelection, and their literal fuckin nazis pick up some seats. That’s… glass house and all, but…

OT: Hahahahaha!

James’ “U Bum” Tweet Is Way More Popular Than Any of the President’s Messages

Mr. Trump tweeted:

Going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team.Stephen Curry is hesitating,therefore invitation is withdrawn!

Mr. James retorted:

U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain’t going! So therefore ain’t no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/09/24/lebron_james_tweet_calling_trump_u_bum_is_way_more_popular_than_anything.html

What is Trump trying to accomplish by alienating football and basketball fans? That’s a big chunk of the electorate and it’s especially a big chunk of the male electorate. It really doesn’t make sense to me.

Interesting point of view

Colin Kaepernick has won: he wanted a conversation and Trump started it

The quarterback wanted kneeling in protest for the anthem to start a national talk about race and justice. Thanks to the president’s blast of rage, we have one

Les Carpenter

Sunday 24 September 2017

All Colin Kaepernick ever asked was for his country to have a conversation about race.

This, he warned, would not be easy. Such talks are awkward and often end in a flurry of spittle, pointed fingers and bruised feelings. But from the moment the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback first spoke about his decision to kneel or sit during the national anthem, he said was willing to give up his career to make the nation talk.

In one speech on Friday night, Donald Trump gave Kaepernick exactly what he wanted. With a fiery blast at protesting NFL players that seemingly came from nowhere, the president bonded black and white football players with wealthy white owners in a way nobody could have imagined. By saying any player who didn’t stand for the anthem was a “son of a bitch” and should be fired by his team’s owner, Trump crossed a line from which no one could look away.

Come Sunday afternoon, players who wanted nothing of a racial dialogue stood before giant flags, linking arms in protest. Owners who once wished their kneeling players would just stop offending fans fired off statements in their support. Networks who have avoided showing the raised fists of dissent had no choice but show the rows of players standing strong against Trump’s rage.

Whether anyone wanted it or not, Trump has forced the US to have the conversation Kaepernick has been requesting.

You could see it in the words of New York Giants owner John Mara, who once said many of his team’s fans would “never (come) to another Giants game” if one of his players refused to stand for the anthem. This weekend he and co-owner Steve Tisch said Trump’s remarks were “inappropriate, offensive and divisive”.

“We are proud of our players,” they said, “the vast majority of whom use their NFL platform to make a positive difference in our society.”

You could hear it in the voice of London Fletcher, a player so tough he never missed a game in his 16-year career but also a strong Christian who dodged controversial topics during his playing days. On Sunday, he told CBS Sports he was angered by Trump’s words “because there is a racial undertone to his comments and the way I heard it is ‘you black SOB get off the field’.”

You could even feel it in the tweets of people like former ESPN reporter turned conservative commentator Britt McHenry, who announced she was not watching the NFL because of the anthem protests or Baltimore Ravens fan Bobby Blivins who put his season tickets up for sale on Twitter after many of the team’s players kneeled at Wembley Stadium.

You could feel it, of course, in Trump’s own words. On Sunday afternoon, as the president headed back to Washington from his New Jersey golf club, a reporter asked: “Are you inflaming racial tensions, sir?”

“This has nothing to do with race,” Trump said, talking, of course, about race. “I never said anything about race. This has nothing to do with race or anything else. This has to do with respect for our country and respect for our flag.”

All of them were having some form of the talk Kaepernick so desperately wants to have. Their outrage was real and their words loaded with phrases that often throw America on to the third rail of public debate but their anger – regardless of the meaning behind it – represented the beginnings of an essential dialogue that often we are too polite to initiate.

“I think this is something that can unify this country,” Kaepernick said in the summer of 2016, at his first press conference about his protest. “If we can have the real conversations that are uncomfortable for a lot of people – if we can have this conversation there’s a better understanding where both sides are coming from. (And) if we can reach common ground and can understand what everyone’s going through, we can really [e]ffect change.”

Earlier this year, the sociologist and civil rights activist Harry Edwards, who has worked with the 49ers, told the NFL Network Kaepernick had achieved something that Barack Obama and all the nation’s activists and prominent black voices had not. He had ignited a discussion that had been missing for generations.

When Kaepernick’s proclamation that he might be sacrificing his career turned out to be prophetic and no team signed him after his release from the 49ers the conversation simmered over the players who continued his protest. Nothing has given Kaepernick’s protest fuel like Trump’s words. Instead of dissecting another football Sunday, much of America is asking why the Pittsburgh Steelers and Seattle Seahawks didn’t take the field for the anthem.

The discourse might not be civil. It probably isn’t reasoned or rational. But it’s discourse. And, really, that’s the reason Kaepernick took his knee. Just when his absence got lost in reports of who kneeled for the anthem or who did not, Donald Trump stood behind a lectern in Alabama and gave the NFL a big old megaphone.

Everyone who sat in front of football on Sunday was forced to have Colin Kaepernick’s great national conversation. That might be the biggest victory of the career he has given up.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/sep/24/colin-kaepernick-conversation-donald-trump-anthem-kneel

Not sure if our PM has just come out as full Antifa, but in relation to the upcoming Nazi march he said in an interview that “democracy has a right to defend itself”.

@PoM

Well, now it’s back to freezing on startup again. 🙁 But at least I managed to backup the document I was working on.

@Moggie

@Kat, is the US even capable of having a “conversation about race” any more? Genuine question.

Sure, we’re capable of having a conversation about race.

The question is, do we have the will.

If we don’t, we need to summon the will. We need everyone on board to fight potential climate catastrophe.

@Kat

If we don’t, we need to summon the will. We need everyone on board to fight potential climate catastrophe

Hey, maybe when discussing whether or not black people’s lives matter, ya know, that as a group and as individuals we are entitled to the inherent value, dignity, and rights of human beings, it’d be prudent not to make the answer contingent on whether or not our struggle will advance your chosen issue. Not the best look is all…

@Pie

That slogan is only for white people.

@Imaginary Petal

That slogan is only for white people.

Hah, yes. But from the other end, is it really the case that the Puerto Ricans are so ambivalent about statehood? Seems like they’ve only ever got the shit end of deals with the US, and yet turnout for independence/statehood referendum appears to be poor. That seems weird to me, but I know almost nothing about the people there.

@Imaginary Petal

I am by no means an expert, but they did vote overwhelmingly in favor of statehood in 2012, with 78% voter turnout

Right, that more or less answers things… the US government isn’t interested in having them in, rather than the Puerto Ricans not being interested in getting in.

I was about to say I was surprised they haven’t been more unhappy about this, but I guess there’s no particular reason I’d have heard about it if they were. Time to think a bit more carefully about my news sources, perhaps.