By David Futrelle
Do you ever find yourself wondering what they’re talking about over on Gab, the “free speech” alternative to Twitter that quickly turned into a playground for some of the worst human beings on the Internet?
Well, wonder no more. I’ve collected together a selection of Gab posts from the site’s “popular” page today. As you look through these lovely posts, remember: I didn’t search for hours to find the very worst posts on the site from marginal commenters that no one there pays attention to. No, these are some of the most highly upvoted posts on the site, which Gab itself chooses to highlight on a special page that’s basically one of the main entryways to the world of Gab.
In other words, these are Gab’s Best and Brightest here, saying things that lots of Gabbers agree with, on topics ranging from the Holocaust (apparently “a lie”) to Lena Dunham’s “arse” (apparently sub-optimal). You can click on any of the images to see the comments in context over on Gab, if you dare.
Be prepared to throw up in your mouth a little.
IRONY ALERT.
So anyhoo, that’s Gab, putting its best (jackbooted) foot forward.
Sorry about the weird cropping of some of the images and the tininess of some of the text in the screenshots above; individual posts there sometimes take up more than one screen, because the site was apparently designed by incompetents.
Had a twitter argue with some lady who said that covering your face with a scarf wasn’t Canadian.
I mean, if you’re white and it’s cold then it’s fine, but otherwise not at all Canadian.
She also mentioned Bill M103, which is a pretty clear signal. M103 says “Canada should oppose islamophobia, and should look into stopping it.” Which Rebel Media has spun into impending sharia law or something.
Humans are terrible 😐
I read that the school librarian in question politely rejected the books because they were already a resource-rich library in a rich school and there were other schools that needed books more than they did (they were picked to receive the gift because they’d won some award for excellence or something).
Also possibly something about how there were plenty of less Classic-Book contenders for this kind of gift; they already had loads of Dr. Seuss on the shelves.
I may be remembering back-asswards, my recollection is a bit vague.
I can’t think of any racism in Dr Seuss. That doesn’t mean there’s no examples of it anywhere, but none that I can think of. The one about the Star Bellied Sneeches is explicitly anti-racist. I wonder why the Trumps would give Dr Seuss books though. Are they unaware that he was a socialist?
@ opposablethumbs, @WWTH :
The librarian’s letter: http://www.hbook.com/2017/09/blogs/family-reading/dear-mrs-trump/
Apparently (towards the end of the letter) someone has found racism in Dr. Seuss – links provided in the letter.
Thought it were a pretty naff response, TBH. Say thanks and gift the books on if you don’t want them.
@WWTH,
According to this article,
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/education/wp/2017/09/28/racist-propaganda-librarian-rejects-melania-trumps-gift-of-dr-seuss-books/
part of the racism thing is that The Cat in the Hat has elements of racist black caricatures in his design. I have not read the original paper on this, so I have no idea what else is being called racist in his books.
Though there is this as well:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/articles.masslive.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2017/10/dr_seuss_step-daughter.amp
About the racist Chinese character from “And to Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street” mural in the Dr. Seuss Museum
in Springfield.
I do know there’s one obvious sexist story in his collections, though. The one where the cat girl normally uses her imagination machine to dream up cute little critters to play with. Then one day she decides to crank it up to eleven, producing a critter who goes out of control and eats all the food in the house and runs up the phone bill calling all its distant family members for long talks.
She and her brother dispell the beast, then he gives her a long lecture about misusing her imagination machine like that, ensuring that she doesn’t try to create anything except cute little critters from there on out.
Don’t see that one reprinted anywhere anymore, outside of Complete Collections-style books.
ETA: I don’t believe Seuss was racist when he did those drawings so much as a product of his times. Evidently when he did become aware of the problematic elements in his stuff, like the Chinese guy in Mulberry St., he altered the artwork to take that out of the later reprint editions of that book.
So there’s that, at least.
Reason #2832712 why there’s no such thing as “ironic” Nazism. Because that implies there’s some kind of performative element to acting like this. There isn’t. This is what the CHUDs really believe.
Well, a lot of Dr Seuss’ earliest wartime stuff was ridiculously racist against Asian people, but he changed his ways and worked his ass off to make up for it, and he was always anti-Nazi. Much like comic books of the same era.
Yeah, considering the art work in children’s books always had racist depictions of Asian and African people until very recently and Seuss had the drawings changed, it seems quite a stretch to call him racist. At least to the extent that his works should be rejected from children’s libraries. There’s a reason that I thought it sounded like a fake story based on a straw SJW stereotype.
There’s not going to be any classics that are 100% free of any problematic content. I tend to think that unless it’s really bad, it’s better to use that as a teachable moment with children than try and shield them from it.
@WWTH
Exactly. Kid-me learned a lot when I was reading Huckleberry Finn for the first time and asked my teacher what a certain word meant (the n-word).
A Twitter alternative for people who find Twitter a hostile environment for racist, sexist, Anti-Semitic assholery?
I hadn’t heard of Gab, and here I am with no whiskey in the house. Grrrr.
I sometimes tangle with ‘race realists’ on Facebook; my usual line is “dude, I’m so white I have a favorite brand of mayonnaise – and *I* think you’re a waste of carbon.” The idea of a white man who disagrees with them seems to distress them, poor delicate flowers that they are.
Is it just me or is the free speech lovin’ Gab a lot harder to navigate without an account than the free speech hatin’ Twitter?
That’s the white kids’ secret, Cap… They’re always angry
As both a vile Jew AND a woman with a potato bag arse I, um, something.
Damn but do I ever hate Couillard.
Background: Couillard heads the Quebec Liberal party, which is the non-racist neoliberal federalist party of Quebec. There’s also a racist neoliberal party that refuses to say if it’s federalist or separatist; a racist social-democratic separatist party; and a non-racist social-democratic separatist party.
They’ve been losing popularity because the party is corrupt as hell. Which makes hell look bad, sorry about that. Moderately competent, but could be a lot better (see above re: corruption); cut social services as much as possible before anyone notices, and move money to the rich away from the poor.
Now, an election is coming up. They desperately need a way to change the topic of discussion away from screwing the poor and getting personally rich off kickbacks.
So a few months the Liberals decided to take on the separation plank. It was bizarre, and nobody bought it: the party that’s been defined in large part about being *opposed* to separation was going to take steps to achieve separation or otherwise resolve the underlying constitutional issue (which only people over 60 care about). Riiiight. So that flopped.
Then they lost a by-election to replace someone who had resigned. They lost to the racist neoliberal party. So now they’ve decided to take on racism as a party plank: out of nowhere they brought up and passed a law requiring everyone, regardless of religion or race, to take off their niqab when seeking public services… including riding on a city bus.
I don’t see this ending well for them: the two main opposition parties are *already* racist, and one of them agrees on everything other than racism, so which voter is going to switch to the Liberals if they too embrace racism? On the other hand, lots of voters have been scared to vote for the other parties because they’re either racist or separatist, and separation is scary because that’s based in nationalism, which is very appealing to racists. Now, they only have one party to vote for which has a platform that advocates against racism.
But more importantly, I see this going very badly for muslims and other minorities. It’s not like Quebec had a shortage of hate crimes already, but sure, let’s stoke the fires.
@numerobis
Thanks for the rundown. I was wondering where the QLP pulled this from, figuring that they did away with Pauline Marois for her stupid Quebec Charter of Values nonsense. Christ, we already had one mosque shooting, let’s invite some more….
Why is it so hard to find a sensible left-leaning party in this country? I think the NDP is moving in the right direction (I hope at least) with Jagmeet Singh, and at the very least he’ll pull Justin Trudeau in the right direction. But with the Ontario NDP pulling right-wing talking points like they did last election and Quebec’s Solidare party for separatism… I’d just like a competent, straightforward CCF-style social democrat party that doesn’t sell out its principles for the sake of political expediency.
This is all very appalling, but I can’t stop laughing at the guy who has (IQ: RICK) in his actual username. That’s saaaaaaaad.
@Gussie Jives:
Unfortunately, the last time I remember a major NDP party in power would have been Bob Rae, and not only was he pretty centrist for the NDP, he wound up pissing off a good chunk of the NDP’s natural voter base. Many of whom, with their ‘economical anxiety’, went conservative instead and we got Harris, who promptly started disassembling some of the good things Rae had done.
(Such as the previously much-delayed subway lines that Rae had set up funding for, two of which were already under construction. One of them had to be filled back in and only got restarted years later as the Crosstown streetcar line along Eglinton, while the other one along Sheppard got cut short and only got built at all because some of Mel Lastman’s rich friends owned property along there and were able to apply pressure to get the subway built so they could justify building condominiums. The nearby condo only now under construction is the reason why Bessarion station exists at all.)
At least Rae had the sense to understand that at the Federal level, having him as the head of the party would likely be a liability in Ontario. I have a certain amount of respect for Rae’s practicality in politics: he always seemed willing to take the workable approach rather than the idealistic approach. But some of the ways in which he did mess up (usually through angering his own base by not taking the idealistic approach) are still reverberating through Ontario politics.
Yeah, I have a certain amount of hope for Jagmeet Singh as well.
I was actually talking with someone in the U.S. recently on a business trip, somebody who had already identified himself as pretty anti-Trump. He asked me what Canadians thought of Trudeau. My answer was “much like a lot of Americans thought of Obama a couple of years in: speaks well, good ideas, nice guy, but more ‘business as usual’ in actual deeds than we were hoping for”.
(I have some ex-military friends who are really not happy with Trudeau, simply because the Canadian military really needs to be pretty much put into a ‘state of good repair’ focus and not used at all until we can get it back to a workable state.)
I think a lot of the general problem boils down to ‘bumper sticker politics’. It’s hard to get people to care about anything that you can’t express succinctly.
My (former) best friend who’s recently gone full alt-right over the course of the last year and a half recently got an account on this site. I’m guessing he may be past the point of no return now.
Re Dr Seuss (whose books I read to my son approx. five million times, & never got bored): my very favourite effort from the whole Melania/ school librarian thing was this:
I find it hysterical, not least because a librarian fails to spell her own name consistently 😀
Popped back to say
@C,
Ohmygod I know right? Especially since Szechuan Sauce-Gate ???
I was unsurprised by the turnout for Richard Spencer’s thing for pretty much the same reason. (That happened here, so I’ve been talking a lot about it). Of course there weren’t many nazis actually at his speech; even they don’t want to listen to him dog-whistle for hours.
She’s not the Queen or the Virgin Mary, dude, you don’t have to spell Our with a capital letter.
Hello my name is None Of Your Business because I am the Librarian in the Unseen University of Ankh-Morpork. I never sent a f****** letter to That Weird Queen In Roundworld telling her that we do not want her donation of “Art of Ye Deal” because I have deemed them suitable for toilet paper.
Being the Librarian and in my current simian condition, I can seriously speak for everyone when I say “Ook” to Lord Cut-My-Own-Throat Trump.
The Librarian
Unseen University
Ankh-Morpork
@Arctic Ape,
Too much amaze. You has killed me 😀
I did consider starting a new religion in your honour, but that’s a bit creepy…
@ mish
Now I’m imagining a parallel universe where it’s the second coming but Jesus is just hearing that from Saint Peter.