Happy Indictment Day! Open thread

Curiouser and curiouser. I can now see my own new comment, but nothing appears between it and WWTH’s comment three hours ago, either in the actual page or in the eight “recent comments” links — almost as if everybody genuinely had stopped commenting for three hours, at one of the site’s busiest times of day, on a thread that has been getting several comments an hour since its inception. And that would require a large number of disparate people to make a collective decision to stop commenting, in a coordinated fashion, without any obvious motive. So I’m still inclined to suspect a technical glitch here, but it’s obviously something more complicated than just a stale cache somewhere in the pipeline between me and WHTM…

@Surplus
I had a comment fail to go through earlier and was getting empty responses back from the site but it was while the bus was going through an area where my cell reception gets spotty, so I didn’t think much of it. It was around 7:30 pm or so WHTM time.

I gotta say that I was in no mood to read through Roosh and his vile ilk spew their toxicity regarding women’s basic rights. They should be property… but still human*! See ladies! We won’t strip you of ALL your rights!! Meanwhile, browsing tumblr and finding scum like this. Pretty much done for the day. Still sick ( Stay strong David!! ) and tired of disgusting misogynists pushing their Caesar’s Legion fantasies as reality.

Also, Trump throwing Jared under the bus? Countdown to when he starts throwing all his kids under one.

My cat was an outdoor cat, but there wasn’t any exotic or endangered birds around. (Not that I ever saw him successfully catch a bird, he mostly hunted lizards) The most exotic birds I’ve seen around the house were hummingbirds.

@Haise I can’t read that tumblr on my phone without signing into tumblr, which may be for the best.

Thanks for the song suggestions all, I really appreciate it!

Oooooh, are we doing riot grrrl?

My contributions:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IxH4tmhuCkY

Also, not my favorite song of theirs, but I’m sure it would greatly upset misogynists;

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PNGYMBfOU4w

In the same vein;

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xD8rWjx90-w

Axe may like this song. Or maybe not.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=deOm8wBbNbA

I’m could post more, but it’s bedtime.

@WWTH

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Kathleen Hanna is always a solid choice, if anything just to watch all the youtube misogynists froth. How do you like Le Tigre? I was really surprised when I first heard them because I was expecting punk, but I've found them throughly enjoyable. Plus, they make great housework music.

Bungalow Bill by the Beatles is a great sendup of macho animal trophy hunters (lookin’ at you, Traitor Tot)

Firstly, hi to anyone who remembers me from months ago(especially Axe, Dali, Sandra and the other few people who previously took time to educate me. Especially after I’d said something ignorant.) But I don’t see any comments from my bestie, Fran the gorgeous Nubian empress?. Hi darling, if you see this.

I haven’t been commenting anywhere since the politics and current events got so horrifying. I’m mildly bipolar and usually can get along without meds, but over time I got more and more volatile and unstable until me and my primary partner decided I should talk to my old strength and see if he thought me checking myself in to the psych ward I stayed in once before might do me good.

I’ve been out for a long time, I was only in for 4 weeks(and they gave me a pretty large prescription for Xanax.) The reason I went in in the first place was I was having hysterical crying fits and not being able to control my emotions at all.

I know this was naive and maybe especially naive considering I’m a black queer(bisexual)female. But the election and the results of it shocked me to my core. I truly thought about 90% of people we’re good at heart but just incredibly ignorant. They meant to do the right thing and wanted to help people if they could without hurting themselves. But it turns out instead there is a large fraction of people who are willing to hurt themselves if it will hurt others more especially minorities and women. Seeing this every day on the news and the internet just was too much for me and the last straw was when in the middle of New York City, Manhattan for fucks sake, I got called a nigger bitch. I essentially had a breakdown. I am feeling better now but I have to monitor my information intake.

I’ve been lurking since I got back and this is the first time I’m commenting for two reasons, 1- I’ve been waiting for this, this feels like one of the first things that could really mean something. I’m feeling like I might be too optimistic but I don’t know he did take down Enron, didn’t he? I’m going to stick with optimism for now at least.

Also seeing how the thread turned into people talking about BDSM scenes with abuse and rapists being rampant I’ve been into the BDSM scene since college and I’m 33, abuse and rapists are just rampant in the world it’s no more common in the BDSM scene and no less common in the BDSM scene then it is anywhere else. I would say one in 2.5 of my female friends has been raped. I would say the number for sexual assault would almost be 100%, everyone has their stories. So why are some people singling out BDSM particularly? If someone could show me that rape or sexual assault is statistically more common in the BDSM scene, I’d be really interested in the study or journal or whatever but I just don’t think that’s true.
I hope everyone had a lovely Halloween. Good night

@KatieKitten420 The BDSM thing was less about statistics and more about the attitudes in the community and how abusers will use and twist the system itself to find and harm their victims. Without going back to reread the thread, I can recall some tidbits about how consent is said to be their biggest rule, but in practice it makes a lot of people in that community fervently deny that they could possibly be breaking that rule; how quite a few participants are just plain old abusers rather than actually kinky; and how like in many geek circles, they’re so absorbed in protecting the group identity from “outsiders” that they’d rather just let it slide when one of their own is attacking another.

That’s just off the top of my head.

‘Punk’ = ‘Prostitute’ is recorded in London from the mid 16th Century, so it seems to have been gender-switched in New York at some point in the 19th Century.

Interestingly the same thing happened with another slur imported into New York from British English. In 18th Century British English ‘faggot’ was a term of abuse for older women.*

So, historical evidence that yet again the worst slur you can throw at a man is any implication of feminity… (cf bitch, twat, etc etc)

* Literally ‘bundle of dry sticks’
The original meaning of faggot is a tied bundle of fireword or herbs, hence ‘faggot’ for a traditional dish of meatballs wrapped in caul fat, or ‘fag’ for a paperwrapped bundle of tobacco, aka a cigarette.

@all the bird nerds – one of my favorite pastimes is just watching the birds at my feeder. I once saw a scarlet tanager and I was so excited! The only person I could ever talk to about it was my now-deceased mother, everyone else just seems confused by my breathless excitement.

And yes, I guess I’m also a cat lady (and dog lady) but so?

I, too, have wondered if Fran is okay. Just when we get our beloved Scildfreja back, we lose another favorite ?.

@Katie this has been brutal for a lot of us, no doubt. I’m glad you and the people who love you are doing all you can to protect and care for yourself. And this IS good news, I only wish there were more of it. Patience, I guess.

Also I think BDSM was mostly brought up because of the Gor novels in relation to Roosh’s “women should be property” baloney.

So why are some people singling out BDSM particularly?

I made a Gor joke and pointed out that the Gorean subculture is a corruption of the BDSM scene and being unfamiliar with that scene, I posed the question to the forum. Pleasantly surprised that the conversation carried on; some excellent perspectives from those more familiar with the scene than me.

————

OT, but something Mammotheers also might offer perspectives on: the whole Contrapoints debating Blaire White/Jesse Singal article thing. This might be a bit more esoteric for those that don’t watch YouTube, but I figure some Mammotheers are familiar with Natalie’s videos and I watched Gwen_No_Fear’s response which struck me as quite measured.

To sum up what’s going on, prominent feminist trans YouTuber Natalie AKA Contrapoints had previously debated transphobic trans YouTuber Blaire White and Natalie seemed unprepared for the bad-faith tactics Blaire employed. Now she’s announced another debate at the same time a New York Magazine (?) piece written by a problematic author named Jesse Singal has just dropped. People got upset and Contra explained that she understands the objections to engaging with “the other side” for lack of a better term, but perceives a reflexive outrage to those that do talk to the other side as “clipping her wings” to use her words.

I’m a cis white guy who isn’t a content creator, so I can’t speak to the kind of shit smaller channels made by trans YouTubers get, but I’m willing to bet that the kind of poison that enablers like Blaire inject into the discourse are incredibly damaging. Gwen’s thesis was that Contra needs to get better at “debate” first and foremost and come to grips with who she’s talking to.

I used scare-quotes around the term “debate” because we all know it really isn’t a debate in the traditional sense. A qualified moderator actually calls out lies and that doesn’t happen even in moderated YouTube “debates”. What happens on YouTube is theater and to an extent Contra understands that given the performative aspect of her videos, but I don’t think she’s quite come to grips with the theatricality on display in YouTube interactions. “The other side” has essentially made abuse of women/trans people/minorities their own meal ticket at this point and performing that role for their audience pays their rent. You’re not going to get good-faith argumentation from somebody whose livelihood depends on them not understanding your arguments. Either come at them with a verbal sledgehammer or talk directly to the audience if they’re who you’re trying to reach.

People are rightfully worried that Contra’s going to go down the Laci Green route, where naiveté regarding “the battle of ideas” comes to wholesale abandonment of allyship. Based on what I’ve seen of Natalie, I don’t see that kind of white privilege naiveté in her, but even this is too much to just overlook.

Just wanted to toss in my two cents and see what you folks think.

I like to imagine that Fran is in a remote monestary mastering the Dragon Punch and therefore can’t post here – remote monestaries have notoriously bad Internet connections.