By David Futrelle
Three, three indictments in one! Three former Trump campaign officials are in the hot seat today. Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is the big name on the list (along with his pal Rick Gates), for such fun things as conspiracy against the U.S. and money laundering. But even more intriguing is the GUILTY PLEA of relatively unknown Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, whom Mueller has presumably flipped, who seems to have been doing some active COLLUDING WITH THE RUSSIANS.
So here’s an open thread to discuss the news and any other indictment fun that transpires today.
NOTE: Sorry to have gone missing for so long. I’m still dealing with a combo of health issues that have made it very difficult to work. Thanks again for your patience and support.
http://www.reactiongifs.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/tenor.gif
U blew my mind!
Since u totes have insights about MRAs and feminists being totes the same that are so deep and amazing and so nu 2 me, I must no wut the rest of ur thought is.
Please tell us! Please?
Irony, what? I must no!
I think maybe yesterday’s mass shooting broke me.
I feel like I just don’t care anymore.
ETA: I’ll probably bounce back, and I don’t mean to go all “poor me, cheer me up!” at all. I just wanted to write it down “out loud” somewhere.
dreemr:
Jedi hugs to you. It does feel endless doesn’t it.
ETA to reflect your ETA: I understand heh.
@ dreemr, sombrero,
Calahan’s Law: The Law of the Conservation of Empathy;
“Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased.”
hmmm… WaPo sez the Sutherland, Springs, Tx. shooter was court-martialled by the USAF for domestic abuse….
Why am I not surprised…?
@sunnysombrero & @Weird Eddie – thank you. Hugs back.
Some days it just doesn’t seem like we can go on. I know we can, but ugh.
@Weird Eddie
The Mail says he preached atheisism too. I now doubt the existence of atheism. And Texas.
I do not doubt the existence of the Cross Time Saloon. 😛
@dreemr,
I hear ya.
Seems like Devin Kelley wanted to kill his former in-laws, who are member of First Baptist. Fortunately for them they were absent. Maybe he hoped his ex-wife would be there as well.
Oh, the shooter just wanted to annihilate his former wife and in-laws? Well, that’s obviously the right of every man. Carry on.
/sarcasm, of course, but it sure does seem like men feel they have the right to kill anyone at any time.
@ Shadowplay
No, we don’t have to doubt the existence of atheism because atheism was touted by someone who did an evil thing… that would be like doubting the existence of evolution because Darwin had bigoted beliefs.
Texas, tho… I’ve ALWAYS thought Texas was a Fig Newton of someone’s overactive imagination….
It’s hard to feel any kind of hope these days.
You know what I find weird? That Jjj posts his “rant” about mass shootings and then a mass shooting occurs.
But do tell us more about your thoughts on wanting more father’s to commit infanticide, since feminists have already been saying for fucking DECADES that the default should not be the mother being the better parent, you fucking DIPSHIT.
(Since you’re going to lie, and all, I thought I’d throw in some hyperbole of my own. I don’t actually want any infant to die.)
Dreemr, yes. I feel the same. I burst into tears when I heard. 35 days after Vegas.
That’s the Universal Truth upon which patriarchy teeters. THAT’S the gospel the volcano god sent down on the stone tablet, the foundation of its religion and of the Levantine religions. If I am “wronged” by a woman, anything I do is explained and excused!!!
THERE IS ALWAYS HOPE! My parents’ generation, my generation, and those that followed worked for social justice… and we made progress, too. We saw legislation for civil rights, for women’s rights, for genderqueer peoples’ rights, for voting rights. To be sure, the gains we made were gains of QUANTITY MUCH MORE THAN OF QUALITY, i.e. they were laws, not changes in the norms of the society. As such, they could be swept away by the whims of a large minority in possession of social power. They can also be won again. Looks like my kid and my grandkids are going to have to do this work anew. They know how, and they were raised with a sense of social conscience.
@Weird Eddy
Hope can be the worst thing sometimes. It can break you harder when the thing you hoped for doesn’t come. It makes you not prepare for negative eventualities because then you think you’re giving up on that hope. No thank you. I don’t need hope social justice wins in the end. I need to make it happen. I need to fight injustice wherever I can.
Yeah. Now the word is to be situationally aware. Because everyone needs to be aware that no matter where they go, they may be mown down by some angry man with a gun.
Not even safe in a CHURCH. God DAMN this shit.
@ Kupo;
I hear you. I am not saying we need to stop working because we’ve been set back. If we stop, what does that say to our progeny, let alone what it says to the bigots and the power structure. I’ve wondered often whether we had even made any progress at all, given how ill-received the laws regarding human rights (across the board, really) have been by whites in general and powerful people in particular.. But, these things change over generations. They change because each successive generation finds more acceptance and continues to demand more change from the society.
This won’t help much, I know. I’m damned if I see this as acceptable, but it is what it is. The first order right now would appear to be, work to minimize the damage the cheeto can do, by resisting.
The protests at election and inauguration, the airport protests of the Muslim ban, the Women’s March, these are actions which we can join with.
It’s always been weird to me that the phrase is “hell hath no fury like the woman scorned” when men are so much more likely to murder over relationship troubles.
I don’t if it’s that men’s vengeance is seen as justifiable while women’s vengeance is seen as irrational. Or maybe men are terrified that women will one day treat them the way that they treat women?
It’s not just that one saying or anything. A very typical comedy trope is that husbands are terrified of pissing off their wives. Yet, severe and life threatening abuse is far more likely to be of the male abuser – female victim type than any other kind.
@WWTH
Women aren’t people, so it’s totes understandable to murder us for being out of line with men’s expectations, but how dare we be angry at them for trivial things like not treating us like people?
/s, if that wasn’t obvious.
THIS!!!!!
I dunno if that’s sarcasm… or not. I remember from when I was a kid, the sit-com “The Honeymooners”… it was pure comedy… right…?, this abusive fucking ASSHOLE, always threatening to physically assault his wife…. It seems to me, this idealized relationship IS the reality, glossed over with a thin veneer of restraint. Still close enough to the surface that we have NO PROBLEM justifying the actions of athletes and celebrities who abuse their intimate partners, of business people who brag about sexually abusing business partners, clients or employees, of politicians and powerful people* (and we’re almost universally talking about men taking power over women here) taking unwanted liberties with whomever they fancy.
@ weird eddie
https://youtu.be/0P84NiVGJsw
Love and hugs to my American friends. This stuff just makes me heart sick. I took the weekend off of the news and this is what happens.
@WWTH, I think that’s just another example of how the media is male-centred. Men are the viewer-inserts, the stars, and women are the foils and accessories to make the main characters’ life interesting. If the dude portrays any negative traits that aren’t lovable, the male viewer can’t feel reassured and sympathetic to them. That’s my take on it anyways.
Media sucks 😐
EDIT: Ugh, the Honeymooners. The sitcoms of that era, *so awful*. Domestic abuse is funny, everyone! Ha ha ha.
@Jjj,
Just want to say that you’re really shit at statistics. Care to list your confounding factors on that little gem you dropped there?
Yet another thing ruined by MRAs: I can’t even find the real statistics on Google, because they’ve been buried by 5000 copy-paste MRA blogs pushing fake ones. (Although I do get a kick out of how many of ’em follow up “Feeemales kill 101% of their children!!!” with “CHILD SUPPORT!!!”)
Oh well. Odds are he meant abortion anyway, they always bloody do.
@SFHC, women are statistically more likely to commit infanticide in the first week after giving birth. You know – alone, terrified, chronically depressed, with no resources and no social services to support them, and a culture that will consider her dirty and worthless for having a child out of wedlock. You know – normal.
After the first week, the scales tip and it’s then men who are more likely to commit infanticide, a father or a male relative.
https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/infant-homicide/
I mean, tell me you’re surprised here.
Women who have no social support and are suffering huge social stigmas do awful things out of desperation; if they can pull themselves together then the biggest danger is men being violent or trying to protect the “family honour.”
MRA’s biggest interest in these statistics aren’t “how to do we stop this”, but in using it as a poorly-constructed argument to say “see how terrible women are”.
Show of hands, anyone surprised? No? Huh.
@PeeVee
Somebody on Twitter posted a picture of the Pastor’s daughter who was killed in the attack and I just lost it…
This state of affairs just can’t go on. Same script, different day. What makes this remarkable (at least to me) is the rhetorical whiplash that right-wingers experienced going from the New York terror attack (“Politicize it immediately! GITMO! Death penalty!”) to this terror attack (“Too soon! Don’t talk about guns!”).
*sigh*
I was listening to some YouTube vids while I hacked around on Sunday following a long Saturday at the Royal (short for the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, which is an annual Toronto trade show for farmers–I hadn’t been since I was a kid and wanted to see if it’s changed at all). Kristi Winters had a great discussion with a fellow YTer discussing the alt-right in depth and Kristi Winters is one of those great people who makes it clear that she leads with her values, particularly humanism, which I find more and more is what’s been eroded by the distance of social media and the collapse of community networks. The discussion kept coming back to that missing empathy over and over again: the alt-right need to dehumanize their opposition to do what they do. This was on full display in the next video I listened to, which was Kevin Logan talking to a Bearing fan, and it was the expected obfuscation, goalpost shifting and “whataboutery”, but what struck me is how this Bearing fan so casually name-dropped “Big Red” and Kevin just went along with that name.
Chanty Binx–the woman so famously made the face of feminism with her glasses and dyed red hair–has been pretty much the only avatar the internet shitlords have for the stereotypical “third wave feminist”. She’s received a metric shit-ton of harassment over the four years since that video made the rounds, a video that clearly shows her trying to make a statement for the cameras and being interrupted repeatedly by some jackass off-screen. I take this one kinda personally because she’s from my hometown; I don’t take kindly to the entire world raking a fellow Hogtowner over the coals, especially the way they’ve been doing it.
But to bring it back to the point of empathy: they have to use that “Big Red” epithet. Because if she has a name, if she’s a person, then they might have some qualms about sending her several dozen threats. Same goes with “Trigglypuff”, “Moldylocks”, “Literally Who” (always women of course)… they have to be dehumanized and this is one of those things that separates the social justice minded from its opposition. And we have to be vigilant and check those epithets wherever they come up. Otherwise, we do the dehumanizing for them.
I tweeted out in response to Carl Benjamin using her picture in another video (to repeat, it’s been four goddamned years!) and said the world owes her a massive apology. Wherever you are Chanty, you got me in your corner. Stay strong!
@Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy:
It’s particularly the theme of Small Gods, which had as part of its basic plotline a god who had lost power because people didn’t believe in the god anymore so much as they believed in the church… which, honestly, seems to be as a good (and pretty certainly deliberate on Sir PTerry’s part) description of a sizable number of Christians today.
Granted, I also seem to recall Pratchett being somewhat publicly atheist as well.
@PeeVee:
George Tiller was shot in a church by somebody who opposed abortion for religious reasons.
Sometimes you feel that Orwell was actually underestimating people’s capability to doublethink.