By David Futrelle
It’s a rarity in this year of terrible, but tonight has been a night of actual good news! Dems are winning elections, and Reddit has banned the toxic cesspool known as the Incels subreddit! Celebrate while you can in this open thread!
No trolls. Fuck trolls.
This is the first time a wall of news notifications hasn't been a nightmare in god knows how long pic.twitter.com/NpTaW5QK6e
— Ashley Feinberg (ashleyfeinberg.bsky.social) (@ashleyfeinberg) November 8, 2017
Dems have won all three of the marquee off-year races — NJGov, VAGov, NYC Mayor — for the first time since 1989.
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) November 8, 2017
Democrats decimated Republicans across the country tonight, at every level and in every branch of state government.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) November 8, 2017
Thanks, Trump!
And this is the icing on the cake:
Trans woman Danica Roem (D) just defeated anti-LGBTQ candidate Bob Marshall (R) in Virginia, becoming the first trans state legislator in America.
— Laura Bassett (@LEBassett) November 8, 2017
The man who wrote the anti-trans bathroom bill just lost the election to a trans woman. Let that sink in. https://t.co/KFEZXSYvMy
— Laura Bassett (@LEBassett) November 8, 2017
Oh, and there’s this:
Jeff Sessions' DOJ Drops Prosecution Of Woman Who Laughed At Jeff Sessions https://t.co/slOPOhmLYN pic.twitter.com/ekRsU1RJAq
— Curt and Frank 🏳️🌈 (@curtandfrank) November 7, 2017
Let’s all celebrate by laughing at Jeff Sessions!
Meanwhile, on Reddit:
Reddit has banned the Incels subreddit. About fucking time; it was a cesspool of misogyny and violent hate. pic.twitter.com/8RieXtxZLN
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) November 8, 2017
HEALTH NOTE: Though cheered by tonight’s news, I’m still dealing with a shitstorm of health issues. I will return to regular posting as soon as I can, but I’m not sure when that will be. Thanks again for your patience and your support!
WWTH, and others:
Thank you all, indeed.
@Scildfreja
In other words, why bother? Just get a bunch of friends together to make Tuesdays movie night. Bam. Eight bucks a week and cinemas don’t serve booze, probably cheaper than any of the non-“free” alternatives and the “free” ones, as you’ve noted, have other kinds of strings attached. The usual kinds of strings, in fact. Free means you’re the product and you’re going to sit through a lot of advertisements, in this case for religions.
What about cocaine? That’s basically just a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, isn’t it? And it’s both euphoric and powerfully addictive, last I heard.
Buttercup:
In addition to what Axe said, I suspect we wouldn’t be trusted.
Speaking of disappointing white guy politicians, I’d like to get some feedback from fellow Canadian Mammotheers (or Mammotheers up on Canadian politics) on the matter of Justin Trudeau.
I was listening to the Michael Brooks podcast on the way to the office and he mentioned Jagmeet Singh in passing to a Canadian caller, saying that he thinks Trudeau is a boring pseudo-woke protector of the status quo (or something along those lines) and that he’d vote for Singh in a heartbeat.
I’ve got huge respect for both Singh and the NDP. Other NDP leadership candidates actually had more progressive platforms than Singh, but Singh’s got charisma to spare. All that said… I don’t think I could cast a ballot for the NDP. From where I live in Toronto, Liberal stronghold that it is, the NDP just end up acting as a spoiler and that’s how our current MP, who is really really good on the issues, lost in 2011. Perhaps if I lived in the downtown core where there’s a lot of NDP support or out in the northern ridings where Charlie Angus comes from, I could get away with it, but not in North Toronto and definitely not in the suburbs.
Perhaps Michael doesn’t understand that we don’t vote for a leader in Canada the way it’s done in the states; we vote for an MP and the party whose leader has the most seats forms the government. Despite what I think of Trudeau, I do like my MP and the NDP hasn’t run a candidate yet who has convinced me that I shouldn’t support him.
The other thing Michael may also not understand is just how much the right-wing media in this country hate Trudeau. And I mean hate. They are trying everything they can, short of actually hitting from the left, to try to tarnish his golden boy image. They’re failing, but the fact that they haven’t let up in two years now tells me that he’s the real threat to them, not Singh.
And yet, I am continuously disappointed in Trudeau’s consistently falling short on promises, benchmarks and letting embarrassments like Bill Morneau and the Paradise Papers get the better of him. I really do expect better of him and as great as his persona is, it’s time the policies got caught up too.
Is Michael right about Trudeau? Am I hiding behind strategic voting to justify not supporting the party that has a better sense of the necessary solutions? The last thing I want is another greasy Conservative scumbag in office with 38% of the vote because the NDP split the left again. Any thoughts at all would be very helpful.
@Scild
“For a not-rich person, “going to rehab” involves going to an evening meeting a couple of nights a week while they’re working. Like, if a dude is arrested on a DUI but is required to go to rehab instead of going to jail, they aren’t going to an actual place. They stay at home, keep working,a nd have to do their AA classes. Same with domestic violence.
Health insurance is a thing, you know. Not everyone in inpatient rehab is rich. (Although they probably are at least lower middle class).
“There may or may not be actual rehab stuff going on, but it’s not uncomfortable,
Dunno, the dailyfail article made this place sound pretty strict. But I don’t really want to argue this point, because I think rehab should be about fixing people and not punishing them, so if it turns out that these places are very comfortable, then I say yay!
“Calling both “getting help to people with problems” and “giving rich assholes cover for their predatory behaviour” the same word – rehab – is one of the unfortunate growths of the english languages, because they’re very different things.”
Well I can get behind that!
“and the court refused to let him take some other option, even if he paid for them.”
I don’t think the courts ever make good decisions when it comes to medicine. Religion may help some people, but it won’t help everyone.
“I can’t recall the statistics source, but there was something about AA being about as effective as going and sitting in a room with friends (and no alcohol) for a couple of hours a week.”
Well not really. Although the success rate (or failure rate) of AA depends on who you ask.
“and that the physical side of addiction isn’t nearly as strong as we make it out to be.”
I think we confuse “dependency” or needing to take, or taper off, a drug to avoid getting temporarily sick, with “addiction”, or your reward pathway becoming so fucked up that it will never be quite the same again.
For example, I’ve been in chronic pain in the past, and had taken opiates daily for months. When I finally got an operation and could control the pain with NSAIDs , I was so glad for the chance to be off the narcotics that I round canned them right away and smiled happily through the week of shits from hell. Because I had seen so many acquaintances go down the rabbit hole with herion, and I DID NOT WANT. So I had a (very weak) dependency on the pills v. being addicted to them.
But I never got high off the opiates, either. I’m not quite so lucky with booze.
“Dopamine isn’t addictive, nor is it a “reward chemical”.
Hair splitting. A dopamine release may not be (strongly) pleasurable in itself, but dopamine is the brain chemical that controls learning about reward. (Among many other things. Ever see the movie “Awakenings” with Robin Williams?) Which is why the reward system of the brain is called the “mesolimbic dopamine system”. 🙂
A huge ass dopamine release is going to cause more, and faster, change (learning) than a very small one. Which is why cocaine (HUGE dump of dopamine into your synapses) can cause addiction, while eating an unexpectedly yummy ice cream (much much smaller release of dopamaine) causes nothing more than getting the same flavor the next time you go. The chances of repeated, huge dopamine releases going and dysregulating the whole system is real, the chances of very small ones doing so is pretty much nil.
“Addiction, and addiction therapy, is about learning and habituation. It’s about social behaviours and about anxiety and trauma. Therapy needs to treat that.”
The problem that I have with this isn’t that I don’t think it’s true, it’s that I think it’s very easy for addicts that *HAVE* turned the lives around, addicts who *ARE* happy now, to think “well I’ve fixed my problems, so now it’s ok to drink or do drugs”. Maybe sometimes this works, but I IMO even happy addicts still risk falling into the same old dumpster fire if they don’t accept that their addiction is now due to permanent changes that have happened to their brain.
I am SO disappointed by the reaction I’m seeing from much of the left to the Al Franken news. So much rape apologia. No, it’s not ok he assaulted her, then staged a humiliating photograph as retribution just because she appears on Hannity’s show, or because you really just like him. Yes, sticking your tongue down someone’s throat who doesn’t want you to is sexual assault, no it doesn’t matter whether he’s actually grabbing her breasts, he’s still intending on humiliating her for rejecting him.
Fuck that noise.
@The Adjunct
Whoa, hadn’t read the details of the kiss thing. Okay, yeah, fuck Al Franken. That’s straight up sexual assault.
@Moggie and Axe – I’ve gotten so, so tired of the unspoken requirement that politicians have to have a partner and/or children in order to be seen as mature and trustworthy. Websites, campaign literature and ads often feature prominent photos of shiny, happy cishet families. Being single is almost a liability for a candidate – I remember Dennis Kucinich getting flak for it during the 2004 campaign. Maybe voters wrongly think that unpartnered people are less invested in their communities, or won’t champion policies that benefit families. For similar reasons, atheists have an uphill battle in government.
I didn’t mean to imply that abuse (and assholery) would magically vanish if asexuals were in charge. I’m just really sick and tired of the whole I Have A Family = I’m Automatically Trustworthy And Wholesome equation, when so often the Boy Scout facade turns out to be hiding monstrous behavior. I would love more diversity in government. Wishful thinking, I know.
@Buttercup
” Maybe voters wrongly think that single people are less invested in their communities, or won’t champion policies that benefit families.”
Yeah, and we think that men need women to “tame” them and “settle” them down. Men with families are rewarded at work, women with families are punished at work.
@Scild
Just wanted to say, I hope my post didn’t come off as harsh- it’s not my intention to be so! 🙂
Oh, and it’s not a “purity test” or “the left is eating it’s own” because we want to hold sexual predators accountable! Goddamit this is exactly why this is such a huge problem, that people everywhere ignore or excuse this kind of behaviour, especially if it’s personally inconvenient! Holding predators to account is NOT the same kind of leftist “purity test” as disowning a candidate because they took wall street money! Come ON! Asking victims and survivors to tolerate predators in the political party that ostensibly “cares” about them just so you can keep hold of power is not “revolutionary”. Keep your fucken revolution.
I’m not yelling at anyone here, just a lot commenters on Twitter, jezebel, etc.
@katamount
I think a lot of people have somehow missed the coercion and backstage assault part of the story and just focused on the photo.
@mrex –
Yep, that’s a big part of it. For a certain kind of voter, a male politician having a wife means he’s free to think lofty thoughts and make lofty laws while his wife takes care of all the domestic stuff. No wife means he’s too busy cooking meals and mopping up spills to make laws keeping women in their place. (Only partly snark.) It isn’t the same for female politicians. The expectation is still that they handle the domestic sphere while they’re senatoring (or whatever).
Marriage also earns a politician a certain seal of approval from the status quo. Voters feel a married politician is more likely to believe in, and uphold, traditional institutions. He or she is probably more likely to be perceived as moral and rule-following. Insurance companies do the same thing when they set different premiums for married vs. single drivers. To hear the actuaries tell it, we singles are apparently reckless drivers with no regard for human life. As soon as we get hitched, we suddenly sober up, become pillars of the community, and start driving carefully. There are probably statistics on which they base their calculations, but I’m not convinced marital status is causative. At best, it’s a correlation.
I could go on. There are a lot of depressing ways in which single people are discriminated against in society at large, not just politics.
And to think that I was upset (a little upset) with Al Franken for adopting a flirtatious tone to interrogate then-Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan during her confirmation hearings — who of course had no choice but to answer his questions while maintaining her own decorum.
“Al!” I said to the radio. “For the love of Katie, leave that kind of stuff to the older generation of right-wing men! The guys who can’t encounter a woman without thinking, ‘I can use this human being to puff up my own ego.'”
Sigh.
I suppose we were all more innocent in 2010. Back when most of us would have sworn up and down that there was no way that millionaire playboy and professional braggart Donald Trump could ever be president — or at least, not president of the USA.
@Buttercup:
I have a darker suspicion, at least in the case of the Presidency. Which is that close family that will outlive the Prez make excellent hostages. Ones able to suppress even deathbed confessions.
I’ve long wondered if every time a new Prez is sworn in a Secret Service agent takes him aside, explains certain things to him, and that is why e.g. Obama did a very hairpin 180 on warrantless surveillance the day he was inaugurated.
Spotted on Twitter: An incisive summary of the Franken brouhaha
And this heartfelt response:
Can it be? Will the feminist government be returning from exile very, very soon?
This is not okay. You do not respect women. You knew it was wrong and you did it anyway. You are not just now gaining a new perspective on your behavior; you’re discovering there are now consequences for it. May your shoes always have thorns which you can never seem to find for removal but which always poke you as you walk.
Jumping in on another subject altogether (only very tangentially related to the discussion of mental health issues …)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/16/feminist-reading-anorexia-books-susie-orbach
I just thought this was interesting – a woman called Kate Leaver talks about how feminist reading (including but not confined to Orbach) helped her recover from anorexia by helping her relate her body image issues to the wider social context, stop blaming only herself and stop feeling alone with the condition.
@Katamount
Re: voting.
There is nothing wrong with strategic voting. I’ve done it to make sure UKIP didn’t take our borough (because fuck that noise – they ran an EDL retread who had a good chance of winning). But in general, vote who you support – it’s simple as that.
If you think the NDP are more in line with your beliefs, show it, and more importantly them, at the polling booth. It might not make a difference this time. Might not make a difference next time, even. But if people aren’t voting for them, why should they run an adequately funded candidate instead of a placeholder in your seat? There’s only so much money for MP’s elections.
*Not a Trudeau fan – he’s too slick. Reminds me of Blair in the first couple years of his power 😛
Damn good point, Shadowplay, damn good point….
Perhaps next election it’s possible. The Cons only won my riding in 2011 due to the extreme inadequacies of Michael Ignatieff (and even then, by a mere percentage point). If the Liberals remain a steamroller, perhaps an NDP vote would not cause a split that allows the Cons to win.
@The Adjunct – I’ve seen some similar apologia in my supposedly progressive FB groups as well.
I mean, I DO get it. I LOVED Franken! I really did! I thought he was smart and progressive and sincerely cared about doing the most good for the most people – and he probably still does.
But as I’ve told my “Well, it was a joke” and “Well he’s done a lot of good” peers, I DON’T CARE. It’s not enough that he he’s done a lot of good. I mean it’s SOMETHING but MY GOD just no. No no no. He doesn’t get a pass for shitty behavior. He just doesn’t. I’m not putting up with this bullshit anymore, not from him, not from Louis CK, not from women who sexually assault young boys – nobody.
Like someone above said, being ace doesn’t guarantee someone isn’t a sexual predator, and neither does being a woman (plenty of women seem to prey upon their young male students). I’m voting for only women, but there’d better not be a single whiff of anything like this bullshit.
Not going to excuse this one more day, not for anyone.
@Moggie
Absolutely not, and in a lotta ways. But especially not with male politicians. There’s the whole ‘virility’ thing, and Al Gore had to awkwardly make out with his wife, and the transparent dick jousting, dominance display neocons want the government to do with foreigners, and *blergh* all around. An out, ace dude comes in with a perceived mayunliness deficit from the get go
@Buttercup
Totally not tryna nitpick your wishful thinking into the ground, I’m wishfully thinking it too after all. But. Diversity means aces in government, regardless of their marital or parenthood status. Aces don’t only count if we’re single and childfree. Straight, white bachelors is a sorta diversity, I suppose, but of lesser import, I think. Also, we already had a straight, white bachelor President. He got married later, but still. But, yeah, absolutely agreed on the rest 🙂
Indeed. But which is, like, the exact opposite. (Usually young, urban, brown) singles are the ones who’re actually in favor of things that help families. (Older, white, suburban/rural) married people only care about policies that will help their family. Especially if it can come at the expense of families they don’t approve of
Surplus:
You and Bill Hicks:
As a warning, the video moggie links to includes footage of the Kennedy assassination, for anyone uncomfortable with images of violence
So, I was a true crime show on Investigation Discovery and the murder they were profiling was sooooo MRA
http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Indle-King-found-guilty-of-killing-mail-order-1081224.php
This abuser marries a mail order Russian bride, she divorces him, he posts screeds online about how women use and abuse him and he’s never going to be used for a green card ever again. He marries another mail order bride, only 20 years old and abuses her. She’s granted a visa extension to complete her education in the states without being married to him and starts the process of divorcing him. So he and his friend/tenant who is a convicted sex offender murder her. The even scarier thing is that he was already seeking a third mail order bride.
If AVFM and the red pill subreddit had been around in the year 2000, he would have been an avid commenter I’m sure.
Sorry, Josh is right. I should have posted this: