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By David Futrelle
Candace Owens — self-proclaimed “Red Pill Black” conservative — is having a bit of a moment, hanging out with new Trump fan Kanye West, posing for selfies with Don Jr., getting an effusive Twitter shout-out from Don Sr,, threatening to sue people who talk about her in what she considers the wrong way.
A lot of people have been left wondering just where exactly Owens came from. Well, there’s a bit of a story there.
Long-time readers of this blog first met Owens back in the days of Gamergate, after Zoe Quinn criticized her ill-conceived plan for an “anti-bullying” site that would have basically doxed a bunch of teenagers. After Quinn spoke out, Gamergaters spouting conspiracy theories quickly abandoned their own critiques of Owens and rallied around her. Owens began spouting conspiracy theories of her own, and, well, let’s just say things got very weird very fast, as they generally seem to do when Owens gets involved in anything.
In several posts, I tried my best to make sense of the whole surreal mess. I’m linking them here because I think they may illuminate a few things about Trump World’s newest heroine.
This post describes what happened immediately after Owens first heard from Quinn. Trust me, the headline (and the snippet from the post below) don’t fully capture the weirdness of the story.
Instead of listening to Quinn, Owens declared war on her, spewing forth dozens of angry and accusatory tweets, charging that Quinn and fellow anti-harassment activist Randi Harper … were somehow the puppetmasters behind a barrage of abusive, threatening, and often blatantly racist anonymous messages that Owens (who is black) started getting not long after news of Owens’ plans hit Reddit and 4chan.
Owens quickly began to sound like every other internet crackpot who sees conspiracies in every Twitter mention.
SocialAutopsy-Turvy: Candace Owens’ Twitter Trainwreck, Part One
(APRIL 24, 2016)
And quite a trainwreck it was. The story continued to get weirder, and at such a pace that I never had a chance to write part two.
In this episode, Owens writes an angry diatribe against an article she imagined that Washington Post writer Caitlin Dewey had written about her. No, really. She accused Dewey and her editor of attempting to libel her in an article that the Post never published and that as far as I know Dewey never even wrote.
Naturally, Gamergaters were thrilled to have such an, er, original thinker on their side.
NOTE TO READERS: Sorry for being MIA the last couple of days; I’ve been dealing with the double whammy of migraines and some really nasty lower back pain. Doing a little better today.
Prays for a rain of chocolate caramels!!
Bingo.
I see your March snowmageddon, and raise you a highly destructive ice storm … in April.
OT, but if there are any trans mammotheers from Ontario, then I have good news! Ontario is waiving the fees to change your sex designation on your birth certificate! Until April 2019.
https://mobile.twitter.com/doncwrites/status/994266821955084288/photo/1
Seconding
@wwth, I hope Dracy is ok now. You’re a good cat mum 🙂
Weird weather is everywhere, it seems. The cold weather has finally remembered that it’s 2 weeks to winter here, so it’s slightly chilly. Although to be fair the northern four season model never suited Aust. anyway. Indigenous people have different models for seasons here, which make a lot more sense.
Speaking of music (well, IP mentioned Kanye, so that’ll do), I cannot stop watching this:
Ah, “This Is America.” I smiled at the 40-second mark, because that’s the “Forest Whitaker” face Glover used to great effect in an early episode of Community.
That was the last time I smiled while watching the video. The layers of lyrics and visuals blew me away, and the combined effect blew my mind.
Since the n-word came up here I’ll jump in with that I was recently accused of using it. I wrote “negroes with guns” in a comment about guns and the NRA and referencing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negroes_with_Guns
I was accused of using the n-word. . I then responded with the above link but don’t know if that comment was ever released from moderation. The last time I checked it had not been and I’ve since moved on. But since the topic again came up here recently thought I would address it. Also, negro is not the n-word.
I understand that maybe most of the readers here may have never heard the term “negroes with guns” and have no idea what it refers to. However “google is a thing”.
Related, I just came across this twitter post;
And below it someone replied
So yeah.
“Slightly chilly” is one way of putting it. “I’m wearing three layers of clothes, under two blankets and wrapped around a wheat bag and a cat with the heater on full blast AND I’M STILL COLD” is another. =P
Hey idli,
Are you really stamping your feet in response to using a slur? Why bring it up. You know you cause people to grumble here but you gotta just keep being ick. You say you are too busy to be part of the community but have no problem defending your problematic behavior over and over.
Oh, man, I can’t stop thinking about This is America.
It’s a goddamned work of art. The super narrow depth of field makes it almost impossible to focus on anything but the action in the foreground. Everything about it is just fucking spectacular. I mean, he’s even doing the literal Jim Crow dance.
@idli
Maybe somebody asked you to do homework? I mostly saw people asking you to shut up tho…
I don’t remember anyone falsely accusing Idli of using a slur. I’m pretty sure it was just objection to the notion that we’ll finally get reasonable gun control if black people all pick up guns.
Can they stop using the that there term though? Methinks they protest too much about their not using slurs as an excuse to keep using them and protesting too much.
“Hey, people are discussing the usage of a slur/reclaimed word that targets people not of my demographic. What a great time to make the discussion all about MEEEEE!”
sunnysombrera:
Funny coincidence. My sister and her partner were visiting England around a week ago, feeling slightly overheated by the weather. Now they’re back here in Helsinki 🙂
Generally speaking, this time of year the weather in South Finland isn’t much colder than in England. In the North, snow melt is still under way, which cools down the weather and delays growth season. Right now the snow is reportedly melting unusually fast, making the rivers flood in the far north.
Unrelated to the OP, but related to tedious old trolls:
http://chainsawsuit.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/20180514_hires.png
Scott Adams hasn’t featured much on here of late (yay!) so I’ll post this now because I’ll probably forget by the time that particular turd floats back up to the surface.
And in other less entertaining news,
http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article210902319.html
I am shocked, shocked to learn that police officers abused this particular loophole.
Kris Straub is updating chainsawsuit again? I hope it lasts, this time.
Holy shit, that Kansas story. And there are 32 other states where it’s still legal?
re: Kansas….
Saw that on the Wichita news channel… as conservative as that commentator is, I was surprised they weren’t mourning the law making it illegal!!!
(/s)
WE’RE NOT LAST!!! WE’RE NOT LAST!!! YAAAYYYYYYY
@SFHC
Sounds cosy! I can’t remember if you’re much further south than me, or maybe we just have different levels of cold tolerance (I whinge all through summer about the heat). I know that Croquembouche is up north, so she’s probably still in T-shirt and shorts at this stage 🙂
Re This is America: apparently Alex Jones has claimed that Childish Gambino is performing voodoo or something in the clip. Mwahaha.
Off-topic
https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/trans-terminologys-constant-evolution-is-good-for-everyone.html
@Mish
Thank you for sharing that Childish Gambino video. It was amazing!
@PaganReader
Hurrah!
*sigh* Just wish the rest of the damned populace would wake up to Doug Ford’s obvious charlatanism.
But in honour of Douglas Ford’s discovery of who Margaret Atwood is, I’d like to take the opportunity to highlight just how freakin’ amazing the Toronto Public Library system is. According to Wiki, as of 2008, it boasted the highest circulation in the world, with more than 12 million items in its collection. While I personally may have been lax in my library visits during my 20s, I intend to correct that during the summer with visits to other branches, particularly the Toronto Reference Library downtown and a new branch opened in 2010 near the old Scarborough Civic Centre where I used to work as a file clerk.
As the article I linked indicates, the primary drivers of that circulation are recent immigrants, likely ones who have English as a second language and are seeking to better their understanding of it through reading… which kinda underscores the hypocrisy of those who want to hate on immigrants for not “assimilating” (read: using their own languages in conversation), but at the same time want to take an axe to public services like the local library system. Libraries are the hallmark of civilization and they should be cherished as such.
I also find it endlessly amusing that for all the jibber-jabber those “Intellectual Dunce Web” tools do about “ideas,” the one thing they specifically don’t tell their dullard fanbase is to actually go out and learn things by reading books at libraries. Clearly tools of Neo-Marxists, no doubt….
As an aside, I might be a minority position, but I wasn’t all that awed by This Is America. Granted I’m not American, but I saw all sorts of hype and memes on Twitter, then watched the video and was like “Okay… huh… interesting… was that it?” Which is probably more telling about me and my relationship to hype than anything, but I wasn’t as blown away by it (no pun intended) as others clearly were.
Song was catchy though. Kinda envisioning a Canadian version rapped by one of our esteemed artists like Kardinal Offishall or an aboriginal hip-hop artist like A Tribe Called Red. It could be called “Welcome to Canada” and have the artist incorporating poignant and confrontational imagery about police carding, Colton Boushie, Kanesatake, the Quebec Mosque shooting or the Highway of Tears.
Much better than that awful Nicole Arbour version…….. thanks for her, Hamilton. Ya jerks…..
@Moggie
Not clear. Apparently the number seems to have arisen from a buzzfeed article back in february, but I don’t think they were careful to check for both “cops can’t fuck people they’ve detained” and “people who have been arrested can’t consent to sex with the people who arrested them”.
There’s a key quote though,
Unfortunately, they didn’t mention any specifics of those 26 cases, and though they did mention their source (http://projects.buffalonews.com/abusing-the-law/data.html#) I haven’t found anything that seems to match what buzzfeed were talking about. I didn’t spend too long searching though, as reading through news articles about police sexually assaulting people is hard going 🙁