Christchurch mosque shootings: The Aftermath (Twitter roundup/open thread)

@Bookworm in hijab (and other Muslims sharing here)

Thank you for continuing to be in community with all of us. I (we) want you to be safe and feel strong and supported. I stand in solidarity with you and other targets of hate and terrorism.

And in general, I just want to apologize for my country’s export and modeling of the worst that humanity can be. It’s bad enough that the USA experiences this bullshit without addressing the root causes; it’s so much worse to see it leaking out into other countries like toxic sludge deliveries. This sucks. It’s not okay. We can do better.

@bookworm in a hajib

I hope your doing okay and that you and your family is safe. I’m so sorry that this has happened.

* hugs all*

We’re going to a vigil this weekend. Still wondering how I’m going to explain this to my kids (younger is too little to really get it; older one I’m worried about). There have been too many hard conversations about violence: Quebec, Orlando, Burma, now New Zealand…

The love and solidarity on here are so overwhelming. ❤?

Geert Wilders, Dutch islamophobic fascist leader.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/16/media/jeanine-pirro-fox-news/index.html

Jeanine Pirro is apparently M.I.A. at Faux News… don’t know more than that, Faux brass isn’t saying anything.

If she’s gone, I’d suggest she was sacrificed after her Islamophobic rant about Omar. Sacrificed to take focus off Tucker Carlson’s islamophobia

@ Hippedameia and Alan,

I wish I knew what practical acts to suggest! I think you both, and all the folks on here, are already quite good at standing up to and speaking out against bigotry…

In the comments to a post by one of my favourite instagrammers (@yesimhotinthis), a lot of non-Muslim readers were saying they were going to go out of their way to directly tell the Muslims they encountered that they supported them. I know for me personally, one of the things I find hard is worrying that the people I encounter in my daily life (like service personnel, other shoppers,whoever) hold Islamophobic attitudes. It’s like the “Shrodiger’s Rapist” idea that hit home so much: until proven otherwise, every random person is a potential Islamophobe. I’ve been caught off guard so often when people I thought were accepting turned out to have all kinds of prejudice right below the surface (my RA at uni, for example, who had always been lovely to me, until the day she went on a lengthy Islamophobic rant while we were driving together…), so it’s hard to feel safe unless I KNOW the person’s attitudes.

I guess…just never feel nervous to tell Muslims that you’ve got our backs. I love it when some random non-Muslim says salaam aleikum to me; it honestly makes my day; it’s such a small but powerful thing. I guess that’s all I can think of, really. Others will have more & better ideas!

So this whole fight about Chelsea Clinton is really depressing to me.
It’s like:
1. She was invited to the vigil
2. She and Rep Omar have already talked and cleared things up between them.

But also
1. The young woman in the video has a right to Express her opinion on this without getting threats from Clinton fans

But also

Said young woman also seems to really like using anti gay slurs.

And

Kathy Griffin doesn’t need to be butting on on this.

The whole thing is fucking depressing and seems to be a way to deflect criticism from the actual white supremacists who are encouraging this sort of monstrous action and turn this into another endless internecine fight between the centrist and progressive wings of the left.
I dunno, it’s really depressing.

@Bryce

If NZ wanted to enact a death sentence (and actually have a system in place which valued human rights over expediency), then the death sentence would likely cost an order of magnitude more than that. Estimates of the cost of the U.S. death penalty over life imprisonment generally peg the death penalty as costing approximately 18 times more than life imprisonment.

https://deathpenalty.org/facts/5-myths-death-penalty/

@Alexis Filth
Unfortunately, the left (here used to include anyone left of the Republicans) is just as prone to hero worship as anyone else, we’re only human after all. Like, tankies are an actual thing. Add in the fact that apologies and explanations just can’t reach as many people as the original act, and the circular firing squad is ready.

I guess there’s an argument for holding your own to a higher standard; they’re the ones who’d listen after all, but there’s always gonna be someone who whines that they’re an ally and don’t deserve any criticism.

I’d put myself pretty well on Omar’s side, she has been censured for far less than most politicians ever said. But I try to stay a pragmatic lefty, if Clinton and Omar have discussed it to their satisfaction, fine. We can’t pillory everyone after all.

(CNN)A manhunt is underway after a gunman opened fire inside a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht, authorities have confirmed.

Firearm attack in Netherlands… I don’t know any more than what CNN has posted, but it sounds early on like “here we go again”

@Contrapangloss

With everything else going on, I lack the energy to even even.

Yeah, me too. Went to High Park on the weekend, but Grenadier Pond was still frozen, so no duckies to feed. Got a nice tour of Colborne Lodge though.

Gonna cite that last tweet that David highlighted as particularly prescient. Because I remember my teenage self being the guy who went to SomethingAwful.com and Newgrounds.com looking for the edgiest stuff that you couldn’t see on sanitized TV or in film and thinking that it was refreshing to get stuff that just felt a little more raw, a little more real. But there was limited capacity for reinforcement; the information only flowed one way.

The tweet just before it actually hammers this point home rather well. Those days where the internet was just a fun little playground where you could say the occasional naughty thing or upload an edgy Flash cartoon to Newgrounds and it would be seen by a handful of bored teenagers or young adults are long gone. Now there’s literally hundreds if not thousands of outlets for the edgiest humour you want, and algorithms in place to suggest event edgier humour. Those were the days before social media made it possible to digitally confront real people in realtime. People are still playing with this rather potent tool as if it was a toy: wind up all the little people that flock to you and just let them go. Whoever gets in the way, it’s their fault.

I just had another obnoxious conversation with Brocialist Dan where he cited the conversation between Tim Pool, Joe Rogan, Jack Dorsey and another Twitter employee (I won’t link it, but it was covered quite well by Matt Binder on his podcast) where Pool tried to convince the audience that Twitter had it out for conservatives because they were banning harassers that were straight-up violating the terms of service agreement. Dan was like “ppl are getting banned for saying ‘Learn to Code!'” My response was “No, people are getting banned for spamming ‘Learn to Code’ in a harassing way, often combined with other more direct threats.” Because much like “It’s okay to be white,” the surrounding context was that it was coined by hideous people as a plausibly deniable method of signalling both your sympathies and opposition. Nobody just deploys them out of the blue, yet there’s still these gormless people like Joe Rogan and Brocialist Dan who take the most naive tack and ask “What’s so wrong with just tweeting ‘Learn to Code’ at a journalist?”

Dan actually elaborated without my prompting: he made it clear that he hated these journalists for having a “political agenda” when they should just be reporting about video game mechanics or “how good the game is.” (He used video games specifically).

But what’s really obnoxious is that people really do think they have a right to express their grievances without the need to care about the recipient. As if journalists, by virtue of being journalists, should be “tough enough” to handle a wave of Tim Pool devotees spamming “Learn to Code” intermixed with various threats and slurs. That’s just the market at work. Well no, it’s not, Dan. Systems can be weaponized so easily these days that with sufficient resources, whole organizations can be destroyed if a powerful person gets it in their head they want them gone. Just ask Gawker. And you don’t need to be Peter Thiel to cause some very real pain to an individual if you really want to. Given influence, you just wind people up and let them go.

And you’ve got stochastic terrorism.

Those are my thoughts with a couple days reflection. I’ll probably be doing some self-care for the time being.

@Bookworm and any other Muslim readers: May you and yours get all the support you need – and then some. <3