Check out my new blog, My AI Obsession
The Butte Public Library has canceled a talk on the history of LGBTQ+ and Two-Spirit people in Montana, citing a new anti-drag law with language so (deliberately?) broad and vague that it could easily be applied to trans people like the scheduled speaker.
The only surprise here is that it happened so quickly; the anti-drag bill was only signed into law last week.
Because these anti-drag bills, in Montana and elsewhere, aren’t really about “protecting” kids from drag queens; they’re an attempt to make it illegal for trans people to speak out in public settings.
Here are the details on the cancellation of the speech; I’d encourage you to read the screenshots in the following tweets to see the dehumanizing language used to describe the trans speaker.
This won’t be the last time laws like this will be used to shut up trans speakers and performers. This is all part of a Republican offensive against “transgenderism” that seeks, as The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles infamously put it in a speech, to eradicate trans people “from public life entirely.” As I’ve noted before, this is straight-up cultural genocide.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
@Lakitha Tolbert:
That notorious stumbling block to freedom, the white moderate, strikes again.
“Anger is more useful than despair” — a reprogrammed T101.
The downside to that is that, precisely because of this, “they” are on constant lookout for anger in marginalized people, and crack down on it very strongly. If you’re a white middle class man and sound angry people tell you to calm down. If you’re a white middle class woman and sound angry people call you “hysterical” and dismiss your concerns. If you’re neither, people call the cops and cops tackle you and charge you with resisting arrest, tase you, or just plain shoot you.
I expect Lakitha to be quite familiar with that, but the people her advice is directed to might be less familiar with it. So, a certain degree of caution is warranted.
But so is anger.
@surplus to requirements What always gets me is that white men seem to be completely oblivious to that dynamic. There’s still “moderate” white men being salty because She-Hulk had the audacity to mention it.
Remember that up until he was murdered, surveys consistently showed more white people thought Dr. King was a rabble-rouser than thought he was progressing society towards equality. The “I agree with them in principle, but they are too loud” is pervasive.
No minority group has ever gotten anywhere by being quiet, polite and well behaved. A lot of people forget that the root of pride is the Stonewall riots. If you ask politely for respect, understanding, and acceptance… You won’t get anyone to listen. The majority only starts to listen when you get to the point of throwing bricks.
@Alan – Thanks for the explanation! So that decision seems like a good start. Fingers crossed it can go to the highest court.
Not 100% on topic, but there were protests in Leipzig this weekend over a 5-year sentence handed to an Antifa organizer. She was coordinating people beating up neo-nazis – at least if I understood what my prof said in German. So people protested her getting such a long sentence when the racists’ crimes didn’t get the same scrutiny. But Deutsche Welle didn’t spend much time talking about the reasoning behind it, more about the riot – https://www.dw.com/en/germany-police-break-up-banned-far-left-protest-in-leipzig/a-65816770
And this is a product of the media angle – it seems to ignore the reasons behind the protest and just focus on what’s most immediate.
It got me thinking about what responses to injustice are the most effective. Because there’s always a danger of people ignoring the message and focusing on the spectacle – but then being too “quiet,” like Natsume wrote, brings the danger of getting ignored entirely or worse. And there are often false narratives spread about people making trouble, as Dave wrote. You don’t have to be violent or extremist to be labeled as such.
So there’s no easy way of balancing that, but I don’t think it’s hopeless either. I think the best approach is a multi-pronged one: legal action, legal or “illegal” protests, education, media, etc.
…
(Personally, right now, I am avoiding the essay I have to write for German class because I am not the world’s hugest fan of essay-writing. Anyway, I’ve got a little over two more weeks left in Germany. I don’t know if I learned as much language as I wanted to, but it’s been interesting.)
@ epitome
It turns out that one of my Law Twitter friends is actually the lawyer in the case. So she’s going to keep me in the loop. And as suspected, there is a bit of a coordinated plan. So they are working with lawyers in other states.
My favorite response to people claiming that they would have no issue with protestors that were “quiet” and “peaceful” is to ask them what they think of Colin Kaepernick.
@Alan:
Re: ‘Villain has a point’
Well, yes, that falls in with the fact that almost nobody is actually the villain in their own heads. One of my stories (written and being edited again right now) involves the ‘villain’ being someone who wants to break the current unjust system and make things better for everybody. The main reason he’s the villain is that he doesn’t really care who else gets hurt in the process of breaking the system, and his methods had a non-zero chance of leaving the entire San Francisco Bay area a smoking crater. Or potentially a glowing one. (Of course, he may have also deliberately leaked just enough of his secondary plans to allow other people to be in the position to keep things from falling over completely while he was finishing off his primary plan. The classic ‘Xanatos Gambit’ sort of thing can be fun to write.)
M*A*S*H being about the Vietnam war:
And one of the things that really drives that home was the character of ‘Spearchucker’ Jones. He existed in the book, the movie, and I think the pilot of the TV show, but was dropped quite early. Why? Because he was black, and historically there weren’t any fully trained black doctors allowed to serve in the Korean War… but there were in the Vietnam war.
And I remember the original V mini-series, yes. Great up until that bloody Deus ex Machina ending. (The novelization greatly improved the ending as far as I was concerned. Instead of just standing at the console and somehow psychically shutting it down, she hacked into the console and just no-oped out the decrement in the counter, so the countdown never advanced past ‘3’ and everybody else had time to safely shut down the self-destruct.)
@Robert Haynie:
It never occurred to me that it could be read that way, but I see what you mean. This is what happens when two things that start out completely separate in my head end up next to each other after an editing pass. Yes, two completely different episodes, but as others have pointed out, hardly the only two blatantly political episodes, either.
@Lakitha Tolbert:
Fair enough, and yes, it is good to have reminders of what else is at stake. Anybody who thinks that the current attack on Trans people is going to stay only being about Trans people has not been paying attention to the last several generations of history. Trans people are purely a wedge issue to re-open all the other old complaints.
And King would have been a lot easier to just dismiss if it weren’t for Malcolm X showing just how much worse the situation could get for those in power. Those on the right have been using a two-pronged ‘insist on extremism and then compromise on only halfway to the death camps’ for generations now to the point where they can’t get more extreme without disconnecting from reality entirely (which of course many of them have). It’s worth remembering that the last time the Republicans were interested in gun control was when the Black Panthers were actively talking about arming themselves.
@Allandrel:
No kidding. Just the fact that Kaepernick never did get his career back shows how well that goes.
Of course, the whole ‘players on the field to stand at attention during the national anthem’ thing was jingoism to start with, added because the head of the NFL was a big supporter of the Vietnam War and wanted to prove that football players were the ‘most patriotic’ by forcing this action on all the players. Previous to that players were often still getting dressed while the anthem played.
@ jenora
Ironically, not only were there black surgeons in Korea, one of them actually was the chief surgeon of a M*A*S*H unit.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3994465/
It was the show runners of the TV series that wrote Spearchucker out because they thought it was inaccurate.
But Richard Hornberger had included the character in his book because he was writing based on his own experiences as a MASH surgeon himself; and he was well aware of the reality.
So the character was totally historically accurate. Well, as much as any other character.
@Alan:
Oh! Well, this falls under the category of ‘I guess you learn something new every day’.
In many ways the book/movie felt a lot less actively political than the TV show sometimes got. The main theme seemed to be ‘people attempting to stay relatively sane in an insane situation, by doing things that other people would consider insane’. Granted, the book in particular got more than a little problematic in its own way in that respect (“Say something in schizophrenic for me, Hawkeye.”) but the war was played mostly as a background crucible that people had to survive intact.
(Of course, going back to Spearchucker, he led to one of the more quotable bits from the movie:
“What’s happening over there, Radar?”
“Their ringer just spotted our ringer, sir.”)
@ jenora
I think the book is more in the vein of Catch 22 (which, as you like learning stuff, was originally called Catch 18). It’s more about the absurdity of war and how people cope with that through humour and reckless behaviour. Surgeons already being prone to that.
The film captures that a bit. I think people only familiar with the TV show might be shocked as to how dark it is.
But literature, films, and TV are very different media. So things have to be adapted to take that into account. (I’m talking to you Alan Moore!)
I think people only familiar with the TV show would be shocked to realize the theme song has words, and just how dark they are.
@ jenora
The best thing about the theme song is it was intended to be used in an actual scene. The script required it to be ‘the stupidest song ever’; as if composed by a mardy arsed teenager.
Robert Altman really struggled with it. Then he remembered he had a mardy arsed teenager at home. So he got his 15 year old son to write it.
But the producers thought it was so good they made it the main theme.
Robert Altman was paid $70,000 for directing the film. His son made over $1,000,000 from the song.
He probably changed his tune when he was asking to borrow a few bucks.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Doing the math, Mike Altman would’ve faced the Vietnam draft himself in three years, had conscription not ended in 1973; I’d say the kid had cause for mardy-arsedness on that particular subject.
I hadn’t known that either.
That said, the lyrics really do sound ‘teenage edgelord’ now that you mention it.
@Lakitha Tolbert
I completely agree.
I think everyone who has enough privilege to get away with being angry and fighting back needs to use it.
I feel old. We’re running out of time. I won’t see how it all turns out, but I try to do what little I can.