We Hunted The Mammoth
When the suspect in the Club Q mass shooting in Colorado Springs claimed, through his lawyers, that he was nonbinary, transphobes could barely contain their glee: No longer could those on the left accuse them of directly or indirectly inspiring the shooting with their hyperbolic transphobic rhetoric. The alleged shooter was trans — one of their own.
So the latest company to rouse the ire of the right-wing boycott-threatening squad is Crayola. Yes, the crayon company. Crayola’s sin? The company posted three pictures of a disabled trans man on its social media accounts as part of their celebration of #DisabilityPrideMonth.
So the New York Times ran a trend piece today about cannibalism. Well, to be more precise, about an assortment of recent novels and films and TV shows that use cannibalism as a plot device. The piece, I shouldn’t have to say, is in no way, shape or form, a call for real-world cannibalism. Indeed, writer Alex Beggs points out that even the concept of cannibalism can be “stomach-churning,” and notes that several of the authors she spoke to had managed to seriously gross themselves out writing the cannibal portion of their novels.
Yesterday the rigt-wing mediasphere went bananas over an ambiguous comment from the top James Bond producer seemingly suggesting that maybe, just maybe, at some time in the future, James Bond could get rebooted as a non-binary super spy.
By David Futrelle
As The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer noted on Twitter earlier today, the right-wing fake-news site The Gateway Pundit “is extremely into calling the caravan migrants ‘virile.'”
UPDATE: 2:30 PM 10/2/17: The death toll has risen to 58, with more than 500 injured. Though it was first reported that Paddock was killed by police it now appears he shot himself before the police entered his room. There are still no details as to Paddock’s possible motives. The original post follows.
As I write this, the media is reporting that 50 have been killed and more than 400 others have been injured in a mass shooting at an open-air concert in Las Vegas. Police have identified the shooter as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, who opened fire on concertgoers from a hotel room in the Mandalay Bay complex overlooking the venue, killing dozens before himself being shot dead by police.
By David Futrelle
White supremacist blogger Matt Forney certainly picked a dramatic way to announce he would no longer be affiliating with the alt-right. In a Facebook posting several days ago, which he subsequently deleted, Forney declared that the internet-enabled fascist movement had become “a coven for homosexual pedophiles.”
Most of us like to think of ourselves as originals. But when it comes to communicating with other human beings, we’re not quite as original as we think.
When we talk, and write, we not only use words; we use a wide assortment of stock phrases that we’ve picked up along the way. Some of these phrases are basic building blocks of language, more or less essential to communication; others are, as the expression goes, worn-out clichés. Some of these clichés are so burned into our brains that we almost can’t help using them — though we sometimes apologize for it afterwards (or even before).
