So a lot of American xenophobia is informed by the fact that our news over-reports crimes committed by immigrants in Europe to such an extent that if you watch a lot of cable news you’ll deadass get the impression that every major European city is full of gangs of immigrants who just run around killing people all day and the European cops just watch it happen like “Alas, because of political correctness I can do nothing, if we try and stop and bloodbath we’ll be executed for racism.”
Which is of course, like, not true even a little bit, but it’s such a strongly-held belief that I’m not sure how to combat it.
I got into it the other day with a dude who was all like, “Yeah, it’s horrible that ICE is putting babies in baby jail and selling them for money, but isn’t it a necessary step to prevent the streets running red with blood like what’s happening in Europe??”
And you can’t just be all simplistic high-school-debate-team about it and just tell the poor fool that, no, that isn’t happening, because real-world political work is more complicated than that, but I ain’t yet got the hang of it.
California too for non-Californians. News reports California like it’s an apocalyptic wasteland. California also is “minority-majority” and conservatives link the two even if they’re not explicitly linked in the reporting.
It’s like when they claimed Muslims had filled Birmingham with no-go areas. Like, I LIVE HERE. I know that is simply not true. I grew up in a majority-Muslim area of Birmingham. It was fine. I was the only white girl in my primary school. We went to the mosque on a school trip. My parents still live there and I’m only a couple of miles up the road. Until this year the main site of my work was there. AND NOBODY DIED OF THE MUSLIMS. Calm down. Have a Rescue Remedy.
But it’s really hard to argue with someone who has said something so ridiculous it’s Not Even Wrong. There’s not a great a deal of credibility to be had in just staring at someone with your jaw dropped and finally managing a “but… whuh… what the fuck?” Oh god, I’m actually supposed to debate that like it’s a reasonable proposition? Ah fuck, let me just recalibrate my brain… uh, I don’t think it dials back that far. The bit’s snapped off and now it’s just sparking.
I’ve reblogged this so many times because I truly think every parent should involve themselves with what their child enjoys.
Not to mention this is an act of solidarity. He’s saying “even if the entire world is against you, I’m on your side.” Which I think is important for a kid to know. He’s refusing to be a bully to his child, even if he doesn’t understand.
I work at Hot Topic and we had a white suburban dad in who was buying matching heavy metal/screamo band shirts for him and his teenage daughter and said “To be honest, I think this stuff sounds like garbage, but she likes it so we listen to it together and we’re going to the concert for Christmas.” And it was just really heartwarming to see him so involved in his child’s life and validating her interests.
I WILL NEVER NOT REBLOG THIS.
“I don’t get it, but I love how you love it” is one of the best things anyone can say. My entire family asks questions about comics because they want to share my enthusiasm for them and support me, even though they otherwise wouldn’t pay attention to the industry at all.
I cried when I first saw this
This is amazing and really important
I went though a goth faze in my teens (like most) and I wanted more than anything to paint my room black. My mom was supportive of my personal expression in terms of my clothes and hair and accessories but she was genuinely concerned about the toll a black room would take on my mental health (I was already prone to recurring depression at that point and still am). I begged for months to repaint my room, but she wouldn’t budge.
One weekend i spent with my dad and when I came back she had repainted my room. A beautiful deep blue on three walls (my favourite colour), lovely sky blue on the ceiling,and one wall was black. The black wall had been sanded smooth and painted with several coats of chalkboard paint. She gave me a couple boxes of chalk and told me to have at it. I LOVED that black wall and wrote on it every day. I drew on it, I doodled, I wrote out my favourite emo song lyrics, wrote reminders for myself, anything I wanted. It was my favourite part of my room and was something that it would have never occurred to me to ask for. It was something only my very creative and clever mom could have come up with and I’m still grateful to her for it.
In retrospect, a room of black walls would indeed have been encouraging a reacurrence of my depression and my moms answer was the perfect compromise. That black wall ended up being the most colourful part of my room.
Wow this is really beautiful. You have a great mom
On the pro-Trump Internet last weekend, the #WalkAway hashtag was the nexus of an exciting idea: that “millions of Americans are walking away from the Democrat party,” as one pro-Trump account put it. Breitbart said that the hashtag had gone viral; the Epoch Times said it represented a “growing movement” of Democrats — particularly minority Democrats — abandoning their party, and liberalism.
#WalkAway, the hashtag, went viral this weekend, as something of a delayed reaction to a popular video renouncing liberalism by Brandon Straka, who described himself to the Epoch Times as a New York hairdresser and aspiring actor. The video, posted in late May, now has more than 1 million views on Facebook. In it, Straka says he was once a liberal, but now he is not.
“If you are a person of color, an LGBT person, a woman or an American immigrant, the Democratic Party wants you to know you are a victim,” Straka says in the video. “This is perhaps the Democratic Party’s greatest, and most insidious, lie.”
“I am walking away. And I encourage all of you to do the same. Walk away,” Straka concludes. The video was meant to spark a movement; this weekend’s going viral of the hashtag has been cited as proof that Straka has succeeded.
As the Internet fragments, our understanding of what it means to go “viral” has become complicated, and increasingly meaningless. A hashtag claiming to capture a movement among liberals has gone viral, in this case, almost exclusively on the right-wing Internet, as a reinforcement of one of its binding ideas.
There’s little actual evidence to suggest that #WalkAway represents a mass conversion of millions — or even thousands — of Democrats to the Trump Train since Straka’s video. Instead, the #WalkAway hashtag is going Conservative Internet viral on the same hope driving recent pro-Trump support of Kanye West: that the country is on the verge of a mass conversion to conservative thought, a Great Awakening of sorts. And the thing about anticipating an awakening is that it never actually has to happen for the idea of it to go viral.
One of the most viral #WalkAway tweets, for example, read as the generational reverse of the “woke toddler” meme:
Image via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, captured July 1.
The tweet had more than 16,000 retweets by Sunday. However, as my colleague Dave Weigel noted, the account appears to be a bot, an impersonation or both: @sofialimited’s profile picture was stolen from a book cover by someone with a different name. The account has since been suspended from Twitter.
Other viral tweets on the hashtag came from real people who aren’t exactly recent converts. Another popular #WalkAway tweet comes from CJ Pearson, a teen who describes himself as “the left’s youngest nightmare” on his website. His #WalkAway tweet has more than 10,000 retweets.
The Democratic Party is the party of slavery. The party of Jim Crow. The party of segregation. The party of the KKK.
Democrats walked away from black folks long ago. Now, it’s our time to #WalkAway.
Pearson has been right-wing Internet famous for a while now: The teen helped to campaign for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in 2015, and has gone serially viral for his videos and Twitter stunts targeting former president Barack Obama.
By Monday, the conversation about #WalkAway followed two familiar, diverging lines of thought: Conservatives were praising the hashtag as proof of a mass conversion in the works, one that they accused Twitter of artificially suppressing from its “trending” tab. Meanwhile, others were pointing to evidence that the hashtag itself was being amplified artificially by bots to seem bigger than it was.
#WalkAway went viral because anticipating a mass conversion of Democrats to its side is an idea that the pro-Trump Internet loves to share. Those who represent the possibility of this conversion become conservative celebrities.
When Kanye West tweeted praise of Candace Owens — a conservative commentator who believes that black people have been brainwashed by the media to vote for Democrats — the right-wing Internet saw an opportunity for a mainstream prophet, whose huge platform would bring around the End Times for liberalism.
When PewDiePie, a YouTuber with more than 50 million subscribers, followed Alex Jones’s Twitter account, the Infowars personality aggressively courted him for an interview on his show. If Jones could reach PewDiePie’s young audience, the movement could grow.
The pro-Trump Internet is really good at convincing its audience that going viral signals popular opinion, that its movement is and always will be #winning. In this case, #WalkAway is the answer to the possibility of a Blue Wave in the 2018 midterms. It doesn’t need to be true to be effective. After all, the hashtag has now become an article in The Washington Post.
Reminds me of #notyourshield (a fake hashtag started by white men pretending to be women and/or POC) from Gamergate and probably appeals to the same sort of people.
PORTLAND REPORTBACK! When DHS cleared the part of the camp that was blocking the ICE driveway here in Portland last Thursday, they hired a pressure washing company to come wash the chalk messages off the ground. The company showed up, realized they were, in a very tiny way, aiding ICE, and they walked off the job. And then they brought pizza back for the folks in the OccupyICE camp beside the building.
Did refusing to wash away those messages of “Abolish ICE” and “Families belong together” actually make a tangible difference for the currently separated families and the people currently facing deportation? No. But did it encourage and inspire us? Does seeing a company refuse service to ICE make it seem more possible for others to do the same? Yes, absolutely.So refuse to wash the ICE building. Refuse to sell tires to the transportation company that leases the buses to ICE. Refuse to operate the plane flying the children to the camps. Refuse to be part of the system. Don’t just “do your job,” follow your ethics and hang on to your humanity.
because you’re stereotyping a country with something incredibly incredibly negative and acting like it’s what represents them in the world.
associating colombia with cocaine and the cartels is like associating every single muslim with ISIS. do you get how racist that would be? because the cartels are literally ISIS in colombia, they were the biggest users of modern day terrorism originally. bombs, kidnappings, public killings, they’ve used it all.
it’s also a very personal situation.
you know how nobody makes any jokes about 9/11 in the US? that’s because 3,000 people were killed.
over 500,000 people have been killed in colombia over the drug wars.
because what cocaine for colombia is is a “war”. it’s not a drug, it’s actual warfare that has been going on for over 60 years. there were over 5 million refugees having to flee their homes at one point because of it. the people most impacted are indigenous people who live in the mountains and jungles (a good place to originally hide from the conquistadors) but are where the drug traffickers hide.
one of our own players cuadrado had to hide under his bed when guerillas came and shot and killed his father in another room. that’s something he lived through.
so i know westerners think it’s cute and funny and seem to enjoy this idea we live in these weird backwards ways and do nothing but fight each other for drugs because we’re “monkeys” and “animals” and “thugs” according to tweets i saw yesterday, but this issue has had a huge impact on colombia and we don’t think it’s funny. we’re not proud of cocaine, we don’t use it the way england does (third on the list of users and we’re somewhere at the bottom), and if you think think it’s funny it only shows you’re really ignorant and have no respect for the devastation it’s caused our country.
Rush's tumblr archive 