Large gaming event set for Florida canceled because of Don’t Say Gay law

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/09/large-gaming-event-set-florida-canceled-dont-say-gay-law/

Yes! More companies need to do this, pull out of Florida and other hater red states. Hit them economically and maybe we can reach them with reason. Right now they’re drunk on power and hate, they are gang thugs, and they won’t stop until they are hammered back down under the rocks they slunk out from under. Hugs

Games Done Quick was going to hold its event in Orlando, but it’s moving online because Florida is no longer “a safe place for our community.”

By Alex Bollinger Friday, September 9, 2022

Photo: Shutterstock

The organizers of a gaming convention who originally planned to hold their event in Florida have canceled, citing both Florida’s lax COVID-19 policies and its hardline anti-LGBTQ stance. The group said that the state is no longer “a safe place for our community.”

“While we would love to return in-person, we’ve determined that to provide a safe and welcoming event to all, it was best that we move away from our originally planned location in Florida,” the website for Games Done Quick (GDQ) says. “Given the state’s continued disregard for COVID-19’s dangers (including anti-mandate vaccination policies) and an increased aggression toward LGBTQ+ individuals, including the law colloquially known as ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ we do not believe it is a safe place for our community at this time.”

GDQ organizes charity events that involve speed runs, or shows of video game skill where players finish games as fast as possible, often using programming bugs creatively and employing novel strategies that game developers didn’t anticipate.

The group’s upcoming winter event — Awesome Games Done Quick — was originally planned to be held in Orlando in January 2023 and was going to be GDQ’s return to in-person events after two years of virtual-only events due to the COVID pandemic. The event will be a fundraiser for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

Several prominent speedrunners who participate in GDQ events are transgender, and transgender people have been especially targeted by Florida Republicans. In the past several years, the state has passed a ban on transgender students participating in school sports, banned transgender people of all ages from using Medicaid insurance to cover gender-affirming care, instructed schools to ignore federal law banning anti-LGBTQ discrimination in education, and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) even declared a cisgender woman the winner of a swimming competition because he didn’t like the fact that a transgender woman won.

The state got national notoriety for what has been dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bans discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in younger grades and restricts them in older grades. School districts have already interpreted the law to mean that they can’t acknowledge LGBTQ people’s existence while schools ban books that conservatives accuse of “grooming” kids for child sex abuse and advise LGBTQ teachers not to have pictures of their same-sex spouses on their desks.

The law also targeted transgender people in particular, requiring schools to out transgender students to their parents if teachers find out their identities.

GDQ used to hold their winter event in D.C. until it was moved to Orlando in early 2020. Since its inception in 2010, the events have raised $35 million for various charities, including Doctors Without Borders and the Malala Fund, a nonprofit organization for girls’ education.

The January 2023 event will be held online.

Kenneth Copeland: Put Bibles Back In Schools To Stop School Shootings

Kenneth Copeland thinks that there would be fewer school shootings in the United States if there were more bibles in schools. Jessica Burbank and Cenk Uygur discuss on The Young Turks.

Read More HERE: https://boingboing.net/2022/09/08/tel…

“Very stable genius Kenneth Copeland, who is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, appeared on a television special last night to educate the world on why there are so many school shootings. It’s not because of easy access to deadly assault weapons; it’s because the naughty Devil used a woman to make the Supreme Court remove Bibles from schools.”

Carlson: Africa Should Be Grateful For Colonialism – JMG

Carlson: Africa Should Be Grateful For Colonialism

Some points about this. It clearly shows that Carlson is a white supremacist racist. He is saying that white people improved the black peoples lives by ruling them. By taking over the black peoples countries. Some how he sees subjugating, conquering, and forcing other people to behave and live by the religous dictates of the invaders. Hugs

Media Matters reports:

The British Empire spread Protestant Christianity to the entire world. A country in the North Atlantic the size of Alabama that somehow took over the world and ruled it with decency unmatched by any empire in human history.

The British Empire was not perfect, but it was far more humane than any other, ever. It’s gone now, barely even remembered. Queen Elizabeth II was the last living link to a truly great Britain.

The British Empire was evil, they wrote, apparently totally unaware of what came after it. And speaking of, what did come after the British Empire?

How, for example, did Africa fare after the British left? Let’s see, Uganda got Idi Amin, who was a cannibal. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and then became the poorest country on the planet under the racist lunatic Robert Mugabe. As of tonight, South Africa is still being run into the ground by an incompetent kleptocrat called Cyril Ramaphosa.

So it’s hard to see any of that as an improvement, because it’s not an improvement. Sorry, Atlantic magazine. And now, of course, the entire continent of Africa has a new master, the Chinese government. China is the latest colonial power to dominate Africa. Its subjects will be pining for the British soon, assuming they are not already.

Bilderbeck • 9 minutes ago

Tucker Carlson Charlatanism: Diversity Hiring Edition

“While Tucker Carlson attacks diversity at every opportunity, a job listing for his own show says, “We are deeply committed to diversity.”

“Tucker Carlson doesn’t just oppose diversity, he demonizes it with inflammatory rhetoric. For example:

“On the Tucker Carlson Tonight show, frequent guest Heather Mac Donald complained about the “scourge of diversity” to the approving host.

“In his own commentary, Carlson played the victim of diversity by arguing that diversity weakens the U.S. and whining, “why does anyone who questions [diversity supporters] need to be shamed, silenced and fired?” He also held himself up as a voice of courage for speaking out against this supposed oppression, saying, “We won’t stop talking.”

https://www.newshounds.us/t…

Paul • 10 minutes ago

It’s the “low IQ” dogwhistle.

Todd20036 • 11 minutes ago

And according to history books made in Texas, Africa is quite grateful for Europeans to enslave them

Smokey • 6 minutes ago

ruled it with decency?
I’m sure a few of those colonies would beg to differ.

Professor Barnhardt Smokey • 3 minutes ago

That’s what I was going to say.

In every last place where Great Britain was ousted, the citizens set off fireworks every year in joyous celebration of the anniversary of the event.

Dennis Prager: “Many Slaveholders Were Nice People”

Dennis Prager: “Many Slaveholders Were Nice People”

Prager is a paid by the right wing normally by the Mercer family to the tune of 36 million dollars to push on YouTube the conservative whatever Republican party wants push is. Sometimes it is very painful to see the positions they push to forward to advance the republican points. The bad part is the republicans are funding this. Yet there is no left democratic alternative paid for by left wing billionaires. The right wing has been doing this for decades. The Mercers are White power white Christian supremacy’s who have founded and pay for many right-wing media outlets. Including Steve Bannon. The left seriously need to up their game on this. The point is these people want to change the world to have only their accepted ones in charge of everything and the left wants everyone to have a say in how everything is run. But our side either doesn’t have the money or won’t spend it on these issues. Hugs

Dennis Prager: “Many Slaveholders Were Nice People”

September 7, 2022 Crackpots, Republicans

“One of the confusing things about life is how many nice people help destroy societies. This is not meant at all facetiously. It is meant literally.

“We think that people who do bad things, either think they’re doing bad and so they’re truly evil or they will be obviously bad in interpersonal relations, but it doesn’t work that way.

“Nice people can support vicious things. The human being is a macro and a micro being among the many, many differences within each of us. There were undoubtedly many nice slaveholders in the South. This is not meant facetiously again, it’s meant literally.

“If you had been invited to one of their homes, you would have been treated beautifully, but they supported a vicious system. The left is a vicious system. It’s not slavery.

“Although the end result of all leftism is the enslavement of populations, not as in transatlantic slave trade or chattel slavery, but in the diminution of human rights and liberties, which is a form of enslavement.” – Dennis Prager.

Dennis Prager: "There were undoubtedly many nice slaveholders in the South. This is not meant facetiously, again, it's meant literally. If you had been invited to one of their homes, you would've been treated beautifully. But they supported a vicious system" pic.twitter.com/1nDmVJUToQ
— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) September 7, 2022

PREVIOUSLY ON JMG: Prager declares he’d tell grieving parents that that they’re “wrong” to oppose gun control. Prager claims Trump “has never made any bigoted remarks.” Prager says most gay people “cannot think as a person.” Prager claims that if the US were to split, “the Christian side would prosper.” Prager declares the Capitol riot to be a “Reichstag fire.” Prager defends anti-vaxxers by claiming that gay men were not “pariahs” during the 80s height of the AIDS epidemic. Prager declares that doctors “know nothing” about COVID and that everybody should stock up on horse paste. Prager declares that President Obama has “zero masculinity.” Prager rages that if the left really cared about black people, they’d tell them to “elevate their moral standards.” Prager laments that nobody says “Negro” anymore and that he can’t use the N-word.

K Elmquist • an hour ago

“Many Slaveholders Were Nice People”

And Adolph Hitler liked dogs. So what? It doesn’t excuse the abuses.

Fearsome Beard • an hour ago

So Mr Prager, would you feel the same way if the slave owners were black and the slaves were white?

You’re Tedious & Boring • an hour ago • edited

One cannot be a nice person and support horrid people or vicious things.
They are mutually exclusive.
Always.

BensNewLogin • an hour ago

Every Catholic priest ever is a nice person until he gets caught with his hands down the cookie jars pants. Hitler was a vegetarian who love dogs and children, but didn’t like Jews at all.

Slavery had nothing to do with left and right. It had only to do with right and wrong

Rebecca Gardner • an hour ago

Does his word salad come with a Bullshit to English translation?

Max-1 🔫+cult(R)=☠️ • an hour ago

https://twitter.com/sdow64/status/1566246251641081861?s=20&t=pCkx8jbav69N6da-2JHflA

BeccaM • an hour ago

‘Slaveholder’ is a term which vastly understates the vicious brutality of human enslavement.

The practice of enslaving someone always included torture and dehumanization. There was quite literally a profession known as “slave breakers”—men who would travel the slave states offering services to ensure that children or newly enslaved adults were physically and psychologically broken.

When Dennis here talks about visitors being treated kindly and generously by slave owners, he’s referring only to white people. But y’all already knew that.

Houndentenor • an hour ago

No, they weren’t nice. They enslaved other human beings. That’s not nice. Many of them (like Thomas Jefferson) were well aware that it was immoral but kept doing it because it was so financially advantageous. (Too many obvious parallels to our own times to bother with specific examples here.) No, they weren’t nice.

Now were some better to the people they were enslaving? Obviously. But if there were that many “nice” slave owners why did so many risk death and torture to escape? I’ve had some shitty jobs but none so bad I’d have risk death or flogging to escape! Not even close to that. Were some so beat down from a lifetime of abuse that they didn’t try to escape? Sure. That’s a whole field of psychology. but there lives were still horror shows.

Many thanks to the scholars who are researching and writing about this topic. I’ve been reading a lot of their work over the past five years or so and I have learned so much, all of it horrifying. The fact that we have white people trying to minimize 250 years of horrors (longer on other continents) is infuriating. (I can only imagine how much that angers the descendants of enslaved people. I’m white and I’m livid.) There’s no reason to excuse slavery. It should never have happened and it’s disrespectful to the people abused in that system to pretend that it wasn’t that bad.

Elected officials, police chiefs on leaked Oath Keepers list

https://apnews.com/article/oath-keepers-leaked-membership-rolls-2ca4195ed3a10e45dd189bf98f3e5a26

Do not think the police will be standing up to protect your civil rights, your rights as a woman, your rights if you are black or a person of color, or your rights as an LGBTQ+ person. Most police are on the right, and many law enforcement at all levels are trump maga cult members. Large numbers of the police are part of the gang of thugs used as enforcers by the white Christian nationalists. I posted before how many white supremacist gangs tried to join and run police forces across the country. Hugs

By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER and MICHAEL KUNZELMAN today

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FILE – Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, center, speaks during a rally outside the White House in Washington, June 25, 2017. A new report says that the names of hundreds of U.S. law enforcement officers, elected officials and military members appear on the leaked membership rolls of a far-right extremist group that’s accused of playing a key role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism pored over more than 38,000 names on leaked Oath Keepers membership lists to find more than 370 people it believes are currently working in law enforcement agencies. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

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FILE – A man wearing an Oath Keepers shirt stands outside the Kenosha County Courthouse, Nov. 19, 2021 in Kenosha, Wis. A new report says that the names of hundreds of U.S. law enforcement officers, elected officials and military members appear on the leaked membership rolls of a far-right extremist group that’s accused of playing a key role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism pored over more than 38,000 names on leaked Oath Keepers membership lists to find more than 370 people it believes are currently working in law enforcement agencies. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)

The names of hundreds of U.S. law enforcement officers, elected officials and military members appear on the leaked membership rolls of a far-right extremist group that’s accused of playing a key role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, according to a report released Wednesday.

The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism pored over more than 38,000 names on leaked Oath Keepers membership lists and identified more than 370 people it believes currently work in law enforcement agencies — including as police chiefs and sheriffs — and more than 100 people who are currently members of the military.

It also identified more than 80 people who were running for or served in public office as of early August. The membership information was compiled into a database published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets.

The data raises fresh concerns about the presence of extremists in law enforcement and the military who are tasked with enforcing laws and protecting the U.S. It’s especially problematic for public servants to be associated with extremists at a time when lies about the 2020 election are fueling threats of violence against lawmakers and institutions.

“Even for those who claimed to have left the organization when it began to employ more aggressive tactics in 2014, it is important to remember that the Oath Keepers have espoused extremism since their founding, and this fact was not enough to deter these individuals from signing up,” the report says.

Appearing in the Oath Keepers’ database doesn’t prove that a person was ever an active member of the group or shares its ideology. Some people on the list contacted by The Associated Press said they were briefly members years ago and are no longer affiliated with the group. Some said they were never dues-paying members.

“Their views are far too extreme for me,” said Shawn Mobley, sheriff of Otero County, Colorado. Mobley told the AP in an email that he distanced himself from the Oath Keepers years ago over concerns about its involvement in the standoff against the federal government at Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada, among other things.

The Oath Keepers, founded in 2009 by Stewart Rhodes, is a loosely organized conspiracy theory-fueled group that recruits current and former military, police and first responders. It asks its members to vow to defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” promotes the belief that the federal government is out to strip citizens of their civil liberties and paints its followers as defenders against tyranny.

More than two dozen people associated with the Oath Keepers — including Rhodes — have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack. Rhodes and four other Oath Keeper members or associates are heading to trial this month on seditious conspiracy charges for what prosecutors have described as a weekslong plot to keep then-President Donald Trump in power. Rhodes and the other Oath Keepers say that they are innocent and that there was no plan to attack the Capitol.

The Oath Keepers has grown quickly along with the wider anti-government movement and used the tools of the internet to spread their message during Barack Obama’s presidency, said Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim deputy director of research with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. But since Jan. 6 and Rhodes’ arrest, the group has struggled to keep members, she said.

That’s partly because Oath Keepers had been associated so strongly with Rhodes that the removal of the central figure had an outsized impact, and partly because many associated with the group were often those who wanted to be considered respectable in their communities, she said.

“The image of being associated with Jan. 6 was too much for many of those folks,” she said.

Among the elected officials whose name appears on the membership lists is South Dakota state Rep. Phil Jensen, who won a June Republican primary in his bid for reelection. Jensen told the AP he paid for a one-year membership in 2014 but never received any Oath Keepers’ literature, attended any meetings or renewed his membership.

Jensen said he felt compelled to join because he “believed in the oath that we took to support the US Constitution and to defend it against enemies foreign and domestic.” He wouldn’t say whether he now disavows the Oath Keepers, saying he doesn’t have enough information about the group today.

“Back in 2014, they appeared to be a pretty solid conservative group, I can’t speak to them now,” he said.

ADL said it found the names of at least 10 people who now work as police chiefs and 11 sheriffs. All of the police chiefs and sheriffs who responded to the AP said they no longer have any ties to the group.

“I don’t even know what they’re posting. I never get any updates,” said Mike Hollinshead, sheriff of Idaho’s Elmore County. “I’m not paying dues or membership fees or anything.”

Hollinshead, a Republican, said he was campaigning for sheriff several years ago when voters asked him if he was familiar with the Oath Keepers. Hollinshead said he wanted to learn about the group and recalls paying for access to content on the Oath Keepers’ website, but that was the extent of his involvement.

Benjamin Boeke, police chief in Oskaloosa, Iowa, recalled getting emails from the group years ago and said he believes a friend may have signed him up. But he said he never paid to become a member and doesn’t know anything about the group.

Eric Williams, police chief in Idalou, Texas, also said in an email that he hasn’t been a member or had any interaction with the Oath Keepers in over 10 years. He called the storming of the Capitol “terrible in every way.”

“I pray this country finds its way back to civility and peace in discourse with one another,” he said.