I have a question of the people who like these meme posts. What day should I do them on. I can post them on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. It makes no difference to me. I do enjoy if others can use any of the memes or cartoons I post, and I know that Jill and I share a few back and forth. So let me know what day gives you the most for enjoyment and ability to use them, and I will go with the majority. I love the meme / cartoon posts also. Hugs
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The Nancy Mace baby picture. In all these years nothing whatever has changed. What a tragedy that she never grew up!
“Democracy dies in darkness” is a phrase popularized by Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward who used it in an article about government secrecy. After billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post and Donald Trump assumed the presidency (sic), it became the newspaper’s first slogan in its 140-year history. Today, democracy is dying.
When Bezos purchased the paper, many felt he was saving the Post and journalism. He stood out of the way and allowed his journalists to defend democracy because there is no democracy without journalism.
After Trump lost the 2020 election by being soundly and squarely defeated by Joe Biden, the Post started to get a little flaky. It laid off and bought out prominent journalists. It started running whimsical New Yorker-like cartoons by Edith Pritchett on its opinion page. It hired right-wing Nixon/Reagan lover Michael Ramirez to draw political cartoons for its opinion page. It refused to make an endorsement in the 2024 election. but it still had Ann.
Herblock Award, Pulitzer Prize, and Rueben Award-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes had been freelancing for the Post for years. She was freelancing for the Post when the excellent Tom Toles retired in 2020. The Post promised to hire a full-time cartoonist to replace Toles who had replaced the legendary Herblock. Many felt the Post would hire Ann full-time as she was the most qualified and deserving. But the Post backtracked (lied) and didn’t hire a staffer. Instead, they brought in a freelancer who worked from Canada.
No offense to Michael de Adder, but this is the legendary Washington Post. The person filling Herblock’s spot should be expected to live in Washington, DC, or at the very least, the United States. I believe political cartoons are better if the person drawing them is actually affected by the issues he or she is drawing about. Ann was living in Washington at the time.
For the past few decades, Ann has been one of the best political cartoonists in the world. The Washington Post never fully respected that, and they disrespected her again this week.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, The Post has been flaky. Bezos issued statements before election day about having high expectations from a second Trump administration. Never mind that Donald Trump has attacked the Post, calling it the “Amazon” Washington Post. Never mind that Trump continues to call journalists the “enemy of the American people.” Never mind that Trump calls legitimate news “fake news” while pushing lies over and over again. Never mind that Trump sues journalism outlets for reporting facts about him. Never mind that Trump threatens and wants to do away with the basic tenets of democracy.
After the election, Bezos and other tech billionaires started dumping money into Trump’s “inauguration” fund with many, such as Bezos, making treks to MAGA-Lardo to kiss Trump’s ass.
As the owner of Amazon, which has government contracts, and with the threat of Elon Musk in a position to make cuts to government spending, it’s in Bezos’ financial interest, or so he believes, to play up to Donald Trump. Jeff Bezos had dinner with Trump, probably sitting in the same spot as all the white nationalists who had dinner with Trump at MAGA-Lardo. Trump was launching a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register for a poll while Bezos was sitting at MAGA-Lardo chomping on his Cobb salad.
This week, Ann drew a cartoon that depicted the billionaires groveling to Trump, and among them was Jeff Bezos. Guess what her editor did with that cartoon? He killed it. Guess what Ann did. She quit.
That’s right. Ann Telnaes got up and quit working for the most prominent publication for political cartoonists. In her substack piece, Why I’m Quitting The Washington Post, Ann, who has been with the Post since 2008, writes, “In all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.”
Ann called the spiking of the cartoon a “gamechanger,” that was “dangerous for a free press.”
She’s correct. When newspaper owners are afraid of presidents to the point they start killing critical political cartoons, a free press is in danger. Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong both killed editorials endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president over Trump. Why? Because it was bad for business.
Ann’s editor, David Shipley, called her a liar for her “interpretation of events and said in a statement, “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Mr. Shipley said in the statement, “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”
As a political cartoonist who’s worked with editors, I smell bullshit. In my experience, editors LOVE it when cartoons coincide with editorials. Now, these are columns but still, they typically like it when they run together or close together. Shipley says one of those columns had already been published and the second is scheduled for publication. Since one of those hasn’t been published yet, then he should have given deference to Ann’s cartoon, that is if he’s not lying. Ann is a Pulitzer Prize winner. Why would he kill her piece for something else?
Shipley said he respects Ann but he clearly doesn’t.
Trump spent his entire campaign promising to weaponize the Justice Department to go after his enemies. Look at his nominees to lead the DOJ. First, it was Matt Gaetz and now it’s Pam Bondi. His pick to lead the FBI is Kash Patel. These are goons.
Ann took a principled stand that will cost her financially. I can’t think of an outlet that would hire her and pay more than the Post. It may have hurt her professionally as I can’t think of an outlet that would hire her and be more prominent than the Post. But she’s established that she’s a badass.
The last time something like this happened was when the Pittsburgh Gazette fired Rob Rogers for refusing to stop criticizing Donald Trump. His replacement was goosestepping Steve Kelley (who was later quietly let go). Someone should tell the Post that Steve’s available, who’s probably already FedEx’ed his resume.
I drew a cartoon in 2015 when Ted Cruz attacked Ann which provoked thousands of death threats and threats of other despicable things I won’t mention here.
I drew a cartoon in 2019 that featured the firing of Rogers. When Rogers was fired, Michael Cavna, who wrote about cartoon issues did a piece about that. He’s not there anymore to write about Ann’s departure.
I drew a cartoon in 2023 about McClatchy laying off three Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonists on the same day.
(It’s been decades since I’ve lived in a place with public transit; when I read the title, I thought they meant human jerks. I was pleasantly educated.)
A jerking, lurching bus ride can be enough to put someone off their lunch – or even dissuade them from using public transport.
But just how much do public buses jostle passengers?
Measuring this, according to one team of researchers, might help to make the vehicles more comfortable.
The researchers, from University of Technology Sydney, have published a recent study in Scientific Reports.
According to co-author Dr Anna Lidfors Lindqvist, bumpy bus rides aren’t just annoying. They can carry health risks.
“Passengers, especially if they’re a little bit elderly or if have a pre-existing injury, those sorts of sudden changes can actually make it worse,” she tells Cosmos.
“If that’s a blocker for elderly people to take public transport, that’s a great area to further look at.”
In addition, studies on frequent or professionaldrivers and passengers have suggested that long-term exposure to engine vibrations could be linked to chronic pain conditions like lower back pain.
The team set out to measure the speed and direction of vibrations and sudden movements on public buses, to give them a baseline for improving bus bumpiness.
One of the researchers – Md Imam Hossain – took rides on 30 public buses driving different routes around Sydney, carrying an inertial measurement unit (IMU).
“An IMU can gather the acceleration in vertical and longitudinal as they’re ported backwards, side to side, and up and down, as well as then being able to measure the rate of change in those directions,” says Lidfors Lindqvist.
They were particularly keen to measure “jerks” – jolts caused by sudden acceleration or braking – which are a strong indicator of bus ride discomfort.
They found that, on average, passengers experience 0.12 times the force of gravity in acceleration, with peaks at 0.44 times.
They’ve got several different ideas for reducing jerks.
“There’s a lot of different sorts of suspension – like where they use air suspension, rather than pneumatic suspension, that’s usually a softer ride,” says Lidfors Lindqvist.
Softer seats – like those used in coach buses or for truck and bus drivers – are also more comfortable.
“Cushioning a seat is enough for it to be a softer ride in terms of the overall vibration from the seat. Whereas, the jerk itself is a little bit more difficult to have a mechanical solution because your body will still move the same.”
Lidfors Lidqvist says that the transition to electric buses is a mixed bag – they don’t vibrate like diesel engines, but they can accelerate much faster.
“This is really another open question: does that then introduce another sort of jerk?”
But buses don’t need to be wholly redesigned for more comfort. The team thinks that driver training can also help.
“Bus driver behaviour is also a factor, and so is the traffic environment that they’re exposed to. Peak hour traffic looks very different than if it’s off peak,” says Lidfors Lindqvist.
In this study, Hossain sat at the same seat on the bus each time for consistency. But there are more and less comfortable zones on a bus, according to Lidfors Lindqvist.
“Other research, will tell you that you’ll find that the ride is often a little bit softer if you sit on top of the wheel axis, for example,” she says.
“But that jerk movement, when you move back and forth when the bus takes off or stops – that will remain pretty much the same, because it’s just your body in relation to the vehicle itself.”
The team is now interested in looking at the connection between buses and human injuries, as well as optimising bus comfort with efficiency of the ride, and greenhouse gas emissions.
January 1, 1831 William Lloyd Garrison first published The Liberator (four hundred copies printed in the middle of the night using borrowed type), which became the leading abolitionist paper in the United States. He labeled slave-holding a crime and called for immediate abolition. From the first issue: “I will be harsh as truth, and uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation.“Assenting to the ‘self-evident truth’ maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, ‘that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights—among which are life, liberty,and the pursuit of happiness,’ I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.” Selections from The Liberator
January 1, 1847 Michigan became the first state – the first government in the English-speaking world – to abolish capital punishment (for all crimes except treason). This was done by a vote of the legislature, and was not a part of the state’s constitution until 1964. How it happened (it’s a .pdf)
January 1, 1959 32-year-old lawyer Fidel Castro led Cuban revolutionaries to victory over the corrupt government of Fulgencio Batista who had fled the island the day before. Batista, a former army sergeant, had seized power in a coup, canceling an election, in 1952. Fidel Castro More on pre-Castro Cuba The news at the time Perspective of a U.S. intelligence agent
January 1, 1983 44 women scaled a 12-foot fence at dawn, breaking into a cruise missile base at Greenham Common in Great Britain, and danced on a missile silo. The lyrics to their “Silo Song”
January 1, 1987 Ten anti-nuclear activists were arrested for trespassing at the Nevada Test Site, the culmination of a 54-day encampment at the main Test Site gate. The camp established momentum for what became a movement ultimately involving over 10,000 arrests in numerous Test Site protests over the following years in the campaign to achieve a freeze of all nuclear weapons testing. Nevada test site landscape The Nevada site includes more than 14,000 sq. km. (nearly 6000 sq. miles, larger than the state of Connecticut) of uninhabited land where atmospheric, and later underground, nuclear testing had been conducted since the 1950s. About the the Nevada Test Site
January 1, 1989 Kees Koning Kees Koning, a former army chaplain and priest, and Co van Melle, a medical doctor working with homeless people and illegal refugees, entered the Woensdrecht airbase (for a second time), and began the “conversion” of NF-5B fighter airplanes by beating them with sledgehammers into ploughshares. The Dutch planned to sell the NF-5B to Turkey, for use against the Kurdish nationalists as part of a NATO aid program which involved shipping 60 fighter planes to Turkey. Koning and van Melle were charged with trespass, sabotage and $350,000 damage; they were convicted, and both sentenced to a few months in jail. Read more about the plowshares movement
January 1, 1991 Early in the morning Moana Cole, a Catholic Worker from New Zealand, Ciaron O’Reilly, a Catholic Worker from Australia, and Susan Frankel and Bill Streit, members of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker community in Washington, D.C., calling themselves the ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand and U.S.) Peace Force Plowshares, entered the Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York. Moana Cole After cutting through several fences, Frankel and Streit entered a deadly force area, and hammered and poured blood on a KC-135 (a refueling plane for B-52s), and then hammered and poured blood on the engine of a nearby cruise missile-armed B-52 bomber. They presented their action statement to base security who encircled them moments later. About Moana Cole
January 1, 1994 The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect. A treaty among Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, it called for all three countries to follow similar policies for environmental, safety and investment regulation, apart from laws passed by their respective legislatures.
January 1, 1994 On the day NAFTA (see above) took effect, more than 2,000 native Mayans in Mexico’s Chiapas state marched into the state capital, San Cristóbal de las Casas, and five neighboring towns, and seized control. Calling themselves Zapatistas, or the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a “declaration of war” was issued. Chiapas is among the poorest parts of Mexico. The indigenous peoples of Mexico long suffered as second-class citizens due to the dominance of the Roman Catholic church and the traditional Mestizo (mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry) political leadership of the country. The EZLN was certain that NAFTA would permanently lock in the top-down economic situation in Mexico. The Zapatistas’ slogan was !Ya basta! (“Enough is enough”). Employees at the Mexican stock exchange were evacuated by riot police. 25,000 Mexican soldiers arrived in Chiapas equipped with automatic weapons, tanks, helicopters and airplanes. 145 deaths were reported, mostly civilians. Massive arrests and subsequent torture of prisoners by the government took place.
The weather outside is frightful, but The Twilight Zoneis… well, also pretty frightful on occasion. But we can’t think of a better way to ring in 2025 than with SYFY‘s annual New Year’s marathon featuring three uninterrupted days of back-to-back episodes from Rod Serling‘s classic and groundbreaking anthology series between December 31 and January 2.
“It’s interesting, because The Twilight Zone has never been off [the air]. It’s always been there. It’s never died,” Rod’s elder daughter, Jodi Serling, told SYFY WIRE while speaking about her father’s lasting impact. “It’s because the message that he’s sending is so apparent today. Everything that he predictively wrote about is coming back to us. It’s just an honor to know that his legacy will continue to live on forever. He was such a humble kind of guy, I don’t think he realized what an impact that he was going to make on our society.”
“When the original Star Trek debuted, when I was 10, I recorded it on reel-to-reel audio tape in case it never aired again. You couldn’t watch a show whenever you wanted to. There was no way to revisit the shows you loved unless they were in syndication and then they’d be cut up,” adds Marc Scott Zicree, author of TheTwilight Zone Companion, during a separate conversation. “We live in a blessed age where you can watch anything you want, anytime you want. I really love these marathons, because I’ve heard from so many people that they just leave the TV on and glance over. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the one with Talky Tina! That’s The Howling Man!’ The great thing about Twilight Zone, is that it’s also a family show. You can literally sit down with your kids, and it may scare them, but you know that they’re not going to see something inappropriate. They know what they’re signing up for. I really love the fact that there are Twilight Zone marathons. I think it’s terrific.”
There’s a discussion on another post, and I think all of us have brought it up here at one time or another, and I know I’m too soft-hearted and worry about elder abuse, and now finally others are calling it out for the abuse of people that it is. I used to say it often before Trump finally left the White House, that he was being abused for nefarious reasons; he’s so disliked that few cared about him being abused. Here’s a story from a publication that’s been around for generations, always bringing me important info, first on recycled newsprint paper, now online. And I’m still pleased I spent 6 hours phone banking for Annie Kuster* a few years back, even though I’d hoped for her more liberal primary oppo. She’s been a fine US Rep. (I also phone banked for Marcy Kaptur under the same condition-different election, and it was time well spent. But Annie Kuster is one subject of this story, so I had to fix that. It was late when I scheduled this, my apologies.)
This year, two veteran members of Congress, Republican Representative Kay Granger from Texas and Democratic Representative Annie M. Kuster of New Hampshire, announced that they were retiring from public service, but the story of their last days played out very differently, illustrating the dangers of a political system that enables both gerontocracy and elder abuse.
In March, Granger, age 81, announced that she was stepping down from her powerful post as chair of the House Appropriation Committee and would not seek reelection, even though she would finish out her term. She cast her last vote on July 24, and has appeared in Washington only once since. For all intents and purposes, Granger had disappeared from public visibility.
On December 20, The Dallas Express, a conservative online publication, revealed that Granger had been living in an independent living facility. Prior to that discovery, Granger’s office was not returning phone calls to the Express or anyone else. Visiting her office, reporter Carl Turcios found “the door locked, the front door glass window covered, no one inside, and no sign of the office continuing to be occupied.”
Responding to these reports, the congresswoman’s son, Brandon Granger, stated that his mother suffered from “dementia,” a condition he claimed was diagnosed in September. Granger’s office shared a statement where she purportedly said that “since early September, my health challenges have progressed, making frequent travel to Washington both difficult and unpredictable. During this time, my staff has remained steadfast, continuing to deliver exceptional constituent services, as they have for the past 27 years.”
This version of Granger’s story, which places the onset of dementia in September, makes little sense, since, as Ken Klippenstein reports on his Substack, there is evidence that as early as March she had difficulty reading even from a prepared statement without painful effort. Further, she sold her home in early July, which indicates that her move to the independent living facility was already in the works at that time.
Granger eventually resigned her seat—but too late. If she had left public service a few years ago, she’d be remembered as a pioneer, the first Republican woman to lead the House Appropriations Committee. Now, there is a pall on her legacy since, as The New York Timesreports, she has “brought renewed attention to how Capitol Hill is powered by a crop of septuagenarians and octogenarians, including some who refuse to relinquish power even far past their primes.”
Granger’s fellow congresswoman Annie M. Kuster, age 68, offers a telling contrast. In an interview with The Boston Globe, Kuster made clear that she is leaving Washington not just for personal reasons but also to show that lawmakers do in fact have the ability to reject gerontocracy. According to Kuster, “I’m trying to set a better example. I think there are colleagues—and some of whom are still very successful and very productive—but others who just stay forever.”
The Granger case, along with new reporting making clear that Joe Biden has served as a diminished president, is forcing gerontocracy onto the agenda in Washington. Aside from Biden and Granger, there are now increasing expressions of concerns about the advanced age and healthcare struggles of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and outgoing Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (both of whom, despite formally giving up powerful posts, remain kingmakers in Washington). Questions have also been raised about Democratic Representative David Scott of Georgia, with even fellow Democrats expressing skepticism about his ability to serve. The decision to sideline young congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House Oversight Committee on behalf of Gerry Connolly, who is 74 and suffers from cancer, has been criticized even by centrist Democrats such as Jen Psaki as proof of entrenched gerontocracy.
This is a major shift from recent years, when a bipartisan code of silence protected elected officials and judges from being criticized even though there was ample evidence that age had made them incapable of serving.
Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky responded to the Granger story by tweeting, “I’m more concerned about the congressmen who have dementia and are still voting.”
Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California tweeted:
Kay Granger’s long absence reveals the problem with a Congress that rewards seniority & relationships more than merit & ideas. We have a sclerotic gerontocracy. We need term limits. We need to get big money out of politics so a new generation of Americans can run and serve.
Khanna’s statement has the virtue of moving the discussion beyond just the individual choices of lawmakers and into the wider system that has made gerontocracy possible. Republican firebrand Kerri Lake, who rarely agrees with Khanna on anything—and is seldom a voice of reason—also offered a systemic analysis, tweeting, “Washington D.C. shouldn’t be a retirement home, but the entrenched forces there are so desperate to hold on to power that they will reject fresh voices while pulling stunts like this.”
Khanna and Lake are accurate in seeing the problem as entrenched systems. The rules of Congress reward seniority with more power, which also makes it logical for voters to keep voting for longtime lawmakers even past the decline in their capacity. Those lawmakers have staff who can make sure that the perks of power are still shared with constituents.
I spoke with Scottie yesterday. He wants me to do a ‘daily thought’ thing. Well, I don’t really have time for daily thoughts (lol) but here goes.
I recently watched a Pierce Morgan episode where he confronted Neil DeGrasse Tyson for having the temerity to disagree with “the greatest mind” of the generation, his hero Elon Musk.
Mr. Tyson commented that the idea of going to Mars is not practical. Not that he didn’t support it, but that something that costly, that reaching, that highly technological and requiring new technology, would not be good business – and if it isn’t an issue of religion or war, the idea was unlikely to be fulfilled. Pierce went on to ignore most of what Mr. Tyson said in order to Rah!Rah! Musk.
What was worse, in my mind, is that he couldn’t seem to find his way out of his prepared argument in order to really listen to Mr. Tyson. The result was that he spouted the very arguments that Tyson had already refuted without bothering to address those refuted points.
Shortly after that I watched a clip of ABC News speaking on an unidentified object in the sky. It was Venus, you know – the planet? Identified centuries ago, it’s orbit mapped and described and is available at the stroke of a few keys or on a handy free phone ap that shows the stars and planets in the night sky. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bv8f7KHnz5Q
So What? Right? Well, my point is not that I’m so smart, because I am surely not. It’s not that I have this issue well in hand, because I surely don’t.
It is quite simply that we are bound to spiral and fail in any endeavor not for, as Pierce Morgan believes, the doubting of Elon’s great dream, but because the dream is nothing without the facts! We find our entertainment in make believe and our news in hypocrisy and innuendo. Don’t get me wrong, I never really liked school and I prefer my entertainment to be fantastic and unreal, but I want my news to be real and factual, and that is near impossible in our current dissemination of what is called “news”. We spend millions on debating the validity of transgender in NCAA sports when come to find out there are less than 10 in the 510,000 athletes. We have chosen to excuse our political leaders for their crimes yet seek to lock up children because “they should have known better”. We have allowed our children to be poorly educated and malnourished while the super wealthy demand tax breaks. We have chosen to believe the lies and made him president, and the first things he has chosen to do are the eradication of of the departments of Education, Energy, Environment and the National Academy of Science.
The use of fear and fabrication is not new to politics, to news pundits, to religious leaders, and of course, the downplaying of anything enlightening and thought encouraging is the true mark of a great propagandist and conman. I mean, “who are you going to believe: Me or your lying eyes?”
I am glad the Rev. made this post. Nothing made me angrier over the years than Christians thinking this time of year that their celebrations were the start of it all. How ignorant of history. To them the world started and ended with their religion. Every year in our park of homes I saw and still do see lawn signs with “Put Christ back in Christmas”, followed by Christ is the reason why we have Christmas. I lost many fellow neighbors as friends when I pointed out to them that most of the season’s traditions were pagan ones and that people celebrated the season long before their religion started. Blasphemous they would yell at me, why the holiday has his name in it, they would yell. No matter the true history they wouldn’t listen and then would try to spread hate behind my back. Very Christian of them. Early maga before tRump came on the scene, but his type of people. They are sure they are correct as it has always been that way in their life or for them. Hugs. Love.
And how long is this ‘masculinity crisis’ going to last?Read on Substack
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Last week, I watched Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story on Peacock, which, unsurprisingly, was fairly disturbing on a number of levels, starting with the fact that most people at the time thought “getting young women extremely drunk and then convincing them to take their tops off on camera” was a fairly normal, “boys will be boys!” thing to do.
The thing that really struck me, though, was the fact that it remained “normal” until about 2011, when creator Joe Francis was arrested for false imprisonment and assault, after he brought three women home after a night out and refused to let them leave, ultimately attacking one of them and bashing her head into the floor. Francis had long been Public Enemy #1 for feminists (along with, on the other end of the spectrum, the Christian patriarchs who fake-married their daughters at Purity Balls), but at that point, no one was really paying any attention to us.
The reason I bring this up, the reason it struck me, is because I don’t think I really realized until just then what an incredibly short time period it was between the end of that era — this era where bro culture was celebrated, where rape culture was celebrated, where women’s sexuality was a thing within their control whichever way they chose to control it, in which beautiful female celebrities were excoriated for being a size four in public — and the era we are now in.
Because we hear a lot about it from their end, right? The story, as they tell it, is that there were all these ostensibly “liberal” men who “voted for Obama,” but then the Left “just went too far” and drove them into the loving, misogynistic arms of Andrew Tate and Donald Trump. And now they’re lonely and they don’t know how to be men and it is a full-on crisis! A crisis I tell you! And an epidemic!
The way they talk, you would think that they had been forced to live in this horrible matriarchal world for years, during where they weren’t allowed any free speech, were constantly accused of rapes they didn’t commit, were told constantly by everyone that they were garbage and that they had to apologize for being born male.
But let’s piece together this timeline, shall we?
2011: Joe Francis arrested, “Entourage” ends.
2012: During a stand-up set, comedian Daniel Tosh starts talking about how rape jokes are “always” funny — causing a woman in the audience to yell, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”, to which he responds, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?”
— Also, Tucker Max, who was celebrated for having written a book called I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, in which he tells multiple stories of having sex with extremely intoxicated women, “retires” from being Tucker Max.
2013: We have the rape joke discourse, led by then-Jezebel writer Lindy West. On the one hand, you have feminists saying “This shit isn’t actually funny,” and on the other, approximately 87 million op-eds about how we must protect the sanctity of rape jokes.
— The campus rape discourse begins. Women who have been raped on campus discuss both the problem of rape on campus and the tendency of school officials to do nothing about it, asking people to take it more seriously and criticizing men who have sex with women when they are too intoxicated to consent. This is followed by years of people complaining that we can’t take these women seriously, because what if they are just having day-after regrets because the man didn’t send them flowers or call them back or something?
2014: In May, incel Elliot Rodger kills six people because he is angry that women won’t have sex with him.
— In August, Gamergate begins — starting out as a rage against progressive videogame developer Zoë Quinn from gamers who believe that she only got good reviews for a game she made that they didn’t like because she had a sexual relationship with a video game reviewer (who never actually reviewed her game). It turns into unfettered rage and harassment against women who dare to criticize games for being misogynistic, and then against all “Social Justice Warriors” in general.
— We have the street harassment discourse, started by Black women on social media, in which women publicly discussed the general unpleasantness of not being able to walk to the grocery store without some guy yelling “Nice tits!” at us. This is quickly followed by approximately 87 million “How are men even supposed to talk to women if they can’t yell at them while they walk down the street?” and “But it’s a compliment!” and “I’m a woman and it makes me feel pretty when men I don’t know compliment my ass!” op-eds.
— The height of the affirmative consent discourse, in which people discuss why it’s important to have affirmative and enthusiastic consent at each stage of sexual activity. Some states implement “Yes Means Yes” laws — so that, instead of asking campus rape victims whether they were clear enough that they did not want to have sex with someone, accused rapists will be asked how they obtained consent, This was, naturally, followed by lots of complaining that it will ruin sex.
2015: Donald Trump begins his presidential campaign, ultimately winning in part due to a backlash to “social justice” activism — feminist activism and rape culture discourse in particular.
So let’s just stop there for now. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, because I know we had a few more discourses and we certainly had a lot more incel mass murders. But it doesn’t need to be, because the main thing I want to point out is that, at the very most, we had a few years of public discussions of things women had grown real fucking sick of, each of which was swiftly followed by an inevitable “Has feminism gone too far?!?” backlash from those who thought everything was fine the way it was and had been — mostly from those with bigger platforms and more power than we ever had.
This, frankly, has been the case for all social justice movements that have occurred over the last few years — not just feminism and rape culture, but also racism, police brutality and trans rights. You see a groundswell of actual people talking about their experiences and how best to change things so that other people don’t have to go through them, and a swift and terrible backlash from those who say they would like those other people to shut up, please.
Donald Trump was elected again this year, and again we were all told “This is all because you all just went too far! They just couldn’t take it anymore!”
But like, in the end, what did they have to take? People talking publicly on social media? People making art, movies, television shows, music, video games, etc. that they don’t like? Or publicly criticizing things they do like or behavior they enjoy engaging in?
That’s nothing. Especially when compared to everything that everyone else was expected to go through and shut up about. I’d like to point out that, quite notably, taking rape more seriously did not lead to any epidemic of men being sent to prison for not sending flowers or calling the day after.
One of the most jarring points of the “Girls Gone Wild” documentary is one in which a girl recounts how she ended up in a video when she was 17 years old (making it, legally, child pornography), and one of the male teachers at her high school responded by asking her to autograph a copy for him. That’s just one moment, one small snapshot of what was meant to be acceptable back then.
And, you know, at no point did anyone back then publicly wonder or wring their hands about “Is the patriarchy going too far?” Rather, then, as now, most public discussion was about what was wrong with the girls who were doing this, not the men who produced it.
It’s not at all surprising to me that men living in that social environment felt “safe” voting for Barack Obama, or felt like they were totally liberal because they wanted to legalize weed and didn’t care if people were gay or not. Because they could vote for Obama and feel like a good liberal while chanting “Iron my shirt!” at Hillary Clinton. Everything was going really well for them and no one was really challenging the status quo, at least not anyone they were paying any attention to. This is part of what they mean when they say “the Left left me!”
(And, again, that’s just the feminist side of it. They were also “totally fine” with Black people until Black people started bringing up police brutality and racism, and fine with LGBTQ+ people when they thought that civil rights push would end with marriage.)
We’re being punished right now for a feminist utopia we never even had. We went straight from the Girls Gone Wild Era to the Gamergate/Incel mass murder era to the the Trump era. And while a whole lot has changed in terms of what we are willing to put up with or be quiet about, the only thing that has actually changed about the patriarchy has been the flavor it takes on.
Scottie's Playtime 