Donohue compares Sam Bee’s mean words to police brutality

Bill Donohue

Samantha Bee got into hot water last week when she called Ivanka Trump a “feckless c—t” on her show. Much of the ensuing outrage was ginned up by Right-wing trolls happy for any opportunity to stick it to a Left-wing firebrand, but there was enough genuine offense that both Bee and parent company TBS apologized, and she addressed the issue in full on last night’s show, explaining that her attempt to reclaim the word crossed a line. For most people, that’ll likely be enough.

It wasn’t enough for Bill Donohue, though. Not that it particularly matters what the President of the Catholic League and the country’s top professional whiner not named Todd Starnes thinks, but he went ahead and released a statement on the matter – one that compares a comedian’s use of a bad word to police brutality. No, really:

Bee ended by saying, “If you are worried about the death of civility, don’t sweat it—I’m a comedian.”

This is exactly the problem. A comedian has no more right to obscenely insult people than a cop has a right to randomly beat a person up. Neither should be allowed to take cover hiding behind his status.

I have to ask what Donohue thinks a “right” is. Insulting people is allowed under the law. Law enforcement officers brutalizing random people is not (not that it’s ever stopped them). Nor is Bee trying to hide behind her status as a comedian (and what status would that be? Comedians are criticized and penalized for saying dumb things all the time). She explicitly apologized for what she said, even as she explained why she said it. Compare that to cops, who routinely protect their own and rarely face consequences for even the most egregious misconduct.

Honestly, how can anyone say stuff this dumb and not be laughed out of every room they’re ever in from now on?

He continues with a veiled threat – or what he thinks is a threat, anyway:

We have ways to deal with trespassing cops, but no remedy to deal with trespassing comedians. Save for boycotts. Don’t push us, Bee. There are a lot of activist groups monitoring your next move.

Ooh, yes, Bee had better watch out, or her show may end up just like Jon Stewart’s did when Donohue pitched a fit over his “vagina manger” joke in 2012, wherein a handful of busybodies got one sponsor to quit and then Stewart addressed the nonevent for about ten seconds on the air before everyone forgot about it altogether. Victory!

Bill Donohue and the Catholic League: An impotent one-man-show designed to fool pearl-clutchers into thinking the times haven’t passed them by.

(via Right Wing Watch)

Peterson: Makeup in the workplace is “sexually provocative”

Jordan Peterson

So there’s this college professor from Canada (sorry, everyone, we don’t always produce winners) who’s made a name for himself by giving young men groundbreaking advice like “clean your room” and other things their moms presumably told them for years, and who those same young men now revere as some sort of philosophical luminary. I don’t see it. What I do see, nonstop, is Jordan Peterson saying dumb things that make misogynists giggle. Things like how maybe there should be a rule against women wearing makeup in the workplace because red lips are “sexually provocative”. No, really:

JORDAN PETERSON: Here’s a rule. How about no makeup in the workplace?

VICE: [incredulous] Why would that be a rule?

PETERSON: Why should you wear makeup in the workplace? Isn’t that sexually provocative?

VICE: No!

PETERSON: It’s not?

VICE: No.

PETERSON: Well, what is it then? What’s the purpose of makeup?

VICE: Some people would like to just put on makeup, just to …

PETERSON: Why? Why do you make your lips red? Because they turn red during sexual arousal. That’s why. Why do you put rouge on your cheeks? Same reason. […] How about high heels? […] They’re there to exaggerate sexual attractiveness. That’s what high heels do. They tilt your pelvis forward so your hips stick out. That’s what they do. And they tighten up your calf muscles. They’re sexual display. Now, I’m not saying people shouldn’t use sexual displays in the workplace. I’m not saying that. But I am saying that that is what they’re doing, and that is what they’re doing.

[…]

VICE: Do you feel like a serious woman who doesn’t want sexual harassment in the workplace, do you feel like if she wears makeup in the workplace, is being somewhat hypocritical?

PETERSON: Yeah. I do think that.

As a sidenote: I sought out the unedited interview to see what may have been left out of the version most people saw (and, perhaps futilely, to negate the usual cries of “out of context!”). Turns out all they’re missing is a bit of cross-talk and a lot of pseudo-philosophical meandering. I’d like to bill someone for the minutes of my life I won’t get back.

Back to Peterson. But not for very long, because everything he said is so dumb and wrong there’s only so much one can say about it. There’s certainly a conversation to be had about the origins and nature of the beauty standards society imposes upon the genders, and women especially. But trying to frame lipstick and high heels as “sexual displays” in the workplace – and additionally, the notion that they ought to be proscribed, presumably because they make poor men too horny to work – is the kind of ridiculousness you expect from bad satire, not from someone bandied around as a public intellectual. Lipstick on women is no more sexual or distracting than ties and combed hair are on men, and I have yet to learn of a workplace that’s fallen apart because its male employees spent all their time gawking at their female colleagues’ tight calf muscles.

Honestly, Ed Brayton put it better than anyone:

But let me just ask one question: Isn’t Peterson asking for it? I mean, really, during this interview, he was dressed well, wearing an expensive suit that shows off his wealth. He was wearing a tie that points directly to his penis, in a blatant sexual display. So if a gay man were to sexually harass him, he has no one to blame but himself, by his own “reasoning”[.]

If you can’t differentiate between polishing up your appearance in concordance with cultural norms and sexual signaling, there’s just no helping you. And perhaps you should stay away from women.

Rebeca Watson lays into the clowns in charge of US science policy

Want to hear a joke? The US House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Specifically, the transparent shills and cartoonish buffoons that populate it.

Transcript:

(Click to open/close:) [−]

What’s the dumbest thing a Republican lawmaker can say about climate change? Is it Donald Trump saying that it’s a Chinese conspiracy theory? Is it Representative John Shimkus saying that it doesn’t matter because God already promised us after Noah’s Flood that he wouldn’t destroy the Earth? Or is it Senator James Inhofe telling Rachel Maddow that it can’t be true because combating it would be far too expensive?

Or is it the latest contender, Representative Mo Brooks telling an actual climate scientist that the global sea levels are rising because rocks are falling into the ocean?

Hold on, because it’s about to get so much worse. Brooks had the opportunity to say such a stupid thing because he is on the US House of Representatives Science Space and Technology Committee, which is like me being on a committee focused on NASCAR, Steven Universe fan-fiction and post-Keynesian economics. In other words, shit I know nothing about. (And I know, I know, I’ve been meaning to watch Steven Universe. I’ll get to it.)

The Committee was gathered to talk about how technology can be used to combat climate change, but instead of talking about that very important subject, it turned out to be a third-grade-level lecture for two hours, in which Dr. Philip Duffy of Woods Hole Research Center patiently explained to seventy-year-old men that no, rocks do not make the sea levels rise; and no, the chart that Lamar Smith brought along to prove that climate change was fake was not based on actual science just because it’s in a chart form; and no, Bill Posey, scientists in the 1970s did not think that humans were actually causing the Earth to cool; no that Time Magazine cover is a hoax.

Of all the dumb shit that was said during those two hours, obviously Mo Brooks wins for the dumbest. Here’s a direct quote from him as he attempted to really sell his idea that rocks falling into the ocean are what’s responsible for the sea levels rising:

Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up.

[-grown ass man on a god damn science committee]

Seriously. Mel Brooks is a 64-year-old man and he sounds like an actual child. That is something a child would say in a poorly researched report on what he thinks makes water go up and down. “Now you have less space in those oceans because the bottom is moving up.” Jesus Christ.

This is why we’re all gonna die. Yes, the coming nuclear war with North Korea or whoever is not going to be pleasant, but some humans will survive. But no-one will survive the coming temperature increase, and it’s going to happen because the science wing of the government of one of the biggest superpowers in the world today can’t talk about technological solutions to the problem because the people running the committee can’t even get past the fact that it’s happening.

It’s as if our house is on fire and when the firefighters show up, they say, “I’m sorry, but we just don’t believe in fire.” And you’re like, “Wait, you what now?” And they say, “We don’t really have any evidence that fire is real. Like, what is it even? Is it a solid? And if so, then how does my hand pass through it? If it’s a gas, why can I see it? How does it grow if it’s not alive? I read a scientific article on 4chan once that says that fire is a Chinese conspiracy made up to frighten us into staying chilly all winter.” When you’re dealing with someone that willfully stupid, your house is just going to burn down, because by the time you answer all their stupid questions it’s going to be too late.

Remember this, please, as midterms approach: Please, for the sake of the next generation, and for my own sanity’s sake, please vote these man-children out of office before our house burns down.

My idea of the worst possible job is being tasked with distinguishing which Republicans act this way because they’re genuinely stupid from those who act this way because they’re dishonest and corrupt. And that’s not counting the overlap.

Is there one part of the US government that isn’t hopelessly broken?

(via Pharyngula)

Daily Links #125: Oklahoma bans same-sex adoption

• Oklahoma officially allows religious adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex parents. It’s the Christian way.

• The fallout from SESTA/FOSTA continues: Cops realize it’s making their jobs harder, whilst sex traffickers are having a field day. It’s not like anyone predicted this would happen or anything …

• PZ Myers says all I have to say on the “Intellectual Dark Web” of regressives who whinge about how they can’t spout bigotry and play footsie with fascists without suffering social consequences.

• Andrew Shirvell, who rose to fame as the homophobic former Michigan Assistant Attorney General who obsessively harassed a gay college student, has been permanently disbarred.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally: in Creativitas news, I’ve recently revised and updated three of my orchestral songs, “Inhuman Suite”, “Setting Out” and “Softer Dreams”. I plan to revisit some of my older songs – some of which I haven’t touched in the better part of a decade, back when I was just starting to write music – and give them the overhaul they deserve, so stay tuned.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Franklin Graham: Trump’s adultery is “nobody’s business”

Franklin Graham

If you’re looking for a reliable source of pure chutzpah, don’t stray far from evangelical Christians. Here’s preacher Franklin Graham explaining that the country has too many problems to focus on Trump’s infidelity and sleeping with a porn star, which isn’t anyone’s business anyway:

I don't have concern, in a sense, because these things happened many years ago – and there's such bigger problems in front of us as a nation that we need to be dealing with than other things in his life a long time ago. I think some of these things – that's for him and his wife to deal with. I think when the country went after President Clinton, the Republicans, that was a great mistake that should never have happened. And I think this thing with Stormy Daniels and so forth is nobody's business. And we've got other business at hand that we need to deal with.

Let that sink in a moment. These are the people who try to legislate their way into everyone’s bedrooms, who campaign to prevent men and women from marrying whomever they love regardless of gender, who spend more time talking about gay sex than gay people do, who make every effort to strip away women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, and who heap scorn and sanctimony upon anyone who isn’t in a straight-laced, missionary-and-for-procreation-only marriage even as they continually throw their lot in with politicians with more ex-wives and male-prostitute scandals between them than ideological positions.

Yet suddenly, they’re so very concerned with all these people who criticize the president, the evangelicals’ golden calf, for lying nonstop to the country and possibly committing felonies. Really, they should all just get their noses out of Trump’s private life and mind their own business.

Being an evangelical Christian has all but become synonymous with couching naked bigotry and pathological blue-nosing in rank hypocrisy and slapping on a transparent veneer of piousness to deflect accusations about their total moral bankruptcy. And they didn’t even need atheists’ help to get that reputation; they’ve earned it all on their own.

(via Joe.My.God.)

Fischer: The First Amendment only applies to Christianity

Bryan Fischer

I give you Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association:

The blunt, simple, direct, straightforward answer is that Wiccans do not have First Amendment rights, nor do Muslims, nor do Jews, nor do Native Americans, nor do Rastafarians, nor do any practitioners of any other religion other than Christianity.

Whatever the First Amendment is about, whatever protections it extends in the federal Constitution, those were just for Christianity. Christianity has First Amendment rights under the federal Constitution, no other religion does.

But whatever you do, don’t call them Christian-fascists. That’s just anti-Christian bigotry.

(via Joe.My.God.)

These Proud Boys don’t seem very threatening anymore

I came across this video on Twitter and I was struck at how perfect it works as a representation of the state of affairs in the US:

Proud Boy in Seattle finds a sign he doesn't like during #MayDay & tries with all his might to rip it up. It doesn't work out. [h/t @nategowdy] #MayDaySea pic.twitter.com/Z2P0KhQw0J

— Ash J (@AshAgony) May 2, 2018

An easily offended proto-fascist sees a protest sign he doesn’t like and tries to destroy it, but fails, all the while outnumbered by liberals laughing at him, until he walks off in a huff.

Conservatives really have this “triggered snowflake” thing backwards, don’t they?

He then tries to save face on Facebook. He fails at that, too.

Guys, he's soooo totally not mad about all these people laughing at him. In fact, he thinks we're all stupid for watching the video. And he's not a Proud Boy either! So the joke's on us! pic.twitter.com/IEmInoDdP1

— Ash J (@AshAgony) May 2, 2018

I see hope for the future, folks.

(via @J_Dot_J; retweet by @Popehat)

Daily Links #123: Bill Cosby found guilty

Bill Cosby

• Bill Cosby ^[pictured]: Guilty on all counts of sexual assault. At his age, it’s effectively a life sentence. Good riddance.

• In totally unsurprising news, the Toronto van murderer is affiliated with women-hating incels.

• Here’s an TV show idea: Disgraced accused sexual predator Charlie Rose interviews other disgraced sexual predators like Matt Lauer and Louis CK about #MeToo. I’m sorry to say that’s not a joke.

• Not a repeat: Right-wingers triggered by NRA boycott destroy their own expensive property to own the libs, clearly need more safe spaces.

• Finally, NRA dude is sad that the unarmed hero who stopped the Waffle House shooter didn’t have a gun to shoot the gunman dead with instead.
  (via @fark)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #121: Trump’s trans military ban blocked yet again

Will you look at that: 500 posts. Do I win something?

• Trump’s trans military ban just keeps getting, er, banned by federal courts.
  (via @fark)

• The Supreme Court just made it a little harder for the Trump administration to deport immigrants.
  (via @Popehat)

• What white people can learn from the Starbucks arrests; or, the importance of recognizing, and fighting against, implicit bias.

• You’d think a professional defender of the Catholic Church’s handling of child-diddling priests would know better than to weigh in on the David Silverman affair. (Yes, of course it’s Bill Donohue.)

• Finally, Ed Brayton presents: Eight Rules for Understanding Our Teenage President.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Fox News’s Hume on media’s treatment of Trump vs. Obama

Brit Hume

Here I am, quite enjoying my little quasi-hiatus, when some dunce on TV says something that just needs to be shared and laughed at. Take it away, Fox News guest Brit Hume:

President Obama enjoyed a certain protected status because he was African-American and because he was a Democrat and a liberal. Those things do not normally apply to Republicans, particularly Republicans so universally loathed among most of our nation's news media as this president is, so he doesn't get the same kind of treatment.

Hey, Hume, you want to know why Republicans are “so universally loathed”? It’s because they just keep saying stupid shit like this. Obama was “protected” in the sense that he had charisma, intelligence, poise and at least basic knowledge of whatever matter was being discussed, all of which your boy Trump famously and flamboyantly lacks.

To be fair, Hume said this on Tucker Carlson’s show, where adhesion to reality (alongside basic sense and decency) isn’t a requirement.

Daily Links #119: SC cops shoot at man 57 times over $100 pot sale

Julian Betton

• South Carolina cops shot at a man ^[pictured] 57 times, hitting him nine times and paralyzing him, during a drug raid over a $100 pot sale. They claimed they’d announced themselves and that he fired at them first, and an “oversight” agency claimed the shooting was justified; his surveillance camera proved they lied about everything. The shooters and prosecutors have now given him a $2.75 million settlement.
  

• Slate exposes the junk science and blatant lies behind Trump’s trans military ban, including the fact that Defense Secretary Mattis was overruled by Mike Pence who, aided by fellow bigots like Tony Perkins, helped sway Trump to ignore the testimony from actual experts who say the ban accomplishes nothing good.
  (via @fark)

• Trump’s EPA continues to attack and lie about science at every turn.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• You know someone has a bad case of Christian persecution complex when they complain that Sweet Jesus ice cream shop’s name is “offensive”.

• Finally, coal baron Bob Murray apparently thought it would be a good idea to send a complaint letter to the judge who dismissed his bogus defamation suit against John Oliver. The ACLU is amused. The judge is not.
  (via @adamsteinbaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #117: Unarmed Black man shot by Sacramento cop

Stephon Clark

• Sacramento, CA: Unarmed black man ^[pictured] shot to death in own backyard after police mistake cell phone for weapon.
  (via The Watch | The Washington Post)

• Meanwhile, the Minneapolis, MN officer who shot Justine Damond turns himself in on murder charges.
  (via The Watch | The Washington Post)

• Having finally lost their cause to keep their old gerrymandered district map, Pennsylvania Republican officials are now moving to impeach the Democratic justices of the state supreme court who ruled against them.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• New Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner promised big criminal justice reforms. And he’s delivering.

• The 400 residents of Dewey, Delaware must be nothing but hardcore gangbangers, because the town’s 11-officer police force requested, and obtained, 31 military vehicles and other gear through the Pentagon’s 1033 program.

• Finally, just a reminder that nine years later, Sean Hannity still still hasn’t been waterboarded as he promised he would be “for the troops”.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.