Labor Day Reads: Decadent Fun vs Angry Wipipo

SOUTHERN DECADENCE

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Hope you’re having a relaxing and peaceful Labor Day Weekend!  The heat has backed off here some, and this morning, we had a pleasant tropical shower. I only wish it would cool off sooner in the evening, but thankfully, I’ve begun to notice the shorter days. Right now, I’m listening to the late Robbie Robertson. We had a marvelous Southern Decadence Weekend and parade yesterday, which is our biggest Gay Pride Event. Fortunately, there was nothing but fun, costumes, and marching bands.   Evidently, we missed the angry mobs this year.

There’s a great combination of krewes and bands that parade.  You don’t have to be a member of the GLBT community to come out and share the PRIDE.

But, Oh, Florida! Florida has a NAZI infestation. Imagine taking your family to Disneyland and the Goyim Defense League screams slurs at everyone in sight. This is from The Rolling Stone, as reported by Peter Wade.   (Trigger warning, especially the video)

Members of white supremacist and antisemitic hate groups marched outside Orlando, Florida, on Saturday screaming invectives, raising the Nazi salute, and yelling “Heil Hitler” and “white power.”

“We are everywhere!” neo-Nazis can be heard shouting in a video shared by former Florida House of Representatives member Anna V. Eskamani. Later in the footage, they yelled, “Heil Hitler” while performing a Nazi salute.

Days before the march, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism warned it was coming. “Two extremist groups, the Goyim Defense League (GDL) and Blood Tribe (BT), are planning to gather in Florida in September 2023 for a joint, public demonstration(s) they are calling the ‘March of the Redshirts,’” the center said in a community advisory shared via email on Thursday.

The ADL describes the Goyim Defense League as “a loose network of individuals connected by their virulent antisemitism” with an “overarching goal” to “expel Jews from America.” The organization characterizes Blood Tribe, led by white supremacist Christopher Pohlhaus, as “a growing neo-Nazi group that claims to have chapters across the United States and Canada.”

“Blood Tribe presents itself as a hardcore white supremacist group and rejects white supremacists who call for softer ‘optics,’” the ADL writes.

In video captured by News2Share’s Ford Fischer, the groups chanted, “Jews will not replace us!” and “Jews get the rope.”

Pohlhaus appeared to lead portions of the march. When Pohlhaus yelled, “Heil the führer!” others responded with, “Heil Hitler!”

Speaking to reporters, Pohlhaus said, “We just have to start a fire. We’re the kindling. Once we set the fire, we get the fire hot, then we get the rest of our brothers blazing.”

Again, Trigger warning.  This video is graphic and full of antisemitic slurs.

So, which parade would you instead attend?  So, the movement to sterilize public education is happening everywhere. This extremism is reported in The Daily Beast. “The California Megachurch Pushing Public Schools to the Far Right. From fights over LGBT rights to prayer at school board meetings, Chino Valley public schools have become ground zero for the culture wars.” These people are not nice or loving, but they are organized to get shit done.  Again, politics is local. Watch your School District elections.  Trigger Warning.  More angry, insane wipipo.

Outside the California State Capitol last month, a fitness trainer turned school board president fired up the crowd at a parental rights rally, telling them they were all fighters in “a spiritual battle” for their kids and must answer the call from God.

Sonja Shaw, who was elected to the Chino Valley Unified School District board of education last November with an assist from a local megachurch and its Christian nationalist pastor, didn’t equivocate in naming the enemy: state Democratic officials who are challenging her right-leaning policies—and drafting laws that hinder book bans and protect teachers from harassment.

“Today we stand here and declare in his almighty name that it’s only a matter of time before we take your seats and we be a God-fearing example to the nation, how God is using California to lead the way,” Shaw crowed, adding, “We already know who has won this battle. You will be removed in Jesus’s name! You, Satan, are losing.”

Now Shaw is in the national spotlight in wake of her Chino school board passing codes that ban pride flags in classrooms and force educators to inform parents if their children identify as transgender—the first such policy to be passed in the state.

This summer, Shaw’s school board meetings, about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, became chaotic spectacles, ones that attracted the Proud Boys and other right-wing extremists and pitted them against students and parents protesting what they’re calling anti-LGBTQ practices that endanger children. When California superintendent of schools Tony Thurmond appeared at the July meeting in opposition, Shaw unceremoniously silenced him.

Weeks after state Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a civil rights probe into Shaw’s “gender disclosure” policy, his office sued the school board. Bonta said the policy violates the California constitution and state law, and would cause LGBTQ+ students, “mental, emotional, psychological and potential physical harm,” according to a press release.

Other right-leaning school boards across the state have followed Chino Valley Unified’s lead. Shortly before filing suit against the Chino board, Bonta issued statements denouncing the Anderson Union High School District, Temecula Valley Unified and Murrieta Valley Unified school boards’ decisions to pursue “copycat” anti-trans policies.

Speaking of another angry, idiotic white guy, catch this headline from The Guardian.  Musk is intent on turning what used to be Twitter into a Fascist hell hole. “Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses. Lawsuit says network discloses user data at request of Saudi authorities at much higher rate than for US, UK and Canada.”

The social media company formerly known as Twitter has been accused in a revised civil US lawsuit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human rights abuses against its users, including by disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities at a much higher rate than it has for the US, UK, or Canada.

The lawsuit was brought last May against X, as Twitter is now known, by Areej al-Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi aid worker who was forcibly disappeared and then later sentenced to 20 years in jail.

It centers on the events surrounding the infiltration of the California company by three Saudi agents, two who were posing as Twitter employees in 2014 and 2015, which ultimately led to the arrest of al-Sadhan’s brother, Abdulrahman, and the exposure of the identity of thousands of anonymous Twitter users, some of whom were later reportedly detained and tortured as part of the government’s crackdown on dissent.

Lawyers for Al-Sadhan updated their claim last week to include new allegations about how Twitter, under the leadership of then-chief executive Jack Dorsey, willfully ignored or had knowledge of the Saudi government’s campaign to ferret out critics but – because of financial considerations and efforts to keep close ties to the Saudi government, a top investor in the company – provided assistance to the kingdom.

The new lawsuit details how X had originally been seen seen as a critical vehicle for democratic movements during the Arab spring, and therefore became a source of concern for the Saudi government as early as 2013.

The new legal filing comes days after Human Rights Watch condemned a Saudi court for sentencing a man to death based solely on his Twitter and YouTube activity, which it called an “escalation” of the government’s crackdown on freedom of expression.

The convicted man, Muhammad al-Ghamdi, 54, is the brother of a Saudi scholar and government critic living in exile in the UK. Saudi court records examined by HRW showed that al-Ghamdi was accused of having two accounts, which had a total of 10 followers combined. Both accounts had fewer than 1,000 tweets combined, and contained retweets of well-known critics of the government.

The Saudi crackdown can be traced back to December 2014, as Ahmad Abouammo – who was later convicted in the US for secretly acting as a Saudi agent and lying to the FBI – began accessing and sending confidential user data to Saudi Arabian officials. In the new lawsuit, it is claimed that he sent a message to Saud al-Qahtani, a close aide to Mohammed bin Salman, via the social media company’s messaging system, saying “proactively and reactively we will delete evil, my brother”. It was a reference, the lawsuit claims, to the identification and harming of perceived Saudi dissidents who were using the platform. Al-Qahtani was later accused by the US of being a mastermind behind the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

And, the Republicans have a new racist to add more MAGA hatred of black Americans.  This is from The Hill.   This OpEd was written by Juan Williams. “Ignore and inflame: the Vivek Ramaswamy approach to racism.”

Donald Trump is surely watching Ramaswamy’s rise closely.

Imagine a 2024 vice presidential debate where the GOP candidate is a brown-skinned man, and he is telling a black woman, Vice President Kamala Harris, that Democrats take minority voters for granted.

Ramaswamy is preparing for that fight by taking his racial rhetoric to disturbing heights.

“I’m sure the boogeyman ‘white supremacists’ exist somewhere in America – I have just never met him,” Ramaswamy said recently on CNN.

“Never seen one…”

Say what? Keep in mind, Ramaswamy spoke a year after a white racist went into a Buffalo grocery and killed 10 people with automatic gun inscribed with the n-word.

He spoke days before another white racist went into a Jacksonville store and killed three black people with a rifle marked with swastikas.

Did Ramaswamy miss the white supremacists marching through Charlottesville in 2017? Has he forgotten Dylan Roof’s racist murder of nine Black Charleston churchgoers in 2015?

Ramaswamy’s reckless use of racial and tribal appeals to win over Republican voters was also on display at an early August event in Iowa.

He said he wants to cancel the Juneteenth holiday, which celebrates the day when slaves in Texas first heard they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. He called it a “useless” holiday.

Two months earlier, Ramaswamy had posted a social media video praising Juneteenth as a celebration of “how far we’ve come.” He added that “as a first-generation American myself, you better believe I’m proud of it.

We are clearly seeing two visions for America. One is hateful, dystopian, worships guns and a twisted version of Christianity, and sees White Men at the top of the food chain. The other is live and let live and seeks to expand our diverse democracy and to ensure liberty and justice for all of us.  In a world of conformity, I choose to be Weird Barbie.   This is from UK Glamour.  The thinkpiece is written by Olivia Anne Cleary.

Kate McKinnon portrays Weird Barbie in the summer blockbuster Barbie. Her character is introduced to viewers under a veil of mystery and, on account of Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie, trepidation. However, I was introduced to Weird Barbie long before the film. As were many others. We just didn’t realise there was a name for it at the time.

As the younger sibling, I often ended up getting my big sister’s hand-me-downs in the’90s. It’s a rite of passage any kid sibling goes through. I inherited her Walkman when she graduated to a Discman. A few years later, I was given said Discman when she upgraded to a fancier model. But the one thing I never inherited was her Barbie dolls. Why? Well, she had chopped off all their hair some years prior and coloured them in with various felt tip pens. My mother, unwilling to subject me to the sight of these dishevelled dolls, who no longer had use for the Barbie hair brushes we had so many of, opted to buy me new ones. However, a couple of the felt tip pen-adorned Barbies remained in an old toy box. I’d never given them much thought until I watched Barbie the film. It was only then that I came to realise that those neglected dolls I’d ignored were, in fact, Weird Barbies.

The pang of nostalgia was instant, as were the chuckles and murmurs I heard around the screening room when McKinnon’s character made her first on-screen appearance. Weird Barbie is feared and avoided by the other dolls in Barbie Land, but it soon becomes apparent that she’s not frightening, simply different.

When explaining why she looks so unique, Weird Barbie reveals that her owner cut her hair, drew on her face, and put her in flexible positions. She was then somewhat discarded and forgotten about, and is now stuck as “Weird Barbie.” Instead of wearing the stereotypical high heels, she’s in flat shoes, and rather than living with the rest of the Barbies, she’s isolated in a house on a hill. “Come into my weird house. Hi! I’m Weird Barbie. I can do the splits. I have a funky haircut and I smell like basement,” she says, by way of greeting the visiting humans.

See you at next year’s Southern Decadence!

What’s on your reading and blogging list.