faulker058

I don't know about you but I'm gutted ever day that Clinton, who won the popular vote and for whom Houstonians voted I think 5-1, is not my president. The intensity (good) and staying power (hooray) of the current focus on sexual assault by powerful men is an incredibly salutary result, I'm sure, of the incredible stuff that happened last year. I've been waiting for something like that to happen since I was old enough to understand what misogyny was in a vivid way (which would be about the age of seven), and in general as the child of a strongly feminist mum. The day I realized I really couldn't be friends with David, was the day he asked, in bookstore of our beloved Tate Gallery, "Why are there no women artists?" I knew it couldn't possibly be true and that the utterance was doing more kinds of work than just being an innocent question, but I had no language to articulate those thoughts yet, so I was only able to say "David, that can't be rig...

My lovely old bandmate Mike's lovely older brother laying down some righteousness against Trump on  Democracy Now :

From my lovely friend Kathelin Gray , the key figure in said project.

Dear Ms. ***,  Thank you for your apology.  As for the explanation, you know what? No. This isn’t about free speech.  This is about fascist violence invading social space.  This is about a disinhibited atmosphere in the country at large. At *** School boys now think it’s okay to yell “Male supremacy!” and “White power!” in front of my daughter.  “Free speech” isn’t speech at all if it’s being used without listening, attention or care.  Or perhaps I should demand that I do a PowerPoint in your class insisting that ***'s dad is a ********* (insert suitable very bad words here). Free speech, right?  This is the same atmosphere that since November 9 2016 (the election of Donald Trump) has caused quiet, introverted kids at my job (Rice U) to wear swastikas, daub them on statues, and deface a piece of the Berlin Wall with “Trump 2016” and “aloha” (aka “good riddance Obama”).  ***  I’m going to start by reporting this incident and that involving her...

The only problems are --It's correct. --Are you ready to diss the vast majority of African Americans, southern women in particular, who voted for Clinton? --If you voted for (I can't write it) out of spite or actually believing him, are you happy now? “Donald Trump, ever ready to pounce on the gullible and disenchanted, chimed in to confirm the pet fear of the far left, convincing many on the fence that the primary was rigged. Supported by legions of Putin operatives, Trump trolls infiltrated online groups to pick up the hammer to do further damage to Hillary Clinton — all the while propping up Bernie Sanders, the weaker candidate. It was classic ratfucking, a reliable scheme employed by the GOP since the Nixon era. [By the way, my friend Danae, a massage therapist who voted for Sanders, knows several Sanders supporters who ended up voting for Trump.] ... “Not only did he never invest the time and money to woo non-white southern voters, he shrugged them off as too ill-informed ...

Dear Ms. Adams,  I'm deeply concerned about hate speech against Amelie Panai, the daughter of a Muslim. Many things have happened to her recently, but perhaps the worst happened today, where students said "she should be killed before she bombs the school,"  This is absolutely unacceptable as I'm sure you know.  The disinhibiting effect of the current president's speech has resulted in students at my job (Rice U), who are normally very shy and introverted, doing things such as wearing swastikas in the library.  I understand from my daughter, who is Amelie's best friend, that students have drawn swastikas on the dividers of students who attend classes that Amelie attends.  When stuff happens at my school I tell the president to make a statement--he usually doesn't do it, for whatever reason--but I just couldn't hear what I have been hearing without writing to you to share.  Yours sincerely,  Timothy Morton

At my daughter's middle school, 12 year old children are drawing swastikas on the dividers of kids in classes where her best friend is, who is the daughter of a Muslim from Indonesia. Those of you who voted for him out of spite or out of actually naively believing he was talking and therefore was going act like Sanders: you happy now? Yeah? Happy now?

“Our task is to find … the common thread that connects our movements. That means, first and foremost, dropping this nonsense of pitting class against so-called identity politics and economic justice”  -- Naomi Klein

The fantasy support of an entire geopolitical and geophysical entity, in a deep sense going back to Puritan ideas of Adamic languages and Providence, has completely evaporated.  The well, shucks, I guess I found myself sitting atop a gigantic lake of oil idea. The dignified marble Sam the American Eagle and the lumpen gold plated all you can eat fantasy are revealed (as I argued in my book on spice) to be not just related but the same thing , just as Bill Bailey deconstructs The Edge's majestic wilderness guitar into “She'll be Coming Round the Mountain.” And revealed to the users of the different modes and versions of such concepts themselves.  The lumpen fantasy has evaporated, the official version has evaporated. Not even the lumpen enjoyment means anything at all.  By the time you realize you're in a game, you have already lost .  The fantasy tablecloth has been whisked out. Sure all the “resources,” the waves of golden corn etc, are still in place--but the ...

In the days to come, there were more declarations of acid satisfaction among the Russian élite. Dmitri Kiselyov, the host of “News of the Week,” a popular current-affairs show on state-controlled television, gloated over Trump’s victory and Barack Obama’s inability to prevent it. Obama, he said, was a “eunuch.” Trump was an “alpha male”—and one who showed mercy to his vanquished rival. “Trump could have put the blonde in prison, as he’d threatened in the televised debates,” Kiselyov said on his show. “On the other hand, it’s nothing new. Trump has left blond women satisfied all his life.” Kiselyov further praised Trump because the concepts of democracy and human rights “are not in his lexicon.” In India, Turkey, Europe, and now the United States, he declared, “the liberal idea is in ruins.”-- The New Yorker

The content of the Russian-hacked emails was actually remarkably unexplosive. Probably the biggest news was that Hillary Clinton had expressed herself in favor of a hemispheric common market in speeches to Wall Street executives. Otherwise, we learned from them that some people at the Democratic National Committee favored a lifelong Democrat for their party’s nomination over a socialist interloper who had joined the party for his own convenience. We learned that many Democrats, including Chelsea Clinton, disapproved of the ethical shortcomings of some of the people in Bill Clinton’s inner circle. We learned that Hillary Clinton acknowledged differences between her “public and private” positions on some issues. None of this even remotely corroborated Donald Trump’s wild characterizations of the Russian-hacked, Wikileaks-published material. “These Wikileaks emails confirm what those of us here today have known all along: Hillary Clinton is the vessel for a corrupt global establishment th...