Over at National Review, Luther Ray Abel jokingly says that Illinois has the ugliest flag in creation. But:
The second-most-hideous ensign, the so-called Pride flag, deserves more consideration because of its actively chimeric nature. The multivarious sexual and racial political interests represented in its horizontal bar and leftward-marching chevron were recently unveiled at a NASA outpost in California. It’s the slippery slope playing out before our eyes, with the previous year’s model — no longer inclusive enough — moldering in a central California dump; a new symbol was affixed to the standard: a circle representing intersex individuals (those born with a combination of male and female genitalia).
....Everyone, no matter what resides in any individual’s trousers, can gaze upon the vexillological, scatological brilliance that is the Pride flag in its final form and say, “I am seen (even if I need binoculars to see which stripe or structure represents my reproductive and racial predilections in this 3×5 quadrangle of nyan-cat-produced accelerant).”
Yeah, the Pride flag has changed a bunch over the years. Early on it coalesced into the six-color rainbow that everyone is familiar with. Then it added brown and black stripes to represent people of color. Then it incorporated the black and brown with pink and blue in a set of chevrons pointing outward to represent the trans community. A couple of years ago it added a circle to represent intersex folks.
But there's no law that says which flag you have to use. The original version is still extremely widespread. So who cares?
The only reason I bring this up is to point out Abel's illustration of a common conservative trait: mockery of inclusiveness in any and all forms. I mean, I get that the ever-changing Pride flag might be fodder for some comedians, sort of like the ever-expanding acronym LGBTQIA+. But for those whose job isn't comedy, why the endless contempt? In one breath they'll tell you that of course they have nothing against gay—or intersex—people, and in the next that everything they do to represent themselves is ridiculous.
Mockery of absurd hypersensitivity is understandable. Criticism of people you actively dislike and/or disapprove of is understandable. Contempt for hypocrisy is understandable.
But don't pretend to be tolerant if you take literally every opportunity that comes your way to mock and denounce some group or another—and never take the opportunity to say anything good about them. Grow up.
It’s a dominance play, because dominance is what drives conservatives.
Ah but you misunderstand. They aren't even pretending to be tolerant. They know perfectly well that their followers do not care at all for tolerance -- very much the opposite! -- and they themselves do not care at all what anyone else thinks. Their apparent words of pretense are in fact mockery, mockery of the tolerance practiced and preached by the very people they despise.
Never make the mistake of ascribing even half-benevolent emotions to right-wing / Republican commentators, nor indeed to most Republicans generally, except perhaps in fleeting moments when they are not surrounded by their fellow cultists. They're like Nazis talking about Jews; their politesse is little but mockery and baiting. They reveal this through their actions, whatever their words may be.
Bingo. All of this bleating about symbols like flags is in bad faith. They hate the symbols because they hate the people those symbols represent, they fervently wish those people would die or magically cease to exist, and any attempt to look for nuance in their position is just overcomplicating things. Whining about the symbols themselves is simply their fallback position because they've judged that it's toxic to their popularity to go any further with nakedly expressed homophobia.
It's the same exact phenomenon as what Lee Atwater was talking about with how the n-word became a political liability for racist politicians, so instead they carefully shifted to dogwhistling about things like welfare policy to signal to the Republican base that their candidates were the ones on Team White. It's not like those politicians were purely motivated by a deep concern for the federal budget, and it would be an equally dumb mistake to assume that wingnuts aren't lying about their motivations on every stupid culture-war issue.
Their insistence on commandeering the streets each year to pay fealty to a foreign country and wear buttons that say, “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” is what is most disgraceful.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH
A-M-E-R-I-C-A-N???
/s
It doesn't matter you said it, because it's true on its face.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect".
Conservatives are ultimately in favor of murdering people they don't identify with, and any conservative who says otherwise is fucking lying to you.
Next topic.
To be fair, they’re ok with illegal immigrants so long as they can be paid slave wages and deported on a whim—including for being uppity.
….. or if they insist on being paid ( a problem here in Colorado).
A few years ago, there were two officers in Montgomery Country, Maryland, who actually helped immigrant workers who had worked a full day, then been stranded far from their homes without being paid. Given what I know of other area cops, this was amazingly good news, however seldom it occurs.
Growing up would get them voted off the island. To this day they make a fetish of punishing disloyalty - ask any Never Trumper about what cancel culture means to them.
Remember, they love America. Just not approx. 70% of their fellow Americans, the American government, or how the American government works.
Remember, they love America. Just not approx. 70% of their fellow Americans, the American government, or how the American government works.
Nailed it!
scatological brilliance
interesting turn of phrase, considering the national review's ideological standard-bearer is the corporeal manifestation of the poo emoji
i take your question as rhetorical, but i appreciate the post becaues it really is a great example of conservatives' innate and insane hatred of anyone or anything unlike themselves, and how it obsesses them to the point of writing pointless screeds about flag deisgn.
This is the nub of it, and it somehow manages to be more disgusting than the less-plausible alternative: that they genuinely believe all the traditional reasons given to justify homophobia (forbidden by the Bible, an indicator of pederasty, counter to "natural law," etc.). No, those are just rationalizations that they glom onto, but only the stupidest among them really believe in them. Their real principle is simply that everyone with the temerity to be different from them should suffer and die.
wapo headline:
Protesters expected to be moved away from park near GOP convention
this park is one block away (diagonally) from the convention center, but apparently the RNC says that's too close
so... how the fuck do you square that with this 2014 ruling:
The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a 35-foot protest-free zone outside abortion clinics in Massachusetts. The justices were unanimous in ruling that extending a buffer zone 35 feet from clinic entrances violates the First Amendment rights of protesters.
sure looks like 'free speech for me but not for thee'
Rs are @nd Amendment absolutists... but I guarantee they'll ban guns inside the convention hall (just like the NRA does at its events). Expecting consistency from them is a mug's game.
true enough re hypocrisy, but i am genuinely curious how the press can cover this story and not bring up the 2014 decision
i seriously don't understand how it's possible to say 35 feet is too far *for this one specific group* but not for anyone else
and on top of that, this is purely political speech, which they've told us over and over is the holy of the holies wrt the 1st amendment
it really really looks like they carved out special rights for right wing protesters that no one else is allowed to exercise
so shouldn't the press really be putting this context in their stories? or are they really that far in the tank for the republican party?
Or are they really that
far in the tank for the republican partyafraid of losing their jobs should they put this decision into context?FIFY
The big thing is that the majority of the time, they get a rise out of folks. I think they are addicted to it.
My dad, a conservative, lives for getting a rise out of people. Not only in real life but also online. Always trying to tell me about people he pissed off online.
yeah, a lot of these people are somewhere on the oppositional defiant disorder spectrum, though that's not really an excuse. they know they can't mouth off to their boss (or other entities they depend on - the government, their customers, etc) the way they want without any consequences, so they save it all for people who can't mete out any. this in turn probably contributes to a vicious cycle - if the only thing driving you is getting a rise out of people, eventually people will just avoid your run-of-the-mill offensiveness and you'll have to get more and more extreme to get their attention again.
“Well, revenge does take time, I will say that,” Trump said during a Thursday interview with Dr. Phil. “And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”
“Look when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them...”
“I know a lot of Republicans who want retribution,” Trump told NBC News on Wednesday at Mar-a-Lago. “They want to do that. We’re going to see what happens.”
"...for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
Well why do conservatives do anything they do? Because fuck you, that's why.
That is some shockingly bad writing. Is the Mark Steyn chair available or something?
Half the things Trump claims he wants to do in his next administration are illegal.
Why is supporting him in his plan to do that not a criminal conspiracy?
Any GOP pol could easily answer that one- "Define illegal"?
Also, I would refer you to Stenner's description of authoritarians as "relentlessly sociotropic boundary maintainers." https://hopenothate.org.uk/2020/11/01/authoritarianism/
This makes it clear that they are actively opposed to inclusion, because it blurs the in-group / out-group distinction that is so important to them. A lot of their identity is bound up in hating outsiders -- LGBTQIA+ folks very much included, but certainly also including racial and religious minorities, immigrants, and doubtless a much longer list of Undesirables (it used to include Catholics, until apparently they became allies) -- which tolerance and inclusiveness challenges directly. It challenges THEM, and their conception of themselves. That's not something you realistically can expect them ever to give up.
Could there not be quite another reason why the proliferation of categories such as LGBTQIA+ is irritating? There are conceptual differences between LGB and T and Q and I and so on; these are sometimes important. As I understand it, LGB is about sexual orientation, T is about sexual identity, Q is about something political, and I is purely biological. It is lazy and confusing to the public to use LGBTQIA+ when only one of the parts is meant. But many policies (marriage, sex trait modification, categories in sport) really depend on clear distinctions. If clear thought is useful when we talk about prices and inflation, it may also be useful for talking about these other issues.
in regular expression pattern matching an asterisk means "match anything", so something like q* (q-star) would be a lot easier to deal with
A dot, ., matches anything. An asterik means "0 or more of the things before the asterisk". So ".*" matches anything, or nothing.
I don't think it will catch on.
Perhaps they are combined for political reasons precisely because the political environment treats them/us pretty much the same? Surely you're not suggesting that, say, evangelical Christianists -- or pretty much any Republican politician, much less the average Republican follower -- distinguishes meaningfully among, say, Lesbians, gay men, intersex people, or trans people? That they hate any one of them/us materially less than another?
Talk about distinction without difference!
(Oh, and condolences concerning the irritation. I'm sure it's trying.)
we need a republican 'big tent' acronym...
fascist
anti-vaxxers
conservative catholics
libertarian
evangelical
industrialist
climate deniers
trumpists
young earthers
facleicty+ works
their flag can be 'an appeal to heaven' with a noose hanging off the tree's bottom branch
+1!
I think the “reasonable” reason to be annoyed with something like this is that it’s performatively complicated. I’m a big-city liberal in good standing and I admit that the fact that the flag is constantly being updated with more and more stripes and symbols raises a question in my mind about what the exercise is actually doing.
To a lot of people this scans as a form of cultural elitism that we Liberals do a lot- we all want to be the smartest person in the room, and a lot of conversations about inclusive values that (I claim) are pretty widely held tend to have a weird dynamic where people compete to use the most sensitive, up-to-date, and tolerant language possible to convey things as a form of subtle elitism. It’s an incredibly annoying form of cultural signaling that tends to exclude people who haven’t spent decades in liberal enclaves learning the correct phraseology.
At a very basic level, we want to speak to each other humanely, but people who don’t know the latest buzzwords are obviously going to feel left out and a little boxed in and annoyed. We interpret those feelings as intolerance at our own peril.
That said, this Abel guy sounds like a real asshat.
The thing is, there are virtually, or literally, zero actual sanctions on people who don't learn the "correct" phraseology. I live in the gayest city in America and nobody has ever looked askance at me for saying "queer," "LGBT," or
"LGBTQ." 'But WHERE IS THE IA-PLUS, YOU HOMOPHOBE?????' is a thing that literally nobody ever says to enforce the "correct" phrasing.
This is why David Brooks's column about his working-class friend who supposedly was terrified by the prospect of having to order unfamiliar Italian deli meats at a fancy sandwich shop was so absurd. If you don't know what mortadella is, the deli guy is not going to make fun of you if you ask! These people are upset not because the LGBTQIA+ flag keeps getting more stripes, or because learning the most updated abbreviation is beyond their ability, but rather because they realllllllly wanna say slurs like "f*gg*t"and tell gay people their lifestyle is deviant and wrong without facing any consequences for it.
this. yeah, there's a lot of letters in lgbtqia. but who the hell cares, no one makes you say it. i don't even know what the last 2 mean, but it's not "irritating" because no one cares or gets angry about it.
Just to clarify things, I believe "i" stands for intersex and "a" is asexual ("ace"). I don't know (or know that I know) any intersex people, but I do know some aces.
Really and truly agree to disagree about this. I see people do this constantly and I really think it’s a deeply dangerous tack to take in most contexts- when you imagine that someone is using the wrong words because that are secretly a stone cold bigot you give yourself an excuse to ignore what that person says, no matter the content.
I’ve seen a super liberal lawyer from the Midwest get tongue tied trying to meet my liberal peers in the middle, and they walk away telling themselves that they are awesome and he’s a troglodyte because he doesn’t fluidly talk about intersectionality.
What I’m saying is that you and your friends who are probably my neighbors really lose out when you do that. It’s pointlessly alienating to a potential ally, and in any case you should want to hold your own ideas to a higher standard.
1 to 1000 odds on this not remotely being what actually happened with this supposedly "liberal lawyer".
See? You did it again. Instead of thinking about what I said and actually trying to defend your position, you just immediately assumed that I'm lying and people like this don't exist.
I'm telling you, it's a brainworm. You should really try to do better than that for your own sake and mine.
lmao it's not an assumption, it's an entirely reasonable inference to draw from the resemblance your post has to every single lying concern troll I've ever read, as well as the dissimilarity between your story and the stories told by people actually operating in good faith
Still no response.
QED
your mother QEDeez nutz, troll
What do you expect from bigots?
Well, think about why so many Republicans pretend to be MAGA. Or better yet, listen to the people who were tossed out of the GOP because of their opposition to MAGA. This is their community; getting kicked out of it is painful. The only way to stay in it is to be performative jerks and hateful assholes, because the leader of MAGA is a jerk and a hateful asshole.
It's not conservatives. It's the current crop of asshats who call themselves conservatives, but in reality are anything but. Their entire philosophy is based on us vs. them, so there always has to be a "them".
There's a certain type of Liberal, Drum and Krugman come to mind, who really are good at data, charts, and numbers. But when it comes to social commentary, they are often reductive.
And a simplistic, and thereby misleading, narrative is on full display in this column. Let's start with the headline. Sure, the new pride flag may very well be disliked by some Conservatives. It is also, as it so happens, disliked by some Liberals and even by some Leftists. And to phrase this whole issue as one where "conservatives hate inclusiveness" is uncomfortably close to an exercise in demagoguery.
Here, for example, is a Leftist (Brianna Wu) complaining about the new pride flag on twitter:
"Y’all. Come on, let’s be real. The original pride flag is better design. It’s really okay to admit this.
"You don’t have to let a bunch of scary, anonymous accounts make you pretend the new one is better. It’s not, and saying so doesn’t make you a homophobe."
And then later:
"I see that this is getting taken in bad faith. So let me explain my criticism ...
"The original pride flag was perfectly clear. It’s a rainbow and we are all different, we are all beautiful and we are all included. It’s a good design because it’s instantly understandable. 10/10 design
"My problem with constantly adding new things to it is it’s not about clear communication anymore, it’s about political pandering. If you look into what these stripes are supposed to represent, they are more niche and more niche."
This commentary addresses both the design of the flag and also how design can interface with activism. And I personally feel that Wu makes some good points. Neither she nor I are Conservatives.
The problem with both the new design and the updated movement that it ostensibly represents is that both are trying to do too much.
Kevin nods towards this reality when he states: " I get that the ever-changing Pride flag might be fodder for some comedians, sort of like the ever-expanding acronym LGBTQIA+."
But, as far as I can tell, he does not, in fact, "get it." Getting it, in this case, would involve some legit and well-deserved criticism of a movement associated with the Left, and that would upset the simplistic narratives that the Drums and Krugmans of the world will apparently never relinquish.
The cold, hard reality, for anyone willing to accept it, is that the initialism LGBTQIA+ (it's not, as Kevin asserts, an acronym) is ridiculous. Sure, it's well-intentioned. But it has become arcane for all but the most fervent acolytes.
Most people, even supporters of gay rights, are going to look at that ever-expanding initialism and just roll their eyes. Its main accomplishment, at this point, is to convince ever more people that a once constructive movement has simply jumped the shark.
It's trying too hard to be too much for too many people. And there's simply no reason to try and force so many widely disparate identities together. Nor is there anything wrong with pointing out this obvious problem. And that's true even when these observations are made by the dreaded bogeymen known as conservatives.
Bigots gonna bigot.
And blame you for their bigotry. lol. poor leo.
@ jdbus:
please get some help.
"Suspicion of outsiders" is basically the most defining trait of conservatives, so it's not surprising they'd be hostile to "inclusiveness". They don't become "inclusive" until it's super widely accepted and the people in question aren't considered Not Like Us anymore as long as they espouse conservative beliefs - hence why there's a bunch of prominent black conservative politicians now, whereas 60 years ago all those rich white conservatives wouldn't even share a bathroom or country club with them.
The next question is, “Why should I tolerate conservatives?”
It's like these guys haven't seen a thin line flag recently. It has almost as many colors as a pride flag now, too.
The original flag was just fine. The current one is hideous, and ridiculous because who knows or cares what all the crap that's been added to it means? If you've got one of these newer flags, just toss it and get the original. Like, you know, everyone knows what gay pride is. No one has a clue what LGBTQRSTXYZ± is supposed to stand for.
Back at the first gay pride march in Washington in the late 70s, we marched and chanted along with the leaders: "Gay, Straight, Black, White. Same struggle, same fight." Good easy marching chant--but it's utterly wrong. They're not at all the same. Everyone agreed, and we laughed about it.
The pride movement has always been a mess, so it's not surprising they messed up the flag, too. And whoever thought reducing us (me) to an acronym was a good idea should be shot. Talk about achieving the exact opposite outcome.
Here's a tip: you want to be and feel included in the "pride movement"-- you're in. No questions asked. You want to find yourself in the original "pride flag" but don't see a color there that matches your skin perfectly, or your sexuality on any given day? Use your imagination. You're in there whether you see it or not. It was full spectrum from the start.
I question that guy's artistic bona fides. The updated flag looks pretty good to me, and I'm one of the cis-white-hetero minority. (Some people...)
Oh, and I also have no problem with the flag of Illlinois. That guy is a real jackwagon (today's word, apparently).
Having read his piece, it seems clearer now, that what they're really afraid of, is the total acceptance of LGBTQIA+ -- the collapse of the social conservative's influence and community.
“You know what I want? I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month.”
Martha-Ann Bomgardner Alito
and who would Jesus be standing with?
Some of these "conservatives" are genuinely nasty, but that doesn't mean there aren't multiple points of genuine validity in their complaints, even the complaints of "inclusivity".
One obvious point is that the process is not democratic; it's basically rule by the loudest. Who decided that "Pride" needed a new flag? Who decided on the details of the new flag? Who decided that the agenda of gay rights should be held hostage to other agendas, be they black rights, trans rights, or Hamas? Or, to bring up an issue that is likely to become salient over the next few years, who decided who fits in the "People of Color" band? East Asians have already been kicked out, and South Asians are likely to be kicked out soon.
Democracy ala the Fabian Society may be slow, but it works in the sense that it creates a genuine persistent social consensus. This was how gay marriage or ADA was achieved. But what's being pushed in the guise of "inclusivity" is not slow persuasion, it's angry demands for things that are ever more divisive coupled with contempt for the politics of negoitation and compromise.
Kevin has frequently stated that the Republicans don't want abortion banned everywhere because it acts as a rallying call when nothing else will. I contend that demands for inclusivity play the same role on the Left. And in the same way, the goal is not to actually achieve the inclusion of the particular group; it's to generate fault lines of "are you with us or against us".
In his clumsy way, I think the "conservative" commenter is trying to make that point, that the PRIMARY goal of the exercise is the generation of friction, not the negotiation of any sort of deal. (Brianna Wu, for example, has frequently made the same point from the small faction of Trans-Left who actually want to get things done, not just generate outrage.)
Who decided that "Pride" needed a new flag?
-some people who wanted to make a new flag which neither you or anybody else is under any obligation to use or even know about.
Who decided on the details of the new flag?
-the same people. and you can make your own flag with the details you want.
Who decided that the agenda of gay rights should be held hostage to other agendas, be they black rights, trans rights, or Hamas?
-no one. i don't even know what the hell you're talking about
Or, to bring up an issue that is likely to become salient over the next few years, who decided who fits in the "People of Color" band? East Asians have already been kicked out, and South Asians are likely to be kicked out soon.
-as an east asian, that's news to me. i once again have no idea wtf you're talking about.
One of the surest signs of a reactionary troll is that they are incapable of nuanced thinking. This schmuck probably heard someone say something reasonable like "East Asians have had very different experiences in this country than black Americans, discrimination often affects them very differently than it's affected black Americans for a variety of reasons, and given that they've been very successful (at least when looking at broad averages) in many parts of the US, maybe we should take that into account when we think about race and public policy instead of treating all non-white ethnic groups as a monolith" and somehow his takeaway from that was:
"I, the People's Commissar, have decreed that Asians are NO LONGER people of color, starting today! If you've attained some of the socioeconomic privileges that white people have, then boom!!! You are now officially white!"
i don't actually think they're trolling (if memory serves, past comments have been reasonable), it's just a very bad, very wrong take.
"
-some people who wanted to make a new flag which neither you or anybody else is under any obligation to use or even know about.
Who decided on the details of the new flag?
-the same people. and you can make your own flag with the details you want.
"
Except that if *I* design a new flag and ask NASA to fly it in front of all their installations, chances are fairly low that anything will happen...
They're bad people, and the National Review, which used to be thought of as the grown-ups in the room, are as childish as any of them.
Just yesterday, I listened to a surreptitiously made recording of Samuel Alito's wife Martha complaining about "having to stare at the Pride flag across the basin". I didn't get the impression that she thought the cause was good, but the flag was ugly. No, she was going to fly her Christianist flag in defiance. DEFIANCE!
I still shake my head at this. So much of their political identity is centered on hating gay people. I mean, yeah, they still want to talk about those 'sketchy' (meaning brown) or 'urban' (meaning black) folks, but that's second order right now, it seems to me.
Meanwhile, count me as eyerolling at the well meaning but wrongheaded evolution of the Pride flag from the simple rainbow. I'm sticking with the rainbow.
The thing is, it's not actually "hating gay people". And this flag shows the point.
The flag is no longer about gay people; it wants to insist that "the gay pride agenda is every element of the leftist agenda" – and when you start making claims like that (and having everyone who supposedly supports gay pride defend every element of the flag) you can't complain when people who oppose various elements of the leftist agenda don't support you. WTF did you expect?
This is no different from the point I keep making about what happened in the 70s and 80s. The issue was NOT "gays are icky", someone like Reagan was very clear about this. The issue was:
https://thecambridgeroom.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/bostons-gfls-10-point-demands-to-the-democratic-convention-1972/
THIS was the 70s "gay agenda" insofar as a political group stood up and claimed such a thing. A random grab bag of reasonable gay rights demands mixed in with irrelevant leftist demands and truly insane demands:
"Rearing children should be the common responsibility of the whole community. Any legal rights parents have over "their" children should be dissolved and each child should be free to choose its own destiny. Free twenty-four hour child care centers should be established where faggots and lesbians can share the responsibility of child rearing.
"
(Note the similarity to the wildest fantasy of today's trans activists.)
Gay rights advanced dramatically in the 90's when a group of non-insane professionals limited the issue to gay rights AND NOTHING ELSE.
But like I said, the current crowd are not actually interested in rights (gay or otherwise), they're interested in creating friction.
And so a replay of the worst elements of the 70s "gay agenda" is exactly what they strive for. Only this time with the help of useful idiots at NASA.