Month: June 2024

Regrets, I have a few

I think the last time I used this was a previous post I made about something the Federalist website posted, and I said then I wanted more opportunities to use. Well, one of Ben Domenech’s dumb fucks gave me one…

They came after Dolly Parton, and people were NOT HAVING IT. And rightly so, too; I’m sure that she’s done things she shouldn’t have done in her time (and her duet with Kid Rock is almost certainly one of them), but I think the general amount of good she’s done overcomes any negative considerations. She is a champion American success story, and she’s used that success for the good of others. And The Federalist decided that made her a fair target. How dare she actually take that bit in the gospel about loving one another seriously! Now the author of the piece is sorry:

The headline, “There’s Nothing Loving About Dolly Parton’s False Gospel,” caught many people off guard. Consequently, supporters flooded social media with critical messages about the essay. In response to the backlash, the writer expressed regret for using such a beloved figure to make her point.
Federalist writer Ericka Andersen criticized Parton for her nonjudgmental approach to life. Specifically, Andersen took issue with Parton’s claim that she loves everyone, including members of the LGBTQ community. Furthermore, Parton has shown support for these communities in interviews.
Additionally, Andersen argued that if Parton is a Christian, as she proclaims, she should call out homosexuality as a sin. Andersen stated, “Parton’s version of love, which includes condoning immoral sexual behavior (‘be who you are,’ she’s said), is unaligned with God’s vision for humanity.”
Moreover, Andersen told Yahoo Entertainment on Saturday that the widespread backlash made her realize she shouldn’t have used Parton to press her argument.

Yeah, you should’ve used someone no one gives a fuck about, CLEARLY. But that would’ve defeated the point of the article which, frankly, was to just be a bit of attention-seeking trolling, not a piece of actual journalism, not even a serious shot in the Culture Wars™; just some arseclown being shitty and desperate, and unfortunately it was successful in that. Who cares if the attention is bad as long as it generates clicks and ad revenue, I suppose. As for Dolly herself, she appears to have said absolutely nothing about the whole stupid thing, which is a far more dignified thing for her to do than it was for Ms Andersen (who I suspect would be unhappy at me calling her “Ms”) to have written it…

Obviously

‘Challenges our authority’: School board in Florida bans book about book bans

School officials in Florida have banned a book about book banning.
The Indian River County School Board voted to remove “Ban This Book” by Alan Gratz from its shelves in a meeting last month, overruling its own district book-review committee’s decision to keep it.
The children’s novel follows a fictional fourth grader who creates a secret banned books locker library after her school board pulled a multitude of titles off the shelves.
Indian River County School Board members said they disliked how it referenced other books that had been removed from schools and accused it of “teaching rebellion of school board authority,” as described in the formal motion to oust it. […]
Gratz, its author, called the Indian River County decision “incredibly ironic.”
“They banned the book because it talks about the books that they have banned and because it talks about book banning,” he said in an interview with the USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida. “It feels like they know exactly what they’re doing and they’re somewhat ashamed of what they’re doing and they don’t want a book on the shelves that calls them out.”

This is one of the most paranoid things I’ve ever read and I don’t know what else to say about it. Fucking Florida.

Still got that bellyache?

Happy 90th anniversary to the REAL star of the Disney universe; the mouse might be its corporate face but the duck was its monster from the id, able to freak out and lose his shit in a way Mickey couldn’t. I don’t like the Disney cartoons nearly as much as the Warners ones (though, granted, the latter didn’t really step up their game until the later 1930s), but Donald is the fowl-tempered (sorry) highlight of almost every one he was in during the 30s and early 40s.

The return of the ICG podcast!?

It’s 15 years today since The Cerebro-Vascular Accident. To mark the occasion of me somehow not dying on June 9 2009, I have for some reason decided to reanimate my music podcast… I actually first attempted such a thing about ten years ago, and started the Inanimate Carbon God one in 2016 as a semi-regular thing, produced 83 episodes of the thing until 2021 which is fairly impressive for me… then rebranded it and tried presenting it more like the radio show I used to do with voice links and a theme I’d bodgied together, and tried to make it regular too… but I soon found writing and recording a back-announcing script was a layer of production I could no longer be arsed with, so that was that. ICG redux, therefore, is going back to its roots of 15 songs per episode (or however many comes closest to an hour) with none of that fancy vocal stuff from me. And probably only semi-regular again. Here’s the playlist for the first one, which you can hear via the widget thing above.

    1. Chrome, Danger Zone
    2. The Adverts, On the Roof
    3. Flowers, Sister
    4. Xmal Deutschland, Augen-Blick
    5. Iggy Pop, China Girl
    6. Public Image Limited, Memories (single version)
    7. Joy Division, Heart and Soul
    8. Gang of Four, Capital (It Fails Us Now)
    9. O.A., Great White Hope
    10. Echo & The Bunnymen, No Dark Things
    11. The Lines, Background
    12. The Saints, New Centre of the Universe
    13. Joe Jackson, Got the Time
    14. The Damned, I Believe the Impossible
    15. MX-80 Sound, Someday You’ll Be King

Gayest. Episode. Ever.

This feels a hundred percent accurate:

HOLY SHIT but that’s the queerest thing to happen to Doctor Who since Tom Baker released the Megara in “Stones of Blood”, and OH but certain elements of Twitter and Youtube are going to have a stroke over it. “Rogue” feels like it was specially timed for Pride Month, let’s just say, and, well, it certainly delivers on that front. Someone else on Bluesky noted that one of this episode’s writers previously helmed a series which Russell T. was quite critical of about its queer representation, so they were evidently determined that wouldn’t happen a second time.

Also, if you’re a fan of Who canon being completely fucked…

I mean, Rusty wasn’t kidding when he said he was retaining the whole Timeless Child thing, there’s Jo Martin as part of the Doctor’s parade of previous faces (and both Tennants)… but there’s also Richard E. Grant. The animated Doctor from “Scream of the Shalka” is apparently now a legitimate canon Doctor. That’s a trick he kept up his sleeve… I wish he’d gone all the way and included Peter Cushing (Amicus films Doctor) plus Trevor Martin and David Banks (stage Doctors), but that’s OK, this will tie enough people in knots as it is. Is it too late to write a fourth explanation for the destruction of Atlantis…?

We will remember what?

So yesterday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon offered this outstanding tribute…

…with a shitty AI image of soldiers walking into the sea away from the land. Even one of Tommy’s racist mates was so struck by the wrongness of the thing that he had to tell him about it. Tommy’s reply?

A quick squiz at the picture immediately reveals, of course, that it is demonstrably piss all of the sort. The thing is, Yaxley didn’t even need to resort to shitty AI images (it appears he’s deleted the original post, though it’s a bit late for that now), there’s plenty of actual photographic images of that day:

Click to enlarge that. Seriously, it’s amazing. And so is Stevo Yax, of course, in his very particular way. Honestly, when white supremacists insist on presenting chuds like him as their finest examples of humanity, it’s no wonder actually sensible people can’t take them seriously…

Of course he did

Jack Dorsey gave $10 million to an anonymous founder with a deep devotion to a fascist ‘guru’

Dorsey gave $10 million to a foundation supporting Nostr and 14 bitcoins, worth roughly $245,000, directly to Nostr’s founder, who until now was known pseudonymously as Fiatjaf.
Nostr “has no board, no company behind it, no funding,” Dorsey said in an interview with the Silicon Valley outlet Pirate Wires last month. “It’s a truly open protocol. The development environment is moving fast. And I gave a bunch of money to them.” Nostr has a relatively small user base of cryptocurrency and privacy enthusiasts, including Edward Snowden.
“We don’t know who the leader is, it’s like this anonymous Brazilian,” Dorsey said.
That anonymous Brazilian is Giovanni Torres Parra, a developer who has also built at least two webpages devoted to disseminating the work of the far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho. Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil’s military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was “incompatible” with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.

So not that long ago I posted something about Beardo quitting Bluesky because he was more interested in Nostr, and I noted my puzzlement at him funding this thing without even knowing who “Fiatjaf” was. I mean, that’s quite a lot of money to give to someone you don’t even know the identity of… evidently that identity is now known somehow (bet he’s thrilled about that), and for some reason I find myself suspecting that Dorsey was perfectly aware of who he was all along. The end of the article further says:

On a podcast last year, Parra, as Fiatjaf, mused about the likelihood that “Nazis or racists or whatever” could see Nostr as a home for hate speech because the nature of the protocol means it has no centralized content moderation.
“I want to tell these people to go somewhere else, but I think we need these people, too,” he said.

Giovanni, meu irmão em Cristo, NO ONE needs Nazis. No good comes from Nazis. And no good is going to come of Nostr if you think Nazis might be useful to it in any way.