Here is some stuff in the news today...
[Content Note: Terrorism; death] Fucking hell: "Two [redacted] car bombs claimed by ISIS killed at least 32 people and wounded 75 others in the center of the southern Iraqi city of Samawa on Sunday, police and medics said. The first blast was near a local government building and the second one about 65 yards away at a bus station, police sources said. The death toll was expected to keep rising. ...Meanwhile, two police officers were killed and 23 people wounded in a suicide car bomb attack on police headquarters in the south-eastern Turkish city of Gaziantep, the governor and police sources said, in one of two attacks on security forces on Sunday. There was no immediate claim of responsibility but security sources said police raided the home of a suspected ISIS militant believed to have carried out the attack and detained his father for DNA tests and questioning." I am just so deeply sad and angry about the death and injury and terror and destruction wreaked by IS. And horrified by how little coverage this weekend's terrorist attacks in Iraq and Turkey have gotten in Western media.
[CN: Financial insecurity] "Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla announced that Puerto Rico's government will not make nearly $370m in bond payments due Monday after a failure to restructure or find a political solution to the US territory's spiralling public debt crisis. Garcia said Sunday that he had issued an executive order suspending payments on debt owed by the island's Government Development Bank, a default that will likely prompt lawsuits from creditors and could be a prelude to a deadline to a much larger payment due 1 July. The governor said Puerto Rico can't pay the bonds without cutting essential services." If you haven't already seen [CN: video autoplays] John Oliver's terrific segment on Puerto Rico, I highly recommend it.
[CN: Anti-choice terrorism] Jessica Mason Pieklo has another great piece on Robert Dear: "After a full day of testimony, which included an investigator's account that Dear had stopped at a crisis pregnancy center (CPC) before moving on to the Planned Parenthood, it was clear that neither the prosecution nor the defense wanted to talk about the central issue of Robert Lewis Dear Jr.'s case: anti-choice rhetoric and violence."
[CN: Breast cancer] This sounds encouraging: "Scientists say they now have a near-perfect picture of the genetic events that cause breast cancer. The study, published in Nature, has been described as a 'milestone' moment that could help unlock new ways of treating and preventing the disease. The largest study of its kind unpicked practically all the errors that cause healthy breast tissue to go rogue. Cancer Research UK said the findings were an important stepping-stone to new drugs for treating cancer. To understand the causes of the disease, scientists have to understand what goes wrong in our DNA that makes healthy tissue turn cancerous. The international team looked at all 3 billion letters of people's genetic code—their entire blueprint of life—in 560 breast cancers. They uncovered 93 sets of instructions, or genes, that if mutated, can cause tumours. Some have been discovered before, but scientists expect this to be the definitive list, barring a few rare mutations."
At Think Progress, Ian Millhiser details "Four Major Decisions to Expect from the Supreme Court Soon," on Affirmative Action (Fisher v. University of Texas), Birth Control (Zubik v. Burwell), Abortion (Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt), and Immigration (United States v. Texas).
[CN: Child abuse] Ted Cruz continues to be comprehensively awful: "A youthful protester who interrupted his rally late Sunday evening should get a spanking, Ted Cruz suggested to his audience in La Porte, Indiana. Such a punishment, he added, would have gone a long way in changing the behavior of Donald Trump. 'All right, apparently there's a young man who's having some problems,' Cruz said, as the young heckler shouted, 'You suck!' Cruz responded, 'Thank you, son.' 'Children should actually speak with respect,' he continued. 'Imagine what a different world it would be if someone told Donald Trump that years ago.'" This gross comment comes right on the heels of new research that finds " spanking is associated with troubling outcomes—like increased aggression, increased anti-social behavior, and mental health problems later in life."
[CN: Fat hatred; weight loss talk; disordered eating] I don't even know where to fucking begin with this article in the New York Times about "Biggest Loser" contestants gaining back weight. On the one hand, it's great that here is more evidence of what fat people have been saying about our own lived experiences. On the other hand, the abysmal language peppered throughout the piece! Like "what obesity research has consistently shown is that dieters are at the mercy of their own bodies" and "that shouldn't be interpreted to mean we are doomed to battle our biology or remain fat." As but two examples. I don't feel like I'm "at the mercy" of my body (as if I am somehow a separate thing from my body!) and I certainly don't feel "doomed to remain fat." For fuck's sake.
In better news, this is very neat: "The comet known as C/2014 S3 (PANSTARRS) has a lot going for it. For starters, it's the first comet ever detected without a tail—a trail of dust and ice that sublimates into space as the sun heats the frozen artifacts. It's also thought to have formed in the same time and place as Earth, meaning that the strange comet may contain the same building blocks that formed our planet, kept chilled and pristine and waiting for scientists to study them."
Cool! "Newfound Jellyfish Looks Like an Alien Spacecraft." I love jellyfish. As is probably obvious given that I have one tattooed on my body, lol!
And finally! "Why Rescued Is My Favorite Dog Breed." Love. ♥
In the News
The "Lone Madman"
[Content Note: Anti-choice terrorism; disablism; misogynist apologism.]
When news first broke about Robert Dear killing three people at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs last year, there was an effort, as is there always, to cast him first as a "gentle" man and then, when that failed, to cast him as a "lone madman."
In the days following his arrest, I wrote:
The coverage of the man, since the earliest moments when his name was released, has been troubling. Despite the fact that he made it clear what his motive was, by muttering about "baby parts," the media has played the most appalling game of Occam's Big Paisley Tie ever, treating his motive like a fucking mystery.The next day, we learned Dear had a history of anti-choice interference, including having "put glue in the locks of a Planned Parenthood location in Charleston."
Early reports on who Robert Dear is looked more like dating profiles than they did profiles of a domestic terrorist. The New York Times reported that acquaintances described him as "a gentle itinerant loner who occasionally unleashed violent acts toward neighbors and women he knew."
...Soon we learned that Dear had been reported for at least one incident of domestic violence, and that he was known to abuse animals. Less and less "gentle," it seemed.
Dear was also married three times, and his second wife has described him as someone who "erupts into fury in a matter of seconds," saying she "lived in fear and dread of his emotional and physical abuse."
Further, it has now emerged that Dear was "charged with rape in South Carolina more than 20 years ago." After harassing and stalking a married woman who was not interested in his advances, he went to her house and then beat and sexually assaulted her at knifepoint.
Not so much a "gentle loner," then.
He was not gentle, and he was not a loner. And he was explicitly motivated by anti-choice ideology.
Now, as a hearing to determine whether he is competent to stand trial approaches, the AP reports that Dear "told police he admired Paul Hill, a former minister who was executed in 2003 for the 1994 shootings of abortion provider Dr. John Bayard Britton and his bodyguard, a retired U.S. Air Force officer named James Herman Barrett, outside the Ladies Center in Pensacola, Florida."
Dear often talked about Hill, including once when he drove past a North Carolina abortion clinic and again when he learned that Colorado Springs had a clinic, his girlfriend told police. Dear's comments after the gunbattle even seemed to echo Hill, who spoke of being rewarded in heaven for his actions.Robert Dear was a not a loner, in any sense of the word. He saw himself as part a movement. He saw that he could be a hero of that movement.
During an interview in which he repeatedly recited Bible passages, Dear told police he dreamed he would be "met by all the aborted fetuses at the gates of heaven and they would thank him for what he did because his actions saved lives of other unborn fetuses," the documents say. "He was happy with what he had done because his actions ... ensured that no more abortions would be conducted at the Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs," which has since reopened.
Before the shooting, Dear frequently posted messages online about his anti-abortion views, he told police. In 2009, he emailed his son a link to a website that has the stated purpose of "honoring heroes who stood up for the unborn," with links to information about Hill and others who had targeted abortion clinics.
This heinous act of anti-choice terrorism didn't emerge from a vacuum. Dear is the precise opposite of a "lone madman." He is a calculating killer who was inspired by, and hoped to inspire, people who share his ideology.
This flagrant, shameless, decades-long campaign of intimidation, harassment, and threats and acts of violence against healthcare providers who offer abortion services to pregnant people (or are even presumed to offer abortion services), and the spaces in which they offer them, in defense of an inherently violent ideology, is a comprehensive terrorist movement which, from just 1977 to 2011, included multiple assassinations, multiple attempted assassinations, and over 200 arsons and bombings.
Robert Dear could only be said to be "acting alone" if one ignores this vast terrorist network and its unifying ideology, which is so central to public life in the US that it's a centerpiece of the platform of one of the nation's two major political parties.
This didn't happen in a void, and it will happen again and again, until we stop pretending that acts of anti-choice terrorism are disconnected acts committed by lone madmen.
Blog Note + Links
Welp, due to colossal corporate incompetence and an aggressive disregard for even the most rudimentary customer service, I will be offline again today. I'm so sorry for the interruption. Let me assure you that I would rather, by a factor of eleventy trazillion, be writing content for y'all today than dealing with the bullshit that's keeping me away.
In the meantime, here are some links of interest for discussion:
[Content Note: Anti-choice terrorism] Robert Dear, who perpetrated the act of anti-choice terrorism on the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility on Nov. 27, appeared in court yesterday and dramatically announced that he is guilty: "'I am guilty there will be no trial. I am a warrior for the babies,' he said in an outburst in El Paso County Court overheard by CBS4 reporter Rick Sallinger. Soon afterwards he stated 'You'll never know the amount of blood I saw in that place.'" Without a trace of fucking irony. Also: Bullshit. He's a liar as well as a murderer.
[CN: Terrorism; death; video may autoplay at link] "The man at the center of last week's massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., began discussing jihad and martyrdom with his [then] soon-to-be wife even before she came to America last year. He also may have plotted an attack as far back as 2012 with a neighbor who had purchased the two assault rifles used in the shooting, according to senior American officials. The neighbor, Enrique Marquez, has spoken at length with federal authorities in recent days about his relationship with the gunman, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and their planning. Mr. Marquez has checked himself into a mental health facility and federal authorities are still trying to assess his credibility and corroborate his account. It is not clear why the 2012 plot did not go forward."
[CN: Guns; video may autoplay at link] This sounds like a terrific idea: "Gun rights groups say they will conduct a mock mass shooting this weekend at the University of Texas campus as they try to end gun-free zones. The Open Carry Walk and Crisis Performance Event will involve actors 'shot' by perpetrators armed with cardboard weapons, said Matthew Short, a spokesman for the gun rights groups Come and Take It Texas and DontComply.com. 'It's a fake mass shooting, and we'll use fake blood,' he said. He said gun noises will be blared from bullhorns. Other people will then play the role of rescuers, also armed with cardboard weapons."
[CN: Racism] Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia continues to be flagrantly racist: "Near the end of oral argument in a high-profile affirmative-action case Wednesday, conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that black students benefit from a 'slower track' at less prestigious schools and are thus harmed by affirmative action." This fucking guy.
"Scientific Evidence Doesn't Support Global Warming, Sen. Ted Cruz Says." Sounds about right.
And finally! "The Fluffiest Cats in the World." A+
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today...
[Content Note: Pollution] Fucking hell: "On Tuesday morning, as China's smog-choked capital declared its first ever air pollution red alert, the school, normally buzzing with over-energetic 10-year-olds, was almost silent. A pungent mist hung over the outdoor basketball courts and running track. ...Across Beijing, thousands of other schools and nurseries were in a similar state of almost total shutdown after the city's authorities announced a three-day state of emergency because of the pollution. Building sites and factories were forced to close; millions of cars were ordered off the roads; and teams of environmental inspectors fanned out across the surrounding region to ensure that coal-fired power stations and steel mills were not secretly churning out even more filth into the already putrid atmosphere. ...At 7am, when the red alert—the first in Chinese history—officially came into force, a thick gloom hung over Beijing. Pollution levels were already nearly 15 times higher than the World Health Organisation deems safe." The linked story notes that there are loads of people who have to live and work in Beijing because they can't find livable wages in their hometowns. Having grown up in a steel town in a highly polluted area of the US, I feel so desperately for the people who give their health to support themselves, their families, and their national economy.
[CN: Islamophobia] For fuck's sake: "A severed pig's head tossed outside a Philadelphia mosque has upset residents of multiple faiths and prompted federal and city investigations. Pigs are considered unclean in Islamic culture and pork is not eaten by most practicing Muslims. Mayor-elect Jim Kenney quickly condemned the 'bigotry that desecrated' the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society building Sunday night. 'The City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection has a long history of coming together in the face of challenge,' Kenney said. 'We cannot allow hate to divide us now, in the face of unprecedented difficulties. I ask all Philadelphians to join me in rejecting this despicable act and supporting our Muslim neighbors.' ...Marwan Kreidie, head of the Arab American Development Corp., told [Philly.com] that the FBI was investigating the pig's head incident. Kreidie said anti-Muslim sentiment is 'worse now' than after the Sept. 11 terror attacks."
Today, the Supreme Court will take up the issue of voting rights, specifically what "one person, one vote" means in the context of drawing voting districts, in Evenwel v. Abbott. At SCOTUSblog, Lyle Denniston has a primer and analysis of the arguments.
[CN: Misogynist violence; racism] Newly elected Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau "has promised an inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women in an appeal to First Nations chiefs. The public inquiry will be 'top priority' of the Liberal government, the newly elected leader said. He called for a 'total renewal' of the relationship between Canada and First Nations peoples. Mr Trudeau promised increased funding for programming and a review of laws on indigenous peoples. Calls for an inquiry have grown since a review found 1,181 indigenous women had been murdered or gone missing since 1980. 'We have made this inquiry a priority for our government because those touched by this national tragedy have waited long enough,' he said at an assembly of First Nations chiefs in Gatineau, Quebec. 'The victims deserve justice; their families an opportunity to heal and to be heard.'"
[CN: Anti-choice terrorism] Robert Dear, the man who killed three people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility on November 27, "asked at least one person in a nearby shopping center for directions to the facility before opening fire, law enforcement sources confirm to CBS News, offering the clearest suggestion yet that he was targeting the reproductive health organization." The clearest evidence aside from saying "no more baby parts" to police upon his arrest and having targeted a Planned Parenthood facility before, for crying out loud.
Meanwhile: "Planned Parenthood opened a new health facility last week in the Los Angeles area, just days after a shooting rampage at a Colorado clinic killed three people. 'Our doors are open today, in Colorado and across the country, and nothing will deter us from providing high-quality health care to our patients,' Celinda Vazquez, Planned Parenthood Los Angeles vice president of public affairs, said in a statement. The West Hollywood facility will offer a range of services, including gynecological and breast examinations, STD testing, cancer screenings, birth control, and abortion care. The clinic will begin dispensing two powerful anti-HIV drugs aimed at lowering the rate of infections." The bravest people.
[CN: Sexual violence; rape jokes] James Deen says he is "shocked" by rape allegations made by a number of former partners and/or colleagues. He also says none of them are true. And then he adds that the woman are probably motivated by vengeance and greed. And also defends making rape jokes. Riiiiiiight.
[CN: Christian Supremacy] Ted Cruz continues to be a lying liar: "During a town hall event in South Carolina on Monday, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz made the bold claim that he will defend religious liberty because 'what kind of country are we living in where…we're threatening teenage girls with going to jail if they say the name of Jesus?' Cruz made the remark after telling the story of Angela Hildenbrand, a high school valedictorian who he claims was 'threatened with jail if she exercised her right to pray during her graduation speech.' At the South Carolina event and at other campaign events in the past, Cruz has discussed her story as an example of the government's war on Christianity. ...But Hildenbrand was not actually threatened with jail for praying. In fact, every part of Cruz's statement in South Carolina is incorrect, Greg Lipper, an attorney for Americans United for Separation of Church & State, who worked on the case, told ThinkProgress."
[CN: Islamophobia] Donald Trump's gross anti-Muslim plan is too extreme even for dark lord Dick Cheney: "I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in. I mean, religious freedom has been a very important part of our history and where we came from." And then he said a bunch of shit about how the refugee crisis has been created by a "US vacuum" in the Middle East that made me want to punch walls.
One woman in politics said something complimentary about another woman in politics, but that first woman didn't show up at another event for the second woman, and OMG WHAT CAN IT ALL MEAN? Let me consult my LADYRULEZ DECODER RING!
All right then! "A new study suggests dinosaurs might have evolved more rapidly than we'd thought, emerging less than 5 million years after so-called 'pre-dinosaurs' hit the scene. That shaves about 10 million years off the previous evolutionary timeline." Something something evolution is just a theory fart.
And finally! Deer + fake reindeer = win. It's basic math.
Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood Shooting: Wednesday Update
[Content Note: Anti-choice terrorism; abuse; sexual assault. Linked material may not be safe.]
For background, please see previous posts from Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.
Yesterday, the New York Times published a long and widely shared article about Robert Dear's background: "For Robert Dear, Religion and Rage Before Planned Parenthood Attack." There is no acknowledgment of their previous reporting in which they drew a picture of a "gentle loner" who only "occasionally unleashed violent acts toward neighbors and women he knew."
Now, they report: "But in court documents and interviews with people who knew Mr. Dear well, a picture emerges of an angry and occasionally violent man who seemed deeply disturbed and deeply contradictory: He was a man of religious conviction who sinned openly, a man who craved both extreme solitude and near-constant female company, a man who successfully wooed women but, some of them say, also abused them."
That Dear both "craved extreme solitude" and "near-constant female company" (an interesting, ahem, way to describe a man who was arrested for rape and voyeurism) is not a contradiction. Men who abuse female partners often want to isolate themselves and the women they abuse from outsiders, who might object to their abuse and intervene to stop it.
That's a basic and well-documented dynamic of domestic violence, and it should not be reported as a "contradiction." Unless, of course, one's intent is simply to draw a portrait of a man whose behavior is incomprehensible, thus underwriting narratives that he is "crazy."
There could hardly be a better way to avoid addressing conformity with cultural misogyny and substitute in its place the suggestion of inexplicable instability than reporting a history of violence toward women, alongside details about anti-government paranoia and internet ranting about pot, without ever connecting the dots between domestic misogynist violence and anti-choice terrorism.
The common denominators of which are a seething hostility toward women's agency, autonomy, consent, and safety.
That's not evidence of mental illness or contradictions. That's evidence of consistent fealty to patriarchal narratives about male ownership of women's lives and bodies.
In the article, we further find out that this was not even Dear's first act against Planned Parenthood:
A number of people who knew Mr. Dear said he was a staunch abortion opponent. [Barbara Micheau], 60, said in a brief interview Tuesday that late in her marriage to Mr. Dear, he told her that he had put glue in the locks of a Planned Parenthood location in Charleston.So Dear has a history of anti-choice interference, was arrested for both rape and being a "peeping Tom" (a situation which likely would have escalated to rape had he not been caught), has multiple ex-wives who report vicious domestic violence, and somehow the word "misogyny" never appears in the entire article, and the headline announces "Religion and Rage Before Planned Parenthood Attack."
"He was very proud of himself that he'd gone over and jammed up their locks with glue so that they couldn't get in," she said.
Sure. Religion and rage. It's technically accurate. But it seems rather more important that he was a violent misogynist, whose religion was a convenient justification for his violent misogyny, and whose rage was directed at primarily at women.
This is not a matter of semantics. To fail to call violent misogyny by its name is to abet it.
Just two months ago, in a piece entitled "The Media Is Failing Women," I wrote:
Just a series of unconnected events, each of which happens in a vacuum! So we're meant to believe.Lots of people are rightly angry that the media refuses to call Dear's actions anti-choice terrorism. We should all be equally angry that the media refuses to connect that to the larger issue of violent misogyny.
That similar failure is no coincidence. It's all violence done against (primarily) women, targeting women who are exercising sexual and reproductive agency, who want control over our own bodies, who insist on deciding for ourselves who we fuck and whether we birth (their) babies.
Violent, entitled men who subscribe to narratives of a profoundly toxic masculinity are waging a terrorist campaign against women's autonomy, agency, and consent. They are killing us (and other men in the process) in order to terrorize us into yielding our independence.
And the media is complicit in their terrorism, because it flatly refuses to call these acts what they are. The media is failing women by refusing to connect the dots.
The only people for whom that concealment is a favor are violent misogynists.
As ever, please keep comments safe with appropriate content notes, and please refrain from posting images in the thread.
Quote of the Day
[Content Note: Anti-choice terrorism; victim-blaming.]
"These facts and overall mission of the abortion industry would easily send anyone over the hill who wasn't rational. ...Violence is never the answer, but we must start pointing out who is the real culprit. The true instigator of this violence and all violence at any Planned Parenthood facility is Planned Parenthood themselves. Violence begets violence. So Planned Parenthood: YOU STOP THE VIOLENCE INSIDE YOUR WALLS."—Adams County Colorado Republican state representative JoAnn Windholz, just fucking going there and full-tilt blaming Planned Parenthood staff and patients for the deadly act of anti-choice terrorism carried out by Robert Dear.
I don't even have words, besides these: FUCK OFF.
And these: "Let's Get This Straight." True then; true now.
Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood Shooting: Tuesday Update
[Content Note: Anti-choice terrorism; abuse; description of rape. Linked material may not be safe.]
Aphra is otherwise occupied this morning, so I'm taking over her beat, at her request. For background, please see her posts from Friday, from Saturday, from Sunday, and from Monday.
Yesterday, as Aphra noted in her last update, Robert Dear was arraigned and is being held on a first degree homicide charge, with additional charges expected next week.
The coverage of the man, since the earliest moments when his name was released, has been troubling. Despite the fact that he made it clear what his motive was, by muttering about "baby parts," the media has played the most appalling game of Occam's Big Paisley Tie ever, treating his motive like a fucking mystery.
Early reports on who Robert Dear is looked more like dating profiles than they did profiles of a domestic terrorist. The New York Times reported that acquaintances described him as "a gentle itinerant loner who occasionally unleashed violent acts toward neighbors and women he knew."
A white man who kills three people, including a police officer, and injures a dozen more, including three more police officers, gets taken into custody alive. Unlike, say, a 12-year-old black boy with a toy gun. And instead of being described as a "thug" or a "demon," he is described, incredibly, as a gentle loner who only occasionally hurt people.
Soon we learned that Dear had been reported for at least one incident of domestic violence, and that he was known to abuse animals. Less and less "gentle," it seemed.
Dear was also married three times, and his second wife has described him as someone who "erupts into fury in a matter of seconds," saying she "lived in fear and dread of his emotional and physical abuse."
Further, it has now emerged that Dear was "charged with rape in South Carolina more than 20 years ago." After harassing and stalking a married woman who was not interested in his advances, he went to her house and then beat and sexually assaulted her at knifepoint.
Not so much a "gentle loner," then.
Over and over, men who commit very public acts of misogynist violence are described, often by male neighbors who had little interaction with them, as "gentle" or "quiet" or some variation thereof. Responsible media would not race to report these descriptions. Instead, they would know by now that the real portrait of a man who commits misogynist violence can only be drawn by the women with whom they had intimate relationships—and/or the women they have previously assaulted.
Of course, that requires the media to acknowledge that acts of misogynist violence are, in fact, acts of misogynist violence in the first place.
* * *
In other news, Paul Markovsky, the widower of Jennifer Markovsky, who was one of Dear's victims, has asked for privacy "as we try to begin the grief and healing process." Something to consider if you see further media reports on Markovsky being shared.
As ever, please keep comments safe with appropriate content notes, and please refrain from posting images in the thread.
