Open Thread and Link Farm, My What Big Protests You Have Grandma Edition

People gather for the Women's March in Washington U.S., January 21, 2017. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

People gather for the Women’s March in Washington U.S., January 21, 2017. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

  1. Women’s marches: More than one million protesters vow to resist President Trump – The Washington Post
  2. Do Political Protests Matter? Evidence From The Tea Party Movement.
    “Policy making was also affected, as incumbents responded to large protests in their district by voting more conservatively in Congress. Our estimates suggest significant multiplier effects: an additional protester increased the number of Republican votes by a factor well above 1. Together our results show that protests can build political movements that ultimately affect policy making and that they do so by influencing political views rather than solely through the revelation of existing political preferences.” PDF link.
  3. Pictures From Women’s Marches Around the World – The New York Times
  4. The photo at the top of this article is, I think, the best illustration of how the media covers protests I’ve ever seen.
  5. Protesters Face Increasing Criminalization in Trump Era | Informed Comment
  6. Donald Trump Mad That Women March Bigger Than Inauguration | The Mary Sue
  7. The Women’s March is massive. Here’s how organizers can give it staying power. – Vox
    A lengthy interview with Becky Bond and Zack Exley.
  8. Women’s March Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles (pdf file)

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And in other news…

  1. A Mixtape For Survival and Resistance in the Trump Years | Literate Perversions
  2. Voter Suppression Works Too Well
    Overview of recent GOP voter suppression efforts.
  3. Stop boring on about babies – the gender pay gap isn’t about “choice”
  4. Whaa? Neo-Nazis shocked to discover that a popular Neo-Nazi podcaster has a Jewish wife :: We Hunted The Mammoth
    For your schadenfreude needs.
  5. North Carolina Republicans sue to preserve racial gerrymandering
  6. This is literally what happiness looks like.
  7. Open Letter: An Open Letter to the Stranger on Facebook Who Convinced Me Not to Be Transgender Anymore – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
  8. Stop boring on about babies – the gender pay gap isn’t about “choice”
  9. A key Obamacare advocate tells us how he’ll fight repeal in 2017 – Vox
  10. Did Inadequate Women’s Healthcare Destroy Star Wars’ Old Republic? | Motherboard
  11. Automated book-culling software drives librarians to create fake patrons to “check out” endangered titles / Boing Boing
  12. The Story Behind the Maternal Mortality Rate in Texas Is Even Sadder Than We Realize | The Nation
  13. Today in Obamacare: the one question Republican senators really don’t want to answer – Vox
  14. What You’re Really Doing By Dismissing US Feminism for ‘Real’ Issues – Everyday Feminism
    Cartoon by Alli Kirkham.
  15. Congress is feuding over a teen’s controversial painting that dramatizes events in Ferguson – Vox
    I love this story. Yes, there are serious issues to discuss here, but at another level it cracks me up.
  16. The Fantasy of Being Thin | Shapely Prose
  17. Democrats Should Run a Celebrity for President, Too | New Republic
  18. Rogue One: the CGI resurrection of Peter Cushing is thrilling – but is it right? | Film | The Guardian
  19. The movie that doesn’t exist and the Redditors who think it does
    Hundreds of people have detailed memories of the movie “Shazaam,” starring Sinbad – a movie which never existed.
  20. More Than 500,000 Adults Will Lose SNAP Benefits in 2016 as Waivers Expire | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
    Even someone diligently looking for work, and willing to accept any job, will have their food stamps cut off. Of course, Congress could easily fix that… but we all know Republicans in Congress won’t allow that.
  21. This 90-Year-Old Lady Seduced and Killed Nazis as a Teenager – VICE
  22. The Ritual (translation of poem by Dmitry Bykov) – Medium
    Sometimes I am reminded of how much people in other countries here about US celebrities and politics, and I feel deeply embarrassed for us.
  23. The Real Story Of 2016 | FiveThirtyEight
    538’s post-election analysis begins.

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115 Responses to Open Thread and Link Farm, My What Big Protests You Have Grandma Edition

  1. 101
    nobody.really says:

    ”U.P. Republican suggests ‘another Kent State’ as solution to protesters” | MLive.com

    Ridiculously, he later claimed that the comments were just “badly worded,” as if the problem with saying “Time for another Kent State perhaps. One bullet stops a lot of thuggery” is the word choice rather than the underlying meaning.

    But Sarah Silverman said something stupid, so I guess that means liberals are worse.

    I recall the uproar that arose on another blog when Whoopi Goldberg compared George W. Bush to her genitals (her “bush”) during a nightclub act. Oh, what an unforgivable breech of decorum. Why must liberals degrade public discourse? Why is there no respect for civility?

    Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney was telling US Senators on the floor of the Senate to go fuck themselves. Nary a word of protest from the civility policy on the blog.

    Most expressions of principle are just expressions of preference dressed in fancy close.

  2. 102
    Ruchama says:

    Brands seem to be going all in on the whole “diversity” thing during this Super Bowl. Less than half an hour in, and I’ve already seen three commercials that made a point of showing “We’re all different races and religions and speak lots of different languages and immigrated from different countries, but we all love this product!” (Coke, Google Home, and Michelin, so far. The Coke one is from a few years ago, with people singing “America the Beautiful” in different languages. I remember my mother started crying at how beautiful it was the first time it aired.)

  3. 103
    desipis says:

    Hey, Desipis, this isn’t a celebrity; but it an Republican party official (local, not national) calling for protestors to be shot

    Yes, that is quite appalling.

    After a Yiannopoulos supporter shot into a crowd, arguably anyone showing up at a Yiannopoulos protest is potentially putting their life on the line.

    Just so where keeping score on the violence thing though, progressives should feel unsafe at right-wing rallies (Trump, Yiannopoulos, etc), while conservatives should feel unsafe anywhere they choose to voice their opinion?

  4. 104
    Ampersand says:

    Desipis, a right-winger, Alexandre Bissonnette, took an ak-47 and shot up a Mosque literally one week ago. Six people were murdered, nineteen more injured. The shooter was both an anti-feminist and a Trump fan.

    It’s been only a year and a half since another right-winger, Dylann Roof, murdered nine people at a Black church.

    The same year another right-winger, John Houser, shot up a movie theater during a showing of Trainwreck, killing two people and injuring nine others.

    Also that year, pro-lifer Robert Dear shot up a Planned Parenthood, killing three and injuring nine more.

    In the previous year, 2014, Elliot Rodger, a misogynist racist whose thinking was strongly influenced by the manosphere, killed six people and injured fourteen more. (To be fair, he wasn’t targeting left-wingers or even women in particular, just anyone who he thought was getting laid).

    About a year before that, neo-Nazi Frazier Miller murdered three people at a Jewish community center.

    About a year before that, white supremacist Wade Page murdered six people at a Sikh gurdwara in Wisconsin.

    All of these were politically motivated killings, all coming from the right.

    (None of this is counting murders by radical Islamic terrorists, even though those folks are also extremely right-wing. But it’s a different right-wing.)

    I’m sure there are also politically motivated killings from the left in the US and Canada, although I’m having trouble recalling many that aren’t decades old. And I’m sure you could quibble with this or that example. But the overall trend is clear.

    So I think your method of “keeping score” is absolute, appalling, ridiculous bullshit.

    * * *

    This morning, I was at a left-wing rally of sorts. (So were Charles and Ben.) A local Latino church (very local: they’re across the street from my house) had a problem last week with some racists harassing and mocking the parishioners as they went in to worship. So this morning, at the Church’s request, hundreds of Portlanders were there to support the parishioners as they went in and out, and to form a human barrier of sorts if the racists returned (which they didn’t).

    Did I feel unsafe? No. There are millions of church services at non-white churches that aren’t attacked by racist gunmen, for every one that is. Similarly, millions of people wearing MAGA hats have walked down the street unassaulted for every one who was assaulted.

    It’s a legitimate concern. I certainly wouldn’t criticize any of the folks at the local church if they felt unsafe this morning, since they had been specifically targeted. But we’re not at a point where people in general “should feel unsafe.”

  5. 105
    desipis says:

    All of these were politically motivated killings, all coming from the right.

    Yet none of these were attacks were based on the political speech of the victims, which is what I was talking about.

  6. 106
    Ben Lehman says:

    Shooting up a church is explicitly about silencing someone else’s speech.

    So is shooting up a movie premier.

    So is — and it’s almost like there’s a pattern here — shooting someone at a protest.

  7. 107
    Jake Squid says:

    Yet none of these were attacks were based on the political speech of the victims, which is what I was talking about.

    Wow.

  8. 108
    closetpuritan says:

    Some links people here may be interested in:

    On getting people fired, a perennial topic of conversation here

    Another example of the Mandela Effect: Why So Many People Think Eli Whitney, Cotton Gin Inventor, Was Black
    (For me, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I heard of people thinking Whitney was black. Certainly sentences like this make it understandable: “How Black Americans Helped Shape the Sunshine State… 1793: Eli Whitney’s cotton gin leads to increased importation of slaves to work on cotton plantations.”)

    Imam Hassan Guillet’s eulogy

    We have 17 orphans. We have six widows. We have five wounded. We ask Allah for them to get them out of the hospital as soon as possible. Did I go through the complete list of victims? No. There is one victim. None of us want talk about him. But given my age, I have the courage to say it. This victim, his name is Alexandre Bissonnette. Alexandre, before being a killer he was a victim himself. Before planting his bullets in the heads of his victims, somebody planted ideas more dangerous than the bullets in his head.

    Also, Harlequin, I really like Schraub’s response to the violence at the Berkeley protests as well.

  9. 109
    nobody.really says:

    “Why isn’t the president talking about the white terrorists who mowed down six Muslims praying at their mosque?”

    “I don’t know, but I would just tell you that there’s a difference.”

  10. 110
    nobody.really says:

    As UNC Professor Charles Kurzman and Duke Professor David Schanzer explained last June in the New York Times [in 2012], Islam-inspired terror attacks “accounted for 50 fatalities [since the 9/11 attacks].” Meanwhile, “right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities.”

    You are more than 7 times as likely to be killed by a right wing extremist than by Muslim terrorists.

  11. 111
    RonF says:

    Amp @ 88:

    I also thought it was bad when a Milo fan shot a protester at the University of Seattle. (The man claimed he shot the unarmed protestor in self-defense.)

    It is bad. But apparently the local prosecutors think his claim of self-defense is credible enough he’s been released and no charges have been brought. Foolishly thinking that he has a right to wear a hat expressing his political views to a location where people are expressing their political views, he apparently wore a “Make America Great Again” hat in front of a bunch of people that the police had to confiscate weapons and shields from and who had been hurling rocks, bricks and fireworks at a building. It seems reasonable to me that he well may have been assaulted and had to defend himself.

  12. 112
    Charles S says:

    Meanwhile, one of the three right wing terrorists who shot five people at a Black Lives Matter protest was convicted.

    And the right wing instigator who pointed a gun at Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland last summer goes on trial shortly.

  13. 113
    Charles says:

    A question for Alas readers who rely on sources other than far left sites like the New York Times and CNN for their news:

    Have any of your preferred news sources pointed out that there is no such thing as the Bowling Green Massacre?

    I ask because apparently half of the 45% of Americans who support Trumps Muslim Ban EO agree that the Bowling Green Massacre is one of the reasons the EO is necessary.

  14. 114
    Ruchama says:

    While that is scary, I do also wonder how many people are just giving stupid answers to screw with the polls. (I remember a poll of high school students, asking about whether they used drugs — it listed a whole bunch of different drugs and asked if they’d ever used them, including a few fake names, and a pretty big number claimed to have used drugs that don’t exist.)

    I’ve got a friend who lives in Bowling Green, and the weekend after that quote, a bunch of groups there planned a rally for “diversity and inclusion” or something like that, and made a point of noting the lack of massacre.

  15. 115
    Charles S says:

    That’s fair. I guess if 15% are willing to declare that they see 5 lights because Trump says there are 5 lights (the “Which picture shows more people?” question), that 25% would be willing to agree with a mere nonsense statement, particularly when they can tell themselves, “Of course, the ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ really just means that 6 years ago the refugee vetting system allowed two former Iraqi insurgents to get resettled in Bowling Green, and that really does justify baring the victims of ISIS and the Yemeni civil war from entering the US! So, sure you far left PPP pollster, I totally believe the ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ justifies a Muslim Ban!”