Shit that Pissed me Off – 5/18/18

White People Are Calling the Police on Black People All Over the Place

Since I missed last week’s column (I was on a trip for my anniversary and we had a lovely time thank you), I didn’t get to write about the white woman who called the cops on a black student who fell asleep at college or the white woman who called the cops on a black family barbecuing. I was also going to write about the two Native American students who were on a campus tour but detained when a white woman called campus security on them.

I was going to write about all three happening in the same week. But then I didn’t write a post last week.

Then this week a Hobby Lobby manager called the police when a black man with proper receipt tried to return something to their store. Shockingly, the manager was a white woman! A white woman also called the police on a black man who was inspecting a property he was planning to buy.

In every one of these cases, the people had done nothing wrong. I mean aside from not being white. In most cases, the individuals reported were at least inconvenienced by the situation. But in all cases, the police acknowledged they had, basically, done nothing wrong.

I suppose all of these people of color should be relieved that they hadn’t raised the concern of a white male because he probably would have shot them and claimed self defense.

I know, not all white women call the cops on people of color. And not all white dudes shoot black people. It seems silly that I have to point out that I’m using hyperbole to make a point but I fear I will bruise fragile white egos if I don’t point out to the white people reading this column that I’m not talking about them specifically.

#NotAllWhitePeople

But then let me as a white dude say this – yes I am.

Because this is our problem. When you put a racist in the White House and you argue that we need to understand both sides of the argument, you are forgetting that sometimes one side is right and the other side is wrong. When a black man can’t return something to a store without the manager calling the cops, the problem isn’t the black man’s behavior.

One one side you have a guy just trying to get on with his day and on the other, you have a racist.

So maybe you aren’t specifically calling the cops on black people. Or shooting black people. Next time it happens, though, maybe you should stop trying to see the “other side” because if you are white, you can’t even begin to understand what it is like to know someone might call the cops on you for existing.

Trump Administration Strips Protections from Transgender Prisoners

Continuing his ongoing policy of “if Obama did it, it must be wrong,” Trump has announced a roll back of a policy specifically stating that Transgender prisoners should be assigned housing based on their identified gender. To my thinking, I can’t figure out how this policy was harmful to a single prisoner.

I suppose it might have been a bit of a hassle for the people running the prisons. I mean once someone breaks the law, we should stop treating them with any kind of respect as human beings.

If you believe prison systems should function only to punish and not to rehabilitate, that makes sense.

In which case, let’s stop pretending any prisoners should be afforded a sense of human dignity. Why just focus on making sure prison is worse for transgender inmates?

The policy as written was not a bad policy. It wasn’t even a difficult policy to implement. So the reason the Trump Administration repealed it has nothing to do with anything but reminding transgender prisoners that their rights are even less important than those of every other prisoner.

Over Fifty Palestinians are Dead in Gaza

I’m not going to try to solve the middle eastern peace process in this blog. I’m just going to say that a whole lot of Palestinians are dead and zero members of the Israeli military are.

That’s great, by the way. I’m not saying things would be better if a lot of Israelis were dead.

But in the midst of saying that these dead Palestinians are the fault of Hamas (and Hamas is awful so let’s not pretend I’m defending them) is the fact that nobody in the middle east seems to be able to figure out how to solve anything without killing someone.

I mean, I wasn’t there. But I feel like there was a way to not open fire. I feel like at some point the solution on one side or the other is to decide to stop the bloodshed.

This is why Batman hates guns.

I’m not trying to say that both sides don’t have legitimate reasons to hate the other. Because they absolutely do. Here’s one article that tries to explain things in a way that is free from most bias.

I’m just saying that individual people might be able to make a change if they decide that all of this is enough.

So no, I’m not going to lecture the Israeli military or the Palestinians. I’m just going to say that over fifty Palestinians are dead. Including children. And hundreds more were shot in the legs.

And I fail to see how that is going to make anything better.

Racist Lawyer Yells at People for Speaking Spanish and Suffers Consequences

There are two sides to this story so bear with me. One side is incredibly satisfying and the other is incredibly disappointing.

So Aaron Schlossberg is a lawyer in New York City. Earlier this week, he was captured on video telling a couple of Spanish speakers that they were in America and they should speak English. He then threatened to call Immigration on them because every Hispanic person in this country is clearly undocumented. To finish things off, he told the woman who was videoing him that she should probably lay off the sandwiches. Presumably this was a suggestion that he felt she should lose some weight.

So – he’s a racist fat shaming asshole.

It took very little time for the internet to identify Schlossberg. Since then, he’s been dogged by reporters, lost his office lease, and probably offered a job in the Trump Administration.

All of that is great. Dude exercised his right to be a bigot and got spanked for it.

Problem is, people with the same last name are getting death threats. And while I’m not a big fan of tone policing, I don’t feel it is tone policing to tell people to stop making death threats.

Especially against people who aren’t the actual guy.

But also against the actual guy. He’s an asshole. Maybe he was having a bad day. Maybe he’s like that all the time. I don’t really care. He decided to be a jackass in a reality where everyone has a video camera with them and the result is his life is going to suck for a couple of weeks.

I’m all for that. He earned that.

He didn’t earn death threats. And the people who aren’t him definitely didn’t earn death threats.

We all need to learn the value of a proportional response.

We also need to remember that while this one dude is suffering the consequences of being a racist asshole, there’s another guy who works in the White House who called undocumented workers “animals” this week. And he’s doing just fine.

Oklahoma Passes Anti-LGBT Adoption Bill

As with everything, the headlines would make you think this is entirely black and white and the issue is slightly more nuanced than that.

The “religious freedom” law that was passed (and signed by Governor Mary Fallin) allows state funded adoption agencies to discriminate against potential adoptive parents based on religious doctrine. In specific, Catholic adoption agencies have said they would have to close their doors if they were “forced” to allow children to be adopted by same sex couples.

And look, I don’t think any adoption agency should close their doors. Especially in states like Oklahoma that have seriously restrictive abortion laws. There are kids who need loving homes.

Loving homes like this one!

But I don’t want to spend a lot of time feeling sorry for adoption agencies that are too homophobic to consider same-sex homes. It is discrimination, plain and simple.

I get the “deeply held religious belief” argument and I guess because my “deeply held religious belief” is “fuck you – be fucking nice to people,” I’m just as biased as the next person who thinks the Catholic adoption agencies could suck it up.

I also think if these religious adoption agencies had shut their doors because they hate homosexuals, other adoption agencies would have filled the void. But it would have taken time and a lot of kids would fall through the cracks.

In the end, though, this is about some adoption agencies wishing to discriminate and the State of Oklahoma will continue to fund them in the name of “religious freedom.”

Meme that Pissed me Off

So a standard response to feminism is to explain to feminists how what they are asking for means some things will be worse for them and why aren’t they talking about it. Take this meme, that pisses me off at least in part because it features Kermit the Frog.

You see my point, right? Kermit doesn’t drive! He rides a bike. Fozzie Bear does the driving!

But also – idiot asshole who wrote this meme and all the other assholes who posted it – feminists don’t talk about this because it has literally nothing to do with Feminism!

I mean guys may not want to hear this but the reason women pay less for insurance is because they don’t get in as many accidents. They don’t get as many convictions for DUI. As a result, they don’t cost insurance companies as much money.

What this meme is saying is “you women want all the advantages of being a man but none of the disadvantages!”

What it doesn’t recognize that if an advantage is “women pay less for insurance,” then the disadvantages of “women get paid less for equal work, have to pay more for the same product because it is ‘made for a woman,’ regularly have to deal with sexual discrimination both at home and in the workplace, are expected to just smile and take it when men offer unsolicited opinions about how they look….” and so on are nowhere near equivalent.

So listen douchebag who co-opted Kermit the Frog to make a shitty point, if paying the same amount for car insurance is all it will take for you to give a fuck about sexism in America, then let’s see if we can fix it by getting men to be better drivers.

It isn’t all it will take, though, is it? You are just going to move the goal posts.