Shit that Pissed me Off – 6/17
A Senseless Massacre in Orlando
I pretty much have to lead with this, don’t I? There’s no way to avoid talking about a killing spree in which almost fifty people were gunned down in the largest mass shooting in US history. Although that depends on how you define mass shooting, as the internet has been careful to remind me.
As if arguing over the how extreme the slaughter was actually matters in the least. Would it matter less if the gunman had only managed to kill five people?
The only thing that now seems to matter is that he was a Muslim. Even though there is enough evidence to suggest that he was a homophobic man who was also likely dealing with a lot of self loathing because he was secretly gay, the narrative is all about his religion.
He may have wanted it to be that way because he pledged allegiance to ISIS during the attack. But that is the narrative he wanted.
Not a picture of the actual shooter because fuck him.
He wanted to be known as radical Islamist. Is that because he didn’t want to be known as gay? I have no idea. What I do know is that the narrative revolves around radical Islam and that narrative originated with the man who did the killing.
No matter what, we haven’t spent enough time recognizing that whatever he used to justify his act, he deliberately targeted the GLBT community. This act of violence was done specifically to harm a community he found objectionable. The reasons he found the community objectonable are irrelevant because there is hate speak coming from everywhere. Not just Islam. I’ll get to that later.
We’ll talk about all of this for a few weeks. And then we will forget about it until the next mass shooting takes place.
At which point, we will only talk about the killer’s religion if they are a Muslim.
One note though: if you want to talk about gun control, or not gun control, or Islamic fundamentalism, or whatever else you want to talk about, that’s great. And it is important. But please do something tangible as well. there is a Gofundme campaign that has raised over 5 million for the victims. I know it seems like $5 won’t make a difference. But it will. If you want to make a difference, please do more than talk. Contribute to the campaign or donate blood or do something to support your local GLBT community. Do something.
Shit that Pissed me off – 1/10
Wisconsin State Senator Wants to Make Sure Workers are Allowed to work Seven Days a week
Talk about a completely dishonest putz. Wisconsin labor law says that an employee must have a 24 hour break in a seven day week. It also says that this requirement can be waived by joint request of the employer and employee.
But Senator Grothman feels just awful for the hard working citizens of his state who desperately want to work seven days a week so they can earn some extra overtime but big government won’t let them! He wants to get rid of that restrictive law that prevents people from the windfall of overtime money that would await them if they could only have a seven day work week.
If there’s one thing that would make my job better, it would be if I could spend even less time with my family!
Does that sound like something workers are crying out for in Wisconsin?
Do we imagine that a lot of employers want to shell out a whole ton of overtime?
Or is it more likely that they’d like to have employees work shorter shifts seven days a week and they can’t get their employees to sign that pesky waiver?
Raiders of the Lost Ark – The Adaptation
This last weekend, I attended Butt-Numb-a-Thon (BNAT) in Autstin. I’m going to do a write-up on the movies I saw at the festival but because I’m a Raiders of the Lost Ark geek, I’m starting with a post about the movie we watched the night before Butt-Numb-a-Thon because it isn’t all that often you wait ten years to see something.
I begin with a flash back to Butt-Numb-a-Thon 4. In the early years there was typically a breakfast break at around 7:00 in the morning that lasted about an hour. We’d just watched House of 100 Corpses and Tiptoes and neither film had gone over well. In fact, for long time BNAT attendees, Tiptoes is frequently cited as the single worst film ever screened. We were all quite certain that the festival was going to end with The Two Towers so while the last two films had been something of an ordeal, we were all but positive what was coming next was going to be amazing.
At the Alamo Drafthouse, they play video in the background between movies. It is usually really messed up stuff that will catch your attention at least once – if only long enough for you to say “what the fuck is that?” One year, we realized we were watching a Hentai version of Star Wars.
At BNAT 4 we were eating breakfast and slowly we noticed that what was playing on the screen looked like a remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark featuring a bunch of teenagers. It was obviously an amateur production but these kids are doing every scene. They light their set on fire for the bar fight scene. They drive a truck into a tree and set it on fire for the Cairo street scene. They couldn’t get a monkey so they used a dog. A really cute dog.
Grail Diary 