bigotry – Prog Gold

Being gay is not rated R

Published on March 20, 2015Leave a comment

The New Yorker talks to the (gay) developer who made it possible to have LGB romances in The Sims. They also talk about a competing Nintendo product where it was explicitly disallowed and the attitude revealed is very American:

While Barrett opposes Nintendo’s decision—a form of wounding social commentary regardless of whether the company perceives it as such or not—he understands how the situation arose. “On one hand, Nintendo is a family-friendly company with a wholesome image that they have maintained for decades,” he told me. “On the other, their products are popular with gay people.

It’s the attitude that hetero kisses are okay, but gay or lesbian ones are always unsuitable for children to see or hear about. It’s a deeply reactionary, homophobic attitude but one that’s still widespread in the States, grudgingly shuffling to at least full legal equality between straight and gay people but still rather uncomfortable with the idea of two men kissing, regardless of context. True equality can’t be reached until this idea is gone.

Charlotte cops arrest black man for leafletting

Published on September 2, 2014Leave a comment

The crime rate in Charlotte is so low the cops can waste their time and the taxpayer’s money harassing black politicians distributing voting leaflets:

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA—The stars of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement took the stage on Labor Day at Charlotte’s Marshall Park to condemn the state’s record on voter suppression and racial profiling, and urge the community to organize and turn out at the polls this November. Just a few hundred feet away, police cuffed and arrested local LGBT activist and former State Senate candidate Ty Turner as he was putting voting rights information on parked cars.

One does wonder why the vaunted First Amendment doesn’t prohibit anti leafletting ordinances like the one used as an excuse to harass a black politican trying to get out the vote.

UPDATE: indeed, St. Louis had a similar law nixed. (via.)

And now the UKIP shipping forecast

Published on January 22, 2014Leave a comment

Because UKIP councillor David Silvester claimed to know the mind of god, revealing that the floods that hit the UK recently were punishment for the country’s passing of gay marriage laws, it made sense to replace the good old Radio 4 Shipping Forecast with a specialised UKIP version, which is just what Nicholas Pegg did.

There’s also the UKIP Weather Twitter service for those in dangerous areas wanting up to the minute warnings of homosexuality caused floodings.

Call somebody a whore? Fine. Complain about it? Whoa now

Published on October 12, 2013Leave a comment

Science blogger DNLee has her blog at the Scientific American network of science blogs, is approached by another network to guest blog for them. She asks some questions, including what their pay rate is and ultimately declines. Then the editor calls her a whore for not wanting to write for free for them. Below she describes the whole incident in her own words:

Then Scientific American responded by pulling her blog because “the post wasn’t appropriate for this area“, which of course is grade a nonsense. More relevant may just be the fact that Biology Online, the ones who approached DNLee, are a partner of SciAm.

dramatic chipmunk

As you may have noticed from the video above, DNLee is a woman of colour and you can’t help but think that if it had been a white man in this situation, SciAm would never have responded this way. Oh what the fuck am I saying? A white man would never be called a whore this way in the first place.

fuck this thing cat

As long as we can’t see it, who cares what happens

Published on April 12, 20111 Comment

Angry Young Alex explains what the the French burka ban and European responses to the political revolutions in the Middle East have in common:

There’s another clue if we look at why we’re not banning it here: it would run “contrary to British instincts”. Our tabloids can’t look at sickening fear, desperation and poverty abroad without worrying about our ethnic purity being soiled. Our government declines mandatory face-nudity, because it’s not quite compatible with our petty, sense of arbitrary national identity. The French are so outraged by women’s oppression that they demand not to have to look at it any more. We see the injustices suffered by Arabs and Muslims the world over, and the first thing we think is “how can we stop it affecting us?”.