The NFL’s new national anthem policy? Yep, it’s fascism.

June 1, 2018

So, the NFL’s owners have collectively adopted a new policy affecting football players during the national anthem. The policy doesn’t directly apply to players, but it does fine a team if any players on that team kneel or otherwise protest during the the national anthem.

This is fascism.

Yes, I know the NFL is a private company (actually it’s 32 different companies, with the league itself as a 33rd). And I know that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to employers, not normally anyway.

However, this is not normal.

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This was avoidable.

April 9, 2018

In April 2016, to try to educate people about the consequences of a Trump victory, the Boston Globe published a fake newspaper front page from the future. The page, dated April 9, 2017, was supposed to depict what could happen if Trump won, and encourage people to turn out against him to avoid that future.

Well, take a hard look at their predictions. It took longer than they expected to reach this point, but for something written in early 2016, it sure looks pretty prophetic:

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What do Haiti and Africa have in common that makes Trump hate them both?

January 12, 2018

This may seem like an obvious statement, but of the core tenets of white supremacy is the degrading of other races.

On a totally unrelated note, the President of the United States responded to a bipartisan senate immigration proposal by asking the senators, “Why do we want all these people from ‘shithole countries’ coming here?” The article notes that Trump was specifically talking about Haitians and Africans. I wonder what those people have in common that he objects to.

Why are there still people that believe Donald Trump is not a racist? Or do all the people saying he’s not a racist just … not believe it themselves?

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“Bushwick” is supposedly liberal, yet disturbingly racist

November 30, 2017

This summer, I was one of maybe five people in America to actually go to a theater and watch Bushwick, a low-budget urban warfare film starring Dave Bautista and Brittany Snow.

From the trailers, Bushwick looked like a celebration of the diverse people of Brooklyn as they unite against a common enemy. The Verge described it as bringing “the debate over punching Nazis” to life. Right-wing pundits celebrated it as a “liberal film” that “flopped”. I mean, check this out:

Seems like something I should love, right? Alas, no. This film was not liberal or progressive, it was white racist garbage.

Now that the film is on Netflix, I’m going to dissect Bushwick. I hated this film, but I’m going to watch it again, so that you don’t have to.

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Are kneeling football players a bigger crisis than Puerto Rico?

September 26, 2017

If Twitter is how Trump comments on issues important to him, does that mean he just doesn’t care about Puerto Ricans?

It’s not like he doesn’t tweet about hurricanes. He tweeted amply about hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and the government’s responses in Florida and Texas. Puerto Rico is in crisis right now. So why is the President of the United States paying more attention to the NFL than the crisis in Puerto Rico?

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It happened. They killed someone.

August 13, 2017

The literal Nazis in Charlottesville can claim their first victim. One person is now confirmed dead after a presumed Nazi plowed his car into a crowd of anti-fascists. Over a dozen more were injured, possibly dozens.

(The story says three people were killed, but two were police officers who died in a helicopter crash. Tragic, but not caused by Nazis, based on what I’ve seen anyway.)

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Colin Kapernick is not supposed to be done already.

August 12, 2017

You know what fascists hate? Statistics. Statistics that show things like FiveThirtyEight keeps showing: Colin Kaepernick should not be unemployed.

That short article follows an earlier, but more detailed, breakdown that FiveThirtyEight did back in March:

Could it be that Kaepernick just isn’t good enough, or that he plays a style that makes him difficult to accommodate?

The evidence suggests that those factors alone don’t explain Kaepernick’s unemployment. Kaepernick’s current employment status looks less like a natural result of the supposed NFL meritocracy and more like something unusual is going on (even by the standards of an unusually complex situation). His play is good enough to have attracted interest from teams by now. That it hasn’t suggests that he’s being punished on at least some level for his political outspokenness.

And that was written in March. It’s August and he’s still unemployed?

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The language of fascism: The meaning (and direction) of loyalty

June 11, 2017

A few days ago, fired FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress. As is common practice for such hearings, Comey released a set of written remarks in advance that were pretty damning. They indicate a President obsessed with loyalty.

But even before Comey testified, Republicans began rushing to Trump’s defense, in a manner I find completely indefensible:

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