Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 795

Amy Goodman agrees with Noam Chomsky: “The media manufactures consent for Donald Trump”

Can you really tell the difference between mainstream media channels when they all basically cover Trump nonstop?

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, said in a video for AJ+, “I see the media as a huge kitchen table that stretches across the globe that we all sit around and debate the most important issues of the day. War and peace. Life and death.” Goodman believes that “Anything less than that is a disservice to a democratic society.”

How much does this disservice affect our decision-making, particularly when it comes to voting? “It is critical in an election year to hear how policies affect people on the ground—not to get the pundits but to get the people themselves,” Goodman said.

What else do all the major networks have in common? According to Goodman, “They’re bringing you the pundits… who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong.”

In a nod to Noam Chomsky, Goodman added, “The media manufactures consent—for war, for candidates in elections—by bringing you more, for example, of one person like Donald Trump.” Trump’s “unfiltered pipeline into everyone’s brain” is facilitated by the media, whose ratings have come to depend on it.

According to a report by the Tyndall Center in 2015, “Donald Trump got 23 times the coverage of, say, Bernie Sanders. They found ABC World News Tonight did something like 81 minutes on Donald Trump and I think they gave Bernie Sanders 20 seconds,” said Goodman.

So why does Bernie Sanders get any coverage at all?

“Bernie Sanders is breaking every record. It’s the only reason he’s getting any coverage right now,” Goodman said. “He is shaming the media. In March [Sanders] raised something like $44 million. Hillary Clinton raised $29-and-change million. $44 million. That hasn’t been done before. You break every record and there’s a blip in the corporate media radar screen. It just shows how astounding it would be if he got anything near the coverage of the other candidates. Could you imagine where [Sanders] would be right now?”

Unfortunately, bought media isn’t just ads or segments, but entire channels.

“In this high-tech digital age… all we get is static… that obscure[s] reality, when what we need the media to give us is the dictionary definition of static: criticism, opposition, unwanted interference,” Goodman said. “We need a media that covers power, not covers for power.”

Watch: Amy Goodman shares with AJ+ how she would make corporate media more democratic:

“My p*ssy should be president next”: How porn stars are voting this election

It’s been said that the 2016 presidential election is unlike any other in history, not least because a reality TV star has led the Republican field for months now. A whole lot of people are talking about the election, including many who have not been terribly interested in national politics in the past. The election has even sparked discussion in the porn community.

In their series “Ask A Porn Star,” comedic porn company Wood Rocket shows some porn stars in a not terribly flattering light by asking who should be the next president of the United States. The all-female panel offers some insight into who is voting for who, and why. Surprisingly (or not), a good percentage of those interviewed are going full-Trumpal.

“He just says it how it is and he gets things done,” says Franziska Facella (previously known as Francesca, or Victoria Koblev). 2015 Hustler Honey Kenna James says, “I believe [Donald Trump] is somebody that will actually take charge. I want a businessman instead of a politician in the office. I’ve seen where the politicians have gotten us and it’s not a good place.”

Also in the Trump camp are Gabriella Paltrova, Dava Foxx and Anna Bell Peaks, who attest, “He’s a good businessman.” She says she is still in the dark as to whether or not Trump is “pro-porn.”

Those who are feeling the Bern include Lili Ivy, Draven Star and Veruca James, who chirps, “Bernie Sanders all the way.” Spanish-born star Amarna Miller is also backing Sanders. “Everybody is supporting Bernie Sanders. At least everybody I respect,” the AVN-nominated actress explains.

Sadly (or not) for Hillary, the pornstars seemed largely unimpressed with her campaign.  Lily Ivy told the camera, “I wish I could say I was voting for Hillary because it would be awesome to have a woman president, but….” Dahlia Sky states, “All I can say is I really hope it’s not Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.”

A handful of pornstars can’t possibly represent the profession as a whole, but the sample did speak to some noted voter trends that have unfolded over the past few months. As older women continue to rally around Hillary Clinton, younger feminists have gravitated toward Sanders by what Vox calls “an overwhelming margin.” According to Vox, “Voting for a man who offers policies that help people — especially women — is not a rejection of feminism. It’s also feminism.”

But perhaps the most progressively feminist porn star interviewed was Ela Darling, who contests, “My pussy should be president next.”

It’s not an easy task to explain Trump’s popularity among the porn stars. Back in December, a Washington Post analysis found that the majority of his backers were white, male, poor and presumably not in the porn business. Though the porn community did collide with Donald Trump when WoodRocket releasedDonald Tramp: The XXX Parody, back in August.

For more on porn stars and politics, check out the video below:

[This article first appeared on Alternet]

Has American pro soccer finally arrived? In this strange saga, the answer is “almost”

One of the many perverse and peculiar aspects of Major League Soccer, North America’s not-quite-top-flight professional league, is that for almost 20 years it had no team in New York City. There are boring practical reasons why that happened, largely having to do with money and real estate. But it’s bizarre, right? Not merely is New York the continent’s largest city and its media and financial capital, it’s a city rich with immigrants from all parts of the globe (and the children and grandchildren of immigrants), where in virtually every park on virtually every Sunday you can find a pickup soccer match or three. In terms of public participation throughout the five boroughs, soccer is probably about even with basketball, and way ahead of all other team sports. As for fandom, if I go outside and walk down the street right now, I’ll encounter someone in a Barcelona or Manchester United jersey within four or five blocks.

Now the Big Apple has its own MLS franchise at last: New York City FC, launched last season with tremendous hoopla. As Claudio Reyna, the American soccer legend who is now the team’s director of “football operations” (or general manager) puts it, NYCFC had to be “built from scratch” in a short time, and might well represent “the last-ever professional sporting franchise launched in New York City,” at least on this scale and under this much scrutiny. As captured by journalist turned filmmaker Justin Webster in the intriguing vérité-style documentary “Win!,” which recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, the results of this grand marketing venture have been strange and turbulent and partly, but not entirely, successful. All of which makes a pretty good analogy for the precarious situation of pro soccer in American sports and American culture.

Launched as a partnership between the English team Manchester City and the New York Yankees, NYCFC signed several big-name European players — most notably superstar Spanish goal-scorer David Villa — along with some decent young American talent. The new team has drawn big crowds and plenty of media attention during its first season-plus in Yankee Stadium, along with the sort of content-free celebrity buzz that only New York or L.A. can enable. At a recent match I attended, a listless 0-0 draw with Chicago on a freezing spring night, Trevor Noah and the cast of “Hamilton” showed up. Anthony Ramos, who plays Alexander Hamilton’s son Philip in the Broadway show, gave a performance of the national anthem that was more exciting than the actual game. (No one is happy about that awkward stadium-sharing arrangement; baseball and soccer make poor bedfellows, layout-wise. Given the aforementioned practical issues, it will be years before NYCFC can build its own facility.)

Fans of the franchise now known as the New York Red Bulls may bristle at everything I’ve said so far, but they know it’s true. Born in 1996 as the New York/New Jersey MetroStars — one of the clunkier monickers of MLS’ early bad-names period — the Red Bulls have always played across the river in suburban New Jersey, which from the Manhattan-chauvinist point of view might as well be Nebraska, or the Moon. They spent their first 14 seasons entertaining depressingly small crowds in the old Giants Stadium, a cavernous 1970s monstrosity inaccessible by public transit. For years the MetroBulls seemed like a team specifically designed to fail, a description that also applied to the league around them. You could make a movie or a miniseries or an opera about the Red Bulls’ epic struggle, except that no one would be interested.

OK, that’s kind of mean: Despite an awful start to the 2016 season, the Red Bulls have become an exciting, high-energy team over the past several seasons. They have their own attractive stadium these days, even if it’s in the barren industrial town of Harrison, New Jersey, just south of downtown Newark. But if the Red Bulls and their plucky fanbase felt neglected and abused by the urbanite soccer snobs before 2015, it’s many times worse now. They’ve been dramatically upstaged by a chaotic and disorganized team that draws twice as many fans and hardly ever wins, but whose uniforms at least do not carry free advertising for a foul-tasting energy drink beloved by fraternity brothers.

Yeah: When it came to results on the field, it’s safe to say that NYCFC’s debut season didn’t go that well. In a sense, that’s a testament to the fact that the quality of play in MLS is not as bad as some snobs and skeptics maintain. It did not turn out to be possible to parachute in with a bunch of money and imported stars and win the championship. As documented in “Win!” NYCFC won only 10 matches in a 34-game season, suffered an 11-game winless streak that lasted from mid-March through early June, and failed to make the playoffs even in MLS’ generous tournament-style system. One of the expensive imports, English star Frank Lampard, arrived months late and never seemed to fit in. The team’s much-lauded young American coach, Jason Kreis, was dumped and replaced with former French star Patrick Vieira, who has not visibly improved matters. (After eight matches in 2016, the team has won only once.)

After the premiere of “Win!” I caught up with Reyna, a longtime star for the U.S. men’s national team and various European clubs, including five seasons with Manchester City, NYCFC’s parent club. He tried to convince me that the film’s title is not ironic. “We didn’t win enough on the field,” he said, “but I personally knew that would be difficult to accomplish in Year One. You always want to give a positive tone and message, you don’t want to say, ‘We might not win that much. We might not make the playoffs.’ But as the league has grown, we’ve seen how much more difficult it is for an expansion team to get up and going.”

In marketing terms, Reyna says his losing team has been a big win. “We exceeded our expectations, to be honest. Going into this, I definitely had some concerns. I had doubts about how big we could be and how relevant we could be. I had no idea whether the city would take to us, whether the media would pay attention to us. I felt some concern that we would not be the success that we turned out to be.”

In effect, Reyna said later, he didn’t have the option of growing a good team slowly and organically, as the management of FC Dallas has done with a roster of homegrown Texas players and young Latin American recruits. As the film demonstrates, in the context of New York it was more important to create a spectacle than field a winning team. So NYCFC was built around name-brand star players like Villa and Lampard and Italian midfielder Andrea Pirlo, and undeniably played exciting, attacking soccer — but was atrocious on defense. (The team scored 49 goals, sixth-best in the league, while surrendering a league-high 58.)

If the strange tale of NYCFC’s semi-successful launch is not quite like anything else in American sports history, one could say the same about American soccer as a spectacle and a business. After a dark stretch in the 2000s when MLS seemed in imminent danger of collapse, the league has not just survived but prospered. No one claims it will rival the English Premier League or the Bundesliga anytime soon, and it doesn’t look like the “soccer will be huge in America” paradise long prophesied by true believers. But we’re closer to that than many skeptics and haters thought possible, and the generations of older sports fans who viewed soccer as an alien or girly invader are fading away.

Mercifully, MLS’ various attempts to “Americanize” soccer have been abandoned: There’s no more football-style “countdown clock,” and no more hockey-style shootouts to settle draws. So have the early team names seemingly devised by a committee of ad executives and eight-year-olds. Gone forever are the San Jose Clash, the Dallas Burn and the Kansas City Wiz, with their unforgettable urine-yellow uniforms and Charlie Brown zig-zag stripes. Let’s not talk about Real Salt Lake, the most baffling and stupidest of second-wave attempts to ape the names of famous European teams.

There has been intense branding churn while MLS tried to figure out what it was selling and who its audience was: Europhile soccer snobs? Latino immigrants? Youth soccer teams? Only five of the league’s original 10 teams have remained in the same cities under the same names. One franchise, currently known as the Houston Dynamo, has had four different names in two different cities. But as the NYCFC saga demonstrates, as America changes, American pro soccer has developed considerable stickiness, and isn’t going away. I’m still more likely to see a Chelsea or Real Madrid shirt when I go outside in Brooklyn today than an NYCFC jersey. But that ratio is slowly but steadily shifting, and more to the point, the person wearing the sky blue and dark blue crest of New York’s insta-team will not look hopelessly uncool.

The librarian who outfoxed Al Qaeda: “In one spasm of violence, they burned just about everything they could find”

It’s an unlikely story, and at times a gripping one: A new book, “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu,” tells the tale of how a gutsy collector saved thousands of documents he considered an important part of cultural history. As if the Sahara desert wasn’t a worth enough opponent, the arrival of Al Qaeda made it even more daunting: It was only because of Abdel Kader Haidara and a group of brave librarians that these manuscripts about poetry, music, sex, and science did not end lost in the desert or up in smoke.

The book, Jeffrey Brown wrote in the Washington Post, “vividly captures the history and strangeness of this place in a fast-paced narrative that gets us behind today’s headlines of war and terror. This is part reportage and travelogue (there is a great deal of “setting off” in Land Cruisers, on camels and in small boats along the Niger River), part intellectual history, part geopolitical tract and part out-and-out thriller.”

We spoke to the Berlin-based Hammer from Seattle, where he was touring behind the book. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Let’s start with your main character, Abdel Kaider Haidara. What’s he like, and what motivated him?

Abdel Kaider Haidara was the go-to guy: He had created his own library, and had created an association for other librarians. He was the repository for this whole effort to rediscover manuscripts from the golden age of Timbuktu and afterwards that had been dispersed and often lost in the desert and the villages along the river and this very large, remote, difficult to penetrate area of northern Mali.

He’s kind of a big guy in every way – big physically, fills up a room with his presence, a charismatic figure. With a lot of energy, a certain sense of pride and dignity, a true lover of books and manuscripts, extremely knowledgeable about the region. Also a very shrewd operator: He was very successful at reaching out to Westerners, charming them, and raising money for his cause. An obsessive guy: He began pursuing this, what began as something he stepped into almost against his will, in the 1980s it became his lifelong obsession and pursuit. You could say he really single-handedly revived Timbuktu’s fortunes by reconnecting it to its culture.

It’s sort of a cliché to say that narrative nonfiction can “read like a novel.” But this one really does. Did you have any novels, or movies for that matter, in mind while you were writing it?

One of the things that appeals to me about great television – “The Americans,” “Breaking Bad” – is the ability to have a handful of plots running concurrently that all converge. So I was drawn to that structure, and that’s why I began with the story of his life, and focused on Adbel Kader’s quest in the desert, and then cutting away, very dramatically, and I think, to this general sitting in Stuttgart with this general watching the rise of jihadis. And then returning to Abdel Kader and his quest, and then cutting away to the rise of these jihadis. Juxtaposing several different stories was something I had in mind, and something I set out to do when I wrote the book.

How impressive and advanced were these documents? They weren’t just a bunch of papers, but the crown of a civilization.

We’re talking 375,000 manuscripts. Yeah, sure, there were some boring legal documents, and commercial transactions from the slave trade and the ivory trade. But there were also a tremendous number of richly decorated, gilded with gold leaf, incredibly intricately illustrated volumes – diagrams deconstructing Arabic-language poetry, charts of the solar system and stages of the moon, beautifully embroidered Korans, sayings of the Prophet… all sorts of artistically magnificent works that are just considered priceless today.

Give us a sense of what Timbuktu was like in the 14th to 16th centuries, and what it’s like now.

I think all the travelers who set foot in the place – as Leo Africanus, who wrote a book about it in the 16th century – were just blown away by this place. The energy, the wealth, the markets everywhere, with camel caravans coming in from the Sahara, convoys of boats coming up the Niger River carrying ivory and slaves and products out of the jungle. The camel caravans carrying textiles from Europe, booksellers, paper vendors – everybody converging on Timbuktu. And gold – everywhere was gold. It was the main currency.

So it was this incredible febrile commercial center which also had this additional overlay of scholasticism: You had 25,000 students at the peak of Timbuktu’s period as a scholastic center, studying in these unofficial universities connected to mosques You had scribes and scholars and scientists and architects, 100,000 people – it must have been an incredible scene.

Compare it to what it is now – kind of a sleepy, desolate, run-down, monochromatic desert town of not too many distinguishing features except for a few of these grandiose mosques that are the vestiges of that era, plopped down at the edge of the Sahara.

The vision we get of the Islamic world is more nuanced than what we get these days in American political discourse. There’s a rich, scholarly, varied Muslim culture a few hundred years ago, and then that learning is later threatened by the Muslim terrorists of Al Qaeda…

This repeats a theme: As I point out a few times in the book, this was not a singular occurrence. You had jihadists influenced by Wahhabism, which emerged in the 18th century. And fundamentalist Muslims who weren’t even connected to Wahhabism. Which grew out of the Sufi tradition, which was in constant conflict with the moderates who liked to sing and dance and worship saints and were kind of laid back about their religion. Someone who traveled there – Leo Africanus – commented that they’re singing and dancing in the streets of Timbuktu until the early hours of the morning. He made it sound like Paris on a typical summer night.

Juxtaposed against that was this severe strain of Islam that was fundamentalist, hardcore, hated music and celebration and just wanted to [stick] rigidly to the Prophet Muhammad’s vision and the early caliphates of Islam.

You had an attempt to impose a fundamentalist state in Timbuktu in the 19th century, it lasted for a few years, and then you had this real severe… I don’t think these guys were chopping off hands and feet or executing adulterers, that came in 2012 with the most recent band of fundamentalists swept out of the desert.

How close did this adventure come to an unhappy conclusion? There were times when these documents were really threatened.

There were definitely some close calls, where individuals were caught smuggling these documents and chests out of the city. That happened a few times. Curiously – and nobody can really figure out why – they were always let go…. I think the jihadis always had other things to worry about. They were destroying the overt symbols of a form of Islam they hated, like these Sufi monuments to saints.

It was only at the end of this, as the French military bore down on the city, and the jihadis prepared to evacuate, that they decided, “Here’s our moment to get our revenge — on anything connected to the West.” These documents were seen as UNESCO-protected and highly valued by Westerners and the people of Timbuktu. So in one spasm of violence, they burned just about everything they could find.

So, who knows, had the manuscripts not been taken out over those months previously? [The jihadis] could have gone from house to house, ransacking them and destroying everything they could. In the last days they said to the imams: We’d like you to bring your manuscripts here, and we’re going to burn them publicly. Things got nasty.

Stop saying you’re sorry: “Women will apologize to inanimate objects for bumping into them”

Comedian and writer Sara Benincasa has been sharing her most personal dilemmas since her one-woman show turned memoir “Agorafabulous!,” about her struggle with agoraphobia. In her new essay collection, “Real Artists Have Day Jobs (And Other Awesome Things They Don’t Teach You in School),” a mix of revealing memoir and advice, she similarly delves deep into some of her biggest challenges, from mental health to abuse to having an ex badmouth her in public. From the other side of those episodes, her tone is that of a wise older sister who’s been there, done that and learned more than a few helpful life lessons (some she’s still learning) ranging from sex (“A Vagina Is Not a Time Machine”) to body image (“Realize Your Size Doesn’t Matter”).

Apropos of the title, there’s plenty of advice within these 52 dispatches for creative types about valuing your work and standing up for yourself, but even more about dealing with friends, family, lovers, pets, and, most—and hardest—of all, ourselves. Salon spoke with Benincasa about being a “real” artist, subverting the self-help genre, overcoming her own prejudices and learning to stop apologizing. 

“Real Artists Have Day Jobs” stems from your Medium essay of the same name. Was there any specific incident that inspired the essay or were these things you were thinking about?

I’ve been thinking about the concept I express in the essay and expand on in the book. I think it’s really stupid and messed up that some people think that if you don’t make money as an artist because you’re busy covering other needs that you’re somehow not worthy. That’s ridiculous. The point of the essay is not that everyone is great at art or that all art is equal. Art is subjective.

The point of the essay is that whether you have a day job or a night job or a side hustle or you’re completely unemployed, you’re wealthy or you’re living in poverty or you’re somewhere in between, if you love something—a hobby or a passion, it can even be a sport—and you do that thing, then you are a doer of that thing. If you love to play basketball, you’re a basketball player. I’m not saying you’re in the NBA. But if you do it regularly, you’re an athlete, you’re a basketball player.

The same is true for artists. If you love painting and you spend most of your time as an HR rep, whether you hate or love your day job doesn’t matter. If you do the painting on the side, it’s not on the side. You are a painter, that is what you are, and you can feel free to describe yourself as an HR rep on the side, or you can be both.

Do you think the idea that it’s so all or nothing discourages people from trying artistic pursuits?

I do. We put people in boxes because it makes us more comfortable. It’s easier to look at someone and say, this is a person who is a doctor and that encompasses their entire personality and mission in life. It’s more complex to say this person is a doctor, this person is a concert pianist, this person is a soccer player, this person is politically moderate, this person speaks Spanish.

We’re a culture of checking off boxes. People aren’t created on an assembly line and not everyone fits into a category, so the book talks about individuality and finding your own recipe for happiness. A huge thing for me in writing the book was to not come off as pretending to have all the answers, because I don’t; I don’t even have most of them. But I have some, and the book is based on all the times I’ve fucked up, and the very few times I’ve gotten something right the first time.

That was something very interesting to me, as someone who reads self-help books, which often have a tone of I’ve figured out everything and here I’m going to impart my knowledge. I feel like you deliberately did not come across with that attitude.

I wanted to subvert the self-help genre. I love reading self-help books; they have helped me in my life. I love when people share their knowledge. But the ones that have helped me are not books that purport to make the author sound perfect; they are books about reality and dealing with the real muck of life.

How do you walk that line of giving advice while also acknowledging that you don’t necessarily have it all figured out?

Because my background is in comedy, I’m by nature a self-deprecating person. To me self-deprecation is about disarming someone else, and showing them that if I can have a sense of humor about myself and I can poke fun at myself, then clearly I’m not going to be too judgmental of anybody else. If I regard myself as a work in progress, then I’m going to regard other people that way too, whereas if I regard myself as perfect and enlightened, then I’m going to expect other people to be at that standard, and that’s not who I am.

When I was really depressed, I would sometimes sleep with a book in my bed that I really loved, just to have it near me. I would hug it; it was almost like a teddy bear, a comfort object. I hope that this book will be that for some people as well.

From the title I was expecting the book to focus on work and career issues. You have that in there but there’s also a lot of stories and advice about our personal lives. How do you see the two as being connected?

You’re an artist full time, 24/7. That’s your job all the time and so part of being an artist is not just producing the work, it’s looking at and experiencing the world differently. For an artist, the personal and the professional are inextricably linked. If you make art, you put something of yourself into it. That sounds high minded, but it’s realistic. You don’t get to make art without some metaphorical and often literal blood, sweat and tears.

You talk in the book about radical self-confidence and you also have a chapter about why we should elect our own executive board of smart, knowledgeable friends we can consult for advice. I thought those were an interesting counterbalance. How can people navigate both having that radical self-confidence and knowing when is an appropriate time to ask for advice?

I’ll give you an example. Last night I was really sad about something. I was crying and I was talking to a friend, and the friend said, “Sara, all the answers are inside you.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s true, but I know when I need somebody to get those answers out.”

So to me, asking for help is a sign of self-confidence. It’s not a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of strength, because when you ask for help you indicate that you are worthy of assistance, that you want to get better, that you deserve to stick around. That’s true for everyone, but not everyone knows that.

Having the radical self confidence to say, no, I don’t want to keep feeling terrible and I don’t want to keep living with less than I deserve, may come in the form of a 911 call, literally. There was a point in my life where that came in asking a friend to take me to the emergency room. That can be at your lowest point. It can also be as simple as asking a neighbor for assistance in the yard.

I find that it’s often the people who don’t ask for help who are in the most trouble. They sometimes get to a place where they’re so far gone, and they’ve never indicated the need for assistance. That’s heartbreaking because sometimes they don’t make it, and I want people to make it.

I’ve also noticed over the years, that it seems when someone who’s very revered publicly admits they’re having trouble and asks for help, that makes people feel so relieved about themselves. It actually gives people more respect for that person. Someone will say, I was never a follower of her before, but once I heard her open up about that situation, then I really wanted her to succeed and I was so impressed by her.

Last night when I was really sad and I was crying, I got a lot of stress out. It was sad but it wasn’t scary. When I was younger it would have been scary. I would have been afraid and panicked about it, but because I’ve asked for help in the past, I knew I could do that now. I knew it was going to be okay.

What’s the most challenging piece of your own advice in the book for you to take?

“Walk your way to a solution” is tough. I’ve always been pretty sedentary. I wasn’t naturally good at sports so I grew up being scared of being physical. I just scheduled a personal training session. Brain stuff comes relatively easy to me; body stuff does not.

The chapter [on] “Abuse is fucking complicated.” That sometimes is difficult for me, because if you’ve been abused in some fashion, it’s really hard to accept that that’s that that was, because nobody wants to feel like a victim; nobody wants to feel powerless.

Also, to “feel all the feelings.” That’s the toughest of all. Not to honor each and every one as precious and beautiful, but to deal with your shit. I didn’t emotionally deal with a breakup and I distracted myself in different ways and that grief comes out.

The challenge is to deal the feelings as they come up, and that’s hard. I was upset about something yesterday and I was buying pepper spray and I was wearing sunglasses because I thought I was going to cry. I wanted to get it out, but I had to buy this pepper spray You don’t always have time to set your shit aside and just feel the feelings. It’s about experimenting with feeling a little bit of them when you can.

One of the most moving chapters was on dealing with personal prejudices. You talk about having grown up going to Catholic church and getting rid of some of the prejudices you were taught but that transphobia was one that stayed with you into your twenties. Can you talk about how your thinking changed?

I think that everyone, even the most open-minded person, has certain prejudices. We decide what is normal in our world, and when someone challenges it with their normal, that can blow our minds. My thinking changed because I was challenged on it. I was challenged on [my] casual transphobia; it wasn’t let’s-go-beat-up-trans-people transphobia. It’s usually not as dramatic as that. It’s the casual sexism, the casual racism, the casual homophobia, the stuff that’s built into the system of society, of your workplace, of your family, and you don’t realize it’s a bad thing sometimes until somebody calls you out.

What I have noticed is that people respond much better to being called out face to face. Not because the person is trying to win points by being the coolest liberal in the room or something ridiculous like that, but because somebody cared enough about you to say, here’s why what you said isn’t cool. It hurt my feelings, here’s why, but coming from a place of respect.

In this case, somebody called me out in person and it was so smart. I’m really glad that that happened. It was embarrassing at the time. When you realize the joke you made isn’t funny, especially when you’re a comedian, that goes to the ego.

The most important thing beyond that was having people in my life who were trans. We talk about these lofty terms, visibility and representation, but it’s actually pretty simple: if you see people of all different types out in the world, then it becomes your normal. I began to have not only friends who had transitioned but friends who were in the process of transitioning. It’s hard to make fun of somebody when you’ve looked into their eyes and you know their pain and you know their joy. You can make fun of them for stuff like watching stupid TV shows, but to mock someone’s identity becomes very difficult when you see how hard they’ve fought to claim that identity.

I shared stories in the book of my own fears and prejudices because I want people to see somebody talk about flaws and show that you can change. I felt out of place and dorky at school, but at church I found solace in a belief system they were spoon feeding me I could just sign on to. A religion is just a cult that’s been successful for a few thousands years. So my particular McDonalds was anti-gay and anti-abortion and when I was in eighth grade a lady came and showed us pictures of dead fetuses, so I believed all that. It gave me an identity; it gave me something to cling to, and certainly transphobia was part of that.

They didn’t sit us down and say “be transphobic,” but they taught us that queer people had been given a burden by God, and this burden was the desire for same-sex people or the desire to be a different sex or gender; it was like Christ’s cross. So if they bore that without giving in to it then they would find happiness in heaven. That made sense [to me]. I was also taught that if a woman or girl was raped, she should carry the baby to term because the baby was the blessing that came out a terrible crime and that God would reward her for that. I believed all that.

Religion definitely fucked me up, but I am glad for it because it helps me have genuine empathy with people who still believe that. If they’re going to keep using that as a weapon against others, fuck them, I think they suck, and I will fight against them. But when I see a mother who’s struggling with having a gay son, my default isn’t to say she’s garbage; my default is to say, with some time and some education, she could come around. But I’m here for the kid first and foremost.

Especially online, people can get very polarized and see people, whether it’s that mother who’s struggling, and see someone who has different political ideals, as the enemy. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I’ve definitely been angry online. Right now I’m pretty chill cause I’m sitting in the sunshine and my hair looks good today and I’m sipping on iced green tea. But catch me at a moment where I’m feeling low or I’ve just talked to a kid who’s in a lot of pain, I will fulminate and rage against what I perceive as the machine. The internet is the enemy of nuance in many cases. There’s beautiful writing online; that’s where I read 90 percent of what I read, that’s where I write a lot of what I write, but the temptation is always there to press a button and broadcast a gut reaction to the world.

I did that recently and had a friend say to me on Facebook, you sound like an asshole right now. I realized they were correct. I was mad about somebody who was rude to a friend of mine and I didn’t think about the context of the situation. It’s easy to regard people as cartoon villains on the web because they’re not in front of you. If you can look into somebody’s eyes, it becomes very hard to vilify them. Unless it’s Donald Trump; that guy’s a fucking asshole.

The hardest thing for me to follow from your book is not apologizing. I did it when I was rescheduling our interview. Even when I was trying not to, I couldn’t stop myself.

I also understand there’s a place for it. It’s perfectly fine to say, I’m sorry I had to reschedule an appointment and then give a reason, without beating yourself up. [You can say] “I’m sorry I had to do this potentially inconvenient thing; here’s why.” There’s a difference between that, which is out of understanding you may have inconvenienced someone, and saying to your gym buddy, I’m so sorry I spend too much time on the treadmill or apologizing to your husband or boyfriend for being too fat or for not moisturizing. Women will apologize to inanimate objects for bumping into them; I have done it myself. We apologize for taking up space in the world. It’s not just women, but it’s an epidemic among women. Anyone who’s been made to feel that they don’t deserve to take up space in the world will often deal with it by either being abusive to others or by constant apologies.

How have you worked on that for yourself?

Somebody pointed it out to me and questioned it. I learned to pause. Take a second, take a breath, and ask yourself, am I really sorry? Sometimes it’s yes, of course. Other times I was just saying I was sorry because I wanted them to be kindly disposed to me. If your sorry can’t be authentic, it should at least be strategic; it shouldn’t be something you throw out there willy-nilly because you were taught to apologize. It certainly shouldn’t be “I’m sorry but __” fill in the blank insult.

“Conspiracy theorist” in panda suit shot after allegedly threatening to bomb Baltimore Fox affiliate if it wouldn’t cover his story

A man in a panda suit who allegedly threatened to bomb Fox Television’s Baltimore affiliate unless it broadcasted his government conspiracy story was shot on Thursday.

Police did not kill the man, who is white and is believed to be in his twenties.

The local affiliate, Fox45, reported that the man broke into the building and demanded that “the news station cover a story about some sort of government conspiracy.”

He was wearing a one-piece panda suit, along with a surgical mask and sunglasses.

Reporter Shelley Orman tweeted video of the suspect walking out of the Fox affiliate building.

Video of man walking out of @FOXBaltimore pic.twitter.com/3Q2i4gwtw6

— Shelley Orman (@ShelleyOFox45) April 28, 2016

The station’s security guard said the man threatened to “blow up” the building.

The building was evacuated after the threat.

A police sniper shot the man, and Baltimore authorities said they sent a robot to check on him.

“Someone came into the front of the building and they apparently said that they had some information they wanted to get on the air,” FOX45 News Director Mike Tomko told reporters, the station said.

“I came down at one point not knowing the person was in the lobby, near the vestibule area. He talked to me and was wearing what appears to be a full body white panda suit, surgical mask and sunglasses.”

Tomko continued: “He had a flash drive, said he had information he wanted to get on the air. He compared it to the information found in the Panama Papers. I told him, ‘I can’t let you in, you’re going to have to leave the flash drive here and slide it through the opening.’ He wouldn’t do that.”

“Apparently he had made some threats before,” Tomko added.

Authorities have no information yet on the man’s identity.

Camille Paglia: “I’m a libertarian. That’s why I’m always freely offending both sides”

Academic and “Glittering Images” author, Camille Paglia, sat down for a wide-ranging interview with George Mason University professor and host of Medium’s “Conversations with Tyler,” Tyler Cowen.

“Young people have no sense whatever of the expansive, of the big gesture,” Paglia said, attributing this fading “sense of the large” to the “miniaturization of image.”

Asked if her lamenting the grandiosity of images in ’50s Hollywood films makes her a cultural conservative, Paglia said, “No, not at all.”

“Usually, I’m not saying we need to return to anything,” she explained. “I’m a libertarian. That’s why I’m always freely offending both sides.”

On George Lucas — who she calls “the greatest artist of our time” in her book — and the latest “Star Wars” iteration, “The Force Awakens,” that he had no hand in, Paglia admitted that she hasn’t seen it.

“I wouldn’t dream of going,” she said. “When it’s on TV, I’ll look at it. Please. Do you think I want to sit in a theater and be tortured by the contamination of my ideals? I’m not going to do that.”

Perhaps more inflammatory than Paglia’s appreciation for the “Star Wars” prequels is her lukewarm take on The Beatles.

“The Rolling Stones are inspired by, animated by, to this day, by the blues tradition,” she said when asked to weigh in on the Stones-Beatles discussion. “The Beatles really were more almost Broadway and musical comedy.”

“They were tremendous songsmiths, but there’s nothing dark about them.”

Paglia was hard-pressed to name a modern pop performer that can stand up to the aforementioned 20th-century greats.

“I was really very hopeful about Rihanna for a while there,” she said. “Unfortunately, she’s not really working with the top producers any longer. The new album is an atrocity. It’s really terrible.”

Read the full transcript here, and/or watch below:

Rahm Emanuel’s political machine is overwhelmingly white. Here’s why it matters — even beyond Chicago

The 2016 election cycle has led to heated discussion about the issues of money in politics and racial justice. However, these debates have rarely crossed: the dominance of the affluent and racial justice are treated as separate issues. My latest Demos report suggests that these debates are actually intertwined: the donor class is dominated by whites, which could  hamper progress towards to racial justice.

While there has been some research examining the demographic composition of federal donors, there has been virtually none at the municipal level (one study examined the contribution patterns of Asian-Americans). The result is that the issue is rarely discussed, and the possibility that donors could skew policy is almost entirely ignored. To fill the gap, I worked with of University of Massachusetts-Amherst political scientists Brian Schaffner and Jesse Rhodes, and used Catalist, a progressive data vendor, to analyze the demographic composition of Chicago’s donor class. (Catalist’s accuracy has been independently validated and used in peer-reviewed articles and books.) The dataset includes all individuals that donated money (greater than the $150 disclosure limit) between May 16th, 2011 and April 7th, 2015. Catalist was able to match more than 90 percent of donors in the campaign finance data to their database.

The municipal donor class is incredibly white

The report shows that the donor class is incredibly white. Though the adult population of Chicago is 39 percent white, 82 percent of council and mayoral donors were. Emanuel relied the most on white donors, who made up 94 percent of his donors. Chuy Garcia, Emanuel’s opponent in last year’s Democratic primary, relied less on white donors; 39 percent of his donors were people of color. (27 percent were Latino.) Only 18 percent of council donors were people of color.

Women made up 30 percent of all donors, 27 percent of Emanuel donors and 44 percent of Garcia donors. People making more than $100,000 (15 percent of Chicago’s population) make up 63 percent of donors. Emanuel relied more heavily on the wealthy, and they made up four-fifths of his donors, compared to only 38 percent of Garcia’s donors. Fifty eight percent of council donors made more than $100,000.

This finding, that the donor class is overwhelmingly rich, white and male, meshes well with data on federal donors. An AP study of the 2012 election finds that 90 percent of donations came from white neighborhoods. Political scientist Michael Barber recently found that federal donors were overwhelmingly high income and high wealth. The extensive Demos report, “Stacked Deck,” also explored how racial disparities in the donor class affected policy.

More diverse in the middle

Although the disclosure limit in Chicago prohibits examining the small donor pool, the report examines the differences between medium and large donors. While donors between $150 and $999 were 73 percent white, donors giving more than $1,000 were 88 percent white. Among mid-level Mayoral donors, 67 percent were white.  Among mid-level donors, 46 percent had incomes above $100,000, compared with 74 percent of the large donor pool.

Because the big donor pool is dominated by men, whites and the wealthy, it skews the total share of contributions coming from these groups. When examining the share of contributions (rather than share of donors) the disparities discussed become even larger. City council and mayoral candidates raised a whopping 93 percent of their money from whites, 78 percent from men, and 78 percent from those earning more than $100,000.

How affluence begets influence

Most of the reporting about money in politics is influenced by the data that are available. This still leads to great and important investigative journalism, but it leaves out important stories about the systemic race, class and gender divides in who donates to politics. OpenSecrets deserves credit for using what limited tools are available (“educated guesses based on biographical material available online”) to find that only 12 of the largest 500 donors in the 2014 midterm election were people of color. However, money in politics is a great example of how important and necessary stories can go untold because data aren’t available.

But even with the data that is available, the racial justice implications of money in politics are clear, but rarely articulated. Simply examining a list of the most powerful and influential donors on both the left and right makes it clear that politicians are spending most of their fundraising time listening to the concerns of an overwhelmingly white group. Indeed, President Obama discussed powerfully in his memoir,

“The Audacity of Hope,” a career spent concerned with the needs of the donor class can wrap perspectives. It’s worth quoting at length.

President Obama writes,

Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means — law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. […]

[T]hey reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital.

As I note in my report, this is almost identical to what political scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels and Jason Seawright found when they interviewed high-wealth individuals for their Survey of Economically Successful Americans (SESA) study. They write of the rich,

“They are extremely active politically and that they are much more conservative than the American public as a whole with respect to important policies concerning taxation, economic regulation, and especially social welfare programs.”

Other politicians have complained about the rarified class they spend time drawing from contributions from, including Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy.

Such elbow-rubbing likely has an influence over policy in Chicago. Rahm Emanuel has been incredibly close to megadonor Michael Sacks, with whom he reportedly talks daily and has exchanged at least 1,500 e-mails. When surveying wealthy Chicagoans, the political scientists performing the SESA survey noted that,

Most of our respondents supplied the title or position of the federal government official with whom they had their most important recent contact. Several offered the officials’ names, occasionally indicating that they were on a first-name basis with “Rahm” (Emmanuel [sic], then President Obama’s Chief of Staff) or “David” (Axelrod, his chief political counsel).

The question is not necessarily quid pro quo corruption (i.e. “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”), but rather a more subtle, more pervasive bias towards the preferences of the wealthy.

Conclusion

One solution to these inequities is a public financing system, either one that matches small dollar donations, one that gives qualified candidates a public grant or one gives all individuals a voucher to contribute. These systems have been shown to increase donor diversity, paving the way for more representative democracy. Public financing is already beginning to win, and as donors continue to dominate elections, will grow ever more important. By empowering the more diverse small donor pool, public financing could lead to more equitable policy making.

Yes, non-parents “deserve” maternity leave — we could all use a break for “self-reflection”

Ain’t no hate read like the one by the spoiled, entitled, childless woman hate read, AM I RIGHT? Case in point: The currently blowing up on the New York Post feature by author Meghann Foye with the napalm-grade title 
 “I want all the perks of maternity leave — without having any kids.” 

Foye is the author of a new novel called “grow and develop as humans and professionals.” Last year, my spouse, after several years with his company, earned four paid weeks off to use as he saw fit. The contemporary American work model — one that is so relentless and all consuming that an adult professional woman writer might in all sincerity publish an op-ed that suggests time off to have a baby is some kind “break” — is wildly disordered. People need time off for all kinds of reasons and no, Foye’s “My best friend just got ghosted by her OkCupid date and needs a margarita” scenario is not equivalent to my 36 hours of labor. But the idea that time off — for any variety of personal reasons — makes us sharper and more focused and better is a totally valid one. It’s not selfish. It’s just makes sense.

Amy Schumer mocks how easy it is to buy a gun in hilarious Home Shopping Network sketch

It’s no secret that the mass shooting at a showing of “Trainwreck” in Louisiana last summer has left an indelible impact on Amy Schumer. The star recently revealed that she was overwhelmed with guilt shortly following the incident where two women were killed and several others injured before the shooter eventually turned the gun on himself. 

But while Schumer’s Comedy Central hit may have kicked of its fourth season with what Salon TV critic Sonia Saraiya describes as “one of the weakest episodes of ‘Inside Amy Schumer,’ period,” a newly released preview of the season’s second episode is everything we’ve come to love about Schumer’s direct comedy.

“This is a gun,” a chipper Schumer explains while brandishing a weapon in a HSN/QVQ style sketch. “Just your regular, run-of-the-mill, meat-and-potatoes handgun. Now how cute is that?”

Comedian Kyle Dunnigan, who plays Schumer’s home-shopping co-host, adds, “It’s like a toy but it’s extremely real,” to which Schumer proclaims, “Here is what’s great about this: Pretty much anyone can purchase this!”

On the lower third of the screen, a series of changing messages mock America’s lax gun laws.

“If you’re mentally ill, you’d be mentally ill not to give us a call,” one message reads on screen as the mock HSN-style guns sold ticker rises. The onscreen number actually (1-888-885-4011) connects to Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest group working to fight gun violence in the U.S., which connects callers to their local congresspeople.

A few callers eventually dial in to inquire about purchasing a gun, and despite revealing rather glaring red flags, learn they too can purchase a gun from Schumer’s “gun show.”

“Oh no, I could never get a gun. I have several violent felonies,” a caller says.

“You bite your tongue, you silly goose,” Schumer chides. “You could absolutely get a gun if you have several felonies, as long as you buy it on the Internet or at a gun show.”

Another caller informs Schumer he’s “a suspected terrorist on the no-fly list,” to which Schumer replies: “You’re fine, sweet potato fries.”

“No one can tell you that you don’t have a right to buy a gun in this country you’re trying to destroy!”

Schumer’s character continues to remind “all the parents at home” that guns “make perfect stocking-stuffers. For as young as — it doesn’t matter. These are great for any age group,” before a siren alarms the “gun show” hosts that there’s yet another mass shooting in America.

“Uh oh! You know what that means,” Schumer complains. “The government could be coming for your guns soon — like they never have, but always might!” A list of members of Congress who were recipients of gun lobby money scrolls along the bottom of the screen. 

“This was a sketch that Amy personally felt really strongly about,” Dan Powell, executive producer for Inside Amy Schumer told Entertainment Weekly. “The whole writers room piped in with jokes and ideas and things like that but ultimately, this was Amy’s baby.”

The episode airs tonight, Thursday, April 28, on Comedy Central at 10 p.m.: