Weekend Reads: The Troll Taunter, Kids Understand Trans Rights Better Than Adults, and the Fall of Milo
Happy Weekend Readers! It’s February 26th, the day that Galileo Galilei was ordered by the Pope to…
to abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it… to abandon completely… the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.
Celebrate by using almost any piece of modern technology ever invented. And fuck the Pope.
Emily Temple-Wood has been editing Wikipedia since she was 12, and for much of the last decade she has been inundated with the kind of vile sexist abuse that has become an all too common experience for women on the internet, Emily is fighting back in her own way, thumbing her nose at misogynists by creating the Women Scientists WikiProject to feature underrepresented female scientists on Wikipedia. Because there’s nothing internet trolls hate more than successful women.
Homeopathic teething products are, like all homeopathic products, a rip off. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A recent investigation has revealed that some of these products contain an inconsistent amount of belladonna, or deadly nightshade. Yup, these fuckers are selling you poison for your babies teething pain.
I am Jazz, a doll based on transgender reality TV star Jazz Jennings made it’s debut at this years New York toy fair. Very cool!
Does bad parenting cause ADHD? Is this a really crappy question? Can science help us reach a reasonable answer? Is that answer NO? I hope it’s no. (Hint… it’s no.)
Did you see the LEGO Batman Movie? If you haven’t then GO. It is awesome, all three Hellions loved it. I loved it. It is also evidently a vehicle for PRO-GAY PROPAGANDA!!!!
Just as the first Lego Movie played with themes of love and community that got twisted into accusations of Communist propaganda, by not condemning the idea of gay relationships, and by allowing a character to believe he has two adopted fathers without that being a mean punchline, those who fear these things view all that as pro-gay propaganda.
So I suppose it all comes down to whether the subtle normalizing of this inclusive view of gender and sexual orientation is something we want to see in the entertainment we consume. And this serves as a reminder, then, that there are still, somehow, people who have trouble embracing these ideas.
Romper likes lists. We like lists. Here’s a list from Romper… 7 Ways to Raise Your Daughter Without White Feminism.
We talk a lot about raising kids here at GP. But there is another important part of the parent/child relationship that is often overlooked. No one wants to talk about losing a parent, but not planning for it makes it worse. This really hits home as my cohort of early Gen-Xer’s are starting to lose Moms and Dads to age and illness.
Janet Mock believes that young people get trans rights. It’s adults who don’t.
Young people overwhelmingly get it. It’s adults like those in the Trump administration who don’t realize that pitting young people against one another has consequences. It encourages some to be bullies and turns others into sinister objects.
These ridiculous wedge topics are a waste of our time and our resources. We’re talking about restrooms here — people should be able to do their business in peace.
Speaking of the Trump administration and bigotry, share this story with your racist uncle if you can…
I Was a Muslim in Trump’s White House, When President Obama left, I stayed on at the National Security Council in order to serve my country. I lasted eight days.
Saying no one in the country is responsible or reliable enough to serve as a legal guardian, child protective services officials from all 50 states confirmed Friday that they had found all of the nation’s adults unfit to be parents and had taken custody of approximately 80 million children.
Award winning Australian children’s author Mem Fox was detained for 2 hours by border agents at the Los Angeles Airport. Because the 70 year old writer of “Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes” and “Possum Magic” was obviously up to something?
Finally, two great articles about the fall of Milo Yiannopoulos, alt-right troll and all around horrible human being. Laurie Penny followed Milo and his crew on his recent tour, including reports from the ground of the now infamous clash with protesters in Berkeley with On the Milo Bus with The Lost Boys of America’s New Right.
It seems perfunctory to point out the hypocrisy of building a movement and a career on the back of insulting people — Muslims, migrants, women, people of color — while nursing a hair-trigger sensitivity to any personal attack you haven’t pre-approved. That hypocrisy, though, does not appear self-evident to anyone within this movement, because a fundamental tenet of far-right pro-trolling is that it’s only other people’s feelings that are frivolous. Their own feelings, by contrast, including the capacity to feel shame when they’re held accountable for their actions, are so momentous that infringing them is tantamount to censure, practically fascism in and of itself. These are men, in short, who have founded an entire movement on the basis of refusing to handle their emotions like adults.
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The reason the Lost Boys allow themselves to be stolen away to Neverland is that they want to live somewhere they will never have to grow up. By coincidence, that’s also the reason that a great many people voted to place a spray-tanned authoritarian in the Oval Office. Remember, though, that only Peter rules Neverland. What happens to the Lost Boys in that story if they ever start to build memories and change, if they ever started to become adults?
They skipped this bit in the Disney movie, but, in the books, Peter kills them.
And at Vox, German Lopez explains how Milo’s fall from grace centered around a dangerous old myth about gay men and pedophilia.
One of the reasons Yiannopoulos’s latest comments are so abhorrent is that he, as a gay man, is tapping into a pernicious myth that has been historically used to oppose the rights of the LGBTQ community: the idea that gay men are sexual deviants who approve of all sorts of abhorrent behavior, including pedophilia and child sexual abuse. Yiannopoulos, perhaps inadvertently, played into this myth by arguing that there’s an upside to sexual molestation.
And now for something awesome to wash the taste of bile out of our mouths…
Featured Image Credit: PR Newswire
