I’ve heard it in more personal contexts over the last few weeks, and just a few minutes ago I opened an email from “People’s Action” that propagates the myth that abusers can become your friends if you’re just kind enough to them and give them what they want: to feel big, strong, powerful, comfortable, and “whole” or other words for happy or satisfied.

Talk of offering “a better option” to them and taking pains to make them not feel like they have to “reject Trump” or “admit he’s wrong” or “face their behavior” is dangerous, self-harming, self-destructive talk that enables abuse to continue, because it’s completely ineffective and gives them the sense that voting for Trump is the right choice because now you’re groveling or pandering to them.

You can’t satisfy a supremacist or a narcissist, or people who are devoted allies to them. Your very existence upsets them. Being kind to them, bleeding for them, and even sacrificing your life for them either won’t result in them feeling anything positive toward you, or will result in a blip of positivity that will quickly be replaced by yet another expression of rage and yet another instance of abuse.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s words about love defeating hate don’t apply to supremacists and narcissists, or to people who are devoted to them. Those kinds of “bullies” don’t “bully” because they are seeking to fill a need for a social relationship with an authority figure. Those “bullies” aren’t “hurt people who hurt people.” Assholes like that enjoy being assholes, and that’s why they gravitate toward each other and commit abuse in packs. They are driven by lust for inflicting violence on others, by lust for control, and by lust for personal excess.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/11/1787482/-Sick-of-the-make-your-abusers-comfortable-arguments-from-liberals

Recently, an 80-year-old man from a village in Jiangsu province risked his own life by going into a river to rescue a drowning 8-year-old boy. It turns out that he’s done this kind of thing before.

According to a video shared by Jiangsu Television, the elderly man, surnamed Xu, said that he and his wife had heard a little boy screaming for help while frantically paddling to keep his head above water on the morning of August 3rd. Despite injuries sustained two years ago when he fell down the stairs, Xu got into the river with the help of his wife and rescued the boy without hesitation.

More:
https://shanghai.ist/2018/08/08/elderly-man-rescues-drowning-boy-discovers-he-also-saved-the-kids-father-30-years-ago/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

To the woman who hasn’t been herself for a while
Stay hopeful…
That your spark will reignite soon.
That this weight will heave itself from your tired shoulders, soon.
That you’ll recognise the girl in the mirror again someday.
Soon.
Don’t let the fear rise up and engulf you in the middle of the night anymore. It’s not real. It’s a lie and it’s keeping you down.
This will pass.
You, you’re still in there.
Hang on.


https://ladiespassiton.com/2018/08/09/to-the-woman-who-hasnt-been-herself-in-a-while/

Picture it: it’s a Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden, and Rod Stewart has just started crooning “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” Suddenly, a Secret Service team appears with none other than Eric Trump.

That was the scene earlier this week when Trump and his wife Lara went to see Stewart perform. According to Page Six, Today anchors Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie were also in the crowd.

Stewart has been a friend of Donald Trump’s for decades, but voiced concern over the real-estate mogul’s foray into politics.


Although he’s sort of a friend of mine, I don’t think he’s presidential,” he told press at Buckingham Palace in 2016. “I don’t think he’s made to be a president.


https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/08/eric-trump-rod-stewart-concert?mbid=social_facebook

GOP strategist Rick Wilson was abruptly muted for seven seconds during an appearance on MSNBC after going on an expletive-filled rant about President Trump and his supporters on Monday morning. When asked by MSNBC co-host John Heilemann during the program how the president can continue to “genuinely boast” about his high approval ratings among his party, Wilson said in response: “Cocaine’s a hell of a drug.” “They love the fact that Donald Trump finally gives them this sort of id of the Republican Party,” Wilson said. “They’re finally given permission to say the ugly things they kind of wanted in their secret hearts for a long time, and the monster got out of its cage in terms of a lot of the.....

Snip:

“I said ‘Washington is full of profiles in chickenshit. You and I both get calls from members of Congress who say I can't stand this asshole,’” Wilson said in a tweet.

More:

http://thehill.com/homenews/media/400565-msnbc-forced-into-7-second-delay-after-gop-strategist-expletive-filled-rant

California firefighters made a surprising discovery as they were helping residents deal with the aftermath of the deadly Carr wildfire that has destroyed more than 1,000 homes.

Grass Valley Fire Department Chief Mark Buttron shared a heartwarming image of a chicken and a cat that huddled together for safety and support in a home in Redding, Calif., which was ravaged by the fast-moving blaze. Firefighters found the unlikely pair last week in the doorway of a home seeking shelter from the nearby fire.

The photo shows the black and white cat sprawled out on the floor next to a large water bowl and the chicken on the other side of the dish. It is unclear how long the animals were inside the home alone.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/unlikely-pair-found-huddling-together-233500459.html

forgot how to add photo

...Strikingly, modern-day socialists embrace this idea, as does the alt-right. In “Kill All Normies,” Angela Nagle explores the deepest and darkest sub-cultures of the internet to find out how the far-right reignited the culture wars and help Trump triumph in the 2016 presidential election.
Snip

I think there are economic solutions to some of it but it also requires a major shift in the culture at this point. Young people need to be able to have families and a home and some kind of job stability. We also need to restore the dignity of ordinary people.

Ruthless competitive individualism is being applied to the romantic and private realm and it's deeply anti-social. Ultimately though, the emergence of all of this is really about demographics and race. Though I've been guilty of it myself in the past, I would now caution that these issues should be considered before diving straight into the psycho-sexual interpretations.
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/08/03/how-the-grotesque-online-culture-wars-fuel-populism?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/howthegrotesqueonlineculturewarsfuelpopulismopenfuture

Snip:
What the Daily Beast found — and why it matters
To understand how the Daily Beast figured out what was going on here, you need to understand a few technical details.

Fancy Bear, a subgroup of Russia’s GRU intelligence service, is the same group that went after Clinton campaign staffers in 2016. The strategy was to put a link in an email saying a password had expired, and then redirect the reader to a website where they would click another link that would grant the hackers access to the email accounts.

To get people to click the second link, the hackers plastered their fake website with Microsoft logos — so it looked like a site you’d legitimately visit to change your Outlook password. Microsoft didn’t like this and actually sued the Russian hackers in US court, demanding the power to be able to shut down any websites hosted on servers identified as belonging to Fancy Bear that used Microsoft logos in them. In August 2017, the company won the case, and it’s been shutting down Fancy Bear sites ever since.

The Beast reporters looked through evidence related to that case and found something interesting in a September 26 snapshot of one of the now-closed Russian sites: a “fake password-change page with the Senate email address of a McCaskill policy aide on display.”

What that shows, in short, is that a website that Microsoft had determined to be hosted on a Fancy Bear server was demonstrably trying to trick a McCaskill staffer into giving up access to their account. That is fairly strong evidence that Russia’s intelligence services were, in fact, trying to hack McCaskill.

This is an extremely big deal. Microsoft had already announced that Russian hackers had gone after “three candidates” in the 2018 election, but hadn’t revealed who they were. Identifying McCaskill specifically as a target is incredibly revealing: She’s only up on her Republican opponent by one point in the RealClearPolitics average. If Democrats lose her seat, they face a very tough road to win back the Senate in November. Helping Republicans defeat McCaskill (or another Democratic senator in a Trump-voting state) would be perhaps the single biggest boost that Russia could give to the GOP — and, by extension, to President Trump.

All in all, this Trump tweet, from Tuesday, has aged remarkably poorly:


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
I’m very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election. Based on the fact that no President has been tougher on Russia than me, they will be pushing very hard for the Democrats. They definitely don’t want Trump!

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/7/26/17619818/russia-claire-mccaskill-2018-midterm-hack

The depiction of police in the Seattle Police Department’s lip-sync video didn’t feel right to Seattle music producer Spekulation (aka Matt “Spek” Watson), so he created a parody of it, using footage of the city’s police force responding to downtown protests.


“This one just seemed like very low-hanging fruit,” Watson said. “I’ve been to so many protests downtown and have seen how Seattle police interact with protesters down there.”

Seattle Police Sgt. Sean Whitcomb said Watson’s video was clever, but stands by the lip-sync video as a community policing effort that he said many residents, visitors and businesses were excited to be a part of. He added that Macklemore signed off on the use of his song.


Whitcomb said satire and police accountability are important, but that neither should take away from the project’s authenticity.

“The project is commonly known as the lip-sync video, but for us it’s so much more than that,” Whitcomb said. “It was a sincere way for us to connect with the people who live here.”

Watson disagreed, calling the video “over the top.” He’s critical of the department’s claim that the video is a community-policing effort, which he said should entail an effort by police to be deeply involved in and accountable to the communities they serve.

“I understand the reaction to people having fun and that’s all fine and good,” he said. “But that doesn’t solve any of the systemic problems.”

Watson, a former rapper, now spends his time producing music for local artists, editing video and raising his child. Watson also produced a parody of an Amazon recruitment video in 2015.


More at link:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-police-lip-sync-video-swiftly-lampooned-spliced-with-images-of-downtown-protests/?utm_source=marketingcloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning+Brief+7-27-18_7_27_2018&utm_term=Active%20subscriber

By Danny Westneat

Seattle Times staff columnist

In a certain world, one populated by a surprisingly large subset of the nation, Seattle now is a city of intolerant and violent leftists hellbent on stomping Trump supporters. Oh and we have green hair.

This is the view you got if you went down the rabbit hole of the right-wing Wurlitzer media machine this past week.

If you missed it — and that depends almost entirely on your Facebook algorithm — a 17-year-old from Illinois made national and international news here this past week when he walked around Capitol Hill wearing a Make America Great Again hat.

Snip

A few years ago, I would have chalked all this up to fringe silliness. But times have changed. The main conservative sites that featured the story — the Daily Mail, Breitbart, Western Journal, The Epoch Times, Daily Caller and Infowars — now have among them more than 35 million followers on Facebook alone (a hundredfold more than The Seattle Times).

The MAGA-hat-wearing teen then used the incident to indict entire belief systems: “I want to expose the left for what they do,” he said. By Monday he was on Fox News national radio, concluding: “If someone wears an Obama hat … I don’t think they have to be scared of people giving them bad looks or assaulting them.”

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/a-tale-of-two-stories-seattles-brushes-with-hate/?utm_source=marketingcloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning+Brief+7-25-18_7_25_2018&utm_term=Registered%20User