HomeLatest ThreadsGreatest ThreadsForums & GroupsMy SubscriptionsMy Posts
DU Home » Latest Threads » ProfessorPlum » Journal
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 ... 39 Next »

ProfessorPlum

Profile Information

Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 11,200

Journal Archives

It Is Journalism's Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible

https://www.theonion.com/it-is-journalism-s-sacred-duty-to-endanger-the-lives-of-1850126997

“Quentin” is a 14-year-old assigned female at birth who now identifies as male against the wishes of his parents. His transition was supported by one of his unmarried teachers, who is not a virgin. He stole his parents’ car and drove to the hospital, where a doctor immediately began performing top surgery on him. Afterward, driving home drunk from the hospital, Quentin became suicidally depressed, and he wonders now, homeless and ridden with gonorrhea, if transitioning was a mistake.

We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.

We stand behind our recent obsessed-seeming torrent of articles and essays on trans people, which we believe faithfully depicts their lived experiences as weird and gross. We remain dedicated to finding the angles that best frame the basic rights of the gender-nonconforming as up for debate, and we will use these same angles over and over again in hopes that this repetition makes them suffer. As journalists, it is our obligation to entertain any and all pseudoscience that gives bigotry an intellectual veneer. We must be diligent in laundering our vitriol through the posture of journalistic inquiry, and we must be allowed to fixate on the genitals.


The Onion writes what the NYT should have.
Posted by ProfessorPlum | Sun Feb 19, 2023, 06:09 PM (7 replies)

Trump just declared war on trans people

fuck that seditious, criminal asshole.

edit: link to his horrible speech.
Posted by ProfessorPlum | Thu Feb 2, 2023, 08:35 AM (14 replies)

The extremely wealthy are planning to transcend humanity

using their vast wealth accumulation as both the cause of future crises and the means of "escape".

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff

Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.


emphasis mine
Posted by ProfessorPlum | Thu Sep 15, 2022, 03:46 PM (7 replies)

Roe v. Wade WAS the compromise decision. It protects a fetus in the 3rd trimester

except in cases of the health or life of the mother. The right wing fascists keep lying to say that progressives want abortion right up to birth, but that was never the situation in the US after Roe. They keep implying that we have to compromise and give up free abortions in the 3rd trimester - but that was never even on the table.

So happy to see women and men voters all over the country dealing out appropriate punishment to these religious prigs for denying bodily autonomy for women.
Posted by ProfessorPlum | Fri Sep 9, 2022, 01:53 PM (0 replies)

I'll be amazed if this country can't protect itself and prosecute a blatant criminal

TFG keeps admitting to crimes. In public. That would have anyone else in chains for decades. Can we really not put a stop to this one man crime spree?
Posted by ProfessorPlum | Fri Sep 9, 2022, 01:06 PM (8 replies)

allowing morons, children, hate-filled goons, and the propagandized to carry weapons of war

actually decreases everyone's freedoms. It means we all have to worry about being in public. When will the next NRA-fest be? Which innocents will be slaughtered? How can we make schools prisons - take away their freedom to be in an open, light-filled, liberating environment and replace them with windowless, booby-trapped, cement cells?

Why can't we win this argument (or at least make the argument) on the basis of maximizing everyone else's freedom not to be gunned down - or worry about ourselves or our loved ones or innocent friends that we haven't met yet - being gunned down?
Posted by ProfessorPlum | Sat Jun 11, 2022, 11:47 AM (2 replies)

Old DU favorite Alan Grayson is running to unseat Marco Rubio!

Some of you may remember Grayson for actually having the guts to call out Republican inhumanity for what it is. He famously outlined the GOP healthcare plan as "Don't get sick. If you do get sick, die quickly."

He has lost some primary and general races in the years in between. And I remember there being allegations of domestic abuse during a divorce.

But he's exactly the kind of person I would love to see in the Senate, calling out Reptilian Bullshit.

See this wikipedia entry for the list of candidates in his race
Posted by ProfessorPlum | Mon Jun 6, 2022, 05:15 PM (28 replies)

so, do I have this right? The corporations win again, and rub our noses in it

They broke the Democratic agenda into two parts, one that corporations liked better, and one that the citizens liked better, with the promise that both parts had to pass, together.

Then, because corporations have to always win and never lose, and citizens have to always lose and never win, we pared the citizen's bill down to almost nothing.

And now, we will pass the corporations' bill nearly unchanged, plus the husk of the citizens' bill.

Just making sure that I'm perceiving this correctly, and that corporate America wins again and disciplines us citizens to expect nothing from government.
Posted by ProfessorPlum | Thu Oct 28, 2021, 05:01 PM (53 replies)

Corporations had to stop Americans from finding out the government could make their lives better

Joe Biden's infrastructure plans seemed so simple. Why not, it seemed to say, spend some of our tax dollars making our country and our lives better, instead of just flushing them away by giving them to people who are already rich or corporations that deal death?

But . . . the corporations who have bought the government obviously did not like that. They can't have the American people less desperate, less stressed, less over-worked. Americans must not, under any circumstances, learn that their tax dollars can be used to make their lives better. It's just not done. Not in America.

And so, we've had two avatars of this corporate mind set kill/main/wound/slow-walk the whole thing. But it's obvious to me that the rest of the corporate world is A-OK with this result, or else the other Democrats would actually object in real and strenuous ways to what was happening.

So . . . because corporations can't let Americans benefit from their government, they are ok with a small group of Democrats (and all Republicans) killing this effort. They are ok with Biden's agenda and approval rating going down the toilet. They are ok with Republicans possibly gaining back control of the house, the senate, the Whitehouse, probably to destroy democracy in this country.

My question is - Biden and the people around him are mostly creatures of Washington. They know, or should know, what is possible in the current state of corporate capture of the government. So, why did they let this embarrassment happen? Who didn't get the memo? Was it Joe Biden himself who miscalculated and thought that our corporate masters would let Americans actually get some benefit, some crumbs, from our amazing productivity and wealth? And why didn't he know better?

It's weird - it's like Zappa's quote about pulling back the curtain to reveal the brick wall behind it, except the surprised people seem to be the Biden administration. I would have thought they were cynical enough for this job, but maybe I was wrong?

In any case, we can breathe a sigh of relief that we won't have to have eye, or dental, or hearing care when we get older. Wouldn't want to cut into any corporate profits, after all, and we the citizens need to be taught that with every lesson.
Posted by ProfessorPlum | Wed Oct 27, 2021, 03:58 PM (24 replies)
Go to Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 ... 39 Next »