On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

I'll get to the point: I am not sure if you're aware that Chanel Pfahl has earned the attention of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network by her conduct before declaring her candidacy for the Zone 8 seat on the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.

I emphasize my choice of verb here: "earned". I say that based on their profile of her activities and conduct:

https://www.antihate.ca/anti_transgender_candidates_enter_school_board_elections_ottawa

She is a person dedicated - so far as I can see - to restoring the protection of law to specific forms of bigotry, against transgender people for openers. We dare not expect her to stop there given the information provided by antihate.ca in the link included above - for example, we see references to "critical race theory", a pet target of Trumpists in the United States - and that's horrific enough. With that in mind, I'm alarmed to see her self-advertisement on page 2 of this half-month's edition of The Orléans Star. Such promotion of hatred is clear evidence that she is unfit to serve on any school board.

I will vote against all organized bigotry, including organized transphobia. I therefore look forward to information on Pfahl's competitors for the Zone 8 seat with great interest.

siderea makes some notes about the monkeypox situation. Once again, we are likely to be Not Paranoid Enough about the things that we should be, because the organized bigots are going to start leveraging this too to restore their power over their chosen prey-groups if they haven't already. And that will likely undermine the public health measure we should already be undertaking.

(Should I use "Augh!" or "Virus Don't Care" for this one?)

Good that they've gotten around to ALEC...

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/12/07/leading-free-market-policy-network-enabling-anti-lgbtq-hate

I think we've had alarms raised by the Indigenous nations about this here on the settler-nations of Turtle Island, right? Michael Geist at the University of Ottawa notes some ongoing trouble between South Africa and the USA along similar lines.

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/?p=13769

That what happened yesterday in Minneapolis to Mr. Floyd - suspected of crimes or not - was murder by torture. I call it what it was.

The firing of the involved officers was a good first step in the response process. I await further steps with a mixture of hope and fear, for reasons already clear to many. There is a history of atrocities and impunity that ties into this.

Thanks to muccamukk for this linkage re: the situation in Bharat-India at the moment, a thing that I think ought to be more widely read:


https://lithub.com/the-graveyard-talks-back-arundhati-roy-on-fiction-in-the-time-of-fake-news/

I'm listening to this at the moment:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/religion-and-canadian-elections-1.5317748

Planning to listen to this later:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/political-rhetoric-about-border-control-part-of-a-moral-panic-says-law-prof-1.5317752

Noting that today, whilst walking around my neighbourhood on a shopping errands and doing yard work, I've spotted bees, a cricket(!) and...possibly a millipede. Are they the ones with "fur" coats?

On the matter of exoplanets around nearby stars:

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/a-second-planet-for-beta-pictoris

(Did I remove "Beta Pictoris" from my list of tags? No, I didn't!)

Current "confirmed" count as of 20 August 2019 at exoplanet.eu, FYI: 4107. Ninety more worlds confirmed in the space of about three months.

And a physicist may have useful data on how to mess with hatemongers online:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/22/online-hate-extremism-physics-science

I'd argue that Andrew Scheer didn't fail to draw the distinction.

He refused to draw the distinction. It's an obedience test for his crowd now, and he chose to pass.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/united-we-roll-1.5030419

That damned shooter is blaming Trudeau for having "triggered" his anxiety. Complaining that Canada's not bigoted enough to be safe for him and his family.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-city-mosque-shooting-bisonnette-sentencing-1.4618414