Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Eyeroll: “White supremacy is the root of all race-related violence in the US”

Amid the disturbing rise in attacks on Asian Americans since March 2020 is a troubling category of these assaults: Black people are also attacking Asian Americans.

White people are the main perpetrators of anti-Asian racism. But in February 2021, a Black person pushed an elderly Asian man to the ground in San Francisco; the man later died from his injuries. In another video, from New York City on March 29, 2021, a Black person pushes and beats an Asian American woman on the sidewalk in front of a doorway while onlookers observe the attack, then close their door on the woman without intervening or providing aid.

As the current president of the Association for Asian American Studies and as an ethnic studies and critical race studies professor who specializes in Asian American culture, I wanted to address the climate of anti-Asian racism I was seeing at the start of the pandemic. So in April 2020, I created a PowerPoint slide deck about anti-Asian racism that my employer, the University of Colorado Boulder, turned into a website. That led to approximately 50 interviews, workshops, talks and panel presentations that I’ve done on anti-Asian racism, specifically in the time of COVID-19.

The point I’ve made through all of those experiences is that anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism: white supremacy. So when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy. White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it.

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Biden to establish commission to study expanding Supreme Court


President Biden will sign an executive order Friday establishing a commission to study whether to add seats to the Supreme Court and other reform proposals, the White House announced, fulfilling a promise he made on the campaign trail.

The commission will be chaired by former White House counsel Bob Bauer and Cristina Rodriguez, a Yale law school professor and former deputy assistant attorney general, and largely consists of academics and former officials from across the political spectrum. 

It will delve into the issue of potentially expanding the court — an idea that has been floated by some progressives but heavily criticized by Republicans — and which Biden himself has been cool to, though without explicitly ruling out the option.

“The Commission’s purpose is to provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, including an appraisal of the merits and legality of particular reform proposals,” the White House said in a release. “The topics it will examine include the genesis of the reform debate; the Court’s role in the Constitutional system; the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court; the membership and size of the Court; and the Court’s case selection, rules, and practices.”

The White House said that the commission will hold public meetings to hear arguments from experts and interested parties. It will be required to complete a report on its work within 180 days of its first public meeting. 

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YouTube CEO: It’s easy to “make up content and post it from your basement” so we boost “authoritative sources”

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has acknowledged that the platform’s policy of boosting “authoritative” mainstream media sources and suppressing independent creators in search makes it “harder, in some cases, for channels, maybe who are getting started or smaller, to be able to be visible when there’s a major event or when people are looking at something that is science or news related” but insists that that the policy is “really, really important.”

Wojcicki made the comments during an interview with The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, at the World Economic Forum’s Global Technology Governance Summit 2021.

While she acknowledged that this policy does make it harder for creators in some cases, Wojcicki argued that the policy is necessary:

“When we had the Las Vegas shooting, unfortunately, there were a lot of people who were uploading content that was not factual, that was not correct. And it’s much easier to just make up content and post it from your, your basement than it is to actually go to the site and to be able to report and have high-quality journalistic reporting. And so, that was just an example of what happens if you don’t have that kind of ranking.

So sure, we want to enable citizen journalism and other people to be able to report and other people to be able to share information on new channels but when we’re dealing with a sensitive topic, we have to have that information coming from authoritative sources so that the right and accurate information is viewed by our users first.”

Thompson followed up by pointing out that such a policy seems to go against the whole principle of YouTube.

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CNN raises eyebrows after warning of ‘racist’ fonts that ‘communicate Asianness’

CNN has developed a reputation for finding offense around every corner, but the liberal network was mocked on Wednesday for taking it a step further and declaring certain text fonts “communicating Asianness” can be racist.

“CNN has reached the epitome of ‘we’re out of stuff to pretend to be outraged by this week for clicks’ if they’re surmising which fonts are racist,” political satirist Tim Young told Fox News.

A font, defined as a set of type or characters all of one style, can “perpetuate problematic stereotypes,” according to CNN. The network’s verified Twitter account wrote, “For years, the West has relied on so-called ‘chop suey’ fonts to communicate ‘Asianness’ in food packaging, posters and ad campaigns. But such fonts perpetuate problematic stereotypes,” to accompany a report examining the theory.

“This piece leaves me with more questions than virtue signals,” Young said. “Which fonts belong to which demographics? Does this mean Times New Roman is a Caucasian font? Is the old typewriter font for elderly people? Are there straight and gay fonts or fonts based on the 54 genders? I need to know. I’m so confused at this point.”

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Kansas mayor resigns after threats over backing mask mandate

 A western Kansas mayor announced her immediate resignation Tuesday because of threats she has received after publicly supporting a mask mandate.

Dodge City Mayor Joyce Warshaw said she was concerned about her safety after encountering aggression, including threats via phone and email, after she was quoted in a USA Today article Friday supporting a mask mandate, The Dodge City Globe reported.

“I understand people are under a lot of pressure from various things that are happening around society like the pandemic, the politics, the economy, so on and so forth, but I also believe that during these times people are acting not as they normally would,” Warshaw said.

The commission voted 4-1 on Nov. 16 to impose a mask mandate, with several exceptions.

Ford County, where Dodge City is located, has recorded 4,914 cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic began, according to the state health department. The county has about 33,600 residents.

Warshaw said despite the threats, she doesn’t regret voting in favor of the mask mandate.

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Editor’s note: we used to tar and feather them, so…a kinder gentler nation?