This Week in Our Dumb World
The Far Right To The North
It’s not just Trump. Or Brexit. Or any one place. White extremism is on the rise and it’s very very dangerous.
This is the story of who it plants its roots.
The overarching goal for many in the Canadian Super Players chat group was the eventual creation of a white ethnostate. In the meantime, one aim was to begin slowly gaining a foothold in a range of institutions and professions, including law, education and the military.
One member described himself as a graduate student and an active far-right recruiter with a keen interest in grassroots political organization. Another said he worked in a small Ontario city at a blue-collar job where he was trying to gradually increase his “power level,” or overt racism, to convert his co-workers to his world view. A third was a middle-aged father who bragged that his teenage children seemed to be adopting his attitudes.
Yet another, who went by the online moniker Dank, described himself as a University of Toronto graduate who was now training at another institution to become a teacher. Like other members of the group, he took care not to reveal his name, but he shared an image of what appeared to be course material with the logo of Nipissing University in North Bay, Ont.
He said that at one point he was working as a student teacher at a school with children in Grades 6, 7 and 8, whose ethnic makeup was almost entirely white. “It’s the ethnostate basically,” he wrote.
Dank told the online group that he was using his position as a student teacher to influence young minds. He described one classroom scene in which the students were learning about the Second World War and the Holocaust. “In a moment where the actual teacher wasn’t in the room, I casually asked them their thoughts and opinions,” he wrote.
The children, he continued, generally saw the Holocaust as “really bad,” but one of them asked why it had happened. Dank asked the young girl, “What was the point of the train cars and the deportations if it was just to kill them all?” He then encouraged the students to look into it on their own if they were curious.
The Car Detective
There are many things that I read that make me contemplate the road not traveled.
Having said that, none of the roads I might have traveled are anywhere near as cool as becoming a car detective. Joe’s job is to track down only the rarest of stolen cars and that, quite frankly, is cool as shit.
Here is the story of his white whale.
People end up doing all kinds of jobs in this life. You sometimes wonder if, given a few left turns and different choices, the guy playing center field at Yankee Stadium could have ended up a taxi driver instead. Or vice versa. But Joe . . . Joe Ford is what happens when a particular set of skills, personality traits, and turns of phrase lead a person into the only thing he should be doing. It’s rare. And when you see him at work—when you see him move easily among both the shady creatures of criminality and the millionaires on those yachts—you wonder whether you, like him, have found your place in the world.
The FBI agent was calling about a new lead in Joe’s current case. It’s a big one, the kind that could set Joe up for a long time. Maybe help him get his own boat, his own rare sports car. Help his daughter be more comfortable as she copes with the disease that’s taking away her eyesight. Help him disappear into the sunset.
He’s been working this case for six years. “Everyone loves cars, but this is different,” Joe says. “At this level, it’s about bragging rights for the rarest and the best. That’s what makes the Teardrop so coveted.”
David Shaw Probably Isn’t A White Woman
Look, as the article points out, there are always going to be a number of data errors in any kind of large scale self reporting database like this. This is particularly true when it comes to an important project that can definitely be handed to the lowest level of staff to complete.
So, I am understanding of all of that. But you can’t simultaneously be the kind of organization that crows about diversity and threatens elaborate legal action when players might get paid AND be the kind of organization that lists David Shaw as a white woman in a database that is used to inform policy decision making.
In this three-year period alone, the NCAA’s database lists 28 different Division I programs with at least one woman working as a football coach. I gotta give some props here, because if this were true, major college football would be a progressive beacon in the American sports landscape. But the only woman who actually coached DI football in 2018 was at Dartmouth, where Callie Brownson made history as a quality control coach.
Yet according to the database, USF had a woman as its defensive coordinator in 2017. Michigan had three women assistant coaches in 2018. Georgia Tech had three in 2016. Arizona State had three, Michigan State had three, Missouri had one, Houston had three, Syracuse had three, and on and on. These errors aren’t confined to football. I found a few more instances in men’s basketball and baseball.
Jack Kirby Was Bad With Names
It! The Living Colossus
As a disclaimer, my knowledge of comic books stops around 1993 (thanks, Rob Liefeld) so just assume I don't know about these characters being brought back as jokes in Deadpool comics or whatever by the man-children who run comics. I'm sure Super Adaptoid is now She-Hulk's gay Hispanic teen friend or whatever because somebody keeps paying Judd Winick to fuck up everything.
It! is a living colossus a Soviet statue brought to life by a "hostile extraterrestrial", so the next time you're watching Signs and you're all, "LOL why would aliens who are allergic to water come to a planet that is 80% water, why can't they open doors" remember that the best comic creator of all time thought "the alien is mad at us, so he makes a statue come to life, and also it's a communist" was a good idea.
Defenestration
Yes, it’s throwing people through a window. And yes, I love that “throwing someone through a window” has a name.
But then there’s a section on “Auto-defenestration ” that takes it to another level.