About what you’d expect of a majority of GOP candidates. 

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the current Republican favorite to be the party’s nominee for governor in 2024, has a long history of remarks viciously mocking and attacking teenage survivors of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, for their advocacy for gun control measures.    

In posts after the shooting, Robinson called the students “spoiled, angry, know it all CHILDREN,” “spoiled little bastards,” and “media prosti-tots.”  

Robinson, whose political rise as a conservative Internet personality started when a clip of him speaking at a city council meeting in April 2018 went viral, as he was speaking against a proposal to cancel a local gun show after the Parkland shooting. He also began attacking the Parkland survivors after they launched the “March for Our Lives” movement that called for new gun control measures, comparing the students to communists. 

It’s a little strange that Republicans would use “communist” as an insult – considering that they just about line up to five political fellatio to a former KGB officer of the Soviet Union.

Back to the probable GOP candidate for governor...

Though the position is largely considered a ceremonial role – and the state has a Democratic governor because the jobs are elected separately – Robinson has now set his sights on the top job. Roy Cooper, the current Democratic governor, is term-limited, and Robinson would likely face Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general, a Democrat finishing out his second term.   

[ ... ]

His harshest rhetoric was saved for then-18-year-old Parkland activist David Hogg, calling the student a “commie stooge,” in a post that also mocked 18-year-old Parkland student X Gonzáles as “that bald chick,” referring to the pair as “stupid kids.”   

Republicans calling other people “stupid”. Yep.

North Carolina, don’t let your state go the way of Tennessee next year!

This is what the GOP now is. The cruelty, the vulgarity, the mean-spiritedness - these are the party’s agenda. The polls have made clear that this is what Republican primary voters want. It satisfies their most vicious impulses, nourishes the worst devils of their nature, makes them feel big, superior to those who are suffering or working to ease the suffering of others. The sneering contempt for the vulnerable, for the marginalized and dispossessed, is now the platform of half of this country’s political ecosystem.

We can only pray that there remain decent people willing to turn their backs on such dreadful candidates, even when they share party affiliation.

OK, IMAGINE THIS RACIST MONSTER AND THEN IMAGINE THE FLOCKS OF MONSTER’S RUSHING TO LISTEN TO HER IGNORANT, RACIST BULLSHIT AND LIES!

Parkland shooter's victims face him in court once more before he's sentenced to life in prison | CNN

Parkland shooter’s victims face him in court once more before he’s sentenced to life in prison | CNN

CNN  —  Parkland school massacre gunman Nikolas Cruz will be formally sentenced this week to life in prison – but not until the families of those he killed in 2018 have one more opportunity to face him in court. “You stole him from us, and you did not receive the justice that you deserved,” Debra Hixon, the widow of victim Christopher Hixon, told Cruz in the first statement Tuesday morning,…

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'You don't know me, but you tried to kill me.' Parkland victims and loved ones get last word before shooter sentenced to life in prison | CNN

‘You don’t know me, but you tried to kill me.�� Parkland victims and loved ones get last word before shooter sentenced to life in prison | CNN

CNN  —  Anguished survivors of the Parkland school shooting and grieving relatives of victims faced the gunman in court before he’s sentenced to life in prison, testifying Tuesday about the loved ones and sense of security he stole from them, and expressing anger over a jury’s decision not to recommend he be put to death. “You don’t know me, but you tried to kill me,” teacher Stacey Lippel told…

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whenever yet another mass shooting happens in the US I always think of Meadow Pollack, an 18 year old senior at MSD High in Parkland Florida who was killed in the shooting there in 2018. Her story has really stuck with me.

when they found her, they discovered that she had used her body to shield a freshman girl. she was shot, injured, crawled to protect Cara Loughran (age 14) who was unable to move due to shock, and the shooter came back and killed them both.

something about the fact that this young woman had to use her last moments to try and save someone smaller than her just really drives home how insane it is that people keep getting put in this unimaginable situation. nobody, especially a kid at school, should ever have to do what Meadow Pollack did.

A fleet of 52 yellow school buses formed a mile-long procession to Sen. Ted Cruz’s house in Houston on Thursday morning — 4,368 empty seats to honor the number of children killed by gun violence since 2020. The procession, dubbed the ‘NRA Children’s Museum,’ was set up by artist Manuel Oliver whose son, Joaquin, was shot and killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Parkland, Florida in 2018. “It’s partially with the intention that some people will think this is truly an NRA museum,” Oliver told BuzzFeed News. The first bus carried items from school shooting victims, including a pair of worn-out checkered Vans from 15-year-old Gracie Muehlberger, killed at her Santa Clarita high school in 2019; a kindergarten graduation card with a smiling teddy bear on it, awarded to Sandy Hook victim Chase Kowalski; and a ​​LeBron James Miami Heat jersey adored by Joaquin Oliver, who died in the Parkland school shooting in 2018. The top of every bus also lists the city and date of the site of mass shootings that took place in America since 2020.

tw: gun violence (this is a long and detailed discussion of gun violence, so please don't read if that makes you uncomfortable!)

i don’t normally talk about this kind of stuff on here, but i’m frustrated and sad and am hoping that some people who read this will find it helpful. if you don’t have time to read, then feel free to skip to the last three paragraphs which contain the big takeaways from all this.

i grew up in a city that many people refer to as the “murder capital” of the united states and that has one of the highest rates of gun-related homicides in the entire country. i heard my first gunshot when i moved to the midwest at age 10 and i couldn’t tell you how many i’ve heard since then.

during the first few years of high school, we had annual 'intruder' drills, where we'd turn off the lights, close the blinds, and huddle in a corner until the teachers told us we could stop. after the parkland shooting in 2018, they started calling them 'active shooter' drills and we had them twice as often. our teachers stopped telling us to hide in a corner of the classroom and instead encouraged us to break the windows and run, do anything in our power to save ourselves if something ever happened.

over the years, there were a few public safety scares that caused our building to be locked down, but i found that the majority of the gun violence that affected our school manifested in ways that i wasn’t prepared for in the slightest. i had a classmate come to school with an untreated gunshot wound. i would see my friends wearing handmade shirts featuring the collaged images of relatives who’d fallen victim to gun violence. even since graduating, three former classmates have passed away after being caught in the crossfire of our country's gun epidemic. there were no drills or prep courses to teach us how to deal with the effects of that.

one the most horrible encounters with gun violence that i have personally experienced happened when i was sixteen. i was attending a neighborhood memorial for a five year old boy who had gotten ahold of his parents’ gun and sadly sustained an accidental and fatal gunshot wound. halfway through the memorial service, which was taking place in a local park, we heard gunshots come from down the street and everyone had to leave behind their candles, flowers, and teddy bears to sprint to safety. the gun violence in my neighborhood had gotten so bad, that we weren’t even able to mourn its victims anymore.

i’m bringing this all up because earlier today, i was scrolling through instagram and was surprised to see my city on a CNN headline. there had been a school shooting at the high school a few blocks away from my old house and it had left 3 people dead and at least 6 people seriously injured. hearing the news broke my heart.

i am currently living in the u.k. and it’s hard to describe to my european friends, most of whom have never been directly impacted by gun violence, why i jump when a heavy dumpster lid is slammed shut, or why i feel the need to sprint if i see a crowd of people running. my friends here will sometimes joke about the u.s. being full of gun-toting, trigger-happy texans, but that is just one caricature of our gun violence epidemic and does not capture the diverse experiences that so many of us have grown up with (and a psa to those who have never been impacted by gun violence — please try to avoid throwaway comments like the one above — gun violence is not a joke).

all this being said, to anyone who has read the news today and is impacted by what’s going on, please take care of yourself and your community. it’s okay to log off if you need to <3

and to all of those who want to channel their frustration into action, remember that the november 8th midterm elections are coming up and this is sadly one of the ONLY ways we can work to prevent further tragedy and fight for better gun control legislation in the u.s. if you’re american, register to vote. if you are an american and won’t be in town on election day or are living abroad, YOU CAN STILL VOTE. and registering is just half the job. make sure you head to your polling place on election day to honor that commitment. research your candidates, check which organizations they give their money to, and which give money to them. there are so many NRA-backed candidates that need to be voted out! keep an eye out for endorsements from people/groups doing the good work. send letters to your local, state, and national representatives. protest. share your own experiences. be there for those who are most impacted (these are ways everyone can help, not just americans!!)

obviously gun violence is not the only issue that is important for the upcoming election, but it’s the one that’s hurting me, my friends, and family the most today.

It's ironic that the administration of the oldest president could be marked by the emergence of a fresh crop of politically savvy young politicians.

David Hogg, one of the organizers of March For Our Lives, is co-founder of a group dedicated to supporting young liberals who run for office.

Leaders We Deserve describes itself as an "EMILY’s List for young people" and that's a useful way to look at it.

The PAC was founded just over five months ago and it's off to a good start.

A Democratic group that aims to recruit and support young candidates for state legislative office announced it raised more than $3 million in the latest quarter of fundraising.   Leaders We Deserve — a group founded by activist David Hogg along with Kevin Lata, Rep. Maxwell Frost’s (D-Fla.) former campaign manager — announced Wednesday its fundraising haul between October and December. More than 100,000 donations were made, with the average contribution being $25, according to figures first shared with The Hill. The group received donations from every state.

Their original goal was to raise $1 million but they took in triple that. And they are using those funds to help younger candidates in races where they can make the biggest difference.

In an interview with The Hill, Hogg said that the goal last quarter was to raise at least $1 million. Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland high school shooting in 2018 who also co-founded March for Our Lives, said the group would be announcing its next slate of endorsed candidates “very soon” and was in the “final stages” of choosing the next picks.   “Part of what we’re doing is really narrowing in on the states where young people can have the biggest impact and not just in voting for these candidates, of course, but voting in statewide races where they may be more inspired to turn out and vote in the first place, especially in a place like Montana, for example, where we could potentially help to break the supermajority,” Hogg told The Hill. Hogg also noted the importance of keeping young voters engaged, as they’ve proven to make or break key races. “The number one reason why young people have turned out to vote so much over the past three election cycles is because of Donald Trump in terms of voting against him, but Donald Trump is not going to be there forever,” said the Leaders We Deserve co-founder.   “And from the work that young people [have] done in the movements over the past several election cycles like March for Our Lives, the environmental movement, the movement for racial justice and others, we know that young people are one of our best ways of stopping Democratic backsliding, ’cause they turn out and vote in such a high rate,” Hogg said. “But we can’t just keep voting against things. We have to vote for something, and we also need to see ourselves represented in office to know that our votes are actually mattering and having an impact and to give us what I perceive to be the greatest way to help our democracy, which is hope.” 

People who vote are taken more seriously than people who don't vote. And one thing which encourages voting is having candidates who reflect the electorate.

Briefly mentioned in the article is that Leaders We Deserve places a high priority on state legislative races. Many disturbing anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ laws get passed in red states because MAGA Republicans have supermajorities in legislatures.

If you're interested, visit their site. If you do contact them, encourage them to become active on Tumblr.

Leaders We Deserve | Invest in Young People

And because state legislative races deserve more attention, look up who represents you in your state capital. If it's MAGA Republicans, get active in the campaign of their Democratic opponents.

Find Your Legislators Look your legislators up by address or use your current location.

Thinking of running for state legislature yourself? The age and residency requirements are mostly lower than for Congress. See what the requirements are in your state.

Eligibility Requirements to Run for the State Legislature

Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama (among others) all served in their state legislatures at one time.

Perhaps you are one of the leaders your state deserves. 🙂

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went on a bizarre tangent after she was called out for lying about her past comments suggesting the Parkland, Florida, school shooting was staged.

During an interview with CBS News’ Lesley Stahl broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes,” Greene was asked for her stance on the 2018 massacre, which left 17 students and staff dead. Two years before she was elected to Congress, Greene responded to a comment on Facebook calling the shooting a “false flag” operation.

But when asked about it by Stahl, Greene tried to rewrite history.

“I never said Parkland was a false flag,” Greene said. “No, I’ve never said that. School shootings are horrible. I don’t think it’s anything to joke about.”

As she was speaking, “60 Minutes” showed a screengrab of Greene’s now-deleted 2018 Facebook comment.

“We fact-checked,” Stahl replied. “Before I got to this interview.”

Greene offered a word-salad comeback, derailing the discussion.

“Have you fact-checked all my statements from kindergarten through 12th grade and in college? And as I’ve paid my taxes and never broken a law, and the only, I got a few speeding tickets, do we need to talk about those too?” she said. “Because I think where you’re going down is the same attacks that people have attacked me with over and over.”

Stahl didn’t challenge Greene further.

Greene, a Trump-supporting firebrand who was the first open supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory to be elected to Congress, has on multiple occasions endorsed conspiratorial nonsense about school shootings and was filmed in 2019 harassing a Parkland victim who advocates for gun control.

In another 2018 Facebook comment section unearthed by the Media Matters for America watchdog, Greene responded “this is all true” to a user who said that “none of the School shootings were real or done by the ones who were supposedly arrested for them.”

Greene, during her “60 Minutes” interview, tried to shift blame for her past social media activity, suggesting that “other people also ran my social media” when she liked a 2019 comment suggesting Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should get a bullet to the head. (Greene was not a member of Congress in 2019.)

Even if that were the case, Greene has publicly alluded to her belief that school shootings are staged. Last year, Greene suggested in a video that the July 4 shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, was orchestrated “to persuade Republicans to go along with more gun control.”

CBS News faced significant backlash over the weekend for interviewing Greene and giving a platform to her dangerous rhetoric. Following the release of the sit-down, Stahl was criticized for allowing Greene to hijack the conversation, failing to adequately call out the lawmaker’s false claims, and normalizing the extremist’s unhinged behavior.

“I have known Lesley Stahl for more than 40 years, worked alongside her for many election weeks. She has been a great journalist, but this is a disgraceful, cringeworthy performance. Shameful to the max,” tweeted Norman Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

“This is even worse than I thought it would be,” wrote The Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols. “Imagine getting outflanked by MTG, whose answer was ‘what, are you going to go back to everything I’ve said and done since kindergarten’ and Stahl just took it.”

This day in history

I'm in Minneapolis! Today (Oct 15): Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Monday (Oct 16): Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

#20yrsago Identity thief steals sex-offender’s name https://web.archive.org/web/20031002192428/http://www.sexcriminals.com/news/15382/

#15yrsago Librivox free audiobook library now has 365 days’ worth of continuous listening material https://librivox.org/2008/10/15/365-days-of-librivox-audio/

#15yrsago Canada elects 34 copyfighters to Parliament https://web.archive.org/web/20081018165923/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3450/125/

#15yrsago BART directors to management: stop using terrorism “fearmongering” https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bart-debates-allowing-drinks-on-trains-3266010.php

#15yrsago Wedding Ring Cipher contest winners https://memex.craphound.com/2008/10/15/wedding-ring-cipher-contest-winners/

#10yrsago South London school bans “slang” https://memex.craphound.com/2013/10/15/south-london-school-bans-slang/

#10yrsago Why email services should be court-order resistant https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2013/10/15/a-court-order-is-an-insider-attack/

#10yrsago EFF to Comic-Con: protect our secret identities! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/open-letter-comic-con-organizers-protect-our-secret-identities

#10yrsago Homlessness and technological literacy: the Tenderloin Technology Lab https://www.wired.com/2013/10/homeless-but-wired/

#5yrsago Epson is teaching the internet not to install security updates https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa98ab/printer-makers-are-crippling-cheap-ink-cartridges-via-bogus-security-updates

#5yrsago Printer refuses humor magazine because “Christian owners” want to protect “the kids” https://www.patreon.com/posts/good-evening-21990238

#5yrsago Parkland kids’ Rube Goldberg machine illustrates the aftermath of school shootings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mue3N5a9NQE

#5yrsago A sensible, free guide to negotiating book contracts https://www.authorsalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20181003_AuthorsAllianceGuidePublicationContracts.pdf

#5yrsago Wannacry ransomware cost the British National Health Service £92m ($121m) https://web.archive.org/web/20181015161904/https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3064515/wannacry-attack-cost-cash-strapped-nhs-an-estimated-gbp92m

#5yrsago What would a “counterculture of AI” look like? https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/rethinking-ai-through-politics-of-1968/

#5yrsago Bruce Sterling on the next 50 years of climate-wracked maker architecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p4DV80xrm8

#5yrsago China’s panicked upper middle class are easy picking for offshore real estate scams https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2167731/desperate-chinese-middle-class-take-big-risks-move-money-and-themselves

#5yrsago Blame billionaires for climate change https://www.gq.com/story/billionaires-climate-change

#5yrsago Georgia Senator, asked about voter suppression, mugs constituent for his phone https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/10/14/david-perdue-snatch-phone-voter-suppression-sot-nr-vpx.cnn

#5yrsago A dating website for Trump supporters leaked its customers’ data ON DAY ONE https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/donald-daters-a-dating-app-for-trump-supporters-leaked-its-users-data/

#1yrago How lawyers became sadists https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/15/lex-sadist/#incentives-matter

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

this song hits HARD (ft. mini kyman rant)

i swear i gotta decode some of these new taylor lyrics LOL. the song “who’s afraid of little old me?” is hitting rlly hard for me rn. i feel like this song is abt how it’s always the people who created the monster in the first place are the ones who act like the victim. i love the line “i was tame i was gentle till the circus life made me mean”. that’s me AF bc i feel like i used to be a super nice person growing up but then bitches wore me down over time and i became a bitch too. but it’s the same EXACT type of assholes who made me like that are the ones who act like they’re all scared and intimidated by me and make me out to be this horrible evil person like ok sure jan lol. like damn that line “you caged me and then called me crazy” is sooo good lol bc people will be assholes to u and treat u like shit and then when u finally snap at them they gaslight u and make u out to be the crazy one with the problem. i feel like taylor’s song “mad woman” has a similar message to it especially in the line “and you poke that bear till her claws come out”. but yeah this shit makes me think abt kyman bc i talk all the time abt how kyle constantly picked on cartman and drove him to insanity in the early seasons and then when cartman snapped back at kyle, he acts all innocent like he did nothing wrong and cartman is just this biG mEaNie. this also makes me think a lot abt the parkland shooting that happened in 2018. like ik shooting up a school is bad and the kids who survived that are obviously victims and traumatized but um those kids who did all that activism after abt it are the same ones who bullied and ostracized that kid until he went mad LOL. like that kid had a lot of problems so i’m sure if someone had stepped in to help him before things got out of hand that shit wouldn’t have happened. and i got cancelled for saying this shit back in 2018 and people were all like “you’re defending school shooters!1!1!1!” yeah i’m totally defending school shooters and supporting school shootings by saying we should prevent kids from wanting to shoot up schools. anyway…

I am gonna repeat what I said to the prime suspect for why my account, @/popcornpie , was banned this morning.

There have been transgender mass shooters...but it's been four in 300. That is only 1.3% of all recorded mass shootings.

The other 98.7%? Take a guess.

Philadelphia shooting, July 3 2023: Cis male.

Uvalde shooting, May 24 2022: Cis male.

Topps shooting, May 14 2022: Cis male.

Parkland shooting, February 14 2018: Cis male.

Oxford shooting, November 21 2021: Cis male.

Old National Bank shooting, April 10 2023: Cis male.

Philadelphia Synagogue Shooting, October 28, 2018: Cis male.

Meanwhile, I have Googled "school shooting trans person" and all of the most recent results have been about the same man. Aiden Hale is the only recent transgender mass shooter out of the eight listed.

The "rise in transgender shooters" is a boogeyman. And the boogeyman is puny.

It's another scare tactic.

They want you to buy into this and they hope you don't look into it yourself.

To that said prime suspect: No, I am not okay with anyone of any race or gender identity shooting children. I never said I was. A trans person who shoots up a school is still a child killing monster. However, I am also not okay with anti-trans rhetoric being spread. You know damn well it's not about protecting kids. If it was, you would be okay with abandoned children finding loving homes no matter who the parents are. You wouldn't have already forgotten Uvalde.

And before I get asks and replies calling me trans slurs, or the N-word, or any of that stuff...I'M CIS AND WHITE. In fact, I am Irish on my mother's side, and that makes me the whitest cracker you can find. I'm so white, you could put a piece of meat on me and call me a ham sandwich.

I do not express remorse to any right wingers I offend with this post. I don't give a shit. I'm only expressing my freedom of speech, aren't I?

“About 200 attacks have unfolded on K-12 campuses since the Valentine’s Day carnage at the Parkland school, a CNN tally shows, and more than 330 shootings with at least four wounded, excluding a shooter, have been recorded so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.”

🤬