In Germany, everyone has public liability insurance, which covers things such as hurting bystanders while doing normal things like cycling, lighting a barbecue in public or private. It is around € 50 / annum and ensures that when you do things as a stupid teenager (mostly there is family cover) no one is bankrupted in the process of rectifying the mess. Here is a link to explain how it works :
I am in favour of gay marriage, and equal rights for gay people. But the interviewer appears to suggest that by being opposed to gay marriage, the Attroney General is causally implicated in violence against gay people. I think that’s a bit of a stupid thing to imply.
Say what now? Where exactly did you see Cooper suggesting that?
I think what he’s instead getting at is that the Attorney General is not acknowledging the significance of the mass shooting as a hate crime against LGBT people, and further, that her past actions demonstrate that she’s a thorough hypocrite for suddenly showing a bit of tepid concern for LGBT people as LGBT people.
“Using language about gay people trying to do harm to the state of Florida …Doesn’t that send a message to people who might have bad things in mind?”
Then again, I don’t know exactly what she said, so maybe I’m reading it wrong. There are some things she could have said that could be said to incite violence etc., but I assumed it was just the usual bullshit arguments about gay marriage “changing the definition of words” or something like that.
I agree that would be a very stupid thing to imply. And I could be wrong but that’s not the interpretation I got. I thought Cooper was pointing out that the only time the Attorney General has acknowledged the existence of LGBT people is when she defended discriminatory laws, but suddenly she cares about LGBT people because it’s politically expedient.
Although even in her statements she’s hard-pressed to acknowledge LGBT people, saying she cares about “all people”. That’s similar to responding to “black lives matter” with “all lives matter”. While it’s true it can also be a rhetorical attempt to sidestep a discussion of the systematic mistreatment of a particular group.
Fair enough. I’ve posted in reply to @anon15383236 the bit I thought implied that, but I could be reading too much into it. Anyway, probably not the best time for me to be quibbling about the minute logic of things people say when they are upset and hurting etc. I’ll stop now.
And this despite the fact that most Americans encounter hundreds if not thousands of people actively using their cars every single day. Even the average gun owner spends more time operating a car than operating a gun.
I’m sorry for sounding overly harsh in my reply because I think your interpretation raises some valuable questions about whether we even can hold a legislator responsible for an act of violence when the legislator has never advocated–or wanted–violence.
I’m glad you brought it up because such questions are part of a larger discussion that I think is worth having even if they’re ultimately unanswerable. And I can understand feeling that now is not the appropriate time for such discussions, but, personally, I wonder, if not now, when?
So, first of all, unrelated to the main story, I’m pretty sure a more succinct term for “young person’s nightclub” is “nightclub.” But that aside, “some LGBT but mostly Latinos.”
Let’s draw a Venn diagram from the mind of Pete Sessions:
I’m wondering - does this guy think so much in terms of voting demographic analysis that he forgot that people can be more than one thing at a time?
But at the same time there were presumably people who never wanted any black people to get hurt but simply didn’t want to share a water fountain with them. Those people played their part in lynchings, even if they were philosophically opposed to them.
Good point, it apparently overlaps significantly with Latinos, but not with LGBT which are something else entirely.
I did just have another thought, though. Maybe the reason the senator says it’s isn’t a “gay club” but just a “young person’s club” is because his experience of being a young man includs quite a bit of sex with men, but that-didn’t-make-him-gay-or-anything. Maybe he just doesn’t like labels.
The whole thing was so confusing, I decided to call him and see what he really meant:
Humbabella: Those comments you made about Pulse not being a gay nightclub seemed pretty ridiculous.
Sessions: Yeah, sometimes speaking off the cuff you say dumb things. I just wanted to highlight that people are jumping to conclusions that the shooter was targeting the LGBT community when he could have equally been targetting latinos, given the current political climate.
Humba: I guess in a vacuum that might have some truth to it, but we know some facts about the shooter that make that seem unlikely. Like his father’s comment that he became enraged after seeing two men kiss.
Pete: I agree, I mean, based on what we know about this actual case it being a hate crime against the LGBT community is far more likely. I had just been reading something about Donald Trump before I made those remarks, and the animosity we are seeing towards Latino and Latina Americans right now was at the front of my mind.
Babel: Hey, that’s fair.
Lil’ Petey: Like, even though it was almost certainly an anti-gay hate crime, we have a mass shooting a day, and they are motivated by race, by sex, by anything. America’s mass shooting problem isn’t a problem for the gay community, it’s a problem for the whole country. But I should have been more sensitive, because I know that right now there are a lot of people feeling unsafe just because of who they love. This act of terrorism worked - people are terrorized. It’s important to stand in solidarity with that community at this time, and I should have thought more before I spoke.
Beautiful child of Humbaba: Well, I’m glad we had this chat. I totally see where you were coming from.
P-to-the-ete, S-to-the-essions: But one thing before you go, while we’re talking about thinking before we say things, I saw your comment on the boingboing message thread about this that implied I may have had sex with men in my college days. Isn’t that kind of the equivalent of using “gay” as an insult?
H: You know, I think about that sometimes. Back when I was a kid it was pretty common, when celebrity or politician said something negative about homosexuals, to respond with a sort of, “Oh, just come out of the closet already.” As if everyone who used hate speech against gay men was gay himself. I don’t think that joke is really made at the expense of gay men. I mean if you were actually gay, and you had been motivated by that to try to deflect from the gay issue because it made you uncomfortable, I’d say that calling you gay would upset you but the reality is that everyone - me and you included - would be happier if you did come out of the closet. I wonder if that kind of joke is problematic, but the other side of that is that I’ve had “Oh, that guy’s a closet case” conversations with gay men before and no one who is actually gay has ever called me on it. And I have friends who do call me on things. Ultimately I don’t know. Of course to me, in this case, what is funny about the joke is that it’s more a joke about identity and projection - assuming others have had the same experiences you have. So the idea was that if you had sex with men in college, you might be so stuck in your own life and have so little idea of how other people live to know that’s not necessarily an experience everyone - or even a majority of men - have. It’s that moment in a comedy movie where someone accidentally reveals a very embarrassing thing about themselves because they assume everyone else does it too. Not that having sex with a few men is embarrassing or even that it means you are gay. But being so disconnected from other people’s experience that you don’t know that not every man did is kind of funny. There’s so much personal context for me that I shouldn’t really expect other people to understand, so maybe I shouldn’t be putting it on the interest where people don’t even have tone of voice to figure out what I’m trying to say. And it’s not really funny anyway - no one is going to laugh out loud.
P: You really think yourself in circles sometimes, eh?
The Notorious H.U.M.B.A: Yeah.
Sessions Sessions Sessions: Well, thanks for calling.
