Archive for the ‘Alt-right’ Category

Trapt Take the Alt-Right Whining to Twitter After Facebook Ban – Exclaim!

Naturally, they have threatened to sue the social media giant

Published Nov 19, 2020

Earlier this month (November 1), perpetually aggrieved frontmanChris Taylor Brown hopped on Twitter to rail against Mark Zuckerberg's company in "Headstrong" fashion, griping about how his Proud Boys support led to thegreat injustice of losing his posting privileges.

"FB is saying this post is violent," Brown wrote in sharing his suspension notice. "Just saying 'Proud Boys' is violence, yet 'Antifa' is everywhere. This is what I mean when I say 'wall street' helping Antifa. Big tech is part of Wall Street. They aid in recruitment mostly. I'd think every Pro USA group would be against Antifa."

Evidently, Brown continued thisbig-brainhypothesizingto the point where Zuck brought down the ban hammer.Metal Suckspoints to multiple Facebook users being alerted to Trapt's page being pulled from the site after being reported for hate speech.

Today, Brown shared that he was banned by Facebook for sharing a Proud Boys meme and inviting followers to "come join the fun on the Parler app," a new favourite social service amongof Trump supporters, conservatives and right-wingers. Of course, he threatened to sue Facebook for the ban.

In September, it was reported that Trapt could continue to dig themselves into an even deeper hole with aJudge Judyappearance.

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Trapt Take the Alt-Right Whining to Twitter After Facebook Ban - Exclaim!

Alt-right homophobe plots to infiltrate gay bar and deliberately infect LGBT+ community with COVID-19 – PinkNews

The alt-right homophobe intended to infect "10 to 20" LGBT+ people with COVID-19. (GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP via Getty)

An alt-right homophobe in New Zealand is being investigated for a plot to deliberately infect the LGBT+ community and people of colour with COVID-19.

According to the queer New Zealand publication Express, the man posted on an alt-right website claiming that he had contracted woohoo flu, andwrote that he had a really sore throat and was unable to stop coughing.

He then explained that he wanted to target the LGBT+ community and communities of colour by spreading the virus at a gay bar in Auckland and at a church.

The anonymous homophobe said he was aiming to infect 10 to 20 people at the bar, and asked for advice on how to fit in without risking getting hit on.

He also said he planned to visit multiple churches with congregations of colour, and in a separate post asked if it would be too suspicious to travel to the churches as the one closest to him was predominantly white.

Police have been notified, and told the publication that they were taking the threats extremely seriously.

A police spokesperson said authorities were continuing to make enquiries into an anonymous post made on an online forum.

They said: The nature of this anonymous post is concerning, and Police take these sorts of matters extremely seriously.

Police are limited in further comment at this stage as our enquiries are ongoing.

New Zealand minister for health responded to the investigation: The ministry supports the police as being the appropriate agency to look into this incident as they will be best placed to find out whats happened and determine what further actions are required.

The country has reduced its new daily COVID-19 cases to single figures under prime minister Jacinda Arden who, after Octobers election, will now lead a parliament with the highest proportion of LGBT+ MPs in the world.

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Alt-right homophobe plots to infiltrate gay bar and deliberately infect LGBT+ community with COVID-19 - PinkNews

Books by 3 Indian writers feature in 2020 100 Notable Books selected by The New York Times – The Hindu

Critically-acclaimed books by three Indian writers have featured among this years 100 Notable Books list of The New York Times that also includes former U.S. president Barack Obamas newly released memoir A Promised Land.

Editors of The New York Times Book Review selected 100 notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction works from around the world.

(Stay up to date on new book releases, reviews, and more with The Hindu On Books newsletter.Subscribe here.)

The prestigious list also includes the work of fiction A Burning by India-born Megha Majumdar (read our review).

A brazen act of terrorism in an Indian metropolis sets the plot of this propulsive debut novel in motion, and lands an innocent young bystander in jail. With impressive assurance and insight, Majumdar unfolds a timely story about the ways power is wielded to manipulate and crush the powerless, the report said of the book.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (read review), who grew up in Kerala, also features on the list.

This first novel by an Indian journalist probes the secrets of a big-city shantytown as a 9-year-old boy tries to solve the mystery of a classmates disappearance. Anappara impressively inhabits the inner worlds of children lost to their families, and of others who escape by a thread, the leading daily said.

Samanth Subramanians A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane is a nonfiction work, reviewed here.

Haldane, the British biologist and ardent communist who helped synthesise Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics, was once as famous as Einstein. Subramanians elegant biography doubles as a timely allegory of the fraught relationship between science and politics, the report said.

Subramanian is a journalist and lives in London.

Red Pill by British-Indian author Hari Kunzru also features in the list.

A fellowship at a study center in Germany turns sinister and sets a writer on a possibly paranoid quest to expose a political evil he believes is loose in the world. Kunzrus wonderfully weird novel traces a lineage from German Romanticism to National Socialism to the alt-right, and is rich with insights on surveillance and power, the report said.

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Books by 3 Indian writers feature in 2020 100 Notable Books selected by The New York Times - The Hindu

Can Online Avatars Define Us? Animator Jenna Caravello Dives Into This, the Art of Online Storytelling and Pepe the Frog – KCET

Southland SessionsPresents:From high school operas and drive-thru art exhibitions to Chicano comedies and underground DJ setswe are showcasing the vibrancy of arts and culture across our city today.

Jenna Caravello makes mind-bending video games, interactive installations and animated short films that use symbolism and metaphor to ask profound questions about memory, loss and meaning.

A still fromJenna Caravello's short animated film "Frontier Wisdom."| Courtesy of Jenna Caravello

Caravello, an assistant professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, will respond to the question What Is Loss? on Monday, Nov. 23 as part of the UCLA Arts series 10 Questions: Reckoning, which brings UCLA faculty from across campus together to examine 10 essential questions.

In this episode of the UCLA Arts podcast Works In Progress, Caravello talks about creating digital avatars, storytelling in virtual spaces and what inspires her, from 90s video games and Akira to European and Soviet animators.

Caravello joined the UCLA faculty this fall and has been mainly working with graduate students on their projects. This winter quarter shell be teaching a class on designing digital avatars.In the course, the students will design, rig and animate their own avatars as part of a larger conversation about digital bodies. For Caravello, an avatar is a picture that represents a computer user or a digital body controlled by a player that can be used to describe video games, puppetry, dance or storytelling.

Avatars are pervasive in so many different types of art and, of course, spiritually and in religious practices as well, she said. Avatars have been the way that we define ourselves, the way that we identify ourselves, in digital spaces for a while now. But they have this long-reaching history."

Another class shell lead this winter will focus on storytelling in augmented and virtual reality spaces. Unlike a single-channel film, VR gives you a limitless 360-degree space, while with AR, the frame is dictated by the placement of the users smartphone. Because the class will be taught remotely, students will use their smartphones rather than VR headsets.

Caravello taught at CalArts, where she was a graduate student, just before the pandemic began. Teaching remotely will be different, she acknowledges, and engaging students in a virtual classroom will take extra effort.

Watch Caravello's animated short film "Frontier Wisdom" below.

While at CalArts, Caravello produced the short animated film Frontier Wisdom. The surreal story follows a phone repairwoman in the desert. Along the way she encounters a corpse that recites Bible verses, a self-propelled peanut and a post-apocalyptic rapture.

The film was inspired by a road trip with her father from Chicago to Los Angeles, but also by her fathers job as a service repairman for the Pacific Bell Telephone Company.

He would leave the house and he would drive around town in a strange van that was full of cables, and it was just very mysterious to me," she said. I started to imagine that he was going on these adventures, that he was really a protagonist in some noir mystery out there in the desert somewhere.

Caravellos father, on a road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles. | Courtesy Jenna Caravello

The films abstract, surreal elements are meant to invoke the idea that a space can be a container for memory, she said. "The Mojave Desert in that film is very similar to, say, an open world, massive multiplayer online game, so just an expansive realm of play."

Caravello was also playing with the idea of a memory palace, a way of memorizing details by creating an imaginary building with rooms that contain pieces of information.

The symbology becomes, what kind of mind palace can you project your memories onto?"

Caravello was an animator on the 2020 documentary film Feels Good Man, about the Internet meme Pepe the Frog. Arthur Jones directed the film, which stars illustrator and cartoonist Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe, as he struggles to reclaim Pepe from alt-right white supremacist Internet trolls.

Watch the trailer of "Feels Good Man" below.

"As the animators, our main goal was to speak to Matts art and to be this kind of voice for Matts comics in a way that that would bring his work to the forefront," Caravello said. "So, most of our conversations were about, will Matt laugh at that? Is that accurate to what Matt would want to happen to his characters?"

Pepe began as one of four characters in Boys Club, a trippy series of comic books about post-college friends who play video games, smoke weed, drink beer and eat pizza. Furie was surprised to see users of Reddit and 4chan adopt the gentle frog and turn his face into Adolf Hitler or Donald J. Trump in the leadup to the 2016 election.

Recently, Pepe has found new life as a symbol of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, and as a reaction sticker on the video game streaming site Twitch.

"It's really an incredible story," Caravello said.

Caravello at work on Frontier Wisdom. | Courtesy Jenna Caravello

Teaching animation to undergraduate students has made Caravello aware of how animation styles change based on age and where students grew up. She began her art career as an oil painter and is used to seeing animation with erased pencil lines, while younger students may have started with drawing tablets and expect a cleaner style.

Caravellos use of space and perspective in her work was inspired by the video games she grew up with, like the LucasArt graphic adventure game Grim Fandango, which overlaid 3D graphics on static backgrounds. Shes also a fan of anime, especially the maximalist dystopian future portrayed in Akira.

She also points to the bizarre work of Ukrainian animator Igor Kovalyov, and the Estonian animator Priit Prn, whose films are part political allegory, part just reveling in ridiculousness and whose film Night of the Carrots "changed the way that I work forever.

I was definitely inspired by more textural animations that for the most part were metaphors for political movements, for consumer culture ridiculousness, abstracted character designs, she said.

Caravello also creates interactive installations, and is at work on a third-person open-world VR game installation called Amber Row. A user controls the game with a custom-made controller rather than a headset. The installation is based on the idea of an MMO that is kept alive on a single server [and] has broken down and now serves as a container for all of the memories that are left behind from a person who is no longer present.

Amber Row draws on Caravellos experience of being diagnosed with the same genetic mutation that led to her mother's death, a mutation mostly found among Ashkenazi Jewish women. In the game the user collects objects that effect the avatars appearance.

"And this is how I explored the idea of collecting memories after my mother passed away, because it really can feel like a futile practice to run in circles after experiencing a loss and try to recreate memories of a person from everything that they've left behind.

The desire to create a game that allows for open-world exploration was inspired by a Tomb Raider game her father used to play.

"He would defeat all of the bad guys on a level, and then he'd call me into the room and he'd let me just run around in the level freely, clear of enemies. Nothing to do but just run around in circles and jump and dive and swim and just be this character in a space, she said.

Jenna Caravello is an assistant professor in the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA. On November 23rd at 7 pm, shell respond to the question "What Is Loss? as part of this falls 10 Questions discussion series. Joining her will be oncology chaplain Michael Eselun, and anthropologist Jorja Leap, who is an expert in gangs, violenc, and systems change. You can learn more and RSVPhere.

Top Image:A still fromJenna Caravello's short animated film "Frontier Wisdom." | Courtesy of Jenna Caravello

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Can Online Avatars Define Us? Animator Jenna Caravello Dives Into This, the Art of Online Storytelling and Pepe the Frog - KCET

Sharp Letter to the Editor 11/20/20 | Opinion | carrollspaper.com – Carroll Daily Times Herald

Nothing makes sense; they want us to believe what?

The constant drama and mischief available for consumption in the 24 hours a day news cycle, if we are actually getting facts, is discordant. Black Lives Matter seems a noble idea but what are the underlying truths of this organizations goals. Antifa wants anarchy and no government at all; when convenient, blame is thrust on fascists, or alt-right groups; maybe those labeled as racists, misogynists, ageists, name-your-phobia, identity politics, all an intrinsically evil way to impede freedom of thought and expression. Why are many so cowardly they must cast aspersions against those they disagree with, and shout them down rather than intelligently articulate their position and have the decency to listen to the other. Were there problems in getting a legitimate vote count, and if so, why? Government cannot have legitimacy with the people if the people distrust the mechanisms that place the representatives of We the People. What is behind the chaos and what do they want? What are they trying to distract us from?

Have no doubt, this is a battle between communism and freedom. These are attempts to destroy the liberty we collectively have fought and died for; the noise we must endure and the distracting protests are nothing more than that, a distraction from what is really going on. As in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, .

Despite what these ideas are labeled: progressive, democratic socialist, anarchist, socialist, workers party; they are all a synonym to communism. The power brokers, media, and tech platforms attempt to re-write our history, control our present and future, and control the information we get. We have allowed our students to be indoctrinated rather than educated in the facts of history, civics, government, and rhetoric. Communism has always failed and led to totalitarianism, tyranny, police state, murder, destitution, torture, genocide, infanticide, slave labor, detention camps; all the ultimate crushing of Mans soul. There is a plan to deprive our citizens of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. But now they are calling it The Great Reset.

Klaus Schwab is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, more commonly referred to as Davos. He has proposed the disruption caused worldwide by Covid-19 to be a narrow opportunity to perform a worldwide great reset of our world in order to: To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a Great Reset of capitalism. By this he means he has a plan for a complete transformation of the world economy and the liberty of its people. There will be no money, no private property, no democracy. Instead, every decision about what we individually do for a living, what we individually consume, whether we individually can take a vacation; will all be decided for us by a remote, unaccountable and unknown group of hegemons. This sounds like totalitarian communism.

Schwab has proposed a concept called Stakeholder Capitalism, wherein private corporations are placed in the position of trustees of society. Draw a set of correlations to the current model of Shareholder Capitalism and State Capitalism where the state sets the direction of the economy. This appears an intent to impose oligarchy that controls the government of the citizens of the United States, and the rest of the world. You can try to mislead the people by inserting the term capitalism, but there is no capitalism about this.

Aristotle wrote in Politics; It is harder to preserve than to found a Democracy. To preserve it, we must prevent the poor from plundering the rich; we must not exhaust the public revenues by giving pay for the performance of public duties; we must prevent the growth of a pauper class. The Great Reset sounds like a plan for the rich to plunder the other 99 percent.

The United States 2019 Federal Budget was $4.4 Trillion and GDP was $21.43 Trillion. Compare this to proposed legislation such as a $32 Trillion single payor healthcare system, $1.6 Trillion college debt forgiveness, $79 Billion per year free college, $93 Trillion green new deal, a $1 Trillion infrastructure plan, abolish ICE, defund the police, have no controls on immigration and provide all benefits for them also; it sounds grand, as does socialism, until it runs out of money then you have poverty, breadlines and all of the things our older population has seen from the end of WWII until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and still there is Communist China. Our younger generations should have been taught the horrors of communism.

It is time to pay attention and to make sure family and friends are informed. There is no consent of the governed of these United States to submit to these plans and we resist in no uncertain terms. We must do it loudly like we have listened to radical politicians and groups throughout 2020. This is a battle for our liberty.

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Sharp Letter to the Editor 11/20/20 | Opinion | carrollspaper.com - Carroll Daily Times Herald