I went on a bit of a mini-rant yesterday on Twitter about assholes using the #falseflag hashtag immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing, mostly because people who scream “false flag” are almost always assholes, because yelling “false flag” doesn’t really have anything to do with the plausibility of a conspiracy theory, but instead relies on the desperate need of people – and, let’s be honest, generally white dudes, because it is white dudes who comprise the overwhelming majority of conspiracy theorists – to feel victimized when something bad had absolutely nothing to do with them.

Like, we’re going way beyond “I got passed over for a promotion because I’m white” levels of victimization here. False flag theories are inevitably stupid – like, well beyond “the moon landing was faked” stupid. I mean, the fake moon landing theory you could feasibly pull off with about a couple dozen people (leave most of NASA clueless, set up a stage somewhere else and just hijack the radio signal with a couple of key inside guys, then get the astronauts to say “yeah, we did that” afterward), assuming nobody simply looked at the moon afterwards and noticed that the lander and flag weren’t there (which they are).

Compare this to the Newtown shooting false flag theory, which involves the Evil Black Helicopter People Who Are Directly Commanded By Obama (or whoever) disappearing an entire classroom full of kids, hiring numerous actors to portray Newtown residents, bribing or threatening dozens or even hundreds of journalists and local residents – this is insane. And it’s all the more insane when you remember that falseflaggers explained that the point of this supposed conspiracy was to get restrictive gun laws enacted – something everybody was grimly saying, right afterwards, would not happen because the gun lobby owns one party entirely and has deep roots in the second. (And what has happened? The most conservative Democratic Senator and a conservative Republican Senator worked “bipartisanly” to create a bill that requires background checks for some, but not all, non-gun-store sales of guns, and which incidentally also outlaws a federal gun registry and makes it easier to transport guns across state lines – and conservative Senators from both parties are refusing to vote for it because it’s too restrictive.)

And so we come to the Boston false-flag theorizing, which is even stupider because all that happened was that an asshole built a bomb and set it off to hurt people, which assholes have done before and will do again. But the falseflaggers are out to explain that, no, this was military-grade ordnance that was used (based on no evidence whatsoever) and that this happened because the Gubmint wants to put more restrictive laws in place to interfere with your civil rights. Of course, the government has been doing that for decades and they haven’t felt the need to bomb anybody because they know perfectly well that they can just restrict civil rights by passing laws and nobody will say boo to a goose, most of the times, because “it’s not my problem” trumps civil rights concerns for ninety percent of the population (just ask any black person about how nobody seems to care when their civil rights are trampled), but whatever, bombs away, am I right?

But falseflaggers don’t care because their theories aren’t about logic or reason or anything at all. Their theories are about making tragedies that happen to other people about them. It’s a fundamentally narcissistic response to tragedy – to not only ask “how does this affect me” but to twist the facts of the event to create a narrative so that you are more likely to be affected. It’s an asshole move, plain and simple, and falseflaggers deserve to be treated like assholes, because they’re assholes.

(And finally, can we again be pissed off once more at police departments who planted agent-provocateurs in protests, who all by themselves gave the entire false-flag belief far more steam than it ever deserved to have?)

Energy-Puking Boy (and others): Community Alignment Chart?

I’m not going to do what somebody else already did perfectly well just for the sake of doing it with my particular chart design. You can quibble if Abed and the Dean should be switched or if Britta and Troy should be, but it’s reasonably accurate. (If you want to see an awful Community alignment chart that rips off my design, here you go.)

Unstoppable Gravy Express: So is that Brad Paisley / LL Cool J song racist or not?

Ta-Nehisi Coates answered that better than I ever could.

Rbx5: re there any Big Two/Image titles you are, in fact, following, and why?

A fair amount of Marvel, actually. Avengers, New Avengers, Uncanny Avengers, Wolverine and the X-Men, All New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men. The current F4 stuff isn’t bad at all but it doesn’t really grab me, mostly because after the Jonathan Hickman run on that franchise it just sort of pales in comparison, and Hickman is the reason I’m reading his two Avengers books – he’s currently my “I will read any comic he writes” writer, much in the way that Grant Morrison was such ten years ago.

I’m not buying anything DC prints new; given their current treatment of creators (this is not to say that Marvel is great shakes, they aren’t, but DC these days seems determined to actively fuck creators over in every possible respect) I try to avoid giving them money. I bought a copy of The New Deadwardians used and it was really good, and I am glad DC didn’t get any of my money for it.

Image… I picked up Sex, which is Joe Casey’s book about a Batman analogue post-Bat-life sort of a thing. It was okay-to-decent but the lettering was so distracting I gave up on it after two issues. I’m reading Saga in trades (it is very good) and The Manhattan Projects because Hickman, and I tried out Prophet which fell into the “it’s good, but not my thing” category.

switchnode: How long do you expect/intend Al’Rashad to run? Are we a significant way into a fast, hard-hitting story about a particular flashpoint, or still in the setup phase of something much longer and more sprawling? On a related note, do you think of it more as a webcomic, or as a comic book that happens to be on the web?

It’s going to run eight “issues,” with issue eight planned to be oversized (e.g. more than 28 pages, less than a full ninth issue). Currently we’re midway through book six, so you do the math.

And it’s a comic book that happens to be on the web. The fact that people keep complaining about things which get revealed 1-2 pages later probably should have been a big tip-off there. Davinder and I wanted to do a comic, and I don’t actually like the episodic/strip format of many webcomics for the purpose of a larger narrative. So there you go.

Murc: Any chance of maps at any point for Al-Rashad?

They’re definitely in the queue, although they might end up being bonuses for the print edition.

Further to John’s excellent post about Steubenville and rape culture over the weekend, my good friend Shannon is running an Indiegogo campaign to fund her creation of classroom materials designed to teach kids from a consent-culture perspective, which will upon completion be distributed for free online.

So, put your money where your mouth is, guys. This is a chance to put money towards something that actually has a shot at creating real change.

Torontoist does its yearly Heroes and Villains at the end of every year, and my hero was the Toronto Marlies, for their equality pledge.

(My Villain is still forthcoming. Regulars can, uh, probably guess.)

Peyton, over in John Seavey’s post about the Fake Geek Girl bullshit which I am glad he wrote because honestly at this point I just do not have the energy to engage with that bullshit for what feels like the tenth time, writes:

As a complete aside I also wanted to thank MGK, John Seavey, and Jim Smith for this site. As someone said upthread, it’s one of the few places, along with Scalzi’s Whatever, Evanier’s blog, and Jim Hines blog and a few others that, as a female nerd, feels safe and supportive.

I’m just gonna say that I feel very proud to have received this comment, since I decided quite some time ago (like, years) that this was going to be one of my primary goals for the site. As I get older¹ I find myself getting more liberal rather than less, which is a pleasant thing to realize, and John and Jim and everybody else I’ve invited to the site were invited, at least in part, because I knew they had no truck with all of the bullshit that nerd-dom encourages in celebration of the straight white guy norm. And I say that as a white guy who mostly invited straight white guys, which happened mostly because whenever I’ve encouraged guest bloggers to apply, they are usually straight white guys.²

This really isn’t just about the blog, either, but what I do generally. I mean, I’ve said before that Al’Rashad is adapted from a screenplay I wrote about a dozen years ago, but the simple truth is that the comic is much better than the screenplay ever was. The big action beats are for the most part the same thus far, but:

- Originally Rayana was much less proactive as a character. Even then I wanted her to be kick-ass, but as written in the screenplay, she was not nearly at the nigh-Brainiac-Five level of intelligence and competence which she is at now, and she works, I think, so much better now than she did previously. Having Kahal be her personal engine of destruction adds a new twist to their relationship which I like quite a bit as well; I like that Kahal takes his lead from Rayana whenever it isn’t a “right now we fight desperately” moment.
- Apali was originally male, and moreover was not nearly so important to the story as she is now. Making her female actually broadened her quite a bit and let me do more with her. The fact that she has essentially been Rayana’s surrogate mother isn’t something I’ve explicitly written in a page yet, but I think it’s pretty obvious, and that simply wouldn’t work as well if she were male as she was originally.
- Also, Joro really should have been a girl, as I’ve written previously, but the ship sailed on that one. Sometimes you realize things too late.
- Finally, there’s one more major character aspect that hasn’t been revealed yet (and might not even be revealed in the first story arc) but to which I gave serious thought, then discussed it with Davinder, then discussed it further with a few people whose opinion I respect in order to make sure that it would work with what had been written already. I think when it gets revealed people will accuse me of pandering (as always happens in these instances), but again: it’s something that makes the overall story simply work better. This is because different races and genders and sexual orientations and all the rest: they’re not checkboxes you have to fill in to pass a test. To blatantly steal from Pratchett: they are all different metals, and alloys are stronger.

I’m drifting a bit here from my original point because I started talking about my comic (which you should all read and adore, of course), but to get back to it: it’s a damn shame that the internet needs places that are “safe and supportive” for female nerds and gay nerds and non-white nerds and all of the other nerds who are not typical nerds, because everybody should have the right to act like a goddamned overgrown child about some irrelevant piece of pop-culture if they so choose because that is what we are all doing, really. The question should not even have to be posed. More people who I can argue “but Superman would TOTALLY beat up Thor” with is always going to be a benefit. More people who will argue whether the Enterprise could blow up a Star Destroyer are always welcome.³ I really don’t care if they have tits or different amounts of melanin – I care that they have fresh perspectives and new ideas, because more ideas is always better.

But so long as those places are necessary, I am determined that my place will be one of those places. This is not an ironclad promise that I will always be perfectly enlightened, because we are all works in progress and nobody ever gets it right one hundred percent of the time. But I think it is important that I try.

Okay, soapbox mode over, and tomorrow if I have time I’ll write the essay about Wreck-It Ralph that lots of people have been demanding for some reason.

1. IMPORTANT CAVEAT: I AM NOT OLD OLD, JUST, LIKE, OLDER AND STUFF [↩]
2. Unless Jim Smith is actually a pseudonym for “Laverne Washington,” which it could be. You never know with Jim. [↩]
3. Right answer: The Battlestar Galactica nukes both of them. [↩]

Twitter right now is aflame with the news that Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo, has resigned from Sesame Street after multiple allegations that he had sex with underaged boys. And, to be honest, some of the reactions to the news worry me, because overwhelmingly what I am reminded of, more than anything, is how Jerry Sandusky’s defenders reacted when he was accused of sexually abusing boys while at Penn State.

Now, before we go any further, I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying the allegations prove that Clash did in fact have sex with teenagers. I am not saying that Kevin Clash is morally equivalent to Jerry Sandusky. I am not saying the allegations against Clash are equivalent to those against Sandusky. After all, Sandusky was caught in the act of molesting children, while the allegations against Clash come from the supposed victims who are now adults, and the allegations against Clash appear to be at least potentially questionable. (But I don’t know if they’re true or false. Neither do you.)

But what I am saying is this: the overwhelming flood of reactions that are defensive of Clash are exactly the same in tone as those who defended Sandusky last year. There is the same mix of denial based on defamation of the accusers (the “they just want to get rich/famous” slam), the same wish-fulfillment in place of reason (we’re talking the “I love Elmo so therefore Kevin Clash must be innocent” line of reasoning, the same resentment of the media for reporting what is, by any reasoning, a newsworthy story. The only difference is that this time it’s coming from fans of the Muppets rather than fans of Penn State football.

That last one particularly bothers me because it is a reminder that people are all basically the same when it comes to bad news, which is to say that, at gut, we never really want to hear it or engage with it. It is quite possible that Clash is innocent of the accusations made against him, and frankly I hope that is the case, of course, because how could I not? But I have to admit the possibility exists that he did in fact do these things, and the fact that he is a beloved performer for children does not weaken that possibility. (Frankly, if anything, it strengthens it: child predators so often work with children for the same reason lions like to hang out where the antelope are, and since we all at heart never want to believe that someone who is good with kids might have become so charming in order to take advantage of them, it sometimes feels like every molestor is described as being a really good person.)

And it would be nice to think that a thorough investigation which exonerated Clash would make the problem go away, but of course we all know that that wouldn’t happen. And that’s another problem with humans.