https://armoxon.substack.com/p/if-you-want-to-be-friends-then-why
"Travis Ikeguchi, 27-year old superfan of supremacist right-wing media
propaganda, murdered Laura Ann Carleton, 66-year old fan of human beings in all
their wonderful variety. Perhaps you heard about this on the news.
Ikeguchi argued with her before he shot her, because she had a pride flag on
display outside her establishment. A pride flag is a way of telling the world
that gay and trans and nonbinary people matter just as much as other people,
which is something that a lot of people believe. I have one up in the front of
my house, for example.
If you look at Ikeguchi’s Twitter page, which I do not recommend, you’ll see
that his pinned tweet approvingly suggests that the correct thing to do with
such a flag, which represents queer people, is to burn it. And as I said,
Ikeguchi was a fan of right-wing media, like for instance Matt Walsh, the
sweaty-minded christian fascist propagandist who recently proclaimed, while
explaining how the existence of trans people brings him into “a boiling rage”
that he would rather be dead than have his children be trans, so you can
imagine how he feels about other people and their trans children.
This means that Laura Ann Carleton’s store is a potentially safer place for
Matt Walsh’s children than Matt Walsh’s house, especially if we ponder what men
who have decided they would rather be dead tend to do on their way out to
family members upon whom they have placed the blame for their boiling rage. It
also indicates that if the time comes that Matt Walsh might be in danger of
wishing his children and/or himself dead, Matt Walsh’s children will know they
have safer places to which to go. That’s one thing the pride flag means for
queer people, and that proclamation of safe spaces for queer people is what
makes people like Carleton so dangerous to Matt Walsh—who, like hundreds of
other fascist propagandists, broadcasts to his audience of thousands or
millions his hatred about the people that flag represents.
And yes, Travis Ikeguchi just so happened to be one of those thousands or
millions in Walsh’s audience, and he didn’t like the message of safety and
inclusion conveyed by Laura Ann Carleton’s pride flag either, so he shot her,
because he thought that was his right, which is something that powerful people
have spent their careers ensuring would be very easy for him to think and then
do. This is because those powerful people insist that guns are an essential
component of freedom, and make sure that there is at all times as little legal
friction as possible between guns and boiling rage.
The argument goes thus: if somebody is impinging your freedom or threatening
you, then you might need to kill them, and guns are the best way to do that.
And these same powerful people have spent their careers telling anyone who will
listen that gay people are an impingement on their freedom, and a threat to
society in general, and a lot of people have listened to this over the years,
and many of them have connected those rather proximal dots—including, it seems,
Travis Ikeguchi, 27."
Via Janet Logan.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
