This weekend's screening of To Wong Foo in Cal Anderson park was extremely pleasant. No complaints. (Well, none aside from those about the script, but that ship has sailed). Matt Baume

Comments

2

Texas Courage now stands for nothing, if it ever did.

3

Glad to read the Stranger now occasionally acknowledges the ongoing violence in Seattle's illegal encampments. (Imagine, persons who camp illegally may also do other illegal things! Nobody could have predicted!) You're right in one thing, though: so long as encampments exist, there will be violence in them. The faster all are swept, the better for everyone.

4

“Pregnant people??” Why can’t we call this an attack on women??

5

"Seattle’s failed waterfront reconstruction", "the Alaskan Way traffic sewer".

It's like you haven't actually looked at the final plans for the street. It's going to be nice. Bike & Pedestrian-friendly and lots of trees; light years improved from the Viaduct era.

Wheeled vehicles are going to continue to exist.

6

You are like Trump Matt, just because you say it loudly and frequently doesn't mean that you are right.

7

@4: you know why. "pregnant people" is inclusive of trans men (and others, yes, I know) who retain female reproductive organs. "women" excludes them.

there was a giant kerfluffle over this and the Pamela Paul NYT op-ed 2 weeks ago.

8

@5: The Stranger has been anti-Tunnel, anti-redevelopment from at least 2009, when the Stranger backed the loser McGinn for mayor. (He was completely wrong about this issue, too.) They then backed Cary Moon, who had also been wrong about viaduct replacement.

This issue marks the moment the Stranger stopped being helpfully anti-establishment, and started blindly supporting a failed status quo.

9

"I'm trying to find some good news to report today, but the world isn’t making it easy."

I've found that the easiest way to do that is to follow up by reading almost anything else that isn't written by Matt.

11

Sorry Matt, but parking lots will always be a thing. If I had to rely on public transit to get me anywhere from out in the 'burbs where I live, it would take twice as long. My commute would already be an hour each way if I went into the office. You really want me to take almost 4 hours of my day just to ride a goddamn bus with a bunch of sweaty, deodorant-averse humans??

Cars are never going away. Just like fetch, it's never going to happen.

12

@10:

Go back to counting bullet-riddled dead bodies, you worthless fuck.

14

7 - I disagree. I don't think that the word woman is non-inclusive of transgender. The word is not threatening and is what is female - the basis of reproduction.

15

See if you can tell if I'm in a good mood today.

Looks like a big turnout for the outdoor movie.

Summer Nights in Bothell. The Collections Capitol of the Northwest! I go for the sponge cake. It's made out of real sponges. Bothell, please.

The last time I say Brendan Fraser in anything was about a year ago. Hardly recognized him. As the Nanny would say, "He's spent some time down on Pepperidge Farm."

16

This persistent flogging of the performative justice for "people who can give birth" etc as a stand in for women is alienating thousands of people and does a disservice to women. Just stop.

17

All the trolls are here today! Buncha sock puppets I'm sure. I'll bet it's one guy living off a trust fund on Bainbridge Island.

No tax's! Moar carz-n-guns! Get a job hippies! Fol de ol rol, who's a troll?

18

@16: Are little girls who get pregnant women? No. Are Trans men who get pregnant women? No. Are non binary people who get pregnant women? No. Are all of these and women people? Yes.

19

I want to understand how the United States is able to get away with forced birtherism. It is literally listed as a crime against humanity. It is a war crime as defined by the United Nations.

The Rome Statute Explanatory Memorandum, which defines the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, recognizes rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, and forced pregnancy as crimes against humanity if part of a widespread or systematic practice.

The United States is committing crimes against humanity, war crimes, against its own population. How is this legal?
Oh yeah it isn't. But Republicans and the compromised, corrupt, and criminal former Supreme Court (now just Hack Partisan Court shit show) don't give a fuck.

Everyone should write to their representatives and ask them every single day why the United States is committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, against its own population. Republicans should be asked this at every turn.

21

good job, liberals, let's get into another circular firing squad over gender semantics while nazis continue to steamroll everyone's rights. works every time.

22

@18, Trans women are women. Little girls who get pregnant are women. Infertile women are women. Attacks on abortion rights impacts all of the above. Word policing while the world burns is counterproductive. Bigger tent please, less exhaustive and reductive listing of body parts to describe whole classes of people. We are smart enough to understand the intent. Do men ever get treated like this? No.

23

@18 just stop. Get outraged about whats happening in this country and work to make things different. You're wasting your outraged.

@21 and 22 - exactly.

25

wait
women
aren’t people??

26

the jaws and teeth of fascism are now firmly attached
to the necks of women
and much of the rest of the citizens and residents of this country
almost all of whom are people.

27

@1, @20 - the "good guy with a gun" thing works occasionally. But what do you think would have happened if the cops had shown up while said good guy was firing on said bad guy? Unless they had the decency and foresight to agree on wearing white and black hats, respectively, the cops would likely have shot them both.

Perhaps it would be better to stop the bad guy from having a gun in the first place.

28

"Four hundred (!) cops descended on the school and then just waited around...."
So much for the myth of rough, tough Texans. Do the Texas Rangers constantly wear those hats, even indoors, just to cover their bald spots?

"Here’s a partial list of all the people killed and injured by cars in a single day in Seattle."
Gee, lots of really useful information there. You might as well publish a list of dog turds you ran across for all that tells us. It's not even a memorial which would give us a glimpse into the lives of the dead. And it's certainly not news giving us insight into the location details & cause of death. But that's the shitty reporting we've gotten used to at SLOG. (no) Thanks (to), Matt.

@4, Thank you. My sister used to be so afraid of offending people she couldn't even discuss ethnic or racial issues. She felt all the words were off limits.
@5, @6, Amen & amen. SLOG never lets facts get in the way of their bigotry. Is it true SLOG is a Rupert Murdoch publication?
@7, @18, Does "swallow the camel & strain out the gnat" have meaning any more? Thank you, @14, @16, @21.
@13, "Well, unless they use Uber, get deliveries, ask for rides from car-owning friends, etc."
And I'm still waiting to see someone actually do the math as to just how much carbon is saved by generating electricity, then losing 1/2 of it transmitting it to where the cars will be charged....then losing 1/4 of it charging & discharging the battery. If they're trying to get electric cars on the street, that's one thing. But there will never be any significant reduction in carbon until electric cars are charged with solar, wind, or geothermal power.
@19, I guess you haven't notice just how MANY ways the US commits or subscribes to war crimes. Not so long ago (I don't know today's status) the US refused to subscribe to treaties prohibiting the use of land mines or to charging Presidents with war crimes......just because we need to keep our options open. I'm not sure that's a bad thing (keeping all the options open), but your outrage is a century late & a billion dollars short.
@20, (sigh) I wholeheartedly agree that stopping the shooter was a good thing. I just can't get my head around the fact that there was a guy with a rifle shooting people in a mall & it required an armed 20 yr old to stop him. @27, Yes. It opens a tremendous can of worms. And I hope the DA doesn't do to the 20something, what they're doing to the 60 yr old store clerk who stabbed & killed one of the robbers who was assaulting him. But the bottom line, in this case, is the bad guy was stopped.

29

Cars bad!

32

Ban all guns. Let everyone open carry swords.

33

Cars are only as safe as we allow them to be because every accident amounts to economic stimulus for attorneys, insurance companies, pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, as well as chiropractors, massage therapists, naturopaths, acupuncturists, orthopedic surgeons, mediators, and all of their referrals, staff, and support staff where a regular and steady stream of acceptable random bloodshed by douchebags doing donuts into pedestrians with several ton massive bullets accelerated into their skulls with more force than a body can withstand without instant death or a lifetime of chronic pain management. But it's okay because it only happened to someone else's kid and that's a level of regular negligent and preventable death I am willing to accept to keep my taxes down and the dollar up.

34

@28: I didn't take a position on "pregnant people", I just explained why the Stranger would use it.

I'd love to see stats on the actual number of transmen & non-binary pregnancies each year, versus total pregnancies, so I'd understand how crucial this inclusivity is. My guess is that it's not a big number. It's certainly brought on an epidemic of eye-rolling.

35

There are going to be people who like you or dislike you at first glance based on what you look like or their own myopic prejudice no matter who you are or how you see yourself. You may as well celebrate yourself for who you are regardless of their small mindedness, but don't forget that we are all equal vessels for consciousness and we are defined by what we choose to do each day with what we have. All of us have the potential to give life and take life and none of us survive without doing both each day.

36

@8: Cary Moon's position was "Surface Solution", IIRC. I had sympathy for that; I always felt WSDOT's focus on Port freight mobility up 99 at the rationale for a tolled tunnel was faintly ludicrous. Port freight goes through the tunnel, and then? It sits at traffic lights from Green Lake all the way to Canada. Trucks go on I-5.

Now that it's built, I think that tunnel is pretty awesome.

37

My goodness, being polite to our trans friends isn't going to hurt you or anyone else, not even one teensy little bit. Why on earth would you get angry about a writer being nice to people?

38

@20, tell it to Matt. It was his quote I used.

39

No one prevented a mass shooting at the Indiana mall where several were killed and injured yesterday.

Also, the Stranger has at least one staffer who does not use she/her pronouns, may not consider themselves a woman, and may be someone who can be pregnant. Haters are going to hate, but I don't think I've seen any transphobic crap directed at them by readers. Like @37 says, it doesn't cost anything to be respectful to transfolks by using the proper pronouns, and if you are deliberately misgendering, you're also being an asshole to Jas K,

40

@36: I believe she called it the "surface and transit option" for non-replacement of the viaduct. As trucks don't generally take mass transit, she would have had them pounding through downtown at all hours or something, I guess.

Most of the trucks which use SR-99 are not going to Canada; they transport goods and services overland, from the main port on Elliott Bay, to the Ballard waterfront at Shilshole. That's why it was important to replace the viaduct with a true bypass of downtown, and why the tunnel now works so well, as you noted.

(When the Stranger actually started complaining about the true bypass of downtown was when I knew they'd lost their way. A freeway with entrance/exits in downtown was simply a mechanism for excess downtown traffic, and sprawl outside of town.)

@17: Casino Royal, is that you?

I suppose it's far, far easier to shake your little impotent fist at your imaginary troll-bot army and their imaginary positions, than to accept the reality of a number of us liberals disagreeing with you all at once.

42

Flogging your own book in your column? Nekulturny.

43

@41:

Why the FUCK would any SANE person with even average intelligence want to move to fucking West Virginia or any other QOP-gerrymandered state? We'd be literally throwing our votes away, because until all those venal cockwombles and their shit-for-brains followers die off, those states are going to remain red for the foreseeable future, if not in perpetuity.

44

@43: I'm leaving a reliably-liberal place, and moving to a purple pocket in a blue state, for reasons that have nothing to do with politics, but much to improve my quality of life. (And I'm eagerly looking forward to tilting my new home just a little bit more to the left...)

"...those states are going to remain red for the foreseeable future, if not in perpetuity."

Tell us all about that future you foresee. (But be careful -- in 1960, there was almost no such thing as a Republican elected official in the South.)

46

COMTE is so obtuse. The author (re #41) didn't actually suggest people move there, but it was just a rhetorical gimmick to underscore how entrenched Manchin's mindset is.

47

The only way we could ever reach "vision zero" pedestrian deaths is for Seattle to get better pedestrians. The pedestrians are almost as bad as the drivers.

48

@19 xina, and @43 COMTE for the WIN!!! I have absolutely zero to add. You both NAILED it!

@41 & @45 STII: Nope, nope, and nope. There is no fucking way in hell I am EVER moving to a criminally insane, RepubliKKKan mismanaged neofascist state of confusion where MAGAs breed like sewer rats because women are considered farm animals in their legislature. Guess again. If the states bordering Washington get any redder and dumber we'll need to build a wall.
Have you been sniffing glue with Elmer lately?

@46 Stop while you're at least 10 centuries and 5 decades behind, Elmer. Try not to fall in when you flush.

@47 Catalina Vel-DuRay: Agreed. This is largely why I leave my phone at home. I see WAAAAAAAAY too many drivers AND pedestrians glued to their phones where I live, whether driving or crossing intersections! Seattle's current traffic situation must be a scene from Matt Groening's pre-Simpsons cartoon book from the 1980s, "Life is Hell":
"Can you help wee little Bongo safely make his way home?"
Good luck!

49

The beautiful symmetry of the contradictions and ironies in this thread.

“Squealing on the internet won’t achieve anything!” Say the dudes who squeal on the internet all day.

Who then claim squealing on the internet will turn off voters.

Hahaha. Beautiful.

50

@34, Sorry. I didn't really see you as taking a position. Sometimes the constant nitpicking over words gets to me. The original use in the article was incidental regarding abortion conflicts. I thought the nitpick was an unnecessary digression. I'm very supportive of clear exact language. But jumping, in the comment, from 'pregnant person' to an attack on women seemed to be missing the point about abortion. Pardon my mini rant.
@39, and actually it does cost a LOT to jump through the self centered, selfish hoops of people who demand slavish, intricate, artificial use of excess verbiage when, in the English language, the masculine includes the feminine and the singular includes the plural. If someone wants to use other pronouns for clarity or to make a point, that's their choice as was the use of 'pregnant person' within the original article. But demanding others slavishly follow when it doesn't add to the clarity of the point, is infantile pique.


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