We humans have to deal with social justice every day but you would think at least animals would be safe from it, right? Not. So. Fast. It turns out pelicans are somehow related to “racialized, sexual violence,” at least according to a feminist scholar.
The University of British Columbia invited University of Washington gender studies graduate student Logan O’Laughlin to give a presentation called “Queer Toxic Ecologies: Analyses and Implications of the Pelicans of the BP Oil Spill,” reported The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Utilizing feminist discourse analysis of pelicans in post-spill popular media and historical analysis of pelicans as the state mascot of Louisiana, this presentation articulates how this bird is symbolically and materially implicated in a history of racialized, sexual violence,” said O’Laughlin.
Yes, you heard that right. Pelicans…are “implicated in a history of racialized, sexual violence.”
If you’re a young millennial or old zoomer — that’s Generation Z — SpongeBob SquarePants probably brings to mind days of childhood bliss, a time unmuddied by politics. But that’s not the case for University of Washington professor Holly Barker, who recently published a nearly 10,000-word study called “Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom,” reported Campus Reform.
Now, if you remember, SpongeBob takes place in Bikini Bottom, and Holly’s upset that this is apparently a reference to Bikini Atoll, a Marshall Islands coral reef used by America during the Cold War for nuclear testing. Indigenous people were moved during the testing and radiation ultimately rendered it uninhabitable.
Holly complains about SpongeBob’s supposed “privilege” of “not caring about the detonation of nuclear bombs,” saying “the detonations do not cause concern for the characters, as they did for the Bikinians, nor do they compromise SpongeBob’s frequent activities, like visiting hamburger joints or the beach with friends.”
Yeah, uh, that would be because it’s a kids show.
But here’s the thing: Holly isn’t just mad that the show doesn’t hit children on the head with the full historical context of a place from which it takes half its name and I’m not sure what else. She calls the characters living in this setting an “occupation,” terms it “symbolic violence,” and says “SpongeBob’s presence on Bikini Bottom continues the violent and racist expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands (and in this case their cosmos) that enables U.S. hegemonic powers to extend their military and colonial interests in the postwar era.”
A guy recently ripped crosses representing aborted babies out of the ground at Whatcom Community College in Washington state, according to Campus Reform. He also compared pro-life claims to flat-Earth, which, putting aside the gap in scientific evidence for those two views, also doesn’t bear much water statistically: two percent of adult Americans believe in flat-Eath whereas nearly half are pro-life. Just in case, for some reason, you needed some kind of logical refutation to that.
So it looks like the pro-life students were able to get a hold of a campus authority, who made the student put the crosses back, but remember that this isn’t the only time we’ve witnessed this kind of behavior. Remember Texas State?
And back to Washington state, the flat-Earth comparison wasn’t the only insane birth-related remark to be made recently. University of Washington professor Stephen Warren responded to someone saying “In terms of carbon emissions … there’s probably nothing worse we can do on an individual basis than take an intercontinental flight” by saying “Actually, there is something worse: having a child.”
Because you know, planes…children, these things are completely analogous. Professor Warren said “By choosing to reproduce, you’re responsible for some fraction of the carbon-dioxide emissions of your children and grandchildren, and all their descendants. This is your ‘carbon legacy.’”
Mhmmmm. That’s, of course, the same logic that has now made reparations a serious part of political discourse.
Eighteen-year-old Ezra Benner tried to use a chain to lock the University of Washington College Republicans inside a room where they were holding an event, according to Campus Reform. Benner was charged with disorderly conduct and the College Republicans are trying to pursue another charge of unlawful imprisonment.
Before that, a local Antifa chapter had posted to Facebook, encouraging people to come and deplatform the event, taking issue with the College Republicans’ association with the Proud Boys and the YouTube man-on-the-street channel Operation Cold Front. Emerald City Antifa said “some useful tactics might [be] to sit in using large items that take up additional seats, maybe with headphones in so you don’t have to hear their garbage, or noise demo tactics such as whistles to make it difficult for them to speak over.”
And the UW chapter wasn’t the only College Republicans group to have some problems this week. Western Oregon University’s chapter had an event with Joey Gibson that was protested.
This is the quality of opposition you get at these events: “f*** you, Nazis” from people who probably couldn’t define national socialism and “hate speech is not free speech” from people who probably haven’t read the First Amendment.
