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Friday, June 30, 2006
From My Files: Foods That Should Not Have Been Invented
NOTE: Since I wrote this post I have found out from the discussion in the comments section that you should not give your dogs any raisins or grapes. So don't. 1. Raisins. I hate raisins. I'm convinced that they are a right-wing hoax, and that what you think are raisins in that large muffin you are ready to bite into are really...rabbit droppings. And the rabbit had rabies and giardia, too. The only reason for putting raisins into anything is so that I have an excuse to dig them out and give them to my dog who doesn't mind eating droppings of all sorts. She's vaccinated against rabies and eats worms for fun. 2. Eating stems of things. Like celery or rhubarb. Nobody expects me to eat the trunks of oak trees but when I refuse to crunch into a celery stick people are all insulted and huffy. Goddesses are not supposed to eat stems of things. They can be used to erect umbrellas over our heads or to create long-handled fans that our underlings can wave to keep us cool. But that's it. 3. Gelatine/jello. It wobbles, for one thing. It's cold and slimy like some human excretions that I don't want to eat. And if it has little lumps of things in it that's even worse. Much much worse. I always suspect they are the brains of wingnuts or their hearts. Do I sound picky? Well, I am picky, and proud of it. Someone must uphold the standards in this latte-sipping elite world of all us welfare recipients. Which reminds me that iced latte shouldn't taste like the coffee I have left over from yesterday. Especially if it costs five bucks and even if I pay for it from my welfare checks. |
Hearsay
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Safe And Free?
Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga, believes in being safe:
Let me just add to that my desire to have a CIA agent in every house or apartment in this country, because otherwise it's difficult to say that we are covering all possible terrorist activity. Or an even safer thing would be to lock up everyone who might, just might, look like a terrorist before anything has happened. Ann Coulter has argued that a country in peacetime should err towards letting more suspects go free rather than towards imprisoning too many innocent people by accident, but that the reverse is true during wartime. Which is interesting because Coulter herself has advocated violence and perhaps should be locked up as a preventive measure. What do you think? I'm just kidding, naturally, exactly in the same way as Ann always does. All this has been said before. But the point is an important one to emphasize and repetition seems to be the way to get there. So consider again a world where every single man is under curfew after dark, unable to go out: a world of safety for most women. Shouldn't we carry out this marvelous idea of male curfew? People like Chambliss should be all for it, especially in wartime. |
Early Friday Dog Blogging
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Thursday, June 29, 2006
The Beaver Hunter
This one goes directly into my "No Comment" files. Or at least right after I gargle with some bleach:
May Tom DeLay dream about giant beavers with very sharp fangs... --- Link courtesy of BG. |
Obama On Religion and the Democratic Party
Is the Democratic party the party of the godless? Ann Coulter thinks so, of course, but that is to be expected as she is one of the people with the task to broadcast this wingnut soundbite. But quite a few Democrats seem to have gone along with this type of thinking and now want to make the party more welcoming to the Evangelists and other groups currently nestling against Karl Rove's bosom. Barak Obama is the latest Democrat to argue for greater tolerance of religious sentiment in the public sector. His recent speech states:
To be fair to Obama, his speech is nuanced and explains carefully what he means by allowing religious beliefs to influence political debate:
Strictly speaking, once we allow for Obama's second point what he advocates is no different from what is actually going on anyway: Some people base their politics on religious ideals but frame the argument as a health issue or a human rights issue or a privacy issue. This is not really what the Christian fundamentalists on the right wish to see happen. They want their literal reading of the Bible to explicitly govern the laws of the country and their concept of god to be the one which is mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance. Anything less than this is regarded as oppressing them. In a sense, then, Obama is saying nothing new, and what he says will not satisfy the right-wing Christians. In another sense, what he says plays right into their hands, because he plays with the rules of their ballgame: that Democrats are atheists and secularists who have no moral values, that moral values only come from established religions, or at least that the moral values derived from established religions should beat those arrived at in any other way. I don't see the problem Obama frames in his speech. Religious values are not excluded from the political arena. People have them and these values affect their thinking. What is excluded currently is the authority of other people's religious values as justification for certain political decisions and the authority of religious bodies to directly deal in politics. Both of these exclusions are what the wingnut Christians lament and wish to have changed. What Obama offers them is no better than stale crumbs and will not draw any of those fervent Dominionists and such into the Democratic party. Talking about religion and politics in this country is an odd game. It's perfectly fine to criticize the political system for excluding religious people or for slighting their rights to, say, evangelize to the rest of citizens. But it is not perfectly fine to criticize religions or the way their adherents interpret them. Thus, we don't usually point out that Christians probably shouldn't bring prayer into schools because of this Bible verse:
And we don't usually point out that the Bible has several thousand statements about economic justice and the need to take care of the poor but not a single one that bans abortions. If explicitly religious justifications for political actions are to be welcomed, so should explicitly political criticisms of religions and their adherents. |
Onwards and Upwards, My Friends!
The wingnut sites are not doing so hot right now:
It could be part of a fairly general slowdown, of course, even with the MoveOn exception. Summertime tends to be slower than the rest of the year. But my numbers are still showing a steady increase from month to month. Soon I will count myself as a firmly B-list blogger. |
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
I Told You So
Well, I didn't. But I thought it, "it" being that the attacks against the lefty blogosphere would soon be about aging 1960's hippies and their anger and rage. This is because the earlier soundbites about young nerdy know-nothing guys didn't work out to match reality. Blog readers turned out not to be especially young. So they must be especially old and still especially fringey. And my predictions have now come true:
There is no way of avoiding these types of nasty labels. It doesn't matter what the demographics of liberal and progressive bloggers and there readers might be; whatever they are the right-wingers will make up suitable insults. But "neo-commies"? Really? |
A Fluffy Post
Just because I feel like writing one in this world where the important question about the New York Times debacle seems to be whether its journalists should be drawn and quartered immediately or only after a prolonged use of thumb-screws and not whether the Bush administration has exceeded its legal powers. And because one of my relatives believes that Valerie Plame will be arrested and sent to jail any day now, for treason. Here's the fluffiness: Yesterday I wore a "Got Democracy?" t-shirt and got lots of wary looks from bypassers. Today I wear a "Never Believe Anything I say" t-shirt and nobody bats an eyelid. Don't you think that this reflects the current political situation in the whole country? A kind of resigned apathy. - Not that I like wearing t-shirts with messages; it's more fun to be mysterious. But I haven't done laundry for a while. The Supreme Court did some laundry, though, and hung it all out to dry. Tom deLay's political redistricting in Texas was mostly allowed to remain, though there will be some redrawing of the map to protect minority voting rights. I don't think that the decision is good for democracy (see how I'm tying this to the t-shirt part here?), because if the parties in power can gerrymander to their hearts' content we are going to get lots of districts where only one candidate is truly viable. And that means a situation not so different from what the Soviet Union used to do: put up one single candidate and let people vote yes or no. |
For Your Information
Dan Froomkin has a good example of the importance of knowing how poll questions are worded before deciding on what the percentages for and against something mean:
It's fairly easy to manufacture public opinion by careful wording of the questions. Or less careful, too. Have you finally started flossing, by the way? Answer yes or no. |
Girls and Boys and Schools
An article in the Washington Post on Monday discussed a new study on that favorite topic of the anti-feminists: the troubles of boys at school:
(Bolds mine.) The article also notes the political angles to this question:
The optimist in me now expects a raised level of discussions on this topic. The realist in me knows that discussions will still be about the evil feminists and about the assumed zero-sum game between boys and girls. And about the benefits of single-sex education, which for the wingnuts include the opportunity to mold boys into godly macho men and girls into helpmeets for the same, I suspect. Their expressed arguments for single-sex education are different, of course, and mostly about how much better the education turns out to be if boys and girls are taught separately. But a recent British study casts some doubt on this:
That last sentence is an important one, as it applies even more generally, and reminds us that there are many reasons why one particular school might perform better than another school. For example, Harvard is a "good" university partly because it attracts very good students. These students would most likely do well in any university they choose, which means that some of the assumed effects of superior Harvard education are really not caused by anything at Harvard. This same selection bias explains at least partially why traditionally all-women colleges appear to have performed very well. These colleges attracted the very best high-income students in the past, and these students then often had brilliant careers. It is hard to determine which part of those careers could be attributable to the actual training the all-women colleges provided. |
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
On The Horrible Scourge Of Flag Burning
Or as John Amato says in his post on Crooks&Liars:
No, it's not a joke. And the article Amato links to points out the tremendous increase in flag burning cases:
Imagine that. Such an important debate. It might save the lives of as many as four flags a year. But the proposed amendment wouldn't cost the Republicans any money, and they like that in a law, unless it's about giving subsidies to corporations or about spending money on those masculine invasions abroad. It's also an informal patriotism test for politicians and a small pat on the head of the extreme wing of the Republican party. And it's ok for politicians to show proper emotions in public when the emotions are about the corpses of little defenseless flags. |
More Christian Lady Blogging
Now this is interesting: A Biblical justification for limiting suffrage to men (or even to men with property). It started with one of those games where people are asked to answer questions, and the blogger answered a question about what she'd like to change in the world like this:
She didn't get into any trouble. Her commenters pretty much agreed that married women shouldn't have the vote, and the blogger herself explained why:
I'm sure the Islamic fundamentalists would agree with this line of thinking. Probably the Jewish fundamentalists, too. Another commenter posed a slightly different reason for no suffrage for women: Women vote for the wrong candidates:
The Islamic fundamentalists also think that women are too emotional to act in the public sector. That is one of the reasons why most interpretations of the shariah law argue that women can't be judges. I have always found it very odd that such emotional people can be put in charge of one of the most important jobs there are: that of bringing up children. It's also hard to see why a blog comment by a woman would be taken seriously if women are so emotional that they shouldn't be allowed to vote. Indeed, it's hard to see why anything that women say should be taken seriously, including Bible interpretation. It would be interesting to learn if taking away women's suffrage is one of the plans for the future Dominionistic United States of America. --- Thanks to moiv in my comments for the original link to the Prairie Muffin Manifesto (like the fundamentalist Rules for women) and to Q Grrl for the link to this blogpost. |
Who Is To Blame For Raunchiness?
This U.K. blog post suggests that it's not the lads. It's the lassies. At least they are the ones to fix the problem:
I'm a little confused. First the writer argues that hormones bubble every bit as strongly in conservative societies, but then he argues that women should become more modest in the nonconservative societies. What good would that do if raunchiness will be there anyway? It looks like anything can make some lads raunchy, be it an eyelash sticking out of the veil or a thong showing right above some woman's low-slung jeans. And somehow it's still the women who are responsible. I get his point about using market power, of course. If only it was that simple. But it isn't, and one of the reasons is the lack of the types of political solutions that the writer doesn't believe in, such as feminism, which encourages women to have more self-confidence and trust in their value as people. Feminists might still buy thongs and low-slung jeans and makeup, of course, but they'd do it for different reasons. |
Quantity Discounts
Are neat things. You can save a bit of money by buying in bulk. The same principle should apply to larger entities than individuals and households, and indeed it does. The Democrats are proposing to use this simple principle in the Medicare prescription drug program:
The "doughnut hole" is defined in the same article:
This doesn't make any sense at all. From a medical point of view those who are more seriously ill will have greater drug expenses. Why suddenly raise these expenses, after first subsidizing them? Some patients might stop taking their medications when the prices rise, and some of these could get a lot sicker or even die. And if the "doughnut hole" is intended to discourage medication use as a money saving device, why then reintroduce the subsidies at even higher levels? In any case, the Democrats' proposal is based on the idea that the mass purchasing power of the government would let much lower prices be negotiated than the current system of market competition but with a ban on such overall negotiations. On the other side, the proponents of the administration plan argue that the system is already cheaper than estimated:
Hmm. But it's not one size of drugs that the bulk purchase proposal advocates, just one set of discounts. The Canadian experience suggests that centralized purchasing could produce considerable additional savings. Of course the Republicans are unlikely to try something like that, given their distrust of the government. The pharmaceutical companies wouldn't like it, either. |
Treason and The New York Times
An interesting story, isn't it? The New York Times first publishes classified government information in an article about yet another secret Bush administration program:
The floodgates then opened. The wingnut blogs wanted the Times taken to court for treason, for its offices to be permanently closed down and worse. The blogs on the right were unanimous in their condemnation of the newspaper: To release classified information during a time of war amounts to treason and to aiding and abetting the enemy. Off with her head, went the call in Wingnuttia. Finally, the liberal media was caught in a most horrendous act of unpatriotism and America-hating. Finally, the evidence was there to show that the real terrorists are domestic ones and consist of the liberal media. And so on. President Bush called the revelations "disgraceful". His spokesman Tony Snow warned the Times of the consequences of its actions:
The strongest words of condemnation came from Representative Peter T. King:
But by far the funniest fight over the whole question can be seen at a videoed debate between two talk show hosts. The debate ended in the wingnut host storming off the set. Then there is the other side, best described by the initial article itself:
Bill Keller elaborated on this in a later letter:
That's the sophisticated version of the arguments for publishing the article. My translation of it is that the media (not just the Times as information about the program was simultaneously published in other newspapers, including the conservative Wall Street Journal) is concerned about the levels of secrecy in this government and the existing imbalance of power between the executive and legislative branches of the government. The decision to write about this is what triggered the story. Yes, the information they published is classified, but then an awful lot of information seems to be classified by this government. Combine this with the new legal interpretations which argue that the president has the powers to do pretty much anything he pleases, and, well, it's possible to see why the press felt they had to publish this story. I very much doubt that the facts in the story were new to the terrorists. We have known for a long time that the counterterrorism programs include financial data gathering, and I'm sure that the terrorists know that, too. They seem to be able to figure things out, especially when Bush mentions them in his speeches. What we didn't know, necessarily, is just how wide the government's financial nets might be and whether these nets could be used to catch completely unrelated fish. Many of my wingnut acquaintances argue that the innocent have nothing to fear from the government's eavesdropping or money-checking programs, and that any attempts to criticize them only make sense if you love terrorists. Just trust the government to take care of you, they seem to say. But if all we needed was trust that people only do good things and that information never falls into wrong hands we'd need no laws or police enforcement, and I'm as suspicious of people in the government as in the marketplace. It's odd that the conservatives who usually really hate and suspect the very idea of government are less concerned about these current trends than an elite, latte-sipping welfare goddess like me. It's something to do with the "fact" that we are at war. Wars make governments suddenly beautiful in the wingnut eyes, even wars against a formless and countryless enemy or a concept such as terror, even wars which have never been declared by the Congress. Even wars which will probably never end. Now, I have problems with all of that, more problems than I have with the New York Times. |
Monday, June 26, 2006
Remember Alito?
He is still a Supreme Court Justice, and he is solidifying the wingnut takeover there:
Remember how Alito wasn't important enough to deserve a filibustering from the Democrats? |
Withdrawal As War Control
A new USA TODAY/Gallup poll:
But as we already know Bush will Stay The Course and the Democrats are for Cut And Run. And the president doesn't govern on the basis of polls. Er, except when he does. |
The Most Expensive City In The World
This would be Moscow:
Cost-of-living comparisons can be difficult to interpret, though their basic idea is simple enough: Suppose that you currently live in Paris, France, and wish to find out how much your lifestyle would cost in Moscow, Russia. You could perform the calculations by making a list of all the things that you spend money on (the two-bedroom apartment with river views, the Saab convertible, the Chivas Regal whiskey, the pastrami sandwiches and so on), and you could then find out how much all of these things cost you in Paris and in Moscow. If you divide the total Moscow expenditure by the total Paris expenditure and multiply the result by a hundred you'd get a measure of how much more expensive (or cheaper) Moscow is than Paris. The value for Paris here would be standardized to 100 and anything higher than that for Moscow would mean that it's more expensive. In reality the bundle of consumption goods and services that we price (the Saab and the Chivas Regal and so on) can't apply to just one person's habits, so a compromise bundle will have to be adopted, and in the study this article mentions it is the consumption habits of an American ex-patriate. Thus, strictly speaking what this study tells us is not which city is the most expensive in the world but which city is the most expensive for someone who wishes to continue consuming in a particular way, the way of most Americans living abroad and probably working fairly high-salary jobs. But people who live in different cities of this world don't consume the same list of goods and services. Rice, say, is eaten more often where it's cheaper, and eating out in some countries is a luxury limited to birthdays and anniversaries, whereas in other countries it's a low-cost alternative to cooking at home. In short, people adjust the bundle of things they consume on the basis of prices, and this means that simple cost-of-living comparisons like the one discussed here don't give us some sort of a universally true rule about the priciness of different cities. Just think of what the list might look like if we performed the same calculations from the point of view of a Chinese or Senegalese ex-patriate living abroad. |
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Deep Question Of The Day
From the American Spectator magazine, in a story about how poorly bloggers write:
Gulp. |
Rabid, Squeaking Lambs Spewing Venom
Welcome to my pack of sheep. We are rabid and we squeak, too. Here's a picture of us, stolen from the comments of Daily Kos, the place where the Kingpin of us Lilliputians (rabid, squeaking sheep that spew venom, too) reigns: ![]() ![]() My apologies if all this makes you feel confused. I'm referring to David Brooks's recent column on lefty bloggers and especially on Markos of the Daily Kos. This is what Brooks writes:
Later there are references to the squeaking of the rabid lambs; the idea being that nobody can hear such faint squeaking. And what do the lambs squeak about? Well, it's a long and complicated story but you can get a flavor of it by reading this post on the New Republic blog and this response by Markos. The most recent move from the New Republic blog is this, which is a response to this post by Steve Gilliard. Notice that this rabid lamb goddess is not allowed to squeak about this story unless the Kingpin of the Lilliputtians has given his permission? Whatever. I'm more interested in finding out what the criteria are for getting into the New York Times stable of columnists. Suppose I wrote a piece about suicidal elephants who sing like larks with bad brakes. Would that give me a spot right next to our David? Or what if I imploded with hatred and venom and rage like a malfunctioning toaster in a plaid apron? Or would it be a good idea to write something about the hordes of NYT readers that compares them to, say, fart-producing worms with falsetto voices? Choices, choices, and none of them seems to get me past that pesky ideological test of being a columnist anywhere these days. I always fail the wingnut questions. |
Saturday, June 24, 2006
One Further Thought About the Next Post
I went out to the mall to look at this dark-green intricately cut skirt for the third time, and it's still 88 dollars. Too much for a skirt which I don't need, even though it's really "Echidne". Grr. But while walking around and letting the accountant part of me win the inner argument about what else there might be that 88 dollars would be needed for, I also realized that I forgot the most important conclusion from my first Wingnuttia trip: The reason so many of the Christian ladies support ultra-right economic policies has to do with the fact that they already live "in a different country". They feel no real kinship with the rest of us and they don't want to pay taxes towards schools that they are not sending their children to or towards social services that their church supplants. I'm not sure why they don't care about the poor if they don't, but perhaps the poor, too, seem to belong to some other reality than the Christian fundamentalist one. If I'm correct, things are pretty worrisome. The country is falling apart right as we speak, into subcultures which can't communicate. And homeschooling children with quite different curricula will further contribute to this collapse and the chasms that are created. |
Christian Lady Blogging -- Part One Of Travels in Wingnuttia
No, I have not turned into a Christian lady. I'm still a pagan goddess but now freshly returned from my first sojourn into the feminine side of Wingnuttia. "Wingnut", by the way, is a term of endearment employed by some of us liberal/progressive/feminazi types to denote those who perch on the extreme right wing of this country. Just like "moonbat" or "dhimmi" is a similar endearment from the other side concerning us. In any case, I am planning more trips to Wingnuttia, in search of information. This first trip was an information gathering expedition on the question of anti-feminism among the fundamentalist Christian women, and I selected the blogs I visited because their proprietors expressed anti-feminist sentiments. The idea is to forget everything I think I know about the question and to let the Christian lady blogs teach me new answers. It didn't work, of course. I'm much too set in may ways. But I tried. The first thing I noticed about these anti-feminist blogs was the fact that they have very little to say about feminism. There are instructions on how to please a husband, true, that few feminists would want to be seen unless there were similar instructions on how to please a wife, but mostly these blogs are full of posts about homemaking, crafts, recipes, childrearing, homeschooling and Bible study. Many posts are uplifting, trying to make the readers better women, though what these posts mean by better women may not always agree with my idea of goodness. The focus on homemaking and homeschooling on these blogs doesn't really explain their anti-feminism, because there are feminists (the "difference" school comes to mind) who end up with fairly similar ideas about what women might want to do with their lives and who also stress the value of mothers at home and the value of homeschooling. Also, even really mean feminists like me can do crafts. Here are pictures of two sweaters I designed and knitted (the first picture is a closeup of the third one), and I also made a business suit once (picture available if requested): ![]() ![]() ![]() No, something deeper is going on with these Christian lady bloggers' anti-feminism, and that is their literal reading of the Bible. They believe that God wants wives to submit themselves to their husbands. One blogger gives the following personal statement:
Note that she blogs with her husband's oversight and blessing and encourages her (female?) readers to seek counsel from men in their families. Another blogger expresses similar sentiments:
This is a hierarchical view of the sexes. Men are higher on the spiritual and power ladders, and this view is based on a literal reading of the Bible as God's word. My view of the Bible is quite different. I see it as written by human beings who lived a long time ago, in a society where women were much less educated and informed than men were and where male supremacy probably went unquestioned. There seems to be an unbridgeable chasm between me and the Christian lady bloggers. If we start from different basic assumptions, well, it would probably be impossible to build any kind of mutually beneficial conversations. This is very sad. Not all the opposition to feminism in these blogs is based on Christian sectarian interpretations. One blogger posted this quip about feminism:
This is really quite funny. Mistaken, but funny. I don't believe that men are any more likely to be jerks than women, but I do believe that the way society is structured gives men more scope to develop any jerkdom they have. I also don't believe that women should be more like men. It's enough if women can become more like themselves, always within the rules of good citizenship and such, naturally. Still, I get the joke. I wonder if the blogger gets the hidden joke in this; the one about women not being protected by submitting themselves to a jerk, however angelic the women themselves might be. The comments to this post about feminism referred to the Titanic disaster. This is a common metaphor that wingnuts use to explain why a male-dominated society was actually good for women, and the reason is chivalry. The men on the Titanic chose to drown so that the women and the children could get first dibs on the lifeboats. I've heard this metaphor being used to explain why women should now submit themselves to men forevermore. Never mind that chivalry might never have been that common or applicable towards lower-class women. And never mind that reversing the argument probably gives you goosebumps: If I promise to drown for you should the occasion arise, will you promise to obey me all your lives? But what's really nasty about the Titanic metaphor is what it reveals about the wingnuts' views on men. There is a hidden threat in this story, and that threat is this: If women no longer submit to earn chivalry, who do you think is going to be on those lifeboats, the strong men or the weak women? Women can choose: either live in a jungle where men trample all over you or agree to submit and then maybe earn chivalry from them. That is a very sexist and mean-spirited view of men. I didn't do very well on my attempt to be open-minded and nonsarcastic, even though I have never edited a post more towards the gentler and kinder direction. Sigh. It's my vipertongueness. Well, nobody is perfect. Not even Christian lady bloggers. |
Friday, June 23, 2006
Blogs as Communities
My earlier post on the way lefty blogs are discussed in the mainstream media referred to the idea of blog communities, but I now think this idea deserves a post of its own. The feeling of belonging to a community, of being its member, of being accepted even when you are grumpy and sad or in the wrong is very important for many human beings. Communities are not the same as the circle of our immediate families and friends, but they are also necessary for pack animals such as Homo sapiens, and I believe that we have not appreciated this importance enough in politics. Think about the idea of America-on-the-road, about how people move across a continent at the drop of a hat, in search for a better job or a better life. This can be good and exciting but it also has its costs in terms of lost ties to people and places, losses of community. And what takes its place for many? Watching the box or surfing the internet. These are not replacements of real communities. The religious believers, including the fundamentalists, have their own solution to our thirst for communities: churches and other religious institutions. They serve to bring people together and to give them the kind of community feeling people need. The new megachurches thrive because of this. People cut adrift from their familiar and geographic ties can hookup immediately to something larger than themselves. This is important, not to be underestimated. I have even heard abused women tell that they stayed in the faith-based community that did the abusing because of this community feeling. But that communities can be exploited for nepharious agendas does not mean that we who are not nepharious should not build our own communities. Communities of people who have at least some of the same beliefs let us feel that we are not alone, not weird. They give us a place where we can relax, where it's not necessary to always be in armor and ready to attack, where it's possible to discuss and plan and to take the risk of being in the wrong without getting your head bashed in as a consequence. Internet communities are not quite the same thing as real world communities, but they are communities, and I believe that we should support them because of the psychological and political and common-sense advantages. And whenever possible, we should encourage the next step: to make these communities into real-world communities. Programs such as Drinking Liberally already do this. So I find blog communities at Eschaton, Kos, Firedoglake and Pandagon, to pick just a few examples, a good thing for us liberals and progressives and feminists. And how do you build such a community? Well, you need to have comments and you need to let people talk about stuff that is not directly related to the topic of the comments thread. You need to give the readers a voice. - You also need to solve the problem of trolling and of unstable commenters and of spamming, but a lot of this is not that different from the kinds of things that happen in flesh-based communities. All this is a long answer to this criticism of blogs I linked to earlier:
Anyone who has organized a church social knows about the lack of concentration thing. It's nothing specific to blogs or lefty blogs. Indeed, anyone who has taught a class knows about the lack of concentration thing. The trick is to bring people's attention back by suddenly yelling like an angry bear, say. Worked for me. Communities are not totally good things. For one thing, anything that makes some people into "insiders" turns others into "outsiders", and all sorts of nastiness can grow from that, and the self-policing of communities can also get vicious. For that reason (and for other reasons) we also need political commons, places, where people of different political views can interact. In a POLITE way. Right now these commons don't exist, because the wingnuts have killed them - I'm willing to defend this argument for pages and pages, so don't even think of starting a debate on it - and some of the criticisms aimed at blogs should be properly addressed to those wingnuts responsible for the lack of such commons. Did you notice that I'm practising using dashes recently? This kind of thing is the reason why my blog will never become a community. |
How It's Done
I listened to the BBC interview with Ann Coulter about her book. She goes on about a preschool child being told at school that his school lunch consisted of garbage because the sandwich was wrapped in plastic which would then go into landfills. From this it was just one short leap for Coulter to say that schools talk about this godless stuff six hours a day, and another short leap inexorably leads to her assertion that the whole country is in the claws of fundamentalist atheists who only worship the god of recycling. To write a book like this but with the accusations reversed I will start with this piece of news about a ten-year old girl being told to remove her bandanna in a mall. Because the bandanna had peace signs. Yup:
Yup. The next step is to point out how children are subjected to this six hours a day in the malls they frequent. And then the next step is to point out how the whole country is in the claws of these censors who decide what our children can wear in public. Peace signs! The horror of it. Ok. This isn't very well done, but my point should come out clear. It's not at all hard to make outrageous theories if all the evidence you need is anecdotal stuff. There is always someone somewhere who can support your theory. |
The Lefty Blogs Have Arrived
Where, exactly, they have arrived is still unclear. But the command has been handed down from the very top wingnuts: Destroy! It's a little like that Gandhi quip about the enemy first ignoring you, then ridiculing you and then you win. A little, because it's not yet clear who will win, though I tend to be fairly pessimistic in such predictions. Still, it's fun to be a thorn in someone's backside. It all started with the attention the so-called liberal media awarded to the Yearly Kos, the gathering of bloggers, blog readers and politicians into an actual in-the-flesh convention. People had fun! And the politicians were IMPORTANT ones! EEEK! Better get the opposition rolling. And so it rolled. First, stories about the convention tried to find pictures of hairy and frightening lefty extremists but failed miserably. The people participating looked just like...ordinary people of all types. Not to despair yet. There must be something else one can point out to make the lefty blogs look bad. Wait, I know. Let's point out that the blogosphere hasn't backed any winning politicians! Yes, that's a good one. Surely everybody understands that a few people blogging out of their basements for two or three years should have turned the system by now if they ever will. Then let's point out how extremists these folk are. No way could we let them have any influence in the mainstream media where we listen to such sane and tolerant and truth-loving people as Limbaugh and Coulter and Savage and Beck and Gibson and... A good beginning. What else could we do? Perhaps dig out some nasty information about some blogger somewhere and then make that apply to every single person who ever blogged outside wingnuttia? Good idea. Let's do that. Then we can point out that the leaders of the lefty blogosphere are not squeaky-clean and make all sorts of conspiracy theories in general. Well, except that there are no leaders really, because the left is disorganized and unable to hold on to any unified agenda whatsoever. Put that in, too. That's it, pretty much, except for lots of repetition. Here's David Broder:
His advice is to use the internet to read mainstream stuff instead. That's ok. I don't mind that advice. I'm going to filter into the mainstream eventually, because Some Things Just Will Be. But I won't stop reading blogs, either, because blogs keep the mainstream journalists honest and scared, and that is good. If repetition won't get you convinced, how about turning the strength up a click or two on the vituperation dial:
Now I have to go and cry in a corner. I've been so totally put into my place. But the writer doesn't get the community idea of blogs. There's a reason for talking about trivial things in the threads, and that is community building. We need communities, we humans (and goddesses), and internet communities can be real communities. They are sort of our megachurches. Heh. Interesting that the term "blogosphere" has suddenly become synonymous with "left blogosphere". What happened to all those wingnut blogs which moved mountains (or so I read quite recently) in American politics? Also interesting how "left blogosphere" now means Markos of the Daily Kos. It's an odd transformation and has very little to do with reality. Such a transformation is necessary, of course, because the next stage in the wingnut campaign is to destroy the enemy and if the enemy is one guy running one blog the operation looks feasible. Sadly (or happily, depending on your point of view), wingnuts are poor war planners. I think we have some more time before we get occupied for the sake of our freedoms. Though the metadiscussions on this already appear to accept the hierarchical model of importance. |
Early Friday Dog Blogging
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Thursday, June 22, 2006
The Party Of The Few Billionaires
The Republican party is the party of money. They harvest the fundamentalists for support and votes, true, and they don't really care if the fundies get to decide how the lives of the poor are, but their real aim has always been to preserve wealth in as few hands as possible. Yesterday's events are such a good example of this simple truth. First, the Republicans crushed the attempt to raise the minimum wage. Note that the U.S. Congress has voted themselves raises every year. But no, the poor can't get raises:
Second, on the same day the Republicans did this:
I once heard William Kristol (one of the thinkers among wingnuts) in an interview state very explicitly that the Republican party is the party of the property owners and that its major goal is to protect property. Good for Bill to be so honest. There is an inbuilt problem with a party which tries to get property more and more concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, and that is that the property owners alone will then not have enough votes to stay in political power. Unless they find out something populist, something appealing to our worst instincts, like fear and hatred of the other or fear of death. Like fearing the terrorists and the Mexicans who steal our (minimum wage!) jobs. Such populist ideas seem to work quite well in the short run, but I suspect that a day will come when the scales fall off the eyes of those who vote for the rich while staying every bit as poor as before, or those who used to belong to the middle classes but now find themselves relying on that seldom-changing minimum wage. - Well, nobody can blame me for lack of optimism now. |
The Axis of Santorums
![]() Senator Ricky Santorum is not an ethical politician:
Why do this idiotic thing? To fetch water for the approval-parched Bush administration? To try to do something about the fact that he's not doing well in the polls about the next elections in Pennsylvania? And this one is truly hilarious: Santorum is now trying to appeal to women voters who are naturally a little skittish about voting for a man who would really like to see them in burqas:
Just to remind you why Santorum is NOT for women, read this earlier post of mine on his book. But Mary Matalin came to Ricky's aid:
Hee hee! He's so connected to my problems as a woman, says Mary Matalin! Now that is funny, because it's also kinda true. If Santorum had his way American women would have nothing but problems. Both candidates in this run are pro-lifers, by the way. I get a little bit angry about all these last-minute campaigns to get women voters engaged. Like the old "W is for women" for George Bush, and now this one. They don't show any real understanding of the female voter base, and they don't even care to cover up that ignorance. Women really don't matter to these guys. Just send them chocolate and flowers and apologize for wanting them in burqas. That'll do it. Then there are all those other Santorums cropping up all over the country. This is a funny take on it, via Atrios. Sort of like all those Elvis-imitators, we can now have large swarms of Santorum imitators, holding press conferences of the sinfulness of uppity women and the holiness of wars. |
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Schizoid Blogging
I'm beginning to separate into two personalities. One is a horribly rude blogger, trying desperately to turn the Democratic party into a party of rabid extremism and thereby digging its grave for the next hundred years. This one, with fangs reaching from here to Arkansas, can't be listened to, can't be ignored, must be ridiculed. This is the one who gets her kicks from imagining the slaughtering of American soldiers in Iraq. Or so Rush Limbaugh tells his faithful ditto-heads. Then there is the other personality. The middly-mudly one, the one who doesn't blog enough on fisting or anal sex or anything really interesting, who isn't really feminist enough or angry enough or capable of building real internet communities. Who isn't doing enough grassroots work, isn't getting people involved in politics. Who is too much a wimp. One of these is an externally constructed persona, the other one is a product of my internal videos. The two are right now duking it out in the backyard, using garbage can lids as shields and rakes and spades as the weapons. Henrietta the Hound is watching it all from the porch and she's bored because she's a much more skilled fighter than either one of my fragmented personas. There is no point to this post, just some selfish whining. I find selfish whining a very healthy thing to do once in a while, and especially at times when I see the mythology of bloggers being created. Like right now. |
The Weaker Sex
Some years ago I got a beg letter from an organization promoting more research into women's health. The letter explained in great detail how fragile and sickly women were, and I was inspired enough (read: mad as hell) to actually write them a letter giving lots of health statistics about the fact that women, on average, live quite a bit longer than men, on average. Now Marianne Legato has taken this idea to the extreme in the New York Times, and on Father's Day, of all things. She writes:
You know what? I feel as angry about this reverse take on the relative health of the sexes, and the reason for my anger in both cases is the same one: Discussions like these may or may not be the springboard for better health research, but they certainly will be used to perpetuate the status quo of power imbalances between the sexes. It's pretty obvious how an article explaining the weakness and fragility of women can be used that way: Women must be protected from the hurly-burly of jobs and power and political debates. Someone else must decide for them, someone else must regulate their lives so that they will stay healthy. Or so that at least their womb and ovaries will stay healthy. But the reverse story can lead to the exactly same conclusion. Don't believe me? Here's Legato on that very topic:
It's like that old joke we used tell about communism when I was a tiny goddess: My doughnut is my doughnut. Your doughnut is my doughnut. - Not a very good joke, but it shows the odd way any differences between men and women are obvious explanations for male dominance. It doesn't matter what way the differences would go. None of this should be intended to read that I don't care about men's possible fragility, compared to us stoic and almost-unkillable women. I do care. Good research in the field is much encouraged, and we might also do something about all those wars that still kill men disproportionately. Also the murders and car accidents which pick out young men more often than young women. But Legato is exaggerating some of the findings to make her point. For example, there are still more boys than girls being born, even in the industrialized countries. We should remember that when interpreting the sad description of the difficulties that boys have in becoming born in the first place. The question of depression rates by sex is interesting. I remember reading a study on depression among the Amish sect in the United States. It suggested that the rates were fairly equal by sex, whereas the general consensus is that women are much more likely to suffer from depressive illness. One suggested explanation for the findings among the Amish was that the Amish don't self-medicate with alcohol and that for some reason there is no cultural ban for men to say that they are depressed. Both these factors might disguise male depression in the wider American context. But this was just one study and I can't recollect whether it was well done or not. We clearly need good research on these issues and probably also programs that support seeking help earlier among men. But I still don't like this current trend of thinking about all of us as just simply generic examples of "male" or "female". A good female friend of mine died young and another woman I knew committed suicide. I had a great-uncle who died at ninety-nine. Programs that would lump all people into treatment groups by sex alone would be as ham-fisted an approach as ignoring the question altogether. |
George Bush Answers Questions in Vienna
Ah, the Sacher torte. George Bush is in Vienna and meeting, for a change, journalists which are not of the tame American breed. See how he manages to answer the questions from the wild or feral type:
"Leadership requires making hard choices based upon principle and standing by the decisions you make." Hmm. I learned two things from this: First, Bush has watched too many cowboy movies and not enough about the last czar of all Russia. Second, we are going to go over the cliff any day now, because we will not veer from the course he has selected. Sigh. - Did you notice how he talks about "leading my country". Imperial tones. Ta-Ram-Pam-Pah. |
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Virginity or Death - A Book Review
Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time is the new collection of Katha Pollitt's columns from the Nation magazine, spanning the time period from 2001 to early 2006. Go and buy it now. I did, though I asked the sales clerk at the local bookstore to "give me virginity or give me death" and his eyes bulged out a little. I'm not an unbiased reviewer of Pollitt's work, because I love her writing. I wrap myself in it as if it were a silk blanket, I gorge on it as if it were the best chocolate in the whole world, I inhale it as if all the secret and luxurious spices were found it it. That last sentence shows that, alas, I'm no Pollitt myself. The idea I wanted to reach was that for me reading Katha's writing is such a sensual experience that it wouldn't matter very much what she writes. But she writes good stuff, mostly, and stuff that very few other commenters in the mainstream print media cover. Not only is she one of the few out-of-closet feminists out there but she is also one of the few writers who takes women seriously as a topic. Of course, these two things are pretty much the same. You should buy this new collection even if you have read every one of the columns before, because of two things: First, the Introduction alone is worth the price of $13.95. Here Pollitt writes about the current regime:
And here she writes about the media treatment of feminism:
This discussion gets even more interesting, but I'm not going to give it all away. Second, it's fascinating to see the columns in time order, starting from the earliest pre-911 ones and reading through to almost the current time. We can observe the impact of the softly-creeping veiled fundamentalism on our lives much more clearly in a context like this. It's a little similar to those films which speed up the opening of a flower. I almost feel like an infomercial here. Must add something critical. Well, for one thing, I had to pay for the book to review it, though I didn't ask for a free copy, either. And sometimes I disagree with Pollitt because I'm more middle-of-the-road in some political areas and less capable of appreciating irony in others. I also suspect that she'd kick my butt quite admirably if I ever really angered her. Which isn't really a criticism. |
Horror
![]() Did you stay up during the night, staring into the darkness, wondering, perhaps hoping or even praying that these kidnapped soldiers, these children, were already dead, past the point where they would feel anything at all? I did that. That we have come to a place where the best thing we can see is to pray for a quick death. And a place where it seemed totally wrong to write about any of this and every bit as wrong not to write about it. Where anything I could say would seem wrong, supporting the wrong political ideas, ignoring all the other horrors (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo), just wrong. Yet somehow not to write about this horror seemed wrong, too. Everything has become politics, including the horrors from both sides. And even saying that appears to imply some sort of equality in horror. There is no such thing about horrors. May those who have experienced horror and are still alive and those who love them and loved those who died in horrors, may all these have peace. |
Justice Wingnut Style
Louisiana has joined with South Dakota as one of those places which worries about rapists' fatherhood rights:
The law will not come to force until Roe vs. Wade is overturned. Which is probably just a question of time, as the new injections of wingnuts into the Supreme Court are already bringing rewards to the conservatives:
The conservative views tend to favor the owners, the business, the conservative church, whites and men, and those will be the groups that will gain in the near future. Note how both baby Justices, Roberts and Alito, are now nicely nesting under the extreme wing? |
Monday, June 19, 2006
How Feminist Are You?
I found a really simple test for you. Go and read majikthise's piece on Hitchens and the blowjobs and then read the comments. If you find yourself banging your head against my garage door or sighing sadly you deserve an honorary feminazi stamp. If you wonder why Echidne is fussing over something like that you deserve a year's subscription to Mensnewsdaily. Remember that the readers of majikthise's piece are quite likely to be liberals and progressives. |
Everybody Hates Linda?
Last December Linda Hirshman wrote an interesting (and incendiary) piece in the American Prospect on educated women supposedly giving up on this thing called career and returning to a life of housewifery. Now she has come out with a book on the topic: Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World and an article in the Washington Post yesterday. In this article she says:
I suspect that Linda likes to strike up some controversy, actually, because that's what happens when you tell people that their life choices are less worthy. And there is a very strong mythology on the side of her critics, the stuff about self-sacrificing women and domestic goddesses. Not to mention the fact that spending time with your own children is a lot more self-actualizing than scrubbing factory floors for a minimum wage, so her arguments, if they apply, apply only to the juicy jobs out there. The ones with power and influence and full of interesting things to do. And most women don't "opt-out" for good, just as most women probably don't "opt-in" for good. If there are mummy wars then a woman might suddenly find her on the opposite side of the fight. But I hate mommy wars. Because they are part of the wingnuts' policy of divide et impera. As long as women fight over who is the better mommy the Bush administration can cut all the support structures (meager as they are) for women and we have no energy to fight it. Still, Hirshman has a point in the last sentence of the quote above: " standing up for staying at work is the big taboo." I tend to agree. This decision must be based on something like a woman's children starving if she quits. Otherwise her choice to continue working is subject to any amount of moral ponderings. Note that none of these moral ponderings apply if it's the father who goes on working when a new baby is born, or even if he turns extra ambitious for promotions at that point. It's just natural, we think, and never wonder if the child will suffer from hardly noticing that there is a father around, except in the form of expensive presents and fancy schools. Selfish? You judge. - I just did a reversal of the message educated women get every month in the United States. There were things that the old, hairy feminists used to say which are still worth saying about the division of labor between partners, and we don't hear them very often anymore. For example, the partner who stays at home will have less retirement income and fewer good opportunities for a job later on. This means that she or he has a more difficult time leaving a bad marriage than someone who has continued working for money. This, in turn, means that the upper hand in such a marriage could go to the money-earning spouse. It doesn't have to, of course, but there's a reason why it might, and the reason is power and money. Then there is another old point: That we lose all the skills of those women in the public sector who quit their jobs. We lose the specific education they have and their specific work experiences. We lose women in decision-making positions which they could use to make the world a fairer place for mothers. The other side of the argument also has very good points: Children need their parents' time and most parents want to spend time with their children. Work is not necessarily more rewarding than spending time with your children. In fact, work is often pretty tedious and tiring. But then that is sometimes true of children, too. I'm not sure how we got the idea that specializing in one thing only would make people happy, on average. Though there are exceptions to this rule, I believe that most of us need both families and meaningful work to thrive, at least over our lifetimes. It is only women that are asked to choose between these two, and only women who are expected to feel guilt and shame over their choices. And no, you can't escape the guilt and shame by remaining childless, because then the wingnuts tell you that you are causing the population to die out. Let me return to Linda's arguments to finish this long piece. She says:
I wouldn't make this judgment, because I'm not sure what measures we'd use to compare lives of totally different individuals. But there is a different judgment that has been made for centuries: That it's the work in the marketplace that counts, men's work. Whoever made the money owned everything: the house, the horses, even the children. Never mind the mythology about the valuable work mothers did. Accolades and pretty paintings of angelic mothers with apple-cheeked children never paid old age pensions. Motherhood didn't even get women voting rights in the pre-women's-suffrage era. It was lauded in words and ignored in deeds. And there is still some of that going. Indeed, a lot of that going. Think of the resources we dedicate to children as opposed to warfare, for example. Think of the prestige of childcare workers (nonexistent) and the way we react to those who suggest that mothering should be paid work (preposterous). Most old-time feminists still worth reading pointed this all out. It is not that feminists had contempt for stay-at-home mothers, it is that the society had such a contempt where it really counted: when something needed to be done to make those women's lives easier. Indeed, it was the feminists who got Individual Retirement Accounts first extended to cover housewives. The second wave of feminism, the one from the 1960's and 1970's, wanted to change all the problems they saw in the work-family balance, but they succeeded only partially. It is now somewhat easier for women in the labor force and in the public sector in general, but the division of labor at home and the monetary rewards for parenting are still about as bad as they were forty years ago. Is it the case that whatever is viewed as men's work gains in prestige and whatever is viewed as women's work falls in prestige? If this is true, then the only long-term solution to getting a better work-family (or work-life) balance for all people is when more men choose to "opt-out", too, when "mothering" becomes parenting. If this solution strikes you as too far-fetched another might be to institutionalize some rewards of mothering into the system. Take this often heard idea: There are so few women in American politics, because there are so few women in the pipelines which lead to the important jobs, and this, in turn, is caused by women having to care for their children which doesn't give them enough time to do the necessary apprenticeships. Suppose all is true (which it probably isn't). Then what a really family-oriented society would do is this: Put in another pipeline for women who have done all the mothering. Make sure that they get in. Don't just stand there and wring your hands over the facts of life. Likewise for promotions and higher education and so on. In short, stop punishing those who care for the next generation. This might make more fathers interested in the "opt-out" strategy, too. I could add all sorts of stuff about more daycare and longer parental leaves and so on. But I'd be talking to myself, probably. |
Wow. Just Wow.
Click on this link for some laughs. Then you can wonder about the braveness and courage of our president. |
The Ten Commandments
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Bush's Best Week Ever!
Listen to this:
I hope that this was meant as a joke, because if it wasn't the alternative reality has truly taken over the so-called liberal media. Speaking about Iraq, this item of news might be of some interest, given that it applies to the same "best ever week":
Other than that, it's been a very good week. For Bush. |
Loose Lips Sink Ships
We are going to lose the Iraq war if we mention any of the reasons that makes us lose it. Got it? Maybe one more repetition would help:
A new psychological approach to fixing problems: just pretend that they don't exist and they will go away. I also doubt that the small number of politics junkies who watch Sunday morning political shows have much to do with the Iraq uprising. |
A Sunday Sermonette To Women
It has to be "a sermonette to women" as a woman can't preach to men, according to conservative religious guys. And women can't become bishops in the Episcopalian/Anglican church and still remain Best Friends Forever with the Catholics. This I have learned. Now you can learn it, too, from "the address Cardinal William Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, gave to the Church of England bishops' meeting June 5, on the question of ordaining women as bishops":
Put that in your pipe, all you hairy feminazis, and smoke it. How does it feel to know that you'll never be equal with us penised people? - But of course that is not at all what our dear Kasper meant. Women and men are wholly and holily equal. Just don't try to test that assertion. You know, this stuff hurts. It hurts that in this great human family of ours it is so necessary to shit on women. To have the family thrive. This definition excludes women but what the heck. Women are used to being told to sacrifice for the greater good, and we have interesting ways of defining "greater good". This was supposed to be a nice and superior type of a sermonette, with uplifting ideas about self-flagellation for women. But I sinned and fell into the duckpit of despair there for a moment. I will try to do better now, I swear. One thing I could be is more modest. Modesty is becoming in women. It's an odd virtue as men don't seem to need it. The muslim extremists go on about the modesty of women a lot, and so do the American modesty folks. As far as I can gather, the idea is that if only women were really modest, never blowing their own horn, never revealing a breast or an eyebrow, depending on the culture, then men could be virtuous much more easily. It's the lack of modesty that is the real problem in this world, the lack of proper feminine modesty. I'm not at all sure why men can't be modest, but it seems that either they are so driven by animal lusts that they just can't stop for even the one second that it would take to look elsewhere from an immodest woman or that it's totally unfair to ask men to change anything in their behavior. That's what women are for. I didn't make any of this up. There is a blog, enchantingly called Modestly, Yours, which addresses these types of topics. A bit of an odd name for a blog. I guess it's meant to be a reference to the way one might end a letter, but it's a teeny-weeny touch titillating. The posts on that blog are all about how women should be more modest and how to get there. You can find pearls like this one:
Modesty is all about clothes. It's ok to agree with Ann Coulter (who advocates genocide and suggests a baseball bat as the appropriate form of communication with us liberals), but not with her mini-dresses. It's confusing that Ann Coulter says outrageous things while being outrageously dressed? I have a long way to go before I can learn all about female modesty. The whole modesty movement is linked to Christian fundamentalism, so it's no great surprise that a central pillar of modesty is the idea that women should withhold sex from men until the wedding night. Because nobody would buy the cow if they can get milk without owning one, and cows better carefully plan how they can get bought. Other metaphors that come to mind here are the "excitement of the hunt" which men are denied if the hunted animals suddenly hunt them instead. This worldview gives men very little credit for being adult human beings who can actually control their primal urges. But it gives women no credit for having any primal urges except a kind of sneaky urge to fish for husbands. To be fair to the modesty folks, many of their commenters are fairly sane. That must have come as a bit of a shock to the ladies who run the blog. I think that "modesty" is not a very different idea from "sexee". They both tell women that the way to dress is based on the demands of others. Depending on the culture, either you hide that hair or you bare that tit, and in both cases it's someone else's feelings which are hurt. Why not let women decide for themselves how to dress? Like comfortably, healthily and in a way that is fun? Just as silence never saved anyone, neither will modesty. Look at the women in Saudi Arabia, dressed in the most modest way possible. --- The link to all that modesty is from Pandagon, where Amanda shreds another post on the modesty blog. I was pretty disappointed to find nothing about Modesty Blaise there, by the way. |
Happy Fathers' Day
Something funny for today: Go here to find out where I come from. Then read how to tell your children about sex. |
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Some Plans for This Blog
First, I'm going to update my blogroll in the near future, I swear. Have already started, in fact. If I do only five a day it's not so painful. Why am I such a poor housekeeper? Isn't that supposed to lie deep in my female genes? Second, I'm always happy to receive donations from those who have more money than they need, especially any wingnuts I have converted to the Way of Light. But there is no guilt in reading me for free. After all, I don't get paid, either. Heh. But more seriously, I'm still breaking even which is good, because I'm having fun most days. Third, a new series is in the planning stages. It's about the world of Wingnuttia, and this time a serious investigation into what fundamentalists and others on the right lack in their lives which makes them so mad at us. My research so far has included going to a lot of Christian Lady blogs, only to find out that I can sew at least as well and probably cook better, and that this might be why they hate us feminists. Not really. But the idea is to see what their actual arguments are. Another post will be about the divorce rates in the Bible Belt. I was shocked to find that seventy percent of Oklahoma marriages end up in divorce. Somehow it's very odd to blame us in the far-distant Massachusetts for this, especially us we tend to get divorced a lot less. But this is a very important topic and I hope to get somewhere with it. Then I'm planning a post on the shallow and decadent culture, and how that has become something the liberals are blamed for when in reality I see almost as much frustration with it from the left as from the right. You could propose other posts in the series. But I warn you about one of the consequences of not getting paid: I might never do the series if something else crops up. In any case, it won't happen in the next few days. You can use the comments to make any other requests or scolding or whatever. |
Just Possibly A Most Important Theory In The Universe
I fell asleep after reading the Michelle Goldberg interview on the sneaky ways we are all skipping towards an American Taliban, and when I woke up this observation was lying on the very top of all my thought layers, like a newly made egg in a nest. This must mean something, so I will tell you what it is: Did you ever read books or articles on how the Islamists became so popular in muslim countries over time? What their real attractions to the ordinary people were? If you did, you know that they worked largely through "faith-based initiatives", by offering the health care and the food aid and the schools that the corrupt governments of those countries didn't bother with. Well, we have gone a step better here in the good ole U.S. of A. We pay the religious extremists from tax money so that they can then look as good to the ordinary Americans as the extremists did in those muslim countries. Don't have enough to eat? Go and ask the church for help! A cousin with drug-addiction? The Christian dominionists will help you! Not the government, note, even though the tax money comes from all sorts of people, including secularists. No, it's the religions that are doing good while the government can't even cope with the aftermaths of hurricanes. So the possibly most important theory in the universe is that we are in the early stages of Christianization, just as Egypt was in the early stages if Islamization a few decades ago. To see how the future will look just check what's happening in Egypt right now. There are differences, of course, and those differences will make the extreme radical Christians' task harder. But not impossible. |
Friday, June 16, 2006
Friday Evening Reading
Please go and read this interview where Michelle Goldberg talks about her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. It's important. |
Friday Lip Blogging
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Danger! Blogs Ahead
This opinion piece warns politicians of falling too much in love with blogs. Just look at what happened to Howard Dean! The yell, oh the yell. Had he just gone to the blogs for money and then stayed away with the moderates and other sane people he would not have yelled. Well, that's my version of the message, but it doesn't veer very much from the real one:
Anti-American radicals. It's not just our name; it's what we do, to quote a recent recurring commercial on my local Air America station. There's something a little flattering about this; I never thought that I'd be called a radical by anyone ever. I'm the Goddess of Milquetoast. And don't tell me that the author didn't mean me but the powerful lefty blogs. She didn't make that distinction in the piece, and I take whatever excitement I can these days. But really. To call the blogs anti-American if they criticize George Bush's war lies and the other policies of his administration! How exactly should such criticisms be presented for them not to be labeled anti-American by the Republicans? We might as well just shut up already. |
Thursday, June 15, 2006
When It Blows It Rains
My meager attempt to tell you that this post is about blowjobs. As Interrobang noted in my comments, blow jobs are suddenly the big conversation topic on feminist blogs. Twisty told us that she doesn't like giving them at all and Amanda shredded Christopher Hitchens's paean to the American blowjob. I'm going to hang on to Amanda's pigtails and borrow a little from Twisty, too. Hitchens is going to be the dinner tonight. So sit down and enjoy. No, you don't have to kneel, my dear reader. This might be a good time to get the children out of the room, as I'm going to define a blowjob for you, gentle reader. It consists of one person taking another (male) person's penis in her or his mouth, and then sucking on it and such. If you want to talk about blowjobs without seeming to do so, you call it fellatio. In either case, it's something where the receiver can only be someone with a penis. There is a corresponding form of oral sex where the woman is the receiver of another person's tonguework on her clitoris and labia. Fancy people call it cunnilingus. The reason for that long explanation is not that any of you would need it. But it delayed getting to the actual topic a little, and I had more time to think what I might dare to write next. Let's start with Hitchens's article. He begins saying the most astonishing thing about Nabokov's Lolita: that the farewell scene between the protagonists Humbert and "his very own Lolita" is the most tragic thing he can think of (after all, Humbert kidnapped Lolita). He then goes on with the homily to the homely blowjob:
Well worth paying for. Shown in brothel paintings, where women got paid for sex. Hmmm. And note that the American term for fellatio contains the word "job". Something you might not want to do unless you get paid for it. Hitchens's take on this "job" aspect of fellatio is a very odd one:
Dominance and contempt enter the story here, sneaking quietly into the article and settling in a corner, unnoticed, and dominance and contempt have entered the blogosphere with the blowjob, too. Every day I read about politicians "who need kneepads", every day I read irate commenters urging others "to blow them" and "cocksucker" is up there with "motherfucker" as the worst possible insult. Note that all the insults are aimed at the imagined giver of the blowjob,not its (grateful?) receiver. How can you write as well as Hitchens does and never notice that the Great American Sex Act he lauds is very one-sided? How can he not notice that one party is serviced by the other, that there are men who find the idea of someone kneeling in front of them and sucking on their wee-wee (icky, because pee comes out of it) empowering because they secretly think that giving blowjobs humiliates the giver? It's possible that there are women and men who can orgasm while giving blowjobs, but most people, I suspect, expect something in return for this favor. Hitchens is totally silent about what this something might be. Because sex for him is something that is done to men, for their pleasure? I don't know. But he clearly assumes that the blowjob is a full and complete act of sex in itself, and this would mean that only one person comes. This is the reason it's called a job, I think, even though it can also be pleasurable to the giver. There is a difference between the pornographic images of sex and the actual sex people have. What I'm discussing here is really the former, and especially the myths that have grown around blowjobs in recent years, the idea that "servicing" men orally is what all women get off on, so that a quick blowjob in the school bathrooms is regarded as a full sexual act, every bit as fulfilling to the giver as to the receiver. It's interesting to notice that Hitchens's article on the Great American Sex Act doesn't even mention cunnilingus. The closest he comes to this is a quick reference to sixty-nine (a couple simultaneously engaged in fellatio and cunnilingus). Alas, cunnilingus doesn't qualify as American as apple pie, Nabokov didn't rhapsodize over it and neither did any of the other guy authors Hitchens likes to quote. It's really quite an odd thing: that something as mutual as sex can be converted into an experience not that different from getting the car washed. |
Health and Morality
Health and morality are closely linked in the American society. It has something to do with the Puritan roots, I wager. Every few years the sin aspect of poor health habits crops up, and because of that Puritan smell in the air the solutions offered are always fairly punitive. We don't give people carrots (or chocolate) to live healthier lives, we whip their butts sore. One of the underreported aspects of all the health warnings we get is that they are often taken as licence to interfere in the lives of total strangers. I remember reading a story about a pregnant woman in a bar who was refused the glass of white wine she ordered, because of the Government Health Warning about drinking while pregnant. Never mind that the French and the Italians and the Spaniards have been drinking wine for centuries and don't have countries inhabited by people with the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and never mind that it's actually legal for pregnant women to drink an occasional glass of wine. The health warnings about alcohol and drinking have morphed into something much bigger: the right to morally judge pregnant women's behavior and to even interfere. Then there is the recent article about breastfeeding in the New York Times, an article which talks about a new campaign urging women to breastfeed, a campaign which seems to turn breastfeeding into yet another moral question. Not a health question, but a moral question. Mothers who don't breastfeed, for whatever reason, even a good medical reason, are bad mothers. They are risking their children's health. There will be helpful bypassers now with wise words of advice to give to every mother who feeds a baby from a bottle, you know, even if the milk in the bottle was pumped from the mother's very own breasts. The same article doesn't tell us what mothers should do about nonexistent maternity leaves or the problems caused by many people not liking women who lactate in public (one of the reasons for putting breastmilk into a bottle). Presumably "good" mothers just burrow in for four years, never leaving their homes and letting the rest of their families starve for lack of earnings. And these "good" mothers will not complain that they have lost retirement benefits and money and promotion chances on behalf of their children. No. As one commenter on another blog stated, it is the children that were breastfed who should take care of their mothers in later life. So take notice, all you breastfed people out there. Then there is the guilt of those mothers who can't breastfeed however hard they try. Not only are they failures, compared to all those valiantly suckling women out there, but now it's also ok to judge them as bad people. All whip and no carrot. I'm sensitive to insensitive health policing because of that morality angle and the angle of offering all busybodies a chance to go around judging other people and feeling smug and helpful about it. I realized just how sensitive I am when I reacted to today's articles about the American Medical Association (AMA) urging large warning labels on high-salt food by feeling unable to breathe. And I don't eat salt at all, really. Neither do I drink soft drinks or even alcohol (never mind what Echidne might do with her nectar bottles). So where does that reaction come from? I was breastfed, so it couldn't be because of the sins of my mother? No, I think the reason is that buttwhipping again. No carrots for as peons: Firms are not told to make fast food with less salt, firms are not told to find better alternatives for soft drinks. Instead we, the consumers, are told that the foods we can afford and enjoy are bad for us and that we just need to search harder, grow our own produce, make bread from scratch and take a few decades off while doing all this and breastfeeding. And if we don't feel that we can do all this, well, then we deserve the disapproval we get and the illnesses, too. Morality and health really are mixed in all this. This bothers me, because the same society that gives us mostly negative incentives towards a healthier life also thinks that Rush Limbaugh's hatemongering is a valid form of political discourse and that Anne Coulter's urgings towards violence are "just jokes". Something has gone quite wrong in how we define "bad behavior", when advocating hate is ok but giving your baby a bottle is bad. Hate also has health consequences. Ask those who died in the Rwandan genocide. Perhaps we should get AMA to supervise the political media in this country. Instead of a large red exclamation mark as a warning on salt containers we'd get a large red exclamation mark all across Rush Limbaugh's face, with a statement about how bad hatred can be for your health. ---- It's important to point out that I'm not arguing against the health advice here but against the methods used in its delivery. |
Some Recommended Reading
For any early risers. This Kos diary is frightening and all too possible. It's about what might grow from our current hate-infatuated politics. If you don't want to be scared you could check out the links I stole from BitchPhD, and her relevant comments on the breast feeding story, in particular. Then there is this post by twisty on the desirability of some current sexual practices. Enjoy. |
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
A New And Improved Version Of An Older Post
Spocko sent this to me: ![]() It's a better and more informative version of this post. Because of the nice frame. |
Meanwhile, in Iran
Participants who were demonstrating for women's rights got beaten for their effort in Tehran:
The Revealer (via Hecate) has an interesting post about the way this event was reported in various newspapers and why the different approaches to reporting matter. I think this is particularly important when a report is about a country we don't know very well. Take the fairly small number of demonstrators, a hundred or so. Does this mean that most people in Iran have no opinion on women's rights? I doubt it. A more likely reason for the lack of numbers is what has historically happened to demonstrators in Iran. These are some courageous women, these protesters. |
Wingnut Framing
Haloscan has gone nuts, by the way. The time stamp might or might not match reality, so you have the chance of inserting your comments somewhere quite different than the end of a thread. Think of the creative opportunities this offers! You can go backwards in time and change the discussion that already happened. Wouldn't the Republican wordsmiths love this. They love framing in a way which makes a topic almost impossible to dissect without giving a long speech (see random liberal 581 in my comments for an admirable example of what is needed). This, from yahoo on Bill Clinton's recent speech, is another example of the problem:
That's what Clinton is reported as having said. And what was the Republican response? Heh:
Class warfare. Race baiting. Class warfare. Race baiting. Class warfare. Race baiting. And so it goes, what is called public debate these days. |
Who Can Pass The Tweety Test?
Ann Coulter doesn't. She's not hawt enough:
Let's reverse the test: Do you think that Tweety (Chris Matthews) is an attractive man? Do you get off on large, yellow heads? Didn't that sound a little sexist, hmh? Well, the same applies to judging Ann Coulter's looks. There's plenty of really nasty stuff to talk about when Ann Coulter is the topic, without deciding to judge her feminine worth quotient. I bet you anticipated this feminist commentary by now... |
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
One Picture Worth A Thousand Framings?
![]() We should have this picture quickly and handsomely framed. It's the heart of the Bush administration and tells us more than we ever need to know about the men who run our lives. And it's very funny. The actual text goes like this:
Do these flak jackets cover their butts? I would think that any attack would come from below. Then there is the expression of Mr. Barlett. Really needed this one today. Thanks, gods and goddesses of ridicule. ---- Link via linda on Eschaton threads. |
Meet Mr. Spinmeister
![]() His real name is Karl Zinsmeister, and he is Bush's new chief domestic policy adviser. An interesting guy, full of nice things to say about all his enemies, including us feminists:
And so on. There are many more examples of the calm and collected good manners of this wingnut in the article I linked to, and also a little explanation for the hiring of Mr. Spinmeister. He got the job because he is to be the animal handler that takes care of the wingnut zoo, and we, my dear friend, are going to be the raw meat that will be thrown over the fence at mealtimes. We and our human rights and such absurd stuff. Now we know the next step in the domestic political plans of the Republican party. It consists of pissing on anyone who is not white, fundamentalist Christian and male, though naturally the enriching of the rich will go on unabated. This is what I would call a badly balanced ecosystem, and this is what Mr. Spinmeister is hired to give all of us. He is bad news. And people wonder why I dislike the policies of this administration. If they had their way this country would consist of two layers: the ultra-rich in their guarded compounds, jetting here and there as the whim takes them, and the rest of us, dirt-poor, but morally living in an American Taliban society, working our asses off for minimum pay. The blacks and the Latinos would be treated kindly but kept to their place and the womenfolk would take care of the cooking and the breeding but otherwise obey and ponder things only inside their hearts. That was the rant part, to remind all of you, my dear readers, that politics is not just a game for overgrown wingnut boys but our lives. The analysis part consists of pointing out the obvious: that Bush is servicing his base, and also the interesting fact that lefty bloggers are supposed to be the ones who say nasty things about politicians and journalists. Not Bush administration insiders. Because wingnuts never suffer from irrational hate. |
Some Sad News
It seems that Karl Rove will not be indicted in the Plame case:
If I were a mean-spirited blogger I'd insert here something about how the devil takes care of its own. |
On Euphemisms
A nonpolitical post, this time, as a way of getting warmed up. One on euphemisms, or weasel words, and especially on the way "resting" is used. We hear that a patient not likely to die right away is "resting comfortably", when the truth might be that the poor patient is in absolute agony. And then there is the "final resting place" and "being laid to rest" when one kicks the bucket. That's another euphemism though rather different in its connotations, by the way. I doubt that being dead can be called "resting", but neither are "rest-rooms" places where we take a nice break from the day's activities. Or not just a nice break, ahem. Do tourists find this term difficult? Imagine standing there with your legs crossed and seeing signs only for boudoirs where it's easy to imagine that you might lie down for a bit. "Resting" might be the most common euphemism of all. Actors "rest" when they can't find a job, and I let an article "rest" when it's bogged down and not going anywhere, even if it gets up all refreshed and ready to do battle. "Resting" covers up things we'd rather not mention: illness and death, the need to pee, unemployment, failure. It really is too bad, because real resting is a wonderful activity, and one for which we have no far found no good euphemism. |
Monday, June 12, 2006
The Scary, Scary Bloggers
Mainstream coverage of the Yearly Kos has been interesting for me. On the one hand, it seems to try to hold on to the myth of bloggers as nerdy maggots who have no life outside the internet, who are young men with pocket-protectors and who are scary. On the other hand, the pieces point out that the participants of the Yearly Kos were predominantly gray-haired and perhaps boring. And scary. Here is the Time magazine article commenting on Markos's speech:
The smell of sweaty fear. Then there is Maureen Dowd's piece on the Yearly Kos, where she decides that the bloggers don't want to devour the mainstream journalists but want to join them:
Which is it? Nobody seems to know. All this is weird to me, including the focus on the few famous bloggers, rather than the vast number of us minor bloggers who keep on hammering away on our keyboards, and the selling of the concept that the people who read and write blogs are some kind of a new breed, never observed before, rather than just the same sort of folks who always used to exist, but only now with new toys. Then there is the whole labeling enterprise: Liberal and progressive bloggers need to be labeled, quick! What is it going to be? Extreme fringe element? Nerdy maggots? Tired 1960s hippies? Ravenous monsters who want to take over journalism without either the objectivity or the training needed? Ravenous monsters who want to gobble up all the journalists? None of this sounds like me. No category for semi-crazy goddesses who dress impeccably and who just want to run this planet with a B-list blog (notice the self-promotion here?). |
How To Write A Wingnut Opinion Column
David Brooks's new column offers such a good example of this. He writes about the conservative angle on boys' poorer school performance. Because his is a conservative angle, the causes of the problem must be innate differences in girls and boys. The solutions he advocates are, astonishingly, quite different from the usual solution winguts offer when they base something on brain differences between the sexes, which is to do nothing. But in this case it is the male sex that appears to be at a disadvantage, so action is needed, and action, which changes the environment. The horror! I thought that the environment never mattered for the wingnuts. Whatever. Here are the rules for writing a wingnut column, as learned from David Brooks. And if you dare to note in the comments that I do any of the same things I shall smite you with my divine anger: 1. You will begin by stating that your opinion is common wisdom, nay, truth:
I shop in what Brooks calls the "men's section" of the bookstore, and I have never been chased away from there because of my sex. And notice how he is defining emotions as something...embarrassing...something he knows nothing about. Has David never felt anger, then? Those masterly men conquering evil, are they robots? See how cleverly the picture is painted? We already know that men and women are really, really different. And if you still doubt that you are told that rather extreme wingnut books on the question are "lucid guides" and that anyone who has questions of the wingnut interpretations of gender science is putting "intense social pressure" on those who just want to talk about neutral science. 2. You will pick studies to prove your point, even if they are not very good studies.
Note that these are not a random selection of men and women. These are "accomplished" women and men, women and men largely drawn from the fields of books, cinema and theater. And the study wasn't really about the "favorite" novels of these people but about novels that were life-changing for them. Why do you think women in those fields might have mentioned books by women, even if they actually liked some book written by a guy just as much? I liked Camus a lot as a teenager, by the way, but hated Catcher in the Rye because the protagonist in it muses about wanting to learn to play women like a guitar or something similar. I have no desire to read about me as a musical instrument, and I don't want my life changed in that direction. 3. You will condense and insert older arguments into the story so gently that they slip past your conscious brain straight into that "we all know" part where the emotions (which men don't have, natch) then work on them to make them part of our worldview:
Maybe. But is the bit about "sitting still" any different from the past decades or centuries? Remember how schools got started? Remember that girls weren't allowed in at all, so that the way schools decided to make students sit still was all intended for boys. This is not a new phenomenom, not a part of the "war against boys" that the conservative propaganda machine feeds us. And so on. |
What Did You Read At School?
David Brooks thinks that if only boys were given less gushy and emotional books to read they'd soon start doing so well at school:
Linda Hirshman has a good take on Brooks's article here, so let me just point out that it's not correct to assume that the small number of men in teaching is caused by the books boys read at school. I might as well argue that the small number of men in teaching is caused by the new red BMW the neighborhood stockbroker drives, and I'd be closer to the mark. So Brooks argues that the books assigned at school are gooey yucky girl stuff. What were you assigned to read at school? |
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Bleeding Hearts
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Mother Theresa for President!
Now wouldn't that be fun? I can't think of any other woman who'd be closer to the female ideal than Mother Theresa, and if she ran for the president of the United States surely she would win hands down (assuming she wasn't dead, of course)? Nah. Not gonna happen. She's too wimpy, and she would let the terrorist trample all over us. Well, how about Ann Coulter then? She's not wimpy. She advocates violence most of the time. If she wasn't such a nutcase surely she could run this country? Nah. She's too bitchy, too mean, too vicious. It reminds me a little of the old fairy tale about Goldilocks and the three bears. The first porridge is too hot, the second porridge is too cold, but the third porridge is just right and so on. The third porridge was probably man-porridge. These ruminations, delightful as they are, didn't grow out of emptiness. An article in the New York Times entitled "The Ascent of A Woman" by Anne E. Kornblut was the impetus for them. She writes:
Do you know in what section of the Times this article appeared? The Style Section! That says a lot more about the whole question than anything else I can say in just one sentence. In the Style Section! I'm going to write a long and erudite post on the topic of the absent female president of the United States in the near future, because I know much of the relevant literature and because I have wonderful and incisive theories about this, as I have on everything else in this world. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, why I'm not the president of any country. Nothing is as horrifying as a woman-know-it-all, said Tom deLay. But a goddess-know-it-all beats even that in horridness. If you can't wait for my long post, check out this take on the Daily Kos and this one by archy. They both offer fodder for thought. What I'd like to write about this very minute is something I found in the comments of the Daily Kos post, something, that I've heard many, many times before, and something that deserves to be taken apart right now. This comment is a good example:
Some other comments give long lists of all the qualifications a female candidate for presidency should have. Very long lists. You might ask what is wrong with this statement. Doesn't everybody want to vote for the candidate who has the best qualifications? Well, if that were true, how did George Bush get in, assuming that he was elected? Surely he lacks almost all of the qualifications that the long lists tell a woman candidate must have, perhaps even all of them. Clearly we don't always vote for the candidate for the best qualifications. The history of politics makes that absolutely clear. But what I really mean when I want to analyze this comment is the way "best qualifications" really means that the woman in question must be a superwoman, about ten times better than any other candidate we have ever heard about. She must be a perfect woman, with children, yet somehow never neglecting them while learning about politics. She must be happily married, yet somehow the husband must not look henpecked when she goes out and runs for the presidency. She must be bold and ready to attack any country that bothers us, yet somehow she must not let any of her female hormones swamp her cool and level head, and she should have been a fighter pilot at the same time as she was bringing up her children while staying at home. She must not be attractive as it would distract from her presidentialness, but she must be the president everybody would like to fuck, too. She must not be shrill. She must not be weak and meek. And so on. I made up that list, not the commenters on the Daily Kos, but I made it because it pretty much reflects reality. The standards to which women are held are not only higher but impossible, if we are to find "the best qualified" candidate. Then there is the fact that saying something like this can also serve to hide the real reasons why a person might never want to vote for a woman: It's not sexism, it's just that there are no well-qualified women out there. Too sad, but that's how it is. And all the time we have George Bush running this country to ground. Note that I'm not saying the Daily Kos comment I quoted was by someone who is a sexist, probably far from it, and it's also true that there is a pipeline problem for women in American politics. But these kinds of comments are exactly what a sexist would use in a public debate, and it behooves us to be wary of them for the reasons I mentioned. Just think of all the male politicians we have and how many of them have "the best qualifications" for the job. |
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Saturday Night Dog Blogging
![]() This is Henrietta the Hound standing on a fairly high stone wall of a bridge. This is one of her tricks and, as you can see, she is quite proud of it. |
Watchdogs of Democracy? A Book Review
Watchdogs of Democracy? is Helen Thomas's new book. The subtitle, a long one as is common these days for political books, runs like this: The waning Washington press corps and how it has failed the public. This is not well written, you know. So I was a little bit worried when I started reading the book. I feared that it was thrown together too quickly, because most political books coming out these days strike me as having been thrown together too quickly. That's the dilemma for those who want to get something into print post-haste. Well, there is some of that about this book, too. The language could have been less choppy and some transitions look like the stuff on my blog: skipping and jumping to something totally different. Those are the bad news about the book for me. The good news are that it's quite interesting. Helen Thomas is a veteran Washington reporter and she has actually lived through a lot of the history that we only read about in textbooks. By reading the book we can tap the memory and expertise of someone who Was There. Now that is quite rare. And what does Helen's memory and expertise offer us? In short, a walk through the history of the Washington press corps and an explanation which allowed me at least to put the current administration's battles with the press into a timeframe and a perspective. The perspective is not one which would make excuses for either the Bush administration or the journalists who are not supposed to be its sycophants, quite the reverse. But Thomas shows us how the tools for managing news and the media were created over time and were there for the wingnuts to grab. She points out that presidents have tried to "manage" news for a long time, at least since John F. Kennedy's era, and that journalists are fully aware of this "managing". What is different in our current era is the journalists' reaction to the administration news management. Instead of combatting it, instead of nosing out the real news and instead of adopting an adversial position in all this, the journalists recording the deeds of the Bush administration have mostly just gone along with the news management, writing down the government's propaganda messages and then forwarding them to us, with perhaps a meek paragraph or two about alternative interpretations tacked to the very end of the article. It's a game gone out of balance, and the real losers in such a game are all of us. So what pushed it off balance? Thomas gives us most of the usually mentioned reasons: the concentration of the media into few hands and the consequent reduction in the number of good jobs available for journalists who are now much more dependent on their employers and the opinions of these employers, the loss of the Fairness Doctrine in media during the Reagan administration and the imperative of the profit motive over any secondary goals about truthful and full reporting, which has lead to reduced resources for news production, fewer foreign offices and reporters and increased emphasis on stories which sell (those about disappearing white brides eaten by sharks), the feverishly fast news cycle which makes it hard for reporters to be both first and right. (What a horrible sentence that is.) But the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back was the public patriotic sentiment after 911 massacres and what this did to news reporting. It gave the administration news managers a great weapon to use: journalists criticizing the U.S. government were labeled as "unpatriotic traitors", journalists criticizing the Iraq war were labeled as "not supporting the troops" and anyone who dared criticize George W. Bush was guilty of attacking "a war president". And as anyone who lived through the events of 2001 can remember, "we, the people" didn't really want critical reporting then; we wanted to grieve and to heal. Neither did we want politicians who deviated from the "unity against our enemies" sentiment of that time. Hence all those Democrats who voted for the Iraq war. We may find their acts contemptible but it's good to remember what was in the air that year. In short, "we, the people" are in many ways as guilty as the press. We let the administration manage the news. Now, Helen Thomas doesn't blame the public in her book. But she does blame the current batch of journalists in Washington. Here she talks about the way the reasons for the Iraq invasion were covered:
Probably. The watchdogs of democracy have been defanged by commercial interests, a government too powerful to resist and the desire to be in the top layers of the watchdog hierarchy, closest to the hand that doles out treats. Who wouldn't sit and stay on command in this pack configuration? And we, the public, are also to blame for this malaise. There aren't enough of us who want real news, real facts, real reporting. Rather the opposite; many Americans want a press corps that fawns on the administration because that is seen as patriotic and something that makes us feel good in a weird patriotic sence. Is the American patriotism so fragile that only good news can be allowed? It's beginning to look like that. Thomas's book urges journalists to fulfill the watchdog role better, to be more idealistic and stronger in their determination to get at the truth. I'd like to see the rest of us work to change the system so as to make this easier. We could begin by not supporting those media which offer shallow and warped coverage of important news and by lobbying for the return of the Fairness Doctrine in Media. |
Stuff You Need To Know About Zarqawi's Death
He could have been killed several times before, but for some reason the White House would have none of it. This article from 2004 discusses the history of Bush's nonaction:
If this is true the murders Zarqawi committed since 2004 could have been prevented. Another source discussing the same nonkillings is Dan Froomkin in his blog for the Washington Post:
Helen Thomas talks about news management in her new book (which I will try to review today or tomorrow), and the history of news management by various U.S. administrations makes me wonder what Zarqawi really was and why he wasn't squashed earlier. Think of all the people that would be alive today if that had been done. So why was it not done? It could be that the stories I linked to here are not true, but then there is no telling these days, is there? Also, I've read so much about the symbolic meaning of Zarqawi's death that I'm beginning to see everything in my private life as symbolic: I found an extra chocolate bar I had forgotten about. This must mean that my future is full of hidden chocolate bars, peace and joy. No, it doesn't, and neither does Zarqawi's death mean that the troubles in Iraq are over or that the war can be now viewed as successful because the U.S. killed one guy. A guy who appears to have been killable several times before. Added later: I stumbled across an article by Media Matters for America which tells us that the Fox News is one step ahead of me:
Eeek! I've been found out! Not. First, the Kos folk are not "far-left". In Europe some of them would be regarded as fairly right wing, for example, and almost all would be viewed as moderates. It's just that this country has decided to rearrange political definitions so that Attila the Hun is a moderate conservative and everything else follows from that. Second, I see no signs of the "demoralized" left, none whatsoever, though quite a few wingnuts have been demoralized these last few months, what with the dropping approval ratings of the administration. Third, it's a lot easier to just say that the people participating in Yearly Kos are nutter conspiracy theorists than to dig out information that would disprove it. Notice how my post actually has links? Heh. |
Friday, June 09, 2006
More On the Yearly Kos
The big party of the Kos website, held in Las Vegas right now. A New York Times article describes it like this:
Nice writing. Kate Phillips, the author, got in all the MSM talking points: about bloggers being sorta like maggots, crawling out of the only existence they really have, an electronic one, about the irreverence of bloggers, about the left blogosphere as Bush-bashers. But that's ok. She's setting up the stage to demolish some of those myths, and even ends up telling us that she's the only one writing in pajamas. But that's inaccurate because I bet she never checked what went on in all the other hotel rooms. Bad fact checking... I feel a tiny bit envious for not being at the party, but if I were there I'd be hiding behind doors and wanting to be at home with the snakes who don't want to talk to me. I'm shy. It's an odd coincidence that this appeared at the same time as the Kos party:
I've never spotted child predators working Blogger or The Daily Kos. Kos is a political website and politics is not of interest for children, on the whole. Do you think this is just ignorance on the part of Mr. Fitzpatrick or is this a heinous plot to make the blogs look like a paradise for pederasts? --- The Fitzpatrick link is from Nim on Eschaton threads. For ten bucks you can watch the Yearly Kos panels via Air America. |
On Nemesis
I forgot to do a follow-up post on our intervention to resuscitate Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, us being me, Ares, Aphrodite and a bunch of monsters and demi-gods. We goddessnapped Nemesis, who has gotten as thin as Ann Coulter though a lot more transparent, put her in a suitcase and brought her over to my place, the Snakepit Inc., to feed her mice and prayers. That's the way us divinities grow plump and powerful. Anyhooow, the intervention was hard work. Hard. Work. What with keeping 'Dite from attacking the mailman all naked ('Dite, not the mailman, poor thing), and me trying to not end up in sack with Ares (too often). You know the drill by now. But Nemesis is truly doing better, trying on some goddess gear in front of my mirror, and I might even see faint outlines of her in it! Or at least I sense a puff of cold air moving when she runs by. She runs by a lot, bursting into tears, because it's hard to wake up from a somnolent state to not being a really hawt and powerful goddess anymore. She'll get there, I tell her, being all kind and loving and nurturing as everyone knows us female godfolk are. Then she tries to throttle me and to rain locusts on me and to scorch her N letter (she got that from old Zorro movies) on my supposedly dead body. Sigh. The work is not yet finished. We gave her political wingnut books to read to bring back that healthy glow of anger and taught her how to cruise the internet (except for this blog, for obvious reasons). My loveliest snake, the Artful Asp, serves as her fingers in these endeavors though Artful is pretty pissed off at the whole thing by now, especially at the number of "her" mice that Nemesis has been gobbling up and because (Artful says) the keyboard static is bad for snake scales. But Artul must understand the need for sacrifice! The nation is at war, and she can't go shopping, given the lack of legs. So she might as well serve the country by helping us to get some revenge. Which requires Nemesis back on her feet, all informed and eloquent and with a booming and frightening voice, suitable for paralyzing the wingnuts in power. Or at least some kind of a voice louder than the current squeak. I keep confusing it with the air conditioner, and air conditioners are insufficiently scary. Not to mention hard to understand. If this intervention doesn't work in a timely manner we'll have to use Nemesis as a sock puppet. One of the monsters could be her voice and I could be her brain and she could be dressed in a long blood-stained gown with all of us under it and the snakes could move her hair in a frightening manner. I bet it would work and look quite lifelike. Or deathlike, but you get the point. Sort of like the division of the labor in our current administration. |
Gardasil
This is the name of the new vaccine which is expected to prevent cervical cancer by blocking:
So far so good. But the road from the approval of the vaccine to it reaching the girls and women that need it still has roadblocks. In poorer countries a major one will be lack of money. Three hundred and sixty dollars is more than the annual income of many of this world's poor people. Unless some form of financial subsidy is provided, most women will not have access to the vaccine. Then there is the sex roadblock. A virus that is transmitted by sex! What will people say if we vaccinate our unmarried daughters? This is going to be a problem in many of the poorer countries:
And not only in poorer countries. In the same April article, an American wingnut made her objections known:
You might think that this attitude is only going to be a problem for the daughters and wives of wingnuts. But you might be wrong, for reasons explained here:
I'm not sure about the eighty percent infection rate cited, but it is certainly correct that the wingnuts have avenues to affect the availability of Gardasil in general. As they appear to prefer death to sexual non-abstinence (though only for women) I'd keep an eagle's eye on ACIP. To find out how you can give your opinions to ACIP, go to feministing.com. Make this little thought experiment: Suppose that there was a similar cancer, with similar death rates, also sexually transmitted, but affecting only men. Do you think that the same arguments would have been brought forward by our wingnuts and many of the traditionalists in other countries? Would we be sitting here reading arguments against making a vaccine against such a cancer available? |
Thursday, June 08, 2006
How It's Done: Tweety In Action on The Woman Question
Now I understand why Chris ("Tweety") Matthew's political show is called Hardball. It's all about Tweety's testicles, or perhaps one of them. Yesterday's show gave us some truly revealing comments about Matthew's troubles with women in politics. Here he is talking about the San Diego race with Ken Mehlman:
All bolding in this post is by me. But the revealing comments are all by Tweety. Note how Francine Busby is not just a candidate; she's a womancandidate! And here is Matthews yesterday on the same topic with Charlie Cook:
Is that enough repetion, you think? Do you think that the viewers got the point? |
The War Against Women in Iraq
Is just beginning. Yes, Zarqawi may have been killed and it's good news, assuming that they don't have others ready to take up the lead. But there is another war brewing, one which affects women and which will go on for a long time. The same war is beginning in Somalia and we see a kinder and gentler version of it here in the good old U.S. of A.. It's the war against modern roles for women, and in Iraq it is winning:
May I say again that this was one of my main reasons for opposing the war, superceded only by the desire to save people from needless death? Whenever something called "democracy" is born the first thing that happens is that powerful groups, those who feel very strongly, decide that democracy means their values should rule the country and not the values of whoever the silverback chimpanzees were in the previous power structure. We may hear beautiful thoughts about the wonders of democracy, but the truth is that democracy is hard work and every additional person's rights to belong to it are won only with a lot of work and in many cases of blood. And it is almost the norm that whenever a government somewhere falls the first thing to do (after thanking the female revolutionaries for their contribution to the fall) is to lock women up in one way or another. In Iraq the groups rising in power are the fundamentalists and their idea of women's proper place is a very dismal one. For women, at least. They are not supposed to exist in the public sphere. You can get the other details by looking up the definition of the term "Taliban". Or you could scan the following quotes from the Independent article I link to:
So. The new democracy is not going to help women to have more rights. Most likely it will help to take away the rights that used to exist in the last twenty years or so. It is true that these rights only helped the minority of educated women with jobs and the desire for some autonomy, and I've heard that we shouldn't really worry about the women in Iraq as they are used to their traditions and their culture and most are not going to be affected by this return to "traditional family values". I disagree. Aren't we supposed to be in Iraq now for the creation of a modern democracy? A modern democracy which refuses to let the majority of its citizens to hold jobs, go out alone, to participate in politics, to wear trousers? That would be some victory for the Western civilization. Should the Western civilization care about Iraqi women, of course. |
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Today's Teh Funny
Ann Coulter is in the news again, spreading love and enlightenment. Even Hillary Clinton, that horrible, horrible feminazi, reacted:
So sweet of Ann. As an aside, someone on the many and varied internets called this "a cat fight". I'm beginning to think that it's not only the poor that will always be with us but also the woman-haters. If that sounds like religious language, it is. Ann Coulter has shown me the way one gets to be revered as a religious sage: You just say that you are of some particular religion and then everything you do is AOK. Here is her justification for her brilliant career of expelling deep truths and spitballs: She is A Girl Warrior For Christ!
This is absolutely priceless. I haven't laughed so hard all day, though it's been a horrible day with continual rain and all my gadgets went on strike. So maybe it isn't quite as funny. No, it IS funny. It's totally and deliciously hilarious. She is such a money-grabbing nutter, our Ann is, and she justifies this with the story about Jesus throwing the money-lenders out of the temple. What religion should I take over and corrupt to earn a few bucks? It would be interesting to try to destroy the world while doing that, too. If you want to see how Coulter debates, the link to Media Matters for America gives a really good example of it. She doesn't debate at all. She just moves to some other outrageous assertion when she can't answer an argument. It's easy to see on paper. Some of my commenters get angry when I write about these nutters, and I see their point. We shouldn't talk about trivialities; we should pick our own topics for debate. I'm all ready to do that, and even to write a book about it, the minute someone promises to do the bulk purchases necessary to get me on the Best Seller list, so that I can go nose to nose with our sweet Ann. Or put another way: beggars can't be choosers, and we are beggars, us godless fanatics of the left, because all we have is the truth on our sides and all sorts of inconveniences such as conscience and compassion. I wish I could have a consciencectomy. I'd be rich the minute the stitches came off. - Wow! The biggest spider I've ever seen just crawled out from behind the computer. I shall name her Anncoulter. - Without a conscience I could write so much funnier diatribes and doing research would be a lot easier, too: no long hours spent trying to verify sources. I could just make up stuff, buy a black miniskirt and go on television saying that all Republicans are members of Hitler youth and went to bed with Stalin and plan to drop nuclear penises on the rest of us. The sad thing is not the existence of ann coulters. The sad thing is the media treating them as if they really were serious political commentators and authors. |
Dispatches from the Womb Wars
On the Southern front those who want to socialize the womb are doing well:
Hurricanes kill people in Louisiana, and some of the surviving victims still live in tents. But it's more urgent to make a bill criminalizing abortions even in the case of rape, and even though this law will have no impact unless and until Roe vs. Wade is overturned. But better be prepared, Louisiana? Just not in the case of hurricanes. The state famous for its ethical politicians, Ohio, is also joining in the excitement of banning almost all abortions. They plan not to make the women seeking abortions into criminals; it's the physicians who provide abortions who will be criminals under the proposed Ohio law. Neat. The women who decide to have abortions will have to perform them on themselves. With coathangers and such. I love the care with which this law proposal has been written. It plugs every loophole that a pregnant woman might use. Except for the coathanger loophole. But then Ohio politicians seem fairly comfortable with illegal activities. It's only the appearance of things which matters. Some of the consequences of socializing the womb in this way are not what the anti-abortion wingnuts wish, assuming that it's fewer abortions. This Washington Post article tells one sad story of the unintended effects of all the anti-abortion activity in this country. But who knows what is unintended in these effects? I suspect that quite a few of the womb-socializers really just want to reign in all the uppity women who have stolen fertility control away from the fundamentalist radical clerics. Kirche, Küche und Kinder, you know. |
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Will You Marry Me? The Newsweek Retraction
In 1986 Newsweek published a story about "older" women's chances of finding a man, which among other weird things stated that a forty-year-old woman was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to ever don a wedding dress. The article was based on incorrect and unpublished data, but it took a long time before any corrections appeared, and then mostly in places hidden from the mainstream. That mainstream bubbled merrily on about the horrors facing educated women who postpone marriage. What they could expect was loneliness and lots of cats, pretty much. Susan Faludi's Backlash summarizes the messages in the original Newsweek article and the ensuing "man shortage" journalism:
Well, it was Newsweek that was wrong, very wrong. It's so sweet of them to offer a retraction to the story, though next time, perhaps, they could do it in a little less than twenty years, please, and it could be a little stronger than this:
I bolded the only apology or retraction that I really spotted in the supposed retraction, though of course it was funny that they found most of the originally interviewed desperate single women all married and stuff. "The story became quickly entrenched in pop culture"? Notice the passive voice in the sentence, as if journalists didn't milk it for every single drop afterwards. Read Backlash to find all the follow-up stories of the initial one, and then notice how these stories are still being written. If you doubt me, read this old post of mine which discusses how "the man shortage" is eternally with us but somehow never affects any other women except those who have education and good jobs. There is much that I could say about this whole myth-making enterprise: How it's ok to do damage to women and not to apologize for twenty years for the fact that the damage was based on terrible research and no checking. How the next story with the same message is already in the works somewhere. How these stories never mention any possibility of a woman shortage or the fact that it is men who really get psychological and physical health benefits from marriage and should therefore be the ones eager to marry. How, were I a really sneaky goddess, I might even suspect that it's some guys who order these stories to be put out there so that they have better luck hunting for a wife. So much juicy stuff! But I will be frugal and abstemious and discuss only one aspect of the Terrible Testosterone Drought in our maidenly bedrooms: The idea that it didn't really matter how wrong the original article was because it "felt" right. Amanda at Pandagon has a good take on that and so does Jessica Yellin in the New York Times, where she writes:
I bolded the important bit. Why were many women panicking over their apparently dwindling chances of wedlock? Why do these articles about "man shortages" seem right to so many? The answer, quite astonishingly, is that they feel true because the media is in the business of trend-making and myth-building and one of the false myths the society has decided to give us is the eternally lonely educated spinster myth. In short, we have been reading and hearing and seeing the same myth many, many times before. Of course it feels "right". We have been played, ladies, played like so many pianos, and the panicky reactions are an intended part of the music, which always plays on the triple sins of pride, greed and sloth. In women only, note. Men are not greedy or proud or lazy if they don't marry young. Not even all older women seem to suffer from man shortage. Working class women are never interviewed in articles worrying about the sadness of female singlehood. It's as if there are no older single women who are not professionals, and such an omission should cause some discords in the music we hear, because it hints on the real message of these songs: That it is women who are educated and who have careers who are greedy, proud and lazy. Will you marry me now? I have some vacancies among my trophy husbands on the mantelpiece. But I'd be as happy a goddess all single. It's the society that is not really happy with single women. Or independent women in general. |
Happy 666
It's supposed to be the Devil's Own Number (though some say that one is 616), but as the Devil is a Christian creation non-Christians don't have to worry about it. What a relief. Even Christians can relax because there is a lot of doubt about whether the translations of the Bible got the number correctly. Which, then, might mean that any other number might be the Devil's own, of course. Makes you shudder, huh? Not really. Superstitions are interesting mostly for what they tell us about our attempts to have some control over the noncontrollable parts of our lives. If my lucky number is, say, seven, then I can affect the odds of winning a lottery by playing it, and if capricorns are unlucky in your bedchamber - well, you know what not to pick as a boyfriend. Go for lepricorns instead. And don't walk under ladders, avoid black cats and chimney sweeps. Somehow this will put you in control. Other people's religions are often called superstition, in the same way as other people's children are called brats. This is wrong. I bet you expect me now to say that we should have more respect for the religions of others, but I won't. Instead, I recommend more careful scrutiny of our own religions. This is hard to do. I can't think of anything in echidneism that I'd like to change. In particular, it is absolutely true that anyone eating frozen tofu while pretending that it is ice-cream is guilty of heresy, will grow large green pimples on their noses and will not share in the Great Chocolate Mountain that is the lot of all good echidneites. Well, maybe such a horrible person could do penance putting their big toes into their eye sockets at the time of the full moon. |
Monday, June 05, 2006
From My Mailbag
The Yearly Kos convention starts June 8. You can still make it, and then you won't feel so alone should you happen to live among wingnuts. Plenty of interesting speakers, too. If you can't go in person, Air America offers screening of the convention for ten dollars (via Atrios). Jessica from feministing.com e-mailed me about Misfortune 500. It's a website dedicated to analyzing corporate malfeasance against women. A good source. Several delicious books also arrived today, and I will review at least some of them this weekend (instead of going to the Yearly Kos). Helen Thomas's new book is among them. Could I ask those of you who e-mail me to make sure that the title of the post is clear? I've started getting a lot of spam that smells like legitimate communications, so titles such as "orgasm" go directly into the trash. At least say "orgasms for Echidne", please. |
The Wingnut Solution For Wealthy Christian Sinners
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The Gay Danger To Marriage
This is such bullshit. The whole marriage amendment crap is bullshit, and all the participating politicians know it. There is no gay or lesbian danger to marriage. Some gays and lesbians want to get married, for Chrissake! They want in on the good stuff. Like fidelity and caring and nurturing children in a relationship protected by contracts and laws and societal support. How is this destroying marriage, especially when roughly one half of all heterosexual marriages end up all broken up and destroyed, without any help from the gay menace? Then there is the bullshit about how bad it is for children to grow up with two parents of the same sex. Tell that to my gay neighbors who adopt reject children and who turn them into happy little rugrats, with a lot of work and a lot of love. Not to mention that these guys throw the best parties I've ever been to. Perhaps that's the problem for the wingnuts: that the gays and lesbians would actually enjoy their marriages? It's all bullshit and it's cruel stuff. It's cruel to exploit a wedge issue which isn't really a wedge until the wingnuts have been scared and frightened into a red-eyed stampede down the cliff. It's cruel to try to create scapegoat groups who are supposed to silently suffer the fears and sins of the majority, and it's cruel to deprive people of their rights to a full and meaningful life when it doesn't hurt anybody else's chances of a full and meaningful life. I'm not the polite political blogger today, though I'm nowhere near as nasty as I can be. I'm the viper tongue, remember. But I'm fed up with all this bullshit. It's vapid bullshit, not even interesting to attack, and it's all a pretense game. Like the immigrant bashing going on at the same time. These are not the concerns Americans struggle with every night while staring helplessly into the darkness. Or at least not the concerns of most Americans. I can't speak for the wingnuts. But I'd love to know how these "mass concerns" are manufactured in the little elfshops of the wingnuts. Who decides what we will worry over next year? Could that person give me a hint so that I can ride the wave and make millions being the expert blogger on the newest moral concern of the Murkan People? Perhaps we will have a liberal war on crosses worn as jewelry next year. There might be an amendment to make cross-wearing totally and fully legal, even in the pagan areas of New York City. The place that has been made into a computer game where little wingnuts can kill those who won't convert to Christianity. Praise the Lord! It's all total bullshit. |
Somalia
Looks like Afghanistan: lawlessness, warlords, then a Taliban-type society:
Somalia has been lawless for a long time. Whether a Taliban-type society is an improvement on that (or the warlords the Americans are said to have supported) is hard to judge. The people of the capital, Mogadishu, just want peace, mostly, and the interviews I read sounded a lot like the interviews I read with Kabul residents when the Taliban took power: Let's wait and see. Peace is what we want. It won't be that bad. And then there were the ones who believed that the Islamic shariah law would solve all their problems for ever. But the long run tidings are not good for the Somali women. There is something about fundamentalism that doesn't like a woman. To paraphraze Frost. |
Godly Politics
My brethren and sistren in God, did you know that God is the Chairman of the Texas Republican Party? Yep:
Theocracy. But the Texas Republican Party has long been known for this kind of talk, I've been told. I've also been told to ignore all this godly weirdness, because it's so extreme that nobody could take it seriously. Then the Texas Republican Party gave us George Bush and the war in Iraq and all the rest of our locusts and boils. Is it now time to take the godly nutters seriously? Before they take away my driver's licence and my bank account, because the women in the Bible didn't have such things. Funny how I used to have a lot of respect for fervent Christians*. This had something to do with the way I was taught Christianity, with a focus on the teachings of Christ, which are mostly about caring for the poor and the least important among us. But the new breeds of Christians don't care for the wimpy kind of Christ. Their Christ is a warrior, perhaps a marine going to fight us, and their Christ hates illegal immigrants to the United States:
No mention of the Samaritan who was the alien deemed more godly than the natives? Nothing from the Sermon on the Mount, not even the bit about turning the other cheek? And man created God in his image. In the Texas Republican Party, this is how a god looks. --- *I still respect true Christians but no longer confuse fervency with faith. Via Atrios. |
Sunday, June 04, 2006
A Mystery
![]() I found one of these on the floor next to the bed. A wingnut! Is this an omen? A threat? Indication that the bed is falling apart? A hallucination? |
The Wimp Factor. A Book Review
Stephen J. Ducat's The Wimp Factor. Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. A book with an indigestible name as is common these days, but also a book with a name which pretty much tells us the contents of the book. Anxious masculinity refers to Ducat's main thesis: That some American men feel masculinity is under attack, that masculinity is not something men just have from birth onwards but something that needs to be fought for and regained and protected. That without masculinity men are no better than...women. And that hypermasculinity as played by George Bush is what got him elected in 2000 over Al Gore's more subdued political performances. Ducat points out the similarity between the Islamic fundamentalists who are always focused on the redomestication of women and our home-baked radical clerics, and he suggests the same reason for the success of these movements among men: anxious masculinity, the feeling that if women gain more powers it must mean that men lose powers and this, in turn, must make men something like women are. Something not desirable. That George Bush is a born-again Christian is not unimportant from this angle. Fundamentalist religions always tell men that women were created for their pleasure and use, that men are the bosses of women, and that all these goodies are not a sign of the oppression of women but the holy will of a divine creature. That fits very nicely with a psychologically safe way of propping up anxious masculinity, though Ducat the psychologist doesn't really take his book very far in that direction. Neither does he pay a lot of attention on one of the reasons for the anxiety among the working-class men in the U.S.: the disappearance of well-paying blue-collar jobs through outsourcing and the competition from low-wage developing countries. This disappearance has made "man the provider" a difficult myth for these men to live up to. The Republican party has been able to use all this anxiety and religiosity in a masterful manner. It probably didn't need very much prodding to redirect the blame for the economic losses of many men from their actual causes to a nearby irritant: women who were going to college in greater numbers than ever, women who were suddenly becoming more visible in the public sector, women who were getting the jobs that somehow should have belonged to the men. Hence the bashing of the feminists, the so-called "war against the boys" that the right-wing gals give us and the renewed effort to keep working mothers feeling guilty. Ducat could have done more on the education debates and the loss of good family-supporting jobs in this country. But what he did analyze is interesting in itself: The way anxious masculinity entered the political debates of the last few years in all sorts of interesting, often hidden, ways and the way it affected both the voting behavior of many American men and the behavior of the politicians. The chapters on vagina dentata and the almost inexplicable deep hatred of Hillary (and Bill) Clinton among the wingnuts are alone worth the price of the book. The meat of the book for me is in Ducat's attempt to understand why masculinity is anxious and frail. He draws on several psychological theories about childhood development which center on the identification between mother and child and on the often emotionally or physically absent fathers. The idea is that the mother is the goddess in a child's world and that her powers to nurture and love are almost infinite. She is the one who can create life and who can feed the life she has created. She is wonderful, and children want to grow up just like her. But boys can't do that, they realize one horrible morning, and from that day onwards they must cope with what might as well be called womb envy (and Ducat does call it that). He writes (page 34):
I could write a book on each of those defensive strategies. Ducat doesn't mean, by the way, that all men employ them. He's talking here about those men who suffer from womb envy, who suffer from femiphobia and who might vote for hypermasculine candidates for such reasons. Interestingly, Ducat's solution to femiphobia is to have fathers play a much bigger role in their children's lives, especially in the hands-on caring. That way the child would have both a god and a goddess to look up to, and boys wouldn't have to break the loving ties to their main parent in such painful ways. Wouldn't it be nice if Ducat's ideas were correct ones? The solution would be such a simple one. Not that I'm arguing against his theories, just wondering how they could ever be tested and how they relate to the generally accepted inferiority that most societies have historically assigned women. If the ability to give birth is such a powerful and enviable gift why is it that we mostly read about penis envy and not womb envy? Mutter, mutter. But I do agree with Ducat that what makes masculinity "anxious" is in the way masculinity is defined: as the absence of anything even remotely smacking of feminine. This makes the whole definition a zero-sum game, might make some men hate and fear those parts of themselves that are labeled feminine, and also tends to cause a shrinking of the female sphere in patriarchal societies: if masculinity is the superior characteristic, then all sorts of desirable things (courage, honesty, intelligence) must be brought under the masculine label. And any attempt women make to redefine femininity immediately harms the definition of masculinity, which makes feminism really hard on some days. The Wimp Factor is an interesting read. It would have been even more interesting if Ducat had taken into account all my comments in this post but I guess he is not one of us divines, and I forgive him, mostly. Except for the part where he tries to explain why there is such a thing as the Wingnut Gal, a woman willing to die for her right to be oppressed. Ducat spends about two paragraphs on this question, explaining it away in fairly fuzzy terms of individual rewards being different from group rewards and such. But this is really not enough, given that most married women voted for Bush in 2000. In a weird way that glancing over the role of wingnut women or Republican women in general is not that different from the way the political right treats women's issues: by ignoring them. |
Saturday, June 03, 2006
It's OK To Remove Your Tinfoil Hats Now
Because the Rolling Stone magazine has published an article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the election thefts in 2004 it is no longer totally disgraceful, shameful and lunatic to talk about it. Though it's still a risky venture. This is how Kennedy begins:
Read the whole article. If it wets your appetite you might want to search this blog for the many, many posts I wrote on this topic in the immediate and later aftermaths of the 2004 elections. They are too many for links, but you could start by skimming through my November and December archives for 2004. This is an early summary post and this explains some of the reasons why statisticians got worried. |
Pork Barrels As Terrorism Prevention
You could crouch behind them, I guess. But more seriously, the way federal resources have recently been re-allocated between cities which might be at risk of terrorist attacks does smell of pork barreling. An editorial in the Washington Post summarizes my thoughts on the topic fairly well:
Or alternatively, Chertoff may be trying to convince us that the government can do nothing right by doing nothing right. We've already been told that the government can't cope with the aftermath of hurricanes and can't do anything much should the bird flu become a pandemic. Soon we might hear that each of us should hire our own police forces and poison detectors, because we are so much more efficient in that than the government. |
Native Tongue
I was rearranging some of my bookshelves in a desperate attempt to control the books which are threatening to take over the house and I came across my small collection of feminist science fiction. Did you know that science fiction is sometimes regarded as having started with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? Suzette Haden Elgin wrote a feminist dystopia around the same time as Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale. Elgin's most famous book in her trilogy is Native Tongue, and I leafed through it while taking a break from my book arranging chore. Elgin writes about a near-future time in the United States, a time in which women are firmly back under male control. Her interests are linguistic ones and she uses them in the book by making the events happen among families who work as linguists who translate humanoid languages spoken on other planets during an era of global trade reaching into the universe. These families are powerful because language is powerful, but their women, though working as linguists, are as oppressed as all the other women in this dystopia. Until the creation of a women's language. This language, Láadan, hatched in secrecy, is the way the women fight against their oppression. Elgin suggests that a different language, one which has terms for women's specific experiences and feelings, may change the reality. Whether it does or not is something you can find out by reading the book and the other two books in the trilogy. I found the short dictionary of the women's language at the back of the book fascinating. Consider these words and their definitions: radíin: non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help rashida: non-game, a cruel "playing" that is a game only for the dominant "players" with the power to force others to participate wonewith: to be socially dyslexic; uncomprehending of the social signals of others All these gave my a tiny "ping", a feeling that terms like these should really exist. Why don't they? More generally, I have noticed that the need for terms which currently don't exist often leaves me feeling odd in conversations or after having read something. It's a little as if a fly was walking up the back of my imagination or as if I had forgotten something that I should have remembered or perhaps not. When someone comes up with the correct term it's a light bulb experience. Think of the term "domestic violence". How did we talk about domestic violence before this term was introduced? And did the absence of a concise name for the experience affect what we said? I think it did, and I also think that there are similar experiences today, experiences that we don't really notice because they are nameless. Or named wrong, left incomplete. Native Tongue may not be great literature and a few of its feminist assumptions strike me as naive but it poses very interesting questions. If you think that the idea of a language for women is preposterous in itself, you might be interested to learn that the ancient Sumerians had such a language and that there are still some speakers of a women's language in China. |
Friday, June 02, 2006
The Flag Burning Amendment
Bill Frist (aka "the catkiller"), the Senate Majority Leader, argues that banning the burning of the U.S. flag is a pressing issue. It isn't, except possibly for the wingnut base of the Republican party. But I don't think even the wingnuts really care about flag burning. The last time I visited Wingnuttia almost every front porch had little American flags stuck to the window frames. Most of them were dirty and ragged and none of them were taken in when the sun set. In a couple of houses it was a garden gnome who waved a filthy flag or a plastic bunny had it in its mouth. Talk about disrespecting the flag. And isn't burning the most correct way of destroying a worn-out flag? No, Frist is desperate for a wedge issue, something that would guarantee mass voting by the wingnuts. Hence the flag and gay marriage issues. |
Women's Health News...
Female genital mutilation (FGM) is bad for babies:
The sarcastic part of me wants to note that this may make FGM rarer, given that the demonstrated harm is to the babies rather than their carriers. The nonsarcastic part slaps the sarcastic part and reminds it to take more vitamins. In Pakistan, a new movement tries to stop honor killings, the practice of family members killing female relatives who are suspected of immoral behavior: ![]()
You may remember the case of Mukhtaran Mai whom the local tribal authorities ordered gang-raped as a punishment for her brother's supposed relations with a woman. She has become an icon in Pakistan and elsewhere for her refusal to be cowed by her rape and for her acts of donating the money she was awarded to the construction of schools for girls. She believes that honor killings will not stop until women are educated, and she may have a point, because educated women have more options and more ways of escaping horrible situations. But ultimately Pakistan will have to address the devaluing of women in general except in the context of their fertility and family roles. |
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Haditha
Such a hard topic to write about. I can taste the bile in my mouth after reading so many descriptions of the events and I expect not to sleep too well tonight. Violence is a dangerous weapon. When we release it in the form of war we are playing with fire. In a sense, then, I agree with those who say that atrocities happen in wars. They do, because violence coarsens its users, because war wears people down and makes them scared shitless, all the time, in all the places, and even more so when the people are in the land of the enemy, always on duty, always frightened. But war is not a license for atrocities of the kind that have taken place in Haditha, and apparently also elsewhere in Iraq. Professional soldiers are supposed to be able to control their killing ability, to channel it into those avenues that the war machinery indicates as desirable. But professional soldiers can't always do this, and so we have My Lais and Hadithas, especially when the upper echelons of the military and the politicians who run the war effort ignore the human problems on the ground. How many of the alleged participants in these massacres had mental and emotional problems beforehand? How many had been on duty for months if not for years? How many had proper equipment, rest and moral support? I'm not making excuses for the killers. There are no excuses. But it's always useful to understand why atrocities happen, because such understanding might allow us to decrease their future numbers. (And no, the way to achieve this is not by giving the military ethics lessons. If the troops don't already know that two-year old Iraqis are not proper targets for violence no amount of ethics lessons will teach them different.) Still, the best way to prevent atrocities is not to go to war carelessly, not to search for reasons to attack someone. War is not a computer game or a football game. War is not something to use to win elections. Yet sometimes I think there are people who see wars as no different from football games or as useful political tactics, and some of these people initiate wars for those very reasons or at least cheer when wars are initiated by others. Now those people, to me, are as bad as the the alleged killers in Haditha. Maybe even worse, because they have not been driven to the edge of insanity by months or years of relentless pressure. Nothing justifies massacres. What about the attempts to hide massacres? It looks like this is what the military tried to do, and I can see why they would try to hide what went on. But all they ended up was a situation worse than anything that might have followed from being open about the events in Haditha from the beginning. I'm weary of the arguments that it's a few bad apples who go and shoot little babies in the head or that the enemy is even worse, cutting off the heads of innocent civilians while videotaping the whole thing. Yes, all this is disgusting, and makes me want to resign my membership in the human race. But armies are not supposed to ignore their "bad apples" and atrocities by the enemy are not an excuse to fall to the same level of violence. I'm weary of all the debate about Haditha and other massacres. I marched against this war before it started, the first time I ever marched for anything, and I wrote letters and made phone calls and so on. I didn't do all this because I hate America. No. The reason for all that resistance was my fear of what it means when we wind up the clicking and clacking and slowly rolling mechanical monster of war, and what it means are dead people, suffering people, people alive but damaged for life. What it means are atrocities like Haditha and My Lai and worse, a generation of children without parents or with sick parents or warped parents. Pain and suffering. We shouldn't wind up this monster without very good reasons for doing so, reasons so good that the alternative of not waging war would cause even more pain and suffering. |
For Your Gaming Pleasure
There's a new computer game which allows you to kill infidels:
Neat. And most likely a good preparation for the coming genocides of nonbelievers all over the world. It's a lot like the training one would get in a madrasa. So both sides of the religious wars are getting ready to kill those of us who are on neither side. The dominionists are scary people, by the way. They are the ones plotting to make this country into the United States of Wingnuttia. Or Talibamerica, if you like. There is a lot of similarity between the two opposing armies of fanatics. Think of how the muslim terrorists praise Allah when they behead infidels. In this computer game:
Of course there's a big difference between actually chopping of the heads of the enemy and between pretending to do that. But then the intended market of this game consists of children, who are not yet capable of actual head severing. |
Unselfish Sperm
An interesting anti-contraception site led me to this graduation speech about the selfishness of contraception. It's fascinating how the young man giving the speech appears to say two quite different things at the same time. Enjoy. |


















