Goddess Praise
- "Dear Echidne, I read your blog all the time! I love it."
- Katha Pollitt, the Nation
- 2005 Koufax Award Winner: Most Deserving of Wider Recognition
- Yes, you read it right. I won.
- 2005 Koufax Award Nominee: Best Writing
- 2005 Koufax Award Nominee: Best Blog (nonprofessional)
- 2005 Koufax Award Nominee; Best Post (Two Nominations)
- 2004 Koufax Award Nominee; Best Overall Blog by a Nonprofessional
- 2004 Koufax Award Nominee; Best Single Issue Blog (Feminism)
- 2004 Koufax Award Nominee: Best Writing
- 2004 Koufax Award Nominee: Most Deserving of Wider Recognition
- 2004 Nominee for Underblogs
- 2003 Koufax Award Nominee; Best New Blog
- Best Political Blogger:Winner in the Category: Most Polite Political Blog
Links
- A Blog Around the Clock
- Adventus
- Agitprop
- Alas, A Blog
- Alternet. The Mix
- The American Street
- Angry Black Bitch
- Baghdad Burning
- Best of Both Worlds
- Bitch. Ph.D.
- blackfeminism.org
- Blog Sisters
- Blue and White
- Bouphonia
- Broadsheet
- Bush v Choice
- Conservatives for American Values
- Crooks and Liars
- Daddy Dialectic
- Dependable Renegade
- Devil's Dictionary Defiled
- Diary of an Anxious Black Woman
- Donna's Place
- Eschaton
- eteraz.org
- Ezra Klein
- Fact-esque, A Reality-Based Blog
- Faux Real Tho!
- the f-word
- Feminist Blogs
- Feminist Campus
- Feminist Law Professors
- Feministe
- Feministing.com
- First Draft
- Frogblog
- Fuming Mucker
- TheGarance.com
- Girlistic.com
- GOTV
- Graphic Truth
- Heavens to Mergatroyd
- Hecate
- The Heretik
- Huffington Post
- Hullabaloo (Digby)
- I Blame The Patriarchy
- Informed Comment
- James Wolcott
- Jesus' General
- Katha Pollitt Dot Com
- Kathryn Cramer
- La Chola
- Laura, 11D
- Lance Mannion
- Lawyers, Guns and Money
- The Left Coaster
- The Liberal Avenger
- Liberal Oasis
- Liberty Street
- Mad Melancholic Feminista
- Majikthise
- Matthew Yglesias
- Maya's Granny
- Multi Medium
- Net Politik
- The Next HurraH
- News From the Front - Fair And Balanced
- No Capital
- Nothing New Under the Sun
- Nyarlathoteps' Miscellany
- Oh No A Woc PhD
- olvlzl
- One Good Thing
- Orcinus
- Our Word
- Pam's House Blend
- Pandagon
- Paralysis of the Mind
- Pen-Elayne on the Web
- Pensito Review
- pesky'apostrophe
- Pharyngula
- Pinko Feminist Hellcat
- Preemptive Karma
- Prometheus6
- Pseudo-Adrienne's Liberal-Feminist Bias
- The Reaction
- Rebel Dad
- Rising Hegemon
- Roger Ailes
- Rox Populi
- The Rude Pundit
- Science and Politics
- scribblingwoman
- Shakespeare's Sister
- Shrillblog
- Sivacracy.Net
- skippy the bush kangaroo
- slacktivist
- Sour Duck
- Spiiderweb
- Spocko's Brain
- Steve Bates
- Stone Court
- Suburban Guerrilla
- TalkLeft
- TAPPED
- TBogg
- Think Progress
- Unclaimed Territory - By Glenn Greenwald
- The Vanity Press
- Welcome to the Sideshow (Avedon)
- What She Said
- Where in Washington, D.C...
- Zuky
- DONATE: FEED THE GODDESS!
The Liberal Coalition
Archives
- 11/01/2003 - 12/01/2003
- 12/01/2003 - 01/01/2004
- 01/01/2004 - 02/01/2004
- 02/01/2004 - 03/01/2004
- 03/01/2004 - 04/01/2004
- 04/01/2004 - 05/01/2004
- 05/01/2004 - 06/01/2004
- 06/01/2004 - 07/01/2004
- 07/01/2004 - 08/01/2004
- 08/01/2004 - 09/01/2004
- 09/01/2004 - 10/01/2004
- 10/01/2004 - 11/01/2004
- 11/01/2004 - 12/01/2004
- 12/01/2004 - 01/01/2005
- 01/01/2005 - 02/01/2005
- 02/01/2005 - 03/01/2005
- 03/01/2005 - 04/01/2005
- 04/01/2005 - 05/01/2005
- 05/01/2005 - 06/01/2005
- 06/01/2005 - 07/01/2005
- 07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005
- 08/01/2005 - 09/01/2005
- 09/01/2005 - 10/01/2005
- 10/01/2005 - 11/01/2005
- 11/01/2005 - 12/01/2005
- 12/01/2005 - 01/01/2006
- 01/01/2006 - 02/01/2006
- 02/01/2006 - 03/01/2006
- 03/01/2006 - 04/01/2006
- 04/01/2006 - 05/01/2006
- 05/01/2006 - 06/01/2006
- 06/01/2006 - 07/01/2006
- 07/01/2006 - 08/01/2006
- 08/01/2006 - 09/01/2006
- 09/01/2006 - 10/01/2006
- 10/01/2006 - 11/01/2006
- 11/01/2006 - 12/01/2006
- 12/01/2006 - 01/01/2007
- 01/01/2007 - 02/01/2007
- 02/01/2007 - 03/01/2007
- 03/01/2007 - 04/01/2007
- 04/01/2007 - 05/01/2007
- 05/01/2007 - 06/01/2007
- 06/01/2007 - 07/01/2007
- 07/01/2007 - 08/01/2007
- 08/01/2007 - 09/01/2007
- 09/01/2007 - 10/01/2007
- 10/01/2007 - 11/01/2007
- 11/01/2007 - 12/01/2007
- 12/01/2007 - 01/01/2008
- 01/01/2008 - 02/01/2008
- 02/01/2008 - 03/01/2008
- 03/01/2008 - 04/01/2008
- 04/01/2008 - 05/01/2008
- 05/01/2008 - 06/01/2008
Powered by
RSSify at WCC
ATOM Feed
OPINIONS OF ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES, A MINOR GREEK GODDESS. She can be reached at: ECHIDNE-OF-THE-SNAKES.COM
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
|
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
|
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 occupie |






