From My Can't-Believe-This-Is-True Archives: Harassment in Gaming, Killing Planned Parenthood and Other Issues

1.  The South by Southwest convention cancels a planned panel on harassment in games ("Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games") because of threats of violence at the event. 

The ethics of that decision are weird.

Did the organizers think:  We can't talk about this problem because of the problem itself?  Or:  If you threaten us we shall cave in, to maintain apparent peace, at whatever hidden cost to those who are commonly harassed in games?  Or even:   Our real audience didn't like that panel so we canceled it?

You figure that one out, always remembering that we were told  the infamous Gamergate wasn't at all about misogyny but about ethics in game journalism.

2.  It's the legal hunting season for Planned Parenthood by all forced-birthers who wish to take it down.

Texas looks for ways to deny women on Medicaid access to Planned Parenthood clinics, including the ones who don't perform abortions, stating that there are lots and lots of alternative sources of gynecological care for poor women in Texas.

And the next select committee will be on Planned Parenthood.  That's like the replacement for the Benghazi committee!  A war-on-slutty-women committee.  Those are needed to toss fresh meat into the cages in which the Republican Party keeps the forced-birthers.  The political costs of doing so are very low for that party.  That the costs might be very high for poor women who have no real alternative sources for gynecological care matters not at all.

3.  A list-post like this should have at least three things.  Otherwise it looks like a twins post.  But I have too many candidates for the third item, yet none of them is quite correct in the level or type of its irrationality.

For instance, comparing these two sentences given to two individuals in two different states for roughly the same type of crime (rape) could lead one to that scratch-your-head-until-bald-if-not-yet land.  But the situations require a more mature discussion than this post allows, and not only because the cases are not in the same state.

Or take the funny joke Maine's Republican governor Paul LePage blurted out about us wimminfolk not being able to do anything but spend the money of their hard-working husbands, and then put that together with the information that it's governor LePage's wife, Ann LePage, who takes care of his family accounts.

Those kinds of jokes are a dime a dozen (with a few freebies thrown in), and the paradox in them isn't even worth mentioning.  Likewise, the belief that women are terrible drivers thrives even when insurance statistics tend to show the reverse.

That stuff is in the air, my sweetings.