Pizza Diavola

The number of open tabs in my browser, starred entries in my RSS reader, and links marked in my email is becoming overwhelming, so here’s another collection of links. Also, I’m waiting for some enormous attachments to slowly upload to email, so I might as well do something in the meantime. One of these days, I’m going to post the food and music entries I have piled up in my head–I made tagliatelle alla bolognese from scratch last night, both the pasta and the bolognese–but at this rate, it probably won’t be until the November election is over.

In this batch of links we have: politics (surprise!), feminism (surprise!), feminism/politics (no, really, surprise!), food, environmentalism, miscellaneous, and some humor.

Politics

Via Pocochina, Hillary speaks out about gay youth suicide (video at Americablog.com)

Pocochina:

She CHOSE to speak on behalf of people who are triply marginalized – youths (who, remember CANNOT VOTE, and hence by definition cannot be subjects of alleged pandering), LGBTQ individuals, and people suffering from depression. It’s a Republican Hate Trifecta. (Oh, and plus being the right thing to do, it is also good politics, because the only jerks who are going to be angry about this are people who wouldn’t vote for a Democrat anyway.) And….oh, my heart. My head and my heart. This issue is a travesty and I am so proud to see a presidential candidate take it on.

JB at Balkinization: “Television Culture and The Politics of Character.”

My sense is that a political culture whose dominant medium is television inevitably emphasizes issues of character, empathy, trust and personal connection between the candidate and the public rather than emphasizing substantive discussions of policy. That is because television is far better at conveying techniques of character presentation and, conversely, character assassination than it is as a medium for serious discussion of public issues.

Ezra Klein at American Prospect: “Establishment Candidates.” On the fallacy of portraying any candidate as being outside the establishment.

Feminism

Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: “Damned if You Do…” Melissa addresses a commentor’s question, “Why aren’t women more formally organized for Hillary—I honestly don’t know.”

Kate Harding at Shakesville: “I Am Not Ashamed”

I’m just spiteful and petulant enough that every time someone says, “I’m totally not sexist — I just don’t want to vote for her because she’s got such an inflated sense of entitlement, and she’s so ambitious, and I don’t like her husband, and I don’t like that she tries so hard not to look ’soft,’ and none of that has anything to do with her being a woman,” I feel compelled to put up another blog post saying, “I VOTED FOR CLINTON IN PART BECAUSE I AM SICK OF SEXISM BEING SUCH A NORMAL PART OF OUR CULTURE THAT PEOPLE CAN’T EVEN CONNECT THE FUCKING DOTS THERE.” Every time I hear about a woman being afraid to admit she likes Clinton, I feel compelled to put up another post saying, “I VOTED FOR CLINTON, AND I AM NOT ASHAMED.”

Ilyka Damen at Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog: “Feminism Friday: Occasionally Conversations With My Man Are Instructive. A conversation that proceeds, step-by-step, through an explanation of why feminism is not all about the men and why men should step up and educate their own damned selves. An answer to the self-defensive,

“A lot of the guys written about on feminist blogs do things I would never do.”

Yonmei at Feminist SF: “The Politics of Indifference.” Scroll down to the bit on vegetarianism for an explanation of the concept of privilege.

I have experienced bigotry directed against the minorities to which I belong, but not often. The most common reaction of majority to minority is indifference, not hostility: in my experience, the first hostile reaction happens when the indifference is broken by a minority question that the majority cannot ignore…. One aspect of privilege is that you do not have to be aware of being privileged. If something is set up to convenience members of a privileged group, members of the group privileged will often react with anger and hostility to any reminder that the way things have been set up is not “just how things are”: that arrangements have been purposefully made to convenience members of the privileged group, with – at best – complete indifference as to how this may inconvenience people outside the privileged group. It should be fairly obvious why this is: if this is “just how things are” then they will not change: everything will always go on as it now is. If you acknowledge that “how things are” is a purposeful arrangement made to convenience some people and inconveniencing others, the question necessarily arises: why are some people deserving of convenience, while others are not?

Cara at The Curvature: “One-Quarter of U.S. Women Experience Intimate Partner Violence.”

A new CDC report shows that one-quarter of U.S women have suffered intimate partner violence. This won’t come as much of a shock to those of us who have been paying attention. I also highly doubt that it will change the minds of those who like to deny the extent of violence against women, seeing as how they regularly ignore the FBI stats on the instance of false rape reports. But I do think that the report is somewhat interesting for its demographic findings: …

Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: “I Kid You Not.” Example 100,000,000,001 in the ongoing parade of sexist attacks on Clinton.

Marcella Chester at abyss2hope: ” Behind The Complaints Over Assumptions About Those Accused Of Rape.”

Unless you are very new to the web and online discussions about rape cases, you will have heard people (primarily men) bemoan the unfairness of anybody anywhere assuming that any man accused of rape is guilty unless and until he has been convicted.This so-called unfairness is often mislabeled as violating men’s constitutional rights because it allegedly gives these men the status of guilty until proven innocent. This argument confuses legal status with individuals’ opinions about what they believe someone did or didn’t do. But as I will show, they suffer from this confusion selectively.

Cara at The Curvature: “Child Murder Trial Takes Another Disgusting Turn.” Cara has been writing on the trial of Nixzmary Brown’s parents for murder. See her previous post “Misogynist Excuses For Killing Women Now Extend to 7-Year-Olds” and Marcella Chester’s post “Victim Blaming Sinks To A New Low”.

Marcella Chester at abyss2hope: “Wellness And Forgiveness And Injustice.” On the expectation that rape victims should forgive their rapists.

All those who claim to take harm and crimes seriously need to acknowledge that the victims of these harms or crimes owe those who harmed them absolutely nothing. When victims are attacked for refusing to give the forgiveness seeker what that person wanted when they asked for forgiveness, the truth about the attacker’s character is revealed. And it ain’t a pretty truth.

Marcella Chester at abyss2hope: “Anthropologist Explains Why Men Who Murder Are The Real Victims.” Are you fucking kidding me?! And people claim that victim-blaming and rape (or in this case, murder) apologism don’t exist. Marcella also has another post on Victim Blaming in action.

Garson Romalis in National Post: “Why I am an abortion doctor.”

Food

Food Crusader: “Showing the hate for HFCS” (high fructose corn syrup). I love the Rainbow Grocery because it’s actively involved in helping consumers make informed decisions about the food and items they buy, and the picture in the post is awesome.

Some of the other reasons that I love Rainbow is that it’s a natural foods store that isn’t priced beyond the means of anyone outside of the upper class and it’s actually responsible about how it sources its products, unlike Whole Foods and other industrial organic stores. They also have a full range of various environmentally friendly household and hygiene products, such as biodegradable dish soaps; laundry detergents; recycled toilet paper; minimally packaged tampons; and plastic-free, washable cloth pads. Their bulk food section is the original reason I fell in love with the store and will trek all the way to the Mission to buy flour, sugar, and spices. They also carry tipo 00, farina di grano tenero, aka pasta flour, in bulk, for a hell of a lot less than you’ll pay at Italian import or baking stores.

Michael Pollan’s essay “Unhappy Meals” in NYT Magazine last year. What with the recent release of In Defense Of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, an extended riff on topics similar to the ones he discusses in the article, I thought I’d share the link. He discusses what he calls “nutritionism,” an approach to food that thinks of food less as food than as packaging for various nutrients: omega-3s, vitamins, antioxidants.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. … Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. …

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren’t they? Sorry. But that’s how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.

Personally, I hate nutritionism and a guilt-driven approach to eating, where each cookie is a sin that must be atoned for with a jog, with a passion, because I grew up with both and I think they take all the joy out of eating; make eating an exercise in stress and anxiety; and nutritionism in particular makes eating unnecessarily difficult (wait, which fruits am I supposed to eat for antioxidants again? Blueberries have those, right? Or was it bananas?).

Mark Bitten: “Recipe of the Day: Spicy Supercrunchy Fried Chicken.” This sounds delicious and I’d love to try it someday.

Jennifer M. at Ethicurean: “Exploring the Pastabilities.” A wonderful post on how easy fresh pasta is and all the things you can do with it: add herbs to the dough, dried fruit pasta, and even chocolate pasta. She had me at “Others may avoid carbohydrates like the plague, but I find that a meal isn’t quite complete without something a little starchy to hold everything together,” and the post motivated me to finally try making fresh pasta yesterday.

Ethicurean: “Plotting Victory Gardens.” I’m uneasy about the WWII nostalgia and patriotism that the term “Victory Gardens” invokes, but as Pollan describes it in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the use of “Victory Gardens” is intended to evoke a consumer effort to reclaim control over their food supply. I can get behind that and I’ve been considering a fire escape balcony potted garden for the spring. What do you think?

David Chang’s recipe for Oxtail Soup. Not quite like how my mom makes, but it still sounds good.

Environment

Alex Williams at the NYT: “Don’t Let The Green Grass Fool You,” an article on environmentalism in the suburbs. It’s difficult to be environmentally friendly in the suburbs because the design of suburbs means that resource consumption is an inherent evil: gas to drive from anywhere to anywhere; water-, pesticide-, and fertilizer- guzzling lawns; large houses that require heating and cooling; sheer usage of land; etc. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck goes into great detail on this issue. However, given that a huge portion of the population lives in the suburbs, we have to reconcile environmentalism and a quarter-acre lot in Levittown somehow.

Elisabeth Rosenthal at NYT: “Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat.” I’m not sure what I think of this article yet, I want to read the studies first. However, it does deal with some of my frustration with the alternative energy debate. I get it: technology is cool, biofuels are sexy, new justifications for turning ever more of our agricultural landscape to corn are welcome. Whatever–why don’t any politicians ever talk about reducing energy consumption while they’re pandering to ADM and Monsanto? I’m in favor of specific kinds of alternative energy and I think shifting away from oil and gas is absolutely necessary in order to deal with greenhouse gases and build a sustainable energy pipeline. However, we can’t do it all by using ethanol (particularly if it’s corn-based); reducing resource consumption has to be a part of any comprehensive, effective environmental strategy.

Miscellaneous

Agent Kristin at Pub Rants on the Amazon Kindle.

Amusement

Carol Lloyd at SFGate: “Small houses challenge our notions of need as well as minimum-size standards” is an article on Jay Shafer, who built a 96 sq. ft. house (Youtube clip). I want to live in a house like that: compact, minimal carbon footprint, and each square inch planned and used.

Hugh Laurie in a Polaroid commercial in the 80s! [ETA: link fixed]

Dmitry Kiper, Alternet: “GodTube.com: Jesus 2.0 Has Arrived.”

Wyatt is trying to fuse his two passions, technology and God, in a venture that is changing how millions of Christians communicate, and harnessing technology as a force for worship and prayer.Wyatt is the founder and CEO of GodTube.com, a video-sharing and social-networking website. “We like to think of it as Christianity on demand, 24/7, there when you need it most,” says the clean-shaven and imposingly tall Wyatt, with excitement.