Blogging Against Disabilism Day Links
Linking to BADD and general disabilism posts I find interesting.
The Hand Mirror: Lose the language. Now.: On using “lame” or “spaz” and other ablist language. YES, THIS. This:
‘ableist’ language. That is, language that uses disabilities to disparage something. Very, very simple stuff, like saying that something is lame, or that someone had a bit of a spas / spaz.
Just.Don’t.Do.It.
Here’s why. (This is very much Disabilism 101 – old, old news to people who work with these issues all the time, but evidently, not much known elsewhere.)
You can say that x is bad just by saying, “X is bad.” But another way to say it is to compare x to something (which is also perceived is bad). So, “X is lame” carries that same connotation i.e that “X is bad.” The two statements are equivalent. And from there, it’s just a short step to: “Lame is bad. You are lame. You are bad bad bad.”
For the love of god, people: STOP CALLING THINGS LAME WHEN YOU MEAN THAT THEY’RE BAD, STUPID, FAULTY, BROKEN, NOT WORKING PROPERLY. STOP. IT.
Metal Sunflower: Opening My (Shortsighted) Eyes: On opening her eyes and noticing things.
I’ve started to see things. Things like the way that you might find a supposedly progressive space, where perhaps one or two of the toilet door signs have the braille equivalent underneath, but there’s no way of knowing how to find them, because there are no braille signposts. … Things like big public events. I’ve been temping, and one of the places I was temping at was a horse race. All of the seating was up a hill, up stairs and almost completely inacessable for anybody with mobility issues. … Things like public transport, too – things I’d seen but not really registered. There are lifts now at most big stations that I’ve been through. There are announcements on some London busses, informing everybody where the next stop is, and what route the bus is on. But it’s still not really geared up for people who aren’t able-bodied.
Womanist Musings: Fibromyalgia: The Invisible Pain: Renee on living with an invisible disability and chronic illnesses.
Please just stop and think before you speak. Moving from able bodied to disabled is a life changing experience and each person needs a different kind of support. Trying to pretend that nothing has changed is insulting. Yes these chronic illnesses are invisible to the naked eye but they are felt in every fibre of my being. Respecting me means respecting my illnesses; they are a part of me just like the the hair on my head. If I have to ask for help, recognize that it is a concession of my own will and I don’t need to be shamed for asking. There will always be a time for laughter and smiles but sometimes know they exist to hide the pain I live with that you have difficulty dealing with.
Bipolar Girl: Disability and Class: With the links between disability and health care, disability is inextricably linked to class issues:
There have certainly been ups and downs and will continue to be, but overall, I’m ok. I graduated with honors, went on to law school, and now am a successful lawyer. I honestly and wholeheartedly believe that without my parents and their money, their willingness to argue with the authorities of a university, their comfort with the legal system and ability to use it successfully – I would be dead. All in all, I had seven suicide attempts, not even counting the extremely dangerous behavior I exhibited while manic. But instead of trying again until I got it right, I had the opportunity to get my treatment right.
I believe that being born into a family with socioeconomic privilege made the difference between my success and my death.
BADD: Blogging Against Disablism Day
Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day (BADD). Check out Diary of a Goldfish for links to many, many interesting posts. Over at Shakesville, Liss wrote “BADD: Out of My Closet,” a thought-provoking piece on living with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from sexual violence.
This, Shakers, is disablism in a nutshell: I’d rather call myself “fucked up” than disabled. And I’ve been doing exactly that for most of my life.
I have post-traumatic stress disorder as the result of a series of sexual assaults which began when I was 16, committed across several years by someone who started out as my boyfriend.
It is disabling. It’s it a disability. I am disabled.
SKM wrote “Domestic Work is Real Work,” a post on how living with a disability, feminism, and labor intersect:
Now that I live with chronic illness, I can feel the cost of domestic labor; it’s taken out of my hide, as my grandmother would have put it. I studied my spoon theory (PDF) first-hand. I should be way ahead of those whose understanding is limited by chronic wellness. But sometimes I still find myself surrounded by homemade food and freshly washed clothes and lamenting, “I haven’t done anything today!”
In addition to being BADD, today is also International Workers’ Day. It is fitting, therefore, to think not only about the work we do, but also about who gets the privilege of being counted as a worker and why. …
The work we do to support the wellbeing of ourselves, our families, and our dwellings is real work. Asserting that truth is not only a feminist act, but an anti-disablist one as well. It is an ongoing struggle for me; one which I don’t have the privilege of ignoring.
I first ran across Christine Miserandino’s The Spoon Theory (PDF) in 2004 and found it extremely educational, as an able-bodied person that had spent most of her life without even considering the existence of spoons. amandaw’s post “What Can I Do?” was similarly eye-opening and made me think about how my able-bodied privilege isn’t an abstract concept. It doesn’t exist only when I’m consciously aware of it or run into, say, broken escalators and out of service elevators at BART stations and think, “I can still make it in, but what about someone with mobility issues?” It exists every day and takes up space every single day. I wrote a post on this topic at my other blog, “Taking the Stairs“:
Elevator closures and station infrastructure as a whole are an example of ableism working at a high level. It’s not something that I or any one individual can fix. However, it’s a result and a reflection of a society full of many people who don’t think about ableism, disability, and making things handicapped-accessible. As with any society-wide prejudice, it’s the responsibility of everyone in the dominant group, even if you or I don’t think that we’re actively the cause of it, because society is built to accommodate the desires and needs of the dominant group, which in this case is able-bodied people. And so ending prejudice and able-bodied privilege requires work both in the individual and group levels.
I take the stairs. It’s not about whether it’s faster (sometimes) or easier (never) for me than the escalator, it’s about thinking and being mindful that although the escalator is convenient for me, it’s not necessary. It might be necessary for someone else, and by joining the clogged-up line, I contribute to that clog and make their day, their participation in society, that much harder when it doesn’t need to be.
Taking the stairs isn’t just about taking the stairs and thinking that’s enough; taking the stairs is about examining the idea behind taking the stairs and applying it to everything else. It’s about noticing what’s ableist and what is and isn’t accessible and working to change that rather than ignoring it or accepting it as the way things are.
That post deals specifically with the problems with the accessibility of public transit in SF and with the need to be mindful that people can have invisible as well as visible disabilities. Lauredhel touches on a similar topic in “Can I Have A Seat?“:
[B]ecause this library has put in a couple of obvious bits of effort, I feel like they are more likely to be receptive to other suggestions. Places that make no effort I just can’t deal with sometimes – once I’ve managed the effort of somehow negotiating the obstacles, I have nothing left for standing around having a conversation with strangers, especially strangers who may be clueless and obstructive.
This is the huge barrier to the “Why don’t you just ask them?” approach to disability accessibility. I’ve tried bringing this up in the course of a transaction before, and been variously ignored, insulted, belittled, lectured, stared at blankly, and offered unsuitable solutions.
Leaving accessibility enforcement to individual people with disabilities means that a whole lot of time, it just isn’t going to get done. Because we’re already running on empty from dealing with life. Sometimes, another five or ten minute conversation that could be thorny and confronting just isn’t at the top of the priority list. Sometimes we just run out of tolerance for being insulted or deliberately ignored one.more.time. And sometimes we’re just too bloody tired. When we need to sit down RIGHT NOW, standing around chatting about it doesn’t help. When we’re bled nearly dry, we have to avoid even papercuts.
Sometimes, I really just want other people to educate their own ignorant selves. For it to no longer be my job.
As someone who is able-bodied, it is my job to: educate my own damned self. To proactively be mindful of disabilities. To not default to the assumption that everyone is able-bodied. To advocate for accessibility. To take the stairs.
Reading through today’s BADD posts is a good place to start.
ETA: Check out Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, a useful resource for making your blog or website more accessible.
Yes on Prop. 8: The Aftermath
Yes on Prop. 8: the Aftermath
Yes: 5,387,939 / 52.5%
No: 4,883,460 / 47.5%
Difference: 504,479
Total: 10,271,399
I’ll put up county-specific data later.
Via Spectrum Blue, Protest 8, a blog organizing protests in SF. There’s one tonight at 5:30 at Market and 7th. Be there and bring your old window signs.
BBC Video of LAPD beating an anti-Prop. 8 protestor – via someone, I lost the link.
Faith is pulling together a list of Yes on Prop. 8 donor-run businesses to boycott. Before anyone gets all het up about freedom of speech, let me say this: I absolutely support peoples’ rights to vote yes on Prop. 8 and for any other Godforsaken, appalling initiative or campaign. I absolutely support their right to donate as much money as they like in accordance with their bigoted, disgusting beliefs. The corollary to that is that I have every right to boycott their establishments and remove my support from their businesses. This is not censorship. This is freedom of speech x 2 – their freedom of speech and my freedom of speech. There is nothing that requires me to give my money to people that turn around and give that money to causes I find reprehensible. A boycott is an act of free expression counteracting another act of free expression, and banning, censoring, or repressing boycotts is the true instance of repression and censorship.
Besides, a lot of you Yes on 8 voters are probably free market types. Boycotts in response to the political donations of businesspeople are a classic example of consumers freely exercising their abilities to choose where to take their business, after a particular establishment proves unsatisfactory. It’s the invisible hand at work! Wrap your head around that.
Pam on the Religious Right’s probable next steps. From the President of the Christian Coalition of America:
“It will be the goal of Christian Coalition to ensure that the other 20 states adopt similar amendments banning homosexual “marriages” including the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut which also had two judicial decisions, by one vote margins, legalizing these abominations.”
Robert @ Calitics: Pledge to Repeal Prop 8: Restore Marriage Equality
Via aaa, a press release from CAMPAIGN for Children and Families: they intend to make sure the initiative applies retroactively.
“Today, marriage licenses can only go to whom they were originally intended — a man and a woman, a bride and a groom. The people of California have successfully overruled the judges and politicians and restored marriage licenses to a man and a woman. Now the false marriages done this summer must be declared null and void. California law now says the only valid or recognized marriage ‘is’ between a man and a woman. The ballot arguments specify that the only marriages are between a man and a woman, ‘regardless of when or where performed.’ It is time for all Californians to respect the new marriage law, which has restored an age-old institution, whether they voted for or against Prop. 8.”
They are also pissed off about losing on Prop. 4. I will post my thoughts about Prop. 4 later.
Via Elena Perez, the CA NOW blog has two posts up on Prop. 8: Prop 8 Postmortem, Part 1: Dissecting History covers the legal arguments behind the SF, LA, Santa Clara County, Lambda Legal, and National Center for Lesbian Rights lawsuits.
“But, Meredith,” I hear you say, “this is a constitutional amendment — aren’t the Supreme Court’s hands tied?” Actually, due to the approach the plaintiffs are taking, the CA Supreme Court does have the ability to consider this. The legal reasoning behind the lawsuits is interesting, and if you live in California, it’s worth your time to understand it.
Prop 8 Postmortem, Part 2: Dissecting the Present: looking at the impact of Prop. 8 on married couples.
ACLU Press release on the lawsuits. Includes a link to request for a stay on Prop. 8.
ACLU Press Release: argues that Prop. 8 does not apply retroactively. Fortunately, State Attorney General Jerry Brown is on our side.
SFChron: Same-sex marriage issue back to state top court. More on the lawsuit. I hope to God that this doesn’t come up before the SCOTUS anytime soon and stays in the state courts. I do not trust Kennedy on this and it’s going to be a 5-4 vote at the best, with three strict constructionists and one follows-Scalia-ist on the court. Korematsu has been much on my mind of late – another civil rights case originating from California – and it stands as a stark reminder that the court is not infallible, it is not all-knowing, it is not always just, and it most certainly is not always liberal or non-partisan. If anything, Bush v. Gore should remind us all of that.
SFChron: 2,000 gather in SF for same-sex marriage vigil – article about the Wednesday protest.
Julia @ Calitics: Prop 8: Questions about what went wrong, so we can fix it for next time. I do have to say that during the campaign season, I thought the No on Prop. 4 campaign was much more organized than the No on Prop. 8 campaign, although it had much less money and much fewer volunteers (the biggest day of phonebanking for No on 4: 150 volunteers statewide. A regular No on 8 phonebanking night in October: 110 volunteers in the SF office alone.).
Kickass
Kickass: Jack and Jill Politics: Announcing The Launch Of The Voter Suppression Wiki – Learn, Report, Act
The Role Of The Wiki
The wiki has three broad goals
Educate people about voter suppression. The term encompasses a wide range of tactics designed to limit voter participation. We want the wiki to offer an explanation of what these tactics are, places to learn more about them and the laws involved.
Collect incidents of voter suppression activity. Based on a standard template, wiki users will be able to add reports of voter suppression to the wiki. Each incident has its own page with a standard form to fill in plus discussion area.
Mobilize action to combat and prevent voter suppression. Knowledge is powerful, but only to the extent that you use it to inform decisions. We don’t just want to create a group of pissed off people. We want to create a group of pissed off people who are going to write letters, make phone calls and file lawsuits to protect citizens’ votes.
And Calitics, a blogging community focusing on California politics.
Links: Carnival Against Sexual Violence 53
Marcella has the 53rd Carnival Against Sexual Violence up at Abyss2Hope. Go check it out, there’s a lot of good stuff there. Here are some of the posts I found interesting:
Mortality’s Thoughts – Who Are They:
Who are they? All those rape and assault survivors… Cos there are a lot of us out there. More than you want to know about and probably in your closest circle of friends. Most of them are female, but not all.
Sexual assault is extremely widespread, yet many people persist in thinking that it happens to someone else, not to anyone they know. That is one (of many) factors in why sexual assault is rarely taken seriously by law enforcement, the media, authority structures, acquaintances, friends, and family – as long as they think it happens to someone else, the problem is easy to ignore and unimportant because they feel it’s not relevant to them. This is why it’s imperative to break through the silence.
Questioning Transphobia – Another Woman Dead, The Blogosphere Largely Doesn’t Notice: On the sexual assault and premeditated murder of Angie Zapata, which 9NEWS legal analyst and moron Scott Robinson declared was “not a classic hate crime”:
It’s also true that men will have sex with trans women and come back later to kill them, or even live with those women for months before killing them. These men are not unaware that they are having sex with trans women. But they know that they can get away with killing these women with a slap on the wrist.
The Crone Speaks – Pre-Trial Diversion or Rapists Go Free: Analysis of a case where a sheriff raped a minor, when she was 15 and again when she was 17, and the charges were dismissed (partly due to victim-blaming – claiming she couldn’t have been a victim in this specific instance because of her past sexual history).
Abyss2Hope – What Lack Of DNA Evidence Proves:
One frequent claim I get from anonymous commenters is that if no sperm is detected when a rape kit is processed that this is proof that no sexual assault occurred.
This claim is false.
Ashley at SAFER Campus – If You Love Date Rape, You’re A Mitchum Man: Analysis of how Mitchum’s advertising promotes sexual violence:
When I was doing sexual assault prevention programming with men, I used to use Mitchum ads as examples of rape culture. They so perfectly meld extreme pressure to be “masculine” with total disdain for women and pressure to have sex as a means of “proving” ones “masculinity” in one bright shiny package. …
These ads don’t just condone the idea that “real men” collude with each other to “trick” women into sex, and that nonconsensual sex and sexual exploitation are acceptable. They actually glorify such behavior, and tell men that acting this way will secure their masculinity.
Here’s the Thing – To Channel 13: Rape Is Not a “Sex Scandal: On the use of euphemisms for rape. These euphemisms (e.g. sex, forced to have sex) support the idea that rape is sex and rhetorically hide the prevalence of rape and sexual assault by couching it as sex or intercourse, which are consensual acts. Rape is not.
Jennifer Kesler at the Hathor Legacy – The myth of the woman who craves abuse: A thought-provoking answer to the question, “But why doesn’t she just leave [her abusive parent/spouse/significant other]?” and its implication, “Well, she didn’t leave, so she’s responsible for the abuse she suffered.”
There are no women who think, “Gee, I like being treated like shit” just as there are no real life bad people who think, “I’m evil! I love being evil! Let us revel in my evilness!” Both of these are fictional caricatures, oversimplified so everyone’s crystal clear on who’s who in the drama. In real life, bad people think they’re doing what’s right or at least acceptable and women who get into and/or stay in relationships where they’re being mistreated imagine their situations to be something other than they are. There are four major reasons why women stay in abusive relationships, but before I talk about any of them, I must point out:
Men stay in abusive relationships, too, but nobody talks about that.
Organicasm – Beyond Blood Diamonds: 5 Other Products That Are Soaked in Violence: A discussion of five conflict resources (gold, wood, oil, cocoa, tech toys – cassiterite and coltan): why they matter and what you can do about them. It’s a reminder that every choice we make has a real impact for better or for worse, whether or not we think about it. It’s important to be a responsible consumer (or as katecontinued at make-a-(green)plan would suggest, as minimalist a consumer as possible) and at least acknowledge that our choices have consequences, whether or not we want to take them into consideration (ideally, that acknowledgment would lead to responsible consumption). The section on cassiterate and coltan were particularly striking for me:
Miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo work extremely hard in dangerous situations, just to get the cassiterite that goes in your cell phone, laptop, and other high tech devices. When they come out of the tiny holes in which they have to dig for the mineral, they’re greeted by soldiers at gunpoint that will take it. Other miners work on sites that are directly operated by the military and other armed groups. Even when they’re not working directly for these groups, they’re heavily taxed by them, or just robbed outright. Often, these mines collapse, leaving many miners and their rescuers dead.
The war over coltan has caused the death of more than 4 million people in central Africa, mostly civilians who have died from starvation, disease, or displacement. In addition to human life, the Eastern lowland gorilla is being driven to extinction through poaching and habitat loss tied to mineral mines.
Even worse, as phones become “greener,” the demand for cassiterite, coltan, and other high-tech minerals like them has risen, and violence along with it. Although the amount of these minerals in each individual electronics device is small, it all adds up.
What can I do? The problems are vast and dire and on the one hand, I’m tempted to say that nothing I can do will solve even a minuscule part of the problem. However, apathy is complicity and change comes from small beginnings. So I’m trying to live according to these ideas:
* Recycle your devices. By donating your cell phone or laptop to services that know how to properly disassemble them, you’ll help reduce mining for the minerals it contains.
* Buy used or refurbished. With technology growing at an ever-increasing rate, the turnover for devices is high enough that you can purchase a used or refurbished cell phone, laptop, or other device that is perfectly able to stand up to your demands.
* You can cut down on this turnover yourself by avoiding full upgrades as long as possible. This can be achieved with proper maintenance, repairs, and upgrading specific parts rather than your entire device.
* Buy for quality. If you’re going to buy a new device, make sure that you’re purchasing one that will be functional for years to come, rather than one that will be discarded within a few years or months.
Baby steps add up (NYT Magazine, The Afterlife of Cell phones, 2008/01/13).
Une Belle Vie – Sexual Crimes and the Gender Struggle:
Rape and gender inequality… Which do you condone? Well here’s the solid truth- when you condone one, you condone the other. Simple as that. If you tell me a woman does not deserve equality to men than you are tacitly approving of the monsters in prison who rape their daughters, granddaughters, mothers and grandmothers, the creatures who capture young girls and torture and kill them.
The Curvature – KBR Bans Cell Phones and Silences Rape Victims:
So. KBR employee is raped by her coworkers and then kidnapped and held prisoner. Employee secures her release through use of a personal cell phone. KBR doesn’t really give a shit about any of it. Employee makes a lot of noise about the incident, making KBR look really bad, even if not actually impacting the company financially. KBR bans personal cell phone use.
Contact your senators and representatives and urge them to investigate the rape coverups at KBR and other contractors in Iraq.
Polimicks – Rape Myth #1: Women make false rape accusations all the time: A takedown of the claim that women make false rape accusations all the time. First of all, that’s misogynist; second,
Given how I’ve seen actual rape victims treated, pretty much with all the tact and sensitivity of raw liver, very, very few women would ever willingly put themselves through that to “get back at” anyone. Seriously.
Think about it.
Ashley at SAFER Campus – Teen Pregnancy and Sexual Violence:
The Center for American Progress gives us a much fuller picture of the problem, noting that teen pregnancy is often a reflection of the high rates of sexual violence toward young women, and that these rates of violence are much higher for young women of color.
Ruminations – Lutte contre l’injustice – Moral Courage: a somewhat rambling but thought-provoking discussion of moral courage prompted by
a scandal at the school where a boy made a sex tape of him and a girl, without her knowledge, and later showed it to his Lacrosse team mates. None of his team mates objected or tried to stop the video, they just watched. Now this team was rated to be #1 and it would have been easy to give the kids a slap on the wrist and go on with the season.
The response of the school’s administration is particularly remarkable given how schools and sports teams cover up rape for the sake of the W.
And my guest post at Shakesville on the use of the phrase “alleged rape” is also in the carnival.
Street Harassment Link
From the comments file, a link to Stop Street Harassment, an anti-street harassment website with “a lot of resources, interviews with anti-street harassment activists, some “soundbytes” from [Kearl's] research, and a companion blog where people can share their stories.” Check it out!
The Equality Train is Coming
Melissa @ Shakesville: “California Court Overturns Gay Marriage Ban!”
I hear equality coming down the tracks—and they really just need to get the hell out of the way if they don’t want to get crushed. [post title from this quote]
I am so, so, so, so, so, so, so thrilled. So excited. So plain happy that finally, the court stood up and said, “SEPARATE IS NOT EQUAL,” in this context. Of course the social conservatives are going to turn out in force, but they were always going to, and we’re going to fight them like mad, and we’re going to win. This decision will change peoples’ lives immediately, and I’m so incredibly thrilled and so happy for them. Cheers to everyone who wants to get married here and now can. Cheers to the thousands of couples who got their licenses in 2004. Cheers to Justices Ronald George, Joyce Kennard, Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, and Carlos Moreno. Cheers to the plaintiffs, Arthur Frederick Adams and Devin Wayne Baker, Alexsis Beach and Rachel Lederman, Myra Beals and Ida Matson, Dave and Jeff Chandler, Sarah and Gillian Conner-Smith, Sarah and Gillian Conner-Smith, Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis, Jewelle Gomez and Diane Sabin, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, Margot McShane and Alexandra D’Amario, Jeanne Rizzo and Pali Cooper, Joshua Rymer and Timothy Frazer, Karen Shain and Jody Sokolower, Janet Wallace and Deborah Hart, Equality California, and Our Family Coalition. The individual plaintiffs’ statements are available at the NLCR link and are well worth reading for insight in to the immediate human impact of the ruling. Cheers to their legal team, the lead counsel from the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Lambda Legal, ACLU, Heller Ehrman LLP, and the Law Office of David Codell.
But San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, whose office filed one of the suits challenging the marriage law, said the court acted in the best tradition of an independent judiciary.
“Our democratic system was founded on the notion that the courts should not be swayed by public opinion when it comes to protecting our most cherished rights,” Herrera said.
Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose sanctioning of same-sex marriages in 2004 led to today’s ruling, said, “It’s about human dignity. It’s about civil rights. It’s about time.”
Chief Justice George was joined in the majority by Justices Joyce Kennard, Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and Carlos Moreno. Justices Marvin Baxter, Ming Chin and Carol Corrigan dissented – though Corrigan, writing separately, said she personally believes “Californians should allow our gay and lesbian neighbors to call their unions marriages.”
…
But George, in a 121-page opinion, said California has already recognized, in its laws and public policy, that gays and lesbians are entitled to equal treatment in every legal area except marriage. He also noted that state laws and traditions banned interracial marriage until the California Supreme Court, in 1948, became the first court in the nation to overturn such a law.
“Even the most familiar and generally accepted of social policies and traditions often mask an unfairness and inequality that frequently is not recognized or appreciated by those not directly harmed,” the chief justice wrote.
Today’s ruling marks a watershed moment in the conflict over gay marriage, with the most influential state Supreme Court in the nation, dominated by Republican appointees, ruling in favor of gay rights advocates in the state with the largest gay population. California was considered a crucial battleground for civil rights groups, which have lost a number of major legal challenges in recent years in other states such as New York, Washington and New Jersey.
The decision is sure to spark a furor that could spill into the ballot box in November, when there is a strong chance voters will be weighing a ballot initiative to change the state Constitution to outlaw same-sex marriage. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger previously announced his opposition to the ballot initiative, and reiterated his opposition today.
“I respect the court’s decision and as governor, I will uphold its ruling,” Schwarzenegger said within minutes of the ruling. “Also, as I have said in the past, I will not support an amendment to the constitution that would overturn this state Supreme Court ruling.”
New York Times, Adam Liptak, “California Court Affirms Right to Gay Marriage” (2008/05/16)
“In view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship,” Chief Justice Ronald M. George wrote of marriage for the majority, “the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples.”
…
The first was that marriage is a fundamental constitutional right. “The right to marry,” Chief Justice George wrote, “represents the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with a person of one’s choice and, as such, is of fundamental significance both to society and to the individual.”
Chief Justice George conceded that “as an historical matter in this state marriage has always been restricted to a union between a man and a woman.” But “tradition alone,” the chief justice continued, does not justify the denial of a fundamental constitutional right. Bans on interracial marriage were, he wrote, sanctioned by the state for many years.
The court also struck down state laws banning same-sex marriage on equal protection grounds, adopting a new standard of review in the process.
With few exceptions, courts considering suits from gay men and lesbians claiming legal discrimination of all sorts have applied a relaxed standard of scrutiny under which the government must show only that the challenged law had a rational basis.
In Thursday’s decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the correct standard of review for plaintiffs claiming discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is “strict scrutiny,” the standard used in race-discrimination cases. Under that standard, the government must demonstrate that it has a compelling interest for the law it is defending and that the distinctions drawn by the law are necessary to protect the interest.
The text of the decision, in PDF.
At last, at last.
Links Roundup: Basic Human Thinking Edition
My friend M got me hooked on Beethoven’s late string quartets last Saturday, and ever since I’ve been staying up all hours of the night listening to them. Hence the lack of posts. It’s not that I don’t have stuff percolating in my mind, it’s that I’m up late listening to the Emerson and Takacs Quartets and then I’m too tired to string words together, or I sit down to write and get distracted by music. So in lieu of a post, have some links!
Shakesville has been hitting it out of the park recently with a bunch of posts that I think of as “______ 101″ posts. That is, posts that are about things that should be obvious with a little basic thinking (hence the post title). Posts that are true and obvious and shouldn’t need to be written, but somehow still need to be. Shakesville is, IMO, the best prog blog floating around out there in the cloud, and if you’re not reading it already, you should add it to your RSS reader. Great posts and great discussions in the comments.
On Shakespeare’s Sister, Shakesville, and Rooms for Feminism
Melissa, Shakesville: Important Announcement: “Feminism is an integral part of progressivism.“
Followed by… Kate Harding, Shakesville: It’s Right There in the Name: On Virginia Woolfe, Shakespeare’s Sister, Shakesville, and the point of a feminist blog.
This is and always has been a feminist blog.
It’s also a blog about a whole lot of other things–politics, culture, LGBTQ issues, racism, ableism, sizeism, pop culture, pets, travel, relationships, clever things said with a Scottish accent, photoshopped pictures of John McCain… There are currently 23 regular contributors, all posting about whatever strikes our fancy. The blogroll is fucking epic. We cover a lot of ground.
But it is and always has been a feminist blog. Because it is and always has been a progressive blog, for starters, and because the name “Shakespeare’s Sister” has always been there, representing women’s historical and ongoing fight to be taken seriously, to be heard.
Followed up, heartbreakingly, by Kate Harding, Shakesville: Question of The Day: “Building on my rant from earlier, I’ve got a two-parter: What did/does your mom do for a living, and was/is it what she really wanted to do?” Read the comments thread.
Followed up by Melissa, Shakesville: I Am Shakespeare’s Sister:
I cannot walk away from misogyny for a moment, and so I cannot for a moment walk away from feminism, either. I cannot set it aside any more than I can set aside my womanhood. No—I will not. The choice is mine, and I choose to face the world equipped at all times with the only tool of self-defense I have against inequality. Feminism is my sword and my shield, which I carry because the world is hostile to me, not the other way around.
I fight because I have to. My obligation. My muse.
That is the context of this room. It was built by a woman. A feminist woman. Shakespeare’s Sister, carrying the weight of all of Shakespeare’s Sisters with her, as she clumsily stumbles toward making long, greedy use of the opportunity they provided her, sucking up every last drop of the chance she’s been given to do what others could not and pay forward with interest the chance to another sister of Shakespeare who may just now be warily peering into this room and thinking there’s something I like in there…
Basic Thinking & Activism
Melissa, Shakesville: Feminism 101: Feminism and Humanism: “Why feminism (where “feminism” means sex equality) cannot be subsumed by humanism (where “humanism” means equality for all humans): Because the majority of humans still don’t understand why calling Hillary Clinton a cunt and a whore is sexist.”
Space Cowboy, Scream It from the Highest Mountain: “DO SOMETHING!”: The post is specifically about Bush’s admittal that he approved the use of torture, but is also more broadly relevant as a call to arms. Activism is important and we, the People, need to reclaim our dysfunctional government.
These folks are already getting enough financial support from me when they’re in office for doing sweet F A. When I call my reps to find out what they intend to do, the staffer has no idea what the plan is; no surprise there. The reps don’t even know what the plan is, aside from waiting around for the next inauguration.
Our government is not supposed to work like this.
Melissa, Shakesville: Time to Make Some Noise [Redux]: a repost from January, 2005. In the aftermath of Gore v. Bush and the failure of democracy, some painful realizations:
What better way to quell the threat of revolt than to offer the chance to effect change once every few years, through the simple and effortless act of casting a ballot. But when those ballots have lost any remnant of power, then they have also lost all sense of purpose, and the act of democracy becomes an impotent gesture, its sole meaning to stave off acts of rebellion against an increasingly centralized and exclusionary ruling class. …
We must not give up on our right and our responsibility to vote, but voting alone will not solve the problems we face. Those of us who can look beyond our next chance to trek to the voting booth must find other ways of making our voices heard in the interim. When Ukraine’s government attempted to undermine their democratic principles, there was rioting in the streets. When will we riot in the streets? I wonder, anxiously, what it will take to shake us from our immutable belief that democracy will solve the problem of its own inevitable ruination so long as we depend exclusively on its fading potency.
Shakesville: We Write Letters: This post is an example of what allies and true progressives do and it’s an example of what makes Shakesville so awesome. This statement is the most important and often most difficult step toward becoming a genuine ally in any activist fight against systemic oppression:
We will endeavor always to be aware of our privilege, and, in moments of failure, will remain open to criticisms and suggestions, resolve to think twice before responding defensively, and apologize when we fuck up.
WKW, Shakesville: Carnival of Allies, Ending the benefits of doubt: For The Angry Black Woman’s Carnival of Allies, WKW writes,
A person who commits a racist act or makes racist comments need not be stamped forever with a Black R on their chest. But their comments or actions, regardless of subtlety, must be pointed out. Words have meanings, and words lead to actions. …
I have been and am a racist. But I am willing to look deeply at myself and try and find out why and hold myself accountable. Because the word racism does not terrify me. It emboldens me to change, and to work on my own flaws.
I am an imperfect ally. And I will undoubtedly have racist, sexist and homophobic thoughts and even make comments that show a disregard or disrespect for other cultures in the future. And when I am called out on them, I will face them head on. Because every word, action and thought matters, and adds up.
Feminism & Politics
Chet Scoville, Shakesville: Hillary Clinton and the 4th Wave: Excerpts of Amanda Fortini’s NY Mag article. There’s some good discussion in the comments. I have some bones to pick with the article’s assumptions, which I might or might not write about, but what I find most interesting is the idea that we’re living through a watershed moment in the development of the fourth wave. Living history, indeed.
Kate Harding, Shakesville: It’s Time to Get Obama-Skeptical: Obama is not a progressive. Clinton isn’t either. So stop pretending that either one of them is, and let’s hold them to higher standards. Let’s hold them to liberal ideals and do our damnedest to drag the Overton Window leftward.
I am only asking that people who have been blindly cheering him on recognize the fight ahead and become, as Zuzu brilliantly put it, “Obama-skeptical.” … I am by no means anti-Obama. I am pro-Clinton and Obama-skeptical. (I am also, for the record, Clinton-skeptical. If you’re not skeptical of the candidate you support, you’re not doing your job as a citizen, as far as I’m concerned. Hence this post.)
Obama has feet of clay, just like every other politician in history. Quit trying to pretend he doesn’t and start figuring out how to help reinforce them. Be realistic about who this candidate is, to whom he’s beholden, and how much he can reasonably accomplish, so you don’t end up under your bed sucking your thumb when the shit starts to fly.
PortlyDyke, Shakesville: What you don’t know CAN hurt you: A discussion of “privilege, and language, and unconsciousness,” prompted by Obama’s interview with The Advocate, wherein he remarked,
I actually had a professor at Occidental — now, this is embarrassing because I might screw up his last name — Lawrence Golden, I think it was. He was a wonderful guy. He was the first openly gay professor that I had ever come in contact with, or openly gay person of authority that I had come in contact with. And he was just a terrific guy. He wasn’t proselytizing all the time, but just his comfort in his own skin and the friendship we developed helped to educate me on a number of these issues. (emp. mine)
Kate Harding, Shakesville: How a President’s Faith Can Affect Us All: An analysis of some troubling statements Obama has made about sex ed, the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and rape. For what it’s worth, I think Obama’s statements stem from privilege: he’s never had to think in depth and at length about rape or reproductive rights (including, but not limited to, abortion), so he’s just clueless about how the way he talks about these issues buy straight into rightwing anti-choice and misogynist frames. I don’t think he’s malicious, just ignorant, but his statements are still deeply problematic for me, particularly the circumlocutions around rape (“when they [women] sometimes in certain situations may not be able to protect themselves from having unprotected sex”) and
there is a behavioral element to AIDS that has to be addressed. And if there is — if there’s promiscuity and we are pretending that that’s not an issue in spreading AIDS, then we’re missing part of the answer.
This vile, patronizing, rightwing-moralistic talking point crap that lacks policy options, right on the heels of the blogswarm for the Congo Rape Epidemic and the Global Day for Darfur, nearly made me vomit. I get it. I get that promiscuity is undoubtedly a factor in the AIDS epidemic in Africa. However, I doubt that it’s the most important factor, and while morality may pander to the right wing crowd, focusing on that rather than the normalized rape epidemic, poverty, lack of legal or cultural protections for women, warfare, lack of health care, lack of access to family planning education, and all the other factors that can be tackled with policy solutions, shows a distinct lack of vision to me. He should have talked about policies and solvable factors and the fact that he didn’t makes me wonder if he has a vision for what he wants to do as president. What does he want the world to look like, and how is he going to get it there?
Also, read through the comments and the debate about women who are “in certain situations may not be able to protect themselves from having unprotected sex” for an example of rape apologism in action.
Erasmus called. He wants you to read Laus Stultitiae
Melissa, Shakesville: Feminism 101: Feminism and Humanism (2008/04/16): A clear and concise explanation of the problems with this attitude: “I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist! Feminism is about women, and I’m interested in the equality of all people!”
My usual response is to snark, “Erasmus called. He wants his philosophy back.” Melissa’s much more productive response is
those arguing in favor of a “humanist” movement won’t say they’re arguing for men’s inclusion, instead citing what they perceive as the limitations of feminism/womanism—”But what about gay people or people of color or the disabled or the poor or…?” they ask, as if there is something intrinsic to feminism that precludes also fighting other biases. The truth is, if one is genuinely concerned with the betterment of women, one is necessarily concerned with fighting biases against any marginalized group, because, half (give or take) of all such groups are women.
…
Arguing for a “humanist” movement, because feminism/womanism is too limited, is necessarily predicated on viewing “women” as a group separate from “people of color” as a group separate from “LGBTQ” as a group separate from “disabled” as a group separate from “poor” as a group separate from “fat” as a group separate from… It’s a failure to respect both intersectionality and the breadth of experience among women, no less among all humans.
I would add that the need to say, “I’m a humanist, not a feminist!” is predicated on either well-intentioned ignorance about the realities of sexism and the feminist movement, or a knee-jerk fear of fighting for women’s equality. Feminism is about advocating for women’s rights, and to say, “I’m not just focused on women, I’m focused on everyone,” is no more and no less than an attempt to redirect attention to men.
Additionally, there is power in labels, power in words. We use identifiers (e.g. the AA formula “Hi, my name is ___ and I’m an alcoholic”) because they carry meaning. They tell us what a movement is about, what’s inside the tin. Feminism, derived from femina, the Latin word for woman, says upfront and boldly that it is about advocating for women. Women have been erased and silenced throughout history and one of the many aims of feminism is to fight back against that erasure. To claim, “I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist,” rhetorically removes women from the spotlight and silences them once again, while simultaneously claiming to advocate for all people, including women. There is some hypocrisy and sloppy thinking there.
In short, if you’re genuinely focused on advocating for women, what’s the problem with claiming the label? I understand the concerns about how various branches of feminist thought have historically ignored intersectionality and I respect the choices of activists who choose to not to associate themselves with the feminist label for that reason. However, the people who go around talking about “humanism, not feminism” are not the people who have those objections to the word feminism. I am not trying to force identity of feminist on anyone who chooses not to claim it. I am, however, pointing out the logical fallacies behind the idea “I’m a humanist, not a feminist!” The people arguing for “humanism, not feminism” fail to recognize that women have intersectional identities; their whole argument is premised on the idea that you’re either a woman or you’re a person (man) of color, disabled person (man), GBTQ person (man), poor person (man), etc. As I said in the comments to Melissa’s post,
It’s amazing how easily most people forget that there are multiple aspects to identity. It’s not that you are only one thing or another, it’s that you’re both (or more), and all those aspects of identity interact to affect your lived experience.
And what’s with this monolithic idea of woman as white, heterosexual, wealthy, able-bodied, cisgendered, etc.? I feel that when the faux-humanist (Erasmus called, he wants his philosophy back!) people talk about how feminism leaves out all other groups, they’re assuming that women are only ever white/heterosexual/economically secure/able-bodied/cisgendered and so they’re not part of any other group. Way to erase WOC, disabled women, transgendered women, queer women, women who have some of those or all of those or more of those identity aspects–which is ironic because the faux-humanists claim they’re looking out for the groups ignored by second-wave feminism. Except they only mean men of color, disabled men, etc.
Ultimately, claims of “humanism” reveal a thought process that reverts toward focusing on men and erasing women once more, proving that “humanism” is not the same as feminism.
Links: Torch Protests
Recent news coverage of protests along the torch route.
Olympic torch protesters scale Golden Gate Bridge (AP, 4/7/2008)
Three protesters climbed suspension cables of the Golden Gate Bridge on Monday as part of an advance protest to this week’s Olympic torch relay here and unfurled two large banners that said “One World One Dream. Free Tibet” and “Free Tibet.”
Olympic Torch Relay in Paris Halted as Protests Spread (NYT, 4/8/2008)
As the relay began in Paris, the French authorities had appeared determined to try to spare China — and France — the disorder that occurred in London, resorting to measures normally reserved for a visiting head of state.
Their efforts drew scorn from protesters, who angrily noted the heavy police presence. Armed officers guarded sensitive Metro exits along the 28-kilometer, or 17-mile, route.
“One would almost think oneself in Lhasa,” said Jean-Paul Ribes, leader of the Support Committee of the Tibetan People in France, who was among the thousands massed on the Trocadéro. “It snowed last night, now the sky is blue — and police are everywhere.”
Many protesters — demonstrating against China’s human rights policies in general or for a free Tibet, or simply advocating a boycott of the Olympics in Beijing — echoed a headline that was emblazoned across the front page of the leftist daily Libération, under a picture of the Olympic rings restyled as handcuffs: “Liberate the Olympic Games!”
Paris Torch Slideshow (NYT)
Thousands protest as Olympic flame carried through London (Guardian, 4/7/2008) “Campaigners complained of heavy-handed police tactics during the Olympic torch relay yesterday as officers were seen pulling down Tibetan flags, barging bystanders away from the route, threatening arrest under anti-terrorist legislation and telling protesters to remove “Free Tibet” T-shirts.”
Numbers low for S.F. Human Rights Torch rally (SF Chronicle, 4/6/2008)
About 200 people gathered Saturday at San Francisco’s Union Square for a Human Rights Torch rally, the first of the city’s two alternative torch protests called in advance of Wednesday’s visit of the official Olympic torch in the city.
San Francisco is the only North American stop in the global Olympic torch celebration that precedes the Olympics’ Aug. 8 opening in Beijing. Critics of China in the United States and other countries are urging the world to stage protests and boycott the Summer Games to punish China for its human-rights record.
Saturday’s demonstration was part of the Human Rights Torch Relay, an international campaign organized by supporters of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice based on meditation and exercise that was banned in China in 1999. The group says its members have been persecuted and tortured in China.
Long-awaited Olympic torch route announced; city leaders condemn China in statement (SF Chronicle, 4/2/2008)
The Beijing Olympic torch will be carried along San Francisco’s waterfront and briefly pass through the Marina District, according to city officials who announced the specific route today.
The long-anticipated announcement about the torch’s planned route came moments before the city’s Board of Supervisors this afternoon passed a strongly worded resolution condemning China’s human rights record. The seven-page resolution also demands an international investigation into China’s record and calls for the local official who receives the torch in San Francisco to do so with “alarm and protest.”
Video of the Golden Gate Bridge climbers:
Links roundup
Links roundup tonight, then a post tomorrow (assuming work doesn’t explode again–cross your fingers for me!). I’ve been kicking around thoughts on “Clinton is too ambitious” / “She’s just doing this to get elected” / “She wants it too much,” and how those statements show that the speaker (1) is sexist or (2) hasn’t thought the issue through and is either relying on sexist stereotypes or simply has invested zero thinking in analyzing the candidate and the statement. It’s also nothing short of bizarre to me that being ambitious and wanting the presidency are bad or even remarkable, given that both qualities are inherent in the nature of running for president in a competition against other people. It’s like going to the ocean and complaining that the beach is sandy and the water’s salty. I also wonder why people think that Clinton is too ambitious and put her in the “wants to be someone” camp of “Anyone running for president either wants to do something or be someone,” rather than Mitt Romney. He’d be my first and probably only choice for “Just doing this to get elected as a vanity project.”
But that’s for tomorrow, whoops, because I’m trying to go to bed early tonight. Another thing I’m thinking about these days is why I’m an activist (or working on becoming one): specifically, what was it in my upbringing that’s produced an angry, argumentative liberal who believes in Social Change and Individual Action? I suspect that it was books. Specifically, the Little House on the Prairie series.
Another plug for The Hillary 1000, a Clinton media aggregating and fundraising blog run by Redstar, Pocochina, and Donna Darko. They have a bunch of analysis of and links to interesting articles on Clinton in both the mainstream media and the blogosphere (ok, I lie–mostly the blogosphere, and some articles in online magazines. Do those qualify as mainstream media?) and I find it encouraging to encounter like-minded people in the blogosphere who are actively involved as volunteers: blogging, contributing, calling, going out to the March 4 primary states!
Election 2008
Quixote at Shakesville: Clinton vs. Obama. “I have a confession to make. I’m moving away from the Democratic dogma that says we have two fine candidates, and either one will be a great President. I no longer think so. There’s a disconnect between Obama’s words and deeds that got too big for me. So I took another look at Clinton.” A post lookinng at ways in which Obama panders to the right.
Y’all already know where I stand in terms of candidates, but I’m an open-minded person and my vote in the general election is still up for grabs. However, between Quixote’s post and a few other recent ones discussing examples of how Obama distances himself from liberal positions and uses conservative rhetoric to broaden his appeal (or something) make it unlikely that I’ll vote for him, unless he gets his head out of his ass and stands up for the liberal voters who presumably make up his grand movement. If this pandering to conservatives (which nomination does he think he’s running for?) is a taste of what he means by bipartisanship and unity, I’ll pass, thanks.
Feminism & Politics
Jill at Feministe: Women in “Free” Iraq. Concern for women’s rights is good. Using “women’s rights” as a justification for invading other nations, particularly when you don’t give a damn about “women’s rights” in your own country except when it comes to curtailing them, is not good. In fact, it’ll probably result in a complete failure. Color me surprised.
Jeff at Shakesville: Gender: It’s Not Just for Girls Anymore. Long story short: people are people and gender roles hurt girls, boys, and everyone else. Why is this so fucking hard to understand?!
Cara at The Curvature: In a rape culture, the man is never to blame.
A man is accused of sexual assault and attempted sexual assault, the victim goes through with the case, the perpetrator testified that he did indeed attempt sexual assault . . . and he walks free. How, exactly, does that happen? Well, because people will stop at nothing to believe in a world where the patriarchy is actually all fine and fucking dandy and where committing sexual violence against a woman is just “poor judgment.” Who is to blame? Take your pick among the judge, jury, law and culture.
The comments are quite interesting as well, in that you see rape apologism in action, as commentators accuse Cara of “sensationalizing” the case, exaggerating and overhyping our “rape culture,” and saying that technically, under legal minutiae, the rapist didn’t actually rape the victim, even though the rapist admitted to raping her.
Holly at Feministe: Sanesha Stewart is dead and I have only tears and frustration for her. A post on the brutal murder of Sanesha Stewart and the disgustingly transphobic media response to it.
Food & Politics
Bonnie P. at The Ethicurean: Nuggets of truth discusses the Charlotte Observer’s special series The Cruelest Cuts, on the lives of the 28,000 poultry workers in North Carolina.
Cheap food comes at a price, and in this area more than any other, it’s easy for consumers to be aware and to make a difference: by refusing to pay the lowest possible price for food, you can directly cut an unethical company’s bottom line and show that you care about workers’ rights and safety. Hell, you don’t even have to write a letter of complaint to the company or write a letter to your local newspaper. All you have to do is read the newspaper, remember “Company X has extremely poor worker safety,” and decide not to buy Company X’s products at the grocery, if you can afford to do so. I think moral apathy and self-centeredness is a greater problem than outright, bone deep prejudice when it comes to reforming society.
Politics
The NYT Board Blog: The New Stimulus Package: A Big Disappointment. Old news by now, but honestly, I think the stimulus package is a good example of how laughably inept Congress is. Have none of them taken economics? Do none of them have advisors? I can’t believe that the stimulus package is anything but pandering to the short-term desires of short-sighted voters, who are willing to take a tax rebate of a few hundred dollars when the government is running a huge deficit and lacks the money to properly fund education, infrastructure development, rebuilding New Orleans, veterans’ benefits, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid . . . American politics is a joke, I swear. The Democrats use their 2006 mandate to accomplish astonishingly little, and then they cut the most vulnerable groups out of the stimulus bill by dropping food stamps, and applaud themselves for bipartisan work. Gag me with a spoon.
The NYT Board Blog: About those Bush tax cuts for the rich . . .
In unveiling his final budget this month, President Bush again called for making his tax cuts from 2001 and 2003 permanent, rather than letting them expire as scheduled at the end of 2010. That would be irresponsible.
In the spirit of the late, great Molly Ivins, you can’t help but laugh at this shit. It’s either that, or cry. What reality does Bush live in? Apparently it’s not one where economists and anyone not in the top 1% of American society live.
Environmentalism
VentureBeatWIRE: Second Rotation picks up $4.4 for electronics recycling. “Second Rotation is attempting to create a marketplace for used electronics that will slow the pace of new additions to the landfill.” Definitely worth taking a look at the company if you have old phones, mp3 players, printers, or other electronics sitting around your home. Sadly, I don’t think they’ll take my dead laptop battery, which I still haven’t dropping off for recycling.
Miscellaneous
Arthur Frommer: “We are about to advertise the delights of visiting the U.S.A. while at the same time adopting constant measures to keep foreigners out”
I heard a lot of talk about the probability that the new session of Congress will set up a public-private organization spending $200 million dollars a year to promote and market incoming travel to the United States. According to various estimates, the United States has lost as much as 20% of the foreign tourists that were visiting our country each year prior to September 11.
I love how populist and down to earth Frommer is, and how he doesn’t shy away from tackling nonsensical politicking as it relates to travel.
Links Roundup
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.
Clinton and Media Misogyny: Links
A few nights ago, I mentioned compiling two posts, one full of links to examples of sexism in the media coverage of Clinton, and one full of links to examples of victim-blaming in media coverage of rape cases. Well, I haven’t ruled the second one out yet, but the first one is irrelevant now, because Shakesville and Feministe have done an excellent job of analyzing present and past links:
Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: “What New Dissed Hill Is This?” has put together a fabulous collection of links to misogynist depictions of Clinton in the media, and discusses no less than three recent instances of sexist media coverage of Clinton:
1. Baseball cards of all the presidential candidates–except, wait, Clinton isn’t portrayed as a baseball player, although she’s clearly running for president, but as “Morganna the Kissing Bandit, a voluptuous woman known for running out onto the field and kissing players.” Then the card is taken out of the deck altogether rather than replaced with one of Clinton as a baseball player, along with her male competitors.
… It does, however, reveal how reluctant some people are to see—and portray—a woman doing “a man’s job.” There’s no reason Hillary couldn’t have been a baseball player … except because of someone’s limited capacity to envision her as anything but a woman and there are no women players in Major League Baseball.
2. Obama, a candidate widely noted for his amazing oratory and rhetorical skills (y’all know what I think of that, but whatever), uses coded sexist language to describe the Clinton campaign:
Someone speaking about Obama being the underdog, outsider candidate—which, by the way, once someone gets Democratic monument Ted Kennedy’s and former nominee John Kerry’s endorsements, is a meme that needs to die—says: “You challenge the status quo and suddenly the claws come out.” Certainly this was a reference to Hillary, whom the Obama campaign has been long painting (and not without reason) as the establishment candidate. Had the non-sexist equivalent, as pointed out by Homunq here, been used—”You challenge the status quo and suddenly the gloves come off”—there would have been no problem, but “claws come out” is as sure a sexist dog whistle as is catfight.The big problem is that the someone who said this is Barack Obama.
3. MSNBC’s David Shuster accuses Clinton of “pimping out” Chelsea, who has the gall to be campaigning for her mother. Interestingly, the Romney sons campaigned for their father and the Bush twins campaigned for their father, too, yet those candidates were never accused of “pimping out” their children. It’s a sexist insult that devalues Chelsea and assumes she’s not intelligent enough to be making her own reasoned decisions and portrays Clinton as an immoral pimp selling her daughter for political gain and donations (i.e. cash). There’s clearly a double standard here, because it’s okay for sons and daughters to campaign for their male parents, but when a daughter campaigns for her female parent, it can only be through exploitation.
At the bottom of the post, there’s a great big bloody paragraph, which I will quote in full because it is powerful and horrible:
In the same world in which that woman turning sexism on its head is framed as Odd News, and in which that woman is called a bitch to the amusement of the other party’s nominee, and is called a she-devil and depicted with horns, and is heckled by jerks demanding she iron their shirts, and is reduced to tea parties and her response to that demeaned as “really be[ing] on edge,” and in which she is cast as a feminazi monster, and has her ability to withstand the rigors of the presidency questioned with an unflattering image, and has a nutcracker designed in her image, and finds her moment of candidly expressed emotion turned into a national story using dog-whistles once removed from “hysterical,” and is routinely accused of playing a victim and of playing the gender card, often erroneously, and is said to need a copy of The Rules, and is accused of having a career only because her husband cheated on her, and is subjected to the swill of online hate groups with names like “Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich” and “Hillary Clinton Shouldn’t Run for President, She Should Just Run the Dishes,” and is regularly featured in sexist political cartoons, and is challenged by a 527 calling itself C.U.N.T., and is called the Crybaby-in-Chief if she shows emotion, and can’t bloody win no matter what she does, but only in the eyes of misogynist wankers because SHE’S. STILL. HERE.
I call it powerful and horrible because every single sexist thing is a link (more thoughts on hypertext and how it affects language later). Go read the full post, with all its links to hard core proof of the sexism and outright woman-hating that’s reared its ugly head in this election cycle.
Thomas at Feministe also posts on the Shuster “pimped out” comment: “A Bad Day For Sexism Is A Good Day For Women.”
Yesterday, David Shuster at MSNBC asked if Chelsea Clinton was being “pimped out” because she’s making calls on behalf of her mother’s campaign, something that adult children of politicians do to support their fathers’ campaigns with regularity. The Clinton campaign told him how inappropriate his remark was in a private email, but Shuster stood his ground. So Clinton’s communication director, Howard Wolfson, called Shuster out for it publicly and said that Senator Clinton would pull out of the MSNBC debate scheduled for February 26.Schuster’s remark is sadly not an isolated incident. Sexist remarks about Clinton are a major dynamic of the campaign. But what is new is that Senator Clinton is in the position so many women wish they were in, to call out sexist remarks and to get results.
One of my colleagues believes that the “pimped out” comment isn’t offensive or sexist, people are just reading too much into a “common expression.” If it’s a common expression, that doesn’t mean it’s not gendered or sexist. If I call someone “gay” as an insult, that’s a homophobic insult even though it’s a common expression. Furthermore, if it’s just a “common expression,” why are people raising an enormous hullabaloo around the comment? It’s poor argumentation to speculate from effect to cause, but I believe that Hillary Clinton, of all people, knows how dangerous it can be to her campaign to be perceived as “oversensitive” to sexism. Threatening to pull out of the MSNBC debate, which is a move I wholly admire, isn’t a light reaction and it’s not something she would do for something perceived as trivial. That makes me think that perhaps this incident is serious and perhaps it isn’t just a “common expression” to say that a female presidential candidate is pimping out her daughter because her daughter chooses to campaign for her. Just like the Bush twins, the Romney sons, Gore’s daughter, and numerous candidates’ children have done for their fathers over the years.
Links roundup
Two things tonight:
One: links roundup
Two: Tomorrow is Super Tuesday! Get out and vote! So, on to the first item on tonight’s agenda.
Meowser at Shakesville posts on a proposed bill in Mississippi that would prohibit restaurants from serving people deemed obese (to be defined by the state government). This is about the most unproductive way of dealing with obesity that I can think of, one that tramples on peoples’ rights, legislates segregation, and has approximately 0% of actually helping obese people lose weight in a healthy manner. It’s classic Republican thinking, although the bill has bipartisan sponsorship, in that responsibility for obesity is foisted strictly upon the individual and no allowance is made at addressing the (sub)urban planning, economic, and social factors that affect obesity.
Pocochina posts on why voting against Clinton because she’s “divisive” is simply a more sophisticated form of victim blaming.
What I’m talking about, though, is some very sophisticated victim-blaming. Does anyone think … for a friggin’ second that Hillary Clinton woke up one day and said “I want to be divisive! I want to be hated, lied about, called the most foul words that we as a society use, and I want it to happen every day, in front of the international press! I want to spend the rest of my career apologizing for the most humiliating months of my life. I’d especially love it if prominent conservatives would score points with the press by saying horrible things about my child.* I think that will be good for me, good for my agenda and party, and especially good for the country!” … So when Obama and his Adoring Fans cite Hillary’s alleged divisiveness as a reason to vote for him and not her, they are actively suggesting that we allow the Republicans to select our candidate, because they are loud and angry and scary. Bad people did something to someone, so to make the bad people happy, punish the person they did it to, and then we will all – what? Make s’mores together? I don’t think so.
Along a similar line, I’m linking again to Kate Harding’s post on “electability” and why the idea’s fucked up:
By all means, if you don’t want to vote for Clinton or Obama — whatever your reasons — don’t do it. But for pete’s sake, don’t vote against them just because you believe that’s what assholes will do. …
The fact is, we can’t know who’s electable and who’s not, because this country is big and complicated — and because we’ve never tried to elect an African-American or woman president before. Trying is the only way to find out if that’s possible. That means giving up the safety net of nominating a white man so we can sidestep the issues of racism and sexism. It means facing those issues head-on, and having faith that the bigots will not win. It means thinking about all the people who will vote for this candidate, and dismissing all those who would vote against him or her solely on the basis of sex or race as the bigoted fuckwits they are — not deserving of our mental energy, much less our fear.
… I am damn sure I couldn’t live with myself if I voted according to which candidate I think a bunch of sexist and/or racist assholes would find most palatable.
Marcella Chester posts on victim-blaming in rape cases. One of my colleagues thinks that victim-blaming doesn’t exist. Well. Maybe I should start a collection of links about “grey rape” and women who “deserved it” and “led him on” to point him, and other idealistic but naive people, to. I’m also contemplating a collection of links to misogynist press on Clinton, because the same person doesn’t think that the national media’s articles, talk shows, cartoons, and opinion pieces about Clinton have been misogynist at all. Nope, they’re just objective evaluations of her personality, policies, and stances that are the same as what would be applied to any of her male competitors.
So-called mixed signals is one of the biggest lies out there. This lie gives cover to the majority of rapists and puts the responsibility for the rapist’s crime onto the victim. …
Think about the defense attorneys who talk about alleged rape victims who didn’t clearly communicate their lack of consent through screaming and trying to scratch the rapist’s eyes out. The default is that the rape victim is to blame for rape and the rapist gets a free pass.
Marcella Chester again, on complaints about “Uppity and Passive Women” and how that relates to ideas of properly masculine/feminine roles and media coverage of Clinton’s campaign.
I put these 2 classifications for women together — even though the complainers seem to want opposite things from women — because these 2 complaints are often used strategically to box women in so that no matter what they do they can be deemed to be wrong.
The only way for women to succeed in this environment is to refuse to fall into the trap laid by the complainers.
The Ethicurean – I don’t usually link to posts with vid clips in them, because I don’t like to watch them. However, this post on
graphic footage of workers at a California slaughterhouse using forklifts, high-pressure water sprays, wooden sticks, and electric shocks to get sick cattle up on their feet so they can pass USDA inspection and be processed into America’s food supply
is worth watching, because it brings home the cost of industrial agriculture.
Melissa McEwan at Shakesville on Obama’s difficulties with defending himself: “But I’m having a hard time getting past Obama’s communication problem, and his (and his supporters’) admonitions to trust him. Have faith; he knows what he’s doing.” Lots of quotes and explication at the post.
Shark-fu at Shakesville on the importance of standing up and participating in the political process (hint, hint: VOTE!):
So, we have to be politically present…women, young people, people of color, seniors, LGBT people, the disabled, the poor, workers, immigrants, religious minorities and any and all combinations of all of the above must stand up and step forward into political life.
No one will speak for me as well as I can so you can bet your ass a bitch is standing up…
Mark Bittman at the NYT, “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler.” A good article on the environmental, economic, and health costs of producing cheap meat that’s widely available to all. It’s a reality that the choices you make in your diet affect other people, and it’s high time that we all started thinking about it. That steak on your plate isn’t just a steak that magically appeared there; it came from a butchered animal, one that was probably raised in a CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) that produced toxic waste, pollution, runoff into the local water table, and fostered antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as well as a wretched quality of life for the animal.
Perhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production. “When you look at environmental problems in the U.S.,” says Professor Eshel, “nearly all of them have their source in food production and in particular meat production. And factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff becomes costly — even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag — the entire structure of food production will change dramatically.”
I realize that buying meat from pastured, sustainbly-raised animals grown and butchered by local farmers and butchers is expensive and in many cases difficult (I couldn’t find a local butcher when I was in college). However, I think it’s worth wondering if meat really should be as cheap, price-wise, as it is, and whether or not that price represents the true cost of the meat in terms of environmental damage and other externalized costs.
Jon Mooallem in the NYT Mag, “The Afterlife of Cellphones.” An intriguing read on the cellphone-refurbishment and cellphone-reclamation trades, i.e. what happens to your cellphone after you recycle it.
Americans threw out just shy of three million tons of household electronics in 2006. This so-called e-waste is the fastest-growing part of the municipal waste stream and, depending on your outlook, either an enormous problem or a bonanza. E-waste generally contains substances that, though safely sequestered during each product’s use, can become hazardous if not handled properly when disposed. Those products also hold bits of precious metals like silver, copper, platinum and gold.
In other words, recycle your electronics! They can leak heavy metals and other toxins into the ground if improperly disposed of (read: tossed into the garbage bin with normal trash); I’ve definitely been tempted to toss my old laptop battery and old phones into the garbage, because I haven’t yet figured out what to do with hazmat recycling in San Francisco, but after reading that article I’ve decided not to let my laziness trump environmentalism. It’d be especially shameful these days, when I can find out everything I need to know about disposing of electronic waste simply by googling ‘electronics recycle San Francisco.’
On a side note, if you have old cell phones that you’re no longer using, you can return them to most cell phone stores, regardless of where you bought them or who your carrier is. AT&T, Best Buy, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, Office Depot, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Sprint, Staples and T-Mobile accept cell phones and chargers for recycling. There are three T-Mobile stores on Market St., a main thoroughfare in SF, so I dropped my phone at the one closest to work and it turns out they also took chargers, too!
2008 is the Year of the Potato! – all hail that gloriously delicious and versatile tuber!
Links Roundup
Just popping in to say that work is eating my life lately, so I haven’t been able to chat with people, answer email, post, or even read my flist. This ain’t going to be much of a post, either, because tomorrow’s a jam-packed day beginning at 5:30 A.M.
First of all, Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary and I cannot begin to tell you how ecstatic I am. A feeling of triumph has been burning inside since I heard the news and it only gets stronger with each passing day; with seeing people freak out over ‘OMG A WOMAN WON–BUT SHE IS UNELECTABLE–AHHHHHH NOOOOOO A WOMAN!’; with every sexist insult I get during the daily course of working and living; with the knowledge that these primaries are groundbreaking. They represent change, they represent advances, they represent an African-American person and a woman storming across the country and saying, “We will not be held down.” They mean that America is slowly progressing to a more enlightened society and the institutional barriers of sexism and racism are being ground down. Change is slow, but it’s happening and the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries are something I can hold in my heart for strength the next time I feel discouraged and wonder what the point is in standing up and speaking against sexism, against racism. I can’t begin to articulate how much Clinton’s victory means to me.
And now, links:
McEwan at Shakesville: on the “Iron My Shirt” incident. I’ll excerpt a bit of Clinton’s speech:
When everyone had settled down a bit, she said, “As I think has just been abundantly demonstrated, I am also running to break through the highest and hardest glass ceiling.”
Her words were drowned out by a cheering, now-standing crowd.
“That’s one of the things I love about it,” she said. “It’s never predictable.”
Good debate in the comments at feministing: on how incredibly fucked up it is that people are claiming the “Iron My Shirt” jackasses were plants from the Clinton campaign. Here, here, here, and here.
On a related note, the coverage of and response to Clinton’s campaign is incredible. She’s too emotionless and unfeeling. No, she’s too emotional and irrational. No, she’s pretending to be too emotional, which means she’s too emotionless and unfeeling. She’s playing the gender card by talking about the rampant sexism she’s faced, which doesn’t actually exist. Etc. To which I’d like to say, WHAT THE HELL? Jesus. Pick a story and stick with it!
Fecke at Shakesville: Angry Women Back Clinton – possibly the best thing I’ve read all week. Wait, no, it’s the best thing I’ve read all week. All year. No ‘possibly’ about it.
Some will criticize this as misguided identity politics, but they’re wrong. Oh, it’s identity politics — women in New Hampshire and throughout the country recognized that Clinton was being attacked as a woman, and came to her defense. But it’s far from misguided.
Clinton may win the nomination, or she may lose; right now she’s probably the front-runner, but that could change tomorrow. Either way, she’s blazing a trail that more women will follow. When the media and her opponents ramped up hatred against her because of her gender, women recognized that the trail she was cutting would be filled with pitfalls and mineshafts if the bile was not addressed. And so they addressed it. Women who could write, wrote. Women who could speak out to friends, spoke out to friends. And in New Hampshire, women who could vote, voted for Hillary Clinton.
And that’s why she won tonight; because women recognized that, at least for tonight, their future was inextricably bound up with Hillary’s, and that, at least for tonight, they needed to send a clear message that misogyny and sexism just won’t work anymore. Clinton may yet lose — there are plenty of legitimate reasons to oppose her. But if she loses, it won’t be because she was too emotional, or because she reminds someone of their ex-wife. It will be because she loses on her merits as a candidate. That’s as it should be, and it’s why our country should be grateful to the angry women who rallied to her, angry women who were angry for a righteous reason, angry women who accomplished something grand.
I really can’t understand the objections I’ve heard to both Clinton and Obama that go like this: “I would love to vote for a woman/black man, but I just don’t think the rest of the country is ready.” Translation: I’m not a sexist/racist — I’m just willing to let those assholes own my vote.
Do people really think it’s going to be any different, any easier, if we have an African-American and/or female candidate next time around? 20 years from now? 50? Do we really think that if we just let our culture progress a little more, with a few more white male leaders shepherding it along, someday America actually will be unequivocally ready for such a change, and race and sex won’t be huge, historic issues the way they are today? Seriously?
Somebody’s got to go first. And without wanting to rule Edwards out prematurely, the way things are looking right now, somebody will be going first this year, whether it’s a black man or a white woman. Which means bigotry and hatred are going to be inescapable, defining issues throughout this campaign and — if all goes well — throughout our next president’s term(s) in office. We can’t avoid that. It will not go away if we just wait a little longer to vote for a person of color and/or a woman. Whoever goes first, whenever it happens, will have a hard and lonely road to walk. That’s the problem with voters having clearly based their decisions on race and gender for over 200 years, even if we’re only getting around to talking about “identity politics” now.
One day, you’ll get actual commentary and thought out of me rather than links. But, um, probably not soon, the way work is going. So I shall post these and run away!
P.S. Harding’s post at Shakesville expresses just how I’ve been feeling about the whole ‘unelectable’ thing. Why is Clinton unelectable? Sure, lots of people hate her. But why bow to them? Why admit defeat without even fighting? Why give in and give up rather than standing for your principles and saying, “No, you’re wrong, and I will goddamn prove it.” Principles and ideals are to be held with all the strength of your convictions. To give up without a fight, merely for some soundbyte, is to lack conviction. To not vote for a female candidate because you think misogynists and anti-Clintonites hate her; to not vote for an African-American candidate because you think racists hate him, isn’t giving us a few more years to become more progressive as a nation. It’s betraying your ideals and it’s telling the misogynists and racists that they are right, because no one’s challenging their beliefs. It’s not progressive or strategic at all; it is a simple failure of conscience and cowardice.
Links Roundup
I had some links and posts in progress I wanted to make, but I don’t have access to them right now. The biggest one was “Why I Do Not <3 Huckabee,” which was about the many reasons it makes me angry to see people embracing Huckabee as the best of the Republican candidates, the Republican answer to Obama, and a viable candidate for president. I might still make that post, because some of the links are eye-opening in a sheer “How can people vote for this person?” WTF way, but Gail Collins wrote a good column on that subject yesterday.
Huckabee! Huckabee! The man of the hour! What is it that voters love so much about this guy? Is it a hitherto inchoate yearning for a president who knows less about international affairs than they do? Hope that a man who can lose 100 pounds could also get rid of the federal deficit? …
Mike is soaring ahead in the early polls, in a surge to the front of the pack that suggests Republicans cannot come to grips with the idea that they are supposed to nominate either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani for president. There has to be a way out! What about Huckabee? He has a good heart! True, his brain doesn’t seem to have a single thought about foreign policy or know much about domestic policy, for that matter. But one well-functioning body part is better than nothing.
Collins’ writing style makes me laugh while I cry:
The Huckabee strong suit is morality and the Republican voters are clearly yearning for someone without a record of spectacularly public adultery who also does not remind them of a snake-oil salesman. The party base, we know, tends to be pro-life. Does that really mean they want a president who tried to stop an abortion for a 15-year-old mentally retarded girl who was raped by her stepfather? The primary voters are obviously not keen on gay marriage, but do they really want to be governed by somebody who suggested quarantining all the people with AIDS?
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More on the Australian case of the 10-year-old girl gang-raped by nine juvenile and adult males:
Via Cara at The Curvature: The Australian reveals that this isn’t the first time the victim, who is “mildly intellectually impaired” and suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome, has been raped:
The committee also found the child had first contracted syphilis in April 2002 when she was aged seven and was raped by five juveniles in Aurukun, receiving severe genital injuries.
The Sydney Morning Herald has more information about how the rapists got off scot-free: the Crown prosecutor for the case told the judge that it wasn’t rape, it was just “childish experimentation” by kids being “naughty.” But these backwards Aboriginal people are just like that, you know:
“they’re very naughty for doing what they’re doing but it’s really, in this case, it was a form of childish experimentation, rather than one child being prevailed upon by another …
“children, females, have got to be – deserve – the same protection under the law in an Aboriginal or an indigenous community as they do in any other community,” Mr Carter said.
“But sometimes things happen in a small community when children get together.”
I want to know how an intellectually impaired 10-year-old can give consent to sex in any meaningful fashion; I want to know how a twenty-six-year-old raping a 10-year-old can be considered “childish experimentation.” I want to know how to get that incompetent, misogynist, racist asswipe fired and his bar privileges revoked.
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More via Cara:
From The Australian: The little girl who was gang-raped in the Cape York community of Aurukun was subjected to a six-week reign of sexual abuse by her attackers
Lauredhel has a post on indigenous responses to the Aurukun rape.
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Melissa at Shakesville has an answer to the victim-blamers, in response to another rape case where the judge blamed the victim.
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And via Jill at Feministe, Courtney writes about the emotional wear and tear of staying informed when you feel unable to do anything. Jill hits the nail on the head when she points out the contradiction between “feeling very tiny and very powerless and at the same time recognizing one’s status as a person of incredible privilege and relative power. And not knowing what to do with that.” I think that’s what gets to me the most, the feeling that I should be able to do something, because my life is such that I have the leisure time, energy, and money to invest in solving social ills. However, the forces of violence and misogyny are so pervasive and overwhelming that it’s hard to figure out where to begin, and sometimes it feels like battling the ocean with a bucket.
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I’m trying this “balance out the good with the bad” thing to maintain my sanity, so The Ethicurean has an interesting post on wild yeast and bread starters and this xkcd comic strikes the right note of geekery and romance.
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Collins, Gail, NYT, The Man From Target, 2007/12/13
Cara, The Curvature, Prosecutor: Gang-rape of ten-year-old was “childish experimentation”, 2007/12/11
Koch, Tony, The Australian, Child safety failed rape girl, 2007/12/11
The Sydney Morning Herald, Prosecutor in gang rape case stood aside, 2007/12/11
Cara, The Curvature, Sobering, 2007/12/13
Meade, Kevin, and Elks, Sarah, The Australian, Girl endured six weeks of sex attacks, 2007/12/14
Lauredhel, Indigenous voices on Aurukun; and the Law Society tells the public to butt out, 2007/12/13
McEwan, Melissa, Shakesville, This is really shaping up to be a “back-to-bed” day of the highest order, 2007/12/13
Fernandez, Pablo, Calgary Morning Sun, Judge calls rape victim ’stupid’, 2007/12/13
Jill, Feministe, Boy do I know that feeling, 2007/12/11
Martin, Courtney, The American Prospect, All the News That’s Fit to Depress, 2007/12/3
Mental Masala, The Ethicurean, Bake on the wild side: Part 1, the sourdough starter, 2007/12/12
xkcd, Angular Momentum
Links roundup
After the last two posts, I’m mentally knackered, so I’ll leave the more thoughtful stuff for later in the week and stick up some nice links instead.
Al Gore’s Nobel Lecture on climate change:
The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: “What were you thinking; why didn’t you act? “
Or they will ask instead: “How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?”
We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.
So let us renew it, and say together: “We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act.”
NYT’s Roundtable Discussion on the environmental fallout of China’s growth. I haven’t read it all so I can’t guarantee it won’t be racist, isolationist, scapegoating, stereotyping, smugly superior, or otherwise narrow-minded and fucked up, but I think it’ll be interesting.
A cute, evocative description of NYC’s Upper West Side by Arthur Frommer. His joy in his neighborhood is evident and it reminds me of cities and locales I’ve fallen in love with.
And yet, walking north from Lincoln Center, on a totally untouristed segment of the great Broadway avenue, I pass such a festival of local life and culture that I feel like shouting out my appreciation of it.
The libretto of La Rondine, in Italiano and en Español
Also, have a picture of a happy crostata di marmellata di more (blackberry jam tart):
Links roundup
Less with the thoughtful, more with the amusing this week.
Cat Alarm Clock, spotted at Sahiya’s LJ. It is amusing the second time…and the third time…okay, I have to stop watching it.
On that note, my sib’s Favorite YouTube clip.
JKR recently said that Dumbledore was gay in the response to the question, did Dumbledore ever find true love? I agree with what toft_froggy has to say on the subject and the many, many ways it is problematic: authorial intent, post facto clarifications, gay=never finds love, gay love–>Hitleresque betrayals that nearly destroy the wizarding world while heterosexual love (Snape/Lily)–>saving the world.
Judith Warner: The Clinton Surprise, on the fallacy of “everyone knows that Clinton’s unelectable.” It’s better than Warner’s last month or so of columns have been and her points about the limited milieu in which conservative pundits circulate are interesting. The polls showing that Clinton would run even with Giuliani in the elections are terrifying. Giuliani is running on a 9/11 platform that doesn’t have non-aggressive proposals for dealing with the Middle East or the Fiasco On Terror; proposals for dealing with climate change; proposals for dealing with illegal immigration in a productive, practical way; and he, as well as most of the other Republican candidates, have been pandering to the racist, fundamentalist, anti-life, homophobic Religious Right. Why are any of the Democratic candidates projected to run even with any of the Republican candidates?
From A Year In Japan, “Quotation Marks”.
On inbabble.com, An Interview with John Poisson on Mobile Photo Sharing, Part I and Part II. The sheer energy and innovation exploding in the mobile sector is crazy. The mobile photo sharing is an interesting concept because it links social networking, twitter-style micro-blogging, and photo sharing, and gives the dinky cameras on camera phones real uses integrated with a mobile service. It ties mobile photography to the mobile web, and I’m curious to see how it takes off. Part of it is sheer curiosity, because I’ve never accessed the web on my phone and I’m not all that fond of having a mobile to begin with, so I’m mostly observing all the new services taking off for mobiles rather than participating in them.
Mark Bittman on pasta sauces, with yummy recipes linked in the article. I’m planning on making the chickpeas and chorizo soon.
Balkinization has a few posts on Attorney General candidate Mukasey’s responses to the questions, “Is waterboarding constitutional? Is it torture?” Good discussions in the comments. This post reminds me of a talk I saw at the law school last year, given by one of the ACLU attorneys representing the inmates of Guantanamo. The talk was mostly the attorney presenting documents that showed that the use of torture in the “War On Terror” was not random outbursts by soldiers, as Abu Ghraib was made out to be, but systemic and done with the knowledge of people high up in the chain of command. A document setting out the limitations on the use of stress positions had Cheney’s scrawl on it: “Only __ hours?” Anyway, one of the documents was from the FBI, complaining that CIA agents were posing as FBI and that they wanted no part in it and they didn’t want to be left holding the sack on torture while the CIA got off scot free.
I Am Emily X continues to post video clips and entries about the protestors at Planned Parenthood clinics around the country.
Links roundup
Links: Miscellaneous links that I’ve seen lately and thought were interesting: feminism, sexism, law, academia, climate change, U.S. politics, abortion
NB: All of the Feministe posts have thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion in the comments that are worth reading.
Feministe: always interesting, well written, thoughtful, provocative, and informative. There are good discussions in the comments, too, as the mods allow dissenting opinions through rather than banning them.
I Am Emily X: the blog of workers at the Aurora Planned Parenthood chapter. Anti-life protestors are staging a “40 Days For Life” campaign of protests at Planned Parenthood clinics across the country, and this blog publishes the experience of Planned Parenthood workers, why they work at Planned Parenthood, the daily tally of protestors, and video clips.
Tamora Pearce on WB exec Robinov’s banning of female leads in movies: Why we shouldn’t be surprised by his sexist comment, the lack of movies with strong female leads, sexism in Hollywood’s movies. My thoughts upon reading the post were a) what? But surely there are lots of movies with strong female leads! b) such as The Interpretor, Nicole Kidman was awesome! That movie was awesome! And…and…um…Room with a View…and…uh…huh. c) I saw the remake of Poseidon Adventures on a plane recently and it was sexist (women are useless for anything but crying, having hysterical fits, needing protection, dying, and making sacrifices). d) I don’t see very many movies. e) I’m not missing much, am I? f) Tamora Pearce is absolutely right.
Feministe post on recent WHO study on the effects of outlawing abortion: it doesn’t lower the number of abortions, it just makes them more dangerous and unsafe. Also contains content on the hypocrisy and anti-life nature of the pro-life movement.
Bob Herbert: The Trivial Pursuit: NYT opinion piece contrasting the behavior of Al Gore since the 2000 elections with the behavior of George W. Bush since the 2000 elections and the behavior of Rudy Giuliani at present. As usual, Herbert is insightful and thoughtful, and this time he’s depressing, too.
Congratulations to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore for winning the Nobel Peace Prize for “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
On that note, A Prize for Mr. Gore and Science, NYT editorial on Al Gore, the IPCC, the Nobel, climate change, and the U.S. government. Additionally, IHT article on Nobel Peace Prize, quote: In this decade, the Nobel Peace Prize has been given to prominent people and agencies who differ on a range of issues with the Bush administration, including former President Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency in Vienna, in 2005.
Pennsylvania court recently ruled that forced gangbanging at gunpoint is not rape: the decision reifies stereotypes about what constitutes rape, how a rape victim is supposed to behave, the kinds of women who can be raped (white, upper class virgins) and the kinds of women who can’t (everyone else).
Post and discussion: is there common ground between anti-lifers and pro-choicers on abortion? Consensus answer from both sides: no. You would think yes, because both anti-lifers and pro-choicers want fewer abortions and fewer unwanted pregnancies. However, anti-lifers are usually anti-contraception, anti-sex education other than abstinence education, and anti-women-having-and-enjoying-sex. So their solution for decreasing the number of abortions is to ban it, which drives abortion underground and makes it more dangerous to the women. Pro-choicers support contraception, informative sex education, and generally, giving women control over their bodies and the kind of sex they have. It turns out there’s little room for compromise.
Feministe on Yahoo! dating advice: dating advice is the same old, same old: heteronormative, sexist (makes women subservient to men), and says that the only thing wrong with relationships these days is women.
The Leaky Pipeline: Women in Academia: interesting post, interesting discussion.
Sexism in our everyday professional lives: exactly what it sounds like. Go read it.
