Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Obama and Pot

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Ampersand

David Maraniss‘ forthcoming biography of President Obama reports that in high school and college, Obama not only inhaled, he was a rather intense user.

This quote from Penn Jillette is apropos:

Do we believe, even for a second, that if Obama had been busted for marijuana — under the laws that he condones — would his life have been better? If Obama had been caught with the marijuana that he says he uses, and ‘maybe a little blow’… if he had been busted under his laws, he would have done hard fucking time. And if he had done time in prison, time in federal prison, time for his ‘weed’ and ‘a little blow,’ he would not be President of the United States of America. He would not have gone to his fancy-ass college, he would not have sold books that sold millions and millions of copies and made millions and millions of dollars, he would not have a beautiful, smart wife, he would not have a great job. He would have been in fucking prison, and it’s not a god damn joke. People who smoke marijuana must be set free. It is insane to lock people up.

I would really like some reporter to ask Obama if he thinks it would have been for the best if young Barry Obama’s life had been derailed by a drug conviction.

Paul Waldman writes:

The reason, of course, is fear, the force that governs so many decisions politicians make. At the moment, there remains a strong incentive to support the status quo, lest you be targeted in your next race as some kind of hippie-lover. The incentives on the other side, on the other hand, are almost nil. When was the last time somebody lost a race for being too tough on drugs? The half of Americans who favor marijuana legalization are not an organized voting bloc that gets together to punish its opponents at the polls… it may be some time before we have a real debate—the kind with two sides—on this issue.

I think it also hurts that the people hurt least by the current system are well-off whites; marijuana laws are disproportionately enforced against young Black people. (Unsurprisingly, the history of marijuana prohibition is thoroughly intertwined with racism.)

Usually I think people are too quick to blame Obama for dreadful federal policy; the President is not a dictator, and very often Obama doesn’t actually have the power to unilaterally change policy.

In this case, however, I think anger at Obama is exactly right. First of all, for the hypocrisy Jillette points out. (Even worse than the hypocrisy, imo, is the utter lack of compassion).

Second of all, when Obama was running for president he promised to lighten up on the federal war on medical marijuana. It’s very reasonable to be angry with Obama for explicit promises broken.

And finally, Obama does have unilateral powers when it comes to medical marijuana.

Marijuana is categorized as schedule I, which means it legally has no accepted medical use. This is why medical marijuana, while legal under some state laws, is illegal under federal law.

However, the law explicitly gives the executive branch the power to change the scheduling of particular drugs without needing Congressional action. Obama can instruct the relevant agencies under him to take an honest look at the research and reschedule marijuana so it qualifies as having legitimate medical uses. The Obama administration could easily and justifiably move marijuana to, say, schedule III, which happens to be the same schedule that synthetic THC is in, making medical marijuana legal under federal law.

There would be nothing unusual, extraordinary or legally suspect about Obama doing this. The executive branch has often moved certain drugs to lower or higher schedules based on new data without Congressional involvement. In fact, multiple sitting governors have petitioned the Obama administration asking him to move marijuana to a lower schedule, so he should be aware of the flexible authority he has.

But why would Obama do that? Obama doesn’t believe that he’ll lose any significant number of votes because he has no compassion when it comes to marijuana issues, and that’s the bottom line.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much we can do. After all, it’s not as if Mitt Romney is going to promote more compassionate policies, and Gary Johnson, while better on pot, is far worse than Obama on many other issues. Nor is there an effective pot lobby to support. In the long run, it’s possible that marijuana legalization will win through attrition, as those Americans who are most against pot, who tend to be older, die off. But in the short run, I can’t find much reason for hope that things will improve.

This Is Too Good Not to Post: How a Book is Born, from WeldonOwen.com

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

This is a great, mostly true and very funny info graphic from WeldonOwen.com:

A tip o’ the hat to CavanKerry Press.

Posted in Writing | 2 Comments

Open Thread: They have bodies! I never knew they had bodies! Edition

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Ampersand

Post what you want, when you want, with whom you want, want not what you want, want post want want post post post want. Self-promotion is cool.

Easter island heads have bodies!?? | Thinkbox
Argentina Passes Gender Rights Law
Don’t Take Away My Oxycodone!
Free Pussy Riot | The Nation
Why Romney could be a transformational president. Be frightened. Be very frightened.
High-resolution video of Earth
Can We Be Friends? « Family Scholars “We” being people who disagree about gay rights. I’m participating in the comments, a bit.
How Much More Do Comic Books Cost Today? | The Awl Turns out that comic book prices have been rising much higher than inflation. Interestingly, the large majority of comic books that are really good and worth reading, came after the collapse of the huge audience comics used to have.
What A Witch Hunt Actually Is Saying that people who believe they’ve been raped should feel free to name their rapists… Not a witch hunt.
Want to know if you’re on the no fly list? That’s classified. And trying to get off of it? No one can tell you how.
“Finally, it needs to be said more often and more loudly that opposing the legalization of same sec marriage is, in fact, a form of intolerant religious bigotry.”
“This Executive Order appears to be an attack on Americans’ 1st Amendment Rights and Yemenis’ rights to self-determination… apparently the 1st Amendment had an exception about Yemen in it that I missed.”
“this illusion turns beautiful celebrities as ugly as a frog peeking through ice. Be sure to keep your eyes on the cross in the center!” It is really amazing.
The Anti-Science Streak in Federal Marijuana Policy – Conor Friedersdorf – Health – The Atlantic
Waking up now responds to Maggie Gallagher on SSM
Support for Gay Marriage Rising in Every Demographic » Sociological Images
Is Mitt Romney the Keynsian choice? The argument seems to be that Republicans are so destructive and so devoted to partisan politics above what’s good for the country, that the only way to prevent Republicans from blowing up the country to hurt Democrats is for Democrats to never be in power.
Who Killed Men’s Hats? Think Of A Three Letter Word Beginning With ‘I’
Did 9/11 lead movie villains to start imploding things instead of exploding them?
Rep. McCarthy: Pushing 300K Children Off Lunch Program To Protect Military Spending Is Trimming The Fat
I don’t know what HBO’s series, The Weight of the Nation*, is going to say, but if the previews are representative, you might want to use this handy “viewers’ guide” to conserving sanity points.
I laughed aloud at this cartoon by Matt Bors:

Posted in Link farms | 33 Comments

God, Homosexuality, Sex, And Dignity

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Ampersand

[Another outtake from my correspondence with “Linus.” I’ve edited it somewhat, so it is not identical to the email I originally sent Linus.]

Can someone believe that God is against people having homosexual sex, and still treat lesbian and gay people with substantive dignity?

There are three issues here, I think.

First of all, can you hold the view that lesbian and gay people within your particular faith should be celibate, while treating them with substantive dignity?

On the surface, it seems like you can — after all, people make the choice to join your faith, and if they freely choose to be celibate, who am I to question it?

But I’d argue you cannot, because it’s inherently cruel for lesbian and gay children (by which I mean, all children who will grow up to be lgb, regardless of if they’re aware of their sexual orientation during their childhood) to be brought up in a faith that teaches them that their own sexuality is so “disordered” that it’s against natural law/God’s plan and they must never, ever practice it. Many of their deepest desires are — they are taught — immoral and against God.

For many people, sexuality — including expressing sexuality — is an important part of their self. There is nothing more cruel than a child being raised to believe that part of their core self is inherently unworthy of love. Many children raised this way take years or decades to grow beyond the self-hatred that they are taught; some will turn to drugs or alcohol to dull the pain; some will commit suicide.

You may believe that it’s possible to bring up children to both believe that they are fine, lovable, and worthy, and that for them to ever have sex is disordered, immoral and wrong. I think it wouldn’t take much time listening to lgbt people raised in traditional Christian families to learn that for many, that’s not so. Most will spend huge portions of their live plagued by internalized self-hatred, arguably the worst pain of all.

Raising people in that way is unjust and cruel. I don’t think it’s compatible with substantive dignity.

The second question is, can you hold your beliefs and avoid devaluing those lgbt people who aren’t members of your church?

Again, I’d argue the answer is no.

When a traditionalist Christian says in effect “God considers your family and love life wrong, and the only acceptable way for you to live, in God’s opinion, is as a celibate,” of course that Christian is devaluing lgbt people. It’s saying that a core element of their being is inherently immoral.

No matter how sincerely the words are meant, no matter how kindly they’re put, telling someone that their love is immoral devalues them.

Now comes the third question: Can you treat lgbt people with real dignity while calling for them to be legally second-class citizens, by banning them from equal treatment under civil law?

I think here, the answer is self-evident: No. Without legal equality, we cannot have real dignity of treatment.

I know my answer may seem hurtful to those who oppose marriage equality, yet think of themselves as a friend to lgb people. To those readers, I say: I don’t doubt your intentions or your good will. But there is no substitute for equality. Someone treated unequally — no matter how kind the heart or sincere the intent of the person treating them unequally – is still, at the end of the day, being treated unequally.

Posted in Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer issues, Religion, Same-Sex Marriage | 35 Comments

Barry will be at VanCAF this weekend

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Ampersand

Hi! Sorry I’ve been blogging so little lately. I’m just spending long days every day drawing Hereville. And it’s not just the time; it’s also, somehow, mental creative energy being expended. Even when I have a few hours after work, I just don’t seem to have it in me to write new posts.

Anyway, this too will pass.

I’ll be appearing in Vancouver, Canada this weekend, at the Vancouver Comics Arts Fest. It should be a lot of fun, and I think admission is free; so if you’re in Vancouver, please come see me and say hi.

Here’s the page from Hereville 2 I finished yesterday — and it’s a pretty spoiler-free page. I’m pretty happy with how this page looks.

It has two unusual elements for me. First of all, it’s yet another attempt at an Eisner-style collage layout. I wouldn’t say it’s completely successful — certainly not as nice looking as an Eisner page, but that’s a given, isn’t it? — but I think this works better than the Eisner-attempts in book one did. (Which were pages 31 and 32, if you’re wondering and have book 1 handy.)

Secondly, drew panel one with the kind of over-the-top foreshortening that artists like Jim Steranko used to such great effect, which is not something I can recall ever attempting before. I think it came out okay, but I probably won’t be doing this often in the future — it’s so visually oddball looking (to my eyes, at least) that I think it’s bound to distract from storytelling in most contexts.

Posted in Syndicated feeds | Comments Off

Intervention

Posted on May 19, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

About a year and a half ago, as I walked home after work at about 11 PM, I passed a couple talking about thirty feet from the entrance to my building. The woman was leaning with her back against the drivers side front window of one of the vehicles parked on the street; her bag was on the car’s roof. The man stood in front of her, close enough that she couldn’t easily move away, with his right hand planted firmly on the spot where the front and rear doors met. Clearly they were arguing, but his other hand was not raised and he did not raise his voice. Nor did she, in any immediately recognizable way, seem intimidated, though they were standing outside the circle of light cast by the streetlamp, so I couldnt see her face. They appeared to be, simply, a couple whod walked out of the restaurant around the corner from my house, which that night was hosting some kind of dance party, to have an argument. I passed by without giving them much further thought.

As soon as I walked up the steps leading to my building, though, he yelled something in Spanish and I heard what sounded like his hand being slammed, flat and hard, against the roof of the car they’d been leaning on. I stopped and listened for about fifteen seconds. It was quiet. I peaked around the tree that was blocking them from my sight and they were standing more or less as they had been when I first walked past them. I waited a little bit longer, and, when nothing else happened, walked into the lobby. Again, as soon as I did so–you’d think the timing had been rehearsed–he started yelling at her again, and this time, from the sound of shaking metal, he was hitting as he did so the alternate side of the street parking sign that was right next to where they were standing.

I stepped back outside just in time to see the two of them walk side-by-side past my building’s entrance. I stepped onto the sidewalk to watch them. He had her purse in one hand and her upper arm in the other and the slump in her shoulders sure looked to me like she knew she had no choice but to allow herself to be led away. Then, as if he felt my eyes on the back of his head, the man turned around, took a few steps towards me and said, the invitation to provoke him into more than words more than obvious in his voice, “What are you looking at?”

He was at least 15-20 years younger than I am, big, though maybe not quite as big as I am, and I have no idea what I would have done if he’d attacked me. It was late; I was very tired; my cellphone battery was dead; every light in my building was off; and I knew my wife and my son were sleeping. The last time I was in a fistfight, believe it or not, was third grade. No matter how good a fight I might have been able to put up, in other words, there was no doubt in my mind that I would be on the losing end of it. So I didn’t say anything to him.

He took another step or two towards me, “Mind your own fucking business, okay? This has nothing to do with you.”

Again, I didn’t answer.

“Look this is not between you and me,” he yelled, and I wondered if he’d woken up anyone else in my building. “It’s between us,” he said, leaning forward, pushing his chest out towards me and gesturing with his hand towards himself and the woman, who was standing, silent and unmoving, a few feet behind him.

“Then you don’t need to hurt her,” I said.

“What the fuck? I’m not hurting her.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Just go home.” It was an order he expected me to follow, not a reassurance that everything was okay; and then he turned back towards the woman, who turned with him, and he hung his arm over her shoulders, pulling her towards him and saying something into her ear as they walked down the block, neither of them looking back in my direction. I watched them for about 20 seconds, went back into my building, took the elevator upstairs and stood by the window listening to hear if there were any further outbursts, but there were none. So I made myself some tea and watched a little television to unwind before getting ready for bed.

I’m not sure that I have much to say about this story, except that every time I try to tease something out of it, I discover that it’s quite a complicated little knot. On the one hand, I do not regret stepping out into the street to be a witness, even if the couple was, simply, a couple having an argument. Nor do I think the initial assumption I made—that there was in him the threat of violence against her—was wrong. It’s much better to be wrong about something like that than not to do anything. On the other hand, though, if I was right, what good did I actually do? Nothing had happened that warranted calling the police; and if he had attacked me for “interfering,” odds are he would have beaten me up. That might have gotten him arrested for assault—if someone saw it and called the cops and they were able to catch him—but it’s not at all clear that it would have made any difference to the woman he was with.

I realize that there’s an analysis of a situation like this which says my presence shifted the focus of violence to where it “should” be in a male dominant culture, between men—and, in theory at least, a part of me agrees with that—but I’m not sure that analysis does much good if I end up bloody and beaten and he goes home and takes his ire out even more forcefully on his female companion.

When I finally got into bed that night, I kept replaying the moment when he hung his arm over his companion’s shoulders and I realized I couldn’t tell for sure if the gesture was familiar, intimate, meaning something like, Look, it’s over. Let’s go home, making his bluster towards me a simple case male posturing; or, if he was actually putting her in a chokehold, the meaning of which, I assume, is obvious. So much of what happened, at least as I remember it, suggests the second reading is accurate, but I could not and cannot be sure. And that haunts me.

Posted in Men and masculinity, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 11 Comments

A Response to AMM’s Comment on My Publishing a Poem at The Good Men Project (Along with the Full Text of the Poem)

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

In a comment on my post announcing the publication of “For My Son, A Kind of Prayer” at The Good Men Project (TGMP), AMM wrote:

I visited the place a year or two ago and read a number of the articles, and they tout a version of masculinity which, underneath all the verbiage, is basically just a “kinder, gentler” version of the same old male privilege. I remember that he-who-must-not-be-named (but whose initials are HS) was an honored contributor, which IMHO does not speak well for it, but was entirely consistent with the rest of what was there.

This made me think that, first, especially when posting the announcement on this site, I should have given an explanation for why I agreed to let TGMP publish my work, since I share AMM’s reservations, or at least I have similar ones, about what the site is all about. Second, it made me think that I should post the entire poem here so that people who will not go to TGMP will have a chance to read it if they want to. (The entire poem is below the fold.)

The short explanation as to why I agreed to have my work published in TGMP is that Noah Brand, the site’s still relatively new editor-in-chief, solicited me directly. (A longer explanation is perhaps a post unto itself about what it would mean, from a feminist/pro-feminist/feminist-friendly perspective, to put men’s experience at the center of discussion.) Noah is the founder–one of the founders?– of No, Seriously, What About The Menz? (NSWTM), which appears on Alas’ blog roll. I read the blog occasionally, and while I find the comments troubling, troublesome and sometimes offensive, I think that the posts embody a discussion of men and masculinity that is both necessary and fruitful. NSWTM is, obviously, not a space where women’s issues are front and center; nor could you accurately call it a male feminist/pro-feminist space, given that the people who comment there are often openly hostile to feminism. Nonetheless, it is in its mission a feminist-friendly space, and I think it is important and worth respecting that they are trying to have a discussion among and about men that is inclusive of all men, from a variety of perspectives, who want to engage in a respectful and thoughtful way.

Which does not mean that I think NSWTM succeeds in this regard–my own experience is that it often does not–but that I respect what Noah Brand was and is trying to do there and that I respect the fact that he is trying to do the same kind of thing over at TGMP. Something he said recently in an interview on The Jane Dough is worth thinking about:

Women face forms of oppression and a constant barrage of microaggressions that men do not, no question. But there are also several decades and at least three waves of feminist thought and activism to help them engage with those problems. Men face different problems, different microaggressions and stereotypes, and we’re still working on finding the language to talk about those. Feminism has the right tools for the job, but has been historically reluctant to engage with men’s issues, and the thing calling itself the Men’s Rights Movement is about as useful as a land war in Asia. (Emphasis mine.)

While I find Noah’s formulation at the end of this quote kind of awkward, I do think he’s right about this: to the extent that feminism has, rightfully, reasonably, placed women’s experience at the center of its analysis, the feminist “toolbox” will not automatically fit men’s experience, and so men need to find a language that will name our experience accurately and that will open up the kinds of analysis and transformation that accurate naming makes possible. There’s no way to know ahead of time whether TGMP will be the place where that language truly begins to take shape, but I think it’s important to be part of an attempt that is as big and as public as TGMP is. That’s why, when Noah solicited me, I agreed to send him some of my work.

And now, here’s the poem. Please remember that it does contain graphic descriptions of sexual violence against both men and women: Continue reading →

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Men and masculinity, Writing | 41 Comments

‘Scuse Me, Great Nations Coming Through

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Jeff Fecke

Remember John Derbyshire? Of course you do! He’s the incredibly creepy guy who got fired from National Review Online for writing an incredibly racist screed for an online site frequented by Pat Buchanan and Steve Sailer.

Anyhow, Derbyshire may have left NRO, but he’s still kicking it old school at the online webmagazine VDARE (slogan: “It’s Stormfront For People Who Like to Pretend They Aren’t Nazis”). And by old school, I mean the 1650s.

VDARE.com occupies a corner of the non-Conservatism Inc. spectrum, though, and publishes commentary from other corners thereof, and it would be nice to have a definitive name for the whole shebang—something a little less defined-by-exclusion than “non-Conservatism Inc.”

“Alternative Right” has been snaffled by Richard Spencer, all good luck to him. “Paleoconservative” has come to have a whiff of incense and cassocks about it, at least to me. I have tried to float “Oppositional Right,” but it’s a bit of a mouthful.

The enemies of conservatism are eager to supply their own nomenclature. “White Supremacist” seems to be their current favorite. It is meant maliciously, of course, to bring up images of fire-hoses, attack dogs, pick handles, and segregated lunch counters—to imply that conservatives, especially non-mainstream conservatives, are cruel people with dark thoughts.

Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think “White Supremacist” is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group. [Emphasis Mine – jkf]

Yes, White Supremacy is a nice term! After all we white people have done a great job running the world, and we’ve only sometimes wiped out indigenous populations a few times. Sure, there was that one time we took all the valuable stuff out of Africa in exchange for subjugating the peoples of Africa and selling them into slavery, and okay, there was that time we started randomly partitioning the Middle East based more on what European countries’ interests were than on where actual peoples lived, and of course, there were those little bitty genocides here and there, but hey, you can’t steal the wealth of the world without breaking a few humans. And there’s no question but that the domination of other states by white people has worked out great for white people!

In all seriousness, a man who would embrace the idea of white supremacy as a good thing has no business in polite society, and neither does any site that publishes him. And frankly, it’s an indictment of any organization that ever published him, because you cannot tell me that Derbyshire suddenly became a white supremacist in the last few weeks, and you cannot tell me that a writer would never have shared those thoughts with his colleagues, even if he had enough sense to keep them out of print. If there was any doubt that NRO still clings to ideals of racial separatism and racist degradation, Derbyshire’s years of service there should eliminate them, even if they fired him when he had the poor judgment to actually express those ideas openly, rather than in code.

Finally, two quick things. First, the link above goes to Little Green Footballs (I know, they’re anti-racist now, which is weird, right?) rather than VDARE, because to hell with VDARE. I don’t link to Nazis.

Second, sing us off, Randy Newman.

Posted in Colonialism, Race, racism and related issues | 3 Comments

Prostitutes in the US are 42 times as likely to be murdered as the average American (Not an accurate statistic – see update)

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Ampersand

UPDATE: I definitely can’t stand by the statistic I quoted in this post; it’s way too high, it seems. See the discussion in the comments for details.

Original post follows.

From an article about serial killers who work as truck drivers:

In early 2009, the FBI announced the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, focused on killers who choose their victims and dump their bodies along highways. Some of the victims are hitchhikers and stranded motorists, but most are truck stop prostitutes. In the 1980s, the FBI was accused of inflating the numbers of serial homicides, fomenting a serial killer “panic,” so they are careful not to overstate their case today. But recent studies suggest that the numbers of serial murder victims have continually been underestimated—even during the serial murder “panic.” The undercounting is because the vast majority of victims have always been prostitutes—as many as 75% according to one scholar. Research into prostitute mortality suggests that the homicide rate for prostitutes is 229 out of every 100,000. The U.S. national average is five.

Posted in Sex work, porn, etc | 21 Comments