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

If you want population growth, support alternative families

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Ampersand

People who promote “traditional” marriage, and oppose official support for or recognition of other family forms, are often the same people who worry about the relatively low fertility rates in the US and other wealthy nations.

The blog Demography Matters quotes from a newspaper article, about attitudes towards motherhood in Germany — attitudes that too many cultural conservatives in the United States share.

Unbeknownst to most outsiders, Germany is the most difficult place in Western Europe to be a working mother, with a deeply ingrained culture of machismo that expects women to give up their lives once they have children.

The ideology itself was Ms. Hoffritz’s biggest barrier. When she talked about her frustrations, her friends and relatives openly denounced her as a rabenmutter – literally “raven mother,” a woman who abandons her children, like the mythic ravens throwing their chicks from the nest. It is a term routinely applied to working mothers in Germany.

“When I got pregnant, even though I’d had a career for 20 years, everyone expected me to drop my job forever, to take care of my son and not do anything else all day for the rest of my life, and they got angry when I said otherwise,” she says. “Friends just thought I should be a full-time mom.”

This attitude, unsurprisingly, discourages women from having children. A new study by Jean-Marie Le Goff compares higher-fertility France with lower-fertility Germany:

Women in France, Le Goff argues, have access to a whole variety of family structures, from the traditional nuclear marriage family to a family marked by cohabitation to single motherhood, with a relatively long tradition of recognizing the responsibilities of parents towards their children regardless of their legal status, with the idea of mothers working outside of the home not only being accepted but supported by any number subsidies to parents to affordable and accessible day care. In West Germany, social and policy norms tend to support traditional family structures. The result? In France, people are childbearing age are split between two sectors, one defined by marriage relationships and the other defined by cohabitation relationships. On the other side of the Rhine, people of childbearing age are split between people who have children and people who don’t. Katja Köppen’s Second Births in Western Germany and France (Demographic Research 14.14) further points out that whereas Frenchwomen seem to enjoy an institutional structure that encourages motherhood and there isn’t a contradiction between high levels of education–hence employment–and fertility, there is such a contradiction in western Germany, with government spending priorities in the latter country being directed towards the support of traditional families. It’s not too much of a surprise, then, that the German Federal Statistics Office reports that [the number] of childless women is rising, particularly in the former West Germany.

Personally, I don’t care if fertility in the US goes down or up; I suspect any deficit in our population caused by declining births can be made up for by increased immigration. But those who are concerned about fertility rates, should consider supporting, rather than denigrating, alternative family forms.

(Curtsy to Economic Woman.)

Posted in Families structures, divorce, etc | 4 Comments

"There never were any good old days": new communications tech is always feared

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Ampersand

I liked this interview with Dennis Baron, the author of A Better Pencil.

Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it’s the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we know it. And most people take a wait and see attitude. And if it does something that they’re interested in, they pick up on it, if it doesn’t, they don’t buy into it.

I start with Plato’s critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They’re not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down — the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won’t have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there’s no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant — it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of “this is going to revolutionize everything” versus “this is going to destroy everything.”

So it’s always true that the new technology — whatever that new technology is — is going to destroy civilization, make kids into idiots, etc.. Fortunately, this never actually seems to be the case. (Not so far, anyway). If anything, scholars seem to be finding that the internet — by making people write much more — is making us into better writers.

P.S. By the way, it’s also not true that the current generation of kids knows less than past generations did. People have been saying that about young people since at least the 1800s, and it never seems to have been true.

Posted in Mind-blowing Miscellania and other Neat Stuff | 10 Comments

Things Michele Bachmann Should Apologize For, but Won't

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Jeff Fecke

You may recall that back in June, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-You Serious?, declared that the census was part of the vast left-wing conspiracy to install Barack Hussein Super-Allah Muslim Muslim Muslim Obama as dictator-for-life of the American Soviet. At the time, she said of the census, If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps.”

One can draw a bright, straight line between rhetoric like that and this horrific crime:

The FBI is investigating the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery. A law enforcement official says the word “fed” was scrawled on his chest.

The body of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old Census field worker and occasional teacher, was found Sept. 12 in the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky.

Investigators have said little about the case. A law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and requested anonymity, tells The Associated Press the word “fed” was written on the dead man’s chest.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Let’s not muse that this might have been a “lone nut” somewhere. This was a calculated act of political violence, one that was encouraged and supported by Michele Marie Bachmann. By raising the specter of internment, of government-sanctioned attacks on the American people, Bachmann gave those “nuts” a real reason to fear the government.

If the government was seriously thinking about interning Americans simply for their political views — even if those views are directly opposite mine — I’d be first on the line to prevent it. And yes, I’d prefer to resist it though peaceful resistance if possible, but I would view violence as acceptable in defense of liberty.

Of course, the government isn’t thinking about interning Americans, for any reason whatsoever. There is no evidence, credible or otherwise, that even hints that they could be. The most oppressive thing Barack Obama is planning to do is provide health care to people who don’t have it. As for the census, it’s going to happen in 2010, just like it’s happened every ten years since the founding of the Republic, because the Constitution says so, not because Barack Obama has suddenly and capriciously demanded that all people come to Bethlehem to be taxed.

By taking a legitimate and non-controversial function of government — having some idea of how many people we have in the country — and by turning it into a secret neo-Marxist plot, Bachmann has posited a world in which even census workers are stormtroopers of destruction. Were she a private citizen, we might ignore her. But she isn’t. She’s a member of Congress, an elected official. If she’s saying that this is true, is it any wonder that someone out there would believe it?

Bachmann has a responsibility to her constituents and her country to conduct herself in a responsible manner. That she has chosen not to is to her everlasting shame. This death is, at least in part, on her head. And she owes her constituents, her country, and most important, the family of Bill Sparkman an apology. But I won’t hold my breath.

Posted in Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc. | 56 Comments

Reading Suheir Hammad’s ZaatarDiva and Kazim Ali’s The Far Mosque

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

This review was originally posted on a literary blog that no longer exists called The Great American Pinup. My understanding is that the blog was hacked and that attempts by the people who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuccessful. I am reposting the review here because I think the books are important enough that the review should continue to be available.

Talk about two very different books by two very different poets, but there are connections, and since I read the books back to back, I want to talk about them side by side. I first met Suheir Hammad some years ago when she came to Nassau Community College (NCC), where I teach in the English Department, to give a reading as part of a day-long program on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The program was sponsored by NCC’s International Studies Committee and it generated, even in the planning, a lot of controversy. I was not involved in putting the day together, so I do not know the specifics of went on, but I do know that the college administration voiced concerns about adequate security, about who the panelists would be and whether a balanced view of the conflict would be presented. What they meant by “balanced,” however, at least as I understand it, was that no one who spoke for the Palestinian side should express views that were overtly hostile to Israel. It did not seem to bother them that people representing the Israeli side might express views overtly hostile to Palestinians and/or Arabs, and, sure enough, one of the speakers was a woman representing a far-right Jewish organization—not Israeli, but Jewish—who spoke quite forcefully about the Arab/Muslim plot to take over the world. It was almost as if she were quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, except that all the references to Jews had been changed to Arabs.

During lunch that day—her reading was in the evening—Suheir and I spoke about “One Stop (Hebron Revisited)” a poem from her first book, Born Palestinian, Born Black, that I had used in a class I’d taught the previous semester called Introduction to World Jewish Studies. The poem is a response to Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 massacre of 29 Muslims—approximately 100 were injured—in which the speaker, a woman, imagines the violence she would have done to a Jewish man she sees had she “caught [him] on the train/on an empty car into flatbush.” The poem is painful to read, not only for the specific details of the violence it describes, but also for the nakedness of the rage it expresses. The speaker is in pain, and it is hard not to feel implicit in the details of what the woman describes how much she hates herself for even imagining that she would perform those acts.

When I taught the poem, I asked my students, all of whom happened to be Jewish and most of whom came from conservative and orthodox religious backgrounds, if they thought it was anti-Semitic. I was truly surprised when they said no, that if they were in the writer’s shoes, they would have felt a similar anger and that Suheir Hammad therefore had every right to express herself in the way that she did. I told Suheir this and she also was shocked and then she told me that “One Stop” was a poem she never read when she gave readings. I don’t remember her precise words, but I think she told me she was afraid to. It was so angry and so violent that she was not sure how her audiences would react. I told her I thought it was a poem that people needed to hear, that she owed it to herself and to her audiences to read it, precisely because the pain and the violence in the poem are so deeply embedded in the emotional center of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and no one should be spared a confrontation with that center.

My own opinion is that, to the extent the speaker in “One Stop” holds the Jewish man she sees on the train in New York City responsible for the views of Baruch Goldstein and, by extension, the policies of the State of Israel, the poem is anti-Semitic, or, to be more precise, the speaker expresses her rage in anti-Semitic terms. Because her rage is comprehensible, however, it is also an excusable moment of Jew-hatred, no different than the way, say, the rage of a Black South African during apartheid might be directed at all South African whites, despite the fact that there were many whites in South Africa who opposed apartheid. What matters is whether the speaker, once she has calmed down, takes responsibility for that moment. In “One Stop,” she does not, nor do I remember, frankly, whether Hammad takes on the question of that responsibility in any of the other poems in Born Palestinian, Born Black, and since I do not have the book handy, I can’t go back and check. My overall recollection of the book, though, is that it is more angry than it is about coming to terms with anger. I remember a couple of withering poems protesting the way Middle Eastern women are exoticized in the US, and I remember poems that were clearly intended to confront the reader with the physical horrors of occupation. (It occurs to me as I write this that I also should state explicitly that I am not accusing Suheir Hammad of Jew-hatred in any form. Not only is it a mistake to confuse a poet with the speakers of her poems, but I have met her and talked to her, and I just don’t think she harbors that kind of hatred for anyone.) Continue reading →

Posted in Anti-Semitism, literature, Palestine & Israel | Comments Off

The BINGO Project

Posted on September 22, 2009 by the angry black woman

the-bingo-project

I’ve had a little project in mind for a few weeks but I’ll need some help bringing it to fruition. As many of you know, when engaging in discussions about contentious topics such as race, gender, politics, oppression, etc., there are always clueless and/or privileged people who whip out arguments so often used and so stock that they end up on a BINGO card somewhere. Veterans of such discussions often comment on this and sometimes even link to specific cards. And the more patient amongst us will explain to the clueless/privileged person why their argument is a cliche.

While rolling my eyes at some of the drive-bys over on Alaya’s Supernatural thread I thought that it would be useful to not only be able to point to BINGO cards and say: “Look, what you just said is on here, this is how clueless you are,” but also have that square link to a post or comment thread wherein the statement is taken apart and shredded to pieces. It’s similar to the way I tell people to read the Required Reading or simply point to coffeeandink’s excellent How To Suppress Discussions of Race. We’ve all had these debates so many times that at this point all we really should have to do is say: “Go here and click on I/3.”

First step is to find the existing BINGO cards. Liz Henry has an awesome Flickr pool with the ones she’s found here. Are there any more we should add to the list? Let me know in comments.

Next, I suggest we go one card at a time and find a link or multiple links for each square. As I said, it can be a comment or thread or a whole post wherein the statement/question is debunked or someone has taken the time to explain why it’s wrong/stupid/prejudiced/not worthy of addressing.

I think this was the first BINGO card I ever saw:

So I would like to start with that one. You can suggest links (your own or someone else’s) in the comments, just be sure to indicate which square the link is for. If you want to take part in the project by posting a card to your blog and compiling links, go right ahead. Just tag your post bingo-project in Delicious and ping me here or on another BINGO Project post so others won’t replicate your efforts.

And now a word from our sponsor…

Your ad could be here, right now.

The BINGO Project

Posted in Race, racism and related issues, Syndicated feeds | 41 Comments

What Do You Do When You Experience or Witness Street Harassment?

Posted on September 22, 2009 by the angry black woman

what-do-you-do-when-you-experience-or-witness-street-harassment

Was thinking about a few things in regards to my post yesterday and reading your stories of unwanted attention and harassment. I find myself depressingly unsurprised at the accounts. This crap is all too common.

A few years ago I made a decision to try and talk/fight back against harassment I experienced or witnessed. I live in New York, so hardly a day goes by when I don’t see it happen. Depending on my situation at the time (rushing to work or alone on a dark street or whatever) I will try to get the guy’s attention and say NO! really loud and like I’m talking to a dog. No! Bad man! Baaaaad.

If I’m the target of the comment or catcalls, I sometimes say something nasty. You know what really gets them upset? Insulting the size of their penis. I didn’t think it would be so easy to insult a guy, but it really is. (Sorry guys!)

Sometimes I don’t jump to that right away. Once I was walking down the street and a guy passing me said something like, “Girl, you are so fiiiine,” and I stopped and said: Excuse me, but that’s really inappropriate! We ended up having a loud debate in the street about how he was just trying to compliment me and put a smile on my face (there’s that fucking ’smile’ stuff again…) and how by saying something nice about my appearance he was attempting to bring something positive to my day. No matter how much I tried to impart on him that random comments from strange men tend not to make women feel that way at all, and how would he feel if someone did that to his mother, made any impact on him.

Since I have a camera in my phone, I try to take pictures of the guys and tell them I’m uploading them to the Internet with the caption “Skeevy Asshole.” They don’t like that, either.

Every now and then I’m not alone when I do something like this. And it’s usually without warning. I’ll just be walking down the street, talking to a friend, then I’ll whip around and shout, “Leave her the fuck alone!” while my clueless friend is left wondering if I’ve suddenly gone mental.

Once they understand what I’m doing, people get kind of upset with me. On some level that’s understandable. People have gotten into physical altercations over less. Which is why I only do this when I feel relatively safe. On a crowded street, near open restaurants/stores, mostly during the day. However, the objection isn’t always just about that aspect. Some get embarrassed as if what I’m doing is somehow more horrendous than what the guy is doing. Like my acknowledgment and anger about it are breaking a social code we have in our culture. Men will harass women and women will deal with it individually as best they can.

That doesn’t cut it with me, though. Because I know how it can feel when the harassment is happening. Standing on a crowded street and having some man try to intimidate you and no one does a damn thing about it. I hate that feeling. I have no idea if the women who are being harassed appreciate my actions or even know about them. They may be trying so hard to ignore and get by that they just register someone yelling, but not about what.

I admit, I’m also doing it for all the times I found myself in that situation and didn’t fight back or tell the guy to go to hell; when I was intimidated and even scared. You’ll never hear me tell anybody that their response or reaction was incorrect or wrong or that they should have been stronger/fought back. I’ve heard guys say things like that and it’s complete bullshit. I’m glad for the times when I have the wherewithal to tell harassers to go to hell, but I forgive myself for the times I can’t.

And now a word from our sponsor…

Your ad could be here, right now.

What Do You Do When You Experience or Witness Street Harassment?

Posted in Syndicated feeds | 21 Comments

Fertility Rates, Infant Mortality, Mark Steyn, Race and Racism

Posted on September 22, 2009 by Ampersand

Writing to Mark Steyn, Mark Adomanis points out that the “infant mortality rate is significantly higher in the US than it is in the UK. In fact, if you want to be precise, it’s 34% higher.”

Steyn replies:

As to infant mortality rates in general, as with “life expectancy at birth”, that’s a very interesting topic that I will be writing about at length in the weeks ahead. But, even without taking into account the significant variations in the definition of “live birth”, one thing you notice is that, by comparison with the United States, the countries with the lowest “infant mortality rate” have some of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. That’s to say, it’s not just that they have fewer infant deaths, they have fewer infants, period. They have so few, indeed, that over the medium-term (in Italy, Germany and elsewhere) it will render their government health systems unsustainable. But, as a general proposition, I would say that, when fertility rates get as low as they are in Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere, to the point that you now have upside-down family trees of four grandparents, two children, one grandchild, it’s hardly surprising that “infant mortality” is lower.

I’m a little confused as to what Steyn is saying. It’s possible that Steyn is arguing that a lower infant population, in and of itself, explains a lower infant mortality rate. As PG points out, if that’s Steyn’s thought, then Steyn misunderstands basic statistics.

Another possibility is that Steyn is saying that if there are more parents and grandparents per infant, that infant will get more attention and thus be less likely to die. That would make more sense, but I can’t find any evidence to support this proposition. (For instance, all else held equal, are only children significantly more likely to survive infancy than second children?)

That said, even if Steyn is mistaken about the cause of the link, he’s right that low infant mortality rates and low fertility rates are strongly correlated. As this World Bank paper points out, the trends mutually feed into each other: “Lower infant mortality can lead to lower fertility by reducing the need for replacement births. Conversely, birth spacing improves the chances of child survival.” ((For a more detailed discussion, see this paper (pdf link). )) (And, of course, both lower infant mortality and lower fertility are made more likely by wealth.)

However, Steyn is wrong to imply that the U.S. can’t lower our appalling infant mortality rate without dropping our fertility rate. Contrary to what Steyn seems to believe, there are many countries with low infant mortality rates where the fertility rate is similar to the U.S.’s. For instance, the UN rates the US and Iceland as having virtually identical fertility rates (the US is ranked 127, Iceland is ranked 128). But Iceland has the lowest infant mortality rate in the world.

There are countries which probably won’t be able to significantly lower infant mortality without lowering fertility rates — Niger, for example, which has about 7 births per woman, a number that’s way too high for health either of women or of children. But the US, with a fertility rate barely above 2 births per woman, is not in that situation. Because our high infant mortality rate isn’t being caused by a high fertility rate, we can lower infant mortality without lowering fertility.

Finally, no one should discuss US infant mortality without pointing out the elephant in the room, which is race.

(Graphic from PRB.)

In effect, whites, Asians and Latinas in the US are living in a reasonably good wealthy nation, when it comes to infant mortality — not as good as Sweden or the Netherlands, but the equivalent of New Zealand, say. But for Blacks and American Indians, it’s like living in an exceptionally poor nation — Tongo, say, or the Palestinian Territories.

Research indicates that the difference isn’t genetic; it’s discrimination. From Science Daily:

They compared birth weights of three groups of women: African American, whites and Africans who had moved to Illinois. Most African-American women are of 70 to 75 percent African descent.

“If there were such a thing as a (pre-term birth) gene, you would expect the African women to have the lowest birth weights,” David said. “But the African and white women were virtually identical,” with significantly higher birth weights than the African-American women, he said.
The researchers did a similar analysis of births to black Caribbean women immigrants to the United States and found they gave birth to infants hundreds of grams heavier than the babies of U.S.-born black women.

For black women, “something about growing up in America seems to be bad for your baby’s birth weight,” David said. […]

David and Collins spoke with black women who had babies with normal weights at birth, comparing them with black women whose babies’ birth weight was very low — under three pounds.

They asked the mothers if they had ever been treated unfairly because of their race when looking for a job, in an educational setting or in other situations.

Those who felt discriminated against had a twofold increase in low birth weights. And for those who experienced discrimination in three “domains,” the increase was nearly threefold.

As depressing as this is, this also shows us that the US’s high infant mortality rate is — or should be — a solvable problem.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Race, racism and related issues | 19 Comments

Tim Pawlenty is Not a Moderate

Posted on September 21, 2009 by Jeff Fecke

One of the interesting things on the teevee tonight has been the shock and surprise from some on the left that Minnesota’s own Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty doesn’t really seem to be a moderate after all.

For those of you normal people who don’t track the comings and goings of Minnesota’s 39th governor, Tim Pawlenty visited the Value Voters Summit this past weekend, where he got to speak to the hardest of the hard-line wingers, the people who actually nodded when the chief of staff for Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., explained that heterosexual pornography causes teens to become homosexual because it “turns your sexual drive inwards,” a ludicrous statement which, if true, would mean that Tucker Max is the most homosexual human being in the history of history.

Gov. Pawlenty went to the summit, and those who’ve only gotten to know him through sound bites and a few interviews on MSNBC probably expected he’d give a bland, lukewarm speech, heavy on economics, light on red meat.

Those of us from Minnesota knew better. We remembered his acceptance speech from the 2006 GOP state convention, where he declared, “I can tell you what your worst nightmare is. It’s one of the big-spendin’, tax-raisin’, abortion-promotin’, gay marriage-embracin’, more welfare-without-accountability lovin’, school reform-resistin’, illegal immigration-supportin’ Democrats for governor who think Hillary Clinton should be president of the United States.” We are well aware that Pawlenty fits nicely into the anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-education Republican Party of 2010. And we knew that Pawlenty would be only to happy to tell his fellow true believers exactly what they wanted to hear.

He did not disappoint. After his usual cringe-worthy joke (something about Brett Favre not being a “clunker”), Pawlenty told everyone exactly what he believed.

On Separation of Church and State:

Now, as you know, you’re gathered here because you share a belief in those values. Those values are under attack. These are not just conservative values. Our values our American values. (Applause.) They are not rooted in pop psychology, they’re not rooted in feelings, they’re not rooted in emotion. They are rooted in the wisdom and experience of our founding fathers and the faith and the wisdom that they brought forward in the defining moments of this nation. And so we need to remind each other – (audio break).

(Applause.)

Our Judeo-Christian values are important, they are traditional, and they are the basis for so much of our country. Now, we have some folks who are skeptics about that. I’m reminded of the story – the true story of Tony Blair, the former prime minister, who came to our prayer breakfast here in Washington, D.C., about a year or so ago. He recalled a story that as a young schoolboy his father had suffered a terrible stroke. It was life-threatening and quite severe. And he remembers being in school and having a teacher pull alongside him and bend down on his knee and whisper to him, “Tony, I’m going to pray for your dad.” And Tony reminded the teacher and remembered the teacher and said, “But teacher, my dad doesn’t believe in God.” And the teacher said, “That’s okay, Tony. God believes in your dad. God believes in your Dad.”

On Abortion rights:

In Minnesota we’ve done a number of things – I won’t go through them all – but one that I’m most particularly proud of and it’s been very impactful is I’ve proposed and signed into law the so-called women’s right to know bill, which provides women important information who are considering abortion, and it also provides a waiting period for them to consider their decision. That combined with many other measures and efforts of good-hearted people all across Minnesota has significantly decreased the number of abortions performed in my state, and it’s a very effective piece of legislation.

(The Women’s Right to Know Act, of course, forced women to read anti-choice propaganda before having an abortion. Part of the information given out by the Minnesota Department of Health initially included the debunked breast cancer-abortion link.)

On GLBT Rights and Marriage Equality:

A really important example of this is defending and protecting traditional marriage. All domestic relationships are not the same, and traditional marriage needs to remain elevated in our society and in our culture. Marriage should be defined as between a man and a woman, and I sponsored that legislation when I was in the Minnesota Legislature, and we should make sure that the people are heard on this, that the Constitution is heard on this, not courts who are making up the law in the backroom.

Now, this is not some radical notion or some extreme notion. My goodness, when it’s been put to the vote of the people even in left-of center places like Oregon and – California voted twice for traditional marriage. If they can support traditional marriage in California we should do it all over this country.

(According to the Washington Independent, at this point Pawlenty ad-libbed, “This is not politically incorrect! This is not politically offensive! This is what our founding fathers believed.”)

On Health Care:

President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress not long ago regarding this topic, and he said he’s going to start calling people out on this debate by name. I guess I was the first one up this morning. The DNC put up a video or some sort of thing attacking me on this debate for various things I’ve said in recent weeks and months, and I accept the challenge. And I’ll just respond by calling out the president back tonight. And I would say – (applause) – and what I’d like to say to him is, DNC and he calls me out, I’ll call you out, call you back, and here’s my message: Stop spending the country into bankruptcy. Stop taxing us into oblivion. And the next time you address a group of young people maybe you should apologize for the crushing debt you’re putting on their shoulders.

(Applause.)

And one additional challenge. If, as he and the Democratic Congress, or some of the Democratic Congress say, “Oh, no, we’re not for public funding for abortions,” then don’t duck, don’t bob, don’t weave, put the language of the Hyde amendment in the health care bill.

Tim Pawlenty is not a moderate. He has never been a moderate. He is a stalwart conservative, quite at ease among the furthest part of the party’s right wing. Democrats and independents need to realize this going into 2012. After all, Minnesota has paid a high price for the reckless budgetary games of Pawlenty. It would be a pity if the rest of America failed to learn from our lesson.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc., Health Care and Related Issues, Same-Sex Marriage | 8 Comments

Does Street Harassment Ever Lead To True Love? (My Guess: No)

Posted on September 21, 2009 by the angry black woman

does-street-harassment-ever-lead-to-true-love-my-guess-no

I’m taking an informal survey. This is mostly for the women out there, but people of any sex or gender are welcome to join in the conversation. This particular issue happens to women more often, but is not exclusive to us.

Most women have had the experience of being approached or spoken to by men who bestow the compliment of their attention on us. Sometimes they simply comment on how we look, sometimes those comments are lewd and sexual. Sometimes they insist that we acknowledge them, either by following or getting in front of us. When we ignore them, blow them off, or express our displeasure at their actions and words, they often turn even uglier.

There are few women over the age of 13 who have never experienced this. And any number of feminist sites or blogs will educate folks on why this behavior is wrong.

What I want to know is: has it ever worked? Have you ever, when walking down the street, had some random stranger say to you, “You’re so hot,” and actually feel an urge to get his phone number and call him up for a date? After telling a guy “Sorry, I have a girlfriend/wife/boyfriend/husband/significant other,” have you ever felt compelled to cheat on said significant other when the guy persists despite these claims? When they’re aggressively attempting to intimidate you with verbal abuse or physicality, have you ever thought, “Hmm, this guy is certainly serious and also full of testosterone, I should rethink my position and go out with him!”?

I ask because there are days when I wonder if men actually think that some relationship or even one night stand might come from these actions. Of course I know that often it’s just patriarchal bullshit and power dynamics and that they are operating under the assuption that all women are or should be available to them as is their right. But honestly, after years and years of the same pattern:

Guy: Hey baby, you look fine.

Woman: You and your tiny dick can go to hell.

Guy: Yeah, you want me…

You would think that the message would sink in: this is not the way to get a date.

Perhaps I am giving such men too much credit. Maybe they don’t ever expect a date or even sex from these encounters They just do it for fun. But, on the off chance that these men do think this is a viable way to meet women, let’s make it clear.

And now a word from our sponsor…

Your ad could be here, right now.

Does Street Harassment Ever Lead To True Love? (My Guess: No)

Posted in Syndicated feeds | 54 Comments

Link Farm and Open Thread, Brain Scanning Dead Fish Edition

Posted on September 21, 2009 by Ampersand

This is an open thread. Post what you like, when you want to. Self-linking makes you smell better and will put a spring in your step in the morning.

It’s science! Researchers hooked a dead fish up to an fMRI machine. The fish was then “shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.” The salmon did great! This shows that dead fish are very smart; or, as Figleaf suggests, it shows that brain-scanning experiments without strong statistical controls have dubious validity.
“The stars are aligning for a winnable and worthwhile fight on U.S. policy in Afghanistan in the next several weeks: stopping the Obama Administration from sending more troops.”
Former deputy chief of the counterterrorist center at the CIA: Preventing a “terrorist haven” in Afghanistan isn’t worth the costs.
Female lawyers with masculine names are the most likely women to become judges. (But sexism is just a myth, right?)
“I am female bodied, but I do not identify as a female or in a feminine way. My gender presentation is masculine, but I don’t identify as a man or male. I am on the trans spectrum, but not in the sense that I’m transitioning…”
Awesome Golden Girls tattoo.
Both rape and false accusations of rape result from rape culture. (Via.)
The singular “They” and the many reasons it’s correct
Why does Ms. Michelle Bachmann get more attention than all the other ridiculous far-right Representatives? I’m not sure I agree — I’d have to compare the statements of the other contenders and see if they really are as extreme as Bachmannisms are — but it’s a reasonable concern.
Did you read Newsweek’s article on how infants and young kids learn about race — and how by pretending race isn’t there, adults encourage racism? If not, you should go read it.
If if the jury finds you “not guilty,” you can still be sentenced to prison for the crime. This has been upheld by higher courts, and the Supremes chose not to examine the issue. Scary. (Via.)
More on the politics of Black hair
The History of Jobs in America. I’m linking mainly because the graphic is so pretty.
XKCD presents: The Search For Intelligent Life Out There
Matt Bors gives out the first award for excessive labeling in a political cartoon (the winner is Anne Cleaves). The cartoon in question is a doozy.
Juan Cole provides a good round-up of links about Iran’s apparently non-existent nuclear weapons program.
Once again, pundits are claiming that women’s happiness has plummeted. And once again, Language Log is pointing out that the statistics don’t support that claim.
Contrary to what I and many other lefties have claimed in the past, the SATs are actually pretty accurate at predicting success in college grades.
Siditty discusses the definition of racism.
Yet Another White Person Who Feels Entitled To Touch Black Women’s Hair
Inside Edition On Nightclub Sexual Predators.
The UN Human Rights Council could become worthwhile — but only if the US puts a huge amount of effort into remaking it.
Asshats of the world, please stop calling Kayne West a nigger.
Great post by Little Light: “Let’s let vulnerability be radical. Let’s embrace it.”
“The problem with making health care reform “cheaper” by lowering subsidies is that if since people will still be required to have insurance, all you’re really doing is making middle-income people spend more money, in order to spare the government the pain of taxing rich people to pay for subsidies.
In defense of the claim that better family planning can help save the environment.
The UK offers paternity leave for the first time. Molly calls this a baby step forward for working moms, and she’s right, but I’d add that it’s also a step forward for working dads.
What ACORN hysteria is distracting us from.
Reading, Pennsylvania: Where you get three years in prison for taking consensual nude pictures of your girlfriend, but cops who expose their penises in the office aren’t penalized at all. UPDATE: Figleaf follows up on this, and finds that it’s a heck of a lot more complicated than that.
Counterpunch Magazine, which has published a lot of articles I like in the past, publishes a pile of anti-Semitic lies. So, fuck Counterpunch, I say. (Via.)
In Iraq, Freedom Is Marching Backward
Five Hard-To-Kill Houseplants For Your Home Or Office
And finally, via Womanist Musings:

Posted in Link farms | 26 Comments