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

Pain Medication Comments That Annoy Me

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Ampersand

The Agitator is essential reading, one of the best political blogs anywhere. Still, Radley Balko sometimes uncritically parrots libertarian tropes. Government Evil! Liberals Stupid!

For instance, today he posted this libertarian boilerplate:

Alternet publishes article calling for government monitoring of doctors and their pain patients, a crackdown on prescription painkillers, and generally expanding the drug war, all because . . . corporations are evil. And Florida’s governor loves the Tea Party. Or something.

So I followed the link, and the reason the Alternet writer, Kevin Gray, gave ad nauseum for wanting stronger government regulations of pain pills is to prevent accidental deaths. Not because corporations are evil (corporate power is mentioned once). Not because Florida’s governor loves the tea party (again, one mention). This is an article that is clearly and overwhelmingly about deaths caused by prescription drugs. Here, for example, is Gray’s first paragraph:

For the first time in nearly a century, automobile accidents are no longer the nation’s leading cause of accidental deaths, according to a major report released Tuesday by the National Center for Health Statistics. The new number one killer is drugs—not smack, crystal meth or any other stepped-on menace sold in urban alleyways or trailer parks, but bright, shiny pills prescribed by doctors, approved by the government, manufactured by pharmaceutical companies and sold to the consumer as “medicine.” Yet of the billions of legit pills Americans pop every year for medical conditions serious and otherwise, the vast majority of lives are claimed by only a select few classes—painkillers, sedatives and stimulants—that all share a common characteristic: they promote abuse, dependence and addiction.

Gray goes on that for paragraph after trite, overwritten paragraph (“pill mills and doctor shoppers are not just creating a land of bathroom-cabinet addicts—their bodies are packing morgues.”) Balko is either the least competent reader of English in the world, or he just flatly lied to his readers about what Gray’s article was about.

That said, I hated Gray’s article. For one thing, the factoid that he builds his article around — his claim that “The new number one killer is… pills prescribed by doctors” — is wrong. According to the CDC data brief Gray cites (pdf link), in 2008 there were over 41,000 deaths by poisoning, compared to 38,000 auto accident deaths. But “deaths by poisoning,” although mostly pill-related, includes some other deaths; the CDC says that in 2008 there were about 36,500 pill-related deaths, about 1,500 fewer than auto-related deaths.

That’s not a big deal – given the trendlines, pill deaths will soon overtake auto deaths, if they haven’t done so already – but it’s still annoying that Gray couldn’t be bothered to correctly understand the leading statistic in his article, which he wrongly hypes again and again.

What does bother me most about Gray’s article is that he never acknowledges that untreated pain is a serious problem in the United States and worldwide, even while he endorses policies that could make matters worse. For instance, the Florida “pill mill” law:

…mandates the creation of a statewide prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP), delineates narrow conditions to establish a pain management clinic, limits the amount of controlled substances physicians can prescribe, imposes harsh penalties on physicians who violate the law ($10,000 minimum fines, six-month suspensions) and restricts advertisement of pain treatment centers, among other measures.

Gray’s article favors this law, and certainly saving lives is important. But the life-saving aspects of restrictive laws (if they really save lives — I’d like to see some research on that) should be balanced against the loss of freedom involved when the government decides for me how much medicine my doctor can prescribe me; and it should be balanced against the truly incredible suffering caused when people can’t get pain medication they genuinely need.

But you’d never know that reading Gray’s article. Is he even aware that there are millions of people with chronic pain? Does he consider providing them with relief worth even a moment’s consideration? I assume so, but he doesn’t allow any such compassion to come through in his article. And that’s unfortunately typical of how this issue is discussed.

***

Couple of side notes:

First, I should acknowledge that libertarian writers are a zillion times better than progressive writers when it comes to pain management. If I could put our country’s pain management restrictions under either liberal or libertarian management, I’d opt for the libertarian in a heartbeat.

Of course, the same libertarian whose heart is broken if Lucy is suffering because badly-written laws keep Lucy’s chronic pain untreated, might not care if Lucy’s pain is untreated because Lucy is poor. So although I’d put a libertarian in charge of the restrictions, I’d put a liberal in charge of guaranteeing access.

Second, I’d really like to see those pain-pill-related deaths broken down by cause. Specifically, I want to know what percentage of pain-pill-related deaths are related to liver failure caused by acetaminophen in prescription opiates. Acetaminophen — which is not hard to accidentally take deadly amounts of, and is available without a prescription as Tylenol — should be banned from prescription opiates altogether. No one’s freedom is substantively reduced if they have to take a Tylenol with their prescription pain med rather than having the acetaminophen built-in, and it’s much safer for consumers to be aware of how much Tylenol they’re taking.

Third point: Off-topic, but I was amused by this paragraph of Gray’s article:

“This is just the tip of the iceberg of the prescription drug abuse problem,” says Dr. Margaret Warner, the federal report’s lead author. “The take-home here is, this should be a wake-up call.”

Dr. Warner reportedly went on to say, “if we keep our nose to the grindstone and take the bull by the horns, then when the dust settles there’ll be a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Health Care and Related Issues, Whatever | 24 Comments

On Change and Accountability: A response to Clarisse Thorn

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Maia

Note for those who don’t read Feministe. Clarisse Thorn posted an interview with Hugo Schwyzer. People objected to Hugo Schwyzer being given this space on a feminist blog as he had, among other things, tried to kill his girlfriend a decade ago. Clarisse Thorn responded by closing comments on the interview thread and writing a post called On Change and Accountability. This post is primarily in response to that last post of Clarisse’s, which attempted to transfer the debate to a theoretical one about change and accountability. (Feministe has since offered this apology). This post will focus on the general not the particular – so you don’t have to have followed all the links to understand it. If you want to follow the wider discussion La Lubu’s post is my favourite (I also think there’s been some good stuff on Tumblr, but I can never find stuff there).

*******

Dear Clarisse

Towards the end of your post On Change and Accountability you asked:

Have you thought about these questions in your own life? I don’t mean abstractly, as an intellectual exercise. Concretely, and with intention. What would you do if, tomorrow, you found out that your best friend was a rapist? Your lover? What would you do if your sibling came to you to confess a terrible crime? To request absolution? To request accountability?

Did you expect your readers to answer no? Sometime this year, it’ll be a decade since a man tried to rape a woman in my house. They knew each other, and me, through left-wing political circles. Since then I’ve known more than ten left-wing men who used intimate violence against women. I’ve never been central to any collective response, all of which were ad hoc and some of which may have done more good than harm, or been particularly close to the men. I still have no idea on how to respond to intimate violence on the left in a positive way, but I do have quite a good idea of some of the ways individual and collective responses can do harm.

So yes, I have thought about your questions – my answers and my response to you is deeply intertwined in the experiences I’ve had, the conversations I’ve had about those experiences, and the reading I’ve done.* However, I am being a little bit more focused in my response than you were in your post. I am very suspicious of attempts to broaden discussions of intimate abuse and abuse of power, to a wider idea of bad things people have done. Men who use the power that our sexist and misogynist society gives them to hurt women generally find it easy to do so, and get a lot of support when they’re challenged. I believe that that social context is important. I am going to focus this post on responses to men who abuse women, because that was the situation that triggered your post and it’s what I have most experience with.

I will provide direct answers to your questions the end of the post. First, I want to outline the ways I disagree with the premise of your post, and why some parts of it I disagreed with so strongly that I felt driven to spend the last few days planning and writing this reply. You ask:

How can we create processes for accountability? Feminists often discuss crimes like partner violence and sexual assault. Our focus is on helping survivors of these crimes, just as it should be. I personally have been trained as a rape crisis counselor, and I have volunteered in that capacity (if you’re interested in feminist activism, then I really encourage you to look into doing the same). And the history of feminism includes convincing people to actually care about and recognize the trauma of rape: Rape Trauma Syndrome was first defined and discussed in the 1970s.

But perhaps because of our focus on helping and protecting survivors, I rarely see feminist discussions of how to deal with people who have committed crimes. In fact, I rarely see any discussions of how to deal with that, aside from sending people to jail. Let me just say that problems with the prison-industrial complex are their own thing—but even aside from those, the vast majority of rapes and assaults and other forms of gender-based violence go unprosecuted.

I think other people have already pointed out whose work you rendered invisible in this section, but I want to take it in a slightly different direction. Here you seem to suggest that responding to perpetrators and responding to survivors are two separate things and that feminists’ focus on survivors has left little space for dealing with perpetrators. My experience has been that the best response to perpetrators have been more survivor centred, and the worst have been entirely perpetrator-centred. Why? Because abuse is about power and control – and centring perpetrators is giving them power and control.

A basic assumption of your in the post is that good responses to perpetrators need to be centred around perpetrators. You barely mention survivors in your post, let alone other people who may have been hurt by similar behaviour and have boundaries and triggers and want to keep themselves safe. Men who use the power society gave them to hurt women can do so because their experiences are centred in society. I think centring perpetrators makes it harder for them to change, not easier.

“Accountability teams” are one way I’ve heard of for dealing with this: whether support groups of perpetrators who share their experiences with making amends and changing their ways, or groups of friends who assist a perpetrator with those processes. I would like to see more and larger discussions about those teams, and more acknowledgement that change is possible.

‘Accountability teams’ sound great – but I’m pretty sceptical of them. When I’ve known support groups set up formally around perpetrators, they have become advocacy groups for those perpetrators. One man I know, who was part of ‘support group’ for a perpetrator rang up individual members of a collective who had decided that the perpetrator was not welcome in their space; he attempted to pressure each individual member, and ignored a woman who repeatedly stated “I’m not comfortable with this” and kept trying to pressure her. Likewise, I’m reasonably familiar with government funded programmes which act broadly like the perpetrator groups you describe above. From what I know of the research, they’re not particularly effective, and there is some suggestion that they actually make people better abusers.

We live in a world with a profound level of ignorance about intimate abuse, and an awful lot of myths that many people believe. In my experience, perpetrators who don’t want to change have found it easy to surround themselves with friends who support their worldview in some way. This makes sense – if you’re someone who doesn’t want to be abusive, you are likely to have among your friends people who will support you in meaningful ways, but if you don’t want to change, then it’s very easy to find people who will act as your apologists. Those who surround themselves with apologists will generally be happy with presenting themselves as trying to change – and use any support group to bolster that claim.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in support for perpetrators who are genuinely trying to change. I just have known far more perpetrators who were trying to persuade people that they were genuinely trying to change, than those who have genuinely tried to change. And those who are not trying to change have tended to use systems that have been set up to punish women they have abused.

I can imagine a time, or a circumstance, when I would have been excited about ‘accountability teams’. I think our disagreement there is just a sign about how many layers of abuse apologist bullshit I have found around every abusive man I have known. However, my disagreement to what you said next is more fundamental:

If we can’t create this kind of process, then how can we expect to create real change around these crimes? How can we expect perpetrators of violence to work on themselves if we can’t give them the space to work? Why should someone work for forgiveness if they know forgiveness can never come?

I want to untangle this, because there are a lot of different ideas here. First of all, when it comes to feminist blogs, there is no ‘we’, in fact when it comes to communities (which after all are informal sets of relationships with non-formalised power and decision making) there is no ‘we’. There can be no ‘we’ without a collective decision making process – just a false ‘we’ people talking on behalf of others.

I agree that perpetrators need space and resources to change, but the biggest barrier to that is generally that they are surrounded by apologists and cultural narratives that justify their behaviour. Outsiders can’t intentionally clear that away, they can only offer alternatives.

But what I really disagree with is the idea that abusive men should be working for forgiveness, let alone your conclusion that that means people need to forgive.

As others have pointed out forgiveness has a lot of religious overtones and baggage, it’s a narrow way to frame responses to abusive men, that will only speak to particular people. However, even if I translate it to language that resonates more with me, rather than forgiveness I would talk about ‘being OK with someone’, I still think you are talking about deeply personal decisions and boundaries that people can only draw for themselves. For example, seven years ago I stayed silent, when a woman with black eyes told me it was an accident, even though I knew that wasn’t true. I have realised, over the years, that I am never going to be OK with what I did. I also realised that that meant I was never going to be OK with this woman’s boyfriend, because I’m not going to hold myself responsible for my inaction around abuse, longer than I’m going to hold the man who did it (who has changed more than most men I know who have committed intimate violence – although he has behaved in deeply problematic ways much more recently than seven years ago).

Perpetrators should not be working for forgiveness, because forgiveness is deeply personal. But more than that I’m incredibly wary of the idea that abusers should be working on stopping hurting people, for any kind of reward, including changing the way people think of them.

One group response I saw from a distance used their silence over a rapist (and were generally very good at silencing other people) to try and get him to attend an anti-sexual-violence programme. They held out that they would keep his abuse from going too public and got him to take certain steps. It was, obviously, a disaster – change is fucking difficult and people have to really want to do it. If you try and use leverage you have over someone to make them change (particularly someone manipulative, as most successful abusers are) then you are going to be unsuccessful.

An easy path back to everything being OK, is often what abusive men who don’t take their abuse seriously (but don’t necessarily deny it) – want. I’ve known an abusive man demand this, and punish the survivor because he didn’t get it. He used all ll those subtle talking to friend of friends ways that it’s so easy for abusers to punish survirors particularly if other people let them. One group I know set the simple requirement “you tell us when you think you are ready to come back” and never heard from two different men again. I think it’s important not to offer short-cuts or a path to people being OK – learning to live with what you’ve done and other people’s reaction to what you’ve done is a perpetrator’s own messy work.

*********

However, none of that was why your post troubled me so much. You wrote it in response to people who were part of a feminist space and were outraged at the way you had centred in that space a man who had tried to murder his girlfriend. You were explicit both at feministe, and your place, that criticisms of that man bothered you, and shut that criticism down.

Then you wrote a post that is incredibly dismissive of people who disagree with you:

But I hope I can dim the flamewar into a lantern to illuminate issues that actually matter.

I believe that the politics of this situation are mostly a cheap distraction from truth and honor.

You go further, you go into some detail about why you think Hugo has changed and explicitly argue that your view of Hugo should be other’s view of Hugo:

Other feminists have been angrily emailing me, Tweeting at me, etc with things like “FUCK YOU FOR PROTECTING THIS WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING.” But I have seen no evidence that Hugo hasn’t made an honest and sustained effort at recovery and accountability.

Your entire post reads, to me, like an argument that people who who don’t agree with you about Hugo’s transformation, or the relevance of Hugo’s transformation about the way he has treated should not hold or express those views (partly because you don’t spend much time trying to persuade people on either of these points). You are demanding a ‘we’ without a collective decision making process.

To explain why I think this is the most anti-feminist position that I have ever read on Feministe I have to tell a story.

In 2006, a man named Ira hit his girlfriend when they were breaking up (he did this in a supposedly radical social centre – he was not the first man to assault his girlfriend in that social centre). After they broke up the girlfriend (who I will call Anne for the purposes of the post, although that’s not her name) named the abuse within the relationship. Ira had been emotionally, physically and sexually abusive.

Ira had many defenders, and responses to the abuse focused on him (in fact a lot of my caution about ideas like accountability teams, and my firmness that all responses have to be survivor centred come from this experience). He was exceptionally good at using mutual acquaintances (and there were many) to punish Anne. He never made amends with Anne, or anyone else. He did what most abusers who I’ve known who were seriously challenged do – he left town.

Apparently in this new place, he talked a good game. He admitted to some of what he’d done, and presented himself as a reformed man. He didn’t need to make meaningful change, he just needed to present himself as someone who had done so.

In 2009, about three years after they broke up he was part of organising climate camp. This was supposed to bring people from all around the country to Wellington, where Anne was living. Anne wanted to go to the camp, but she did not want to be around him. She wrote to various people, including the safer spaces team, outlining the situation and asking if he could not come. She got nothing back but vagueness and an argument that they could not do anything because the camp did not exist yet.

One of the arguments of the safer spaces team, which included people who claimed that they were feminists, was that they had talked to Ira and were convinced that he had changed. They believed, or at least acted as if it was true, that it was their belief about him was important. They ignored the view of one of the people he had abused, and many other women who felt unsafe around him.

It got messy from there. Ira left, but only after a protest. A woman who had been part of protesting Ira’s actions was kicked out of climate camp by the safer spaces committee for being ‘abusive’ because she yelled at a man for hugging her when she didn’t want to be hugged. Ira got someone connected with Climate Camp to harass Anne – like I said he was good at getting mutual acquaintances to punish her.

The safer spaces committee had made it clear where they stood when they decided that it was their view on whether or not Ira had changed that mattered.

*********

Your post read to me as taking exactly the same position as the climate camp safer spaces committee. You appeared to be arguing that your view that Hugo Schwyzer was reformed, and that his reforming mattered was important. Why?

Everything about your post oozes pressure. When you argue: “Why should someone work for forgiveness if they know forgiveness can never come?” You are arguing that people should forgive abusive men, because it’s necessary for them to change.

There is no space in your post for survivors. Either direct survivors of Hugo’s actions, or survivors of similar violence. There is no space for people to draw their own boundaries around an abusive man. Indeed nothing appears to matter in your post except the perpetrator, and his path to forgiveness. There is no way of getting a unified response – of promising survivors forgiveness – which doesn’t involve asking or demanding that some people ignore their own boundaries.

There is nothing new or transformative in arguing that survivors and those who care about their abuse, should not have boundaries because other people believe that the man has changed. Just a month ago I was in a meeting where someone argued that as far as we knew Omar Hamed hadn’t tried to rape anyone all year, and therefore it was divisive to argue that he should not be welcome at our political event.

I believe that part of being OK with an abusive man, has to be accepting that other people may not be OK and respecting their boundaries.

To pressure women to be OK, act OK, or pretend to be or act OK around a man who has been abusive towards woman, is a profoundly anti-feminist act. That pressure cannot be part of anything that is truly justice, or truly transformative.

*********

I don’t have a generic answer about how I’d act if someone I cared about had raped someone. There are too many variables. Obviously if anyone came to me seeking absolution, I would tell them that is not something I can give. But, if I decided that I was OK continuing the relationship then I would tell him that he needed to respect people’s boundaries around him, that some people would never be OK with him, and that he needed to find a way of being that wouldn’t pressure other people and their boundaries (and he would have to be on board with that for me to continue the relationship). I would respect other people’s boundaries around him, and try to ensure that I didn’t put direct or indirect pressure on them.

I feel incredibly lucky, ten years down the track, that I have never had to respond to intimate violence from a man I cared about. But I have seen the harm that women do to survivors of violence in defence of men they care about. I’ve seen manipulative men get women to do their dirty work. I’ve seen the way ‘he’s changed’ has been used by other women to pressure both direct survivors, and women who are uncomfortable with abusive men more generally. I hope I have learned enough to recognise those roles and refuse them.

Do we actually believe that people can change? If so, how do we want them to show us they’ve changed? Is absolution possible? Who decides the answers to these questions?

In reverse order, groups that have genuine collective decision making processes can make group answers to these questions. Otherwise the decisions can only be individual.

Absolution is a religious idea that is not compatible with liberation. Whatever we have done, we have done. Nothing and no-one can stop us from being the person who has done the worst actions we have taken.

Abusive men show me that they’ve changed when they stop hurting women and don’t use intimediaries to do their dirty work. If an abusive man was OK with people talking about their abuse, was OK with people not being OK with it, and understood that responses to their abuse cannot be all about them, but about the people they hurt, then I’d probably be willing to believe that he’d changed.

And yes – I do think people can change. I think feminists have to believe in the possibility of abusive men changing otherwise there’s no hope but a separatist commune.

But I won’t stake anything on that belief, not anyone’s safety, or comfort, or boundaries. I don’t like the odds. Nobody knows how to stop someone from abusing their power, and most attempts to do so are failures (that’s from friends who have worked in the field and reviewed the research).

I know this post sounds despairing. Believe me when I say none of the ways that abusive men I’ve known have responded to being challenged has given me any reason to hope.

But still I hope. And it is that hope that lead me to write this post. That hope that makes me believe that it is worth writing about my experiences and more and less harmful ways of dealing with abusive men.

In recognition that we are part of the same struggle,

Maia

* I haven’t read the book The Revolution Starts at Home yet, but I have read the zine (warning that link is a pdf) and recommend it, even though as this post probably shows I am deeply unsure about any way forward. I should point out that one of the problems with the post I am responding to that other people have discussed is the way it renders invisible the work of WoC dealing with issues that you say feminists don’t deal with.

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 181 Comments

Why I’d Have To Think About Who To Vote For, Barack Obama or Ron Paul

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Ampersand

Let me say, first, that I’m confident this is not a choice we’ll ever face. It’s going to be Romney versus Obama. (Unless Ron Paul decides to run as a third party candidate, which, from a Democratic point of view, would be delightful).

Let me say, second, that I agree with pretty much every progressive critique of Ron Paul I’ve read. As Jeff has written, Paul’s positions on reproductive rights are abominable — and shows how truly shallow many libertarians’ commitment to liberty is. I think it’s clear that Paul is a racist; the only question remaining is if his past embrace of racism was heartfelt or cynical. ((That Paul may have merely appointed racists to speak in his name is not a good excuse; the ability to delegate authority competently is not incidental to being a good President.))

He’s quite possibly antisemitic and homophobic as well. His economic ideas are to economics what creationism is to biology. And in the White House, Ron Paul could do a hell of a lot of real damage to the country.

There are domestic issues where I agree with Paul — particularly his opposition to the drug war — but I just don’t think that as President, Paul would have much power to end the drug war. And although I think Paul is better than Obama on many civil liberties issues, in many cases those issues don’t actually effect many people.

But.

I just don’t trust Barack Obama to keep us out of war with Iran.

And that’s huge. It should be huge to any progressive.

I pretty much agree with Srdja Trifkovic when he writes:

The Iranians are undoubtedly enhancing their enrichment capability and seeking control of a full nuclear-fuel cycle, but there is nothing in the recent International Atomic Energy Agency’s report to indicate that they are building a bomb. Nonetheless, the drumbeat has returned to Washington, and its objective is to present a military attack against Iran as a legitimate policy option to deal with a major threat to the United States. This campaign is reminiscent of the propaganda barrage over the 18 months preceding the war against Iraq in March 2003: It is based on an exaggerated threat and on the bogus claim that diplomatic solutions have been exhausted. ((Quoted from the excellent Eunomia blog. I really think that lefty bloggers who don’t read right-wing blogs are missing out on one of the best bloggers writing by skipping Daniel Larison.))

We definitely seem to be moving towards war with Iran, and the Obama Administration is part of that movement. I have little confidence in Obama’s interest or desire in keeping us out of war with Iran.

Americans tend to vastly overstate the president’s power. A president is not a dictator, and cannot singlehandedly decide on policy.

But there are areas where Presidents have more influence. When it comes to foreign policy — and the decision to make war — no one is more powerful than the President. When it comes to the decision to go to war or not, the President has as close as he (or she) ever comes to dictatorial powers. ((I know that the Constitution gives Congress the job of deciding when the US goes to war. But Congress seems as eager to give up that power as the White House is to acquire it.))

How many hundreds of thousands of people will die if the US pursues another “war of choice,” this time with Iran? Is there anything wrong, from a progressive point of view, with considering that an overwhelmingly important issue?

I really don’t like Ron Paul. But preventing another needless war might be worth having an ignorant, racist, sexist, asshat like Ron Paul in the Oval Office.

I think that people who consider a vote for Paul impossible to justify from a progressive point of view are either undervaluing anti-war as a progressive principal, or are underestimating the danger of war with Iran under President Obama.

I’m not saying that war with Iran is certain if Obama is re-elected. But Ron Paul is far more war-adverse than Barack Obama, and for me, being war-adverse is very possibly the single most important trait of a good President.

Of course, in the real election, we’ll be faced with a choice between Obama, who seems to be leaning somewhat towards war with Iran, and Romney, who is leaning even further in that direction, although of course being Romney his actual views are hard to pin down. Despite the fact that Americans in general are fairly war-adverse, there will not be a viable candidate for President who is firmly committed to keeping the US out of war with Iran if at all possible — another sign of the failure of US democracy to produce genuinely democratic choices for citizens to vote on.

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Elections and politics, Iran | 79 Comments

Win a Free Copy of Hereville From A Knitting Site!

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Ampersand

A Knitter’s Home Companion is running a contest for a free copy of Hereville. To enter the contest, just follow the link and leave them a comment!

So far no comments have been left, so the odds of winning are looking good. The contest runs until January 22nd. Thanks, Knitter’s Home Companion! KHC is a blog about knitting and kid’s books, so you can see that Hereville fits right in with their themes.

Posted in Syndicated feeds | 6 Comments

Open Thread: Jim Henson’s Into The Woods

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Ampersand

I’ve been reading Sondheim’s second collection of his lyrics, Look I Made A Hat, which was a Hanukkah gift from my wonderful mother. Here’s a bit of trivia I didn’t know: in 1995, Jim Henson was making a movie of Sonhdheim’s “Into The Woods,” with human actors but with Henson creators playing Jack’s cow and Cinderella’s birds. A screenplay was written, Sondheim wrote two new songs for the movie, they did readings of the screenplay featuring stars who probably would have been wrong for the actual movie, but some who would have been great, like Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Baker’s Wife), Neil Patrick Harris (Jack), and Rob Lowe (Cinderella’s Prince Charming). Then Columbia Pictures changed management, and the project was killed. The thought of what might have been could easily keep this blogger up at night, staring at the ceiling and periodically yelling “Why, Columbia Pictures, why?”

Anyway, consider this an open thread. Self-linking, selfless linking, and shellfish linking are all welcome.

Matthew Rodney draws Wonder Woman with the word “wonder.”
Stunning photo of NYC’s Central Park.
New Reports Track Devastating Impact of Alabama’s Extreme Immigration Law on Residents » Immigration Impact
Philippe Legrain on the case for open immigration laws.
Probably my great-grandparents would never have been let in if they had come to America today.
David Romer: Evidence for the Effectiveness of Fiscal Policy
Highdeas, a collection of people’s ideas thought of while high. “The word OK looks like a sideways person. I’ve said OK my whole life and never noticed him. What’s up little guy?”
There really is no difference between men and women’s math abilities: “None of our findings suggest that an innate biological difference between the sexes is the primary reason for a gender gap in math performance at any level. Rather, these major international studies strongly suggest that the math-gender gap, where it occurs, is due to sociocultural factors that differ among countries, and that these factors can be changed.”
QUOTE: “Want to know what’s evil? Nice people’s lies.” –Stephen Sondheim. The speaker is the character of the Witch in “Into The Woods,” in a song that got cut and replaced with “Last Midnight.”
Why Biased Refs Are Good Business
Double Standards Galore: Differences in how ordinary Americans and corporations are treated by the government.
“The results were surprising. Women in the study who were told they had a serious illness were seven times as likely to become separated or divorced as men with similar health problems….”
I’ve long been fond of the two-time Tony award winning actor George Rose, whose has a brilliant career in his day, and whose turn as the Major-General in Pirates of Penzance is one my earliest theater memories. Earlier today I was indulging in “whatever happened to…” browsing and looked up Rose. I was shocked to read out Rose was brutally murdered in 1988, and his murderers (including his adopted son) got off nearly scott-free.
FYI: 100% of Your Body Fat Should be in Your Boobs
This infographic about Harley Quinn may arguably be inaccurate (her new, much more skin-baring costume has technically gotten a lot of fan interest, if interest includes “disgust and derision”), but you can’t argue with its elegance.

Happy holidays, no matter what holidays you enjoy! (If you enjoy any at all, of course. No pressure. It’s cool to pretty much coast by ignoring the holidays, if that’s what you want. Me, I tend to work through them.)

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Link farms | 25 Comments

Reminder: Support Dinah Press!

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Julie

Just poppin’ in to say that Dinah Press only has a few days left in its fundraising drive. We’ve received a very generous non-Pay Pal donation, plus some preorders, so we’re actually a lot closer to our goal than the ChipIn meter indicates. Anything you can give will help!

Here are descriptions of our first two projects:

A poetry collection in progress
Cynthia Oka is honoured to collaborate with Dinah Press on her first book, a collection of poems searching to recover terrains of joy, possibility and power inside the complicated/complicit spaces of late imperialist/colonial/hetero-patriarchal capitalism.

Other Life Forms: A Novel
Other Life Forms, Julia Glassman’s debut novel, tells the story of Sylvie Frankel, a young sculptor struggling to rebuild her life after the death of her college sweetheart. Meditating on the complexities of creation, identity, strength, and the self, the novel explores what it means to be an artist and a woman when neither mode of being seems sustainable.

Once the books start coming together, I’ll pester you all with cover artwork, blurbs, and details on how you can host a house party. Hurray! Hurray for literature!

By the way, you should like us on Facebook!

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Happy Chanukah!

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Not much time for posting these days. Too much teaching and grading and dealing with the situation at school which only seems to be getting worse. Right now, it appears as if the administration has used the pretext of a criminal investigation into the alleged abuse of our college email system, specifically involving the college-wide listserv that we use to communicate with the entire campus, to impose a pre-screening of any email that anyone wants to send to the entire campus; and it is very clear that the result of this pre-screening, even if it is not the intent, has been to censor certain communications that are critical of the administration. It’s not a free speech violation, apparently, since they have not closed off all avenues of communication–though this situation does make it more difficult to get information out to the entire campus in an efficient manner–but it does raise serious questions about the administration’s commitment to academic freedom. And it is depressing.

But it is also Chanukah, and I want to share with you this video that my wife shared with me on Facebook. It’s just plain fun and it lifted my spirits. I hope it does something similar for you:

Posted in Jews and Judaism | 3 Comments

Abortion, Parenting, and the Government

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Grace Annam

Last year I read a piece written by a woman who worked in a court system in her state. It was an eye-opener for me, because it laid out in detail how apparently small single requirements could in fact be huge multiple barriers. She has since taken the post down, and when I inquired, someone who knows her told me that she took it down for “personal reasons”. I wanted to link to that post, but it’s not there anymore. I saved a copy for my own reference, but I won’t post it or even quote from it, because I do not want to cause the author problems. I do not want to risk a threat to her health, safety, or life. I don’t know what her personal reasons were, but I’m going to respect her decision to take it down.

So I’m going to do my best to express, in my own words, some thoughts on access to abortion services, including some of what I learned from that post. This is me speaking, with my voice, expressing my own opinions. So if you don’t like something in what I write here, argue with me. If you think I’m plagiarizing, two points:

1. I’m writing my own thoughts in my own words.

2. When the person I learned from tells me that she wants me to do so, I will happily link to her post, where you can read better writing than mine. It’s either this or be silenced in this discussion because someone else talked about something first.

Conversely, if you find what you read here interesting, educational or mind-blowing, don’t credit me. Credit her. You’ll just have to be abstract about it until she decides to respond, if she does.

Small-government conservatives are wont to tell us that one of the best reasons to keep governments small is that governments inevitably screw things up, and by limiting the size of government, we limit the size of the damage. Given that the default alternative to Big Government is not EqualityHappyLandForEveryone, I don’t necessarily agree. But I will agree with this general principle: If you give a government a task to do, a government will implement that task sub-optimally. In fact, a government will often execute its mandate in a way which bears little resemblance to the original intent of the legislation, especially if the legislation was a difficult compromise in a heated debate between bitter opponents.

Cue abortion legislation, entering Stage Right.

It’s easy to assert that, generally speaking, pregnant girls should consult with their parents before they make ethically difficult decisions with long-ranging effects. Someone has to raise them, and Western society broadly insists that, in the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the parents are the best people to do that. The problem, of course, is that pregnant girls individually do not get to benefit from being a statistical amalgamation. Each individual doesn’t get an average result. She gets a hand-crafted, individualized result.

So, I sympathize with people who assert that, broadly, pregnant girls should seek the advice of their parents. But that’s a different thing from legally mandating that all pregnant girls everywhere should always do so. Let’s look at some of the ways in which such a mandate can go wrong when it get implemented by Government, and by a Society which is deeply divided over what to do about unwanted pregnancies.

Meet Jane. Jane is 15. She started having periods when she was 13, and they have not yet become regular at all. She is pregnant, but she doesn’t know it yet. Seven weeks into her hidden pregnancy, she starts throwing up in the morning. She thinks nothing of it until it lasts for over a week. Then she puts the morning sickness together with not having had a period for the last nine weeks, together with her breasts feeling tender and fuller in a different way from normal tender, growing breasts. She realizes that she might be pregnant. Four days later, she gets past the denial and decides to buy a home pregnancy test. She waits two days for the weekend and takes a bus a couple of towns over so that she does not have to buy them in her town. She buys two. She finds a public restroom, locks the door, and takes them.

Now Jane knows she’s pregnant. She does not yet know that she is nine weeks pregnant.

Jane lives with one parent, and the other parent is across the country, in another state.

It is Saturday. Jane is smart and purposeful. She uses the weekend to think about it, and decides that she wants an abortion.

On Monday, Jane goes to school as usual. She skips her first class. She has a cell phone, but she does not want the call to show on her bill, which she knows her parent sometimes reads. Fortunately, she has a few dollars of cash and her school still has a couple of pay phones. One is at the end of a hall where she can keep her voice low. Jane stuffs quarters into the phone and calls a medical provider.

She asks how to get an abortion. Maybe it’s a hospital, maybe it’s a free clinic like Planned Parenthood, maybe it’s a doctor’s office; doesn’t matter. The medical provider tells her that they don’t provide abortions. They also inform her that she lives in a parental notification state. The state says she can choose to abort but only after she notifies her parents that she is doing so. She explains that she does not want to tell her parents. They tell her that she needs to go to court and get a judicial bypass.

Jane calls the local court. The clerk confirms that Jane cannot get an abortion without either parental notification or a judicial bypass. She asks how to get a judicial bypass. They don’t know, because they’ve never done one.

They do not tell this to Jane, but in fact most of their judges refuse to hear such cases. Some of them have personal pro-life convictions which prevent them from being able to rule impartially. Some simply don’t want to do them because it will hurt their chance of re-election; in places where judges are elected, it’s not surprising that judges might shy away from being tagged politically as abortion providers.

Turns out that just because the law requires something doesn’t mean that government has to provide that thing.
That requires that the legislature set up a structure and allocate funds, which is complicated in this case by the fact that they’re telling the Judicial branch how to run things, always a dicey proposition.

If you’re about to reply that such people shouldn’t be judges, yeah, no kidding. But let me welcome you to a little thing I like to call Reality, where judges and police officers and court clerks and lawyers all must come from the available pool of actual human beings, who are sometimes flawed, and who sometimes get scared, and who sometimes make compromises in order to get that political sausage made.

So Jane asks if there is any court anywhere which has actual judges who hear such cases. The court refers her to such a court. It’s on the other side of the state.

Jane cannot get across the state on her own; she has no car, no driver’s license, and does not have cross-state bus fare or enough free time where she can skip school and take a bus across the state without raising questions anyway. She decides that she must notify her parents. She lives with her … (I rolled actual dice for this, and considered same-sex parents while doing it) … father. He has divorced from her mother, and has custody. Her mother has visitation rights, though she has not exercised them in several years.

She tells her father. They discuss it. He disagrees that an abortion is the best course, and refuses to drive her anywhere to get one.

Parents have tremendous power to restrict children.
Parents can’t keep children from having sex, by they can certainly limit their options afterward. Jane now has notified her father, but still cannot get anywhere to get an abortion.

Over the next few days, Jane and her father have further discussion, and after long discussion, her father reluctantly agrees that an abortion is the best course. He can get time off from work two days from then, and they find a clinic which provides abortions and drive there.

At the clinic, a staffer listens to their account. They do a basic medical exam. The clinic does not do ultrasounds, and there’s no reason to do an ultrasound on a healthy teenager anyway, so the best data for estimating the date of the pregnancy would be … her last period. (Remember, it is pretty routine for a 15-year-old not to have a regular period. Also, it sometimes happens that a teenager has a period while pregnant. Such periods are typically short and spotty … which also isn’t unusual for any teen period.) They tell her that they can’t know for sure, but based on her period, she’s around five to ten weeks pregnant, and probably isn’t further along than ten.

The staffer explains that Jane will need proof of identity, and proof that Jane’s father is in fact Jane’s father. Jane’s father has his driver’s license. Jane has no state-issued ID; she is not yet driving. The staffer asks if they have her birth certificate. Although birth certificates are laughable as identification because they contain no biometric data to match an individual human to that birth certificate, government bureaucracy will nonetheless accept one as identification. Jane’s father is not sure where her birth certificate is. They have moved several times since she was born. It might be with Jane’s mother. He asks how they can get a duplicate. The staffer tells him that he must apply for that in the county of Jane’s birth, which happens to be in the state across the country where Jane’s mother lives.

Can you prove your relationship to the person standing next to you, to the standard required by civil servants who will be in VERY hot water if they get it wrong?
The law, as written, does not require proof of identity or say what that proof might be. But the law, as implemented, requires both proof of identity and sets a bar for it, all to protect the people who must implement the law.

The staffer also tells Jane and her father that the law requires that both parents be notified. Her father explains that he has custody. The staffer explains that custody status is not mentioned anywhere in the law, which requires that both parents be notified. Her father does not have her mother’s current address and phone number with him. He uses his credit card to make a bunch of cross-country calls, and eventually he manages to get Jane’s mother on the phone. He explains the situation to her. She hangs up.

What constitutes notification?
Saying that you notified someone? An affidavit from each parent? Each parent’s signature on a form? The law does not say. There are people out there looking for the smallest excuse to shut the clinic down. For the protection of their staff and the clinic’s ability to operate, the clinic’s procedure prudently requires something more than someone’s say-so.

The father calls the mother’s number again, on speakerphone, from the staffer’s office. An answering machine picks up. He leaves a message. Jane’s mother does not call back. Even if they can “prove” Jane’s identity and her relationship to her father by finding a copy of her birth certificate, they are out of luck on notifying the parentS.

In other words, Jane cannot legally notify her parents, even though her father is standing next to her and her mother just heard the situation direct from her father.

Jane needs a judicial bypass. Her father drives her across the state, to the court which does those. They get passed around to three different departments to find the one which does them. The law says nothing about which department will provide this service, and as a political hot potato, it ended up in a department which is not immediately obvious. That department does them, but it tries to keep quiet about it, because come budget time they could find that their budget is slashed after protesters picket their department, and that would mean that the department could not fulfill its actual, intended, primary purpose.

By midafternoon, Jane and her father are in the right department. A staffer there tells them that judicial bypasses happen on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It is Tuesday. They can drive back across the state and return on Wednesday, or find a hotel for the night. Jane’s father arranges for another day off from work, and they find a motel.

The fact that a service is theoretically available does not mean that it is actually available in practice.
Under the law, Jane has a right to seek a judicial bypass. The law says nothing about speed or ease of access.

On Wednesday, Jane and her father sign the forms and start the legal process rolling. That afternoon, the case is called and the judge hears them. [Coin flip] … She is puzzled about why they are wasting taxpayer money in the court system. Were both parents not notified, one in person and one by phone? She declines to rule, since there is no necessity for a judicial bypass.

The clinic which provides the abortion is not a part of the court system in any way. They do not coordinate. The court may regard the clinic’s precautions as paranoid, and refuse to aid their paranoia.
I, personally, have watched judges express puzzlement from the bench about why we took a precaution in a criminal case. They seem not to understand sometimes that if we hadn’t taken that precaution, we ran the risk of being ruled against by another judge, or by that same judge on another day in a different mood. Judges strive for consistency, but they’re human, and it’s an impossible target.

Jane and her father ask the clerk of court how to appeal the judge’s ruling. They are referred to the public defenders’ office. They call that office. The paralegal who answers the phone explains that there are no public defenders who take such cases. Yes, they defend rapists and murderers, and they receive the occasional death threat, but to date, none of them has been sniped from a distance or had their house firebombed, and they’ve seen the news coverage on abortion providers. They did have one who used to do it, an experienced attorney who worked pro bono on these cases, but he had to stop after his private practice fell off when he became known as the attorney who helped kill babies.

Also, the public defenders’ office is buried in casework, and if they hire a fresh-faced young attorney tomorrow who would be glad to take such a case, between case preparation, filing times, docket procedures, and other high-priority cases, it will be at least a month before their case can be heard. By that time, though she cannot know it for sure, Jane’s pregnancy is out of the first trimester and into the second. That will complicate the procedure if she manages to get access to an abortion, and also could complicate simply getting access.

The law permits and requires that Jane make use of a service, but it does not mandate the existence of that service, or access to it.

I could go on. There were other barriers mentioned in the post I am thinking of as I write this. But they were more specific, and I don’t want to get specific without the writer’s permission. Suffice it to say, that in that person’s actual experience with the court, there were further barriers to implementation of a system which could actually serve the person seeking the service.

You might protest that this is all very specific, very particular, and that while it might be true in one or two cases, certainly most cases differ in the details. Sure, that’s true. But I have read the accounts from enough people to know that there are many, many scenarios which lead down this road to disaster: familial rape, or one parent in jail, or both parents in jail, or paternity unknown, or mother kicked the kid out for being sinful, or, or, or… One attorney I read commented that familial abuse was not the exception in such cases, but the rule (which should come as no surprise in bypass cases, that families with serious problems are overrepresented among pregnant girls who don’t want to talk to their parents about being pregnant).

Parental notification laws restrict access to medical services. They do not ensure good parenting. They do not mandate a streamlined, responsive government. They restrict access to medical services.

If that’s your objective, to restrict access to medical services, then carry on. Advocate for parental notification laws. But don’t pretend that you just want parental involvement. Because you can’t legislate parental involvement. You can’t even effectively legislate parental knowledge.

All you can really do, ultimately, is legislate governmental involvement.

Good luck with that.

[edited for formatting]

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues, Sex | 56 Comments

Open Thread and Link Farm: Photographic Proof That Yertle the Turtle is Real Edition

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Ampersand

This is an open thread — post what you like. Don’t post what you don’t like. Wiggle your bare toes in the pond. And feel free to self-link.

Prison Rape in Popular Media « Law Journal for Social Justice A good post by our old “Alas” friend Raznor.
It’s neat how the Onion did a perfect satire of Gene Marks’ incredibly clueless “if I were a poor black child” piece so many years before it was published. An Open Letter To A Starving Child
But if you read just one response to that piece, make it this one: A Muscular Empathy – Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Poor Black Kid Tumblr is also pretty funny.
“The border wall now stretches across Arizona in the easiest places to cross, so that migrants are purposefully funneled into the most treacherous conditions. The remains of over 6,000 human bodies have been found in the desert since militarized immigration policies started in the mid 1990s.”
Rich People Create Jobs! And five other myths that need to die for our economy to recover.
The Non-Problem Of Online Piracy “In the absence of serious evidence that the public is suffering from some kind of content drought, I think we have ample reason to oppose new strong IP rules…”
The Gender Ternary: Understanding Transmisogyny | Gender Agenda
QUOTE: “I heard a speech by Noam Chomsky who said that corporations are like super humans. They cannot be hurt like a human can and they never die. They are not susceptible to scrutiny or accountability. This makes them more profitable. If companies want to enjoy these benefits to some degree they have to live with what else comes with being not human. You miss out on compassion, forgiveness, comraderie, empathy, trust — all kinds of shit.”
50 best photos from The Natural World – The Big Picture – Boston.com
Natural Hair Group Gives Away 40 Barbie Dolls with Natural Hair Makeover – COLORLINES
Which Countries Fail the Most at Climate Leadership? | ThinkProgress
The evidence on Unemployment Insurance | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy
Supreme Court Could Tilt US House Majority
The Civil War happened, in part, because people on both sides couldn’t picture what war would be like.
Boycotting the All-American Muslim, and why we should boycott boycotts in general.
Search “let it snow” at Google
I didn’t really get the point of this video until about 30 seconds into it, and then I went “whoooa!”

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Link farms | 89 Comments

Things That Are Not Racist

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Jeff Fecke

A landlord putting up a “Whites Only” sign on her swimming pool? Not racist:

An Ohio landlord accused of discriminating against an African-American girl with a “white only” sign at her swimming pool told ABCNews.com that the sign was an antique and a decoration.

“I’m not a bad person,” said Jamie Hein of Cincinnati. “I don’t have any problem with race at all. It’s a historical sign.”

The sign in question reads, “Public Swimming Pool, White Only.” It is dated 1931 and from Alabama.

Hein, 31, was unapologetic about the racist origins of the sign that she displayed at the entrance to her pool. She said she collects antiques and was given the sign as a gift. She also said that even though the sign seems to indicate that the pool is public, the pool is on her private property and “everybody has to ask before getting in my pool.”

Well, you know, no harm, no foul…

Michael Gunn, 40, is the man who took issue with Hein’s sign and filed a discrimination charge with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. He was a tenant in one of Hein’s properties.

“We invited my daughter, who is African-American, to visit and swim in the pool for the Memorial Day weekend,” Gunn wrote in his complaint. “The owner, Jamie Hein, accused my daughter of making the pool ‘cloudy’ because she used chemicals in her hair. Days later, she posted a sign on the gate to the pool which reads, ‘Public Swimming Pool, White Only.’”

Hein said that the sign had nothing to do with Gunn’s daughter and that it was already up at the time of that party, but cannot be seen when the gate is open.

Oh, well that’s better — she’d already posted a “Whites Only” sign on the pool. It wasn’t in response to the horror of having a black girl swim in the pool with her hair full of chemicals that I can only assume included radon, lead, and ricin.

I must admit, it looks pretty bad for Hein, but she’s got a solid defense.

Gunn said the family previously “had unrestricted access to the pool area,” but Hein said that was not the case. She said everyone, including her own father, has to ask permission before swimming in her pool.

See? It was on her property! That makes it totally fine for her to discriminate against people because of the color of their skin, at least if you’re Ron and/or Rand Paul.

At any rate, it’s pretty awful of the Ohio Civil Rights Commission to find that this was a violation of Gunn’s daughter’s civil rights. Hein is clearly not a racist:

“I’ve never said anything to that child,” Hein said. “If I have to stick up for my white rights, I have to stick up for my white rights. It goes both ways.”

Jamie Hein: sticking up for her white right to put up a racist sign that echoes one of the worst times in American history, just because she happens to love history. Way to stick it to the man! What’s next — them telling her to stop burning crosses on her neighbors’ lawns? She’s just a historical re-enactor!

Honest to God, the only people in this country willing to admit to being racists are decent people who abhor racism, and want to try to get beyond their own internalized racism. I’ll admit, I am racist; I try to do better, and mostly I succeed (and sometimes I fail, and try to learn from my failures), but I figure I can’t do better if I don’t own up to the problem. And the most racist thing I’ve ever done is be pretty clueless about my own privilege. Hein actually put up a “Whites Only” sign on a pool. But she’s not racist. Racists never are.

Posted in Race, racism and related issues | 11 Comments