Whitefish Trip Photos

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Jen Sorensen

Here are some photos I took while visiting Whitefish, Montana for my Oregonian story. Enjoy!

snow ghosts on Big Mountain

Snow ghosts on Big Mountain

snow ghost kangaroo

Close-up of the snow kangaroo

Looking down at Whitefish Lake

Looking down at Whitefish Lake

The Bulldog Saloon

EAT at the Bulldog Saloon

Non-Hostile Hostel sign

One of many signs from defunct businesses hanging in the Great Northern Bar

Whitefish depot at dawn

Whitefish Depot at dawn

I didn’t get to talk much about restaurants in my article, but if you do go to Whitefish, I recommend Wasabi Sushi, Piggyback BBQ, and the sandwiches at Montana Coffee Traders. I ate cheap, but well!

Posted in Syndicated feeds | Tagged | 1 Comment

House passes measure stripping Planned Parenthood funding

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

From MSNBC:

As expected, [Republican] Indiana Rep. Mike Pence’s amendment to strip federal funding for Planned Parenthood passed the House by a 240-185 vote. Ten Democrats joined the GOP majority, while seven Republicans voted against the measure.

It is very unlikely that the measure would pass the Democratic-controlled Senate.

This link will take you to a page where you can sign a petition, donate money, etc. Please consider doing so.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights | 25 Comments

Response to Clarisse Thorn’s Backlash 2: Nuke *and* appease, please; be a both/and blogiverse

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Mandolin

On Feministe, I posted in reponse to Clarisse Thorn’s article on “The Backlash 2” about where activists should draw the balance between encouraging safe spaces and high-level conversation on the one hand, and not unfairly filtering out contributions from people who are privileged and/or aren’t as well-educated on the topic.

I referenced:

Kinsey Hope’s theory on the different kinds of strategies employed by commenters in arguments: the nuker, the appeaser, the the emoter and the logic bomber. From commenter Jadey at Feministe, a link to the introduction to her four-part series on the topic.

And also I Blame the Patriarchy’s recent post on a change in her comment policy which states, “This blog is goin’ dudeless. If you are commenting as a dude, don’t do it here,” the salient bit of which (in my opinion) is *as a dude* which implies the commenters’ presentation is being restricted, not the commenters’ chromosomes, gender identification, or genitalia.

Here’s my comment:

I’m a big fan of the idea that there should be a multiplicity of strategies and points of view. So, ideally, there should be forums where nukers are asked to take a gentler stance, and forums where nukers are permitted. There should be forums that draw the line for “is this a valuable contribution?” at well before 101, and forums that draw the line at the advanced calculus level.

They all have their benefits, and they all have their detriments, and the more different types of conversations that are happening and being engaged in, the more different kinds of ideas can be produced and shared.

I admit you’re more of an appeaser than I prefer. I like your work, and many of your thoughts, and I appreciate the consideration and time you put into your pieces. I feel I learn from seeing your perspective. I feel much the same way about I Blame the Patriarchy. Even if I don’t agree with your conclusions or hers (and sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t), I’ve learned something by exposure to both.

I’m not particularly fond of arguments, though, that suggest all spaces should be similar in terms of how accepting/appeasing/101-friendly they are. Maybe that’s not what you meant to suggest, but it’s sort of how I read it. I think the balance you strike is a needed balance. But I also think more restrictive balances are needed.

To draw the comparison again to I Blame the Patriarchy, I actually think that her comment restriction (at least as I read it) is kind of brilliant–men are actually perfectly permitted to post as long as they don’t post about being men, since that’s not the topic of the space. I admit that her piece was ambiguous on the point, but that’s what I read her to mean based on her prior essays on the subject, in which she celebrates men’s contributions to the site, but says she finds it grating when someone takes the conversation to a place about “I, as a man, feel that the issue should really be X.”

It’s not that men’s perspectives on the issues are bad in general, but I think it’s okay to have a space where they don’t dominate the conversation. And it’s okay to have spaces where they do! I actually often think Alas, a Blog, where I write, would be much more successful as a space intended for male perspectives on feminism and positive constructions of men’s rights activism. However, the men I write with, who I feel are rather brilliant on these topics, have expressed that they don’t feel like they have time to create what would amount to a new movement, which is reasonable–they have lives.

Anyway, there’s room for that sort of forum (I would argue even deep necessity for it, since men really are restricted by some of the kinds of things MRAs don’t ever manage to productively talk about), and there’s room for I Blame the Patriarchy’s comment policy, and there’s room for places that do both, or some mixture.

(Aside: Unfortunately, I think I Blame the Partiarchy’s comment policy is doomed to failure for the simple reason that the commentariat is kind of a clusterfuck. There’s poisonous privilege of the kind that I really don’t think is okay anywhere, as per the threads on trans rights. A few years ago, I had brief hope that the commentariat was going to explode out all their nasty and then start to improve, as happens sometimes, but it never seemed to happen there. Not that there isn’t signal there, sometimes, but there’s a lot, a lot of noise.)

I’m not trying to say (as I believe you are also not trying to say) that there are never lines where behavior is unacceptable. I’m not really chill with any social justice forum that permits the kinds of comments about trans people that are regularly written at IBTP. I guess I might be forced to admit that it might be okay in some kind of no-moderation community where the goal was antithetical to moderation, because I do believe that there’s probably something to be gained from those conversations just as there is from controlled ones, but permitting that kind of poison is, IMO, antithetical to stated social justice goals.

Anyway. To analogize it to a class discussion, some professors direct a lot, some a little, some not at all. On either end, the discussion can be impaired by too little or too much direction. But even the extremes work for some people, produce a conversation that might not happen in the same way if a different technique was used. And on the internet, where we do not lack for classrooms, I think it’s great for many different strategies to be embraced.

So, basically, both/and please. Nukers and appeasers. 101 conversation and level 1 conversation and the kind of conversation you only get at conferences with experts. And lots of room for people to pick which settings they want to be in.

Posted in Uncategorized | 33 Comments

You can’t talk about the debt without talking about rising medical costs

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Ampersand

Via Andrew Sullivan, I read this article by Anne Lowrey trying to make the deficit understandable by putting it in terms of a household budget.

For our purposes, let’s use $60,000 as the government’s income and $85,000 as its expenses.
Advertisement

Where does all of that spending go? Mostly, to mandatory programs, spending that does not change much year-to-year and is not easily reduced. But given that mandatory spending makes up about 60 percent of spending, if the debt is going to come down, these are the line items that need to change. Next year, Obama is requesting $17,400 for Social Security, $10,700 for Medicare, $6,100 for Medicaid, and $13,600 for other mandatory programs such as food stamps.[…]

The country needs to fund the Afghanistan war and the Department of Defense. This is not cheap: In fiscal year 2012, Obama is asking for $20,000 for overall security costs.

So far, my friend, you’re at $68,000. No cuts yet, and you’ve already blown your budget by about $8,000.

Obama’s budget primarily proposes cutting stuff from outside that $68,000. Obviously, that won’t do much:

So where to cut? The White House is mostly focusing on those nonsecurity, discretionary programs. Next year alone, the federal government plans to cut from 200 of them—axing some of them entirely. This saves a grand total of $750…

If people are serious about cutting the debt, then they have to be willing to consider cutting entitlements; they have to be willing to consider cutting military spending; and they have to be willing to consider increasing the household’s income, which is to say, raising taxes.

But there’s another, even more important requirement, and that’s addressing rising medical spending.

Lowrey says one thing that’s absolutely wrong:

Mostly, to mandatory programs, spending that does not change much year-to-year and is not easily reduced.

That’s simply not true. A big chunk of our spending is on Medicare and other programs that subsidize medical care, and that spending is changing year-to-year. It’s going up — going up so fast, that in the long term it matters more for our budget outlook than anything else does. Here’s a graph from the CBO:

Okay, let’s say that we manage to cut our 2013 budget so severely that we wipe the deficit out (that is, our spending isn’t bigger than our income) — how does that change the budget outlook? Here’s the same graph. Except I’ve added a new line, indicating what happens if we get rid of next year’s deficit.

So in return for permanent spending cuts that will be politically difficult and cause real pain for many Americans (less heating oil in winter, less money to pay for college, etc), we’ll “fix” the deficit for five years. 2013 through 2017. Then, in 2018, we’ll be back to deficit spending. Does that seem like a worthwhile trade to you? If so, I’m guessing that you’re not someone who depends on Federal programs to stay warm in the winter, or whose ability to go to college (and long-term financial security) depends on Federal aid.

Let’s return to Lowrey’s household budget. We now spending about $17,000 of our household’s $60,000 income on medical expenses. But although the other items on our budget don’t change much year-to-year, our medical spending has been rising about $850 a year. That means that in a decade, if nothing changes, we’ll be spending $26,000 of our $60,000 income on medical expenses, and in 20 years more than half our income will be needed to pay for our medical expenses.

If we’re not addressing the rising costs of medical care, then we’re not addressing the real long-term federal debt. It really is that simple.

* * *

UPDATE: For further reference, here’s a graph showing how total health expenditures as a share of GDP have changed in the US and other countries. Big thanks to Charles for making the graph. Further discussion in the comments.

Data from exhibit 5 of “Health Care Spending In The United States and OECD Countries,” by Kaiser Family Foundation.

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Economics and the like, Health Care and Related Issues | 18 Comments

This Week’s Cartoon: Freelancer Riot At Huffington Palace

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Jen Sorensen

A rare one-panel Slowpoke. I was sure someone must have already done this idea, but couldn’t find it anywhere.

I often hear people say that Huffpo’s unpaid contributors were fools for doing all that free work in the first place. Which is mostly true, but overlooks the fact that Huffpo also seeks out work from published writers and cartoonists. And they simply refuse to pay. As Matt Bors blogged last week, Huffpo contacted him while he was in Afghanistan, filing comics for paying clients. They wanted to post his work on the site, but darned if they just didn’t have the budget to pay for it! Not only was Huffpo being unfair to him, but to the publications that were buying the work. He said no, but this sort of situation creates an unfortunate race to the bottom for freelancers and paying publications alike. Which is why I try to avoid clicking on any links to the Huffington Post if I can.

For further reading, I suggest this article in the Columbia Journalism Review about an earlier case of labor exploitation involving AOL.

Oh, and you can read my Huffpo-AOL comments and those of several other cartoonists over at Washington Post’s “Comic Riffs” blog.

Posted in Syndicated feeds | 1 Comment

Why Vida’s “The Count” Matters to Me

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

The results of Vida’s The Count 2010 reveal a shocking, though not really surprising, disparity–weighed heavily in favor of men–between the numbers of male and female writers published, reviewed and reviewing in some of our most prominent literary magazines. As one might expect, a myriad of articles, essays and blog posts have begun to appear that attempt to explain the numbers–some to explain them away, some to explain them as a way of moving forward. Katha Pollitt’s piece appeared in Slate; Eileen Myles has one on The Awl; Jessa Crispin has a piece on PBS.org; there’s a piece on Ms. Magazine’s blog by Margot Magowan; Annie Finch wrote a blog post called “How To Publish Women Writers: A Letter to Publishers about the VIDA Count” on Her Circle Ezine; Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry, has written a blog post about his attempts to get that magazine to address the gender imbalance; this post on Alas links to a couple of other responses; and I have a feeling I have just skimmed the surface of what’s been written since The Count was published.

Ironically, when I first read the “The Count 2010,” I had just set aside a similar, but much smaller scale counting project of my own that I was planning to write about in a blog post that, for a variety of reasons, never got written. I had two magazines in front of me. One was Time’s issue of November 29, 2010, with a cover story called Who Needs Marriage?; the other was The Economist’s end-of year 2010 issue. I had not even read Time’s cover story yet and I was already wondering how it might have been different had it been written not by Belinda Luscombe, but by a man. Not that I anticipated there would be anything wrong with the way Luscombe handled the story, but it just seemed to me so obvious that a cover story about marriage would have been assigned to a woman–because relationships is one of the things women are expected and therefore traditionally assigned to write about–that I could not help but wonder what a male perspective would have brought to the article that a female perspective would have missed.

Then I began to wonder what kind of perspective I would find in The Economist. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Actually, I wondered if my assumption that the perspective offered by the articles in The Economist would be overwhelmingly male would turn out to be true. So I counted. The notes I took were unfortunately lost in the wave of papers that swept over my desk in the beginning-of-semester craziness, but I will tell you that the ratio of male to female writers that I found in that issue of The Economist was in keeping with what Vida found in the magazines and journals they surveyed.

The question I wanted to ask in the post I didn’t write was how different the world might look through the lens that issue was intended to provide if more of the writers providing the analysis in it had been women. It’s crucial to realize that asking this question is not merely an abstract intellectual exercise, nor is it simply the first step in achieving some kind numerical parity; what does and does not get seen because of who is doing the seeing matters to each of us in very material ways, even if we are unaware of it. Our governments make policy based on this; curricula are written based on this; laws are passed based on this; we make decisions about how to raise our children based on this; about the food we eat and where we live; how we spend our money; and I could go on and on. Who gets published, in other words, and why, and what kind of writing they are able to publish, is or ought to be a matter of personal concern for everyone, not just the people who are trying to get their words into print.

That’s how I feel about “The Count 2010.” It’s personal for me, not out of some abstract commitment to equality, but because I would not be the person I am today had it not been for the women writers whose work I read and reread in my 20s and 30s. I owe to Adrienne Rich, for example, as I recently wrote in a post called Why I Am a Pro-Feminist Man, not only the healing I have achieved from the sexual abuse I suffered as a young boy, but also the commitment to feminism that has helped me be in the world in a far more ethically meaningful way than I think I would otherwise have been. On the Who I Am page on my website, I wrote briefly about the poet and essayist June Jordan and the role she played in my life as a teacher; but it was reading her poetry and political essays that made the greatest impact on me, because I learned from her work how to write explicitly out of a political engagement with the life around me, in the largest sense that the phrase “political engagement” can be understood.

Other names that would appear on the list of women writers who have been important to me include Andrea Dworkin, Rosalind Miles, Kim Chernin, Julia Alvarez, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sallie Tisdale; and I could go to my bookshelf and start to list the women whose books have been important to me in more recent years; but making the list is not the point, or at least it’s not my point here, since I wouldn’t say that making such a list is unimportant. Rather, my point is that the odds these women had to beat in order to get published were also odds against my becoming who I am today, and so the odds against women being published that The Count demonstrates are in existence today are also odds against someone somewhere (multiplied many times over) becoming who they would be if they had the opportunity to read the work of those women. Those odds are not fair, and that is something that all of us should take very personally.

Cross-posted on The Poetry in The Politics and The Politics in The Poetry.

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, literature | 2 Comments

MIND MELD: Rereading

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Mandolin

Over at Mind Meld, John DeNardo asked (on behalf of Derryl Murphy), “What science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror books do [you] read and re-read again?”

There are lots of interesting answers from authors from Pamela Sargent to N. K. Jemisin. You should go check out the whole thing. Meanwhile, here’s a teaser in the form of my answer to the question:

If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to answer this question a bit tangentially, by discussing my experience of rereading in general and then moving into the specific. Rereading is always interesting for me because of the way I was trained to read–namely, by my mother, who is a librarian, an avid reader, and someone who *hates* rereading.

To my mother, reading is accomplishing a task. It’s checking off a box on your list of life’s achievements. I have read that book–check.

Not that she doesn’t enjoy reading. She loves reading. But to her, rereading is pointless. You’ve already checked off that box, so what’s the point in revisiting?

So, then there’s me. I love rereading, but I always feel a little guilty about it. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure.

I tend to reread for one of three reasons:

I find the work extremely profound and revisiting it allows me to uncover new layers in the text. Not every work can tolerate this kind of rereading, but I love it when I find a text that is equally breathtaking–though usually breathtaking in a different way–on reread. I go to Octavia Butler’s work for experiences like this, particularly Lilith’s Brood and Parable of the Sower, although I admit it’s gotten harder to do this since she died. As a friend of mine says, it’s sad to live in a world where there will never be a new piece of work by Octavia Butler.

I find the work comforting and part of the reason I like rereading it is because it’s a familiar, cozy experience. I reread many of the Terry Pratchett books every year or so. I often do it when I’m sick or stressed out and I don’t have the mental resources to go exploring. I just want to be in a warm cocoon with Lions of Al Rassan or Doomsday Book or Wicked.

Nostalgia. I reread work because I want to evoke the feeling I had the first time I read it. This can be great–I really love Tanith Lee’s Biting the Sun and Silver Metal Lover, for instance, although I think they were really something keyed into my experience of the world as an adolescent. Some children’s books still have that crackle of a world I saw as potentially magical–E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Roald Dahl’s Mathilda, The Forbidden Door by Merilee Heyer. Rereading for nostalgia can also be painful, though. In college, when I met someone who had written Pern fan fiction in high school, I thought to myself, hey, it would be fun to read those again. “It really won’t be,” she told me, “You’re going to be sad you did.” I didn’t believe her, but she was right and I was so very wrong.

Of course there’s a lot of overlap between these categories. I find Octavia Butler’s work very profound, but it also reminds me of all the times in all the previous years when I’ve read it before. Wicked is comforting, but also nostalgic of my adolescence–when I was sixteen, I painfully over-identified with Elphaba. Even though I see Biting the Sun through the eyes of my teenage self, I discover new layers when I reread it, too, especially as I read more feminist SF and gender theory and see the ways in which the book is part of an ongoing conversation.

I guess there’s also a fourth reason I reread–which is when I’m trying to figure out how an author achieves a particular effect, or do a structural analysis on a text because I hope it will help me discover something about my own writing. But while I often end up doing this as I reread, I don’t think it’s usually what’s on my mind when I go pick up the book. Instead I’ll think “You know what I want to reread? That book!” and then when I’m halfway through, realize that it’s because there was something in it that resonates with one of my own projects, or some way I’m thinking about writing, or even just a philosophical or emotional dilemma I’ve been contemplating.

I really love rereading–I find it inspirational, profound, comforting and nostalgic. But I have to admit, from time to time when I look at my shelves and see all the books I still haven’t managed to pick up for the first time, I start to worry about all those empty boxes that I still can’t check off.

–so what books do you like to reread?

Posted in literature | 18 Comments

Lara Logan Rocks

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Jen Sorensen

I actually linked to this video nearly five years ago, but it’s worth a replay now. The clip shows Logan being interviewed a highly condescending Howard Kurtz, who was needling her about why the reporting from Iraq was so “negative.” I came away from this very impressed by Logan, and was saddened today to hear about what happened to her in Egypt.

[UPDATE: Reading more about Logan, I see she’s made some comments about Afghanistan that suggest she’s been embedded with the military too long. But I still admire the way she handled Kurtz here.]

Posted in Syndicated feeds | 7 Comments

Vile Beyond Words

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Jeff Fecke

As you may have heard, CBS correspondent Lara Logan was brutally sexually assaulted while covering the revolution in Egypt:

CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a “60 Minutes” story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy.

In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently in the hospital recovering.

It’s an awful story, and of course most people would simply hope that Logan makes a full recovery.

Not Debbie Schlussel, though. Yes, the Poor Man’s Pam Gellar felt the need to take Logan’s story and turn it into yet another arrow in her quiver of hate:

As I’ve noted before, it bothers me not a lick when mainstream media reporters who keep telling us Muslims and Islam are peaceful get a taste of just how “peaceful” Muslims and Islam really are. In fact, it kinda warms my heart.  Still, it’s also a great reminder of just how “civilized” these “people” (or, as I like to call them in Arabic, “Bahai’im” [Animals]) are[…]

I just love it when the people of the profession of “the public’s right to know” suddenly want “privacy.” Tell it to your next interview subject, Lara. Of course CBS has no further comment. Wouldn’t wanna impugn the “peacefullness” of “Religion of Peace” animals, would we? Now, if they were Christians or Jews, well, then there would be comments galore.

So sad, too bad, Lara. No one told her to go there. She knew the risks. And she should have known what Islam is all about. Now she knows. Or so we’d hope. But in the case of the media vis-a-vis Islam, that’s a hope that’s generally unanswered.

So to hell with Lara Logan. That’s what she gets for viewing Muslims as humans, instead of animals, amirite?

Now, if Islam was the only religion to harbor rapists, Schlussel might have a point buried in her utter indifference to the rape of a woman. But alas, there are rapists of all religions, races, and nationalities. Indeed, Christians have been known to rape Muslims. And Americans have been happy to engage in gang rape.

No, while the behavior in question is abhorrent, it is far from limited to the Muslim and Arab world. Rape occurs across cultures and religions. If there is a saving grace in all this, it is that those who fight rape are everywhere, too; Logan was saved by Egyptian women and soldiers who defended their fellow human, and who got her to safety at risk to themselves. That’s far from subhuman; indeed, it’s the best part of humanity.

No, the assault on Logan doesn’t show us that Muslims are feral. It shows them as all too human. That’s why it’s horrific. And that’s why any decent person simply condemns it, and wishes Logan a speedy recovery.

Posted in About the Bloggers, Ageism, Anti-atheism | 17 Comments

Quote: Make It More Ethnic

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Ampersand

I have been on sets before when a director says ‘can you make it more ethnic?’ I always say ‘can you demonstrate to me how you want it done?’ That usually ends it.

–Yvette Nicole Brown

Reading this article by Jabari Asim made me think about another pernicious aspect of the “sassy fat black women” stereotype, which is that almost any strong or angry character played by a fat black actress is going to come off as the stereotype, even when that’s unfair. Years before she starred in “Community,” Yvette Nicole Brown’s photo from a Dairy Queen commercial illustrated this New York Times article about the stereotype.

But the photo, from a Dairy Queen commercial about a guy who repeatedly drops his carry-on luggage ((It took me a few moments before I got why Youtube’s suggested next video to watch was Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”)) on another passenger’s head, is a marginal case at best.

Brown’s job in this commercial is to be comically enraged. She uses wide eyes and an angry voice to do this. I don’t think a big white guy, given the same part, would have performed it differently. But when Brown did it, her photograph was published in the Times as an example of a troubling racial stereotype. That can’t be fun.

As Ani remarks in the comments of pre-Racialicious:

I would be pretty sassy and annoyed if a someone’s large carry on bag was repeatedly dropped on my head. I didn’t think her reaction was totally out of line for this type of situation. […]

I am not saying terrible racial stereotypes don’t happen, but does context (ie carry-on being repeatedly dropped on head) ever trump that?

Obviously, the stereotypical casting of fat black women as “sassy” happens a lot, and should be criticized. But I also don’t want a situation where an actress like Brown automatically gets criticized if she ever plays strong or angry.

Anyhow, great quote, isn’t it?

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Media criticism, Race, racism and related issues | 10 Comments