Post what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want. Self-linking makes the baby Amp squeal with happiness.
I’ve been horribly busy this week — not with cartooning, alas, but with house stuff and non-cartooning work. So no links in this one.
But here’s a couple of photos I liked. (Click on the photos to see some explanation of where they come from.)
Is that second picture the house you have to work on? No wonder you’re busy.
Wow. I knew that California was a left-leaning state, but I didn’t realize it was THAT bad.
i have links!
Presentation of gender in Toy Story 3: minor spoilers. discussing the ways pixar is still getting it wrong, and a few ways it’s getting it right.
Sexual assault in Back to the Future, or “I’m totally about to ruin your nostalgic love for this movie, so get ready”: Trigger warning: discussing how sexual assault is central to the plot of this movie, and why the ending in particular grossed me out.
The Last Airbender: fail fail and more fail: discussing the many many ways this shitfest does a huge disservice to its source material, as well as discussing the films inconsistencies and lack of focus.
Ah, San Fran…though we had a good sized quake yesterday afternoon where I’m at so that was my first thought…
I’ve been blogging on City Hall where I live and how the assistant city manager got caught destroying public records after they were requested. He’s just so icky even when he’s not waving guns in women’s faces. And the swearing in of the city’s latest police chief with my favorite part being that the oath of office was given by an elected official just implicated in illegal behavior involving police resources.
Hopefully this chief will work out but it’s going to be interesting how he’ll uphold the law when his bosses were caught by the state AG office committing violations themselves.
Alllllllrighty, then:
Cindy Pon’s YA novel covers have been whitewashed, which totally sucks. I love the original SP cover; it’s completely fierce, and definitely eyecatching. Now it’s got a caucasian cover model (whose face is cut off) in dark colors. Siiiiiiiiiiiigh.
I’ll also toss out this one I wrote for work, about the ADAP funding crisis from the AIDS service organization standpoint. (ADAP waiting lists are now at an all-time high, with at least one person who’s died while waiting for access to meds — probably more at this point, but I only know of the one officially.)
It turns out that Yiddish has a positive word for not circumcized, or as it was put in Born to Kvetch, a prepuced man. The word is orel, and is used as a neutral term for Christian man.
I thought is was a cool coincidence that I run into orel so soon after reading the discussion here.
This whole story about the actions of the DOJ dropping a voter intimidation case it had already won looks pretty interesting. It doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of notice in the MSM, though. I wonder what would be going on if the case was white people intimidating black voters?
There’s more to be uncovered before we can be sure of what the truth is here. But after all the fuss about Pres. Bush politicizing the Department of Justice, and considering that this man did testify to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and that others have gone public supporting his claims, you’d think more notice would be taken in the press and that the press would be working to in fact do the uncovering.
The actual testimony in front of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights sounds worth further investigation:
The armament was a billy club, which apparent was being brandished with similar remarks at white voters at the polling place.
Mr. Bull is not exactly a white supremacist:
There are allegations being made by other members of the DOJ that Attorney General Holder and his appointees have enunciated policies that voter intimidation cases against black people are not to be prosecuted.
Now, it would be one thing if this was only rumors published in Fox News and Pajamas Media. But this is testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. And that commission has issued requests to have others at the DOJ testify about this matter only to face Atty. Gen. Eric Holder blocking them from doing so. Seems kind of ironic that a black Atty. Gen. would block his staff from testifying in front of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
I think it’s worthwhile to get to the bottom of this. It’s interesting in doing a search on this that I never saw a link to the Associated Press, NBC, ABC, etc. on it. Do you think this is an investigation that’s worth pursuing?
Nancy, are you absolutely sure that orel is a neutral term? It’s obviously related to the Biblical term ‘arel (ערל), which is definitely not neutral, I can only think of contexts where it’s derogatory. It’s not impossible that Yiddish ended up using goy to put down non-Jews, whereas its Biblical meaning is just “nation”, and instead used orel as the neutral term, but I’m a bit suspicious about adopting that one.
@8 – I don’t understand why you’re bringing up “goy” as if only one term for non-Jews could be neutral or derrogatory. Are you suggesting that goy is derrogatory or neutral? And how does that affect whether orel is derrogatory or neutral. Do you think shiksa is derrogatory or neutral? I don’t know anyone who speaks more than a few words of Yiddish, so I don’t have a strong basis for saying what is derrogatory or neutral. I’ve heard people use shiksa, I’ve never heard orel.
Of course Bartle Bull endorsed John McCain, so he’s not exactly a liberal.
While Mr. Bull may once have been a liberal, statements like:
can only come from the modern day Republican Party.
Whether Mr. Bull’s claims are true or not I can’t say. But I am suspicious when the rightwing media touts him as a liberal when he clearly no longer is.
I have some interest in this literary(?) project, about which I wrote this. Someone else described it this way, “You could have your own personal ghost writer explain how you saved your best friend, Roland Barthes, from the ravages of a band of drunk monkeys wielding typewriters.”
Emily, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean there could only ever be one derogatory term and one neutral term! I was just giving an example of a case where a Hebrew word was adopted into Yiddish and changed its connotations. The same could well be true for orel, but I feel nervous about starting to use it without knowing a bit more.
During the Bush administration, Minutemen members — armed with a gun — allegedly harassed Latin@ voters at a polling station, and the Bush DOJ declined to press charges. I don’t recall much of a fuss being made in that case. (In fact, there were a few cases like that that the Bush DOJ declined to press charges on).
In this case, as I see it, there are three issues:
1) Did the Black Panthers, either as individuals or as an organization, do something wrong?
2) If so, can and should that something be prosecuted?
3) By far the most important question: Was the DOJ’s actions in this case determined by the DOJ’s racial bias against white people, as many conservatives have implied or said?
Here’s the incident in question:
The armed man left after the police asked him to.
There are hearsay reports of the two men intimidating three voters who said they’d come back later, and of them threatening a black poll worker. However, there are no direct complaints either from voters who said they were intimidated, or from a poll worker claiming to be threatened.
In the end, the Obama DOJ sought and got an injunction against the guy who carried the weapon. The DOJ decided to drop charges against the other man, and against the Black Panthers as an organization.
So my answers to those three questions:
1) I’d say “yes” to question one. With the possible exception of cops (and then only in some circumstances), hanging out in front of the entrance to a polling place with weapons is just wrong. Wrong when the Minutemen do it, and wrong when the New Panthers do it.
2) Question 2 is tougher. Wearing a politically-charged uniform and hanging out in front of a polling place is expressive behavior, and very likely protected by the first amendment. There are no direct witnesses saying that they were intimidated or threatened by these guys. And there’s zero evidence that the organization told these guys to be threatening or to carry a billy club.
3) Question 3 is pretty ridiculous.
There is basically zero history of the government ever using its power to unfairly practice racial discrimination against whites. Even the US Commission on Civil Rights (a group strongly dominated by conservative activists) isn’t alleging a pattern; they’re inferring this from a single case. The Justice Department’s Perez (originally hired by the first President Bush) has testified that the decisions in this case were made by career staffers with decades of experience, not by Obama’s political appointees.
The only evidence of anti-white racial bias in the DOJ is (a) hearsay coming from Republican activists, which on its own isn’t credible, and (b) the claim that the DOJ’s decision could not have been made in good faith, and therefore the decision must have been made based on extralegal factors.
But I don’t think it’s self-evident that the DOJ’s decision could not have been made in good faith. Here’s a typical example of conservative arguments on this case, from Representative Frank Wolf:
But read the actual memo from Flynn (pdf file), and it’s clear that she didn’t think it was an open-and-shut case at all. The very next sentence in Flynn’s memo says “the argument may not succeed at the default stage, and we should expect the district court to schedule further proceedings.” She points out that “we are seeking relief against political organizations and members in areas central to First Amendment activity” and “it is likely that the court will not order relief absent… further proceedings.” She raises doubts that any case can really be made against the Panther organization: “Our case against the nationals may be a bit of a reach.”
Flynn also seems to suggest seeking a narrow relief (i.e., a slap on the wrist), in order to protect themselves against First Amendment defenses. Of course, seeking a narrow relief is one of the things conservatives are criticizing the DOJ for in this case.
And this is the memo in favor of proceeding.
Thomas Perez, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, testified (pdf link) that the decision to get a ruling against the dude with the nightstick, and drop the other cases, was based on a good-faith legal judgment that there wasn’t enough evidence to justify going forward with the other cases. That, to me, seems overwhelmingly more plausible than the allegations that the DOJ is conspiring to deny justice to white people.
Although in this case, it has not been confirmed by the man concerned.
I am nonetheless curious as to what men especially think about becoming a parent through arrangements such as surrogacy.
I should have said that Born to Kvetch describes orek as neutral. I have no previous experience with the word, and the book is very clear that Yiddish has a lot of local and temporal variation.
The book got a lot of enthusiastic reviews on amazon for what that’s worth– in this case it suggests to me that it’s pretty accurate about Yiddish.
My guess is that if orel were imported into English as a neutral word, it would be neutral here, regardless of what it was in Yiddish.
I ran my first guest post by a former managing editor of the local newspaper on on the history of the former police chief’s public intoxication before his DUI accident.
Thanks, Nancy, that’s just the sort of clarification I was looking for.