Post what you want, when you want, with whom you want. Self-linking makes me clap my heels and dance the night away.
This camera commercial is just neat as a piece of animation, although I found the story odd — I found myself wondering if the dude had gotten divorced or something, just because his wife stopped showing up at all. They also made a sequel with billboard-sized photos.
More links:
- Christopher Hitchens writes beautifully about his cancer.
- Interviews with Christian boys about how girls should dress to be “modest”:
Immodesty, then, is not simply about being vigilant about your clothing (don’t wear a purse that falls diagonally across your body, don’t show your arms or your thighs), it’s a constant vigilance about how you display your body (don’t stretch, bend, or bounce). “Clothing plays a part in modesty, but it is only a part,” an 18 year old male explains, “Any item of clothing can be immodest” (his emphasis).
- The history of zippers is surprisingly entertaining reading. (Via.)
- A graduate student in Medieval Studies at Yale discusses the actual history behind the word Cordova. What a shock: It doesn’t mean anything offensive at all. Who knew that people who uncritically parrot stuff they heard on Fox News could be mistaken?
- THE GREATEST ACTION-ADVENTURE TV SHOW INTROS OF ALL TIME!
- Look at GOP leader Boehner squirm when directly asked about how the GOP’s tax cuts will grow the deficit. A stunning entry in the annals of weaseldom.
- Glenn Greenwald takes apart Ross Douthat’s defense of marriage inequality.
- Dispatch from Arizona: Life Without Sanctuary
- The average term of Supreme Court Justices has gotten much longer, not mainly because people are living longer, but because the job has gotten so much better that almost no one quits anymore.
- We could save over $500 million a year by no longer printing dollar bills, and using dollar coins instead. But our political process is so broken that it’s hard to imagine Congress being willing to pick up a free $500 million dollars that’s just lying on the sidewalk.
- Undocumented immigrants aren’t “jumping the line,” because there is no line to jump.
- “Illegals” are Helping to Save Social Security — for Other Americans :: racismreview.com
- When unemployment rises, xenophobia and nativism rises, too.
- Ear Pull Championship (with photos!)
- Today’s Degrassi episode will feature transgender character
- “Crisis Pregnancy Center” employee suggests that women go through with childbirth in hopes that it’ll reform her abusive boyfriend.
- This cartoon about a newspaper delivery boy made me laugh.
- “Sometimes I think it’s too late for my daughter to develop a healthy sense of her own sexuality, when at 10 she’s already getting clear messages about her function as a object for the male gaze.”
- XKCD on Period Speech
- Another reason Senate Democrats are (and always will be?) losers.
- The NAACP Was Right, Cont.
- Obama Launches New Program to Help Corporations “Take Advantage of Low Labor Costs” Abroad
- States are broke not because of poor planning, but because of a historically bad recession.
- Indian Women Increasingly Taking Self Defense Classes to Fight Back (Literally) Against Eve Teasing
- Unemployment marches on, and if watching this video isn’t terrifying to you then I think there’s something wrong with you (via):
Hm. If the New York Post is to be believed the near-Ground-Zero New York mosque may not happen.
Long term leases are not equivalent to ownership, although I’m not privy as to whether his particular lease allows him to do as he wishes without buying the property. Stay tuned. Especially should this come before the Public Service Commission.
Dear Ampersand,
I apologize for this post’s being off topic, but I wanted to contact you. I am the Jay who was commenting on the posts at familyscolars.org until they banned me. Since I am banned from that forum, I thought I would try to reach you here. I just want to tell you that I think you are a saint to be so calm (and yet persistent) in your challenges there. You and Peter are very effective in challenging many of the assumptions of those people. (BTW, that Karen Clark is especially nutty. If I read it correctly, she was arguing that it was bad that incest is prohibited and that she couldn’t support ssm unless incestuous marriage was permitted. Usually, it is the “slippery slope” argument.
I suspect that you already know this Salon.com article, but I wanted to draw it to your attention because it gives the lie to the propaganda they spew that IAV is a “non partisan” organization or that David Blankenhorn is a “liberal Democrat.” This article was written after Blankenhorn published his op-ed in favor of Prop 8 in the LA Times on the eve of November’s election:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2008/10/02/blankenhorn
In any case, I just want to thank you for your good work.
Best,
Jay
My husband alerted me to this great alternate version of Inception:
http://i.imgur.com/JiPqw.jpg
Hi, Jay. I’m sorry you’ve been banned — I always enjoyed reading your comments at familyscholars. Thanks very much for your compliments on my comments — flattery is always appreciated.
I agree with you about both David’s and the IVF’s partianship. As I commented on familyscholars earlier today, there’s a distinction between someone’s private behavior (such as privately supporting liberal causes), and someone’s public behavior — and both David and the IVF, as public figures, have acted in alliance with conservatives.
Re: “Illegals” are Helping to Save Social Security — for Other Americans
Interesting title. Who are the Americans that “Illegals” (their term, not mine) are are not helping to save SS for?
Wow, the post on the symbolism of Cordoba is more benign than I had imagined.
RonF, that would be those legally eligible for SS benefits.
A fun library version of the Old Spice commercial.
That’s hilarious!
Jake, that’s pretty much everybody except certain groups such as some teaches and railroad company employees. It would have made more sense to me if the title had been “‘Illegals’ are Helping to Save Social Security — for Americans”
I wrote this week about the interrogation of a female officer who had a relationship with a former deputy chief and the kinds of questions they asked.
The first part details the claims filed by both officers.
There’s also the latest in the cold plate scandal this time involving elected officials.
Considering that Americans encompasses North, Central, and South Americans, I think they got their headline right.
I don’t comment on TADA, so I’m slipping this here.
There are lines of argument re: Sondini that I would have been willing to hear out, e.g. “Loneliness and isolation are enormous problems in American society, and while this guy’s issues with them are clearly sick, if we take a step back from his particular manifestation–if we can disconnect the obsession with younger women from his obsession with needing to connect–then we see an issue that seems to correlate to America’s high rates of mental illness, low rates of happiness among the elderly, and so on. Highly mobile nuclear units have dissolved the extended family, and we haven’t yet evolved anything to replace it, apart from extensive church networks which are only amenable to some Americans. Would a greater sense of community have ameliorated Sondini’s loneliness and obsession, and kept him from jumping down the rabbit hole that eventually led to mass murder? I don’t know, but it’s possible it might have helped.”
I don’t know that I *agree* with what I just wrote, but I don’t think it’s inherently upsetting on the same level as “George Sodini is an MRA hero as much a reason to learn game” which obviously glamorizes the murderer, as does “I am calling him a hero,” or these comments which make women out to be objects men have a right to consume: “A decent looking man who earns a good living and does not abuse women DESERVES to get laid… The fact that so many do not, is a crime” and “One thing that might help prevent future incidents of this sort is repealing IMBRA, the federal law that essentially put the mail order bride industry out of business” and “Import ten, twenty million nubile, lithe, young women to America” (because one imports people now?) and “A man deserves to get laid, just a a person who walks into Starbucks with $5 deserves a drink.” That’s not even all the quotes, that’s just some of them. The comments speak out in favor of denying us basic rights: This incident is “why women should not vote” and “Therefore I applaud rape and purposeful violence against women where it is made clear that embittered men are hurting and killing them for not putting out.” They indicate the women’s lives are basically worthless: “It is a very minor tax if just 3 women die in return for the $100 billion or whatever than men pay to women each year.”
That’s all fucking scary and dehumanizing. And it has relatively little to do with trying to understand evil or understand that most murderers are victims at some point–please, let’s not forget the line between attempting to understand something, and justifying it, glamorizing it, dehumanizing its victims, and using the crime to argue for denying the victimized class their basic civil rights.
ETA: Justifying it, as I’m using here, does not mean “attempting to understand why something happened,” but saying “what happened is just”–which RJN did not say, and which several of the MRAs did. What happened was NOT just, in either case.
Doug “won’t judge” the difference between murdering because you can’t force women to fuck you, and murdering because you are subject to white privilege. Fine. But he also apparently won’t judge the difference between saying “women’s lives are worthless, they deserve to be raped, Sondini was a hero, and women should be denied the vote” and explicitly discussing the worth of the victims: “since I do not want to lose sight of the fact that those eight people are gone, I would like everyone reading this post to pause here and go read “Remembering Lives Lost in a Warehouse Rampage,” an article in The New York Times by Patrick McGeehan that memorializes their lives,” and explicitly repeating the victims did not deserve what happened, “No matter how much he might have suffered because of racism, nothing changes the fact that he was guilty of murder.” Nowhere does RJN discuss denying white people civil rights.
Where is there a similarity? Well, one MRA does say, “Not one single woman is capable of understanding this” and RJN does say, “because we are white, we have no way of knowing what it’s like to live through, to borrow bell hooks’ phrase, sequence after sequence after sequence after sequence of “racialized incidents;” there is no way we can know what it’s like to feel the core of who we are eroding beneath those sequences, repeated day after day, year after year, the way rock erodes when water flows incessantly over it; there is no way we can know what it’s like to reach a point where we don’t feel anymore that there is a core to who we are and that the entirety of the society in which we live has arranged things for us that way simply because of the color of our skin; it is to acknowledge that because we are white, no matter how difficult our lives may have been in other ways, we will never have to know the particular desperation that emerges from that particular feeling of emptiness simply because we are white.”
But guess what RJN doesn’t conclude? He doesn’t conclude the MRA’s very fucking next sentence, “This is why women should not vote.”
Maybe it all seems like nit-picking to you, Doug, but basically that means you’re throwing out the content in favor of the form. Elliding the real differences between the two sets of comments indicates to me that maybe you didn’t really get what was horrifying about the Sondini comments in the first place. Were you just upset that someone was talking about the whys and mind of a serial killer as if he might not just be some kind of completely irrational bomb-person that went off in a gym? Did you miss the glamorization, the justification–not a plea for understanding, but the implication that the acts were in fact *justified* which RJN explicitly did not do–, the exhortations to violence and to removing the civil rights of an entire class of people?
Condensing the two sets of commentary is not only inaccurate, it’s insulting. Saying I deserve to die, to be raped, that because I am fat I must consent to being fucked by any man who asks because otherwise I’m holding out for “alpha cock,” I deserve to have no voice in my political process, that my death would be “a minor tax,” that my bodily autonomy is completely irrelevant as long as some guy’s desire is involved… saying that’s equal to “white people don’t have an intimate understanding of racism” is incredibly fucked up. It impugns RJN, sure, but it also minimizes every threat of violence against women in that thread.
So knock it the hell off.
Mandolin,
Just sending you a hug of affirmation. That was a great comment.
Also, the post isn’t up on TADA yet.
I screwed up; criticism accepted.
Since this is, in fact, an open thread, some links to a couple of posts to Katja Grace’s blog:
Why is gender equality so rude?
Discrimination: less is more
Statistical discrimination is externality deliniation
What interview questions should I ask Professor Sharon Lamb, who — if this article is accurate — says that her research suggests that modern superheroes are bad for boys?
For starters, whether she’s ever read a comic book, and whether she’s read comic books historically. The portrayal of women and minorities in “old” comics was hardly a wonderful example to boys. There’s a reason that comics like Watchmen deconstructed ‘classic’ comics and it wasn’t because those offered sterling role models.
Who does she think would win in a fair fight, Thor, or the Hulk?
Hmm. Wonder what this is all about. If anything. It’s a minor effect, at most.
Who does she think would win in a fair fight, Thor, or the Hulk?
Irrelevant. The Hulk never gets a fair fight. It’s part of his character that every situation he gets in is rigged against him. (Full disclosure: statements based on extremely limited knowledge of character.)
Thor. Gods beat superheroes.
Oh, come on. Somewhere in the Marvel Universe Thor vs. Hulk must have happened.
Now, what I’d like to know is who would win: Dr. Bruce Banner or Dr. Donald Blake?
Well, Blake technically has a weapon.
OTOH, if Banner takes the fight at all seriously it’s going to turn into Blake vs the Hulk pretty quickly.
Indeed, Thor vs Hulk has been done at least twice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk_Vs#Hulk_vs._Thor
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/Hulk-Thor-Battle-Snider-100311.html
Now, the real burning question of our age is Goku vs. Superman. ;)
Ampersand (and others),
Here is a link to an interesting/scary/depressing post (of medium length) about weight loss surgery in California (with apologies if you’ve already seen it): http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/08/17/predatory-lending-and-health-services/
~ April Q
None of those describe fair fights. Hand to hand, steel cage (well, it’ll have to be forcefields or something, steel is cardboard to these guys), no weapons, no allies, no trickery.
My money says Hulk.
If you take away Thor’s hammer then Hulk all the way but with the hammer the only way to tell would be if Q somehow made those two real and had them fight it out (preferably somewhere where the damage to the landscape won’t be too bad, like Jupiter).
But seriously I wouldn’t be so quick to say that even older superheroes were such great role models for boys. You pretty much learn that violence is the answer, one’s own problems outside of the hero life pale in comparison to the “greater good” (okay I’m all for making a sacrifice for the greater good but I’m really surprised that Peter Parker hasn’t started to display serious pyschological issues), you must shoulder the burdens of the world on your sholders and your shoulders alone, if you don’t do the right thing you’re a coward, and the principle of 99 out of 100 (meaning that if you do 99 out of 100 things right people’s memory and impression of you will be based on that one thing you got wrong) is magnified.
And about that article:
I hope she realizes that Iron is only about 25 years newer than Superman. (1938 vs 1963). Or maybe she is not literally saying “today’s superhero” so much as “the superheroes that are popular today”.
I would like to ask how/why some heroes manage to get lots of attention despite being the near opposite of what she describes there. My examples of this would be Professor X and Magneto (to an extent) and their MLK/Malcom X like relationship.
I think she’s talking about how she thinks popular superheroes today are depicted. The depiction of a superhero can change a lot over time; there’s a huge difference between the Batman in the current movies and the Adam West Batman, for example.
I would love to see Adam West, with his pot-belly straining the grey draylon to bursting-point, fall off the batpod and bounce a couple of times. Shame we’ll never see that.
Or have I been reading too many ‘dark’ superhero comics?
Amp–
Just to say that the bookstore is a great idea! And thanks for listing my translations as well.
Mandolin:
Ah, but since when is the Hulk a superhero?
Isn’t that what Marvel did with the Hulk and with Spiderman, and even the X-Men? Created beings with superior abilities but who were neither “black” nor “white”, neither pure heroes or pure villians? DC had that with Batman but then threw it away for a while.
With regards to the article:
The exploitation of women to the degree that Tony Stark did was actually pretty unique to the Iron Man character. And he has gone through a lot of changes in that regard IIRC.
Hey, Amp, those little graphics that appear after each comment have sparked an idea. Is there a way to personalize those, so that a given person’s posts are always followed by the same graphic? A graphical tagline?
I have no idea, sorry. I only know what happens in comics when it reaches the mainstream. Except Xmen. I watched the animated Xmen show on some mornings when I was about 11. I wanted to be Storm.
The ‘tragic hero’ was kind of Stan Lee’s thing. He’s said that he wanted heroes who were not all perfect Superman types, and who the reader would identify with – hence Spiderman. The Hulk was a flat-out attempt to make Frankenstein’s monster as a superhero.
mythago, I’m not sure if there’s a generally accepted definition for “superhero”. But my understanding of it would be that it’s an entity who a) has some innate abilities that are far superior to those of standard human beings and who b) seeks to use them for the benefit of mankind. In his original incarnation Hulk fails on b). Hulk pretty much wants to be left alone and uses his strength and other abilities primarily for his own survival, not to save the world. Marvel messed around with that formula down the line. Originally he was led to do good under the influence of others such as the Avengers or that kid who was his sidekick. Then later they let Bruce Banner’s brain leak into Hulk’s body. But the original premise seems to me to have been not “hero” but “elemental force in a world he didn’t understand”.
There isn’t, but… Ahem.
Hm. The Hulk certainly satisfies 1 through 4. In the beginning, at least, he spent a lot of time fighting the U.S. Army, so that would fail 5, but later on he fought a lot of super-human protagonists. But at least in his initial incarnation he failed the initial qualification – he didn’t fight for the good of society, he fought for survival and to be left alone. So I’d say by that definition the Hulk was not a superhero.