John McGowan, guest-posting at Michael Berube’s blog, is critiquing Martha Nussbaum’s critique of Judith Butler (part one and part two). I think readers who want to know a bit of what Judith Butler’s work is about, but have found Butler’s ultra-opaque prose unapproachable, might find McGowan’s discussion very helpful.
Amy of the 50 Minute Hour has an excellent post regarding the recent “doctor badgering fat women patients” controversy, and more broadly criticizing the entire weight-loss approach to health taken by too many doctors.
Dawn of The Dawn Patrol thinks that pro-choicers are uncaring meanies. I’ve been debating about various things with her and the other folks there in the comments. Amanda and Lauren have been posting there, too. Dawn enforces civility and on-topicness pretty strictly, so if you’re tempted to post there, be warned.
Dawn also has posted a list of guidelines for civil debate, written by a couple of high-school debaters, which I want to preserve the link to for future reference.
Kim Gandy (president of NOW) expresses horror at what’s happening to women’s rights in Iraq. Some stupid anti-feminist troll leaves a comment saying that she looks like Tom Hanks; I never noticed before, but (at least in this photo) (and without meaning it in the negative or insulting way the troll meant it) she actually kind of does.
Just to show that right-wingers aren’t always wrong, I should point out that this writer at World Net Daily is also outraged at the betrayal of Iraqi women.
Pro-lifers in Kansas are suing to prevent the government from paying for abortions in any circumstances at all – even when an abortion is necessary to save the mother’s life. Lovely. Lauren at Feministe has the story.
Res Ispa has two good posts criticizing the marriage movement’s indifference to the well-being of children growing up in non-traditional households, here and here. “There is a sense among the gay parenting opponents that if they just wish hard enough, gay parents are going to disappear. That just isn’t realistic and it’s appallingly bad public policy.”
Surprisingly, a study has found that watching Fox News doesn’t change who people vote for. Nice to know. Thanks to “Alas” reader Sara for the tip.
This is such a nice roundup that I’m just linking to the whole thing. Nice job!
Dawn enforces civility and on-topicness pretty strictly, so if you’re tempted to post there, be warned.
Well, she hasn’t banned me yet, but she does delete my comments at an alarming rate. Of course, I’ve been poking her hard with the hypocrite stick, so I probably deserve it. But it’s hard for me to care about civility when she pretty much wrote a post that’s main point is “Despite the long-term relationship that has all the hallmarks of boring old monogamy, Amanda is actually a big slut.” The bar to get into the Slut Club is set pretty low these days if you can get in by having sex with only one person.
I don’t think I’ll be posting there. The desire to control thread drift that firmly would be admirable, if the blog host herself didn’t routinely encourage drift by –for example– likening abortion to heroin addiction and PP to drug pushers;Then she scolds and plays snip-o-rama with people who respond to the drift that she herself encourages. Yeesh. Dirty pool is dirty pool, no matter how “civil” the terms are that it’s couched in.
An ongoing mystery to me is why some opinion-crafters can be vehement in their dislike of “personal attacks” and yet sit quietly when their own side –as happened in that very thread– can basically say that all sex outside the bonds of het monogamous marriage amounts to shallow mutual masturbation and moral decay. If that’s not a personal attack, it’s most assuredly an attack on the personal lives of millions, based upon nothing but the knowledge that those millions didn’t have Bible-based sex under Fundie-Christian-approved social restrictions. The smugness and air of superiority is astounding, if only because it’s so predictably cliched’. Stuff like that always makes me want to start my own pagan polyamory board, and I personally care for neither Paganism nor polyamory. :/
Just to show that right-wingers aren’t always wrong, I should point out that this writer at World Net Daily is also outraged at the betrayal of Iraqi women.
I’m not impressed by the writer at WorldNetDaily’s concern. Outrage is cheap. I notice the doesn’t actually try to suggest a way to rectify the situation.
The problem in Iraq is that we went in with the idea that Iraq was mostly populated by people who were interested in secular government and western concepts of universal human rights (as opposed to “me and mine”). Mainly because fundamnetalism had been suppressed by Saddam, we assumed that it would not play a big role in Iraq.
Because of this, we were unprepared to deal with a situation in which a large number of Iraqis wanted to live in a theocracy (or at least in a government much closer to a theocracy than the one we would choose). The reason we are willing to compromise on such issues as women’s rights, secular government, and protection of minorities, is that there are powerful groups in Iraq that oppose such things, and we cannot afford to lose the support of such groups, because without them, we may lose what semblance of order we have. We simply do not have the force strength we would need to be able to keep the fundamentalists in check on our own, and so we have to deal with them. Or more simply, our presence in Iraq is too weak for us to negotiate with the fundamentalists from a position of strength.
Put another way, if we are going to fight for women’s rights in Iraq, we are most likely going to need a much larger force presence, we are going to need to assert a lot more control over the process of Iraqi-constitution writing, and we are going to have to most likely deal with a larger and more deadly insurgency as we lose the support of a lot of the religious Shiite groups.
I don’t think that the US is compromising on women’s rights because we don’t care, but becasue we have little choice. This is happening because we went in with the assumption that the Iraqis were more like us than they were and so were unprepared to deal with the possibility of heavy popular support for Sharia. (Of course, it is not clear to me that we could have prepared for this possibility – to secure Iraq and to keep the fundamentalists in line, we probably needed at least twice as many soldiers as we had, and it is in no way clear to me that that many were available; but at least if we had been less optimistic, everyone would have known the score earlier rather than feeling betrayed when we allowed the empowerment of fundamentalists).
Just to show that right-wingers aren’t always wrong, I should point out that this writer at World Net Daily is also outraged at the betrayal of Iraqi women.
People are usually pretty outraged when somebody else encroaches on their turf. Dude, don’t be making with the Islamofacist oppression, we’ll do it our way!
As I recall, Tom Hanks didn’t look too bad as a girl.
Amp, I’m amazed at your patience with some of the posters on Dawn’s site. I cannot for the life of me understand her posting policy. She claims that she wants to be fair and civil so she deletes comments she believes are vulgar, off topic, and overly insulting. But what is really happening is that if you post something that she doesn’t agree with, you have to make sure it’s framed really, really nicely or else she’ll delete it or accuse you of thread drift. But if you post something she agrees with, she’ll let you get away with anything but blatant insults.
The whole thing is very irritating to me and frankly it’s turned the thread into the appropriate way to hold a discussion between pro-choicers and anti-choicers rather than a constructive dialogue on the issues.
But props to you for trying to point that out and still continue the dialogue. I hope you manage to get through to them.
If you ask me, Dawn enforces her “civility” and topic rules fairly inconsistently (to put it kindly). I agree completely with alsis39. How can it be “off topic” to point out that pro-choice folks and abortion foes can have fundamental differences of opinion about what an abortion really entails, but then OK to equate abortion with heroin addiction? She’s not looking for a dialogue on the issue.
Alsis, I wholeheartedly concur. I find it sad that she drew the conclusions she did from my post, which is clearly an attempt to constructively discuss our inherent differences from either side of the fence. That she is a professional makes me wonder.
I have many more unkind things to say but I’ll just keep them to myself. :P
And further, I’m confused by her “Amanda has never written about my pet syndrome thus she doesn’t care about women” missle. Nevermind that Amanda had another blog before Pandagon, or that Pandagon lost its archives not too long ago, if Amanda didn’t publicly write about Dawn’s issue of interest it is clearly a sign that feminists are shrewd, ignorant harpies.
And actually, now that I’m thinking about it, the scene at Dawn’s blog reminds me of a conversation has on Alas in the past year about how people can hide behind a call for civility. In many ways, I see this exact phenomenon at Dawn’s but had never been able to put my finge on it before.
No more posting from me. I’m miffed that I got singled out as a voice for all feminists. Bullshit.
I read the posting at 50-Minute Hour about the doctor who was at odds with his patient about her weight, the effects thereof, and what she should do about it. My sympathies are mostly towards the doctor, but she made one excellent point; if you’re trying to get a patient to change their ways, getting them pissed off is not particularly effective.
When I teach people about communications, I stress that in order for communications to occur, you have to effectively present the information, and your audience has to hear and understand it. If you get your audience angry at you, then they are not very likely to spend much time trying to understand what you’re talking about.
This physician may have been trying to do that via shocking his patient. We don’t know what he’s said previously to her and in what fashion. Perhaps he’s tried other methods of communication previously and it hasn’t worked. So, it’s hard to comment on this particular case. But overall, a physician should be asking themselves, “How can I actually convince my patient to change their behavior?”, not “How can I most quickly say what I think?”
Well, Lauren, at least you tried. The sad truth for me is that I don’t care much if I’m an “uncaring meanie” in the eyes of people whose views I don’t respect. And I don’t care much about hiding my “uncaringness” from them when we have occasion to speak to one another. It’s probabably just as well that I don’t have my own blog. :/
I’m appalled by that DE kerfuffle, particularly the post about the IUD. How is it in any way civil to write nasty (and inaccurate) things about a stranger’s lifestyle based on what you’ve “learned” from her Livejournal interests list, and try to frame it as “caring” about her? (“Oh, gee whiz, dear, you shouldn’t have that IUD you’ve been asking for, because as a rape survivor you clearly are too stupid to know that ‘intrauterine’ means ‘in the uterus’ and make your decisions accordingly. I’m just looking out for you! Really!”)