Open Thread And Link Farm, She was all like, “whatever” Edition

dinosaur

  1. Getting real about bad advice | language: a feminist guide
    Why advice to women to change how they speak is misguided. Via Grace, who says “It takes awhile to get there (while making other good points, mind you), but at the end, it makes a really good point about why recognizing and understanding structural inequalities is important.”
  2. Police Body-Worn Cameras Are Making Departments More Powerful – The Atlantic
  3. Scientists reveal most accurate depiction of a dinosaur ever created | Elsa Panciroli | Science | The Guardian
  4. Why Dieting Can Rarely (If Ever) Be Body Positive | Bustle
  5. Is fat-shaming Donald Trump a fair response to his misogyny?
    Their answer (and mine): No.
  6. “This is Us” Fails To Unpack The Tragic Fat Girl Trope At All And It’s Super Bumming Me Out – Medium
  7. In defense of the “imagine she was your sister” argument, and a partial rebuttal.
  8. Also, here’s my contribution to a different thread of the discussion.

  9. When a Worker Freezes to Death in a Walk-In Freezer at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Downtown Atlanta
  10. Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle legal problems – The Washington Post
    He also bought himself hugely expensive things from his charity, bought advertising for his hotel with his charity, etc. He has not, by the way, donated any of his own money to his charity for years; the money comes from other people’s donations. He’s like a cartoon tycoon villain.
  11. Ingenious Hack for Sketching with Two Point Perspective Using an Elastic String | Colossal
  12. ‘Birth of a Nation’ actress Gabrielle Union: I cannot take Nate Parker rape allegations lightly – LA Times
  13. Middle School Students Push for a Gender-Neutral Dress Code—And Win | Bitch Media
  14. I love this little two-page comic about time travel by Bouletcorp.
  15. High Hitler: how Nazi drug abuse steered the course of history | Books | The Guardian
  16. Asking the Wrong Questions: Tales of the City: Thoughts on Luke Cage
    Nussbaum, like me, has a very mixed reaction to Luke Cage. The show does everything so well – except for the story. But the things it does right (mainly, the complete centering of a black and brown community at every level) are so rare to see in the superhero genre that it overwhelms the things it does wrong.
  17. Jeffrey Tambor, Coming Out, and “The Most Important Time To Be An Artist” – Medium
    Interesting story from a writer who took an acting workshop for trans actors taught by Tambor.
  18. Wealthy black kids more likely to go to prison than poor white kids | NOLA.com
  19. Why Trump Answered the Wrong Question on Race
    Really interesting take, especially on how Black communities are simultaneously over and under policed. Thanks to Mandolin for the link.
  20. “I don’t know how to describe this .gif of a mcdonald’s fight on rideau street except to say that at one point, someone pulls out a raccoon.”
  21. It’s Easy for Obamacare Critics to Overlook the Merits of Medicaid Expansion – The New York Times
    Indirect link.
  22. Female Chief Terminates 850 Child Marriages in Malawi and Sends Girls Back to School | Viral Women
  23. ‘Sesame Street’ Afghan Spin-Off’s Puppet Deals With Feminism and Racism — And Trolls
  24. A universal basic income could wind up hurting the poor and helping the rich — Quartz
  25. Greg Rucka on Queer Narrative and WONDER WOMAN | Comicosity
    Rucka is the current writer of the WW comic.
  26. Attorney general to ignore new report finding that commonly-used forensics are bogus.
    I’m really not confident in DA’s ability to discern when evidence isn’t scientifically justified.
  27. Employees at Trump’s California golf course say he wanted to fire women who weren’t pretty enough – Los Angeles Times

tsang-3

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23 Responses to Open Thread And Link Farm, She was all like, “whatever” Edition

  1. 1
    RonF says:

    Re: #1

    “The people hiring and promoting you really should be listening to what you say, not how you say it.”

    Actually, the people hiring and promoting you really need to listen to both. They are not mutually exclusive. Those people know that communications is a two-way process, and it doesn’t matter what you say if people – such as their managers, their customers, etc. – don’t listen, get confused when they do or find you annoying. Especially with “uptalk”, which makes every sentence you say sound like a question. There are standards to how to speak English. If you’re not using them, the problem isn’t the people you’re talking to, it’s the person talking.

    ” ‘How to stop saying the word “like”’.”

    The disservice done here is that somehow the author thinks this is a feminist issue. Plenty of people of both sexes use “like”, “uh”, etc. as filler words. Constant use of these words puts a lot of noise in your conversation and also makes you sound as though you’re talking faster than you are thinking. Neither is good. And it has nothing to do with feminism.

  2. 2
    Evan Þ says:

    There is a legal principle where, when one party to a case destroyed evidence, the court may presume the evidence to have been against that party.

    That should be applied whenever police “forget” to turn their body cameras on. At this point, I would almost be satisfied if any accusation of an officer about an encounter that is not captured on-camera would result in an automatic conviction.

  3. 3
    Harlequin says:

    RonF:
    Okay. Should young women, for example, be excluded from radio jobs because people find their vocal style annoying, even though that same style isn’t considered annoying in men? (For example, the Freedom Fries segment of this TAL episode.)

    Plenty of people of both sexes use “like”, “uh”, etc. as filler words. Constant use of these words puts a lot of noise in your conversation and also makes you sound as though you’re talking faster than you are thinking. Neither is good.

    In normal conversation, disfluencies aid understanding rather than hampering it. (Example.)

  4. 4
    Harlequin says:

    I’m somebody who can’t draw at all, but that two-point perspective thing was way cool anyway.

    (“Way cool.” How old do I sound? Jeez.)

    The article said something like “a more accurate method would involve rulers” but, really, the elastic string method should be just as accurate, as long as you don’t move the string with the pencil as you draw.

  5. 5
    Fibi says:

    On body cameras, it seems to me that it is only a matter of time before cameras come on the market with technology spun off of our phone technologies. If you can program a phone to constantly monitor sounds and turn on when you say “Siri” you can have a camera that turns on when you hear 1) police sirens, 2) curse words / raised voices / etc, or 3) gunshots. Add in the feature described in the article where there is at least 30 seconds of footage stored at all times so the recording actually starts 30 seconds before the camera is turned “on,” and the only way to not record incidents is to consciously turn the camera off.

  6. 6
    Chris says:

    There is a legal principle where, when one party to a case destroyed evidence, the court may presume the evidence to have been against that party.

    That should be applied whenever police “forget” to turn their body cameras on. At this point, I would almost be satisfied if any accusation of an officer about an encounter that is not captured on-camera would result in an automatic conviction.

    That’s horrifying. We can’t fight for the rights of citizens by infringing on the rights of police.

  7. 7
    AJD says:

    RonF: Indeed, plenty of people use “like” as a filler (and for other functions, such as quotation and approximation, which Cameron mentions in her blog post). And yet the use of “like”, and other phenomena such as rising intonation, are simultaneously (1) thought of as feminine, (2) thought of as sounding immature or unconfident or inappropriate in some other respect, and (3) less likely to be noticed and remarked upon when used by men. That is what makes it a feminist issue.

  8. 8
    Ampersand says:

    Harlequin – a ruler would be more accurate for things like drawing a lot of parallel fence posts (as in this drawing), because with a ruler you can find the correct distance between each post, whereas with the elastic string I think you’d have to eyeball it.

    But still – the elastic string thing is incredibly cool.

  9. 9
    Harlequin says:

    Ah–I was thinking of using the ruler as a straight-edge, not as, like, a measuring device! Thanks for the explanation. :)

  10. 10
    nobody.really says:

    NPR has a story about a police officer who transitioned from male to female.

    Meanwhile, we have a regular correspondent.

    Score one for the internets!

  11. 11
    Evan Þ says:

    @Chris – yes, that’s why I said “almost.” Rationally, I agree with you, at the very least until body cameras become much more reliable. However, for a police officer, turning a camera off should result in very serious discipline – and if they’re accused of misconduct and it comes to light that they’ve turned the camera off at that time, that should definitely be treated as evidence.

  12. 12
    RonF says:

    Should young women, for example, be excluded from radio jobs because people find their vocal style annoying, even though that same style isn’t considered annoying in men?

    Of course. The purpose of a radio station is to make money while operating a broadcast station. If people find their station’s on-air talent annoying they won’t listen, the station won’t make money and it will go out of business. If someone uses filler words/sounds constantly they won’t be hired. If someone uses uptalk constantly they won’t be hired. The fact that some people think it is sexist or a social problem that a majority of people find a given vocal effect annoying in women but not men is not the radio station’s problem, nor is it presumptively a social issue that it is the duty of the radio station to do something about.

    If someone who speaks in a fashion that listeners find annoying wants an on-air career in radio, they can get some vocal coaching and learn to speak in a fashion that listeners find attractive. It’s apparently fairly common, as a search on “radio announcers vocal coaching” revealed. I’ve had vocal coaching for singing techniques myself, and the person who teaches me gets paid good money to teach professional singers for auditions and parts in opera and musicals – another group of people who learn how to use their voices attractively to suit their listener’s preferences, and there are certainly sex-based differences in that as well.

  13. 13
    RonF says:

    you can have a camera that turns on when you hear 1) police sirens, 2) curse words / raised voices / etc, or 3) gunshots.

    You have a cop camera that comes on every time it hears a curse word and you’re going to end up with a camera with a dead battery that took a lot of pictures of the inside of the cop car.

    I would support the concept that if a policeman deliberately turned off a body camera that they should be subject to disciplinary action. But:

    At this point, I would almost be satisfied if any accusation of an officer about an encounter that is not captured on-camera would result in an automatic conviction.

    What kind of accusation? If a body camera is turned off and and the cop kills someone you’d support a presumptive verdict of murder?

    AJD – I saw where there was a perceived sex-based difference on the issue of uptalk – not that I’ve heard very many men do uptalk at all – but I missed that there was a perception of the use of filler words being worse in women than men. If it’s there, fine, but I didn’t see it.

  14. 14
    nobody.really says:

    Should young women, for example, be excluded from radio jobs because people find their vocal style annoying, even though that same style isn’t considered annoying in men?

    Of course. The purpose of a radio station is to make money while operating a broadcast station. If people find their station’s on-air talent annoying they won’t listen, the station won’t make money and it will go out of business. If someone uses filler words/sounds constantly they won’t be hired. If someone uses uptalk constantly they won’t be hired. The fact that some people think it is sexist or a social problem that a majority of people find a given vocal effect annoying in women but not men is not the radio station’s problem, nor is it presumptively a social issue that it is the duty of the radio station to do something about.

    Jackie Mason: “If a Jew tries to get a job as a radio announcer and comes out stuttering, he’ll say he didn’t get the job b-b-b-b-because they’re anti-semitic!”

  15. 15
    h says:

    #1

    Reading this blog, I thought the article she was responding to was advising people to point out to their female coworkers speech patterns they thought were self-sabotaging. Like so:

    Judy [squeezing past Bob standing in doorway]: Sorry.
    Bob [sighing]: Judy Judy Judy, Apologizing when you’re not doing anything wrong projects weakness.
    Judy: Sorry?

    The original article seems like it was written with the intention of just pointing out these speech patterns to people who’d never thought about it before. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t get what point the linguist was trying to make. Is she saying these patterns of speech aren’t problematic? Is she saying that they’re a symptom of a bigger problem, and we should focus on the problem rather than the symptom?

  16. 16
    desipis says:

    An unfortunate side effect of all the BLM rhetoric:

    “A subject who was under the influence of PCP attacked a female officer. Viciously pounded her head into the street as her partner was trying to get him off of her. This attack went on for several minutes,” Johnson told the assembled dignitaries.

    “As I was at the hospital last night visiting with her, she looked at me and said she thought she was gonna die. And she knew that she should shoot this guy. But, she chose not to because she didn’t want her family or the department to have to go through the scrutiny the next day on national news.”

  17. 17
    Sarah says:

    h, a good portion of the essay seems to be about how it’s pretty pointless to advise women to change their speech patterns when it’s rare for people to change their speech patterns as a result of criticism in general. So, sort of a pragmatic argument against policing women’s speech – that it’s ineffective because such advisement will likely never be implemented.

    Near the end she also briefly hits on the idea that there isn’t actually anything wrong with women’s speech, except for other people’s stigmatized perception of it, which she attributes to society-wide gender prejudice. I’d say your second potential point (symptom of a bigger problem which we should be working to fix) is a good summary of that paragraph’s topic, but I don’t think it’s the thesis of the entire piece. I’d assign that role to the pragmatic argument I mentioned above.

  18. 18
    RonF says:

    Re: #21 – I’d be interested to know what that female chief’s personal history is. Was she in a child marriage? If so, were there children? And how did she, in such a society, become a chief?

  19. 19
    nobody.really says:

    This election has seized me with a desire to make a music video for Pink Floyd’s “In The Flesh”—but it turns out that MANY people beat me to it. Here’s one example.

    TRIGGER WARNINGS OUT THE WAZZOO. If this video doesn’t provoke you, check to see if you still have electricity—or a pulse. Some will be triggered by the violence; some by the imagery; some by the clumsy changes to the original lyrics.

    For the uninitiated, “In The Flesh” comes from Pink Floyd’s 1979 album (and 1982 film) The Wall; the linked video mixes movie footage with news footage. The Wall tells the story of a kid, Pink, raised under oppressive circumstances that drive a wall between his authentic self and the constricting role that he’s required to play. The pressure for mindless conformity–and the public’s embrace of these pressures–eventually drive Pink to their grim logical conclusion.

    (Siskel & Ebert declared the movie “one of the most horrifying musicals of all time…. Two thumbs up!”)

    Both the album and the film end with a cathartic chant of “Tear Down the Wall!” Regrettably, no one has yet appended that part to the video. Maybe after the election?

  20. 20
    nobody.really says:

    This year the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued Peaceful Coexistence: Reconciling Nondiscrimination Principles with Civil [Religious] Liberties. In his own statement at p. 29, Chair Martin Castro states that “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of intolerance.”

    Really? I expect people who pursue religious liberty/freedom to strive to act in accordance with their religions. Sometimes that will mean feeding the poor. Sometimes that will mean healing the sick. And sometimes that will mean expressing intolerance for things that conflict with their religion. To build a presumption that religious liberty/freedom will magically never result in conflict with other norms – THAT is a formula for hypocrisy.

    Now, we can fashion public policy to value equality over freedom in various contexts, or not. But let’s at least acknowledge that there’s a trade-off, that people of good faith can hold sincere views on either side of these issues, and that however we resolve these questions will inevitable result in somebody’s ox getting gored. It does no credit to the side of equality to act as if we espouse our views out of ignorance of or indifference to other people’s views.

  21. 21
    h says:

    Thanks, Sarah. It all makes more sense now.

  22. 22
    nobody.really says:

    From The Journal for the Quantification of the Obvious, The Atlantic provides graphs showing how members of different demographic and political groups respond when asked whether they agree with statements such as—

    • “Society seems to punish men just for acting like men.”
    • “Men face a great deal/a lot of discrimination.”
    • “Society as a whole has become too soft and feminine.”

    As you might imagine, you are more likely to agree with these statements if you are white, male, Republican, working class, a Trump supporter, and if you have never attended college. And you are also more likely to offer penetrating insights such as “Ms. Clinton couldn’t control her husband in the past. How is she going to control the country?”

    And here’s an interesting tidbit: If you ask men how much they earn relative to their spouses, you drive up their affinity for Trump—regardless of men’s answer to the question. (Note to social scientists: STOP ASKING THAT QUESTION UNTIL AFTER THE ELECTION!)

  23. 23
    nobody.really says:

    In honor of the International Day of the Girl, Director James Gunn writes:

    I can’t wait for you all to see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, with Gamora, Nebula, and Mantis in action, where we not only pass the Bechdel test, but run over it and back up over it again and again in an eighteen-wheeler….