Just clearing out my open tabs… but please feel free to use this thread to post whatever you’d like. (Self-link love is a healthy activity that everyone engages in, and I encourage you to do it without guilt.)
My open tabs:
1) Orson Scott Card calls for overthrowing government if same-sex couples can marry in California. Curtsy Box Turtle Bulletin. See also Feminist SF Blog‘s post on this, which is by far the best and most thorough post on this subject I’ve read.
2) Speaking of Scott Card, John Kessel’s analysis of Ender’s Game, “Creating The Innocent Killer,” is excellent. (Previous “Alas” posts mentioning Scott Card: 1 2 3).
3) Should the obese have to pay more for airline tickets? Newsweek says no.
4) Delta Makes Woman With Muscular Dystrophy Crawl Off Plane
5) Rebecca Allen, a nerd at peace, explains why pop culture analysis matters. There’s also some discussion of Joss Whedon’s upcoming series “Dollhouse” in the comments.
6) Uh-Obama: Racism, White Voters and the Myth of Color-Blindness. I love Tim Wise’s writing. (Curtsy: Racialicious).
7) How do we deal with a great and important work of art, that’s also disgustingly racist? Roger Ebert discusses “The Birth Of A Nation”.
8) The Opt-Out revolution among working mothers is a myth.
9) Police arrest 6-year-old black girl for throwing tantrum, charge her with resisting arrest. (Curtsy: Racialicious)
10) Bush Justice Department fires employee for being suspected of being gay.
11) Five year old American Indian refused admission to kindergarten because he has long hair. But, basically, it’s because where conservatives dominate local schools, local schools are mean-spirited xenophobic and racist. (See also.)
12) The limits of superhero movies are limitations inherent in movie executives, not in the superhero genre.
13) Kitten vs. Fan. The cuteness! It burns! It burns!
(Thanks to Bean for several of these links.)
To anyone here who was around in the 1970s…do you remember “Kelly & Duke”?
http://bakertoons.blogspot.com/2008/07/kelly-duke.html
http://bakertoons.blogspot.com/2008/07/more-kelly-duke.html
Get that? A PERMANENT FACT! Not subject to change EVER! The human species may go extinct, the sun go supernova, and the universe slowly cool down as the stars blink out one by one. But, dammit, the love of opposite-sex couples will always mean more than that of same-sex couples.
Except in cases of divorce. Or shotgun weddings. Or drunken drive-through marriages in Vegas. Or if human evolution favors reproduction through three or more sexes. Or we meet an alien race that includes more than two sexes. I mean, Card is an SF writer, so he should be able to conceive of such situations.
All kidding aside, what exactly is the basis of Card’s assertion? Does he have some sixth sense that can plumb the depths of human emotions and thus can accurately gauge the love and commitment levels relative to straight and queer relationships? And, really, why does it matter?
Nope. Not big enough.
I’ts called the Book of Mormon.
And if you view secret golden tablets and magic underpants with skeptecism, then you should probably view his ideas about gay people in much the same way.
Card has always been completely batshit. I’m not sure he’s living in the same dimension as the rest of us
He also didn’t write the first two Ender’s Game books. Theory and proof here:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034
okay, it only proves he’s an *sshat but well, I’m convinced about the first theory.
Jennhi, I’ve read that, but I just don’t buy it at all. The evidence that Card didn’t write his first two novels is incredibly slight, far too slight to sustain that serious an accusation.
Angie Zapata’s murderer claims trans panic as a defense.
Well I will take the opportunity to blogwhore and bring up a post I wrote about a blog that publishes the confessions of Johns. It is amazing how honest people will be about their depravity on the internet.
Katie Couric says, sexism is worse than racism
and finally a post I wrote regarding the ways in which female sexuality is always constructed as passive and how damaging it is to women.
If you have a blog and use sitemeter, you might want to read this at free episodes:
Sitemeter Crashing Web Sites Using Internet Explorer on August 1, 2008
We apologize if you’ve been trying to visit the site this evening and it’s been down.
We just discovered that the SiteMeter (www.sitemeter.com) tracking code that counts visitors to our site was causing visits from Internet Explorer to crash. We first realized the issue at 8:30pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).
After further investigation, we discovered that SiteMeter is bringing down every site where its counter code is loaded when the visiting browser is Internet Explorer versions 6.0 and 7.0. The error may also affect Internet Explorer 5.5.
Tens of thousands of publishers use sitemeter to track their content, including thousands of bloggers. The result: sitemeter takes down the internet? not quite.. but its pretty amazing.
The text of the error is “Internet Explorer cannot open the internet site.”
How to Fix the IE error on WordPress, Blogger, and Other Sites
We removed the Sitemeter tracking code from our site and now the site is loading fine. If you need to remove this from your site, the code you’re looking for is:
Status Updates
Update @ 9:00pm EDT: No Change.
Update @ 9:30pm EDT: No Change.
Update @ 10:00pm EDT: No Change.
Update @ 10:30pm EDT: No Change.
Update @ 11:00pm EDT: No Change.
Update @ 11:30pm EDT: No Change.
Update @ 12:00am EDT: No Change.
For further status, visit http://www.sitemeter.com in internet explorer. If it works, they’ve probably got it fixed. If you are working from a machine without IE, you can use netrenderer to test the site.
The other problem with the “Bacon wrote Card’s novels!!!” theory is that the tone and style of Ender’s Game matches the tone and style of his other books quite nicely. Not only is the Mystery Hitler Apologist Author uncannily good at masking his secret fascist agenda, s/he’s also an amazing literary mimic. (Or has been doing all of Card’s ouevre in secret.)
Eh, I’ve got a quickie about the Death of a Disney Legend, but I’d rather people went and checked out Smitten Kitchen’s blueberry crumb bar recipe, because the pictures are gorgeous, the result is delicious, and blueberries are in season and have I mentioned it’s delicious?
Food is love, people. Get bakin’.
When I read that Orson Scott Card piece, the first thing I thought of was a line-by-line satire that turned it into a rant against judges who struck down the laws prohibiting interracial marriage.
Unfortunately, the “leave a comment” box was limited to 1000 characters, so I just wrote a 1000-character comment saying that, by the same reasoning, the Supreme Court was wrong when it issued Brown vs. Board of Education and all the other anti-racism rulings.
Is Delta the one that makes the flight attendants be skinny?
I knew there was a reason I haven’t been on a plane in 30 years.
Or read anything by Card.
Thanks for the link, Amp — Alas was the first feminist blog I ever found and the first I read regularly, so the pingback gave me lots of warm, fuzzy feelings. :)
Probably everyone’s already seen this, but I only stumbled across it today. One more reason why the Stanford Fair Use Project rocks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo
Orson Scott Card is my most favourite author of all time – it’s a shame that he’s also such an idiot.
Know Your Place ?
More evidence that facially neutral rules can create, reflect and perpetuate hidden biases.
Seems like Ender is blameless, but as a carefully cultivated tool; you don’t blame the gun. Instead, you have a bunch of people engaging in all kinds of abuse “for his own good”, but really for their own; not just to save the planet, but also to provide a scapegoat. Ender’s feelings of guilt serve two purposes: they provide a front to make him seem less culpable and morally upright, and they make him dependent on his keepers for absolution. They’ve constructed a moral steel cage around Ender’s mind; he blames himself and continues to feel guilty (the unofficial morality of the book) but is through carefully designed training to continue to engage in such acts, the only way out of which is to force down feelings of guilt and accept his keepers’ assertions that he is blameless. And in that constant emotional battle, he is continually vulnerable to abuse, a constant victim in need of release.
Of course, Card’s use of the “I came to bring a sword” passage shows just how screwed up his personal morality really is, and serves as a clear illustration of the contradictions inherent in biblical morality. Card is preaching the same kind of morality used to justify genocide and terrorism anywhere.