Say what you will!
Link you will!
Self-link at will!
Use short declarative sentences I will!
- Have I recommended Linda Bacon’s Health at Every Size website? If not, then I really should have. It includes passages from her book Health At Every Size. Go! Read! Don’t diet!
- I’m late linking to this, but of the dozens of “Why are (some) black people homophobic” essays I’ve read, I think this is the most interesting and thoughtful. There’s some good stuff in the comments, too.
- Remember that drawing I did for Wonder Woman day? Well, it raised over $26,000 for feminist charities. (Not my drawing in particular, alas, but the event as a whole.)
- Paul Campos points out that measured by mortality, it’s healthier to be “overweight” — or even mildly “obese” — than to be “normal” weight. Via Fat Fu.
- Check out this photo of a tortoise named “Jonathan,” taken around 1900. Jonathan is still alive today and is believed to be the world’s oldest living animal.
- Really touching Ani song, “Present/Infant,” about physical insecurity and motherhood. Kate has the lyrics, and you can watch a video of Ani singing the song here.
- From Australia, this is what a real apology for racism looks like. I find it unimaginable that a US President would apologize to native Americans like that — but one ought to.
- Young women sometimes have sex lives! They must be punished!
- Very informative post on the Taliban. I really, really hope that Obama reconsiders his commitment to more troops in Afghanistan, which seems foolhardy at best.
- I really can’t describe how much I hate the settler movement in Israel.
- In Canada, 50 years of card check union elections and not a single complaint about union intimidation of employees.
- Anti-Immigrant sentiment is killing the Republican Party. I know you’re all weeping for them.
- David at The Debate Link and I had another round of our usual “what is anti-semitism” debate, this time over Hillel versus a Canadian PIRG.
- I find it commendable, but also off-putting, that Jim Davis and Paws, Inc. have thoroughly embraced “Garfield without Garfield.” They’ve even put out a book collection.
- A Kiss is a Kiss. Except when it’s two dudes kissing.
- Dear Oprah. Kate Harding on what she should have said during her two-sentence chat with Oprah.
- The Invisible Fat Man. Excellent guest post at The Rotund by Stefanie from Men In Full.
A few reviews posted this week:
Ain’t I a Feminist? African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom: White’s book not only showed me that African American men can be feminists (a conclusion she was more skeptical about than I was), but that many of them are far more evolved in their feminist development than I am. Furthermore, I realized that in making this personal observation in the first paragraph of my review of her book, I am exercising my white privilege and not acting like a very good feminist!
Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men: Men in Guyland watch pornography in large groups, not to get off, but to discuss humiliating the women to whom they feel entitled. Binge drinking and partying all weekend are common behaviors, both in college and beyond. No one acts particularly interested in committed relationships, though many men interviewed assume they will one day marry and have children. The contradictions continue throughout the entire book, as entitled young men voice to Kimmel their desires without introspection about how to reach them.
Changeling: There’s a lot going on with the film, most notably, a feminist theme that’s surprising, as Eastwood isn’t the first name that would come up when thinking of feminist directors. However, Straczynski’s script does bring up important questions about how women were treated, most notably when they challenge male authority.
Perhaps Jim Davis, Inc. has realized that Garfield is pretty superfluous for most the strips. Get rid of the cat, and it’s actually pretty funny.
I rarely self-link, but what the hey: My reaction to a WaPo article on teen moms.
The writer put me in high snark dudgeon.
I took a look at the Orcinus link on immigration. I clicked through to the survey analysis presented by America’s Voice. It’s interesting that the graph presented by Orcinus from that survey and the graph itself state that the response to the question shows that there is a broad consensus that illegal aliens should be given a path to citizenship. However, the alternatives presented in the question don’t cite citizenship – the one that gets the support says that people should be required to register and become legal. As I”m sure the people at America’s choice are well aware, resident aliens are legally here but are not citizens. It seems that they are misrepresenting their results – which is pretty suspicious.
I wonder what result they would have gotten if they had provided different alternatives for “become legal”? Of course, the results might not have fit the conclusion they wanted to draw.
I wish I’d seen Linda Bacon’s site before I wrote about the proposed “obesity tax” here in NY
Also, my partner hit the straight actors playing gay characters thing touched on by Shake’s Sis
So true about it not being healthier to be normal weight but especially not to be thin or underweight. I was just on the phone to a friend with kidney failure who has to gain weight discussing methods given her renal diet, it would have been a lot easier if she had not been thin before she got to this stage of kidney failure.
This is probably the best cartoon I have ever seen in my life.
Seriously, wacky animation, appealing designs, and the music is funky, too. The character is realistically “sick” and psychotic.
http://thadkomorowski.com/2008/12/14/jim-tyers-greatest-triumph/
The character was created by Gene Deitch, who is also the father of cartoonist Kim Deitch.
Deitch has a bad rap in the world of animation due to the “Tom and Jerry” cartoons he directed in Czechoslovakia, but he was really a true “alternative” cartoonist in the 1950s and was also one of the first people to recognize the genius of Jules Feiffer; Deitch hired him to work at Terrytoons BEFORE he started working for Village Voice.
i’m totally self-linking here, but i would really enjoy some feedback. i do a lot of reading in the fantasy genre, and part of my enjoyment is to tear it apart in analysis. this one is my latest: Gender, Race, Body Image, and the Repetitive Cast in David Eddings’ novels
i also wrote a few other things on david eddings months back. feel free to comment on everything
Howdy!
I finally watched the documentary “Demographic Winter” and am writing a 3-post series on my reaction to it.
Babies: Endangered Animals Pt.1
Babies: Endangered Animals Pt.2
Part 3 coming soon!
The film deploys science to show us that the white world is facing a demographic decline due to low fertility rates. Whose fault is that? According to the film: Women, Gays, Secularists, Immigrants. But it’s SCIENCE!
The reason I’m giving this film any of my time is that the arguments behind it are behind a lot of social-conservative and fundie Christian thought. And this line of thought is the bedrock of actions and laws that hurt real people.
Well, Kevin, I read your blog entry. I have a little bit different view on the topic than you do (big surprise, eh?). Here’s a couple of points:
You said:
Heavens! Helping people without censuring them? As one nurse observes, “There is zero shame.” Zero shame! Ooooh God, Nooooo! How can we expect people to act more like us responsible middle class types if we don’t instill them with self-loathing?
Why shouldn’t there be shame? Should we not censure people for doing something wrong?
Welsh repeatedly singles out Latina teens and “the rising birth rate among Hispanics” as sources of trouble for befuddled and overworked social workers, educators and health officials. Get it? They are a burden. They’re a drain on tax dollars that should be going to bailing out the financial industry or failing to reconstruct countries we’ve bombed into chaos and desperation. Damn these poor people and their grubby demands!
The fact that you don’t favor how we currently allocate tax dollars (and you and I have common ground at least on the issue of bailing out various industries) does not change the fact that people who have children without having the resources to support them themselves have made a bad choice are, in fact, a burden on the rest of us. It may well be a burden that compassion compels us to assume, but it’s a burden none the less.
Look, no matter what age a woman becomes a mom, our society is not prepared to support the needs of children. Period.
Why should it be society’s job to support the needs of children? Our society’s norms up to this point have been that it is the responsibility of both of a child’s parents to support that child, that having a child is a responsibility that both people in a sexual relationship are responsible for controlling and accepting and that they should only do when they can support it, that should they fail to be able to support a child the parents should call upon relatives, church, etc., and that the State should step in only as a last resort.
If you don’t have a relationship structured to support a child, don’t have a child. Sure, life is such that things can change in unanticipated fashion. But that doesn’t mean that society should be structured to accomodate without censure or limit problems that can be readily anticipated. Save our resources for those problems that are hard to anticipate.
Children (absent out-and-out rape) are conceived as the result of conscious choices by two people. They are not accidents. You are as responsible for having a child if you have unprotected sex as you are responsible for murder if you get behind the wheel of a car drunk and run someone over. “I was drunk”, “I forgot”, “The Depo shot didn’t work” are excuses for what happened but not reasons for not being responsible for a child’s birth, and “I didn’t want a kid” or “My boyfriend took off once he found out I was pregnant” aren’t excuses for forcing someone else to pay for raising your child.
Now, there are no good bastards out there. But the incidence of married guys bolting out of a relationship once their wife becomes pregnant are vanishingly small compared to the incidence of young girls getting pregnant by a guy who never gave any evidence of being a reliable partner in the first place.
I am not anti-sex. God knows! But I am against acting irresponsibly and then presuming that you have a right to do so and expect other people to help pay for the consequences of that choice. Especially without being criticized for your actions.
Amp, this song made me think of you, for obvious reasons (like that the title is your name, mainly) (and in any case it’s a pretty song):
Amanda Palmer, Ampersand
–can anyone give me a reference?
I need to publish a few (5-10) copies of a book for a family member who is not computer literate. He has given it to me in Word format, and he wants me to use my laser printer to make various copies for his acquaintances to read.
As it happens, he hasn’t gotten many people to read it so far: in my opinion, that’s because it is horribly difficult to read. At the moment it is dense philosophy writing in page after page of poorly formatted 8.5×11 paper in Times font.
I want to surprise him by making it really nice for him and printing up a few paperback drafts that he can read (and he can give to others to read.). I’ve already reformatted the book to look better–that took my whole morning but I used styles so it’s easy to change. I want to get it printed in paperback form, which will be much easier for people to read and transport (and notate, and mark up, and fold back pages.)
Now I need to find somewhere to get it printed.
I was going to use lulu.com until I saw that they reserve the right to ‘grab’ your text and publish it in their advertising, with or without permission. IOW, their privacy sucks ass.
Is there anywhere else that Alas readers would suggest?
That’s a nice suprrise for your family member.
I’ve had good luck with publishers graphics, the printer for Hereville. I have no idea what their prices would be like for 10 copies, but I imagine pretty high per copy.
You can find a bazillion places by doing a google for “print on demand.”
Sailorman:
I don’t have any names I can give you off the top of my head, but you should look into shops that will do print on demand.
Well, i actually spoke with lulu and I have been assured that they won’t grab my private text without permission. So if they do, at lest i can make a fuss ;) And they are CHEAP. I’m talking a 200+ page 6×9 paperback and it’s about eight bucks.
I’ll try this one again:
ShopRite Refuses to make a Cake…for Adolf Hitler
I had a good discussion with the ACLU national office today, about legal backing on my information requests if they get denied again.
We have all read the stories of parents sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars because their teenage children file swapped music over the internet. In many cases, the parents were bullied into settlement, even though they may not have been guilty of anything. Over 35,000 individuals were sued for sharing music in violation of copyright law. The government should have ended this travesty a long time ago, but our political leaders are in the RIAA’s pocket for campaign donations. This list includes Barack Obama. I wish I could tell you the RIAA had come to their senses and realized the unfairness of what they were doing, but I can’t. They are stopping because it isn’t profitable any more.
The Intellectual Redneck: RIAA ending lawsuits
One of the most amazing bloggers on law enforcement related domestic violence has received threatening emails from one of her subjects of her postings. This is absolutely outrageous but it’s unfortunately, a fact of life for those who blog on LE issues including corruption and misconduct. If you blog on these things, you WILL get harassed and/or threatened at some point. The only question is when or how. Especially if you’re a woman and often they threaten you with violence particularly sexualized violence. They often do this with impunity from officers within their own department.
Here’s one email.
Another blogger on LE DV issues has offered her site for messages of support
I was kind of too pissed off to blog but I wrote this posting anyway, expressing cynicism that these cowards are nothing but protected by the authorities by their conduct having my own experiences but I do hope in this case, it’s different. This shouldn’t happen to any blogger.
We’re kind of an insulated blogging community on these issues because they don’t really fit in any larger topic for many people, but we do support each other and the freedom to blog without harassment or threats.
Well, Christmas dinner ended with an argument about the El Coyote boycott as my parents are close friends of the owners there. I left the table when the gay bashing got pretty thick.
Wow, that sounds pretty sucky. :-( I’m sorry to hear that.
I don’t really celebrate Christmas, but Bean and I went ate out, just to avoid being in the house all day.
I read the El Coyote link. Let me see if I understand this; a woman gave $100 in support of Proposition 8 in California. So people who opposed it are boycotting where she works. She doesn’t own the place. It wasn’t the restaurant that gave the money.
What, then, are the owners supposed to do? Fire her? Seems to me that this would be in violation of labor laws. What’s going on with this?
Are people tracking down where supporters of Prop. 8 work and trying to close down those businesses? For what? Having the temerity of not checking out the social beliefs of their employees? Do you think that employers should do this?
She’s essentially a co-owner of the restaurant — it’s legally owned by her parents, I think, but everyone has always understood it to be jointly owned by the family that runs it. (She’s the manager of the restaurant, not just an employee).
Just as importantly, she’s been the public face of the restaurant for years — and it’s a restaurant that caters primarily to the gay community. I think the situation is more personal than you realize; the boycott is because longtime customers feel betrayed by someone they had thought of as a friend.
It’s as if I found out that the manager of a family-run deli, which was largely supported by Jews, was actually a supporter of antisemitic laws. I’m not sure that you, or anyone, would have the right to order me and other Jews to keep on giving that deli our money in the name of their free speech rights. They don’t have a first amendment right to my business.
That said, I think the way the restaurant handled it — giving a large donation to the campaign to repeal prop 8 and disassociating themselves from her act — is right. If it were up to me, I’d end the boycott there.
But it’s not up to me — nor should it be. I’m not the one whose marriage has been broken up by a bigoted, hateful law; I’m not the one who feels betrayed by someone whose business my community had supported for years.
No, they’re not. (I mean, for all I know someone somewhere has suggested this, but it’s not happening in any organized widespread way.) El Coyote is an unusual case. I’ve heard of another case like it, involving a theater specializing in musicals. In both cases, the issue was a business that was supported by and close to the gay community, which makes it hard for them to get along if the gay community doesn’t want to support them any longer.
I agree with Amp, in that it’s not my right to tell another community of individuals how to protest. And Amp’s right, the majority of patrons and quite a few of the employees are gays and lesbians. He’s also right in the personal relationship that happens at that restaurant. Marjorie is out there talking with everyone and helping with food service. She’s a real fixture there. My family’s regular patrons at the restaurant for years. Never have to wait for a table long. I think that’s how a lot of customers looked at it, much more than at many restaurants in L.A.
But I think people were shocked and felt they had been slapped in part because of the personal touch. She lost some of her employees who quit and at least as of early December, about 70-80% of her customers.
I don’t think it’s necessarily to shut down businesses but to make an economic impact and it’s their choice whether or not they want to frequent and give their money to a business and under what terms as customers.
If you donate money to a candidate or initiative, it’s public record so anyone can get it as long as it’s $100 and above, so she actually donated the minimum for disclosure (although you can disclose your identity with smaller donations). I think the size was small but the fact that the clientele of the restaurant which is pretty close to West Hollywood and is in West L.A. is why it was targetted for a boycott and briefly for protests.
What struck me about the conversation I mentioned is that it went so quickly from pro and anti El Coyote boycott to just being anti-gay. It strikes me often the connection between the passage and support of anti-gay and lesbian legislation (or on initiatives which disenfranchise women and men of color as well), the relationship between these and bigoted statements and even actions like hate crime (the gang rape of a gay woman up in the Bay Area coming to mind). Pretty scary sometimes.
Andrew Sullivan, in talking about the musical theatre director, put it really well:
His point is well taken.
Beyond that, there’s a trend here that I think folks like you don’t understand, Ron, and that’s the degree to which Prop 8 was a horrible vicious attack on gay people. As such, it’s provoked some extreme reactions.
Q: Boycotting a restaurant isn’t nice, but you know what it’s not as bad as?
A: Taking away the fundamental human rights of their employees or owners.
Q: Booing Boy Scouts isn’t nice, but you know what it’s not as bad as?
A: Taking away their fundamental human rights.
Q: Yelling at Mormons isn’t nice, but you know what it’s not as bad as?
A: Taking away their fundamental human rights.
Q: Calling someone a bigoted homophobic jerk isn’t nice, but you know what it’s not as bad as?
A: Taking away his fundamental human rights.
I’m all for civility, and I’m all for reasoned discussion, but I question how exactly gay people are supposed to be all nicey nicey with the people who did this to them.
I think that there needs to be an understanding that even if you do something vicious and discriminatory in a reasoned and civil way, that doesn’t make it ‘not vicious and discriminatory’.
—Myca
Myca, I am so glad to read your comment. In both gay and lesbian rights and in the rights of people who have been labelled with psychiatric diagnoses in Virginia there is a ton of pressure to always be “nice” on all advocates. There is even pressure in disability rights to “reach out’ to folks and organizations who oppose our rights, reach out in the sense of actually cooperating with them. Even saying “but they are not friends to our cause” will get you labelled polarizing by fellow people with disabilities and most especially by people in the MH system, even non-disabled folks who work for advocacy organizations. This was the most validating thing I have read in the longest time, thank you so much.
I’m reading the 10th anniversary coverage in the daily newspaper of Tyisha Miller here
The slide show made me cry, because it’s all vivid to me even later, every moment. I saw some people I haven’t seen in years.
The problem was, that they talk a lot about the protesters and they have noted local people talking about the protesters, and pending riots, burning downtown and all that but they don’t interview a single protester. There were street demonstrators who later ran for office, were involved in civic issues so it’s not like they couldn’t find them.
The article on her family’s words about her was the highlight. They interviewed one of the officers involved, and he said something about no training being done on what happened and there’s some truth to that.
I’m working on blogging something but I’m not sure what.
Here’s an attempt at blogging I guess.
Our anniversary event turned out really well. It ran over but there were quite a few preachers in the mix. I had to speak at the last moment for someone who had asked me to speak if they couldn’t make it and that was fine.
What’s disappointing are some of the racist comments written under the articles on Tyisha Miller. I do know the identity of one of the authors, an RPD officer who harassed me on my blog for two years. This is his contribution.
Grow up?? That officer should get a medal for saving a man’s life! By that logic, I guess all of those LAPD officers involved in the North Hollywood bank robbery gun battle should be bannished from field duty for all the misses. Of course since your an expert now, you know that shooting at a paper target at the range vs. a real life situation is exactly the same, right?? Wow!,,you passed the “firearm requirement”. Well heck, lets give “Raw Reality” a “Jr. G-man badge”!!
november19…Just trying to make sense of your ignorant comment. First of all, facing a person armed with a firearm would make me “gun happy” too. Sounds like your a little jaded because maybe the police shot your dog. And I beg to differ, Riverside area law enforcement is top notch. It’s a tough job dealing with “bottom of the barrel” members of the community, like yourself.
Were those two comments supposed to be examples of racist comments?
I read the story (although for some reason I can only pull up the 4 most recent posts). Apparently it’s established that the woman had a gun in her lap, and it’s stated by the cops that she reached for it. Of course, we’ll never know how true that is. Likely one cop started shooting, and once one shoots they all shoot.
Now, there’s apparently all kinds of history with the Riverside cops and I have no idea what the records of these particular cops are. It’s entirely possible that people who know these things and more are justifiably skeptical of the official story.
Tell me this, though; let’s say for argument’s sake that the cops’ story is true. She did have a gun and upon seeing the cops she did reach for it. What would you suggest the cops’ next move should be?
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