Post about whatever you like, with whatever links you want to share. Sluggo would want you to self-link!
- I Repeat-Quit Using ‘Tranny’ To Insult Cisgender Women
- Mary Anne Mohanraj Gets You Up to Speed, Part II. This one, also terrific, is more narrowly aimed at white writers writing characters of color.
- New relationship initiative in California would convert civil marriage to Domestic Partnerships for everyone. The compromise both sides oppose!
- How a children’s book (Sam Llewellyn’s Lyonesse: The Well Between the Worlds) uses fat as a symbol of corruption and evil.
- Why we think we’re post-racial, and why it’s a dangerous desire.
- Citigroup used bailout money to lobby against labor rights bill.
- I am not a foodie at all. For one thing, I’d rather spend the money on comic books. But darn, the extremely elaborate and wildly original meal described here sounds like an experience.
- The case against objective definitions of rape.
- The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist. Really entertaining read. Via Boing Boing.
- Billy Bragg and other rock stars speak out in favor of fans downloading music.
- One-eyed filmmaker plans to install tiny camera in his empty eye socket. He thinks it’ll let him more intimate, natural footage when talking to people. This reminds me a little of Connie Willis’ short story “The Last of the Winnebagos,” which featured a photographer using a hidden camera to capture more genuine expressions.
- Mzbitca considers Buffy Season one.
- U.S. job situation now worse than in our previous five recessions.
- Note to newspapers: “Rape” is not spelled S-E-X.
- You know who didn’t cause the economic crisis? Women.
- Bus bench in Netherlands publicly displays weight of whoever sits on it. It’s a promotion for a “health” club.
- Intersectionality and violence against South African, and California, lesbians.
- The Watchmen movie may disappoint, but fan culture does not.
- Some horrible Bush administration policies that Obama is embracing; and in other cases, he doens’t continue Bush’s crimes, but he does cover them up. Obama’s a lot better than Bush, but a lot worse than he should be.
- Bank ad featuring a trans women. And clearly being anti-trans bigotry. Neat.
- California legislators propose legalizing pot for the tax revenue.
- You’re right, Lisa, the way Vogue frames dieting, fat and “curves” is both sexist and racist. But I wish you had also pointed out that it’s a prime example of anti-fat bigotry (or “sizist,” if you’d like an “ist” word).
- Really striking, huge-scale, anti-domestic-violence art project.
- The argument against participating in Durbin II.
- Gay marriage opponent jokes about same-sex couples being denied visitation rights in hospitals. Yeah, that’s a laugh riot.
- Is food the new sex? Right-wing and wrong in a number of ways, but interesting if you can deal with that, essay on fat, sex, and self-indulgence.
You know one thing I really love? Great book design. Check out the elegant and striking cover design for the upcoming Nancy collection. Published by Fantagraphics, designed by Seth (who’s also a great cartoonist).
Once you’ve bought the book, xerox some pages on to thick-stock paper so you can play Five Card Nancy.
I wasn’t disappointed by the “Watchmen” film at all. I thought it was generally excellent (with the exception of the underwritten and poorly-acted Silk Spectre II character) and that the film’s take on Ozymandias was a huge improvement on the graphic novel’s. So there.
I saw Watchmen with no expectations at all and thought it was fine. Not brilliant but good. I did think Rorschach (sp?) was excellently played by Jackie Earle Haley.
There’s a fight going on between the
Campaign for safe cosmetics and the personal care products lobby.
And waaay too many people are either rushing medical care or skipping it because of the economy.
I humbly submit Controlling the Means of Reproduction for your enjoyment. :)
[Broken link fixed.]
I have to agree with Kevin Smith’s appraisal of the Watchmen movie – the perfect Watchmen movie is impossible, and Snyder took a hit for the comic book world by doing his damned best to make a solid movie that would have probably been crapped out by somebody like Michael Bay if he didn’t.
Whether you love his work or not, you have to be able to see that Snyder really loved Moore’s story and wanted to make his movie celebrate Moore’s book.
It could have been another LXG.
Okay, in order to appease the God of Sluggo, I hereby willingly self-link.
I wrote about chopstick troubles, and a standup guy (Louis CK) who jokes in surprisingly enlightened ways about white male privilege, and the raced and gendered trainwreck that is a recent Old Navy ad, and white people who like to pet black people, and then, the overreaction to seemingly–gasp!–inscrutable Chinese writing on a Princeton University blackboard.
Thanks for all the link love lately guys.
One more thing to add: My take on the most recent episode of dollhouse
http://mzbitca.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/dollhousehas-the-tide-turned/
There have been a bunch of updates on the Durban conference since I wrote that post.
Most important:
1) The language singling out Israel for criticism was erased
2) The language reaffirming Durban I was maintained (which is the major sticking point, since Durban I was the epicenter of the vilification prompting the potential walkout this time around); and
3) A Dutch proposal to condemn anti-gay discrimination was taken out (the Dutch are pissed).
I gave my comments on these developments, I also think Gerald Steinberg had an interesting take. The major worry on the anti-Semitism side is that all these victories will be lost on the floor, and we’ll be back to where we started.
Watchmen had some problems, but I liked it for the most part. The movie also sparked a discussion over at mine about Snyder’s 300 and expressions of race and culture on film.
I wrote about the weird anti-geek backlash in light of the release of Watchmen and the SciFi Channel’s rebranding.
Commenting on your link to California considering legalizing pot…I think it is a great idea to help the California economy. It is going to take a few states moving in this direction before we ever end prohibition on a national scale.
Re: 4, I’m not sure how to deal with this in historical works. The Canterbury Tales makes lots of reference to people’s being fat in order to emphasize that those who supposedly had taken a vow of self-denial (e.g. people in the Church) clearly were hypocrites, and I would hope that no one wants to re-edit Chaucer to make him appropriate for modernity. In times and places where there often wasn’t enough food to sustain everyone, being fat was a sign that you were eating more than your “share.” None of this makes sense in the 21st century West, where calories are abundant and wealthy people are more likely to be thin, but I’m not sure how hard to rap a re-telling of the Arthurian legend for it.
Re: 15, Yglesias misses that while finance is all about making sound assessments of risk, that doesn’t preclude taking risks that you’ve calculated are worth taking. One reason Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got heavily into the secondary subprime mortgage market is that they were being pressured by shareholders who wanted the companies to increase their profits. Some i-banks didn’t offer certain kinds of financial products until they were getting heat from customers for not doing so. People don’t go for high-risk financial products because they’re stupid and masochistic; they do it because the rewards are much greater. So in most years, a risk-taking finance guy will do better than his risk-averse female counterpart. The problem is that when they fall, they fall hard (and actually the whole system of hedges and insurance purchased from AIG was an attempt to ensure that there was a safety net for the risks … AIG just underestimated — in a way that makes the word “underestimated” woefully inadequate — the systemic risk of having everyone call in their claims at once).
Over at GenderCritics ZoBabe has good post about Confronting Abusers.
Thanks for the link love!
May I also humbly submit another TransGriot post commenting on the tendency of some GLBT peeps to slime allies with ‘homophobe or ‘transphobe’ to silence constructive criticism they don’t want to hear
http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2009/03/allies-arent-homophobes-or-transphobes.html
I think there’s a lot of space between “re-editing Chaucer” and criticizing a modern retelling of the Aurthurian legends intended to be read by contemporary kids. I don’t want history edited, but nor do I want history to be an excuse for supporting current-day bigotries in new works, especially those aimed at children.
I think the author should have either have left the anti-fat bigotry out of his retelling, or if he couldn’t do that, than contextualize it.
The domestic partnership initiative is awesome. But then again, I was already partial to the “ban straight marriage” solution
I don’t think we should clean up history to make it appropriate for kids. If I set a story in a place and time period such as England in the Middle Ages, in which there were food shortages and being fat indicated a degree of wealth and not having to do a lot of physical labor, should I pretend that this wasn’t true? I think providing context is important in any historical work aimed at kids to help them understand the difference between historic norms and those of today (e.g. in a historic work set where women were almost universally illiterate, to include an “author’s note” about how it was wrong to have withheld literacy from women, that some women nonetheless managed to obtain literacy and others found ways to pass on knowledge even without access to the written word, and thank goodness now both boys and girls can enjoy the author’s book). But I’d be leery of a context that got pushed into the narrative itself because that kills the sense of going into a different world that’s part of the pleasure of reading fiction.
Do you think that J.K. Rowling was wrong to describe Dudley Dursley as “very fat and hated exercise”? Or is that balanced out by thin characters (Draco, Snape, etc.) also being portrayed negatively?
I’d say it depends on how you do it. It’s my experience that most children’s books about the Arthurian legends are actually completely willing to ignore historic accuracy, and are in effect “cleaning up history for kids”; if that’s the case, then I think the “I’m just being true to history!” plea in defense of anti-fat bigotry rings false.
On the other hand, if the book takes a strict warts-and-all approach to depicting historically accurate settings and social attitudes, then I don’t object to leaving social attitudes about fat in — but I think contextualizing through an introduction or some other way is important.
Regarding Harry Potter, I think the description of Mr. Dursley and Dudley in the earlier books was disgusting, among the most bigoted and hateful children’s books I’ve ever read in its treatment of fat. It’s not like Rowling just said Dudley was very fat and didn’t like exercise, and left it at that; her descriptions made it clear that fat had made them physically grotesque and disgusting. This was, pretty clearly, a reflection of the warped state of their souls.
She did something similar with Mrs. Dursley, too, but in that case it was extreme thinness which was treated as grotesque. I don’t think that balances things out, to answer your question. (Also, there’s something kind of sexist in how she treated fat and motherhood; Mrs. Dursley, who is a terrible mother, spoiling one son and abusing the other, is grotesquely thin; Mrs. Weasley, the perfectly maternal loving mother, is the only positive, important female character allowed to be a bit chubby.)
The important good characters of the book mostly had “normal” bodies, and even when they didn’t, were never described in grotesque terms. What would have “balanced” things would be if there had been very fat people among the important positive characters (Haggard is described as big, but never fat), but even that wouldn’t have made up for treating being very fat as a grotesque sign of soul rot in the case of the two male Dursleys.
[edited after initial posting]
I would like to point out the best, “I can’t be X-ist,” statement that I have ever seen.
Ann Althouse is incredible.
Found at:
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2009/03/ann-althouse-sure-has-lot-of-anti.html
I liked this comment:
By that standard, what percentage of American Jews are antisemites?
Regarding women and finance:
There’s likely to be quite a bit sex discrimination in the finance industry keeping women out of prestigious positions. My brother was an intern at an investment bank a while back, and he described how all the female interns were pressured to go into sales and actively discouraged from trying out other positions (such as stock trader) because they were “so qualified” for sales. And, of course, “qualified” was a euphemism for “has the kind of body that makes men stupid.” He’s no longer an intern and works there full-time, but he’s not sure he wouldn’t welcome being laid off, because many of his co-workers are rotten bastards (and at least one has tried to sabotage his work), the hours are ridiculous, and the work itself isn’t particularly fulfilling.
Oh, yeah. Those comments are full of gems. I really like the thinly veiled anti-semitism of that comment, itself.
The, “I can’t be anti-semitic…” comment from Althouse just jumped out at me. Even with all the other really funny comments. I guess the “ex-husband” makes it just that much lamer to me.
I have to admit to a fondness for the humor that is Althouse commenters responding to having anti-semitic comments pointed out with a thread that’s just chock full ‘o anti-semitic comments, both blatant and veiled, including Althouse’s not up to even the low bar of, “some of my best friends are…” comment.
chingona,
Dangit, by that standard I’m as much of an anti-Hindu as Bobby Jindal. And here I’d hoped that by not leaving my family’s faith for one that said my family would all burn in hell, I was getting away with something.
@ Jake … That it was Althouse herself, and not one of her commenters, makes it better, as does the “ex-husband” bit. For some reason I can’t put my finger on, the thread at Althouse’s was making me laugh, but when I clicked over to Ezra’s to read his explanation (what Althhouse called a partial apology) and read some of the same people trolling his blog, it started to make me a lot more uneasy. Like it had crossed the line from “so stupid it’s funny” to “this is making me the slightest bit queasy.”
@ PG … Seriously, who knew that was all it took?
Explaining so much about the military’s problems overseas:
Lest you be tempted to believe this is fake, look at page 169 of “Survival,” By Dept. of the Army, United States Dept. of the Army, United States. Published by U.S. Govt. print. off., 1957. (Snippets are in Google Books.)
Did Neville Longbottom end up growing out of being fat? He was pretty awesome by the end, but I have a niggling suspicion that she mentioned him growing into a “normal” body. It’s still largely fat-phobic but not so bad.
Neville stays chubby throughout the series, and we don’t actually see him in the epilogue; they just tell the kids to give their love to Prof. Longbottom. No reason to think that he became a thin adult.
Also, re: #23 — I am avoiding Jezebel since this incident.
Open thread-wise: FREE MUSIC!
I just found out that South By Southwest (the Austin-based music festival) puts out a “Showcasing Artists” public release each year. They’re all available as torrents; the 2009 version is over 5 gigs of DRM-free music (1200+ songs )and the torrents go all the way back to 2005.
See
http://hewgill.com/sxsw/
for the 2005-2008 versions
and
http://sites.google.com/site/sxsw2009torrent/
for the 2009 version.
If you join me in downloading, use a decent upload speed please; they’re big, and it is otherwise very slow.
yeah, you all probably knew this already ;) I’m just happy to pick up a couple of thousand songs for free, which I might not have ever bothered to otherwise check out!
I blog on two sides of releasing confidential police records as the police union fights to release the records of a former officer running against their endorsed candidate and how I feel that personnel records privacy laws impacted my own safety during an internal affairs investigation of my blog several years ago.
The resignation letter of one of the AIG bonus recipients, who says he had nothing to do with the credit default swaps that brought the company down and that he will not stay at a company where employees are threatened by politicians with loss of privacy — in an environment where their lives and those of their families literally are being threatened — should the employees accept the bonuses for which they contracted.
OK, I’m a little late on this, but I had to share:
Moses is Departing Egypt: A Facebook Haggadah