Post what you want, as long as you want, with whomever you want. Self-linking is encouraged.
I agree with the politics of this song, but really I’m just posting it here because I find the inclusion of the Disney characters endearingly bizarre.
A relevant quote from law professor Amanda Frost: Attitudes towards nationwide injunctions also turn on one’s view of the courts…
With regards to the courts, I think we’re about to see the Supremes tell lower courts that their rulings will…
the people he picks to work in his administration are supposed to support that effort as long as they don’t…
@Ron: What do you think Trump did in his first term that was unique or made a positive impact on…
During his first term Trump walked into the White House with no experience in government, so he selected a lot…
I don’t know. Here’s a dilemma. I’m being cyber stalked on a political site, including having my neighborhood posted, my high school information from Classmates.com and other stuff they believe is lurid that they can speculate to death on. And slander saying that I’m a drunk, attend A.A. and a bunch of similar stuff like having multiple orgasms over dead police officers. Some threatening stuff but more innuendo.
One of them even found out my moniker here and they’ve posted that all over the place amid some rantings about the evils of feminism.
The high school stuff was interesting b/c I was notified by an email alert from Classmates.com that my guestbook was signed one week ago. The guy who signed it is a police detective in my city. So suddenly, he finds it (or looks for it) signs it and then all this information from it just gets posted. All this is clearly from what these assholes write is because they don’t like my blogging about the incumbent in my district. Too critical. So I should call the police right?
The high school stuff is dry, but it’s kind of creepy that I’m being investigated, just for the creep factor by a detective who may not be harassing me but may be providing information to someone who is.
Guess what? Can’t do that. Why? Because the incumbent in my district and the police chief lived together for several years. A bit of a conflict of interest, I think. It’s getting to the point where I think I’m ready almost to quit because I think I know who most of my harassers have been, through one way or another. Some were city employees including cops.
I haven’t blogged about it but a little b/c I’m not sure. I’m not sure of the employment status of the detective so I called IA and said they had until the end of the day to give me his employment status or I would hire a lawyer.
I could use a little advice from my fellow bloggers. My blog is cancer related and I have had some communication from a woman with an incredibly strong breast cancer history in her family. I asked if she had received genetic testing and her response was that her GYN had told her that because the cancer history was on her father’s side of the family she is not at increased risk.
I am not a doctor but I certainly know enough about genetics to understand that this is just plain wrong. I would like to advise but as I am not a doctor am I taking undue risk? Is there a liability issue I need to be aware of? Thanks – Kate@ http://aftercancernowwhat.blogspot.com
Wow. That is really scary. The very idea that anyone would harass someone like that because they are critical of the city government is terrible. I had a little bit of a similar experience once. Someone ranted on a site about all of the Mexicans in town who were working as dishwashers and about how awful it was and about how they were going to turn in the restaurants who hired them. I said that just because someone was from Mexico or seemed to be, it didn’t mean that they were in this country illegally. The next thing I know, all of my personal data including my full legal name, my address, photos etc were posted on an anti-immigration web site. Luckily for me, all that happened were a few posts about how stupid I am and many more about how I didnt matter because I was fat. But it was scary because the people on that site were loony as anything but also often would talk about violence they would like to see against various pro-immigration activists.
But at least I wasnt worried that the public servants in my town had anything to do with it. The police are supposed to protect us but what happens when *they* are behind the harassment? And heck, what does it say about them that they would respond in such a way to someone who is merely being critical of them online? It makes me appreciate my town a lot more. Once, I called the mayor a jerk online in a heated discussion and the only thing that happened was that I had to apologize to him later when I was proved wrong (I had misunderstood his position on the issue).
Anyone read “FoxTrot” by Bill Amend? Apparently there were moments where strips that appeared in newspaper were different than what was seen in reprint collections.
http://bakertoons.blogspot.com/2009/04/foxtrot-altered-strips.html
Would you say that the last strip in particular can be problemic (it involves race)?
If you’ve watched the 9 to 5 movie, when the women smoke a joint, they each create a fantasy of how to dispose their overlord. And I think Lily Tomlin’s involves a bunch of animated cutesy disney-esque animals, circa Bambi. The fantasies end in this fantasia/bambi world where each of them are princesses freeing the world of oppression or something. That’s where the animals come from.
What Is and Isn’t Racist: Looking at why whiteness has a conflict of interest when they decide to declare an action or image to be not racist.
Is Boycotting Jamaica the Solution For The GLBT community: looking at why the plan to boycott all things Jamaican in an attempt to bring pressure to end the violence may cause more harm than good.
Rubina : The slumdog millionaire child is up for sale
Mathew McConaughey On Black Women: Apparently the star has decided that black women are not “cover worthy”
in case anyone missed it, a sonnet to my fiance’s penis: http://filthygrandeur.blogspot.com/2009/04/there-never-was-member-so-defined.html
a sonnet to my vagina: http://filthygrandeur.blogspot.com/2009/04/soft-pillows-of-flesh-tucked-unseen.html
the final installment of my three-part essay on gender, sexuality, and identity in china mieville’s Iron Council: http://filthygrandeur.blogspot.com/2009/04/gender-and-sexuality-identity-and_14.html
my site’s new look: http://filthygrandeur.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-look.html
a rant on an email i received, which i call racist: http://filthygrandeur.blogspot.com/2009/04/quick-post-about-email-circulated.html
and my thoughts on adam lambert’s use of eyeliner: http://filthygrandeur.blogspot.com/2009/04/adam-lambert-nail-polish-and-eye-liner.html
With those Foxtrot comics, I’m pretty sure that the first one was edited for the Deseret News (a paper owned by the LDS church) to take out the religious reference, and then restored to its original form for the book. Because really, the version published by Deseret doesn’t make much sense, and you can see where there are words missing.
That last one is interesting, though. I’m not really sure what to say about that one.
Radfem – you probably know this, but you could make a report/complaint to the state police and/or local US Attorney’s office.
Transphobic/transfetishistic comic controversy…and example of how not to respond when called out for your actions.
Original comic by Erika Moen, creator of DAR: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary.
Various responses to the grossness, with additional links there as well. The comic was first brought to my attention as problematic through this Feministe thread and was directed to the links via this post.
While not at all the same phenomenon, I am accessing my anger and sympathy by imagining how I would feel if a cartoonist drew the same cartoon about Asian women, of which I am one.
Katie — interesting. Devoid of context, I read it as the main character being a jerk, and the trans person pointing out the truth, which the main character then ignored. Kind of like this:
http://www.leftycartoons.com/maintain-that-hierarchy/
Where the main character of the cartoon is exhibiting behavior we’re supposed to disagree with.
Someone who read the comic corrected me about the context. Ugh. :(
Radfem, i’d agree that the US attorney would be your best bet–or the feds in general, unless you have reason to believe that they are also complicit.
This is more a request: can anyone explain to me why we’re killing the school voucher program in D.C.?
I’d prefer school choice through public schools, e.g. New York City’s fairly successful use of public charters, which avoids all the problems of giving taxpayer money to sectarian schools and ensures that the schools can’t cherry-pick students (they’re admitted by lottery).
But the D.C. voucher program seem to have worked well and people of whose opinion I think highly like former Mayor Anthony Williams support it. It seems particularly cruel to pull kids who’ve been enrolled in a school for a few years out of it, especially those who are current sophomores and will be dropped back into a public school just for senior year.
Also, notwithstanding some concerns about the shortage of women working on the Great American Novel, all three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer in fiction are women:
FICTION: ELIZABETH STROUT, “Olive Kitteridge”
FINALISTS “The Plague of Doves,” by Louise Erdrich and “All Souls,” by Christine Schutt
I meant to link this last Wednesday and forgot.
Thanks, Sailorman and Emily. I’m going to call the feds outside my city. I talked to an IA sergeant when I went just to find out if this detective is retired and he retired a short time ago. The sergeant thinks it’s another person with the same name because he knew the detective and told me he didn’t have an evil bone in his body and he thought the guy was too old because while he thought the detective was in his fifties, he didn’t think he was mid-fifties. So he’s giving me a character reference for the guy. Then he brings up the blog investigation of 2005-06 which another sergeant was assigned. I did say that I knew some officers were involved in that but didn’t have proof. He didn’t contradict me just said was a huge, complex investigation.
I mentioned that another retired lieutenant wrote comments on my blog and he said, don’t you see the pattern here, retirees. And I’m like excuse me, didn’t you just say that this detective was incapable of doing anything like this and how can you have a pattern with only one person? So he essentially contradicted himself.Then I mentioned asked how close the officer (who was caught) with two years on the force was to his retirement.
So the guy’s retired, it’s out of his jurisdiction and I think that is that and then he says that it’s being handed off to his boss’s boss, the captain of personnel to handle and that he’ll call me “fairly soon”. So what does the captain of personnel have to do with it?
Since you post about obesity issues here, I wanted to link to a post I did tonight:
http://www.anglofille.com/2009/04/20/the-nanny-state/
I live in London. Yesterday, the police raided a Caribbean fast-food restaurant and forced it to close because it’s too close to a school. There is a new law in this area of London banning new fast-food restaurants from opening near schools because of the “obesity epidemic.” To me, it’s just another example of how the “obesity epidemic” is used to justify all sorts of government actions, not to mention the way this vilifies fat people and gives a green light to discrimination.
I was inspired to write about the questionable logic of an article in the paper on legalizing incest. I ended up with the pro side.
Ok. I’m going to break the rules and not self-link. This has to be read by everyone who calls themself a feminist.
[Just to clarify, linking to people other than yourself isn’t against the rules at all! –Amp]
Really good article on ableism/disability tokenism within the feminist movement, especially with regard to selective abortion:
http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2008/12/recently_i_stum
As a disabled person who WANTS to identify as a feminist but has never felt I was “allowed” to be one because of my views on
eugenicsselective abortion, I am really grateful to read these words. I would love to see more people in the feminist movement read them too.EDIT: I know this article is from last year, but I only just stumbled across it by accident.
sanabituranima,
I’m surprised the author doesn’t bring up the issue of sex-selective abortions, as I think these are a particularly hard one for feminists: should a woman living in a society where women are undervalued have the liberty to abort a fetus because it is female? From what I have seen, even on this question most Western feminists say yes, because we can’t dictate to women what they ought to think about gender, and certainly can’t expect women in those societies to single-handedly fix them so that dowry, inheritance etc. no longer favors having sons instead of daughters.
The UK law also is different from that in the U.S., as like much of abortion law in Europe it is oriented toward finding justifications for the abortion, rather than being based on the woman’s individual liberty. If you have a justification-based law, then it’s definitely going to be awful to have disability or XX chromosomes or really anything short of threat to the mother’s health be used as the “justification.” I mean, how do people who know they were conceived in rape or incest feel about rape and incest being treated as justifications for abortion? Isn’t that a society saying they never should have been born? Actually, come to think of it, how are people whose births did impair their mothers’ health or even lead to the mother’s death supposed to feel? (in case they’re not saddled with enough lifelong guilt)
The justification regime is inherently problematic. It will always reflect and reinforce biases about who “deserves” to live. This is one reason among many to prefer the U.S. constitutional regime in which abortion is a right, not something for which you must go begging and pleading and justifying.
Oops, I posted the same link twice by accident (I though the spam thingy ate the first one, turns out I was wrong.)
PG – yes, I see your point, in theory. But in practice, it works out the same: women terminated planned, wanted pregnancies because of pre-natal tests and societal prejudices.
Right, but are you saying that we should be able to dictate the reasons that motivate someone to abort? Aborting because your marriage broke up is a good-enough reason; aborting because you don’t feel capable of coping with a Down’s Syndrome baby isn’t? I’m just wary of saying that my judgment of a “good” reason to abort should be binding on another woman’s life. That’s why I discussed the difference in abortion legal regimes above: I start from the American presumption of liberty and that society shouldn’t decide what’s an acceptable reason for you to exercise a liberty; someone in a society that’s based more on the common good may find that kind of control more acceptable.
Freedom is hard sometimes. Giving women the freedom to make medical decisions about their own bodies means legal abortions even when one does not approve of the reasons a woman chooses to have an abortion. Giving people freedom of speech means that people with messages one would rather not hear get to have a voice. Giving people freedom to bear arms means some mean MFers are going to own guns. And so on.
Generally when it comes to things like people choosing to abort because of potential disability of the fetus, I think the best course of action is to work to educate people about disabilities. For example, how many people who have aborted because of Down’s Syndrome have actually met someone with Down’s? The root of the problem isnt that women choose to abort when they find out that the fetus is disabled or female. That is a just a symptom of the real problem. The real problem is that people are assigned different worths in our society based on any number of criteria.
When that author says
it seems to be incorrectly setting up a dichotomy. She may be engaging with the ethical questions and/or prejudices. related to disability. However, she is also (intentionally, accidentally, or as a collateral effect) writing about choice. She doesn’t get to say “look only at disability issues and ignore choice” any more than someone can discuss choice while pretending that there are no issues beyond a pregnancy.
Setting the torture memos to music has a strangely poignant and yet, at the same time, stomach-turning effect.
h/t Edge of the American West