You are not a number! You are a free person! So post whatever links or thoughts you like. And if you’d like to self-promote, go wild.
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Same-sex marraige will inevitably lead to sex with ducks, and that’s an outcome Garfunkel and Oates are willing, even eager, to accept. (Via Pandagon.)
- Excellent series of posts arguing that, despite the setbacks, pursuing equal marriage rights (aka gay marriage, aka same-sex marriage) through the courts as well as through other means has been an extremely successful strategy.
- “I didn’t know what homophobia was until I left the reserve.”
- Interesting article about Unitarian Universalism in Africa, which isn’t the same as UU in the West. (Via.)
- “If you are an education reformer who believes teacher quality is the single biggest factor affecting student achievement, here is compelling evidence that you should also actively support existing desegregation programs.”
- How far to the right has the Supreme Court gone? Very, very far.
- Sotomayer is no bleeding heart jurist, alas.
- Slavery 101: Clearing up misconceptions about African slavery
- I like the anecdote in the second half of this post.
- Language Log examines the study which Ross Douthat cites to imply that feminism has made women miserable: “the effect under discussion is a shift of a few percentage points, mostly accomplished by shifting the opinions of around 5 women in a hundred from ‘very happy’ to ‘pretty happy’.” (Via.)
- Well-done post discusses how anti-fat bigotry is different, without devolving into oppression Olympics.
- Poor people pay more for daily necessities of life than rich people.
- It turns out that laws protecting labor don’t lead to increased unemployment.
- If you’re a member of Threadless, please vote for this design by my friend Jenn, so I can buy it.
- So which sex is “the sex class,” men or women? An argument over terminology that actually has some interesting stuff underlying it.
- Thank goodness the Israeli Supreme Court is there. (Seriously.) More here.
- Obama hasn’t remembered a single promise he’s made to LGBT Americans (and he made eight). We should remember that.
- The Pervocracy discusses the clothed female/naked male sexual fetish. (Via.)
- If I was a coin collector, I’d really want one of the godless dollars.
- This article on health care costs in The New Yorker examines why some places in the US (such as the Mayo clinic) provide excellent, relatively inexpensive health care. Where is the extra money going in areas of the US which spend much more money for care that’s not any better? He argues that the difference, frankly, comes down to how much the system in any town encourages doctors to make as much money as they possibly can.
- Texas mayor resigns and leaves the country, because homophobic US immigration & marriage laws don’t recognize his Mexican partner.
- American voters are less white every election.
- How to be Mike Lester, political cartoonist: 1) Find something that someone dislikes. 2) Compare it to abortion. 3) Repeat, repeat, repeat…
- An argument in favor of Palestinians embracing nonviolent struggle against Israeli oppression.
- Sixth grader censored for doing a school presentation about Harvey Milk.
- On what is “normal” and what is “fetish.”
- World’s most interesting bridges. Great photos!
- I lovelovelove So You Think You Can Dance. But this homophobic garbage has got to go.
That video is hilarious! And thanks for the list of great reads.
Garfunkel and Oates is the best name for a band in the history of history. The song’s great, too.
“If you are an education reformer who believes teacher quality is the single biggest factor affecting student achievement, here is compelling evidence that you should also actively support existing desegregation programs.”
I’d say that the single biggest factor affecting student achievement is parental support – both physical (make sure the kid has proper clothes, a meal in his/her stomach, glasses if needed, etc.) and mental (value and encourage academic achievement, give it priority over athletic achievement, make sure the kid sets aside time to study, keep video games, TV and other distractions away, etc.).
If I was a coin collector, I’d really want one of the godless dollars.
One thing the article didn’t make clear; the phrase “In God We Trust” by law must appear on all U.S. currency. The enabling act for any new currency may state where the phrase will appear but not whether it will appear at all.
My review of Pixar’s Up
The personals are apparently also for soliciting assassinations.
Thank you, all kinds of good great efforts in that list.
More good great efforts, hope you’ll agree:
The History Channel’s upcoming “event” about “Africa” doesn’t look like it’s going to include much real history.
Regarding white moms who raise their kids in isolation from people of color, and another on white moms who go on amber alert when male people of color come near their toddlers.
For once, we don’t need the Israeli Supreme Court to do the
dirtygood work. The bill was rejected by the minister’s committee (i.e., legislatively). Apparently, every minister that wasn’t in Yisrael Beiteinu voted it down.I wanted to pop in and say thanks for the linky love.
In Memory Of Robert Mitchell Can We Stop Calling Tasers Non- Lethal Force?: How many have to die before we decide that this is indeed a feminist issue and that tasers are not non lethal weapons?
Is Teaching a Child that “All Black People should Die” Abuse?: A skinhead mother is fighting for custody of her children after teaching them that POC should die. The follow up articles can be found here and here
Tory MP Pierre Poilievre Brings Tar Baby To Parliament Hill: Apparently intent erases harm when it comes to using terms that may be deemed racist.
Thanks for all the links, including the ones to my blog.
I loved that Garfunkel and Oats video too.
figleaf
7: Re the Slavery 101 post, I was glad to see someone pulling these points together, yet at the same time I found it a little difficult for me to follow because so many different ideas were being expressed. I hope that Nia or someone else will make her paragraph toward the end a more central focus for a post:
This is what I had always thought to be the most crucial difference between the “enslavement” practiced when different tribes — whether European or African — fought one another and took slaves as the prizes of war, versus the race-based multi-generational and inescapable slavery created by Europeans’ colonizing and enslaving Native peoples (as with the Spanish in the Americas) or importing slaves (the Atlantic slave trade in African people). There’s slavery in the Bible and the Iliad, but the children of those slaves were not all doomed to slavery themselves. The Old Testament patriarchs had sex with slaves specifically to produce children who would be the patriarchs’ acknowledged offspring with rights of inheritance, not to produce more slaves.
Of course, all forms of slavery are bad, but marking out one race as that of slaves, as the United States especially did (articulated in Dred Scot’s declaration that even blacks not held in slavery lacked citizenship*), seems to have been a historical anomaly.
* “A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a ‘citizen’ within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.”
10: An excellent post, and one that helped me think about where I stand on the issues raised. In particular, this:
brought to mind the concept of “similarly situated” that has played a significant role in reducing other types of discrimination. That is, I am 100% on board with the idea that size-based discrimination in housing, employment or education should be illegal, because one’s size is irrelevant to one’s reliability as a tenant, competence as an employee or abilities as a student, just as race, sex, religion, etc. are irrelevant.
Where I’m not quite with meowser yet is in areas where I can see size as being relevant, such as whether one can fit into one’s airplane seat with armrests down or requires an additional seat, or (less closely correlated but probably not irrelevant) one’s pre-existing conditions and likelihood of incurring future expensive health problems. Obviously not everyone who is deemed obese has health problems, but neither do all smokers, yet most people seem OK with the insurance companies’ treating smokers worse than non-smokers, even if a given smoker might be much healthier than me, a non-smoker.
Amen on the nasty homophobic crap on SYTYCD. Love the show, but every once in a while it devolves into an extended lesson in traditional gender roles. Makes me nuts. I believe (and this may be wishful thinking) that Nigel really means well but is just so steeped in that worldview, and so personally threatened by the whole male dancer=gay stereotype, that it bubbles up out of him every once in a while. My Mom’s very much the same about race: her rational opinions are quite just, but she hasn’t really done the work necessary to change unconscious biases, and they make their way to the surface periodically. Am watching SYTYCD Canda atm (they just wrapped their first season recently), and Mary showed up as a judge for the auditions … turns out she’s just as bad as Nigel about this type of thing.
Tried to edit my previous comment to add: the article is a bit out of date, as I’ve read an apology for this already issued by Nigel. It was reproduced on a blog over at Salon, I think.
Thanks for the great links. #10 has an extra h at the beginning, though.
I went to the post on moms going on amber alert when male poc are around their toddlers. It’s a good post. But what the FUCK is with this comment left on it?
Question for folks who are knowledgeable about the Iran-Iraq war — do you know if it was ever clearly established that Iran actively recruited children under the age of 15 to serve in the war by walking across minefields before professional troops would be sent across them?
I was talking about the movie “Persepolis” with a conservative who said that while the movie talks about the recruitment of adolescents and young teenagers with the use of religious rhetoric and plastic “keys to heaven,” the movie didn’t mention the use of those children as low-tech mine clearers.
I looked online for confirmation that this was a standard practice of Iran during the war, but most of what I found on the subject was in conservative and/or pro-Israel-anti-Iran opinion writing. There was very little in the way of news articles, except this Associated Press article from September 21, 1988:
It seems pretty indisputable that Iran was recruiting children as part of its war effort; I’m just trying to figure out to what uses the children were put, and especially if they were treated as cannon fodder while adult soldiers were held in reserve.
Filthy Grandeur, I checked out that assassination post you made.
I actually wish I could agree with you! But, I work with grade school and high school kids a lot. In fact, one of the things I do is discuss things like American history and citizenship and the rights and duties of citizens under the American Constitution and such (various requirements for rank and merit badges in the BSA). I can easily imagine someone who graduated close to or below the median in their high school not making the “Kennedy and Lincoln = both assassinated” correlation. In fact, I can even see them thinking “Kennedy and Lincoln = both great Presidents” and thinking that the ad was wishing President Obama well!
Remember what P.T. Barnum is reputed to have said; “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the American public.” I see little evidence in my daily life that he was wrong.
As far as a presumption of racism – sure, it was likely a white person. Heck, by random chance the odds are, what – say 7:2 that they were white vs. black? But plenty of people said they wanted President Bush dead, and every President before him. Just because someone hates what the current President is doing and wants him dead doesn’t automatically make them racist if they’re white.
RonF,
Are there folks out there who consider Garfield and McKinley great presidents as well?
RonF–
even if there are people who could interpret it in a way that is “hey, great president” doesn’t make it okay. It strikes me as offensive because that person deliberately chose those four presidents. if the person wanted to make the point that Obama follow in the path of “great presidents” they could have chosen a number of others than four who all share the assassination commonality.
and i’m standing by my racism statement.
I dunno if I would have instantly twigged to the link re assassination, though when pointed out it’s certainly obvious.
But then again I would not have been especially upset if Dick Cheney had been shotgunned by his hunting partner (instead of the reverse) and the main reason I’d have been upset about Bush would have been that Cheney would step into the seat. I don’t actually think that wishing the president were dead is especially uncommon. It’s illegal to be involved in it, but it’s not uncommon to wish that the President would die or even be killed. I’ve heard ill wishes bandied about at plenty of bars, over many presidencies.
It may also be racist. But that’s a bit more complex in this particular case.
In my experience there seem to be a fair number of people who harbor those thoughts about ANY sitting president.* US Presidents are the most powerful people in the world, and are figureheads of blame for a lot of crazy people worldwide. I don’t see it as determinative proof of racism if the current group of crazy President-haters are white and the President happens to be black, because a fair number of those same people may well have wanted to kill Clinton too, and may want to kill the next Democratic president.
It may well be racist, of course, no denying that. But in the world of crazy president-hating people, the basis of anti-Obama animus is less than clear. You have to accept that some people are going to REALLY hate the President; some of them will be white; and some of them will be doing so for reasons entirely unrelated to racism.
There’s usually a difference between how serious we are about a sentiment we “harbor in thoughts,” or even express to friends over a beer or in a hastily-published blog post, and how serious we are about one we pay to put in the newspaper. Or did I just miss the vast number of wishes for prior presidents’ assassinations that were published in the classified ads all along? I admit I haven’t read a physical paper daily since college.
Filthy Grandeur, you’ve completely missed my point. I’m not talking about how you (or I, for that matter) interpret the intent of that ad. My point is that in my opinion your presumption that the ad rep understood the point of the ad is not well-founded. As has been said (and attributed to people stretching from Napoleon to Robert Heinlein), “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.” As apparently Heinlein pointed out, you can’t rule out malice – and I don’t. But I’d bet on stupidity.
PG, I wouldn’t. But then I’m presuming, as Filthy Grandeur grants the possibility of, that the ad rep probably didn’t have a clue about the history of McKinley and Garfield.
I’ve been trying to think of exactly what to say about the killing of Dr. Tiller. I finally found it expressed well on Neptunus Lex. Simply put, I cannot see how you can murder someone and call yourself pro-life.
A madman reputedly inflamed by an extremist interpretation of Islam murders American soldiers in Arkansas.
I likely know people who know at least one of these soldiers. Young men willing to risk their lives for the rights of others cut down by a murderer.
Neptunus evidently isn’t aware of the legal definition of domestic terrorism (18 U.S.C. 2331):
And anti-abortion terrorism is working a lot better on the civilian population of abortion providers than Al Qaeda terrorism is working on us, in terms of achieving the goal of intimidating or coercing the targets to stop the behavior the terrorists find undesirable. 87% of U.S. counties have no abortion access; it’s 98% of rural counties. It’s not because abortion prohibitionists have converted providers into thinking that abortion ought to be prohibited, either; it’s because prohibitionists have intimidated people who want to make abortion available into shutting down. Comparing this organized, systemic effort to a tragic murder within a family just indicates how desperate Neptune is to turn any criticism of any Christians into “No, it’s the Muslims who are really bad, lookit!”
As for pro-life people’s opposing anti-abortion terrorism, why were there so many people willing to hide Eric Rudolph, selling Tshirts and coffee mugs with “Run Rudolph Run” and writing country songs about him? And what do you make of this statement by Randall Terry in response to Tiller’s murder?
Terry also was quoted in the WSJ as saying of Dr. Tiller, “He was a murderer who reaped what he sowed.”
Or another Operation Rescue leader, Flip Benham, who said in response to Dr. Slepian’s murder that it was inevitable that baby-killers would be killed themselves.
Heck, even Fred Thompson when he was running for president said he’d be OK with the death penalty for abortionists, just so long as we weren’t “giving criminal sanctions to a 19-year-old girl and her mama.”
Shockingly, if you keep comparing a guy to Hitler, someone’s going to think it’s a good idea to assassinate this latter-day Hitler. Or do pro-lifers claim that they also would have opposed an assassination of Hitler and that they make this opposition clear in their rhetoric; it’s just so confusing how anyone could have gotten the idea that it would be heroic to stop the “holocaust” of legalized abortion?
Operation Rescue has for years been trying to shut down Dr. Tiller’s clinic through harassment and intimidation of the people who work there and even of the businesses those people patronize. As I noted on the thread about Tiller’s death, these people have come inside his church and grabbed microphones to preach their own views during a service, then refused communion because they do not consider his church to be holy or capable of having the body of Christ. Roeder posted messages on Operation Rescue’s website suggesting similar mass actions at Tiller’s church.
A couple of the prohibitionist websites on which Roeder commented evidently are feeling self-conscious. ChargeTiller.com has been completely wiped of its previous content and left up only a plain HTML text statement about the murder. Other prohibitionist websites are less concerned about how their efforts to make individual abortion providers as visible targets as possible might look now.
I’ve seen little inclination among any part of the abortion prohibitionist movement to respond to some of its members’ thinking on whether abortionists are murderers who should be executed. It’s not as though those likely to become violent are hiding their thinking, either. A GQ article predicted that Paul Hill would murder Dr. John Bayard Britton, and a few months after the article was published, Hill did so.
It may be significant that the previous rash of violence against abortion providers ocurred during the Clinton Administration, and there was no similar violence during the Bush II administration* even though the legal status of abortion in the U.S. remained almost unchanged (with the exception of the ban on the D&X procedure). I doubt that Dr. Tiller will be the only victim during the Obama Administration.
* During the last Bush Administration, there were no attacks on personnel but there were several on clinic property, including one genius who crashed his car into a women’s care center that didn’t even perform abortions.
Also, re: #12 on Amp’s list of links, Quiggin’s stats seem out of date: the Eurozone-16 had a seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 9.2% for April, which is higher than the U.S.’s 8.9%.
PG @23
Thanks for breaking that down. I was pretty put off by the post’s suggestion that feminists/leftists don’t care about domestic violence (a family murder) unless they get a chance to make Christians look bad, as well as conflating domestic violence and political terrorism. But I didn’t really have the energy to take on the argument.
It’s been a rough few weeks here in Scotland, and I’m not even certain how much I’m allowed to say about it. (Well, I suppose *I* can say anything I want, as I’m Jewish, but my partner and most of our friends are Church of Scotland, and there’s a lot of people whose jobs and lives are in very precarious positions right now.)
This is interesting from the perspective of a mixed-faith family. Since civil partnerships are legal in the UK, the only way for the conservatives to get an anti-gay measure through without bumping into discrimination legislation is to specify ‘Christian marriage’ as the only appropriate sexual relationship, so that it falls under religious protection (the Church of Scotland, like the Church of England, is exempt from certain anti-discrimination legislation). Not to distract from or undermine the seriously horrible things that are happening to LBGTQ folks in Scotland (and let’s remember, CoS is an established church; it’s tangled up with the government in a tremendously complex fashion), but there’s another category of people who can’t enter into Christian marriage, and I’ll be very interested to see whether anyone happens to notice that at any time in the next two years.
I suspect it’s the same thing that drives us to kill people to try to stop them from killing other people, or to go to war to try to stop war, etc.
I mean, obviously these people are basically insane. But if you get past the semantics of “pro life” (and the semantic argument was never especially strong anyway) then it becomes an issue of least harm: if you thought Tiller was doing more harm to blastulae than you would do by murdering Tiller, then you’d do it.
I really don’t get the “bunch of cells as a person” argument. But it seems obvious that if you DID feel that way, you’d act accordingly. It’s as if you valued ducks just as much as humans, and you started offing duck hunters: you’d be crazy in how you assigned value, but within your crazy world you’d be acting perfectly logically in killing hunters.
I blogged on the city council election results where in my district the challenger upset the incumbent. It’s really nice because after three months of being harassed and slandered online by the incumbents’ campaign people, at least their guy lost (aided in part by his refusal to walk precincts and his involvement in a shady land deal).
The party was nice even before it became a victory party. I talked to a lot of people in attendance everyone from neighbors to teachers to cops. Very interesting to see what will happen in the future.
Radfem, that body found in the Chicago area near Channahon isn’t Drew Pearson’s wife – it’s male.
One can only imagine the state of decomposition that the body must have been in given that it took an autopsy to determine this ….
Cool on the election. God knows that in Illinois we need a whole lot of fresh blood in just about every layer of government.
Disturbing parenting story of the day: mother claims that her kindergarten-aged son’s favorite book is the Bible, in order to bring it into the public school to read to the other students as part of the “celebrate me” day for her kid. The boy’s baby-sitter says his favorite book is, rather more plausibly, “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See.”
Maybe Mom was going to bring in a version of the Bible that has language and incidents appropriate for children? Not so much of Lot’s daughters getting him drunk so he’ll incestuously knock them up? I would have put some age-appropriate limitations on this program in the first place. According to Freud, there’s a little kid out there who would deem an album of his mother’s nude photos his favorite picture book (Oedipal/phallic stage supposedly occurs between ages 3 to 6), but that doesn’t make it acceptable for school use.
But seriously, I wonder what is going to satisfy these folks with regard to being able to inflict their views on others. If you want to read the Bible to your kid’s classmates, send him to a Christian school instead of public school. Problem solved. My mom didn’t send me to school with the movie version of the “Mahabharata” when we were allowed to bring movies to watch on the bus during field trips (even though the “Mahabharata” movie we had has awesome fights between the gods and the devils that I think lots of kids would enjoy, plus cheesy special effects to entertain the adults, and no kissing because it was made in India — epic fun for the whole family!). Some folks need to learn, even beyond the Constitution, what is socially appropriate. Like, don’t be creepy and obnoxious.
On the other hand, I didn’t grow in an evangelical religion, and maybe this woman sincerely believes that she’s going to help all these kids escape hellfire if she can just sneak some Bible into their kindergarten class. Still sad, though. According to the 3rd Circuit decision, the mom said that the school district couldn’t limit the parent’s choice of what to read in class, even if it advocated violence or discrimination, so long as it was “about” the parent’s child.
Speaking of the nasty bits in the Bible, here’s a literal take on all the variations of “Biblical marriage.”
But yeah … it’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder how the mother who brought in the Bible would react if her child’s classmate’s parent brought in any non-Christian holy book to read to the children.
Dropping in quickly to wonder if anyone here knows anything about this news story concerning rape on the campus of University of the Pacific. Even if everything the university says is accurate in terms of how it treated the woman who was raped, its position that date rape is not as serious as “‘outright rape’ [because] date rape does not involve ‘a rapist jumping out of bushes and attacking people randomly,'” is more than scary.
On the fraudulent berry front:
http://www.loweringthebar.net/2009/06/reasonable-consumer-would-know-crunchberries-are-not-real-judge-rules.html