Mick Foley Gets It

Posted on March 8, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

Pro wrestling features athletes who are performers, and we all know that there are a lot of athletes and performers who are jerks. But Mick Foley isn’t one of them. The veteran wrestler is now donating half the proceeds from his latest book to survivors of rape in Sierra Leone (through Child Fund International). The other half is being donated to RAINN.

But Foley’s support of victims of rape and abuse isn’t stopping with money. He’s also donating his time as an online counselor for RAINN:

They have my first name when they sign in. There are times when the [screen] goes dead. Some women understandably may not want to talk to a man. But for the young lady I talked to, I think she appreciated my perspective. I told her I have four children, including a daughter about her age. She was very worried about what her parents might think. In those cases you have to continually reassure victims that they are victims. We let them know how brave it is for them to reach out for help.

It would be easy for Foley to live in comfort, to take the proceeds from his books and invest them in himself, to use his fame as a wrestler to make his life easy. Instead, he drives a 2002 minivan because it works (and because, he says, it helps teach his kids that nice things aren’t everything), and he donates his time and money to helping make the world a better place for victims of sexual abuse.

I don’t know about you, but I think Mick Foley has figured out what this whole life thing is supposed to be about.

Posted in Popular (and unpopular) culture, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 3 Comments

Are You Ready For Some Oscars?

Posted on March 7, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

I don’t know about you, but I don’t see anything beating this movie:

Posted in Popular (and unpopular) culture | 9 Comments

Bigotry, Thy Name is Marty Peretz

Posted on March 6, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

Glenn Greenwald is right. This pro-Iraq War column by Marty Peretz is not only wrong, but it contains an unbelievably racist statement:

There were moments–long moments–during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

There are racist bigots who have argued that Jews cannot be trusted, because they’re inherently deceitful people. These racist bigots are rightly called anti-Semites, and they are despised by anyone with a functioning brain.

Marty Peretz just argued that Arabs can’t be trusted, because they’re inherently deceitful people. He’s a racist bigot, and he should be despised by anyone with a functioning brain.

This is not new. And it should not be ignored. Marty Peretz is a flaming racist douchebag. He views Arabs as less human than the rest of humanity. He is not merely prejudiced. He is proudly so.

His opinions are of no more merit than those of David Duke. And no decent human should think otherwise.

Posted in International issues, Iraq | 39 Comments

Random YouTubery

Posted on March 5, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

I still have no idea who this guy is, but the made Steven Colbert happy, and he’s Russian.

Via Chris Bodenner

Posted in Popular (and unpopular) culture, Whatever | 5 Comments

Another Hereville Preview: The School Cafeteria

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Ampersand

I already posted part of this page in progress, but I haven’t posted the whole page before, and now you get to see it with Jake’s colors. Enjoy!

(Click on the image for a bigger size).

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Hereville | 22 Comments

The Real Victim

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

Errol Louis of the New York Daily News has a very good point about the scandal surrounding New York Gov. David Paterson. Namely, that the focus of this case should not be on Paterson. Rather, says Louis, it should be about the person at the center of the controversy — no, not aide David Johnson, though Johnson’s actions should be neither forgiven nor forgotten. But rather on Johnson’s victim, the woman who he abused, a woman who was failed every step of the way:

Johnson’s ex-girlfriend told the NYPD and a Family Court referee that she was injured, afraid and subject to intimidation.

“He’s like a government official, and I have problems with even calling the police because the state troopers kept calling and harassing me to drop the charges, and I wouldn’t,” she told the referee in November.

After which, it appears, nobody lifted a finger to help the accuser. City cops, tasked with serving an order of protection on Johnson, proved unable to do so, even though the towering 6-foot-7 aide was by the governor’s side at every public appearance.

The governor’s schedule is public information. Anybody could have served the papers.

The judge does not appear to have passed along the report that men with guns from a state agency were supposedly harassing a victim who appeared in her court.

The state police appear to have acted more like a private intimidation force than a professional law enforcement agency. And members of Paterson’s immediate political staff – and, perhaps, the governor – may have known all of what was going on, but tried to spin or dissolve the complaint rather than face it head-on.

Bad business all around.

In a city where attacks between family members or intimate partners are an epidemic – the NYPD responds to some 650 domestic violence calls every day – it chills the blood to read about how one high-profile encounter was botched.

It does, and not just because this one woman was failed. It chills the blood because it begs the question, how many more victims of domestic violence are being failed?

Obviously, most victims of domestic abuse are not going to be harassed by the Governor of their state. But the other failures — the lack of follow-through, the judge who was silent, the general nonchalance about serving papers — these are failures that are systemic, and general. If city police can’t be bothered to serve papers on a man traveling with the Governor, whose schedule is public, how many other abusers is the NYPD failing to serve?

Moreover, this case is precisely why so many victims of domestic violence choose not to come forward. No, most women who are abused are not going to be visited by state troopers. But many will be pressured by family and friends who are eager to minimize the deeds of the abuser, and eager to get all the unpleasantness behind them. While this is a case of that writ large, Paterson’s actions in this are simply the actions of someone with power trying to get all the unpleasantness swept away, so that his friend can move on with his life — because hey, the guy just made a mistake. Why wreck his life, right?

MRA types are fond of saying that orders of protection are given freely and capriciously. And no doubt, cases can be found where that is true. But this case shows the reality of orders of protection — the fact that victims all too often struggle just to get that piece of paper that maybe, maybe, will help them avoid further abuse. Questionable orders of protection can be quashed. Abuse cannot be so easily undone. And so I’d much rather a system that makes a mistake that can be remedied than one that refuses to take domestic violence seriously. Unfortunately, the latter appears to be the system in place in New York.

Posted in Elections and politics, Feminism, sexism, etc, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 5 Comments

The Final Push For Health Care Reform Begins

Posted on March 3, 2010 by Ampersand

And at last, Obama commits to something. My bet is that he wouldn’t be saying this if he didn’t think that there’s an excellent chance the Democrats can pass health care reform soon. The big hurdle is getting enough Democrats ((I say “Democrats” because it’s clear that not one Republican will vote for the bill.)) in the House to vote for the bill the Senate already voted for; after that, all that’s left is to make some small fixes through reconciliation.

I’ve put the entire speech after the break (it’s not long). So what do folks think?

My view is that this is a long, long way from what I’d really like, which is a French-style health care system. But that wasn’t an option on the table. Neither was “Medicare for all,” aka single-payer health care, which is what most of the lefties I know want.

But even though it’s not what we want, it’s a large improvement over the status quo. It would set up systems that could “bend the cost curve” down; it would get a hell of a lot more people covered; and it would make it possible for nearly all Americans, including those with pre-existing conditions, to get health insurance coverage.

So if the Democrats do pass this plan, that will do a lot to make them seem other than worthless. On the other hand, if the Democrats don’t manage to pass health care reform, then I barely see any point in supporting them at all. It’ll be time to rejoin the Green Party, I guess.

Continue reading →

Posted in Health Care and Related Issues | 52 Comments

Well, Crud.

Posted on March 3, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

Those of you who’ve been meandering around the interweb for a while will be familiar with the blogger Jon Swift, the mock-conservative who declared that he received his news through unbiased sources like Rush Limbaugh, and who said of the economic downturn, “At a time when Wall Street executives are being forced to give up their private planes, limousines, bathroom renovations and multimillion dollar bonuses, the idea that a homeless man has been allowed to hold on to his cellphone while others are making sacrifices is more than we can take.”

The writer behind Swift was Al Weisel. And sadly, Al Weisel has died:

Al was on his way to his father’s funeral in VA when he suffered 2 aortic aneurysms, a leaky aortic valve and an aortic artery dissection from his heart to his pelvis. He had 3 major surgeries within 24 hours and sometime during those surgeries also suffered a severe stroke.

I didn’t know Al personally, only through his writing. But his writing was superlative, the sort of satire his cognomen’s namesake would have heartily approved. My heart and thoughts are with the Weisel family, which is having to face far too much loss in too short a time.

Posted in Whatever | 3 Comments

What I'm Reading – 2

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Some things I’ve been reading when I should’ve been grading papers or doing other work:

  • A Tough Patron and an Old Ideology Give Women a Lift in Bulgarian Politics, by Dan Bilefsky, The New York Times: What’s most interesting in this article about how Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko M. Borisov has been appointing women to political offices are the explanations people give for why he is doing so and why women are needed in politics. Boiko says, for example, “Women are more diligent than men, and they don’t take long lunches or got to the bar,” and also, “Women have stronger characters than men because when they say no they mean no, and they are less corruptible.” Others suggest that women are less corruptible because they have more to lose, and others talk about the fact that while Bulgaria “never had a feminist movement” but that during “Communism women in Bulgaria were represented in almost every walk of life, from plant managers to medicine.”
  • An interesting piece in The Lede about the politics behind Iran’s capture and the televised confession of Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of Jundallah, a militant group that claims to be defending Sunni Muslims in Iran’s southeast and has killed hundreds of Iranian soldiers and civilians since 2003. For some related articles in the news try here, here and here.
  • In I Was the One Reading Andrew Marvell. You Were . . ., also in the Times, Alan Feuer turns some of the “Missed Connections” postings on newyork.craigslist.org into found poems.
  • I appreciated “Thoughts on the ‘hookup culture,’ or what I learned from my high school diary, a guest post on Feministe by Nona Willis Aronowitz. One of my favorite bits: “We need to admit as a culture that teens are sexual beings, and that more often than not, sexual maturity has a completely different timeline than emotional maturity.”
  • Before I became a translator, I was working on what might have become a book exploring male heterosexuality and pornography, of course, was one of the things I was researching. At the time, I was very disappointed at the narrowness and often impoverished nature of the discourse I found not only about the representation of men in heterosexual video pornography (which was what I was looking at) but also in pornography that was touted as progressive and even feminist. Perhaps one day I will return to that project, but in the mean time I have been enjoying Male Submission Art, the mission of which is to “showcase beautiful imagery where men and other male-identified people are submissive subjects. We aim to challenge stereotypes of the ‘pathetic’ submissive man.” The images are often very cool, and what I like about the analysis is that its core tenet seems to be that for a man to “submit” (whatever that word might mean in any given context) is not, by definition, for him to unman himself or to be unmanned by the one he is submitting to (whatever to “unman” might mean in any given context). Leaving aside the question of whether the particular sexuality expressed by the site is one’s cup of tea or not, it is–for me, anyway–a new, interesting and interestingly subversive way of trying to transform what we mean when we say the words “manhood” or “masculinity.”
  • It’s odd, and maybe a bit arrogant sounding, to include something that I’ve written in this list, but I’ve recently been putting together my application for promotion to full professor, which involved going through the two books of translations that I’ve published. As I did so, I was reminded of how wonderful a poet Saadi was. (One of these days I have to add my work to the Wikipdedia entry on him.) So these words may be mine, but they are someone else’s work. It’s from Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan:

The best thing for an ignorant man is to be silent, and if he understands that, and practices it, he will no longer be ignorant.

If the learning you possess is less than perfect,
keep your tongue tucked safely in your mouth.
Empty words disgrace the one who speaks them,
like serving a walnut shell without a nut.
A fool was trying hard to teach his ass
to talk. A wise man watching him observed,
“Aren’t you afraid of what they’ll say
when they find out what you’re doing? This beast
will never learn the trick of human speech.
Better you should learn the gift of silence.”
A man who does not think before he speaks
will almost always use the words foolishly.
If you will not take the time a wise man takes
to speak wisely, practice an animal’s silence.

Posted in Link farms | 7 Comments

Resign, Resign, Resign

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

If I lived in New York, I’d be giving serious consideration to voting for the Republican candidate in the next gubernatorial race. Not so much because the Republican’s bound to be a great candidate, but because there’s pretty strong evidence that New York’s Democratic governors don’t so much give a damn about women.

First, we had former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a rising star in the Democratic Party nationally who ended up having to resign when it turned out he was soliciting prostitutes the way some people order pizza. That might have been forgivable, had 1) Prostitution been legal, 2) Spitzer not made his mark as a prosecutor by going after prostitution, or 3) Spitzer not been caught moving enough money around to spend on prostitutes that it drew the attention of bank regulators.

Spitzer ultimately wasn’t prosecuted, but he was forced from office ignominiously, and in his place New Yorkers got Gov. David Paterson, who immediately announced that he had had affairs in his lifetime. Okay, well, that’s not good. But points for honesty. And surely, surely, Paterson would keep himself on the straight-and-narrow after seeing what happened to his predecessor.

Or, you know, he might decide instead to obstruct justice in a domestic violence case:

Gov. David A. Paterson personally directed two state employees to contact the woman who had accused his close aide of assaulting her, according to two people with direct knowledge of the governor’s actions.

Mr. Paterson instructed his press secretary, Marissa Shorenstein, to ask the woman to publicly describe the episode as nonviolent, according to a third person, who was briefed on the matter. That description would contradict the woman’s accounts to the police and in court.

Mr. Paterson also enlisted another state employee, Deneane Brown, a friend of both the governor and the accuser, to make contact with the woman before she was due in court to finalize an order of protection against the aide, David W. Johnson, the two people with direct knowledge said. Ms. Brown, an employee of the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, reached out to the woman on more than one occasion over a period of several days and arranged a phone call between the governor and the woman, Mr. Johnson’s companion.

After the calls from Ms. Brown and the conversation with the governor, the woman failed to appear for the court hearing on Feb. 8, and the case was dropped.

It was probably a minor issue, though. MRAs are always telling me that you can get an order of protection for any reason at all. I’m sure she was just mad that the stunning floral bouquet that her charming boyfriend gave her had only seventeen roses in it. I mean, surely, she didn’t have a good reason to get this order, right?

Mr. Johnson’s girlfriend had accused him of choking her, smashing her into a mirrored dresser and preventing her from calling for help during a Halloween altercation in the Bronx apartment they shared.

Oh. Um…well. That’s…a pretty damn good reason, actually.

So to recap: a woman is assaulted, goes to the police, and begins the work of getting an order of protection. The Governor of New York — the Governor of New York — uses his aides to put pressure on her to drop the case, because the assailant is on his staff.

Frankly, as someone who cares about women’s rights, I’d rather have the guy who just liked sex with prostitutes.

But of course, Paterson is blameless in this. I mean, he didn’t know that the attack was as severe as it was.

Mr. Paterson has stated that he was unaware of the details of the case until The Times reported them, and has said he did nothing improper.

See? He had no way of knowing that the case involved someone slamming someone’s face into a dresser. And no way of finding out. Which is why he immediately got mixed up in the case, because…uh…the woman was probably lying.

Okay, actually, that’s not a very good excuse.

Paterson has already announced he won’t stand for election in the fall. If today’s allegations are true, then that doesn’t go far enough. Like his predecessor, Paterson should resign, before the day is out. Paterson injected himself into a criminal case on the side of an assailant. At best, he did so recklessly, assuming that the — again — criminal case was not so serious as it really was. At worst, he did so with malice, seeking to get the exact result he did — a woman who, faced with pressure from the office of the governor, gave up on her criminal case because she saw more pain going forward with it than any relief justice could give her.

Either way, Paterson has demonstrated that he is unfit to serve as Governor of New York. Maybe Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch can do better than the two moral lightweights to precede him this term. He certainly can’t do much worse.

Posted in Elections and politics, Feminism, sexism, etc, In the news | 12 Comments