Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

My Trip in the Philippines

Posted on August 13, 2009 by Jack Stephens

Mendiola St., Manila, Philippines: Protesters apart of BAYAN (Bagong Alyansang Makabayan) gather at Mendiola in Manila to oppose the president’s plans to change the constitution to allow her to become Prime Minister and hold power after 2010 (Photo by Jack Stephens)

So I got back from the Philippines on Sunday night and the trip was one of the more amazing experiences in my life. So over the next month I will be going through my notebook and pictures and will be posting some pics and reactions to my days in the Philippines on my blog.

Plenty of these happened during my trip, a four day march from Calamba, Southern Tagalog to Makiti City, Manila, the death of former President Cory Aquino, and me being accused by local militia of being a communist rebel.

Hope you all look forward to the posts.

Posted in International issues | 2 Comments

Lubna Ahmed Hussein: "if the law is constitutional, I'm ready to be whipped not 40 but 40,000 times"

Posted on August 13, 2009 by Ampersand

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — Sudanese police fired tear gas and beat women protesting at the trial Tuesday of a female journalist who faces a flogging for wearing trousers in public.

Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein could receive 40 lashes if found guilty of violating the country’s indecency law which follows a strict interpretation of Islam. The 43-year-old says the law is un-Islamic and ”oppressive,” and she’s trying to use her trial to rally support to change it.

”I am not afraid of flogging. … It’s about changing the law,” Hussein said, speaking to The Associated Press after a hearing Tuesday.

Hussein said she would take the issue all the way to Sudan’s constitutional court if necessary, but that if the court rules against her and orders the flogging, she’s ready ”to receive (even) 40,000 lashes” if that what it takes to abolish the law.

Hussein was among 13 women arrested July 3 in a raid by the public order police on a popular cafe in Khartoum. Ten of the women were fined and flogged two days later. But Hussein and two others decided to go to trial.

In an attempt to rally support, Hussein printed invitations to diplomats, international media, and activists to attend her trial which opened last week. She also resigned from her job in the U.N.’s public information office in Khartoum, declining the immunity that went along with the job to challenge the law.

Around 100 supporters, including many women in trousers as well as others in traditional dress, protested outside the court Tuesday.

And from another article:

Police have also cracked down on another woman journalist, Amal Habbani, who published an article in Ajrass al-Horreya newspaper (Bells of Freedom) entitled: “Lubna, a case of subduing a woman’s body.”

I am awed by Ms. Hussein’s courage and determination. She’s now been banned from leaving the country, either out of pure vindictiveness, or to make it harder for her to appear in the media.

Anne of Carversville (whose blog is all over this story) has posted an English-language translation of an interview with Lubna Hussein. In the interview, Ms. Hussein claims that three of the women lashed for wearing pants were teenagers, one as young as 16.

(The photos came from this AP photo gallery. The blog title quote came from this article.)

UPDATE: More commentary on this case:

SECOND UPDATE: Here’s a petition you can sign in support of Lubna Hussein.

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Gender and the Body, International issues | 9 Comments

Justifying homosexuality without justifying incest

Posted on August 13, 2009 by Ampersand

Photo by SF Bart

Science fiction writer John Wright ((Coincidentally, Wright is married to Ms. Lamplighter, who Karnythia has recently been blogging responses to. I didn’t realize that until after I had put this post online. Small internet.)) writes:

All the same arguments that apply to making homosexuality a norm apply to incest… What argument can be given to outlaw incest that cannot be given with even more logic to outlaw homosexuality?

And he later added:

Give me an argument justifying homosexual relations on grounds which do not answer as well or better for justifying incest?

I’ve seen this claim — that there are no moral arguments for accepting homosexuality that don’t also apply to incest — fairly frequently. The claim seems flatly wrong.

What follows is what I wrote in John’s comments. This isn’t meant to be a complete catalog of the differences between incest and homosexuality; there are many essential arguments I didn’t touch on. I just outlined a few arguments that I thought might appeal to at least some of John’s readers. (Hence, these arguments are all rather social conservative in their approach.)

* * *

I think there are a number of compelling differences.

1) Accepting the legitimacy of homosexual relationships doesn’t fundamentally alter relationships between child and sibling, or child and parent.

In contrast, if incest is legitimate, that socially recognized potential for sexuality will alter (and in some cases poison) the relationships between children and their siblings, and between children and parents. And this will be true for all families, not just those families that practice incest.

(Some might object that if homosexuality is accepted, then same-sex parent-child incest will be accepted with it. Not true. Parents don’t need social condemnation of homosexuality to avoid sex with their same-sex kids, any more than they need social condemnation of heterosexuality to avoid sex with their opposite-sex kids.)

2) Gays (including women and men) are a significant portion of society. probably between 1% and 4% of Americans are gay, and most will be gay for virtually their entire lives. There are tens of thousands of children being raised by same-sex couples.

It’s to society’s benefit that gays be integrated into society’s stabilizing institutions to as great an extent as possible. It’s beneficial to society that couples form commitments of caring and responsibility; it’s beneficial to society that children have the stability and security of married parents.

Furthermore, there are high costs to society if 1%-4% of the society is made into outcasts. Higher suicide rates, economic costs (non-outcasts form businesses and employ people), public health (non-outcasts take better care of themselves), and riots are just some of the costs society pays.

Sometimes treating people as outcasts has clear benefits which outweigh the costs (for instance, treating violent criminals as outcasts), but homosexuality is not such a case.

This provides us with some clear distinctions between homosexuality and incest. There is no incest equivalent to the Stonewall riot; there are not tens of thousands of children being raised by openly incestuous parents. There is no large population of “incestists” who it would benefit society to integrate into norms of mutual care and responsibility, and maintaining the ban on incest incurs virtually no costs on society (and has some benefits).

3) Sexual orientation is significantly different from an attraction to a particular inappropriate individual (such as a sibling). Forbidding someone the chance to pursue an inappropriate attraction is an ordinary part of life; but forbidding someone their entire sexual orientation is cruel and lifelong.

If Albert feels an attraction to an inappropriate person — for example, an already married woman — it’s not particularly cruel to tell Albert that he must forget that particular attraction. The same thing would be true if Albert feels an attraction to his sister. In both cases, Albert isn’t really being told to give up on love; he’s just being told to put it off until he meets someone who’s available.

I think that most of us, if we were honest, would admit to having at some point in our lives had an attraction to someone who it would be wrong to pursue. And (I hope) most of us did the right thing — we didn’t pursue the attraction and hoped to meet someone else.

But what if Albert is gay? The large majority of gay people, are gay for life, and won’t ever be genuinely attracted to people of the opposite sex. So if we forbid homosexuality, we’re not just telling Albert to put off love until he’s attracted to someone who is willing and available. We’re telling Albert that he must accept an entire life without even the hope of romantic, sexual love.

In that way, forbidding homosexuality is cruel in a way that forbidding incest is not.

Now, sometimes we should be cruel in the service of more important social goals — for instance, protecting children from adult sexual predators is laudable, and we rightly don’t care if this is in some sense cruel to the predators. However, the same reasoning cannot support needless cruelty towards consenting adults.

Posted in Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer issues | 44 Comments

I’m about to be a jerk on the Internet or RaceFail Goes To WorldCon

Posted on August 12, 2009 by karnythia

im-about-to-be-a-jerk-on-the-internet-or-racefail-goes-to-worldcon

As some of you know I went to Montreal for Verb Noire last week. It was…an experience. See, I don’t really like conventions. They are important and necessary to the success of my business and I get to hang out with some great people. But if it weren’t for the business I probably would not go to them. Aside from not being a big fan of crowds I tend to wind up in at least one discussion of race that leaves me feeling like I need a drink. Maybe three. And that’s just not good for my liver. Case in point, I was on a panel last Sunday entitled “Writing Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Geographic Terms” that went nowhere near a good place. I was a last minute substitute for my business partner (who now owes me a bottle of Riesling and a lifetime supply of chocolate) and I planned to discuss all the reasons why making the bad guys POC in epic fantasies are a terrible idea. Instead we spent the panel dealing with one L. Lamplighter and her insistence on saying awful things about race (highlights include calling someone extraordinarily black right after insisting that she literally does not see color and had to have the race of friends pointed out to her as well as whining about the difficulties of being criticized for writing POC poorly) and derailing the panel from the topic at regular intervals. The moderator and I have since been the focus of a few posts on her LiveJournal. Those posts….well I’ll link to them and you can see for yourself. The first post seemed to be particularly dismissive of Kate Nepveu and I thought “Well there goes a prime example of being a jerk online” ala my panel with John Scalzi on Sunday morning. Then I got to her post about me being called a nigger ¹ and I was a little perplexed to see just how wrong she’d gotten the details of that anecdote. Mostly I was offended by her repeated use of the word “girl” since at 32 I’m well past the point of being taken for a small child. But of course there’s a whole lot of history attached to using such language towards POC² and I’m certain she’s well aware of that history. If she’s not, then she really didn’t belong on that panel or on any programming to do with race. Or anywhere outside her narrow little bubble.

Then again anyone that feels it necessary to make statements like:

My son’s favorite friends from school are a boy the color of pitch whose family is from Africa, a Korean boy, and a Spanish boy whose family hardly speaks English.

as proof of her “colorblindness” is such a mess of aversive racism³ and outright bigotry that I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. She’s dressed it up a little, but her real meaning when she claims to be colorblind is “I can treat you with some semblance of respect as long as I ignore the color of your skin. If you force me to see you as a whole person then you’ve brought my bigotry on yourself and it isn’t my fault. It’s yours for being so extraordinarily of color. Because I can’t handle the possibility that your reality is informed by experiences that I don’t share.”

To be completely honest I am not interested in educating her or changing her mind or even speaking to her again in my life. I am not in the mood for some aversive racist bullshit reframing of my life. I am not in the mood to be patient, kind, gentle or even brutally polite. This is not a teaching moment. She had plenty of those during the panel (so many that we never did get to have the actual discussion because she kept on whipping out the fail every time she came near the microphone and we’d have to stop to correct her so that the audience didn’t get the wrong idea) and all that effort clearly made little or no impression upon her entrenched bigotry. Let us be clear…this conversation started in a room face to face so there can be no question of body language or tone. She had all of that on hand, and she…well let’s just say that she performed mental gymnastics worthy of a Matrix movie to miss the point of the conversation. It was not that she could not hear us, instead she chose to ignore our words⁴ in favor of hanging onto her prejudices. That’s her choice and she’s welcome to the path that she is on. But, that choice doesn’t come without criticism. She has the right to hold these beliefs and I have the right to call her on them.

So, for the record I am appalled and offended and just plain disgusted by her attitude and her condescension and her racism. Because make no mistake that is *exactly* what she has proven with her own words. No need for slurs or grandiose terrorist gestures when devaluing and disrespect will do. No need to listen to the words of those “girls” that are trying to tell you that your ass is showing. Because clearly we aren’t enlightened enough to know that the best way to approach life is to seek harmony with people who will tolerate our differences by ignoring them. My hair, my skin, my entire life is not something that I can pick or put down at my convenience. And the privileged assumption that the road to harmony is to ignore the parts of my reality that make you uncomfortable? Enough to make any sane person ill. Now, I’m not telling anyone to go over there and beat their head against the brick wall of her racism. Instead I’m encouraging you to hold her up as an example of what not to do and what not to say. Because really that’s the best approach to this kind of willful ignorance. Ignore her and maybe she’ll go away. And even if she doesn’t? Just consider the source the next time you hear someone spouting off about being colorblind.

And now a word from our sponsor…

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I’m about to be a jerk on the Internet or RaceFail Goes To WorldCon

Footnotes

I was 12. It was a cop who had an established pattern of harassing me and my friends on the way to school. My grandmother’s pastor was affiliated with Operation Push so we had some juice with the city. There was no rallying around by anyone, there was some phone calls and a watch commander who didn’t want the publicity that comes from such an incident.
aside from being dismissive and disrespectful in general, the use of the word girl has the same connotations as using boy, namely that one thinks an adult is incapable of making their own determinations and they need someone to guide them
Color Blind or Just Plain Blind? is a great place to read up on what’s wrong with colorblindness and why it is just a new twist on the old standby of racism
Not to mention the words of another panelist, a male author of some renown who was unbelievably diplomatic

Posted in Race, racism and related issues, Syndicated feeds | 10 Comments

Sex offender registry laws are too harsh and indiscriminate

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Ampersand

The Economist argues that sex offender laws — specifically, sex offender registries — are too harsh. It’s mainly concerned with statutory rapists, some of whom were only two or three years older than the person they were arrested for having sex with.

There are three main arguments for reform. First, it is unfair to impose harsh penalties for small offences. Perhaps a third of American teenagers have sex before they are legally allowed to, and a staggering number have shared revealing photographs with each other. This is unwise, but hardly a reason for the law to ruin their lives. Second, America’s sex laws often punish not only the offender, but also his family. If a man who once slept with his 15-year-old girlfriend is barred for ever from taking his own children to a playground, those children suffer.

Third, harsh laws often do little to protect the innocent. The police complain that having so many petty sex offenders on registries makes it hard to keep track of the truly dangerous ones. Cash that might be spent on treating sex offenders—which sometimes works—is spent on huge indiscriminate registries. Public registers drive serious offenders underground, which makes them harder to track and more likely to reoffend. And registers give parents a false sense of security: most sex offenders are never even reported, let alone convicted.

It would not be hard to redesign America’s sex laws. Instead of lumping all sex offenders together on the same list for life, states should assess each person individually and include only real threats. Instead of posting everything on the internet, names could be held by the police, who would share them only with those, such as a school, who need to know. Laws that bar sex offenders from living in so many places should be repealed, because there is no evidence that they protect anyone: a predator can always travel. The money that a repeal saves could help pay for monitoring compulsive molesters more intrusively—through ankle bracelets and the like.

I agree with pretty much all of this. (Via.)

Posted in Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 23 Comments

New political cartoon: "Libertarian Freedom"

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Ampersand

Click on the image to biggify it.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Libertarianism | 49 Comments

The Blood of Patriots and Tyrants

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Jeff Fecke

You know, I’m a free speech absolutist, and a staunch civil libertarian. But quite honestly, if you’re going to bring a gun to a town hall meeting held by the President of the United States, you probably should, at the very least, get a visit from the Secret Service:

A man carried a handgun strapped to his leg to a town hall meeting being held by President Obama in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Tuesday.

It’s legal for him to have the gun as long as it is unconcealed, the police told MSNBC. The man was on private property — church ground on the roadway leading to the high school where Obama would speak. The church gave the man permission to be there. However, according to police officers, he is under constant surveillance and is not anywhere near where the president will speak.

You know what? I don’t care if it’s legal for you to carry a gun in New Hampshire — you don’t carry a gun to a protest against the President of the United States. You especially don’t carry a gun while holding a sign that says “It is Time To Water the Tree of Liberty!” For those of you who’ve forgotten your Revolutionary War-era Thomas Jefferson quotes beloved by libertarian types, the full quote is, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Quite simply, carrying a firearm to a protest against the president, while holding a sign threatening violence against tyrants, is, if not illegal, than deeply immoral to the point of pure anti-Americanism. Had our country never lost a leader to gun violence, one might feel differently, but we’ve lost four; when one out of every eleven presidents has been shot and killed, and more than twenty percent of presidents have had shots fired at them, it’s impossible to view this as anything other than a direct threat on the president’s life.

Of course, the man carrying the gun, William Kostric, is unrepentant. He sees nothing wrong with implied threats on a president’s life, nothing wrong with the direct implication that our government leaders should be killed. He just wants, in his words, “an informed society, an armed society, a polite society.” Which is why he was carrying a sign calling for the death of tyrants.

We are steering down a dangerous course. While the health care proposal is modest by world standards, people are decrying this as some kind of Trojan horse for communism, Nazism, the theft of our nation’s vital bodily fluids, and the end of life on Earth. With the stakes raised so ludicrously high, and with the anger being fed at such a fever pitch, I fear that threats of violence will not be where this ends. After all, if Barack Obama was planning on herding our parents into death camps, seizing everyone’s bank account, and creating a panel that would decide who lives and who dies, I would be the first one on the line in the ensuing revolution. He isn’t, of course, doing any of those things. But a huge subset of the right, fed by people who should know better, thinks he may be. This does not end well, I fear. I hope I’m wrong.

Posted in Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc., Elections and politics, Health Care and Related Issues, The Obama Administration | 18 Comments

To Hug the Mountain, to Envelop That Mountain

Posted on August 10, 2009 by Jeff Fecke

Robert Wright gives us a little bit of sublime:

Incidentally, that is William Shatner talking about the opening to Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a movie that most fans of Trek argue never actually happened. (Much like Rocky V and both Matrix sequels. They never happened. It was all a dream. Don’t you feel better now?)

Still, even in a movie that is best disappeared down the memory hole, the scene Shatner describes is a particularly egregious bit of suck. As you may recall, the movie opens with Capt. James Tiberius Kirk climbing El Capitan, only to fall off to certain doom. Spock, in an amazingly blunt bit of foreshadowing, uses anti-gravity boots to intercept the falling Kirk just before he hits the ground. Hooray!

Except, of course, for physics, the laws of which ye canna’ change. Kirk was probably falling at close to terminal velocity when Spock grabbed him by the ankle; assuming that his ankle wouldn’t have simply pulled off, Kirk’s brain most certainly wouldn’t have stopped moving at the same time his body did, leading to almost certain death from blunt force injuries.

Granted, Trek has never worried about physics when it got in the way of a good story, Montgomery Scott’s protests aside. But even so, this was a particularly egregious bit of stupidity, one that set the tone for the dumbest of all the Trek movies. The only good thing about the movie was that it gave us this exchange from “Futurama”:

Leonard Nimoy: Melllvar, you have to respect your actors. When I directed Star Trek IV, I got a magnificent performance out of Bill because I respected him so much.

William Shatner: And when I directed Star Trek V, I got a magnificent performance out of me because I respected me so much!

Truer words were never spoken.

Posted in Mind-blowing Miscellania and other Neat Stuff, Popular (and unpopular) culture | 4 Comments

A Post For the MRA Apologetics and Rebuttals

Posted on August 10, 2009 by Ampersand

There are a lot of off-topic comments in this thread. Or rather, there were. But I’m now moving them to this thread. Or, rather, I will. If the plug-in I downloaded works.

UPDATE: I think it worked!

Posted in Anti-feminists and their pals | 273 Comments