The Rabbit Hole

The whole fight over contraception has exposed a lot of ugly bullshit, which is actually great. Because sunlight is a great disinfectant, and too long have the same resentments and misogynist undertones been circling without full exposure. It's hard to take a lot of the time, especially when legislatures controlled by a) men and b) Republicans get to change laws that no one asked or wanted them to change. But I have to remember that this sort of thing exposes them for the ignorant assholes they are.

To whit: Responsible women shouldn't be having sex. No really, that's what some asshole in North Carolina said to justify turning down funds for family planning. Because sluts, you know:

Chairman Ted Davis said he thought it was a sad day when "taxpayers are asked to pay money for contraceptives" for women having sex without planning responsibly.

Call me a sex-crazed feminazi (thank you!), but I thought taking contraceptives was planning for responsibly for women having sex. There's a better quote where someone else says something to the effect of lamenting all the sex these women are having (presumably not within ten feet of him, seeing as he's a lady-boner-killer), but the one I've highlighted above was the most hilarious to me.

Someone on Bill Maher's show suggested that women do exactly what these men want--women should just stop having sex with them, Lysistrata-style until they back the fuck off. I know it would hurt some women not to be able to get their itches scratched (except the lesbians and bi-ladies; they can go to town). I think, therefore, we should mandate taxpayer-funded vibrators for all women until such time as we stop fighting the battles of yesteryear for women's rights.

Tolls to go up for travel across the Hudson.

I am all for making driving a little more expensive to convert drivers into mass-transiters, but given the sorry state of mass transit--and the fact that mass transit would become more expensive, too--this is a shit plan. I don't know what to think about this but that milking commuters has never been shown to make for happy commuters or even to support the transit authorities. I mean, we raised the cost of the Metrocard and the MTA was still crying poverty.

The only thing, far as I know, to effectively fund and fund improvements to our public transit systems are public funds. If we could get past this "no new taxes ever!" hew and cry, we might actually be able to fund collectively--and completely--what punitive taxes on individual commuters won't ever be able to.

(This primer brought to you courtesy of this article at The New York Times. h/t moonlightalice)

Lesson 1: If you find yourself making the brutal murder of someone into a story about how you, the not-at-all-persecuted, let-alone-dead person are finding it really hard to be called mean names, congratulations, you're on the side of evil.

Example: “Naturally, I don’t want anyone killed but I don’t feel I had anything to do with that,” said Mr. Schmierer, who added that in Uganda he had focused on parenting skills. He also said that he had been a target of threats himself, recently receiving more than 600 hate mails related to his visit. “I spoke to help people,” he said, “and I’m getting bludgeoned from one end to the other.”

Note: Ms. Schmierer uses the word "bludgeoned" in regards to his own imaginary persecution when, in fact, such a term is better used to describe what was done to an innocent man who was so unfortunate as to live in a country full of murderous zealots. This earns him extra cockwhacker points. Sarah Palin ain't got nothing on this guy's sense of victimhood.

Lesson 2: If this guy is on your side, you are on the side of evil:

Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity, James Nsaba Buturo, a devout Christian, has said “Homosexuals can forget about human rights.”

Lesson 3: If you seriously intend to argue against Lesson 2, you are on the side of evil.

Any questions?

Without explicitly stating from whence my aggravation of these issues comes, I'd like to simply, accurately educate the world. Those of you on my f-list pretty much know this already, but humor me. It won't take long. I just have two common misconceptions that I would like to correct. Right. Now.

1) Do you think women are people, with all the inherent complexities, strengths, and failings thereof? CONGRATULATIONS, YOU ARE A FEMINIST.
Contrary to what you may have heard, women, you don't have to stop shaving any part of your body--legs, "down there," armpits, mustache--nor burn bras, nor hate pornography, nor change the spelling of words to either "feminize" them--WO-mandatory, for example--or "neuter" them--"hyr," "womyn," "semyn"--in order to be a feminist. You just have to think women are people. Men, you do not have to encourage your female friends and significant others to do any of those things nor is feeling emasculated a necessary prerequisite of being a feminist. You can be a feminist by thinking women are people! It's just that simple!

2) You know who likes to molest little boys and girls? PEDOPHILES.
Being sexually attracted to people under the age of 10 is a disease, currently an incurable one. It's a psychological pathology. Some times, that pathology manifests in way that might appear "gay" to you, and not in that Johnny Weir, "That's gay," locker-room-towel-fight gay way. We're talking male-on-under-age-male gay. So I understand it is confusing when I say it's not gay, it's PEDOPHILIA. It is not gay because it's not about having sex with someone who has the same genitals as you. It's about abusing someone who has the same genitals (or will, when they, you know, fully mature) as you. People who are sexually attracted to under age boys or girls are sick, sick people. They're not gay. Even if gayness is sickness to you (and if it is, I'm now 99% sure you're a self-hater), gay is a different sickness, a different pathology entirely from the one that makes you want to abuse kids. Please correct your thinking.

It's now homicide if you get an illegal abortion in Utah (a state where pretty much any abortion is illegal). Oh, wait, except this law also applies to miscarriages. So all your potential fetuses had better be veeeeeery well looked after, women. Because even if you wanted that baby more than life itself, even if you're screaming and crying and seeing a shrink for PTSD following your miscarriage, if someone decides that your miscarriage looks at all out of the ordinary, you could be investigated for murder.

As the title of this post points out, this is terrible law. This is on par with that attempt to classify a zygote as a human being. It's something you cannot legislate at least 90% of the time. Miscarriages tend to occur mostly within the first trimester. It is possible that a woman may not even know she was pregnant or that she miscarried. Are all women, therefore, supposed to submit their used pads and tampons as proof of innocence? If a woman miscarries before viability, is it a lesser/greater charge? If a baby dies in utero, is she then subject to laws about handling a corpse?

Bottom line: you cannot declare fetuses to be persons. It is far too problematic. This is terrible law. On the one hand, it's nice to see the people hiding behind OMG BEBBIES! bullshit go the whole hog and finally start trying to convict women they've always believed were murderers. I mean, courage of your convictions and all that, well done. On the other: you're trying to convict women who have lost their fetuses for murder. That is going to go down really well, let me tell you. The fact that such a radical step would be made just proves that anti-choicers hate women. Just in case y'all hadn't gotten the message by the slut-shaming and presumption of women's stupidity that runs rampant through anti-choice messages.

What a crock of shit.

Time for a good old-fashioned gripe. Here's what's annoying me this week!

1. People who pronounce things wrong.
I don't mean people who don't speak English well or have accents. They are lovely and allowed to speak with accents all their life for all I care, especially if they are British. (Or Australian. Or Kiwi. Or even South African, though I will probably confuse that with one of the others--or all of the others at some point.) I mean people who were born and raised in America and obviously speak fluent English who insist on pronouncing words that they clearly have only ever read on paper in a way that is stupid and obviously wrong, and worse, no one corrects them.

( FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT )

2. People who are anorexic presuming to lecture other people about their eating habits. Yes, this article has to do with the Kevin Smith kerfuffle, which should be discussed in terms of customer service and has instead devolved into "Fatties deserve it." But it's a good read. Because even if you want to make this about someone being fat, end of story, you really, really shouldn't let anyone that obsessed with food tell you what's right and what's not when it comes to a) eating, b) obesity, c) anything else. Obsessed people make very poor philosophers.

3. The fact that I'm probably going to have to buy this expansion.
( I hate this strategy. )

It looks like I was right. I blogged about this before, but this really slam dunks the case I was trying to make in a much, much shorter format.

I'd also like to point out the disproportionate loss of women of color from that map. Every season, you lose at least one female character, usually the non-white female character. They tried to compensate, it seems, by putting in two new female characters in, but one of them always leaves and the others are now all white.

The issue of women on this show is a sore one for me. Every season has, in a list of 11-13 central characters, only 4 female characters AT MOST. Of those four, only two have been around since season one, if you fudge the matter and count Ali Larter as being continuous even though her characters have not been. That's a serious imbalance before you begin to consider how marginalized the women in this list are. The three remaining in the fourth season play the very definite roles of maiden, mother, crone, too. Which helps immensely, let me tell you.

Someone remind me why I watch this again?

One of the things that bothers me most in reportage about political bloggers and commentators is the tendency to forget that just as there is a difference in extremism, there is also a difference in type when people have opinions and suggest courses of action. The extremism equilibrium issue is a bad one, but it is also one that is easy to point out and shut down. You can easily see the difference, with some thought, between people who aren't sure that the health care reform being debated right now is what's best and people who think that health care reform is the Holocaust by another name. That is a difference in extremes of the same opinion.

The differences in kind are quite different and no one will give acknowledgment the time of day because it takes more than hyperbole to see. However, when you compare moderate activists against a hyperbolic, probably insane television anchor, it becomes much, much easier to see what a difference in kind actually is.

A gay female blogger suggests that her fellow LGBT readers should not donate to the DNC because, on the whole, the DNC is doing nothing to advance their agenda. This is better than the RNC, who would do less than nothing, but not acceptable. You donate money, you expect your congressperson/senator/president to pay attention. That's how the system works. She is working within the system to send a message.

Glenn Beck goes on TV and literally threatens his watchers with death, death, loss of liberty, death, death, fascism, and death. His network sponsors a rally against the government, and it inflates coverage of said rally. People at this rally reflect the paranoid mindset of Beck himself, mirroring his suggestions that the government is being corrupted from within and might require the blood of patriots to free once more. A man showed up the to the 9/12 rally with a "We came unarmed. [This time.]" poster. The threat isn't even subliminal. Beck is encouraging a section of the populace, his popularity rides on that segment that wants to overthrow the system.

This, my friends, is what I mean when I say a difference in kind.

Tobin Harshaw thinks that Beck's meddling that undermined Scozzafava in the NY-23, that Beck himself celebrates as a purge of the insufficiently conservative, is the same as a blogger encouraging potential Democratic donors to vote with their dollars to encourage the rise of more progressive candidates. Beck used terror and undue pressure to force out Scozzafava--he and others declared her the enemy, and they moved to hound her out of the race to make room for a know-nothing loser candidate that will never be elected and cannot, therefore, do anything for their movement. Pam Spaulding says that people should direct their support within the party to candidates of a more progressive bent so that they win primaries and then, hopefully, the elections that will get them to a point where they can effect change.

There are similar problems with the struggle--both sides end up risking losing a seat to the opposition if they drum out more moderate candidates (Beck) or promote overly progressive candidates that the district as a whole cannot support (Spaulding). So, yes, in a sense, their issues are alike. But their methods are of such different timbre, I have difficulty believing that anyone could confuse the two.

Then again, this Opinator quoted Jonah "Liberals can be fascists if you rewrite the definition of fascism" Goldberg in his last column, where he was busily forwarding this lie that Obama was somehow materially damaged by supporting his party's non-starter candidates in two gubernatorial races. Clearly, we are not dealing with the sort of deep thinker who can appreciate the apples-to-oranges nature of an obvious difference in kind sort of comparison.

So far this season, Heroes has not been awful. I credit much of this to Robert Knepper and the uber-creepy inclusion of the Carnival. Everything is better with circus freaks. Everything. Of course, this will all change in another few episodes and I'll regret saying this, but I'm even enjoying parts of this season. (My reviews at Pink Raygun for this season are here, here, here, and here.) There are definitely still problems, much of which stem from the show's loyalty to characters and the actors playing them.

That might be about to change, however. If you still care about spoiler warnings, don't read what's under the cut.( Who am I kidding? I'm the only one still watching this show. )

( And did I mention the racefail? )

I have a few questions about this ruling.

Let me start by saying that it is amazing, given the kinds of questions even the liberal SCOTUS justices were asking, that they ruled as they did. I'd also like to add, as many on progressive blogs have been doing, that I, too, was certain before I read the details of the ruling that Thomas would be the lone dissenter, proudly trumpeting the rights of school districts to strip-search tweeners at any moment for any reason. So, hurrah, SCOTUS actually managed to rally and say, no, you can't strip search a teenage girl because some other teenage girl felt like getting her in trouble and passed on a rumor that the first girl was packing heat Advil. (Thomas' dissent is giving me the creeps, so I'll leave it to you guys to read about it rather than going into it myself.)

But I still have a couple of questions:

1) The school officials have been granted immunity from, I assume, civil prosecution despite SCOTUS having found that the officials violated the girl's rights. Since Justice Thomas is so certain that every mixed signal = everyone breaking the law, won't this not deter schools from doing such searches in the future, despite their unconstitutionality, because they know they can't be sued?

2) The school district is not immune. Is it really the best way to stop this kind of adult-power-tripping madness to say that individuals can demand students be officially pantsed but that only the school can be sued for it? Honestly, wouldn't it better to say the school should be ashamed for not disciplining this person or that one but that the real problem was that person deciding to take the law into their own hands?

Basically, what I, the non-lawyer, get out of this is the following:
School teachers/administrators cannot strip search students...but there won't be any personal penalty if they do. The school district will be liable, however, meaning that the victims of these administrators will be in the oh-so-enviable position of suing a public school. So victims of this kind of unwarranted and now definitely unconstitutional assault will get to chose between letting the incident slide or bankrupting the center of education for their fellow students. Won't that be fun.