Commentary and criticism from a social justice standpoint.
Here’s part of a great answer:
I am a feminist because I do not want that right, because I never want to stand on the same side as my abusers;
I am a feminist because, if I am honest with myself, I cannot deny that I am, as a man, always and already on that side, because to be honest with myself is to recognize the changes that my side needs to make…
A page on the Geek Feminism Wiki defines a grunch as one of those little moments that just causes all of your illusions of being seen as an equal to fall apart.
From an outstanding article by Tim Chevalier about programming, women and sexism, entitled How To Exclude Women Without Really Trying. Read it!
Here is just a taste:
Countering sexism requires courage and (in Samuel Delany’s words) moral stamina. It is work that largely needs to be done by men, since men who tacitly believe that women aren’t quite human are hardly going to listen to women’s opinions on the subject.
I admit I was not really in the know about the teachers’ strike in Chicago. UNTIL I read this very helpful article:
CHICAGO’S TEACHERS JUST WENT ON STRIKE — HERE’S EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WHY
So if you didn’t know, now you know.
There’s actually not a lot more to say about this story. Shawn Lowe, who hopes that “I and everyone else can just move on,” was recently convicted of raping two 14 year old girls when he was 21. This wasn’t simply statutory rape- these girls both said “no” and he proceeded to coerce them. He fed one half of a 40 first.
Missoula County District Court Judge John Larson sentenced Shawn Lowe, 23, on Thursday to 20 years in prison, but suspended all of that but 90 days, which he said Lowe could spent in the Missoula County Detention Facility. He also designated Lowe a tier 1 sex offender, meaning that his risk of repeating the offense is low.
As a commenter on the story says, that’s only 45 days per rape, an experience that will haunt the girls for a lifetime. So much of the “justice” system has to be messed up for a sentence like this to be handed down, that I honestly don’t know where to start and I don’t even want to try. I’m depressed enough.
Mary Fallin, Governor of Oklahoma, gained my notice by expressing this extremely creative history of Oklahoma at the Republican National Convention:
“The history of my great state of Oklahoma offers a great example of pursuing the American Dream. It was built and settled by pioneers movibe west to seek better lives. During the Great Land Run of 1889, thousands of families rushed to put a stake down on empty plots of land. They built tent cities overnight. They farmed the land and they worked hard. And, in 1897, eight years after the land run, a handful of adventurous pioneers risked their own money — not the federal government’s money — to drill Oklahoma’s first oil well, the Nellie Johnstone. By doing so, these early-day pioneers changed the future and Oklahoma forever and today Oklahoma is one of the nation’s key energy producers and job creators. President Obama wants us to believe that Oklahomans owe that success to the federal government — to the Department Of Energy,to the EPA, to the IRS, or maybe even to him. Mr. President, we know better. As we say in Oklahoma, that dog won’t hunt.”
I recommend the following party game: have someone read this statement aloud (or play the youtube video!). Everytime Fallin says something that is TOTALLY MADE-UP AND/OR OBSCENELY OFFENSIVE, everyone takes a shot. The first person to black out loses.
Read Wonkette’s take on this laughably predictable piece of racism at the Republican National Convention.
I just finished reading Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships & the Crisis of Connection by Niobe Way. Way is a Psychology professor and performed her own research to create this book- a study of boys and their friendships, and how the pressures of “being a man” create loss as the boys grow up and feel they can no longer be emotionally intimate with other males. Recommended!
Some quotes:
“The gender divide — where girls don’t think and boys don’t feel — the virtual “DNA of the patriarchy” does not capture how boys actually experience their worlds.” Pg.263
“The very social and emotional capacities, needs, and desires that are associated with being female and gay are not only the very same skills that are at the foundation of our survival as individuals and as a species; they are also capacities, needs, and desires that boys themselves have and are explicit about if one is willing to listen.” Pg.265
“Friendships as well as our emotional and social intelligence are central to our emotional, cognitive, and physical well-being. Yet we continue to ignore the evidence and blame female teachers, mothers, fathers, and the “feminized” school curriculum for boys’ problems. We fail to see that they stem from our idealization of a stereotypic version of manhood…” Pg.268
“Just as our masculine stereotypes rest on constructs of autonomy and stoicism, so does our definition of maturity — revealing, of course, the patriarchy at work, with manhood meaning the same thing as adulthood.” Pg.268
“The opposite of patriarchy is not a fictional matriarchy where emotions rule and thinking is passé. It is a thick democracy where thinking, feeling, learning, and having a range of different types of relationships are possible and encouraged for every “citizen.” ” Pg. 276-277
Here is an article written for the Village Voice in 1979. It was written by Lester Bangs, at the time an important music journalist. Entitled “The White Noise Supremacists”, it is about the racism Lester has been encountering in the Punk and New Wave scenes.
Truly worth checking out!
From ABC News:
Paterno told his son, Scott Paterno, that he did not know anything about Sandusky’s sexual abuse, noting that he did not listen to rumors and only knew what McQueary told him.
“‘I didn’t hear anything, why are you badgering me?’ Paterno told his son. ‘What do I know about Jerry Sandusky? I’ve got Nebraska to think about, I can’t worry about this.’ Nebraska was the next game.
Thanks for laying out your priorities there, bro.
The article also says:
He had his dark moments, certainly, when he wondered how old friends could turn so suddenly on him and how people at Penn State, the school he had loved and championed for most of his life, could believe such terrible things about him.
How could they believe that he didn’t give a rip about child molestation? Maybe they got that opinion by listening to him talk.
Sigh.
Remember when Penn State students demonstrated their disgust for child sex abuse by rioting in defense of Paterno? Because it was so unjust to expect him to investigate serious allegations about an underling?
Sigh.
I guess some ICE employees are itching to kick more brown people out of their United States. I’m supposing they got involved with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the hope of making life worse for people of darker hue, and then stuff like budgets and politics and human rights got in the way.
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE “BROWN TIDE” and the DEMOGRAPHIC DISASTER??
The natural answer is to sue. Certain enterprising government employees at ICE established a natural link to the nativist organization, NumbersUSA. NumbersUSA, with extensive ties to racists of all types, is a big supporter of all the toughest anti-immigrant legislation, and has agreed to fund this lawsuit.
MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN HELL.
Tavis Smiley and Cornel West published a book called The Rich and the Rest of Us. I recently read this book, and here are my favorite quotes. I highly recommend this book as an excellent introduction into poverty issues and America’s class system.
” “There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great,” President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1913 at the beginning of the 20th century…”
“Poverty is 21st-century-style slavery; its eradication should serve as the battle cry of a new civil rights movement.”
“[A] condition of truth is to allow the suffering to speak.”
17-year-old Savannah Dietrich was sexually assaulted at a party. The two boys even took pictures of their heinous deed. The criminals actually had to go to court, but received light sentences, and then a gag order was placed on the case so that no one, including the victim, could speak publicly about it again. Dietrich, upset at the lack of justice, used Twitter to speak out, and dared to name her attackers. The boys’ attorneys tried to have her charged with contempt, a jailable offense.
Thank god that they withdrew that motion, after international outrage.
Dietrich sounds like one cool lady:
“There you go, lock me up,” Savannah Dietrich tweeted, as she named the boys who she said sexually assaulted her. “I’m not protecting anyone that made my life a living Hell.”
…“I’m at the point, that if I have to go to jail for my rights, I will do it,” she said. “If they really feel it’s necessary to throw me in jail for talking about what happened to me … as opposed to throwing these boys in jail for what they did to me, then I don’t understand justice.”
The numbers suggest that the legitimate votes rejected by the [Voter ID] laws are far more numerous than are the cases of fraud that advocates of the rules say they are trying to prevent. Thousands more votes could be in jeopardy for this November, when more states with larger populations are looking to have similar rules in place.
So… doesn’t that indicate that Voter ID laws in fact perpetrate greater fraud than the “fraud” they’re supposedly fixing? Isn’t preventing someone from voting some sort of crime?
Just some thoughts.
Also from the article:
A Republican leader in Pennsylvania said recently that the state’s new ID law would allow Romney to win the state over President Barack Obama.
Huh. YOU DON’T SAY.
This is essentially an instruction video on how to be awesome. Isis King, best known for being the first transgender woman on America’s Next Top Model, and Janet Mock, an editor at People Magazine, interview each other. Seeing these two accomplished trans women of color talk TRUTH is invigorating!
See for yourself:
Crap like this is why I needed to see some positive representation of trans women right now.
Pope Ratzinger has fired a bishop for suggesting that women could be priests, but he has never fired a bishop for covering up child sex abuse.
Interesting, don’t you think?
I was reading CNN and after seeing the headline “Prominent atheist blogger converts to Catholicism” I had to doublecheck and make sure I hadn’t slid over to Fox somehow.
I had not.
I ask again, why is this news? People convert back and forth between religions or no religion all the time. Why is the conversion of a single blogger, who is certainly not prominent, worth reporting on a national news site? The only thing I can even venture to guess is that they view it as a small repudiation of atheism, and Christians in the newsroom just couldn’t pass up a chance to take a swipe at atheists. It seems awfully cynical to look at it that way, but I can’t imagine any other way this could be deemed newsworthy.
I just read about a new dimension of the work of the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation: policing gender!
Staff at a popular Seattle swimming pool were confronted with the horror of a woman, who is a survivor of a double-mastectomy and breast cancer, who wished to swim topless to avoid the pain she feels in a tight swimsuit top.
SCANDAL! WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN!! IF WE DON’T HAVE SEPARATE RULES FOR DIFFERENT GENDERS, ANARCHY WILL RULE THE EARTH!!!
However, Jodi Jaecks is no ordinary woman, and she doesn’t give a fuck about gender norms. So she pursued the matter. So far, she has won a partial victory: Parks and Rec will grant her, and only her, an exception to their gender rules.
Of course, Jaecks, other cancer survivors, and other women aren’t done advocating for themselves. And since nudity is not illegal in Seattle, it’s curious that the pools have stricter rules than the city. We’ll see what happens!
Jodi Jaecks
So indicates the Chicago Tribune and the jerks it interviewed for the article Politicians, health advocates seek transparency, restrictions in food stamp program.
At issue is the worn-out “debate” about whether food stamps recipients should be able to decide for themselves what they want at the grocery store, or whether the government should decide for them.
Suddenly, the government cares that corporations peddling unhealthy food and beverages may receive “government money” in the form of people using food stamps to buy, for example, Pepsi. As though major corporations don’t receive government perks at every turn, and the thought of a poor person enjoying a soda just offends certain officials’ senses of corporate ethics.
As though the “healthy food” that the government would rather poor people use their food stamps on is not also corporate-owned and already government-subsidized just as the “unhealthy food”.
I will never understand why punishing poor people for their poverty is a solution when they likely live in “food deserts”, where real grocery stores, let alone farmer’s markets and the like, are scarce and the junk food sold at bodegas is easier to get and more filling.
Punishing poor people for being poor will not make them healthier, will not cause them to make “better” choices, and will not stop the sale of unhealthy food and beverages. It will simply be another way in which the government and our society infantilize and condescend to the poor without offering any real solutions aimed at the root of their problems. In fact, it seems we believe the poor are to blame for their own poverty, which is why they need the government to tell them what to eat and what not to eat. The assumption that poor people are dumb lies barely covered beneath the surface of these crap arguments.
If these unhealthy food items and beverages must be banned from the poor, why not also everyone else? If the government and “health advocates” are so concerned about the public health effects of unhealthy food, why not ban it from everyone, regardless of income level? That would certainly strike that blow the government is suddenly so eager to strike against the corporations producing these products.
“In a ‘rape culture’, violence against women, a social disaster, is euphemistically termed as ‘unfortunate’, just like natural catastrophes, and not ‘unjust’.”
-Upendra Baxi, The Second Gujarat Catastrophe
WordPress won’t let me embed this video but I urge you to check it out here.
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