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My brain made a thought recently.
After Glenn Beck’s accusation that Obama hates white culture, coupled with his refusal to explain what he means by “white culture”,
after Rush Limbaugh’s “Obama’s America” comments and his demands that Obama make a personal apology for every act of violence perpetrated by a black person,
after Pat Buchanan’s umpteenth racist screed,
after certain rhetoric at Tea Parties,
and closer to home, after racist whites in St. Bernard Parish freaked out when I wrote about housing discrimination in their community,
it is clear that there are plenty of Americans who are proud of their racism. They are happy to display it in public places, from prominent news sources, and to be completely unequivocal in their hatred of blacks and black equality.
Just don’t you dare call it racism.
My question is: why? Why are the proudly racist among us so unwilling to claim their racism? If they are so proud of their opinion that blacks are inferior, why don’t they proudly name themselves racist?
Racists, do you think you’re tricking us? ‘Cause we can tell.
I ask because I think it would be great if racists could just reclaim the racist label. If they would just call themselves racist right from the get-go, it would save the rest of us a lot of time. I would much prefer to know someone is racist up front than to find it out much later after they’ve done something shitty. It would also make it a lot easier to socialize and choose friends. Or to choose one’s work environment.
Do any non-racists have an opinion on this matter? What is so alluring about claiming to be non-racist, but yet being really really racist? Again, if you are so proud of your high opinion of whites and your low opinion of blacks, why are you not proud to declare it openly?
Are you ashamed?
If that’s a case, here’s a suggestion: stop being racist! The shame just melts away.
Please contribute your thoughts. Racist comments will not be tolerated. Big surprise. Please visit the Race section of my 101 post if you honestly want to discuss in good faith but are worried you might not have the background or language to do so.
This post was inspired by an article at Alternet titled Eating Meat Is Not Natural. I wrote a long-ass comment, but now that I am blogging again, I will turn it into a post, goddamn it! It got a good response over there, but I think my ideas were inspired by a post at Feministe, so I can’t take all the cred.
I am an omnivore. AND I completely respect and support the choices of those friends who are vegan and vegetarian, and I expect the same respect for my choices. We are all thinking adults and have come to our conclusions after careful deliberation.
I do have criticism for *some* vegans/vegetarians for the way they interact with omnivores.
1. Using gory images to try and shock omnivores into not eating meat, much the same way anti-abortion activists use shocking pictures of dismembered fetuses to make a point. It is disrespectful and in poor form for the anti-abortion activists, just as for the anti-meat activists. As a woman, I am turned off by this kind of rhetoric because of its close connection to a movement wanting to take my rights away.
2. Using the tactics of creationists to cherry-pick science and create specious pseudo-scientific arguments. We are talking about a moral choice, and it is clear that there are convincing scientific arguments for and against eating meat, as well as how long human have historically been eating it. When I see a side of an argument refuse to accept evidence simply because it contradicts a preferred world-view, I am reminded of creationists. Anyway, we all know that science can’t prove morality.
3. Using the language of the anti-gay movement. For me, as a queer person, a huge red flag goes up when I see an argument for what’s “natural” or not. Natural is a subjective and loaded term, and is often used by bigots against marginalized groups in society. Why would anti-meat activists choose such a term? Humans are also animals. We are part of nature, not separate from it. Humans and our behavior is just as natural as any other animal and their behavior.
4. Comparing meat-eaters to slave-owners, and animals to black people. As an anti-racist, it raises red flags when I hear the anti-meat argument put this way. It makes vegetarians seem as though they must all be white and privileged to be unaware of how insulting this rhetoric is to blacks. It makes me wonder why a movement would be willing to sacrifice dignity for blacks, to further marginalize an already marginalized group, in order to promote their cause.
Again, I am only speaking to those vegetarians and vegans who use this sort of disrespectful language. I have nothing but respect for those of you who respect me in return!
Please add your vegetarian/vegan dos and don’ts in the comments.
What happens when we stand up for our own human rights to the government? Lately we’ve had some interesting examples of how powerful people respond to we commoners when we stand up to advocate for ourselves.
Case study 1: Henrietta Hughes, an elderly black woman living out of her car, spoke up at an Obama rally in Florida about her unmet housing needs. Donors and government officials, including the wife of Republican State Rep Nick Thompson, stepped in and she now has a roof over her head.
Case study 2: Ty’Sheoma Bethea wrote a letter to lawmakers about the wretched and shameful condition of her school. It eventually made it to the Oval Office, and Obama invited Ty-Sheoma to his “state of the nation” address to Congress in February.
More details from CNN:
…Mark Sanford, announced he wouldn’t use his share of the stimulus money on projects like rebuilding her school. “It’s easy to fall into the trap of we need to fix this one school,” said Sanford, a Republican.
…Taking a stand against government spending, Sanford said he would be willing to use the $700 million in the stimulus bill only if he believes he has discretion to control paying down the state’s debt.
That means Ty’Sheoma’s community is left with its school, whose condition is astonishing.
“The auditorium is condemned,” she said on the tour through the crumbling structure. “They use the stage for storage.”
She looked around and said the walls are peeling off and debris has fallen from the ceiling. The gymnasium is in such bad shape, the basketball coach has to cancel games when it rains.
…Many classes are taught in trailers on the school grounds. But the walls are so thin, teachers have to pause when trains roll by, which happens about five times a day.
The school lies in what’s been called the Corridor of Shame, a stretch of highway with enormously poor neighborhoods that are mostly African-American. Some critics say the state doesn’t want to spend money on black kids.
Ty’sheoma’s got something important to advocate for here. Her basic right to quality education is clearly going unmet. Yet Sanford doesn’t care, because he finds it more politically expedient to stick to his amoral conservative ideology. What does government exist for if not to guarantee the rights of the public? For people like Sanford to get and keep power?
What do you notice about these photos? These two individuals advocating for themselves and others like them, Americans who lack access to reasonable housing and education, are both black women. They are ridiculed and rebuffed by plenty on the right, but yet they risk that to raise their voices against injustice. It isn’t surprising that black women would be the ones to step out and take the lead here. Black women have a long history of advocating for human rights, and feel very acutely the lack thereof. Here are two more such women coming forward and speaking out to power.
I’m glad Obama is listening.
This is a real BBC headline.
Mice may be responsible for a blaze that killed nearly 100 cats at an animal shelter near the Canadian city of Toronto, officials say.
…An initial report from the fire marshal says mice or rats chewing through electrical wires in the ceiling are likely to have sparked the blaze.
WOW! From the New York Times:
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — A pediatric neurosurgeon says a tumor he removed from the brain of a Colorado Springs infant contained a tiny foot and other partially formed body parts.
Dr. Paul Grabb said he operated on Sam Esquibel at Memorial Hospital for Children after an MRI showed a tumor on the newborn’s brain. Sam was 3 days old and otherwise healthy.
Grabb said that while removing the growth, he discovered it contained a nearly perfect foot and the formation of another foot, a hand and a thigh.
”It looked like the breech delivery of a baby, coming out of the brain,” Grabb said. ”To find a perfectly formed structure (like this) is extremely unique, unusual, borderline unheard of.”
Grabb isn’t sure what caused the growth but says it may have been a type of congenital brain tumor. However, such tumors usually are less complex than a foot or hand, he said.
The growth may also have been a case of ”fetus in fetu” — in which a fetal twin begins to form within another — but such cases very rarely occur in the brain, Grabb said.
A: We kill it!
I’ve noticed a bit of discourse going on in America lately. Expressions of shock at the slaughtering of animals. The insinuation that it’s barbaric. Warning viewers of the gruesome images they are about to see.
Now, I am an omnivore. I love fried chicken, sausage, bacon, lamb, hamburgers. But I’m not under any illusions as to where that food comes from. I know that I am eating a dead animal that was killed in order to nourish me. I am a thinking omnivore- whenever possible, I want to make sure that the meat I am eating was raised free-range, preferably on a small farm, was fed appropriate food, and was slaughtered in a humane and respectful way. Or I will eat wild game that was hunted legally.
I want my eyes to be wide open about the whole process. If I can’t acknowledge the fact of the slaughter and stomach that, well then I shouldn’t stomach the meat either.
So back to the media. Remember the interview of Sarah Palin in front of turkeys being slaughtered for Thanksgiving? News anchors, pundits, average Americans made that into such a HUGE DEAL. The anchors warned squeamish viewers to turn away, blurred out what was happening, and expressed pious shock.
I kept wondering, where the fuck does America think our Thanksgiving turkeys come from? Exactly how do we think the live turkey becomes the big packaged thing that we get in the grocery store? Did we really expect death not to be involved? Why is it so gruesome that we can’t even see two turkeys be slaughtered, when we must have slaughtered literally millions to satisfy Thanksgiving demand?
So Dec. 8 was Eid Al-Adha, the “Festival of Sacrifice,” which includes the ritual slaughter of sheep and other animals. The animals are killed according to special standards, which involve saying the name of Allah as the animal is slaughtering and respecting the sacrifice of its life. The meat is then divided into thirds: one third is kept by the family, one third is given to friends, and one third is donated to the poor.
I cannot imagine a more respectful way to treat an animal intended for human consumption, nor more generous way to distribute the meat.
The Washington Post ran a slideshow after the fact of rural Muslims in America performing this ritual slaughter. Fine and dandy, the pictures are great. But the captions are filled with the same shock and moral indignation that accompanied coverage of Palin’s turkey interview. Before you can see the pictures, you are presented with this message:
“WARNING Editor’s Note: Some images in this gallery may be disturbing because of their violent or graphic nature.”
Some of the interesting photo captions include:
“A child feeds a sheep who will be killed at Home Place Farm in Maryland. “
“Most of the animals die silently but it is not always quick. “
“An animal lies trembling and tied on the ground. For one holiday guest named Benizir the tradition seems out of place in America. She believes it better to send money back to Afghanistan, her homeland. “And I feel sorry for the animals,” she says.”
“Five-year-old Nizar Ghoumari of D.C. weeps after pleading with his family to have one of the sheep alive to keep. He ran off in tears after realizing it would be slaughtered.”
“Mahfooz wipes away the blood of a sheep at his home in Virginia.” (Accompanying a picture of a man splattered with blood.)
“Nalia Zahid of Herndon, Va., winces as she and her children watch the final struggle of an animal.”
From reading these captions, you would imagine that eating meat is uncommon in America! The shock, the horror, the sorrow that the photographer and caption-writer chose to depict seem to come from people who have never contemplated an animal as a source of food.
Thousands, if not millions, of animals are killed every day to feed Americans. And most were not killed in the respectful way, after free-range lives on a small farm, that these sacrificial animals were. The death of animals is a banal, quotidian fact. They die by the thousands, and at factory farms and major slaughter houses their killing is almost completely mechanized- no prayer, no respect, no portion sent to the poor. They are killed all day long, every day, butchered, packaged, shipped to grocery stores, and sold to the majority of American consumers.
So why, when faced with a simple fact that is behind most of our daily existences, do we respond in such a silly way? I think a lot of us are simply in denial, a chosen and studious ignorance, about where meat comes from. Most of us are town, city and suburb dwellers, and if we choose, we never have to go near the site of animal slaughter. We are completely divorced from the production of our food, to the point that we act as though its very production is barbaric, but yet do not consider ourselves barbaric for being the reason for the slaughter.
Thoughts? Omnivores and vegetarians, please respect each other’s choices.
h/t to Fally
HOLY FUCKING SHIT! ELBOW SQUID! OMG! This motherfucker is some scary shit. I’m reduced to cuss-word-laden sentences after experiencing this video.
From the National Geographic site:
In a few seconds of jerky camerawork, the squid appears with its huge fins waving like elephant ears and its remarkable arms and tentacles trailing from elbow-like appendages.
Despite the squid’s apparent unflappability on camera, Magnapinna, or “big fin,” squid remain largely a mystery to science.
On a side note, this footage was captured by a Shell oil company remotely operated vehicle that was patrolling near a deep-sea oil-drilling site. Shell, this is the first and last time I will be thankful for something you did. You may want to commission a plaque.
Bella DePaulo writes a blog about being single, called Living Single.
Wow, a whole blog about us boring, unimportant single people? I’ll try to keep my head from swelling.
Of course, writing this blog for years has given DePaulo a bunch of super interesting insights. Here is some of her writing from Why Don’t Friendships Get What They Deserve?:
In our laws, politics, religions, and in the cultural stories that we tell, it is the married couple relationship (and secondarily, the parent-child relationship) that is honored, protected, and sentimentalized. Friends are marginalized as “just” friends. The model that celebrates the marital relationship and dismisses friendship, though, no longer corresponds to the way we actually live.
Now that Americans spend more years of their adult lives single than married, friendship is more important than it used to be. As family size decreases, so, too, do options for family care in old age or any other age – fewer people have siblings or adult children to care for them (or if they do, those family members may live many miles away). Again, it is friends who come to the rescue.
Legal scholars are beginning to take note, and they are raising questions about whether the place of friendships in law and public policy needs to be reconsidered.
So fascinating. Protecting friendships with the law – what an interesting idea and a nightmare at the same time. What would it look like if friendships were respected by the law? You know, for such purposes as hospital visits, inheritance, stuff like that. If these relationships are significant and valuable, why should the law ignore them and place all importance on blood and marriage?
I think it makes a lot of sense to think realistically about how real Americans structure their actual relationships, instead of focusing on tradition or ideals. Since adults spend more time single than not, and have smaller families, the importance of friendships must certainly be rising. I don’t think dominant social discourse addresses this at all. There is serious silence surrounding adult friendship and the way these relationships improve quality of life and form a non-familial safety net in rough times.
One could correlate the devaluation of friend relationships with the dismissal of singlehood as a valid adult choice. Mainstream discourse says when you marry (or commit to a life partnership) you are to forsake all others and cleave only to your spouse. Married people focus their attention on spouses and children. Single people focus their attention on friends and other family relationships. Or, so sez the mainstream discourse. I can think of bunches of coupled people in my life who would attest to the value and importance of their friendships.
This post is just a starting point – I think I’m going to want to spend more time thinking about this topic.
Your thoughts on singlehood and friendships are humbly requested.
WHAT THE HELL?
NEW YORK – A worker died after being trampled by a throng of unruly shoppers when a suburban Wal-Mart opened for the holiday sales rush Friday, authorities said.
At least three other people were injured.
. . . Nassau County police said the 34-year-old worker was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead at about 6 a.m., an hour after the store opened. The cause of death was not immediately known.
A police statement said shortly after 5 a.m., a throng of shoppers “physically broke down the doors, knocking (the worker) to the ground.” Police also said a 28-year-old pregnant woman was taken to a hospital for observation and three other shoppers suffered minor injuries and were also taken to hospitals.
Source: Yahoo News
Wow. [insert tirade about consumerism here]
People can, and do, grow horns. They are called “cutaneous horns.”
From the World Journal of Surgical Oncology:
Cutaneous horn (cornu cutaneum), is a projectile, conical, dense, hyperkeratotic nodule that resembles the horn of an animal. The horn is composed of compacted keratin.
The wonders of the human race are infinite. You can read more at the above link, or at Neurosurgery Online or at the Human Marvels. Apparently, horns occur more frequently among the elderly, especially women. Of people who grow horns, many work outdoors unprotected from the sun. The horns may develop out of resulting lesions.
From the Human Marvels:
The earliest reliable account can be found in the report of German surgeon Fabricius Hildanus. In the late 1500’s he encountered a man with horns protruding from his forehead. Several other cases have been well documented by noted naturalists and medical experts. In his book Anatomicae Institutiones Corporis Humani Dutch naturalist Bartholinus mentions a patient with a horn measuring 12 inches and in 1696 there was a well know case involving an old woman in France who had her amputated 12 inch horn presented to the King. There is also an account from around the same time regarding the extirpation of a horn nearly ten inches in length from the forehead of a woman of eighty-two. Finally, in 1886 the famous dermatologist Jean Baptiste Emile Vidal presented before the Academie de Medecine a twisted horn from the head of a woman. That horn was ten inches long.
And do you know where you can go to see some human horns here in the US of A? Philadelphia!
You can see actual human horns and more at the “disturbingly informative” Mütter Museum. (Their words, not mine.) The Mütter Museum was founded to educate future doctors about anatomy and human medical anomalies. This website says:
The Mütter Museum, located within the stately, late-Georgian halls of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (CPP), is sometimes disparaged as a “baby-in-a-bottle freak show,” but this label is simplistic.
Indeed. Back on topic, here are some incredible examples of individuals living with horns.
Ma Zhong Nan
Man from Zheng Zhou
Zhao from Zhan Jiang
Abdul Razak of Narasimharajapura
Saleh Talib Saleh of Yemen
Wax cast of Madame Dimanche of France
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