"We strongly condemn the violent and unjust suppression of civilians in Iran seeking to exercise their universal rights. ...It is telling when governments fear the aspirations of their own people more than the power of any other nation."—White House spokesperson Mike Hammer, on the Iranian government's heavy-handed suppression of opposition protesters.
BoingBoing's got a good round-up of more coverage. The Times of Londonwonders: "Is this Iran’s Berlin Wall moment?"
This is the thread in which you may offer congratulations or admiration for a teaspoon or teaspooner. If you're posting with just congrats or admiration, though, do take a moment and check the thread to see whether other people have said so a number of times already. Remember that no one is required to read here just because they posted over there, so there's no guarantee you'll get a response to a given comment.
(Personal note: Sorry for the long gap between posts - the painstorm continues, and more and more of my resources are going to work-only behaviour; the same applies to Bread and Teaspoons - and still applies today, grr).
Time for another Teaspoon Report, brought to you by Shaxco, proud purveyors of Shaxco™ brand Transparent Clothing, ideal for your next rendezvous with the Getcher-Shoes-Off-An'-Throw-Your-Clothes-In-With-'Em brigade at the TSA.
So, leave comments here that describe an act of teaspooning you encountered or committed. They don't have to be big, world-shaking acts; by definition, a teaspoon is a small thing, but enough of them together can empty the ocean.
If you would like to discuss the teaspoons here reported, or even offer congratulations or your admiration to a fellow Shaker, we ask that you do so over here in the Discussion Thread for today's NQDTR.
Shaker bgk has been kind enough to get a Twitter-pated version out there for you young twittersnappers (and by the way, get off my lawn, you meddling kids! *shakes cane*). You can find the details about the Tweetspoons project right here. That runs all the time, as far as I'm aware (*grumblenewtechnologygrumble*), and we encourage you to let other people know that there's at least one tweetstream talking about just going out and doing good things for the human species.
I don't have anything brilliant to say about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian man who tried to set off an explosive on a Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. But I wanted to give people a place to talk about the situation, so here's an Open Thread, and a few of the most recent relevant articles as recommended reading.
(There is a paraphrase of the relevant bit of this video at the link. If anyone can locate a transcript for this Today show interview between Matt Lauer and Napolitano, please drop a link in comments. )
NYT—Explosive on Flight 253 Is Among Most Powerful: "Sewn into the underwear of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a powerful plastic explosive, the authorities say. Had Mr. Abdulmutallab, sitting in seat 19A of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Friday from Amsterdam to Detroit, been able to set off the explosive, it might have blown a hole in the side of the airplane and caused it to crash, experts believe."
When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father in Nigeria reported concern over his son's "radicalization" to the U.S. Embassy there last month, intelligence officials in the United States deemed the information insufficient to pursue. The young man's name was added to the half-million entries in a computer database in McLean and largely forgotten.
The lack of attention was not unusual, according to U.S. intelligence officials, who said that thousands of similar bits of information flow into the National Counterterrorism Center each week from around the world. Only those that indicate a specific threat, or add to an existing body of knowledge about an individual, are passed along for further investigation and possible posting on airline and border watch lists.
"It's got to be something that causes the information to sort of rise out of the noise level, because there is just so much out there," one intelligence official said.
Steve Benen: "In light of the attempted terrorism aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas, there are plenty of reasonable questions that deserve thorough answers. Why was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab able to get and keep a visa in 2008? To what extent to Abdulmutallab have terrorist associations? How dangerous were his materials, and how was he able to get them on the plane? And if you're Joe Lieberman, how soon can we go to war with Yemen?"
The Guardian's Comment is Free is doing a series this week, asking its contributors what they changed their minds about over the last decade—something that's gotten better than they'd hoped, something that's gotten worse than they'd feared, etc. My piece (which has a rather misleading subhead; I didn't suddenly, spontaneously, change my view last week, but wevs) discusses my being simultaneously pleasantly surprised by how far same-sex marriage has come over the last decade in some places, and disappointed by how very far away marriage equality is in others:
[I]t's in that cavernous disparity – that there are places in which the queer community and its allies are fighting mightily for basic survival, while other places are celebrating hard-won marriage equality with beautiful, dramatic kisses against a backdrop of rainbow flags – that I find my wonderment at how far marriage equality has come in the last decade in so many places and how far it hasn't in others.
In my blog Shakesville, we have a series called Feel the homomentum, celebrating each incremental success, anywhere in the world we find it. I believe quite firmly that in the slow and steady march toward equality, time is on our side and progress is inevitable. I believe quite firmly that the people who still make life unnecessarily difficult for gay men and lesbians are dinosaurs, and one day they will be extinct – and we will collect their bones and put them in a museum and tell our grandchildren about the pea-brained leviathans who once thought the gay community didn't deserve equality, and those children will laugh and shake their heads incredulously at such senseless bigotry. Not that there's any other kind.
I couldn't find the opening credits for "The Bob Newhart Show," which was just a great show and had an awesome theme, so here's an advert for the show plus a track of its theme. Enjoy!
"God hates Lady Gaga. ... As much as she'd like to pretend otherwise, there's nothing new or different about this particular hussy's pretentious prancing. Does the simple slut truly think that she can change God's standards by seducing a generation of rebels into joining her in fist-raised, stiffnecked, hard-hearted rebellion against Him? Get real!"—The Westboro Baptist Church Clan (pdf), who are fixin' to "picket this sleazy God-hater" in January. Good times.
One thing many people report after coming to progressivism is that so much of formerly favourite media becomes almost unwatchable/unlistenable/unreadable/unplayable. Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (I refer specifically to the James Stewart/Doris Day remake), for instance, once a great favourite, is now pretty much something I can't ever watch, because of the horrid scene in which he non-consensually sedates his wife to preempt her freaking out because their son has been kidnapped in Morocco: white doctor-man to the rescue!
Or Pepe le Pew, the cartoon skunk whose romantic endeavours amused me so when I was a child, now I watch it and all I can think is "RAPIST RAPIST RAPIST!"
And so on, and so forth, even ad nauseam.
How do you cope with formerly loved media becoming unenjoyable because of your progressivist beliefs?
(Blog note: I was supposed to set this up to post at 18h this evening, but I kinda bollixed it, and it's here now. It may well stay at the top of the page until the time it was supposed to be posted, though.)
This is the thread in which you may offer congratulations or admiration for a teaspoon or teaspooner. If you're posting with just congrats or admiration, though, do take a moment and check the thread to see whether other people have said so a number of times already. Remember that no one is required to read here just because they posted over there, so there's no guarantee you'll get a response to a given comment.
(Personal note: Sorry for the long gap between posts - the painstorm continues, and more and more of my resources are going to work-only behaviour; the same applies to Bread and Teaspoons).
Welcome to Shakesville, a progressive feminist blog about politics, culture, social justice, cute things, and all that is in between. Please note that the commenting policy and the Feminism 101 section, conveniently linked at the top of the page, are required reading before commenting.
