This is, for those who have requested it, your bi-monthly reminder* to donate to Shakesville—although I haven't actually done one of these since November, because I wanted to get the blog working again first.
Asking for donations is difficult for me, partly because I've got an innate aversion to asking for anything, and partly because these threads are frequently critical and stressful. But it's also one of the most feminist acts I do here.
So. Here's the reminder.
You can donate once by clicking the button in the righthand sidebar, or set up a monthly subscription here.
Please don't feel obliged to donate, especially if money is tight. The last thing I want is for anyone to feel stretched because of a donation.
I also want say thank you, so very much, to each of you who donates or has donated, whether monthly or as a one-off. I am profoundly grateful—and I don't take a single cent for granted. I've not the words to express the depth of my appreciation, besides these: This community couldn't exist without that support, truly. Thank you.
(Why I ask for donations is explained here.)
---------------------
* I know there are people who resent these reminders, but there are also people who appreciate them, so I've now taken to doing them every other month, in the hopes that will make a good compromise.
Bi-Monthly Reminder & Thank You
France to "Tag" Violent Husbands
[Trigger warning.]
The BBC reports that the French Parliament is considering, and is likely to pass, a new law that would require men who have been court-ordered to stay away from their partners to wear an electronic tag that would alert police if they break the order and get too close to their partners.
My immediate response was essentially a slew of questions about the specifics: What is the threshold for getting a court-order in France—is it easy or difficult? Is is only applicable for married, opposite-sex couples? Does the abused partner have to wear a tag, too, in order for the abuser's tag to know he's getting too close, or does it only work as long as the abused partner stays in her home? How long does the tag stay on—forever? Or is it a temporary thing, like an ankle bracelet worn by someone under house arrest? If it's finite, who determines—and how—when it's safe to remove the tag because its bearer no longer poses a significant threat?
But all of those details aside, there has to be a pretty compelling case for me to support a new kind of human tracking by a government. Which makes this the only truly relevant question: Have these "tags" been shown to have any kind of observable deterrent effect?
Because if they have, if violent men who are tagged by court-order are demonstrably less likely to attack and/or murder their spouses ("three women are being killed by their partners every week" in France), then that's a pretty compelling reason.
But if they haven't, then all we're talking about is something to make the job of police and prosecutors easier, because they get "alerted" when a tagged abuser breaks a court-order to kill his wife.
Which ultimately doesn't help abused women at all.
And doing something just to feel like you're doing something, instead of doing something to materially and practically help victims of domestic violence, can be worse than doing nothing at all, because it gives everyone an excuse to avoid doing something genuinely effective for even longer.
[H/T to Memeorandum.]
Big Bipartisan Healthcare Summit Review
So yesterday was the Big Bipartisan Healthcare Summit, and my colleague at CifA, Sahil Kapur, perfectly sums up the event: "Thursday's much-hyped bipartisan healthcare summit was a predictably fruitless political showcase. Republicans knew coming into it they wouldn't reverse a year of frenzied opposition to healthcare reform under any circumstances, and Democrats knew the prospect of GOP co-operation was laughable on its face. That's how it began, and that's how it ended."
I keep reading over and over this morning that this was the final straw, and now Obama and the Democratic leadership will forge on without regard for the Republicans: "Obama listened politely for six hours, with occasional flashes of temper, but in the end, the message was clear: It's over. We're moving forward without Republicans," writes Greg Sargent.
And Steve Benen notes: "In effect, yesterday was about both sides asking the other a fundamental question. Obama's question for Republicans was, 'We're offering a bipartisan, comprehensive package built around principles you claim to support. Are you willing to work with us?' Republicans came with their own question: 'Will you throw out all the work you've done and promise to let us kill reform with a filibuster?' Both sides have the same answer to the competing questions: 'No.' The difference is, Democrats are the governing majority, and the party's leaders see no reason to make Republican satisfaction a prerequisite for success."
This is no knock on either one of those fine writers, whose observations are absolutely right, but I am left wondering, yet again, what was the goddamn point of wasting an entire year—not to mention enormous amounts of political capital, progressive goodwill, and, quite literally, thousands of American lives—to come to the conclusion that healthcare reform will just have to move ahead without the help of the Republicans, who indicated from DAY FUCKING ONE that they were going to offer naught but obdurate obstructionism?
I guess I finally understand the objective of 12-dimensional chess: To end up with the board looking exactly the same as when you started, but sitting across from a stronger opponent.
Paul Krugman: "So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right."
Digby, looking at the media response, finds, naturally, that they are right. The media is declaring the GOP the victor. Digby notes that CNN analyst David Gergen proclaimed, I shit you not: "Intellectually, the Republicans had the best day they've had in years. The best day they've had in years."
And check out this typical headline from that liberal media outlet CBS: "The Summit Was a Tie—and That's Good News for GOP." Even when the Republicans tie, they win!
And all they needed to do to "tie" apparently was not completely lose it and start flinging their own shit at the president like caged monkeys, because they sure didn't win on facts. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used the occasion of the summit to scold his Republican colleagues: "You're entitled to your opinions, but not your own facts. Your opinion is something that is yours and you're entitled to that, but not your own facts."
But the truth is, they are entitled to their own facts, because the media lets them say whatever the fuck they want and, as long as they look confident saying it, declare them the winners.
This is a narrative that media watchdogs like Eric Boehlert and Bob Somerby have been documenting for years. And yet President Obama and the Democratic leadership are so arrogant or daft or delusional that they evidently believed it will be different for us!
I cannot begin to convey the depth of my contempt for this administration's patent refusal to surrender its belief that the game can be changed by foolishly pretending that the rules simply don't apply to them.
People have died in the last year because they didn't have health coverage, while Obama & Co. fucked around trying to win an ideological battle that they were never. going. to. win.
Me, almost a year ago: "The Democrats should concede nothing to the altar of bipartisanship and corporatism. They can water down legislation until it's not remotely progressive and unlikely to even be effective, but it still won't be enough for the right-leaning interests in this country to do anything but try to kill it and kill it and kill it, and anything resembling it, until they get what they want. And what they want isn't good for the American people. Which is why they should be roundly ignored."
I've said what feels like a hundred times in the last year that any attempt to compromise with the GOP is utter folly, because you can't negotiate with someone whose position is "No." And I resent bitterly that this administration's insistence on ignoring something so patently obvious, in pursuit of indulgent and ultimately vain political gamesmanship, has ended up where we are today, in the same place we started, but with countless people sicker than they had to be, broker than they had to be, or dead, when they didn't have to be.
In other news that makes me want to smash things...
The public option never even got a mention at the summit, which doesn't mean there aren't still the few, the proud, the authentic progressives in both houses of Congress who are still valiantly fighting for it:
The Senate has the 50 votes necessary to pass a public health insurance option using the budget reconciliation process, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Thursday.
I'm with you, Bernie. Perplexed and pissed and still hoping, despite all evidence of its futility, for something good to come out of this huge, stinking, disgusting mess.
Sanders, a self-described "democratic socialist" who supports the government-run plan, urged President Barack Obama to push for the public option even though the possibility of passing it appeared to die this week.
"I think we do have 50 votes in the Senate for a public option and frankly I don't know why the president has not put it in and I hope that we can inject it," Sanders said on MSNBC. "I think it's a very important part of healthcare reform."
Open Thread
Hosted by Jimmy, H.R. Pufnstuf, Cling, Clang, and a gravestone so fucking cool it's making me rethink cremation, if I can get a duplicate made.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker The_Great_Indoors: What's something you're proud of? No real restrictions on this; could be recent or years past, public or private, and not necessarily a teaspoon item—just a small space to brag up something.
With All Due Respect
Every email I get that begins, "With all due respect," is followed immediately thereafter by a barrage of seething, hyperbolic vitriol. Usually several paragraphs of it.
One might reasonably argue that my correspondents are being ironic, implicitly commenting that I am due no respect at all by showing me none.
But one then wonders why it is they take the time to hector, lecture, berate, condemn, and attempt to persuade me of my principles with compelling arguments like "Your a fat stupid cunt anyways!"
Hmm. Well. There is a fine line between respect and fear.
What a pitiable existence it must be, quivering at the keyboard and pounding out vicious missives to perfect strangers, scared of the mere knowledge there are people in the world who are different than you and not inclined to accept that those differences make them less than. How sad to be threatened by anyone whom the strategies of the high school bully fail to silence.
Insight isn't the only thing that undiluted privilege doesn't freely give its members; it also robs them of an internal, dignified security that isn't predicated on treating rights as a zero-sum game. Every layer of privilege serves as proxy for the self-assurance hard-won by struggling to be proud despite one's marginalization. Privilege tells its members they need not reflect, or justify, or earn, or question. They needn't even bother themselves with the business of being good, because unexamined privilege assures them they are good, by virtue of their privilege.
But who are they, if that privilege comes undone? Are they good? Are they smart, strong, deserving? They've never had to find out—and thus the insecurity, the desperate lashing out at anyone who threatens, in even the most meager way, to topple the tower of unexamined privilege atop which they stand. Their pride was unearned, and they're left with a cavernous void of self-esteem if that tower crumbles beneath their feet.
They are nothing without their privilege, because their privilege has allowed them to live a life never having to be anything, other than privileged.
So they flail, urgently and frantically, in my inbox, because it's easier to impotently shout at me than to even begin to contemplate the vast fuckery that is having been robbed of the will and need to know themselves, coerced into complacency by the damnable illusion that they have everything already that they will ever need, and need never expect more of themselves.
With all due respect, my friends: You've been hoodwinked.
Multi-language Feminist Links?
I think I may have mentioned once or twice that I'm a translator by vocation (and to an extent by avocation too), specifically of French, German and Russian (I also read some Spanish and Japanese, but not well enough to work in them).
One of the ways I keep my skills up is to read every day in my languages, various news sources online: Le Monde, Suddeutsche Zeitung, NTV.ru, and El Pais are on my daily list.
It occurred to me today, while reading yet another kyriarchal paean from one of them, that it'd be really interesting to hook into communities of feminists speaking languages other than English. Quickest way to accomplish something like that, I figure, is ask a Shaker.
So this is me asking: You Shakers who speak/read languages other than English: what's your favourite $LANG_ADJ feminist site? What fauxgressive $LANG_ADJ sites should be avoided, in your opinion? Leave your links below.
And please don't worry, those who come here to post from off-site feminist places whose native language isn't English: since I'm proposing to unleash a small horde of second-language learners on your sites, please don't fear that your (if it is!) imperfect English will be unwelcome here. If you need or want to post in a non-English language, let us worry about finding a translator - I'm explicitly inviting comments in not-English.
What's "teaspoon" in Arabic, anyway? Anyone know? :)
Hudson Taylor, Ally
Shaker BrianWS emails:
How awesome is this?! Offered with no comment besides that. Oh, and a blub or seven.I've got nothing to add. Just go read.
"My eyes are just a little sweaty today."
Jack's not crying.
[Paraphrase: Scenes of Jack from Lost, totes crying plentiful jears, set to the Flight of the Conchords' "I'm Not Crying," the lyrics for which can be found here.]
Thanks to Shaker alabee for passing that along under the subject line "FOTC + Jears: Need I say more?", and also aptly noting that, aside from being funny, "It's also a pretty awesome dissection of rigid conceptions of what's properly 'masculine'."
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
A Different Way to Feel the Homomentum
I don't ordinarily do much about Valentine's Day. Besides being the anniversary of the day my back was damaged (22 years now - half my life ago), I've a number of friends who are single but don't want to be, and who find the day really unpleasant and painful as a result, with its strong emphasis on dyadic happiness.
But this year, one of my partners (a woman) happened to be in town (I have two long-distance relationships at the moment - we're all polyamourous, no "cheating" involved) on V-Day, so we went out for dinner, to a local steakhouse we like reasonably well.
It's a fairly ordinary steakhouse/sports bar, lots of TVs tuned to various mercenary companies playing sundry forms of "put the MacGuffin in the scorehole more often than the other bunch does"*.
Anyway, we went, and were seated, and were handed the V-Day special menu, from which we ordered - it was a thing where you could get various dishes "for two", as it were, served on a main plate with the intent of sharing it.
In the background, the TVs blared eight different McGuffin-moving-matches at once, and faintly, if you listened carefully, you could hear a succession of bland pop songs under it all.
Just after we ordered, a song came on: I Kissed A Girl, I don't know which version, but it made me smile.
And then recognize what this was: we were, very evidently to anyone, on a date, two women in a sports bar, effectively, having a romantic dinner like any hetero couple might. And were served off the "couples" menu, while listening to a pop song(!) in which a woman loudly proclaimed how much she'd enjoyed her moment in the lesbo sun.
My mind went back, to many dinners with many dates, over the years, and how it used to be we would travel to Toronto to have such a romantic dinner so we could have it on Church Street and not have to worry, being surrounded by other queer and/or queer-friendly folk - rather than face dirty looks and slurs, poor service, and all kinds of "you're not welcome here, dirty queers" responses, that generally stopped short of anything you could report to the Human Rights Tribunal.
That is what the homomentum does for me. It means I no longer have to drive a two hundred kilometre (hundred and twenty mile) round trip to have a date. It means popular media include me, and people like me, at least a little. It means matter-of-factly handing the "couples" menu to any group of people as wants it. It means relationships that look like mine don't make heads turn.
It isn't about special rights. It's not about having a lifestyle. It's about having a life, like anyone else's: to be able to go out for a nice evening together, and to be free of harrassment, opprobrium, and not occasionally physical danger.
So maybe we don't all need same-sex marriage, even the queer folk. But even if you personally don't need it, its existence is yet another piece of making it so being queer isn't...well, queer. It's another tiny piece of making us part of "normal".
And on that level, every single jurisdiction, no matter how small or remote, adds another teaspoonful to that big sack of homomentum.
Thanks, Maryland. And all the others.
* And geez, what do you think Freud would have to say about that? Group after group of large, physically masculine men, gathering in groups which they prefer not to include women, to symbolically stick their McGuffin in the scorehole as often as possible. Getting any sense of metaphor here?
Feel the Homomentum!
Woot! Maryland to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other places:
Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler (D) declared Wednesday that Maryland will recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere and that its agencies should immediately begin affording gay married couples the same rights as heterosexual ones.I really love his matter-of-factness about it. While opponents are going apoplectic, Gansler just gives a straightforward soundbite about it, casually underlining that equality isn't a radical notion.
With Gansler's decision, Maryland in effect joins [Washington D.C.] and a handful of states including New York that recognize same-sex marriages performed in four New England states and Iowa. [D.C.] also has its own measure legalizing those unions that is expected to take effect next week.
Gansler, a supporter of legalizing same-sex marriages, was asserting his authority as the top legal adviser to state agencies to answer a question that experts say had been left unclear by Maryland law. He was responding to a legislator's request that he issue an opinion.
The attorney general's opinion unleashed a torrent of emotions from both gay rights advocates and those opposed to same-sex marriage, adding a potentially explosive issue to election-year politics in Maryland. It is likely to be quickly challenged in court, Gansler acknowledged.
...In a news conference, Gansler went beyond the written opinion, saying his writing should dictate how state agencies respond when same-sex couples from elsewhere request benefits and legal protections.
"It's not that foreign of a concept. I mean, it's just people. It's just like any other heterosexual couples," Gansler said. "However a heterosexual couple is treated that was validly married in Maryland or elsewhere, [a same-sex couple] will be treated like that here in Maryland, unless and until a court or the legislature decides differently."
(Or shouldn't be.)
Del. Heather R. Mizeur (D-Montgomery), an openly gay delegate ... was joined at the [celebratory news conference Wednesday afternoon] by her spouse, Deborah.Blub.
The couple held a marriage celebration in Maryland in 2005 and was legally married in California in 2008. At the news conference, Mizeur held up a copy of their marriage certificate.
"The [attorney general's] opinion says my state can and should recognize my marriage," Mizeur said.
This will see a court challenge, and opposition will be fierce and obnoxious and rude and unfair and hateful, but it also has the potential to move Maryland one step closer to legalizing same-sex marriage.
Captain America
So I'm reading about how Marvel is doing "screen tests this week in its search for the actor to play Steve Rogers, the alter ego of the title character in its 'Captain America' movie," and I notice that the list of contenders—John Krasinski, Michael Cassidy, Patrick Flueger, Scott Porter, Mike Vogel, and Chace Crawford—has the same problem as Details' "Next Generation of Hollywood's Leading Men" gallery I mentioned the other day.
Now, I know that Captain America is a white dude in the comic and all, and I remember that it was fucking heresy to suggest that Star Trek's Captain Pike be recast as a woman, but I stand by my contention that a belief in the inherent equality of people renders absurd any argument that a privileged character must retain the characteristics of privilege to prevent undermining a character's heroic nature.
Which is a fancy way of saying that I don't believe Captain America has to be white. Or straight. Or even a dude.
(As an aside, I'm unthrilled with a female counterpart named American Dream. Heroines are treated as sexualized fantasy objects enough without having "Dream" right in their names.)
The questions up for discussion, thus, are: Who would you cast as Captain America? And why?
I'm giving my vote to Rosario Dawson. She hails from NYC, which is a quintessentially American town, she's a philanthropist, she's a feminist, and she's Puerto Rican, Afro-Cuban, Native American, and Irish, which is exactly the sort of melting pot make-up I would expect an anthropomorphized America to have.
Sigh
Obama Defends His Policies to CEOs:
President Obama rejected assertions on Wednesday that his domestic program amounted to big-government socialism."Seriously, dudez," he added. "I'm only acting even marginally like a Democrat because I have to."
Speaking to a group of corporate leaders, he defended his spending, tax and regulatory initiatives as the natural response to a historic economic crisis.
Declaring himself an "ardent believer in the free market," Mr. Obama challenged a line of criticism that has fueled discontent with his presidency. The policies of his first year in office, he said, "were about saving the economy from collapse, not about expanding government's reach into the economy."
Healthcare Open Thread
The Big Bipartisan Healthcare Summit is today (currently streaming on C-SPAN), and there's a lot riding on it. Here's some of this morning's recommended reading:
Michael Tomasky: The Healthcare Summit Stakes
McClatchy: Big Stakes for All as Obama, Lawmakers Talk Health Care
USA Today: Poll: Expectations Low on Health Summit
Gallup: Americans Tilt Against Democrats' Plans if Summit Fails
New York Times: Preparing for Health Debate, and Its TV Audience
WaPo: A Viewer's Guide to the Health-Care Summit
Ezra Klein: There's No Plan B for Health-Care Reform
WaPo: Obama May Compromise on Consumer Agency to Pass Financial Regulation
Discuss.
In Which I Substitute an Email Conversation with Liss for an Actual Post
Liss: What. the. Fucking. Fuck.
Deeky: No.
Deeky: Seriously. This story is a hoax, right? As is this line: "The pair has Walter the Farting Dog in development at Fox, with the Jonas Brothers starring." There is no way this could be happening. No. It can't be.
Liss: I'm just... WHUT? There is no way that anyone thinks this is a good idea.
Deeky: George Lopez thinks the big fat paycheck he's getting is a good idea.
Liss: What a total jerk. And I don't know why I'm under the totally absurd impression that people in Hollywood would consider this a BAD idea, considering the existence of the multi-part Shrek franchise, the central character of which is literally just a collection of nasty Scottish stereotypes. Still. They don't even play Speedy Gonzales cartoons anymore because they're FUCKING OFFENSIVE. Still. Jeff "Jose Jalapeno" Dunham has his own show on Comedy Central. Still. Christ.
Deeky: Also in development: Beaners: The Motion Picture, Wetback: The Musical, and the dramedy Lazy Mexicans.
Liss: And the new Baz Lurhman musical, Picante Immigrante.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker artem1s: If you could bring one person forward in time and show them how they affected the world, who would that be and why? Sort of a George Bailey moment.
