My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult: "Sex On Wheelz"
Responsible Adults
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) offered the Republican response to President Obama's weekly address and, per Steve Benen, informed America that if we elect Republicans in November, they would offer "responsible, adult leadership."
And ponies. Everyone will get a pony.
Since the election of Barack Obama, we have seen responsible adults offer us death panels, Armageddon, outbursts on the floor of the House during a presidential address, egging on protesters from the floor of the House, a promise by a Senator to "break" the president, expressions of hope that the president would fail, threats of filibusters of Supreme Court nominees before their names have been submitted to the Senate, tantrums of legendary dimensions, blockage of a bill to extend unemployment benefits because it was cutting into watching a basketball game, and deliberate misinterpretation of a bill in order to claim that it contains the exact opposite of what is written. The list goes on and on; feel free to add your own. Meanwhile, can you name any legislative proposals such as economic recovery, healthcare, immigration reform, or anything else that was proposed by the Obama administration that didn't get instant GOP opposition based solely on its origin rather than its merit? And can you name any GOP legislative proposals, such as their 2009 budget proposal without any numbers in it, that passed the laugh test?
So these are the responsible adults they're promising, huh? I can't wait.
Crossposted.
Today in Our Liberal Media
Thomas Mitchell, editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, pens an editorial titled "Time to repeal the 19th Amendment?"—a header whose question mark is superfluous since it's flat-out advocacy for repealing women's suffrage on the basis that "Men are consistent. Women are fickle and biased." and ended on the single word "Repeal."
He then writes a follow-up piece in which he claims the first piece was "bait" to prove that we live in an age of political correctness in which ideas aren't based on merit:
Just as I had anticipated, and in fact spelled out in a veiled reference in the second paragraph, my posting was judged by almost every commenter and e-mailer, not on any merits or demerits of facts in evidence or syllogism used, but on the basis of my age, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, disability, weight, sartorial choices, facial hair, writing ability, mental capacity, sobriety, sanity, political leanings and perversity — the very appellations the politically correct find so jaw-droppingly offensive.People—women—have died in this country to get the right to vote. Most among us have mothers and grandmothers who were born without the legal right to vote; some of us have parents or grandparents who stood on a line in the south facing cops and dogs and firehoses to fight for full enfranchisement. If I had been born only 54 years earlier, I would have been born without the legal right to vote.
...Without once addressing the fundamental postulate that men and women are delightfully different, I was called an idiot, an (expletive deleted) moron, an ignorant redneck male chauvinist, a racist, a sexist, a narrow minded and crude douchebag, unsophisticated, ignorant, a flat earther, a fool, a Neanderthal and a misogynist.
Advocating to repeal women's right to vote because "women are fickle and biased" is not a way of saying "men and women are delightfully different." It's a serious threat to women's autonomy and (ostensible) equality.
I'm quite obviously not condoning the behavior of people who responded to Mitchell with ad hominem attacks, but this guy said something deliberately provocative, and now he's tsk-tsking at people who were provoked—and arguing with a straight fucking face that people should have ignored the substance of his wildly offensive proposal in order to engage his "fundamental postulate that men and women are delightfully different."
All of which wouldn't matter except, as my friend Steve says, "Remember, this guy runs a major newspaper. The mind reels."
Indeed it does.
The Virtual Pub Is Open
[Explanations: lol your fat. pathetic anger bread. hey your gay.]
TFIF, Shakers!
Belly up to the bar,
and name your poison!
Dobbs 2012!
Former CNN talking head and current douchebag Lou Dobbs confirmed in an interview with GQ he's considering a run for the White House. When pressed by the interviewer to confirm his presidential aspiration, Dobbs responded "If you say so." WTF? Okay, maybe he's just running for student council. I'm not sure what party Dobbs is going to attach himself to. Maybe he'll form a new We-Hate-Mexicans Party. Or maybe he'll just run on the GOP ticket.
Goldman Sachs Sued for Securities Fraud by SEC
Goldman Sachs, which emerged relatively unscathed from the financial crisis, was accused of securities fraud in a civil suit filed Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which claims the bank created and sold a mortgage investment that was secretly devised to fail.The assertion that the accusations are "completely unfounded in law and fact" is hilarious. As Matt Yglesias points out: "The general form of this complaint, that it was wrong for Goldman to make money by betting on the failure of debt-vehicles that in another context Goldman was marketing, has been around for a while." Being pissed that the SEC believes the law applies to you isn't the same as the case being unfounded in law. Sorry, fellas.
The move marks the first time that regulators have taken action against a Wall Street deal that helped investors capitalize on the collapse of the housing market. Goldman itself profited by betting against the very mortgage investments that it sold to its customers.
The suit also named Fabrice Tourre, a vice president at Goldman who helped create and sell the investment.
In a statement, Goldman called the S.E.C. accusations "completely unfounded in law and fact" and said the firm would "vigorously contest them and defend the firm and its reputation."
Also see: BTD.
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
[Background.]
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.]
Prescriptivism, Classism, Racism: Three Bad Ideas That Go Poorly Together
As many of you already know, I'm a linguist by training and vocation, as well as by avocation: I simply adore language and languages, always have. One of the first things one often hears when mentioning a background in linguistics is something along the lines of, "Don't you just hate it when people say $EXPRESSION? Wouldn't it be great if they had grammar?"
My answer is always, "Well, no, actually, I don't just hate it; I find all forms of my native English delightful in the most literal sense, that is, they delight me. And further, every language and dialect has a grammar. If they didn't, no one would understand anything anyone said, and they do, or they wouldn't be talking that way."
Because, like most linguists, I'm a fairly staunch descriptivist. In small words, what that means is that I believe language is what it is created to be, and that it changes, constantly, and that change in language is neither bad nor good: it simply is. As linguists, it's not our job to tell people what is or is not "good $LANGUAGE_NAME". It's our job to study how and why language is what it is.
This is where it might be useful to define terms a little bit.
A language, for our purposes, is a system of sounds, and rules for how those sounds should be used to convey meaning to another human being. Every single language that isn't specifically created for the hearing-impaired fits this definition.
A written form of a language is a system of marks and the rules for their use, intended to be a representation of the sounds and their rules. Note that these rules for mark-use may be very different from the rules for sound-use: the written form of "running" includes a "g", where the spoken form for many people in ordinary speech involves so such thing. The "i" in the last syllable is almost exclusively rendered as a schwa, a vowel which English uses constantly in unstressed syllables. Not being aware of these differences is a big part of what characterizes the speech of non-native speakers, what we call "foreign accents".
A dialect is a bit of a funny word, in linguistics. There's kind of a hazy point between when a language is splitting into dialects, and when the languages becomes separate, and this point is often defined for non-linguistic reasons. For a good example, see Serbian and Croatian, which share a huge similarity on many levels, but which are adamantly two languages, not dialects of the same one - for reasons historical, ethnic, and all kinds of non-linguistically-important grounds. And whenever we as progressives find ourselves making what should be objective decisions based on political or religious differences, we should see this as a red flag for likely non-progressive behaviour.
A grammar is, basically, the ruleset which tells the speaker how to organize the sounds used in the language so that meaning will be conveyed. Every language has one, by definition. EVERY language. This explicitly includes those "dialects" which are frequently derided, such as what I learned in university to call the "Black English Variant*", that variant which is labeled "talking 'hood", or whatever other it's been slapped with lately.
It's not news to any of you that this dialect of English (BEV) is widely derided as "having no grammar", and as being the speech of uneducated people and/or people living in poverty. It's not impossible that some of you even have held this view.
So, here's my bombshell for many of you: BEV has exactly as much of a grammar as the more "standard"** varieties we see used in the mass media. It is completely regular, has conjugations and infinitives and passives and every other little gem we love in language. It has rules for how to neologize (create new vocabulary), and those rules are well-enough understood that, for instance, new songs performed in it don't need subtitles for native speakers, as they would if the language didn't include those rules.
It does not limit its speakers linguistically (but I don't think I need to tell anyone here how it can limit its speakers socially/in the work sphere/in education/et c., because of prejudice and bigotry); how could a thriving and vibrant community be making movies and music in it if it did?
Being a fully-fledged language/dialect in its own right, it can be easily seen that it is so by the fact that many of its native speakers are able to code-switch into and out of it with as much ease as any child of a bilingual home. As with any bilingual home, there are usually social rules about when code-switching should be done, which I'm sure at least some of our Shakers of colour and/or immigrant Shakers could give us in moments, if they wanted to.
There are strong elements of classism in this too. When was the last time you gave an "Aw, shucks," and poorly imitated the speech mannerisms of people from the US' Appalachian region? When was the last time you laughed at Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel on The Simpsons?
By appropriating their dialect for use as allegedly "comic" fodder, we tell people who are native speakers of that dialect that they are less than we are, that they are inferior, unintelligent...and think for a moment: if you're thinking that kind of thought about a group of people for no other reason than the way they speak - which is quite simply and only a product of absorbing the language as humans do, by listening to the other humans around them - how are you not being a classic walking definition of the word "bigotry"?
When you deride someone else's use of English for its "failure" to adhere to the "standard" variety, it's not they who end up looking ignorant. Consider, next time, asking yourself about some "pet peeve" about a particular variety of English: Did the speaker achieve communication (the goal of language)? Were their goals achieved, in that you were able to understand what they said, their ideas successfully conveyed from their brain to yours? If so, then what grounds have you for complaint?
Remember that what are today dialects, in 200 or 500 or 1000 years, may be wildly divergent languages. That's how languages happen: groups of people, for various social and psychological reasons, alter their language slightly from the "standard", in order to express various identities. Over time, membership in that linguistic group becomes more and more isolated from people speaking the "standard" variety, and eventually, the standard and the variant become mutually unintelligible.
If, say, Nero had been able to successfully force everyone*** never to change language, all of us in the West would be speaking Latin. Not French, Italian, Spanish, or even a good chunk of English: just Latin.
Language changes; dialects exist. Neither of these things are inherently bad. The opprobrium they bear is only that with which our society chooses to freight them.
* My apologies to you all if this is no longer the apt term, and my gratitude in that case if someone can tell me what the most recent name is. Edit: Per several of you (and my thanks!), the accepted current term seems to be "AAVE", for African-American Variety of (or Vernacular?) English.
** And please note, again, that when you're talking about "standard" language, you're normativizing one group's dialect at the expense of another's. And that ain't real progressive.
*** Please note that this has never happened in the history of humanity, despite strong efforts by many, many people.
Nope
There is, perhaps, no more perfect example of the fucked-up ways in which women, womanhood, and female bodies are viewed than at the intersection of the realities of breast cancer and the tone of breast cancer awareness marketing—whether it's the pinkification of everything breast cancer, or the insistence that everything about breast cancer has to be cute and/or sexy and/or funny (see Save the Boobs! Save the TaTas! The Beauty of Breast Cancer Research. Boobleheads!), it's just 87 different shades of obnoxious.
No exception is the increasing trend in getting men "involved" in breast cancer fundraising by reframing breast cancer treatment as a way to save boobs, rather than the lives of the women to whom those boobs are attached.
To wit: The Noreen Frasier Foundation's "Save Some Boobs" campaign, the website for which greets visitors with the tagline "It's a Matter of Life & Breast!" and a welcome video featuring Professional Dudebro Kevin Connolly:
Hi, I'm Kevin Connolly. Please send our pledge to the important woman in your life. You'll help fund groundbreaking women's cancer research—and save some boobs. And who doesn't like boobs?! The Facebook application that Social Vibe designed for the Noreen Fraser Foundation makes it that simple. Because really what is Facebook all about—faces? [laughs] I don't think so. It's about boobs. Ladies go there to show 'em off; guys go there to check 'em out—I mean, really, when you think about it, it should be called Boobbook. So sign in and send the pledge. Every time you do, Social Vibe will make a donation to fund important women's cancer research and you'll help save some boobs. Please do it. It's a matter of life and breast.Well, I won't be giving a donation, but I will dole out 1,000 points for rank sexism, plus bonus rainbow points for naked heterocentrism.
Getting men involved in breast cancer fundraising is a good idea, not just because a lot of men will be the partners, fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, nephews, friends of women with breast cancer, but because men get breast cancer, too.
But surely there's a way to do that without totally alienating feminist/womanist women in the process and more deeply entrenching the divide between the sexes that leaves many women's health concerns (including research into the causes of breast cancer) woefully underfunded.
[H/T to Shaker mschicklet. FYI: The website—at which the video begins playing automatically, so click through with caution if you're at work or in some other space where launching video wouldn't be cool—can be found here, if you're inclined to look at it.]
Daily Kitteh
My oft-mentioned friend, and KBlogz's older brother, Todd and his partner Ken recently adopted three kittens from the same litter. In front: Fizzgig. In the middle: Rufus. In back: Siouxsie Sussudio. Awwwwwwwww!
Federal District Court Rules "National Day of Prayer" Unconstitutional
by Shaker Jadelyn, linguist, witch, feminist, pacifist, progressive, activist, writer, queer, gamer, musician, exile, lover, and superhero, in no particular order.
Last summer, I decided to face one of my fears by taking a public speaking class. The final project for the class was a persuasive speech. I, loving controversy as I do, decided to argue that the National Day of Prayer should be abolished, a position which I took not only for the fun of arguing it to a not-terribly-receptive class, but because I genuinely believed it to be true, and still do.
Well, I got my wish today. A Wisconsin federal district court held yesterday, in a suit brought against the President by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, that the law requiring the President to declare a National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment. The NDoP will still be held this year; the judge added a 30-day stay on his order to allow time for appeals, as is customary, and that extends past the first Thursday in May, so President Obama will still issue the proclamation this year.
But this? Is still a huge step forward for non-believers in America, or those who do not "pray" in the traditional sense of the word, or just those who understand the concept of separating church and state and would like to see it upheld. And it deals a hefty blow to the dominionist types, who are forever arguing that America is a Christian nation, to be told outright that even a non-sectarian and inclusive (for some value of "inclusive", which pointedly does not include atheists or agnostics) Day of Prayer, when mandated by law, is unconstitutional.
Of course, since the right-wing Christians in charge of the National Day of Prayer Task Force were upset over just the scaling-back of Obama's first declarations of the NDoP, from Bush-style prayer breakfasts and public events to a quiet signing and no events at the White House at all, you can bet they are going to flip. their. shit. over a judge declaring the whole thing unconstitutional. The judge, forseeing this, added this explanation to the end of her judgment:I understand that many may disagree with that conclusion and some may even view it as a criticism of prayer or those who pray. That is unfortunate. A determination that the government may not endorse a religious message is not a determination that the message itself is harmful, unimportant or undeserving of dissemination. Rather, it is part of the effort to "carry out the Founders' plan of preserving religious liberty to the fullest extent possible in a pluralistic society." .... The same law that prohibits the government from declaring a National Day of Prayer also prohibits it from declaring a National Day of Blasphemy.
Will this stop the Dobsons and their NDoP Task Force from claiming this as religious persecution? I highly doubt it, but at this moment, I don't care. I just know that I, as an American who does not pray in the way most people mean the word, and who definitely does not recognize some kind of supreme authority-deity that might reasonably be represented by proclamations urging Americans to ask for God's blessing or offer thanks "to God", am grateful that a court has recognized the marginalizing power the National Day of Prayer holds over Americans of non-deistic faith or no faith. We are Americans too, and there is no reason to have a law require the President once a year to insinuate that we're less so because we don't join the rest of the nation in prayer.
It is important to clarify what this decision does not prohibit. Of course, "[n]o law prevents a [citizen] who is so inclined from praying" at any time.... And religious groups remain free to "organize a privately sponsored [prayer event] if they desire the company of likeminded" citizens.... The President too remains free to discuss his own views on prayer.... The only issue decided in this case is that the federal government may not endorse prayer in a statute as it has in §119.
Thank you, Judge Crabb. Thank you for standing by the Founders' true intentions (both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson spoke about the problematic nature of government urging religious expression) instead of the revisionist history that would create America as a nation of faith, and to hell with the rest of us. Thank you for refusing to dismiss the case when the Obama administration asked you to. From the bottom of my godless heart, thank you.
[Cross-posted. Related Reading: On Values and Faith.]
Quote of the Day
"On Lost, most of the answers to the questions we're asked [by reporters] can be categorized in one of two ways: stuff we know and can't talk about and stuff we have no clue about."—Jorge Garcia, who plays Hurley on Lost, in a guest post for People's "TV Watch" blog about the most recent episode of the series.
Friday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, publishers of Olivia Twist McEwan's Couch Potatoing for Dummies.
Recommended Reading:
Victor: Rep. Steve King Physically Grabs Think Progress Blogger When Asked to Account for His Justification of IRS Attack
Marcella: Carnival Against Sexual Violence 92
Cara: The Importance of Consent in Everyday Situations
Fannie: Male Sports Star Accused of Rape Again, Will Not Be Prosecuted
Tigtog: Friday Hoyden: Jane Goodall
Ope: 'Feminists, Womanists' Battle Across Racial Lines
Latoya: Erica Jong Wonders if Oprah is "A Professional Negro"
EastSideKate: Observation
BAC: In Memoriam - Dr. Helen Ranney
Leave your links in comments...
Today in Rape Culture
[Trigger warning.]
Q: When is a rapist not a rapist.
A: According to Australian Supreme Court Justice Dean Mildren: When he's lonely.
CHIEF Minister Paul Henderson said yesterday he did not believe a 13-year-old girl could consent to having sex with her teacher.Rage. Seethe. Boil.
He made the comments after a Supreme Court judge said a teacher was not a rapist "as that word is ordinarily understood" because there was no evidence the sex he had with his student was not consensual.
...Justice Mildren said the teacher was not a "sexual predator" - but had suffered from a "life of loneliness".
What makes Mildren's fuckery even worse is that the teacher started what the article euphemistically describes as a "physical relationship" with his student "after the girl confided to the teacher that she was the victim of a sexual abuse."
So, a vulnerable 13-year-old survivor confides in her teacher, whom she is meant to trust, that she's been sexually assaulted, and he responds by launching a "physical relationship" with her. That is textbook predation. Even if there existed some scenario in which "loneliness" justified an adult man engaging in a "physical relationship" with a 13-year-old girl (note: that scenario does not exist), it still wouldn't be applicable to this guy who is obviously a sexual predator.
It really, really disturbs me how many men can more easily sympathize with male rapists than their female victims, how many men will twist themselves into all manner of logical contortions to make defenses and excuses and explanations for even admitted rapists, to the point of claiming they're not really rapists at all.
The "physical relationship" lasted four months. Mildren sentenced the teacher to two years.
[H/T to Lauredhel, by email.]
Sure, This Makes Sense
Totally legal, totally ethical, totally appropriate. Nothing to see here:
Porter J. Goss, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in 2005 approved of the decision by one of his top aides to destroy dozens of videotapes documenting the brutal interrogation of two detainees, according to an internal C.I.A. document released Thursday.Destroying the tapes and then concealing the destruction, only to be caught later, makes you look awesome, though.
Shortly after the tapes were destroyed at the order of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.'s clandestine service, Mr. Goss told Mr. Rodriguez that he "agreed" with the decision, according to the document. He even joked after Mr. Rodriguez offered to "take the heat" for destroying the tapes.
"PG laughed and said that actually, it would be he, PG, who would take the heat," according to one document, an internal C.I.A. e-mail message.
...It was previously known that Mr. Goss had been told by his aides in November 2005 that the tapes had been destroyed. But a number of documents released Thursday provide the most detailed glimpse yet of the deliberations inside the C.I.A. surrounding the destroyed tapes, and of the concern among officials at the spy agency that the decision might put the C.I.A. in legal jeopardy.
...According to one of the e-mail messages released Thursday, Mr. Rodriguez told Mr. Goss that the tapes, taken out of context, would make the C.I.A. "look terrible; it would be devastating to us."
Is it really too late to just round up every single member of the Bush administration and throw them in a Halliburton-built jail...?
Feel the Homomentum!
Obama extends hospital visitation rights to same-sex couples:
President Obama mandated Thursday that nearly all hospitals extend visitation rights to the partners of gay men and lesbians and respect patients' choices about who may make critical health-care decisions for them, perhaps the most significant step so far in his efforts to expand the rights of gay Americans.Um...wow. Okay. Granted, I'd prefer that he just issue an executive order extending marriage rights to same-sex couples, but federally-mandated visitation rights is a very, very important interim mandate.
The president directed the Department of Health and Human Services to prohibit discrimination in hospital visitation in a memo that was e-mailed to reporters Thursday night while he was at a fundraiser in Miami.
Administration officials and gay activists, who have been quietly working together on the issue, said the new rule will affect any hospital that receives Medicare or Medicaid funding, a move that covers the vast majority of the nation's health-care institutions. Obama's order will start a rule-making process at HHS that could take several months, officials said.
My one concern is whether this is going to cause the huge network of Catholic hospitals (or any of the smaller religiously-affiliated hospitals, many of whom already have ridiculous policies like denying emergency contraception to rape survivors) to stop accepting Medicare/Medicaid. Because that, of course, would be bad for everyone, including same-sex couples, dependent on Medicare/Medicaid in small communities where such a hospital is the only option.
It seems the administration may have considered that possibility and thus also included this provision: "[The new rules] also will affect widows and widowers who have been unable to receive visits from a friend or companion. And they would allow members of some religious orders to designate someone other than a family member to make medical decisions." ("Some religious orders"? No clue.)
Naturally, it wouldn't be an article in the mainstream media without a sop to "the other side," so the fuckos from the the Family Research Council were called in to comment.
But opponents of same-sex marriage have called the visitation issue a red herring, arguing that advocates want to provide special rights for gays that other Americans do not have.AAARRRGGGHHH!!! YOU DO NOT GET TO ARGUE "SPECIAL RIGHTS" WHEN THIS IS A SECOND-BEST OPTION GIVEN TO PEOPLE DENIED BASIC RIGHTS!!! JUST SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!
Ahem. Sorry. You were saying, asshole...
"In its current political context, President Obama's memorandum clearly constitutes pandering to a radical special interest group," said Peter S. Sprigg, a senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council. He said that his organization does not object to gays giving their partners power of attorney but that it questions Obama's motives.Radical gay blah blah. Undermines sanctity of yadda yadda. Snooze. These people don't need "senior fellows." They just need a tape recorder with their tired-ass comments from 1982.
"The memorandum undermines the definition of marriage," he said.
Jackasses.
