A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.
Regardless of whether Brooks is correct about the egalitarian nature of the 'net (hint: he's not, see also: Liss moments ago), the important thing to note is that Brooks is arguing that this is a bad thing.
I don't advocate playing by Mr. Brooks' rules, but if you'll indulge me: Mr. Brooks, I, and not you, have completed a Ph.D., and suggest that you should defer to me. Do STFU. On a similar note, Dr. Paul Krugman is still a Noble laureate.
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*Look at me, I'm on the internet* intentionally not capitalizing words that the American Heritage Dictionary says I should. Anarchy, wheeeeeee! Run for the hills!
[TW for stalking/violation of privacy. Original post here. Related discussion thread here.]
Blizzard's decision to implement the RealID system in their public forums, making it impossible to comment in a public forum without your real name being viewable, continues to be met with serious objections, particularly from marginalized populations—especially women, who are disproportionately victimized by stalking and harassment in online communities. This epic comment in a MetaFilter thread on the decision (h/t to Shaker SImon) is a great read on that subject.
Shaker Catulla emails a heads-up about this post over at the WoW Ladies community on LiveJournal, the author of which will be reading every comment and has the ability to, and promises to, bring the concerns of the WoW community directly to those who have access to Blizzard company execs. Catulla notes there's also a post on her personal journal here, as posting in WoW Ladies is moderated for members-only.
The Bill will now be sent to President Mary McAleese for approval. The President can sign it into law or refer it to the Supreme Court after consultation with the Council of State, if she has concerns about its Constitutionality.
McAleese is expected to sign the legislation.
The bill will extends benefits to gay and lesbian couples "in the areas of property, social welfare, succession, maintenance, pensions and tax."
The first civil registrations are expected to take place January 1st.
Oh, excuse me. There has been a verdict in the Oscar Grant involuntary manslaughter case.
Rage. Seethe. Boil.
In case the name Oscar Grant is unfamiliar to you, he was the victim of a police shooting in the Bay Area, sometimes known as the BART shooting. The shooter, former officer Johannes Mehserle, was arrested on suspicion of murder, which was a reasonable charge to anyone with an internet access and a functional sense of decency. Kevin has video of the incident here, to which I direct you with a strong trigger warning. It is very upsetting to watch.
In the subsequent trial, the jury could have found Mehserle guilty of second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, or involuntary manslaughter. After six and a half hours of deliberation, they convicted him of the least serious charge.
A jury found former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle guilty Thursday of involuntary manslaughter, concluding that he did not intend to kill train rider Oscar Grant when he shot him in the back on New Year's Day 2009 but acted so recklessly that he showed a disregard for Grant's life.
...The jury also found that Mehserle, 28, had used a gun during the crime. In all, he could be sentenced to five to 14 years in prison.
The jury took 6 1/2 hours over two days to decide that Mehserle was guilty of a crime, but not guilty of the other options it had been given - second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter.
Their verdict suggests they believed Mehserle when he testified that he had mistaken his pistol for his Taser as he sought to subdue the 22-year-old Grant at Fruitvale Station in Oakland following a fight on a BART train, a shooting that was captured on video by five other riders as well as a platform camera.
The whole taser-gun switcheroo is on what the verdict rests. It was Mehserle's contention that he had accidentally pulled out his gun (located on his right hip) instead of his taser (located on his left hip) and fired a round into Oscar Grant before realizing he'd "grabbed the wrong weapon."
Which, in my estimation, is all a red herring even irrespective of its alleged veracity (which is a whole other issue). The fact is, Mehserle could not have justifiably used his taser in that situation, either. Grant clearly hadn't come close to resisting, and thus Mehserle's intent was to hurt him, plain and simple. That he hurt him until he was dead doesn't make it involuntary. Fuck.
This is just rage-makingly heartbreaking.
Eastsidekate and I were just talking about this by email, and she noted (which I'm including with her permission:
What's really bothering me is captured in this awful, condescending editorial from the San Jose Mercury News. They've obviously learned nothing.
The thought running over-and-over in my mind at 3 am last night was that there will undoubtedly be calls for communities to come together and have dialogue and fix things together, which is bullshit, because the Grant family and communities of color don't have the power to end racism or convince people that there's a reason not to trust all law enforcement personnel at all times (in that, yes, there are in fact some bad cops). Also the whole police not murdering people thing isn't going to be solved by dialogue, but rather by police not murdering people.
Indeed so.
And yet another round of "you don't even KNOW what it's like to be a police officer!" is already in full swing—a reliable bit of apologia from privileged people (who would never find themselves in Oscar Grant's position), behind which the police are willing to stand every single time something like this happens.
It's true; I don't know what it's like to be a police officer. But I am the granddaughter of an NYPD cop who retired from a lifetime career working in New York City without ever having discharged his weapon or hurt a suspect in his charge. My grandfather was a small man, 5'8" and slender, not a cop who muscled suspects. He just did the job without fear or entitlement, and he did it without the expectation that he could do whatever the fuck he wanted and be protected by his badge.
I daresay if I had asked him while he was still alive if he'd have used a weapon (any weapon) against a young man detained for a fight on a train, even if there was a chance that not using the weapon might mean he got away (which are not the facts of the Oscar Grant case, but let's pretend), my granddad would have told me that letting go a kid who got into a scuffle on the train was an okay exchange for not killing him.
Because protecting the life of any suspect in a minor crime has to be more important than detaining hir at any cost. Anything else is an unreasonable priority in a healthy community.
And I don't need to know what it's like to be a police officer to know that.
My condolences, again, to Oscar Grant's family and friends. I'm so sorry for your loss. I'm so sorry that real justice eluded you.
[Related Reading: luthersrock's got two posts on the media coverage of the verdict, here and here.]
Tickets for the North American leg of the Scissor Sisters' Night Work tour go on sale today. Here are the dates:
August 21, Buckhead Theatre, Atlanta, GA August 23, Dar Constitution Hall, Washington, DC August 24, Terminal 5, New York, NY August 27, The Electric Factory, Philadelphia, PA August 28, House of Blues, Boston, MA August 29, Metropolis, Montreal, QC August 31, Sound Academy, Toronto, ON September 2, Riviera Theatre, Chicago, IL September 3, The Rave, Milwaukee, WI September 4, Epic, Minneapolis, MN September 6, Ogden Theatre, Denver, CO September 10, Pearl Concert Theater, Las Vegas, NV September 11, Hollywood Palladium, Hollywood, CA September 12, Fox Theater, Oakland, CA September 14, Roseland Theater, Portland, OR September 15, Showbox SoDo, Seattle, WA September 16, Malkin Bowl, Vancouver, BC
Suggested by Deeky (who's too fuckin' lazy to post it himself): What's your favorite song to have sex to?
Mine is "Moving," by Suede. I like the ebb and flow, the crescendos. It's a song that feels like sex to me—at least a certain kind of sex (and one I happen to like).
I have it on good authority that Deeky's favorite song to fuck to is Bryan Adams' "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You," not just because he enjoys the tender humping, but because parenthetical song titles make him horny.
You may recall that Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle recently explained she holds the position that abortion should be illegal even even in cases of rape and/or incest because "God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives."
Given the opportunity by a conservative radio show to, well, presumably backpedal from the assertion that God subcontracts rapists to facilitate parts of his "plan," Angle instead doubled-down:
Question: What do you say then to a young girl...when a young girl is raped by her father, let's say, and she is pregnant. How do you explain this to her in terms of wanting her to go through the process of having the baby?
Angle: I think that two wrongs don't make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at-risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade.
Being raped and impregnated by your father = Lemon.
Carrying that pregnancy to term and birthing your own half-sibling at age 15 = Lemonade.
A U.S. judge in Boston has ruled that a federal gay marriage ban is unconstitutional because it interferes with the right of a state to define marriage.
U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro on Thursday ruled in favor of gay couples' rights in two separate challenges to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.
The state had argued the law denied benefits such as Medicaid to gay married couples in Massachusetts, where same-sex unions have been legal since 2004.
Tauro agreed, and said the act forces Massachusetts to discriminate against its own citizens.
The Justice Department argued the federal government has the right to set eligibility requirements for federal benefits -- including requiring that those benefits only go to couples in marriages between a man and a woman.
For those of us who have been wondering when this would become breathtakingly obvious to the court, it is a long-awaited ruling (PDF). The court ruled against DOMA based on violations of the Fifth and Tenth Amendments; that it violated equal protection as embodied in the Fifth, and overrode the rights of the states to establish their own laws.
The right wing will go into paroxysms of all kinds of batshittery, screaming about "activist judges," and, to be sure, this ruling will be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, probably getting there at the same time as Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case being decided in California on Prop 8.
As Melissa said in an e-mail, "Awesome. I can't believe it took this long to find a court to come the ridiculously obvious conclusion that it forces states to discriminate against their own citizens, even when they don't want to."
Those were the words in my head as I watched this film, by Isao Hashimoto, on the history of nuclear testing, from 1945-1998 (SFW, if work is okay with extensive beeping; can be viewed without sound effectively). Purposely displayed completely without language (to be comprehensible as visual art without regard to audience language), the film takes a one-second-per-month look at a world map, as flashes of various sizes denote nuclear tests between the abovementioned years. Counters with flags above and below the map show the countries which have performed each test and a running count, while the map flashes are colour-coded (and tone-coded) to show the testing nation. The tones build to an almost melodic level, which is chilling when it occurs what's being represented.
I'm 44, or nearly. In my lifetime, there have been over 1200 nuclear tests, more than half of those by one country: the United States.
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 (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
"In a counter-insurgency campaign, the people are the prize."—UK Defence Minister Liam Fox, explaining the decision to send 300 additional troops to Afghanistan.
See also: the US Army's Combined Arms Center's blog, and U.S. Marine Corps Brigadier General Lawrence Nicholson.
I had a gay best friend in high school. We are still friends now and I still LHLAS.
We became friends when I was a girl of 15, and he was a closeted gay boy of 14, a friendship formed in the discovery that we shared a peculiar and ironic sense of humor, back in the age of the dinosaurs when irony wasn't cool and was damning evidence of vulnerability, rather than an advertisement of indifference. There only needed to be one other person in a school of 3,000 who knew down to his bones what I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar really means to make the world perfect, and I found him, or he found me, and so it was.
Todd and I were two peas in a pod, attached at the hip, like-minded misfits in mail-order t-shirts and Doc Martens, whose collective nirvana was making light-headed pilgrimages to Wax Trax records to browse their dusty bins for long-awaited releases or rare bootlegs, shuffling among the other angsty shoegazers there for the same purpose. We dyed our hair and graffitied our leather jackets with images of the deities—The Smiths, The Cure, Siouxsie. Our tribe. We staked out our place among them and locked arms.
We've now known and loved each other longer than we lived on this earth without our friendship—and we have been there fast and hard for each other through difficult things that lesser friendships would not have weathered. He came out; I was raped; we have both fallen in and out of love, sometimes in spectacularly heartbreaking fashion, including with one another; and we have seen each other in both good times and bad as our worst and best selves.
Our intertwined lives have left me with indelible memories of all the things we've done as a duo—writing an underground paper, writing a shitty screenplay, writing shitty songs, making silly movies, going to university together, living together, working together, vacationing together, attending innumerable concerts together, celebrating our 9-days-apart birthdays, marching in Pride parades, seeing thousands of films, eating thousands of meals, getting drunk, doing drugs, hanging out, wasting time, shopping, swimming, singing along to The Smiths at the top of our lungs, spending nights talking 'til dawn, laughing until we are gasping for air and swearing we shall never recover.
It would be a lie to say that Todd's being gay didn't matter to me; it always mattered, primarily insomuch as anyone who dared to treat him as less than because of it was clobbered with the blunt end of my ire. And we may, in an indirect way, have become friends because he is gay, which gives him a particular perspective on the world that informs many of the things I like about him, and trust about him.
But I did not collect him like a trading card. And I was not friends with him because friendships with women are somehow more difficult. I am still friends with my female BFF, who I've known since we were 11, too.
That you would even pose the question "Is a GBF (Gay Best Friend) the New Must-Have Accessory for Teen Girls?" appalls me. That you would insert an editor's note trying to justify such unmitigated horseshit by asserting "Friendships with other girls—even the healthiest and most supportive of relationships—are always a teeny bit complicated" fills me with contempt.
And the truth is, if my friendship with Todd hadn't had some "teeny complications" over the course of two decades, I don't guess it would have been much of a friendship.
Rape culture is prioritizing the protection of footage of two daughters being sexually assaulted by their father over their desire to have the footage returned to them or destroyed, because that father was an artist and his sexually assaulting them on film is thus "art."
Rape culture is also describing that artist's sexual activity with a 15-year-old girl as an "affair."
[Trigger Warning: The following video contains testimony describing the damage to the homes of fishers in the Gulf, illnesses of the residents, including children, and damage to the gulf as seen from a personal boat. The woman speaking in the video also uses a very objectionable term to describe herself and her ethnicity, which is Cajun. While this is a local term to Southern Louisiana near the Texas border, it is a highly objectionable one with an associated history of racial violence. I am aware of the term and in no way whatsoever do I wish to condone its use.]
[The video is subtitled, but if you cannot view the video, here is a paraphrase by Liss of its content: Kindra Arnesen, a woman who lives on the Gulf—and was, after speaking out at a townhall meeting, given security clearance and thus access to BP's coordination meetings, clean-up efforts, and meetings with safety officers—gives a speech about what she has observed. 1. BP is using a "ponies and balloons" strategy, deploying all assets to hardest-hit areas when officials visit, and then dispersing people once the official is gone, satisfied the clean-up is all-hands-on-deck, all the time. 2. No one is wearing a respirator to clean, because BP refuses to let anyone wear a respirator for clean-up until they've had training, but are claiming that OSHA and the EPA say that the air is fine, so the training isn't necessary. 3. Seven men were taken for medical treatment, one by helicopter and six by ambulance; she inquired what was wrong and was first told it was food poisoning, then told heat exhaustion, and was then told by OSHA that the boats the men had been on were sprayed with Pine Sol, and the men had breathed in Pine Sol fumes and had chemical poisoning from that. 4. Her children have broken out in rashes; her daughter has upper respiratory problems. She and other residents are being told there are "bad air days," during which they should close up their houses and put the air conditioning on recirculation, but "everything's fine." 5. There's a media blackout on the significant and extensive environmental damage.]
Yesterday afternoon, a friend of mine posted this video to her facebook account. I've been paying attention to this issue for two reasons: first, I plan on using it as a staple issue in next semester's 101 courses. And second, because I'm from South Louisiana.
The people I know in my Mawmaw's (grandmother's) town have a cynical, pessimistic view of politics and history. Often with good reason—my grandmother's town contains an Olin Petrochemical processing plant, a CITGO processing plant, Lyondell Chemicals, American International Refinery Co and a Conoco processing plant and drilling operation.
We grew up with the ever-present waste torches staining the clouds orange, the air thick and faintly sulfurous. With the torches came stories of people who fell in, people who lost hands or feet, people covered in chemical burns or with cancer, or whose kids were sick. But my relatives, like many of the people I knew, were fanatically loyal to the companies which paid them, for fear of losing one of the only jobs with regular raises in town.
Even before Katrina and Rita, the prevailing attitude is best summed up by a political cartoon I saw as a teenager, featuring a man in a nightshirt, labeled 'voter,' standing between two beds filled with gators.
The gators, of course, were labeled after the two then-current gubernatorial candidates.
I asked my Mawmaw how she felt about it, and with a very French Cajun shrug, or at least one typical to my experience of them, she said that this was just as it was. I'm not going to even try to capture her liquid, rolling accent.
And the uncles and aunts agreed: That's life. It just goes on without you.
Even after being evacuated to Alabama just before Katrina, and finding out she had lost the house my Pawpaw build for her, the same sort of stoicism governed my Mawmaw's responses. She told us not to make a big deal out of it, just a hurricane and some water. They could always rebuild.
Perhaps because I have a soft, gooey center, visiting the family always bothered me: The environment made by those plants was killing them by inches, but nothing ever seemed to be done about it. They were determined not to complain, or too afraid to be retaliated against. And, since your family worked at the plants, the retaliation was never isolated to you. Your whole family could lose their job.
This video was a little more shocking to me because I know that the people I know in Southern Louisiana do not complain. They shrug off injuries, make do with a steadily more poisonous environment, keep trying to go on as things fall apart. They weather illnesses and deaths with the same sort of refusal to admit that it troubles them, holding out that last concession of defeat because in the end, they have their pride.
And, increasingly, not much else.
As Kindra Arnesen talks about her children in this video, their mysterious rashes and trouble breathing, I find myself picturing the people I know, and how hard it would be to say something, even with your children. The long term health gamble is more feasible than watching your children go without.
What Arnesen has to say is damning, as if there were ever any doubt.
"Ponies and balloons," a phrase she overhears from BP officials, discussing the visit of inspectors—ponies and balloons like a circus has come to town, a show for the people who trek out to those small, forgotten places in rural Louisiana, to tour the destruction. The local fishers, who are quite typically poor and working class, are asked to participate in the circus for a paycheck.
Their livelihoods are gone, as Arnesen points out.
Where, she says, where can I go? Point me where I can go to get back to work.
The fishers get to be a part of this macabre show, which happens until the inspectors leave. But, and I suppose this comes as no surprise, only on BP's terms.
For those of you who do not know, to this date, nine fishermen have been hospitalized for working on the crude oil clotting the beaches and marshes of Louisiana without respirators or safety equipment. Arnesen addresses this: She was told first that they all had food poisoning. Then that they had heat stroke, and finally that they had covered their boats in Pinesol and then, inexplicably, sat in the fumes all day.
The fishermen aren't talking. Clint Guidry, the President of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, told Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales of Democracy Now that the workers feared to lose the only paycheck they were getting.
Guidry, like Arnesen, confirms that BP would not allow the fishermen to use respirators. According to the discussion during Guidry's interview, the transcript for which is here, it is to prevent lawsuits over safety. To allow use of the respirators is to admit the severity of the problem. During Arnesen's testimony, she states that she was told the EPA found the air fine, and that until the EPA certifies it, there is no need for BP to provide and train the fishermen on how to use the respirators. They cannot use their own; according to BP, it creates liability.
Are we expendable, she asks. Are the people I care for expendable?
And that is the million dollar question: When all there is to measure value is profit, is there any value to people?
I love Louisiana, and I miss it sometimes, but I grew up seeing the answer to that. It was in the plodding death of inheriting your parents' jobs, when they die of cancer. And in the brown night sky, and the howl of chemical spill sirens telling you to stay indoors, in your house, the way Arnesen was told to just stay indoors on 'bad air days.'
I think we are all seeing the answer to that question, over and over and over again, in the news. And, like Arnesen, I think many of us are blazing pissed when we aren't feeling hopeless at the enormity of the problem.
Arnesen ends the video asking where people are. Where, she asks, is the government as the crude surrounds her house on three sides? Where is the government when she has to send her children away because they are falling ill?
There is no simple answer to that question, because it is as enormous now as it was after Katrina. The best I can come up with is to go about my day looking for those ways, small and large, to teach, live, support and constantly remind the people around me that we are actually in it together. And it, that complex mass of society, environmental policy and technology, is not working for most of us. For all the people saying it's not that bad, and that not all the seafood is ruined, and all the other ways in which the problem is made to seem not as serious, thanks to the internet and the possibility of citizen journalists, we get these kinds of guerrilla videos popping up, as people who are sick of it try to get the truth out and mobilize people.
This video and the ongoing reports on the subject make me all the more determined to do what I can to fix it. Those things are many. I can write my senators about this video, I can talk to people about this video, I can lobby in groups in front of my government buildings and express my disgust with the collusion of regulatory agencies and BP in an environmental disaster which is, as we've discussed on this site, un-fucking-precedented.
I'll also be exploring this topic with 45 first year students this fall, because showing people that they are a part of the world around them is an essential part of understanding who they are. And because I want them to not accept, as many of my family members and the people I know in Louisiana do, that they are expendable and that life just passes them by.
Dear deity, I do not want those first year students to go through college accepting that they are a passive part of the process. One student at a time, in the little power any individual has, I want to make a difference for them.
I want to be a part of using citizen journalism to restore the fourth estate, and to make it clear that there are times when the internet can be used to expose the horrific incompetence and apathy of a corporation.
This is what I love about this site, and why I keep coming back as I view videos like these, when I read the most heart-rending news.
When I can't find anyone else to wield a teaspoon, I know I can come here.
The video is a bunch of video clips edited together behind some generically inspirational piano music and a Sarah Palin voiceover, which I'm guessing was stitched together from various speeches.
Video description: Graphic: "SARAHPAC" over an image of the US where the "heartland" has been replaced by Alaska (it is surely meant to look like Alaska has been "relocated" to the "heartland," but instead looks like a cut-out). Palin stands at a podium in front of a giant US flag, a crowd applauding behind her. A young white women holds a sign reading, "We don't care for Obamacare," next to an old white woman holding a sign reading, "No Government Run Healthcare!" A young white woman in a "Savagette" t-shirt holds a sign reading, "Annoy Liberal [sic] Work Hard & Pay Your Own Bills." A middle-aged white woman in a wheelchair has a sign reading, "Don't Tread on Me." An old white woman holds a sign reading, "We [heart] Sarah USA." Montage of Palin waving, hugging, standing in front of giant US flags. A young white woman holds a sign reading, "I Love Sarah Palin because she loves my country!" Montage of white women at Palin events, holding supportive signs and/or US flags, many of them wearing patriotic gear. Montage of Palin shaking hands, greeting people, hugging, posing for pictures, being applauded while standing at podiums, giving the thumbs-up. Same "SARAHPAC" graphic as at the beginning.
Voiceover transcript: This year will be remembered as the year when common-sense conservative women get things done for our country. [applause] All across this country, women are standing up and speaking out for common-sense solutions. These policies coming out of DC right now—this fundamental transformation of America—well, a lot of women, who are very concerned about their kids' futures, say, "We don't like this fundamental transformation, and we're gonna do something about it." It seems like it's kind of a mom awakening in the last year-and-a-half, where women are rising up and saying, "No, we've had enough already." Because moms kinda just know when something's wrong. Here in Alaska, I always think of the mama grizzly bears that rise up on their hind legs when somebody's comin' to attack their cubs, to do something adverse toward their cubs. Ya thought pit bulls were tough! Well, ya don't wanna mess with the mama grizzlies. [applause] And that's what we're seeing with all these women who are banding together, rising up, saying, "No—this isn't right for our kids and for our grandkids. And we're gonna do something about this. We're gonna turn this thing around; we're gonna get our country back on the right track, no matter what it takes, to respect the will of the people." Look out, Washington!—'cause there's a whooooole stampede of pink elephants crossing the line and the ETA stampeding through is November Second, 2010. Lotta women, coming together.
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