Last night the NYT posted an online "Room for Debate" round-up on the topic of benefits for veterans with PTSD.
Of course, they invited someone from the American Enterprise Institute. (Spoiler: her views on PTSD were pro-business).
Maybe Brooks was right after all. The Internet is broken.
...I'm speaking to my fellow Canadians, here. While the Harpertron* visits flood-ravaged areas of Saskatchewan for the usual photo-opps, and promises assistance, strangely, other flooded areas don't seem to get the same amount of attention.
Now, a cynic would suggest that the secret ingredient of this foul brew is an oldie but a goodie, racism. I'm sure you all know I'm much too nice for that.
I'm sure it's completely coincidence that the Harpertron is visiting areas where white Canadians are the majority, and ignoring the areas where, say, First Nations people** are the majority. Totes coincidental.
Totes post-racial, ain't we, Canada?
Contact your MP (ou ici, en français) to suggest that the PM might show we give a damn about our First Nations citizens too.
* AKA Stephen Harper, our Prime Minister, a white, apparently cisgender and hetero man.
** "People" instead of "Canadians" in this line because not all First Nations people identify as Canadian citizens, rather than because of any doubt on my part: my Canada includes the First Nations.
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, proud distributors of Deeky Brand Sensible Trousers. Now with lasers!
Recommended Reading:
I highly recommended reading back-to-back this post by Echidne and this post by Renee, both on the nature of celebrity. The juxtaposition is rather wonderful. A trigger warning applies to Renee's post, for discussion of violence/sexual assault.
Charlotte: Fat Art and Fetish Objects
[TW] Cara: Illinois Passes Law Requiring That All Rape Kits Be Tested
Historiann: The value of college: great for me, not so much for thee!
Well-Rounded Mama: Will I Feel My Baby Move If I'm Fat?
Quadmoniker: The Sims Just Did This Totally Racist Thing
Leave your links in comments...
[Trigger warning for sexual assault.]
"The teen was not hurt in the incident."—The final line of a news story on ABC's Boston affiliate, about a man charged with assault after approaching a 16-year-old girl on a train, reaching out and pulling her shirt down, exposing her breast, before running from the train.
What they mean to convey, of course, is that the girl was not physically injured. But saying she "was not hurt" is a piss-poor way of saying that, especially since two of the key narratives of the rape culture are: 1. Sexual violence isn't real violence; and 2. Sexual assault only counts as a serious trauma if a survivor is left with physical injury.
Neither of those are true.
Which is not to suggest that every woman who was assaulted in the manner described above would be traumatized or have lingering effects. But that's just the point: Every survivor of sexual assault reacts differently. "Hurt" is an emotional description as well; I daresay the survivor hasn't even quite processed yet whether she is hurt, or hurt how, yet.
It's not the media's job to decide that for her.
[H/T to Shaker Phlebotnum.]
I'd really love to ignore Brooks, but today he's talking smack about us, so...
Brooks:
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.
[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.
Work those teaspoons.
Feel the Homomentum!
Ireland's Seanad (English: Senate) approved 48 to 4 civil partnership legislation yesterday.
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.
[Trigger warning for violence.]
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 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."
...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.
What's really bothering me is captured in this awful, condescending editorial from the San Jose Mercury News. They've obviously learned nothing.Indeed so.
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.
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.
[Trigger warning for sexual assault.]
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?Being raped and impregnated by your father = Lemon.
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.
DOMA Goes Down in Massachusetts
From the New York Times:
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.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.
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.
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.
Just sayin'.
Tip of the CaitieCap to Arkadia.
