This is why Sarah Palin makes me want to barf: Because she frequently credits to "God" what is rightly attributable to privilege, and says things like "The government that governs least governs best," and "Why is it called the far right when it is just common sense?" which, given the current state of conservatism and its reliance on turning marginalized populations into wedge issues, is just a more polite way of saying, "Stereotypes exist because they're true."
Palin's primary talent as a politician is delivering a steady stream of pandering mendacity without a hint of compunction to people who long desperately for scapegoats, lest they have to at long last admit gormless complicity via ballot in the ruination of the economy that once gave them a genuinely envious standard of living.
That is an authentic political talent. It's just also a resoundingly detestable one—particularly when used to such convincing effect by a person claiming to share hir audience's onerous circumstances, advising them to pray for relief just before walking away with a five-figure speaker's fee.
Ugh
Monday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, publishers of the award-winning Deeky W. Gashlycrumb memoir, Layovers in Cleveland.
Recommended Reading:
Andy: Pope Benedict Sets Stage for UK Visit with Attack on Gay Marriage
Steve: Boehner's Big 3% Concession
Mustang Bobby: Not All Conservatives Are Racists, But...
Fannie: End Not Near In Post-Same-Sex-Marriage Iowa
Pam: Charlie Crist Releases Position Paper Supporting LGBT Rights (But Not Marriage)
Scott: Finally, a Fresh Idea!
Leave your links in comments...
The Overton Window: Recap and Cover
It's been a while since we read The Overton Window, so I thought a little refresher might be in order.
In the prologue we met Eli Churchill, undercover janitor spy working to expose a massive conspiracy. There's lots of money and some missing nukes and a plan to build a new "political and economic and social structure."
Eli rings up Beverly (yay for payphones!) to tell her all about it, but is murdered (boo for silencers!) before he can spill the beans.
Our story's reluctant hero is Noah Gardner, PR wiz with an aimless existence. He has "an outstanding record of success with the ladies" but that all falls apart when he meets Molly Ross, auburn-haired, teabagging patriot.
Molly is sassy and hates PR people Naturally, Eli is taken with her.
The villain of this tale is Noah's father: Darth Gardner. I mean Arthur Gardner. He's a PR wiz with dreams of world domination. He invented bottled water, thinks "Social Security was the boldest Ponzi scheme in history" and, I guess, hates America.
Arthur Gardner lays out his plan for a "new framework" in a very corporate manner: via Xeroxed hand-out and Powerpoint.
Okay, so there we are. Noah, Molly, and Arthur, teaparty rallies, the NWO, and Powerpoint. The excitement just jumps off the page, doesn't it?
Before I jump back into the story, there is something I wanted to comment on: The cover. (See below.)
It is, at first glance, an image of the Statue of Liberty overlooking the New York skyline. Except there have been a few changes to Liberty's familiar visage.
First, and most noticeable, is Liberty's left arm. Her tabula ansata and been replaced with what looks like a rifle. I'm guessing it's a Revolutionary-era musket. (Other theories are welcome.)
Less noticeable is Lady Liberty's recasting as a man. Note the broad, masculine shoulders. (And what is commonly referred to in certain circles as a "swimmer's build.") The robe, originally covering the right upper arm and shoulders, now drapes over the left shoulder, and just barely.
If viewed from the front, Liberty's chest would be exposed. I think we can safely assume Liberty isn't showing off her titties. Liberty, now male, bares his chest in defiance.
Discuss.
Number of the Day
30%. The increase from 2007 through 2009 in the number of families (defined as at least one adult and one minor child) in homeless shelters, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Quote of the Day
"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."—Professional wankstain Newt Gingrich.
Ironically, the actual "most accurate, predictive model for [Obama's] behavior" is Republicanism, before Newt Gingrich ascended to the Speakership, drew up a Contract With America, and turned the Republican Party into the party of corporatocrats and the ignorant, bigoted rubes who can't vote fast or hard enough for their own economic demise.
[Previous Newt.]
Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime
Cube Squared: "Baby Doll"
For Spudsy, who looked after TMNS for me while I was away last week. Thanks, Paul!
Math Is Hard! (For Girls.)
by Shaker Talonas
So I was doing my thing on Facebook, which usually consists of playing Pot Farm and Market Place, when I was delivered this gem of an advertisement.
["Math Games for Girls—Always Ice Cream: Girls 7-12 collect "ice cream" for practicing multiplication, fractions, exponents, and more. It's fun, safe, and creative. FREE trial!"]
The app can be found here, where visitors are greeted by an impossibly thin teenage girl avatar in a weirdly provocative pose, saying, "Hi, I'm Aki! Join our awesome girls site - cute animals, fun games, and your real friends. Even your parents will like the site because you also learn important stuff."
Let's start with the notion that girls cannot learn math without the proverbial carrot being dangled in front of them. Girls from a very young age are taught, in direct and indirect ways, that they are inherently lacking in math skills (but excel in social and verbal skills) by virtue of their femaleness.
To this day, as an adult woman, I catch myself saying things like "I'm not really good at math." When I know for a fact that I am good at it. I like math; I find myself doing math in my head all the time just for the fun of it. But I'm not supposed to like math, or be good at it—I'm a girl.
This insidious notion is further perpetuated with games like "Always Ice Cream" that suggest girls couldn't possibly be interested in math, or motivated to learn it, unless the lesson is bathed in the color pink and the female pupils bribed with things that girls obviously like. Hence the ice cream.
And Liss pointed out something else, when I emailed her about this application: "But what about the OH NOES OBESITY CRISIS?! Surely we can't be motivating girls with ICE CREAM or they'll GET FAT!!!"
Which reminded me of some of the stereotyping that I dealt with in high school, and the overlapping prejudices against being a fat chick and being a math nerd. I only liked math because I was a fat chick and had nothing better to do, or I was fat because I was a girl who paid too much attention to books and not enough to my appearance, or various other equations of similar antiquated malarkey.
It would be great if we could instead have more apps, programs, games etc. that focus on making math fun for children—ALL children—in a gender-neutral way, without phrases like "Math for girls!" as if we just discovered that girls can also like math.
Citibank's Recommendations for the Ladeez
Blogger David Xia recently posted a scan of a laminated card his friend nicked from Citibank's offices, "on a floor he suspects was the human resources department," while interviewing there:
Citi Logo / What NOT to do / What women do to sabotage their careers / TOP 10 things to remember / 1. Women tend to speak softly—you are not heard. 2. Women groom in public—emphasizes your femininity and deemphasizes your capability. 3. Women sit demurely—the power position when seated at a tables is forearms resting on a table and resting forward. 4. Speak last in meetings—early speakers are seen as more assertive and knowledgeable than late speakers. 5. Women ask permission—children are taught to ask permission. Men don't ask permission, they inform. 6. Apologize—women apologize for the smallest error which erodes your self-confidence. Men tend to move into problem-solving mode. 7. Women tend to smile inappropriately—when delivering a message, therefore you are not get taken seriously. 8. Play fair—women tend to be more naive. A woman might assume the rules have to be obeyed whereas a man will figure out a way to stretch the rules and not be punished. 9. Being invisible—women tend to operate behind the scenes and end up handing the credit over to the competitor. 10. Offer a limp handshake—one good pump and a concise greeting combined with solid eye contact will do the trick."That's what she said!"—Citibank.
(Emphasis, terrible punctuation, and grammatical mistakes original.)
David notes the 10-points "are taken from an actual book titled Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers by a woman who earned a Ph.D. in psychology," and apparently is making a handsome living filling the role of the Exceptional Woman Who Navigates the Patriarchy by Pretending It Doesn't Exist and Selling Out Other Women to Ingratiate Herself With Misogynist Men.
For their part, Citibank says: "The material in question is not part of Citi's formal leadership training or human resources communications. It appears to have been taken from a published book by a noted author in the field of executive coaching." Yeah, it just fell out of the book that way—laminated and bearing the company logo.
Naturally, the "not part of Citi's formal leadership training" dodge is absurd. That it exists at all, official enough that it bears the company logo, creates a hostile workplace for all the company's female employees, who, like nearly every other woman working in corporate America, is already expected to navigate the impossibly thin course of being feminine-but-not-too-feminine while acting-like-a-man-but-not-acting-too-much-like-a-man in the never-ending patriarchal game of Can't Fucking Win.
[H/T to Shakers Phyllis, Maritzia, and Lizardbreath.]
Open Thread
Hosted by those wax bottle liquid things.
This week's open threads have been brought to you by candy.
Candy is delicious food - eat some today!
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!
Two Facts
1. David Brooks has written yet another garbage column for the New York Times, who is still paying him exorbitant amounts of money for his peerless garbage column-writing services.
2. This column is THE WORST, even by Brooks' own garbage standards.
Seriously, what is he talking about?
America's brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism.By contrast to what? To "Things That Are Embarrassing or at Least Countercultural"? David Brooks, what the everloving fuck are you talking about?
It would be embarrassing or at least countercultural for an Ivy League grad to go to Akron and work for a small manufacturing company. By contrast, in 2007, 58 percent of male Harvard graduates and 43 percent of female graduates went into finance and consulting.
The shift away from commercial values has been expressed well by Michelle Obama in a series of speeches. "Don't go into corporate America," she told a group of women in Ohio. "You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. ... Make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry." As talented people adopt those priorities, America may become more humane, but it will be less prosperous.Wait, huh? America will be less prosperous if people don't go into money-making industries, but literally two paragraphs earlier it signaled America's economic doom that people are going into "prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism" instead of pursuing "industry and technical enterprise."
Apparently, David Brooks imagines that there are tons o' lucrative jobs at small manufacturing companies in towns like Akron, Ohio, waiting to be filled by well-educated snobs who just can't be bothered to work there.
For someone who purports to be an expert on the American Heartland, he sure is mistaken on, well, pretty much everything about the American Heartland.
Then there's the middle class. The emergence of a service economy created a large population of junior and midlevel office workers. These white-collar workers absorbed their lifestyle standards from the Huxtable family of "The Cosby Show," not the Kramden family of "The Honeymooners."WHUT. Here, Brooks engages in one of the most annoying habits of elite conservatives: Pretending that everyone in between the wretchedly poor and independently wealthy are one, big, monolithic middle class.
Nope. The Huxtables were a well-to-do, upper-middle-class family living off the dual incomes of two highly educated and successful professionals. The Kramdens were a working-class family living off the single income of a working schlub. It is not to say that one is inherently superior to the other to note that they are fundamentally different.
And it is not to demean the Kramdens of this country to say that it's understandable they are not aspirational figures for midlevel office workers. Many midlevel office workers are the daughters and sons of Kramdens, who wanted their children to be Huxtables.
You are a mess of mind-boggling incoherence, David Brooks. Go lie down and be very, very still for awhile.
Daily Dose o' Cute
Video Description: Iain and Dudley play CHASE!!!WOO!!! when Iain gets home from work. Iain does this funny little shuffly dance, and Dudley flips in circles and runs around like an excited goofball. Set to Toy-Box's "Best Friend."
Sometimes, when either Iain or I is playing CHASE!!!WOO!!! with Dudz, he will actually pop off the floor like he's on springs and do a complete 180 in midair, falling right back into his play-crouch. It's amazing.
As I've mentioned before, this is a game Dudley won't play at the dog park—only in a small space, which apparently makes it much more fun!
As always, still pix are below the fold...
And the couch held dozing Matilda.
Lady Chubfuzzle of Bellysworth.
"Duuuuuuuude, I am soooooooo hungover."
"Um, if you're going in the kitchen, could you bring me back a treat, please?"
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
Jon Hamm: The Last Alpha Male.
It's funny, ahem, how frequently being mature, oozing "adult-ness," inhabiting the body and mind and career of a grown-up, being one's authentic self, is implicitly synonymous with being a man.
Not in contradistinction to being a boy, but in contradistinction to being a woman.
Quote of the Day
"Last night a neighborhood exploded. ... Just like that. It was there one minute, gone the next, apparently the victim of a deteriorating 62-year old cylinder in the ground that wore out, blew out, and exploded after rupturing the ground above it. That cylinder is just one of many old, deteriorating lines. ... I wonder whether conservatives give a damn when an entire neighborhood spontaneously combusts. I wonder whether they have a fixed number of dead people in their minds before they actually treat our infrastructure problems in this country like something worth their attention."—Karoli, on the explosion in San Bruno last night, which sent up "a geyser of fire that killed at least one person and injured more than 20 others, and ignit[ed] a blaze that destroyed 53 homes and damaged 120 more."
This morning, when I was out walking the dog, I smelled gas about half a block away from my house. It was the third time I'd smelled gas in the same area. When I got home, I called the gas company and reported it.
They came out to fix it not long after I called. The air was filled with gas. Though the other three didn't seem bothered, Sophie was running around mewing pitifully and trying to hide inside a closet, presumably to get away from the smell of the gas.
Not long ago, they left. I don't know what they did. Put a patch on it, I guess. It's vaguely terrifying.
Sophie still hasn't come out from behind the couch.
Audacity-rific!
In my inbox (TW for ableist language, emphasis original):
Dear MoveOn member,
Remember what it felt like to watch Barack Obama back when he was Candidate Obama? Seeing him fired up and ready to go in front of a crowd of 20,000?
Well, as of this week, that Obama's back. On Wednesday, he gave a feisty, tough speech that showed just how irresponsible Republicans have been, how crazy it'd be to give them back control of Congress this fall, and what he proposes to do to get our economy back on track.
"Fired up and ready to go in front of a crowd?"
"Feisty?"
"Tough?"
Apparently Obama is getting ready to captain a team in next year's 'Pols vs. Pundits' roller derby bout at ECE. Hopefully he'll watch out for Helen Thomas-- I hear she throws a mean can opener*.
This newfound (as of this week!?! are you for realz?!?) ass-kicking through standing around saying things is neat n' all, but um... every tube on the internet is clogged with discussions of how unsatisfying Obama's inaction on his supposed campaign platform has been. I'm not even going to get into the things that Obama actually has done-- let's just say that I'm pretty indignant.
In conclusion, moveon.org, I think I'll keep the money I don't have. I know it's not a popular saying these days, but maybe you should quit while you're behind.
--
*A can opener is essentially a check where you squat down low, twist your torso and pop up to drive your shoulder into the chest of the skater directly behind you. Can openers are either very fun, or not fun at all.
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 (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Emailing! With Liss and Spudsy!
Liss: Look at the callout quote in this piece (about Clinton's speech earlier this week at the Council on Foreign Relations).
[The callout quote reads: "What is so piquant here is not the fact that Hillary understands that Obama is president. It is the growing sense that Hillary would have made a much, much better president than Obama."]
Spudsy: YES. WE KNOW.
Liss: I love the implicit suggestion that there was a chance Hillary Clinton might not have "understood" that Obama was the president. Insert caricature of mouth-foaming Hillary Clinton, driven wild with unfulfilled ambition, sitting at an overturned refrigerator box in her living room with Mrs. President scrawled on it in crayon, barking at Chelsea to "get Tehran on the line STAT! I'll sort out that Ahmadinejad once and for all—if it's the last thing I do as president of this great nation!" and calling Bill "General Husbandton" while ordering a nuclear attack on Oslo (thus proving once and for all you cannot have a woman at the button).
Spudsy: OMFGLOL. My favorite comment from that thread, btw: "Palin will not be the candidate. She is a creation of the liberal media and a desperate, horrible candidate for President, not the GOP at large. " LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Liss: I love the first comment: "Could this be Hillary's first punt at the presidency?" Will that she-devil's drive for the presidency never end?! Just look at her—NOW SHE'S BEING GOOD AT HER JOB! SHE WILL STOP AT NOTHING!!!
Spudsy: I love how someone further down is still, STILL pushing the Vince Foster conspiracy. LOL. MURDEROUS HARPY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Liss: "I heard that Hillary Clinton faked the moon landing."
Spudsy: "I heard that Hillary Clinton is actually some horrible half-woman, half-goat creature."
Liss: "I heard Hillary Clinton's vagina is Illuminati headquarters."
Spudsy: "I heard that Hillary Clinton is secretly working with the United Nations to bring about a universal currency and to abolish Christianity."
Liss: "I heard they tested Hillary Clinton's DNA and found out she's half katana."
Spudsy: "I heard she ate a live cat."
Liss: Well, that's probably true, since it's a standard part of the induction ceremony into the Cult of the Feminazi Cooter.
