Cindy McCain blasts 'don't ask' as husband fights to keep it alive.
Earlier today, I sent that link to Shaker BrianWS with whom I was talking about a related subject, and he said: "Ha! I saw that too! Family dinner is going to be GREAT this weekend for the McCains!!!!!1"
To which I replied: "I'm guessing family dinner is ALWAYS great at the McCain residence."
A few moments later, my phone rang, and on the other end was just the sound of uncontrollable laughter.
This has been your regular reminder that John McCain is a horrible person.
Awwwwwwwwwkwaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrd!!!
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
[Trigger warning for fat hatred, disordered eating, diet talk.]
The bottom-line diet: Eat less.
Genius. Why have I never thought of that?
The thing is, eating less was indeed a great plan to lose weight for the man at the center of this story who was consuming 10,000 calories a day.
But if you're not a compulsive eater in the first place, cutting 7,600 calories out of your daily diet isn't an option. In fact, I'm going to guess that cutting 76% of one's daily intake of calories is not something the vast majority of fat people could actually do and still survive.
We're going to keep seeing shit like this as long as the "conventional wisdom" holds that everyone who is fat is fat because they have an eating disorder.
They don't, despite what Maura Kelly, Esther Cepeda, Dan Savage, Bill Maher, MeMe Roth, et. al. would have everyone believe.
[Related Reading: B-b-but CALORIES IN CALORIES OUT!!!, Part One, B-b-but CALORIES IN CALORIES OUT!!!, Part Two, Killer Pearfat!, I Am Not a Bunsen Burner, Today in Lazy Fatasses, No Shit.]
Friday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, proud publishers of Paul T. Spud's memoir, OMG Owls!
Recommended Reading:
Andy: Log Cabin Republicans File Reply to Supreme Court Over DADT
[TW for homophobia] Resistance: More Education, Please
[TW for racism] Joe: Somos Republicans Condemns Extremist Republican Leaders
[TW for harassment] vaurora: Street harassment reporting app now available for iPhone and Android.
Helen: Trans Bodies, Trans Selves Call for Interns
Jorge: No Matter What Toys I Buy…
Leave your links in comments...
Oooh...How EDGY!
(trigger warning for violence, racism, Islamophobia)
Colour me shocked - SHOCKED, I tell you - that it's a Conservative pol who's been caught for this particular type of offence.
SHOCKED. This is my shocked face: ō_ō
In the UK on Wednesday, a Tory member (Gareth Compton) of local government in Birmingham1 posted to Twitter the following comment (since expunged):
Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan't tell Amnesty if you don't. It would be a blessing, really.There's so much fail in this that I can't even...well, I guess I'll try anyway. Ms. Alibhai-Brown is a journalist who had earlier remarked that any British politician who had supported the war in Iraq was on shaky ground criticizing other governments for their human-rights records.
First, "jokingly"2 referring to the death of a political opponent is an appalling escalation, and one we're seeing more and more. And it will come as no surprise here to know that this "joke" is more frequently deployed against people with marginalized bodies. Ms. Alibhai-Brown, as a woman, a Muslim, and a person of colour, clearly fits the bill. People with marginalized bodies are always going to be an easier target for this sort of thing, as the "joker" perceives them to not have the power to do anything about the "joke", and will instead be silenced. As Liss wrote recently, that's kind of a goal of privilege.
Second, it's profoundly racist to make this particular "joke" about stoning someone to death, and the insensitivity of it - given the current campaign (led, I might note, by Amnesty International, one of my own particular favourite groups) to fend off the execution of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani - is breathtaking.
Third, hate-motivated attacks against South and West Asians in Britain3 have been endemic since the London bombings, fueled by a river of vitriolic xenophobia from right-wing politicians, both the extremists of the BNP and the "moderate" racists of the Conservative party.
I look forward to seeing the news of the trial of Mr. Compton, who was rightly arrested for the threat. I will hope that the courts recognize that there's no joke in receiving death threats, as both I and our Shakesville host can attest personally.
1 Britain's second-largest city, and one which has a large percentage of the population being of South Asian backgrounds - including many, many Muslims.
2 Scare quotes because what exactly is supposed to be funny about a woman being beaten to death with hurled rocks?
3 Muslims and non-Muslims; most bigots don't bother to find out before they hurl their words, bricks, whatever's handy. :/
SCIENCE!
Did you ever wonder what is the sound of one cat lapping how cats lap up liquids?
Well, now you know!
That is, unless the cat in question is pulling the dip-paw-in-and-lick maneuver, as Olivia likes to do to my glass of ice water every chance she gets, or stands in a sink mewling pitifully until her Two-Legs turns on the tap, which is Matilda's favorite liquid-acquisition strategy of choice.
[Transcript here.]
Two Facts
1. David Brooks is still getting paid handsomely for writing for the New York Times.
2. David Brooks evidently has no fucking clue that there are millions and millions of Americans who literally need every penny of their Social Security checks (and sometimes more) to survive, or else he wouldn't be asking bullshit questions like: "Are you really unwilling to sacrifice your Social Security cost-of-living adjustment at a time when soldiers and Marines are sacrificing their lives for their country in Afghanistan?"
The Overton Window: Chapter Twenty-Five
Contest time:
If you can guess what happens in chapter twenty-five, you might win one gently used gummi worm! Hey, who wouldn't want that? (You wouldn't want that, trust me.)
If you said "nothing happens" then you're a winner! But we're all winners here, aren't we? By reading this book, we've all had the opportunity to Grow and Learn, and that is something to be proud of. There is no second place in learning and there is no crying on Glenn Beck's TV show. Oh, wait, there is lots of crying on Glenn Beck's TV show. Nevermind.
Okay, so there are two plot points revealed this chapter, which, I guess makes them a slight bit more engaging than the previous three installments of The Kearns & Bailey Show. Maybe this story arc is starting to pay off.
To the plot point, the most important one, I am guessing:
Danny took a printout from his pocket, a transcript of the most recent chat room conversation, and matched up the four men with their screen names. The fifth, he was told, a guy named Elmer, had taken an unexpected trip to Kingman, Arizona, on a related matter and wouldn't return until well after midnight Monday morning.
Elmer is away. That is ominous, isn't it? Where do you suppose he is? I mean, aside from maybe Kingman. (Winona? Barstow? San Bernandino?) Wherever he is, I assure you it is not good.
No matter. "All of them agreed, though, that Elmer was a serious player and absolutely a man to be trusted." I think they had the same ideas about Kearns & Bailey too. No one in this bunch seems especially thoughtful. No one seems to have a name yet, either, aside from Ron, who has "been wise to those Zionist bankers and the good-for-nothing queen of England ever since [he] saw what they did to us on 9/11." (I guess that is supposed to be a joke.)
Nameless, faceless terrorists. At least they've not been saddled with the label "diverse."
Bailey explains the bruises on his face, the beating he took, and how it was the final straw, so to speak.
He'd been picked up by the cops after a patriot meeting in New York City, he told them, and then they'd beaten him within an inch of his life while he was in custody. Everyone has their breaking point, and this had been his. He knew then that there wasn't going to be any peaceful end to this conflict; the enemy had finally made that clear. So he'd called his old friend Stuart Kearns to come and bail him out so he could be a part of this plan.
Sure. Everyone who gets roughed up by the cops decides the best recourse is to nuke a major American city. That makes sense and is totally believable. By which I mean it isn't. Not even in the confines of this novel does that sound plausible. Maybe Beck is trying to demonstrate how far out there these terrorists are. Or perhaps, this is just shit writing.
Kearns shows the men the bomb.
As the men looked on with a mix of awe and anticipation, Kearns began to provide a guided tour of the device. The yield would be about on par with the Hiroshima bomb, he explained, though the pattern of destruction would be different with a ground-level explosion. The device was sophisticated but easy to use, employing an idiotproof suicide detonator tied to an off-the-shelf GPS unit mounted on top of the housing. With the bomb hidden in their vehicle and armed, all they'd have to do is drive to the target. No codes to remember, no James Bond BS, no Hollywoodesque countdown timers—just set it and forget it. The instant they reached any point within a hundred yards of the preset destination the detonator would fire, and the blast would level everything for a mile in all directions.
There is no "Hollywoodesque countdown timer" just a GPS trigger which does not qualify as Hollywoodesque either. Kearns arms the bomb, and "a line of tiny yellow bulbs illuminated, winking to green one by one as a soft whine from the charging electronics ascended up the scale." That is also not Hollywoodesque, in case you were wondering. Nothing Hollywoodesque to see here, move on!
Now, that second plot point I mentioned. The target: "the home-state office of the current U.S. Senate majority leader, the Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse, 333 Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada."
Oh. My. God. The target of the plot is Harry Reid (D-NV). What the fuck? How is this appropriate, even for fiction? Even for faction? I realize Reid is a public figure and all, but this seems beyond the pale. Maybe I am overreacting. I don't know. However, I do know that I do not like this book at all.
I understand nuking a city is acceptable for a thriller. I think Tom Clancy did it once, right? And I've read enough post-apocalyptic fiction to not get all squeamish about California sinking into the ocean or whatever. It happens. It's supposed to be scary, in a roller coaster sort of way.
But...
There is something frightening, and in a whole different way than the author intends, no doubt, about using a real, sitting U.S. Senator as the target for a fictional assassination in a book that is a thinly, at best, veiled manifesto on the evils of the Left.
Today in Not News
Glenn Beck is a shameless, vile nightmare.
Yeah, I know, so self-evident at this point it's hardly worth the energy to type. But it takes a real special sort of human horror show with garbage where his soul should be to take to the airwaves not one day, not two days, but three goddamn days in a row to smear Holocaust survivor George Soros as a Nazi collaborator.
And to do it on the basis that Soros' life was saved because his father paid a government official to say the then-13 year old Soros was his godson, so he would be spared from removal to a concentration camp, and the official who agreed to be his protectorate was tasked with taking "inventory on the vast estate of Mor Kornfeld, an extremely wealthy aristocrat of Jewish origin," which Beck has reimagined as "confiscating the property of your fellow Jews."
I mean, I've seen some pretty ugly goddamn smears from the shitsacks at Fox News in the six years I've been doing this, but that is some low-ass fuckery, right there, even for that lot.
You'd think for a group that's so invested in BOOTSTRAPS! they wouldn't be so keen to [TW] victim-blame children for doing whatever it takes to survive in the most incomprehensibly horrific circumstances.
Question of the Day
We've done this one before, but not for a long time...
What have you done that your family will absolutely NOT let you live down?
There are dozens of these I could mention, but the first one that came to mind is when we were watching the news one night (I was about 14) and some guy was broadcasting a sports story from the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion. It was abbreviated as "UIC Pavilion" under his headshot, and—thinking it was his name, rather than his location—I misread it as "Vic Pavilion."
"What an odd name—Vic Pavilion… Wait, no. That's a U. How would you say that? Yoo-ick Pavilion?"
My parents must have laughed at me for ten million years. And the UIC Pavilion has forever been known at Parental Manor as the Yoo-ick Pavilion.
It's also, of course, still the easiest way to imply that I'm being a dildobrain about something twenty-plus years hence. If I get a name wrong: "I wonder if he knows Yoo-ick Pavilion?" If I get a location wrong: "I wonder if that's anywhere near the Yoo-ick Pavilion?" Sigh.
Quote of the Day
"It's like the more equal we can get through creative ways, we're going to do it. It's just important to do anything we can to find creative ways around inequality."—Mark Reed, "a board member for the national LGBT direct action group GetEQUAL [who] recently married his longtime partner, Dante Walkup, at the W Dallas Victory hotel [in Dallas, Texas]. Their 'Skype' wedding was officiated via teleconference from Washington, D.C., where same-sex marriage is legal, and they received their license in the mail a short time later. It's called 'e-marriage,' and it's a sort of high-tech version of the proxy wedding traditionally held when one of the parties can't be physically present—because, for example, they're in the military stationed overseas."
This is why anti-equality dinosaurs should just give up now. They don't have a hope of out-creativing progress.
Congratulations to Mr. Reed and Mr. Walkup!
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Silence Isn't Golden (Unless It Is)
[Trigger warning for sexual violence and institutional misogyny.]
For reasons that I understand but to which I don't particularly relate, a lot of USians are fascinated by the English Royal Family. Which is why stories about Prince William and his long-time girlfriend Kate Middleton, who are reportedly very close to getting married, end up in places where I go for news. And over the past two weeks or so, because William and Kate are reportedly very close to getting married, I've heard or seen a dozen stories about this allegedly imminent wedding, all of which have included this piece of biographical information about Kate Middleton: She has never spoken publicly.
"Katie Waitie," as she has been dubbed by British press, because obviously she is best wholly defined by the assumption that all she cares about is marrying her (literal) prince, ahem, has never done a press interview or been caught on camera talking about their relationship. "She's never spoken a word in public," is the phrase I keep seeing. During a discussion about Prince William and "Katie Waitie" on CNN this morning, a male anchor complimented her on her silence. An article I read about a week ago noted breathlessly that the British public does not even know what her voice sounds like.
This, I have heard and read over and over, is a most impressive thing.
And, more than that, it is evidence of her suitability to be William's Wife.
I must make clear that this admiration for Ms. Middleton's silence is not being framed as the sensible choice of a young woman who is evidently press-savvy and prefers her privacy. It is not indicative of an independent will, of a clever and dignified woman who staunchly resists the clamoring demands of the same celebrity-obsessed soundbite culture that literally pursued her possibly future mother-in-law to her very death.
No. It is being framed as: "She's doing everything right to get William down the aisle." She's a good girl who knows how to play the game, and her silence is compliance.
Now, I don't know the first thing about Kate Middleton, and I don't know which frame better reflects reality. But that's just the point: No one does, because of her fierce determination to preserve her privacy for whatever reason.
And yet the almost-unanimous assumption is that she maintains her silence because that's what smart girls who want to marry princes do.
Anyone else see a problem with that narrative?
On the front page of this blog, as this is posted, we've got a piece about how the media filters stories about Hillary Clinton and thus shapes narratives about her, a piece about how only 17% of the members of the US Congress are female, a piece about a woman's stated lack of consent being challenged, a piece that references sexual assault of female soldiers, a piece about a rape survivor who was bullied until she committed suicide, and a piece about airport regulations that require passengers to submit to invasive security checks.
All of those stories, in one way or another, are about women's voices not being heard and respected, whether it is an individual woman at the center of a specific story or women being institutionally marginalized.
Girls are culturally socialized (if not directly admonished in their own homes) to be compliant, to be cooperative, to be quiet. Good Girls are helpful. Good Girls do what they're told. Good Girls are civil and deferential and they don't make a fuss.
Women are socialized to be disadvantaged in a male-dominated world of bombast and braggadocio, of workplaces that favor male socialization, of men—and sometimes other women—who will take advantage, in every conceivable way, of women whose voices aren't heard, because they never learned to raise them, or because of cultural disincentives against listening to women.
Even women who successfully reject the powerful persuasions to not make waves, to be a Good Girl, who raise their voices loudly and unapologetically and inerrantly in defiant rebellion of expectations of their silence, cannot control whether they are heard, and by whom.
Not listening is a silencing mechanism, too.
Which underlines how imperative it is that women do speak. Cacophonously and often. About everything.
But also on their own terms.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all regard Kate Middleton's (finite) silence not as compliance, but as an act of rebellion?
She is a woman whom everyone wants to hear, who hasn't said a word.
That's powerful.
If only that were the frame everyone embraced, the one that ultimately values women's voices and women's terms, instead of the Good Girl Who Knows How to Play Her Cards Right and Keep Her Mouth Shut.
[Related Reading: The Sound of My Voice, Feminism 101: How are we supposed to take feminist bloggers seriously if they post about shoes?, The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck, The Bargain, and Its Alternative, Screaming (Or Not).]
Safe Passage for Me; Thee's on Thine Own
[Trigger warning for sexual assault.]
On Tuesday, I wrote about the new TSA regulations regarding full-body scanners and "enhanced pat-downs."
Today, CNN reports: Pilots urged to avoid body scanning.
Pilots' unions for US Airways and American Airlines are urging their members to avoid full-body scanning at airport security checkpoints, citing health risks and concerns about intrusiveness and security officer behavior.And that's not all:
..."Based on currently available medical information, USAPA has determined that frequent exposure to TSA-operated scanner devices may subject pilots to significant health risks," [Capt. Mike Cleary, president of the U.S. Airline Pilots Association wrote in a letter to members this week].
..."It's safe to say that most of the APA leadership shares my view that no pilot at American Airlines should subject themselves to the needless privacy invasion and potential health risks caused by the AIT body scanners," APA president David Bates said in a letter to members.
Unions are encouraging pilots to request private pat-downs. USAPA urges members to make sure a witness is present during the procedure.The unions argue that pilots are effectively taking charge of a huge-ass weapon as soon as they assume control of the plane, so there would be little incentive or purpose to try to sneak a box-cutter (or knife, or gun, or bomb, or whatever) onto the plane. Which is a fair point.
USAPA refers to incidents where Transportation Security Administration officers may have implemented the screening technique inappropriately.
One pilot described his experience as "sexual molestation," according to Cleary's letter. Bates wrote, "There is absolutely no denying that the enhanced pat-down is a demeaning experience."
But it doesn't do much good for passengers who have to go through the same security checks.
That might not seem like the purview of a pilots' union, but singling out pilots for exemption won't do much good if they lose their jobs because passengers are unwilling to tolerate exposure to radiation and/or a demeaning (or worse) fondling by airport security, in order to fly.
[H/T to Iain.]
Teaspoons 101: I Am Not the Thought Police
Frequently, when I (or another mod) ban a commenter who isn't overtly expressing bigotry, but is derailing a thread with typical silencing techniques—accusations of bad faith, oversensitivity, humorlessness, looking for things to get mad about, exhortations to "get over it," protestations of providing much-needed objectivity, concern trolling, and the usual tiresome attempts to deny the perceptions and experiences of the actual targets of the particular bigotry being discussed—I make a point to note that the commenter is not being banned from the blog in its entirety. I will note that their commenting privileges have been revoked, but invite them to keep reading the blog in the hopes they might learn where they went wrong, and assure them I will be open to a discussion of reinstating their commenting privileges if and when they email me with some awareness to that end.
I almost always immediately receive an irate email full of phrases like "echo chamber" and "fascism" and "hypocrisy" and "censorship," and I am berated for being the "thought police."
I am not the thought police.
I am challenging you to think about things in a way in which you may have never thought about them before.
The entire rest of the world, with its privileging of men, and heterosexual and cisgender people, and thin (but not too thin!) and tall (but not too tall!) and able and healthy white bodies, and religious people and people who have sex (but only in certain ways) and people who can and want to be parents and the wealthy and the educated and the employed and the powerful and residents of the Western hemisphere, and all the ways in which most of the rest of the world facilitates and upholds that privilege, and all the ways in which the rest of the world marginalizes and demeans and treats as less than all the people who deviate from those privileged "norms," and all the ways the rest of the world has indoctrinated you into that system of privilege, and socialized you to believe it's the natural and right and immutable state of the world, and all the shills for the kyriarchy who fill the ether with self-reinforcing rubbish on a constant loop so you swim in a sea so thick with the detritus of Othering that you don't even notice it on a conscious level anymore, and all the bullies who swarm out of the woodwork to kick you back in line if you do, if you have the temerity to question the message, and all the other bits and bobs of the brainwashing to which we are all subjected since the day we're born as part of the scheme, nearly incomprehensible in scope, to ensure that challengers to these traditions are never made, and, if they're born, are squashed with the weight of mountainous tidal waves of blowback in the other direction…? The purveyors of that shit are the goddamn thought police.
And you know what one of the biggest lies they tell you is?
That it's the other way around.
[Originally published in similar form August 24, 2009.]
Top Chef: Just Desserts Open Thread
[Image from last night's episode: Zac's garbage disaster anniversary cake nightmare in blue.]
Last night's episode will be whipped and folded, so if you haven't seen it, and don't want any spoilers, pack your cream filling and go...
The Best Thing You'll Read All Day
I love Dick Van Dyke, who is always a brilliant and compelling raconteur, and a generous and hearty laugher, and this story has to be one of the cutest things I've ever heard [story starts at 8:20]:
Craig Ferguson: Where do you live now? Do you live in California?[H/T to Ann Friedman.]
Dick Van Dyke: Yeah, right here in Los Angeles.
Ferguson: Do you surf?
Van Dyke: [grins] No. [audience laughter] Not any more.
Ferguson: Did you ever surf? 'Cuz you're down in Malibu, aren't you?
Van Dyke: I surfed when there were— Remember the ten inch boards? [grins at realizing his mistake] The ten inch boards!
Ferguson: [laughs] I never forget ten-inchers! [audience laughter]
Van Dyke: You have to be pretty good. [laughs] Ten FOOT boards.
Ferguson: Ten foot boards.
Van Dyke: The old-fashioned—
Ferguson: Yeah, the big, uh, the long boards.
Van Dyke: Yeah.
Ferguson: They used to have a canteen at one end, a little bar at one end, maybe some chairs. [Van Dyke laughs] You did, you used to long board then?
Van Dyke: Oh, yeah.
Ferguson: Ohhhhhh.
Van Dyke: On the East Coast, really. In Virgina Beach, places like that.
Ferguson: It's freezing, the water there!
Van Dyke: That's correct. [nods emphatically] I went out once and fell asleep on that board [audience laughter], I did, and I woke up out of sight of land.
Ferguson: Oh lord.
Van Dyke: And I looked around, and I started paddling with the swells, and I started seeing fins swimming around me, and I thought, you know, I'm dead. They turned out to be porpoises! They pushed me all the way to shore. I'm not kidding. [mimics the porpoises pushing him] Pushed me all the way to shore.
