Shakesville

Meanwhile, in Russia...

[Content Note: Misogyny; homophobia; religious supremacy.]

Pussy Riot members jailed for two years for hooliganism:

Three members of Russian punk band Pussy Riot have been jailed for two years after staging an anti-Vladimir Putin protest in a Moscow cathedral.

Judge Marina Syrova convicted the women of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, saying they had "crudely undermined social order".

...Judge Syrova said Maria Alyokhina, 24, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29, had offended the feelings of Orthodox believers and shown a "complete lack of respect".

"Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and Samutsevich committed hooliganism - in other words, a grave violation of public order," she said.

...The judge then took three hours to read the verdict, before handing down "two years deprivation of liberty in a penal colony" for each defendant.

"Considering the nature and degree of the danger posed by what was done, the defendants' correction is possible only through an actual punishment," she said.

One man in the courtroom shouted "shame" at the sentencing, and there were chants and whistles from the band's supporters outside.

Tolokonnikova's husband, Pyotr Verzilov, said: "Russia's image was quite scary even before [this]. What happened now is a clear sign that Russia is moving towards becoming more like China or North Korea."

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny added: "They are in jail because it is Putin's personal revenge. This verdict was written by Vladimir Putin."

The defendants' lawyer, Nikolai Polozov, said they would not appeal to President Putin for a pardon. However, there will be a legal appeal against the verdict.

Amnesty International said the ruling was a "bitter blow" for freedom of expression in Russia.

This story is getting lots of attention, and deservedly so. It's an absolute disgrace. The idea that a nonviolent protest at a place of worship is "dangerous" but punishing protesters with a two-year sentence at a penal colony is responsible and reasonable jurisprudence is truly chilling.

Getting less attention today: Gay parades banned in Moscow for 100 years. "Moscow's top court has upheld a ban on gay pride marches in the Russian capital for the next 100 years. ... The Moscow city government argues that the gay parade would risk causing public disorder and that most Muscovites do not support such an event."

Prevention of "public disorder," or, as we call it in the States, "disturbing the peace," is a great euphemism for all manner of tyrannical attempts to squash progress, isn't it?

Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

Thomas Holm: "Nitten"

SPLC Responds to Tony Perkins

[Content Note: Guns; violence; terrorism; homophobia.]

Yesterday, in my piece about the shooting at the Family Research Council, who is blaming their being called a "hate group" for the shooting, I noted: "Attributing [the shooter's] actions to the identifying as bigoted and/or hateful groups that want to entrench second-class citizenship of people belonging to the LGBTQI community is a parody of legitimate concerns about violent and eliminationist rhetoric."

As if to prove the point, FRC President Tony Perkins amped up the rhetoric, specifically blaming the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and has thus identified the FRC. According to Perkins, the shooter, Floyd Corkins, "was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center. I believe the Southern Poverty Law Center should be held accountable for their reckless use of terminology."

Which is pretty rich, coming from a guy who has said: "If you look at the American College of Pediatricians, they say the research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a danger to children." (A gross lie.)

The SPLC has responded, and it is terrific:

Perkins' accusation is outrageous. The SPLC has listed the FRC as a hate group since 2010 because it has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people — not, as some claim, because it opposes same-sex marriage. The FRC and its allies on the religious right are saying, in effect, that offering legitimate and fact-based criticism in a democratic society is tantamount to suggesting that the objects of criticism should be the targets of criminal violence.

As the SPLC made clear at the time and in hundreds of subsequent statements and press interviews, we criticize the FRC for claiming, in Perkins' words, that pedophilia is "a homosexual problem" — an utter falsehood, as every relevant scientific authority has stated. An FRC official has said he wanted to "export homosexuals from the United States." The same official advocated the criminalizing of homosexuality.

Perkins and his allies, seeing an opportunity to score points, are using the attack on their offices to pose a false equivalency between the SPLC's criticisms of the FRC and the FRC's criticisms of LGBT people. The FRC routinely pushes out demonizing claims that gay people are child molesters and worse — claims that are provably false. It should stop the demonization and affirm the dignity of all people.

Right the fuck on.

Shameless Plug

This one time, I wrote an entire book chapter without including a single cuss word. The book, Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender Studies came out this May (just a few days after Goldberg's latest).

My chapter's centered around my experiences as femme, visibly trans woman on the academic job market. (Spoiler alert: I no longer work in the academy.) Here's [another] preview:

sandals

I'm excited about getting my copy (Temple University Press still thinks I work for SUNY) mostly because of the amazing line-up of authors.

Here's what well-known websites are saying:

"Be the first to review this item." - Amazon.com

"Be the first to add a comment for a chance to win!" - Powells.com

"Kate marked it as to-read." Goodreads.com

"Elvis fanatic remembers the day he died" - CNN.com

In conclusion, this book is a thing in the real world.

13%

Yesterday in comments, Shaker Anitanola linked to this David Simon piece about Mitt Romney's 13% tax rate. I didn't have a chance to read it until this morning, but it's just great.

Can we stand back and pause a short minute to take in the spectacle of a man who wants to be President of The United States, who wants us to seriously regard him as a paragon of the American civic ideal, declaiming proudly and in public that he has paid his taxes at a third of the rate normally associated with gentlemen of his economic benefit.

Stunning.

Romney is proud of his 13% tax rate, notes Simon. He boasts about it, like it's some kind of accomplishment.

I've been thinking about that.

Even granting that there are parts of the Republican base who support miniscule tax rates (while, naturally, protesting in public squares they accessed via public roads to tell President Obama to keep his hands off their Medicare), the vast majority of them don't pay anything like a 13% tax rate. I'm not sure that bragging about already paying only 13% while hardly anyone else does works as an aspirational notion the way that, say, extraordinary wealth does.

And it's not like Romney's saying, "You, too, could pay a 13% tax rate if you elect me!" He's just belligerently asserting that he pays a shit-load of taxes—over 20%, if you count the charitable contributions that aren't taxes at all!

I think Romney genuinely has no fucking idea what average people pay. He certainly has no idea what the self-employed and fledgling entrepreneurs that he loves to hold up as the bootstrappin' job-creators of tomorrow pay. He is completely out of touch.

He doesn't understand very basic things about a country he wants to lead, because he's never had to live in it like most of us do.

Open Thread

A man in a suit shouting through a cone megaphone.

Hosted by a megaphone. Also hosted by Flyover Feminism.

Question of the Day

What is your least favorite thing about where you live?

I am rather distinctly unfond of how I lose electricity every single time we get a storm.

I can't wait until rural electrification comes to Indiana!

Today in Mitt Romney Is Terrible

Mitt Romney standing in front of the Romnibus, saying 'Did you guys happen to notice where my people parked that darn campaign bus?'

This has been your daily reminder that Mitt Romney is terrible. And so is his stupid Romnibus.

Important Nina Simone News

[Content Note: Racism.]

Have I mentioned I love Nina Simone? Once or twice? Three million times? Well, then you know I was VERY EXCITED to hear that the Nina Simone biopic, which at one point was going to be made with Mary J. Blige and then fell through (which crushed me), is finally going to begin production this October (yay!), with Zoe Saldana in the lead role.

Now, I love Zoe Saldana, too. Star Trek YEP. Colombiana SURE. But the thing is that Zoe Saldana doesn't look like Nina Simone. Like, at all.

images of Nina Simone and Zoe Saldana

And, you know, not everyone has to look exactly like the person they're playing in a biopic. Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn't look a hell of a lot like Truman Capote. But it does strike me that Zoe Saldana doesn't look like Nina Simone in a very particular not-looking-like-her way.

Like, the lighter-skinned, "fairer"-featured, more closely hewing to the racist Beauty Standard kind of way.

That's no fault of Zoe Saldana's; I'm certainly not criticizing her. I am, however, criticizing the casting, entirely typical of Hollywood casting, which endeavors to pretend as though women who look like Nina Simone don't exist in this country, and that they are not beautiful.

And, you know, the fact that Nina Simone didn't look like Zoe Saldana wasn't incidental to her life.

Quote of the Day

"I just have to say, given the challenges that America faces—23 million people out of work, Iran about to become nuclear, one out of six Americans in poverty—the fascination with taxes I've paid I find to be very small-minded compared to the broad issues that we face. But I did go back and look at my taxes and over the past 10 years I never paid less than 13 percent. I think the most recent year is 13.6 or something like that. So I paid taxes every single year. ... Every year I've paid at least 13 percent and if you add, in addition, the amount that goes to charity, why the number gets well above 20 percent."—Mitt Romney, taxpaying superhero, obviously.

You know, one of "broad issues" that the country faces is class warfare, a central piece of which is the very wealthy not paying their fair share of taxes. So, I'm quite sure Mitt Romney finds the "fascination" with his taxes "small-minded," but that's because he's a fuckhead, not because it's actually an inconsequential issue.

And, no, what someone pays to charity is not the same as what they pay in taxes. I can take tax deductions for charities to which I donate that spend virtually none of their donations in the US, as but one example of why those things are not equal.

So I don't really give a flying flunderton that Mitt Romney paid "above 20%" in taxes and charitable contributions combined, particularly considering that's still less than half the percentage I pay in taxes every year, despite the fact I make diddly-shit. Especially compared to Mitt Romney.

This is a real thing in the world.

After the "Olympics of the Women," in which every competing country had at least one female athlete, in which the women outnumbered the men on the US team, in which the women won 29 of the US' 46 gold medals and 58 of the US' total 104 medals, this is how Nike is honoring their victories:

image of a short-sleeved back women's-cut t-shirt with the Nike swoosh accompanied by gold-lettered text reading: 'Gold Digging'

An official description for the T-shirt reads, 'We aren't saying they're gold diggers - we're just saying they're out for the gold! What's wrong with that?', suggesting that even the sporting giant itself is aware of the product's potential to be deemed sexist.

The company defended the design, telling MailOnline: 'Nike has consistently supported female athletes and the position they enjoy as positive role models. The T-shirt uses a phrase in an ironic way that is relevant given it was released just as the world focused on the success of female athletes'.

That's not actually irony.

[H/T to Shaker Suzanne77.]

Daily Dose of Cute

A couple of lovely images of the dogs from the beach last weekend, taken by Shaker GoldFishy:

a close-up of Dudley the Greyhound's face with his ears back and tongue hanging out

a close-up of Dudley the Greyhound's face with his ears back and tongue hanging out

"Fangs for the memories!"
GoldFishy and I were talking about how irresistible a subject Dudley is when he's grinning with his tongue lolling out of his head. He just stands and poses, virtually begging for his picture to be taken. I told GoldFishy, "I must have one million pictures of him with his tongue hanging out: Dudley at the beach with his tongue hanging out, Dudley at the dog park with his tongue hanging out, Dudley at Christmas with his tongue hanging out..." LOL.

image of Zelda the Black-and-Tan Mutt lying in the sand, looking out at the water of Lake Michigan

image of Zelda the Black-and-Tan Mutt lying in the sand, looking out at the water of Lake Michigan

"A gal could do some major rolling in stinky stuff around here."
Walking the dog-friendly part of the beach with Zelda was a great socialization exercise for her, especially since the vast majority of dogs are on-leash there. At first, she was pretty anxious at the sight of all the dogs, and if we got too near a dog, she started pulling and whining, ready to launch into her fear aggression thing, but I made her sit and be calm, and she did it. After awhile, she was passing dogs and ignoring them after a "leave it." Eventually, she was even able to relax.

Good girl.

Random Nerd Nostalgia: Silly Putty

[Content note: Christian privilege.]

[Image Description: Title says "SILLY PUTTY" in green letters against a red background, followed with "the favorite stocking toy of every girl and boy!" A cartoon of a white boy with blond hair, wearing blue stripe-on white pajamas, taking silly putty out of a Christmas stocking. In the corner is the edge of a Christmas tree, or possibly a jagged, green-colored rip in time-space reality. A blissful-looking white, cartoon girl with blonde hair is using her silly putty on a newspaper and thinking," ...takes up comics in full color!" More text: "bounces! stretches! makes things! ASK FOR Silly Putty in your stocking!"]

Scanned from Lois Lane no. 65, January 1954.

Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

The Fixx: "One Thing Leads To Another"

FYI: Janesville is Not a Small Town

Paul Ryan is Mitt Romney's running mate. Paul Ryan is from Wisconsin. Neither of these facts are lost on the mainstream media.

However.

Despite being from Wisconsin, Ryan is not the small town boy made good, the son of a dairy farmer who fought his way into congress. The dude's from Janesville.

Charles Pierce (one of the finest foreign-born scholars of our fair state, I might add), brings this point home:

Janesville is not a small town. Luck is a small town. Unity is a small town. Independence is a small town. Janesville is a small-to-middling size city of about 65,000 people, and once was a not-inconsiderable manufacturing center. Janesville is not a small town simply because it happens to be in Wisconsin. [Emphasis mine]

Seriously. This week, I've read everything I'd care to read. I've even read that Ryan is from Janesville, population sixty-three thousand. I could feel the contempt dripping off each syllable in that number. It's as if the author thought to add "and four hundred thousand cows" before considering the redundancy of hir writing. [By the way, have you checked out Flyover Feminism yet?]

Just because Janesville is home to a massive fiberglass cow, doesn't mean it's a cow town. My ancestors are from a town of less than 1,000 in Taylor County (population 20,000-- for the county). They didn't live in a cow town either-- that part of Wisconsin deals in wood. Wood and frozen pizzas, to be exact.

As Pierce says, the media is making Janesville (and Wisconsin) into something it's not, so that it can make Ryan into something he's not. That's only half the problem.

In the process of helping Team Ryamney (please let that catch on) sell a fake story, the media is missing what I consider the real story of Ryan's origins.

Top Five

Here is your topic: Top Five Favorite Books by a Non-US Author. Go!

Please feel welcome to share stories about why your Top Five picks are what they are, though a straight-up list is fine, too. Please refrain from negatively auditing other people's lists, because judgment discourages participation.

This Seems Reasonable

[Content Note: Guns; violence.]

During a recent concert in Singapore, Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine accused President Obama of "staging" the recent mass shootings around the country in order to ban guns.

Mustaine made the comments on stage at an August 7 performance in Singapore ... when he told the crowd, "Back in my country, my president ... he's trying to pass a gun ban, so he's staging all of these murders, like the 'Fast And Furious' thing down at the border ... Aurora, Colorado, all the people that were killed there ... and now the beautiful people at the Sikh temple."

He continued, "I don't know where I'm gonna live if America keeps going the way it's going because it looks like it's turning into Nazi America."

For the record: President Barack Obama has not proposed any new federal restrictions on guns. He has not even pursued reinstatement of President Clinton's assault weapons ban, which was allowed to expire during the Bush administration. The idea that President Obama wants to ban all guns, or even some of them, is pure fantasy.

And the idea his administration is staging mass shootings of citizens to ban guns is as absurd as it is contemptible.

Mustaine is hardly the only person who subscribes to these paranoid conservative fever-dreams, though. He's just the only one famous enough to make the papers.

Shooting at Family Research Council

[Content Note: Guns, violence, terrorism.]

There was a shooting at the anti-gay Family Research Council's D.C. offices yesterday, which left a security guard wounded. He is now in stable condition.

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said the shooter walked into the lobby of the building at about 10:45 and was confronted by the security guard as if the guard were asking him where he was going.

The man then took out a gun and opened fire on the guard, Lanier said. The guard and others wrestled the man to the ground, disarmed him and waited for police, she said. The guard was then taken to the hospital and is in stable condition, the chief said. FBI officials said the guard was shot in the arm.

...The shooter is in FBI custody and has not yet been charged, authorities said. A law enforcement official said at one point in the scuffle, the shooter expressed views that differed from those of the Family Research Council. The official also said the shooter was carrying a bag that had a Chick-Fil-A bag inside.

Tony Perkins, president of the FRC, was a prominent Chick-fil-A defender: "Chick-fil-A is a Bible-based, Christian-based business who treats their employees well. They have been attacked in the past about their stand. But they refuse to budge on this matter, and I commend them for what they are doing."

The shooter, identified as Floyd Corkins, had been volunteering at an LGBT community center for the past six months.

In response to the shooting, about 40 LGBT organizations released a joint statement:

We were saddened to hear news of the shooting this morning at the offices of the Family Research Council. Our hearts go out to the shooting victim, his family, and his co-workers.

The motivation and circumstances behind today’s tragedy are still unknown, but regardless of what emerges as the reason for this shooting, we utterly reject and condemn such violence. We wish for a swift and complete recovery for the victim of this terrible incident.

Meanwhile, anti-gay organizations are blaming LGBT activists and allies, as well as the hate group tracking SPLC, for the shooting:

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), one of the nation's leading opponents of same-sex marriage, told The Hill the shooting was a direct result of the Southern Poverty Law Center's decision in 2010 to place the FRC on its list of hate groups for its rhetoric on gays.

..."Today's attack is the clearest sign we've seen that labeling pro-marriage groups as 'hateful' must end," [Brian Brown, the president of NOM] said in a statement issued following the shooting.

"For too long national gay rights groups have intentionally marginalized and ostracized pro-marriage groups and individuals by labeling them as 'hateful' and 'bigoted.'"

The shooting was unequivocally wrong and the shooter should be held responsible; I couldn't be more disgusted with this guy, for many reasons.

That said, I'm not going to mince words here: Attributing his actions to the identifying as bigoted and/or hateful groups that want to entrench second-class citizenship of people belonging to the LGBTQI community is a parody of legitimate concerns about violent and eliminationist rhetoric.

And, in the wake of yet another shooting, I will ask again: At what point will we take gun reform seriously in this country? How many people will have to be injured and killed before we reconsider our truly foolish gun laws? Will second-amendment fetishizing conservatives reconsider their position on guns now that the guns are being turned on them...?

This shit doesn't happen in a void. This "lone gunman," like all the others before him, was socialized in a culture steeped in the glorification of guns and gun violence. We are all accountable.

Open Thread

A Marshall amplified speaker.

Hosted by a Marshall speaker. Also hosted by Flyover Feminism.

Question of the Day

When is the last time you accidentally hurt yourself in an amusing way?

Not that it was necessarily amusing at the time, mind you, but amusing upon reflection.

The other day, I smashed my pinky toe against the foot of the ottoman in the living room while I was on the phone with Spudsy. All he heard was a muffled mmmphfuck.

When he asked what happened, I told him I'd just stubbed my toe and it hurt like hell. What I did not share was that I'd stubbed my toe, immediately froze in pain, and tipped forward like a plank face-first onto the ottoman, where I lay for a moment, stunned, before I could even enunciate the grunt that welled in my gut.