What kitchen gadget do you covet?
I looooooooove kitchen gadgets, so I pretty much covet all of them. But the most extravagant and absurd kitchen gadget that I covet is the SousVide Supreme Water Oven, which I will probably never be able to afford (nor justify purchasing, even if I could) in my life, lol.
Question of the Day
Number of Day
[Content Note: Privilege.]
45%: The percentage of US respondents to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll who "believe affirmative action programs are still needed to counteract the effects of discrimination against minorities, while an equal 45 percent feel the programs have gone too far and should be ended because they unfairly discriminate against whites."
That is so fucking depressing.
Reasons for the trend range from the idea of "diversity fatigue" to what others believe is the effect of an African-American being elected president, as well as 20 years of anti-affirmative-action campaigns."What we need is fewer affirmative action programs, and more seminars on how to properly use BOOTSTRAPS!"—45% of USians, apparently.
"Right now, I feel like it's reverse discrimination," said one poll respondent, a white, 69-year-old retired teacher from Rhode Island, who was interviewed for this story and did not wish to be identified. "I did support it at first, but, gradually, because of this reverse discrimination it's gone too far."
Among the allegedly multiple "reasons for the trend" is the reason that will not be meaningfully included in any public discussion: The incredibly common practice of treating exceptions to marginalization as evidence there is no more need for affirmative action programs, while casually ignoring that often people who appear to be exceptions are only so because they benefited from affirmative action programs.
(And that evidence of achievement does not axiomatically translate into freedom from prejudice in other aspects of one's life.)
This exceptionalist narrative is deeply pernicious in its capacity to justify a refusal of empathy among privileged people.
If there is one person born to poverty, one person with disabilities, one person who has survived profound abuse, one person who has managed to overcome any potentially success-fucking origin who can be held up as an example of achievement, then everyone else is failing to thrive. Even as we devour barfinating narratives of triumph over tragic circumstances, we pretend that terrible beginnings don't really matter, except insomuch as they make great first acts for Sandra Bullock Oscar vehicles.
This intractable belief in bootstraps manifests bias, and hostility for programs seeking to contravene bias, because it encourages the lie that history doesn't matter. And neither does present bias. It encourages the lie that every life happens in a fucking void.
GOPriorities
Priorities. The GOP has them.
The House will vote next week on a bill banning abortions across the country after 20 weeks of pregnancy.Ha ha great reporting. "Some medical professionals." Graduates of the Bill Frist Institute for Garbage Medicine, no doubt.
Doug Heye, deputy chief of staff to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., confirmed to CQ Roll Call that the chamber is on track to consider legislation next week that would ban all abortions after the 20-week threshold — the point at which some medical professionals believe a fetus can begin to feel pain.
This bill has literally zero chance of passing in the Senate, even if it passes in the House. (And it probably will, since there's a Republican majority in the House, and the Republican Party has long ago jettisoned even the mere appearance of decency or integrity.) So it is a total waste of time, aside from communicating, again, to women and other people with uteri that the Republican Party doesn't give a fuck about us, except as incubators for future patriots or political footballs.
And doesn't give much of a fuck about anything else, either.
PRIORITIES.
Photo of the Day
[Click to embiggen.
The photographer writes: "There was a shot floating around the internet last week of a bridal party being chased by a dinosaur. It's funny, admittedly. So here's our take on the idea…mostly because Leslie (and us) are huge Star Wars nerds! We couldn't resist their bridal party getting chased by a squad of Imperial AT-AT Walkers! lol. So for all you Star Wars fans, this ones for you."Awesome. Totally awesome.
From the You Can't Make This Shit Up Files
[Content Note: Racism; violence.]
This is an actual fucking conversation between Fox News host Jamie Colby and former federal prosecutor Doug Burns that happened on air on the opening day of George Zimmerman's trial:
"I know that George Zimmerman's attorney will prove that he has no criminal background, he's not an aggressive guy," the Fox News host explained. "That he's a gentle kind caring soul who was minding the neighborhood, the police didn't get there quick enough and he had reason to pursue, even though he was told no to. He was just doing his Good Samaritan job."All of this, by the way, in the course of a discussion where they allowed that Zimmerman shooting Martin dead may have been an overreaction. "STILL! LET US NOTE YOU COULD PROBABLY KILL SOMEBODY WITH SKITTLES! WE'RE JUST SAYING."
...[Said Burns, after pointing out someone can die in a fistfight:] "There's certainly a very good argument to be made that the force used was out of proportion to what was going on, and the kid was unarmed. We didn't even discuss that. Totally different case, let's say the kid had a gun."
"Which he didn't know," Colby observed. "All that Trayvon -- we learned later -- was armed with was a bag of Skittles and an iced tea."
"I know everybody keeps sarcastically saying about the Skittles," Burns complained. "You could probably kill somebody with Skittles."
"It's very compelling," Colby opined. "Only a kid who hadn't had dental work could eat Skittles."
"I know, but I find that rhetoric, 'He had iced tea and a Skittles,' it really doesn't matter," Burns replied. "The point is he didn't have a weapon."
"But he didn't take that iced tea and bang Zimmerman over the head with the bottle," the host noted.
"The thing is, yeah, you're spinning a lot of hypotheticals," Burns agreed. "And you could break a bottle of iced tea, right, with the jagged edge, and you could kill somebody with it."
"You could use it as a weapon," Colby concluded.
Daily Dose of Cute
Sophie is not totally content unless she is sitting three inches from my face.
Did you know that June is the ASPCA's Adopt a Shelter Cat Month? It is! From the wayback machine, please enjoy the first pictures of Sophie after we adopted her from a local shelter five years ago. She was the tiniest kitten ever, and now she is the tiniest cat ever! I love my silly wee Sophs. ♥
* * *
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
In The News
[Content note: Terrorism, misogyny, homophobia]
The Words With Friends Dictionary Needs Improvement:
A Chinese spaceship carrying three astronauts blasted off from a launch center in the Gobi Desert. Neat!
So there were at least three bomb threats this morning. Fine work, America!
It's bad enough Chewbacca didn't get a medal at the end of Star Wars, but now he's getting hassled by the TSA.
Buzzfeed is super concerned about Hillary Clinton's Twitter bio!
John Malkovich came to the rescue of an Ohio man who fell into a Toronto street and cut his neck on a scaffolding pole outside of his hotel. Good job, Malkovich!
Here's a probably-NSFW short film on gay New Orleans hip-hop.
And here's a clip from Christoga: Christian Yoga. Obviously.
Oprah Winfrey is donating $12 million to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Neat!
Pope Francis says there is a corrupt gay influence in the Vatican. If only.
Quote of the Day
"[Ray Donovan showrunner Ann Biderman] writes about violence, vulnerability, and the façade of machismo in a glossy, sexy way, but with depth, duality, and humanity. He's very lonely and very isolated. The contract of marriage, sexuality, relationships, all of that stuff is outdated. Every other social group has gotten an upgrade except for the average white man, and Ray is working on old software, functioning in a world that no longer appreciates men as breadwinners and warriors, and there is a lot of pain in that."—Actor Liev Schreiber, on the titular character in his new Showtime series, Ray Donovan.
"Every other social group has gotten an upgrade except for the average white man." LOL. Okay, player.
It isn't that "average white men" (which, naturally, in the parlance of the kyriarchy means "straight, cisgender, able-bodied, Western, white men") are losing some Zero-Sum Hunger Games of Social Status. In just about every way imaginable, "average white men" still have the advantage out of the starting gate. What "average white men" in the main are lacking, in a time of social change, is a way to (re)define themselves that is neither oppressor nor oppressed.
The Traditional Masculinity of "average white men" has defined itself exclusively in contradistinction to the characteristics it isn't—female, queer, brown—for so long that a serious challenge to the idea of inherent male superiority has left millions of "average white men" floundering—and the best answer most of them have found for the question "What is my role if not a keeper of women, a superior to brown people, an enforcer of cis and hetero dominion?" is "I am a victim of oppression by people unlike me." Otherness has become the center-pin around which masculinity pivots—on one side there is dominion; on the other side, subjugation.
What "average white men" are lacking is not "an upgrade," but a vision of equality.
Marginalized people, those of us who are not "average white men," had to change the rules, because we were told "You can't," because we had seemingly unnavigable barriers put in our way by the "average white men" who didn't want us to succeed, because, if we had played by The Rules (as dictated by The Kyriarchy), we never would have gotten where are—because The Rules were designed so that we fail. For many of us, the odds have been against us our whole lives; everything we've ever done has been in defiance of the distinct likelihood—and expectation—that we would settle for less than we wanted.
But we wanted more, and so we changed the rules—primarily by raising the bar.
The "average white men" who resent that the bar has been raised, their unearned privilege undermined and replaced with an expectation to achieve to the same level as marginalized people who hadn't their head start, can now do naught but whine about victimhood. They haven't yet realized that they are not victims of marginalized people, who only want the equality that's been denied them, but victims of a kyriarchal culture that has spoiled "average white men" with the promise of success without effort, and robbed them of the will to expect more of themselves.
What "average white men" are lacking is not "an upgrade," but great expectations for themselves and of themselves.
Insight isn't the only thing that undiluted privilege doesn't freely give its members; it also robs them of an internal, dignified security that isn't predicated on treating rights as a zero-sum game. Every layer of privilege serves as proxy for the self-assurance hard-won by struggling to be proud despite one's marginalization. Privilege tells its members they need not reflect, or justify, or earn, or question, or fight. They are not social justice "warriors" (though many enlist as defenders of the status quo), because, by virtue of their privilege, they have never had need to be. And they imagine marginalized people have been magically gifted "an upgrade," because, by virtue of their privilege, they have the luxury of ignoring the wars we must fight (though many choose to engage only to fight us back).
Who are they, if that privilege comes undone? If they cannot define themselves as the "breadwinners and warriors," and must express humanity beyond a caretaker/oppressor vocation? Are they good? Are they smart, strong, deserving? They've never had to find out—and thus the insecurity, the resentment of anyone who threatens, in even the most meager way, to topple the tower of unexamined privilege atop which they stand. Their pride was unearned, and they're left with a cavernous void of self-esteem if that tower crumbles beneath their feet.
They are nothing without their privilege, because their privilege has allowed them to live a life never having to be anything, other than privileged.
He is functioning in a world that no longer appreciates men as breadwinners and warriors, and there is a lot of pain in that.
What "average white men" are lacking is not "an upgrade," but a way to appreciate themselves as something other than breadwinners and warriors.
In the same interview, Schrieber describes spending three years of his life in which he followed his partner, actress Naomi Watts, while her career blossomed, "traveling the world and being manny to the children." I guess because parenting isn't the sort of job a real "average white man" would do. Mothers are parents; fathers are "mannies."
Maybe "average white men" need to give themselves a goddamn upgrade, instead of waiting for it to be gifted from an unappreciative world. That they run.
Treasonous
[Content Note: State execution.]
Since publicly disclosing his identity, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has left the Hong Kong hotel in which he was staying, and his whereabouts are currently "unknown," at least to the people who are investigating him. And it's no wonder why: Yesterday, Democratic Senator and Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Dianne Feinstein called Snowden's leak "an act of treason."
"I don't look at this as being a whistleblower. I think it's an act of treason," the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told reporters.Not that she's biased or anything, even though "in addition to exposing the sheer range of surveillance our government is doing, Snowden made it very clear that [Senator Feinstein] allowed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to lie to her committee. And continues to allow Clapper's lie to go unreported, much less punished." Whoops.
The California lawmaker went on to say that Snowden had violated his oath to defend the Constitution.
"He violated the oath, he violated the law. It's treason."
Treason is punishable by death.
Despite calling Snowden a traitor, Senator Feinstein didn't engage in the violent hyperbole of openly calling for his execution, but Fox News analyst Ralph Peters was happy to do so:
"Now you've got this 29-year-old high school dropout whistleblower making foreign policy for our country, our security policy," he told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade. "It's sad, Brian. We've made treason cool. Betraying your country is kind of a fashion statement. He wants to be the national security Kim Kardashian. He cites [Breanna] Manning as a hero."This is the national conversation we're having in the wake of a gross invasion of USians' civil liberties without oversight or accountability: The guy who blew the whistle is a traitor who should be executed.
"I mean, we need to get very, very serious about treason. And oh by the way, for treason — as in the case of [Breanna] Manning or Edwards Snowden — you bring back the death penalty."
A traitor to whom?
He is certainly not a traitor to the 41% of USians who find it "unacceptable" that their government, which is meant to be of, by, and for the people, is encroaching upon the very liberties it's purporting to defend. There is already a petition 45,000 signatures strong (and counting) asking the Obama administration to pardon Edward Snowden. Is he a traitor to those people?
The only people to whom Edward Snowden is a traitor are the liars who claim to value transparency and liberty, while obfuscating their cloaked intrusions into our privacy. The government is not the nation. They have forgotten that.
UPDATE: Not to be left out, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner has also [note: video plays automatically at link] called Snowden a traitor: "He's a traitor. The disclosure of this information puts Americans at risk. It shows our adversaries what our capabilities are. And it's a giant violation of the law." I have surveillance overreach bingo!
Good News
The Obama administration has decided to give up its fight to limit over-the-counter sales of Plan B:
The Obama administration has decided to stop trying to block over-the-counter availability of the best-known morning-after contraceptive pill for all women and girls [and other people with uteri], a move fraught with political repercussions for President Obama.Good.
The government's decision means that any woman or girl will soon be able to walk into a drugstore and buy the pill, Plan B One-Step, without a prescription.
The Justice Department had been fighting to prevent that outcome, but said late Monday afternoon that it would accept its losses in recent court rulings and begin putting into effect a judge's order to have the Food and Drug Administration certify the drug for nonprescription use. In a letter to Judge Edward R. Korman of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, the administration said it would comply with his demands.
... Women's reproductive rights groups, who had sued the government to clear the way for broader distribution of the drug, cautiously hailed the decision as a significant moment in the battle over reproductive rights but said they remained skeptical until they saw details about how the change will be put into practice.
The drug prevents conception if taken within 72 hours after sexual intercourse.
"We will not rest in this fight until the morning-after pill is made available without delay and obstruction," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a lawyer and the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which represented the plaintiffs in the case.
[H/T to Shaker Mod Scott Madin.]
Question of the Day
What's the oldest thing you own?
I don't really own a lot of old things, partly because my aesthetic has always leaned modern, so I haven't acquired lots of old things, and partly because I don't come from a wealthy family and/or a family with lots of valuable items, so I haven't inherited many old things. I suspect the oldest thing I own is probably one of the many old books I've picked up in second-hand shops.
[Originally posted by Paul the Spud in May 2008.]
2FA, #18
[Liss in purple; Deeks in green.]
Taken from an actual text conversation, combining several of Deeky's and my favorite subjects: The cooking competition Chopped; the male privilege on Chopped; gendered food; food; sarcasm.
Game of Thrones
Take a nap, stupid baby.
Last night was the season finale of Game of Thrones, and, as usual, Jess and I are talking about it with the usual abundance of caps and exclamation points over at Jess & Liss Talk About Stuff. The standard content notes for violence and spoiler warnings apply.
What did you think of the episode?
Quote of the Day
"Fifty years ago today, President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law, right here in the White House. He said it was basic to our democracy. It's the idea that all of us are created equal. And as I said in my inaugural address this year, our journey to equality is not complete until our wives, our mothers, our daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. The day that the bill was signed into law, women earned 59 cents for every dollar a man earned on average. Today, it's about 77 cents. So it was 59 and now it's 77 cents. It's even less, by the way, if you're an African American or a Latina. So I guess that's progress, but does anybody here think that's good enough? I assume everybody thinks we can do better."—President Obama, in remarks in the East Room earlier today on the 50th Anniversary of the Equal Pay Act.
1. It has taken 50 years to move the average pay gap 18 cents closer to parity. IT HAS TAKEN 50 YEARS TO MOVE 18 CENTS. Get it the fuck together, US employers.
2. Still with the "wives, daughters, mothers" construction. Okay.
3. "I assume everybody thinks we can do better." Um, I don't. Because if "everybody" thought that, then there wouldn't be people who pay women less than men. But I guess shaming the people who actually make the decision to exploit female workers doesn't go over very well when they're the ones who pay for your party to win (or not win) elections.
Monday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by vines.
Recommended Reading:
Congratulations, Serena Williams!
Aviva: Santa Monica Mass Shooter Planned to Kill Hundreds with Stockpile of Guns and Ammo [Content Note: The post at this link includes discussion of gun violence and death.]
Rachel: New Developments in OTC Emergency Contraception Court Case
Jamilah: Fight Ensues to Save Country's Oldest Black Bookstore
Melonie: Anti-Fat Attitudes in Academe [Content Note: The post at this link includes discussion of fat bias and fat shaming.]
Peter: Are We a Moral Society? [Content Note: The post at this link includes discussion of violence and hostility to consent.]
Adam: What Happened to Melissa McCarthy's Face in the UK Poster for "The Heat"? [Content Note: Fat bias via photoshopped images.]
Leave your links and recommendations in comments...
Photo of the Day
[Content Note: Rape culture.]
Above: Host Neil Patrick Harris dances alongside convicted rapist Mike Tyson during the opening number of The Tonys last night. Apparently, Tyson had a one-man-show on Broadway last year. And the rehabilitation of Mike Tyson continues unabated.
I sure hope Charlie Sheen has a guest spot for Tyson on his terrific sitcom. That would be so great. A real meeting of the
