I'm aware of the image issue. It's a problem on Photobucket's end, as I already pay for their most robust plan, and I have contacted them regarding the fuck-up, but they have yet to respond. My apologies for the inconvenience.
The Virtual Pub Is Open
[Explanations: lol your fat. pathetic anger bread. hey your gay.]
Belly up to the bar,
and be in this space together.
Daily Dose of Cute
Video Description: Zelly the Black and Tan Mutt stands in the garden, looking around for flies to chase. Dudley the Greyhound comes trotting down the garden path, then looks around with silly ears, then yawn dramatically. He spies a flying bug of some sort, and goes after it. It disappears into the greenery, so he runs down the path, Zelda in tow, to wait on the other side of the garden for it to come out. Because dogs don't understand how bugs work.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
Quote of the Day
[CN: extreme hostility to autonomy, violence]
Rep. Lynn Watchmann (R-Eprehensible), author of HB 125, Ohio's "Heartbeat Bill":
“I would remind you the real war on women are the abortionists, the slayers of those young babies, the young girls in the mother’s womb who take their lives. That is the real war on women.” , in response to the idea that the bill is part of a war on women.
You see, in 2011 Ohio Watchmann attempted to pass the now infamous "Heartbeat Bill". Back then the GOP even scheduled two embyro "witnesses" to "testify" for the bill (it didn't quite work as planned). Eventually the legislation stalled in the Ohio Senate after passing the House. Last November, Senate President Tom Niehaus said the bill may get "another look" and that "a substitute bill is being prepared".
That substitute bill is now being reintroduced.
In addition to the fetal heartbeat test, State Rep. Christina Hagan said the new bill mandates inspections of abortion clinics.As with before, Ohio Right to Life does not support this legislation.
“We will now have inspectors in our abortion clinics to ensure that the regulations we’re putting in place, as far as fetal heartbeat detection goes, are being held up,” Hagan said.
This time around, Hagan said the bill also includes a commission to study ways to improve adoption in Ohio.
***
Hey Watchmann:
Detecting cardiac activity does not a viable pregnancy make. For one. Your asinine legislation is unconstitutional. Shut up.
Also? Effectively banning--because that's what this would do--a legal, necessary medical procedure because you don't like it is, in fact, a hostile act of aggression against the autonomy and agency of anyone who wants and needs to access it. You spouting off that it isn't is such disingenuous bullshit that I'm almost surprised you weren't struck by lightening on the spot by the universe-at-large for sheer offensive lying asshattery.
And you want to talk "abortionists" and war, you willfully ignorant fuck? Ok, let's do that.
Just yesterday a federal judge ruled that threatening people who provide health care via doing abortion procedures is, in fact, just fine.
From 1977 to 2011, there have been:
218 arsons and bombings
99 attempted arson or bombing
656 bomb threats
191 incidents of assault and battery
420 death threats
4 kidnappings
15,062 incidents of hate mail or hate phone calls
Last year in 2012: a Pensacola, FL, clinic was burned down, a Wisconsin clinic was attacked with homemade bomb, two clinics in Georgia were set on fire, a clinic in Louisiana was set ablaze. Those are "just" the fires.
Dr. David Gunn was murdered in 1993.
In 1993, Dr. Tiller was shot but not killed.
In 1994, Dr. John Bayard Britton and his escort, James H. Barrett, were assassinated.
In 1994, Dr. Garson Romalis was shot but not killed.
In 1995, Dr. Hugh Short was shot and killed.
In 1997, Dr. Jack Fainman was shot but not killed, the shooter was a suspect in an unnamed NY physician's murder
In 1998, Dr. Barnett Slepian is shot and killed. His murderer, James Koop, was the suspect in 1997's shooting of Dr. Fainman and the other unnamed doctor.
In 2009, Dr. Tiller was shot, again, and killed.
In 1994, Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols were shot and killed at clinics in MA.
In 1998, Officer Robert Sanderson was killed during a clinic bombing and nurse Emily Lyon was severely injured.
More about the violence faced by health care providers: here and also here.
So, Lynn Watchmann, your hyperbolic jackassery is not only flat out factually wrong, it's an offensive, disgustingly dramatic and saccharine call-to-arms to anti-choicers. It's dangerous. And you know it.
She Strongly Suspects
[CN: Harassment]
Her friend tells her that she's scared. And angry. And triggered. And paranoid. Because she is experiencing the thing that happens to women when they challenge the men who terrorize women online.
She and her friend are very much alike, in a lot of ways. But she has been challenging the men who terrorize women online for much longer, since dinosaurs still roamed the earth. She writes something to her friend.
She makes the usual caveat about everyone being different, but says she will say these things anyway because of the important ways in which they are the same. And then she tells her friend that the first couple of times, of the many times, the countless times, she has been under siege, not just in the regular every-day-is-a-battle kind of way, but in a Something Specific Is Happening and Here Comes the Onslaught way, she was as triggered and paranoid as her friend is now.
And then, she says, after a few times, she wasn't anymore.
She tells her friend that she STRONGLY SUSPECTS if her friend gets through this (and she will, because she is who she is), she will come out the other side better prepared for when it happens again, and it will, because this is the nature of being a woman who challenge the men who terrorize women online.
It will happen again. And again. And again and again.
She tells her friend that, eventually, you will be angry and scared and angry and also angry, but you won't be so triggered and won't feel so paranoid. And part of you will think, rightly, that it's suuuuuuper fucked up that you can become inured to being terrorized, and part of you will think, rightly, that it is profound evidence of your humanity, because if there is one thing that is true about humans, it is that we are adaptable, that we survive.
She says: "I bet that doesn't feel possible, or even desirable, right now, but."
She observes, frankly, that the truth is, when what happens to women who challenge the men who terrorize women online happens, what you feel doesn't affect the outcome. Whether you are scared or angry or defiant or indifferent doesn't matter.
She tells her friend that she STRONGLY SUSPECTS she will also, someday, get to a place where, unfathomably, she gives herself permission to not be triggered and it actually happens, because it's such a crucial part of your self-care.
She tells her friend that she realizes none of that matters in this moment, except perhaps the validation that her friend is not overreaction—not that her friend needs to be told for it to be true, but both of them know that validation matters, sometimes. Especially when you are a woman who challenges the men who terrorize women online.
None of it matters in this moment, she says, but she sort of wishes she'd had someone who could have drawn her a picture of a possible future where she wasn't constantly fucking terrified in a physical shaky way when she first experienced what happens to women who challenge the men who terrorize women online, because she legit expected she would get worse and worse until she shook herself into dust.
But she hasn't.
She has gotten better.
Her friend says thank you. Her friend tells her she has spent most of the day wondering if she will ever be herself again. Her friend is comforted by knowing that there's this other possible future, which she couldn't even imagine.
They agree that they will Talk About This, that they will make it an invitation to the women who are watching what happens to women who challenge the men who terrorize women online, and who are making decisions about whether they will speak, or whether they will be silent.
No one is obliged to speak. (And no one is obliged to keep speaking once they start, as if walking the fuck away is not an option. It is an option, and self-care is not defeat.) But, they think, everyone has the right to make the decision about whether to speak, or to keep speaking, knowing what might happen. Not just the things done by the men who terrorize women online. But the things that might happen inside yourself, and inside the safety of friendships with titans.
[Previously: She Was Gonna.]
Friday Blogaround
Today's Blogaround is brought to you by one word: plastics.
Suey Park: Tim Wise, informed by Tim Wise
Jamilah King: ‘Lee Daniels’ The Butler’ and the History of Black Work at the White House
Sarah Yang: Paper-thin e-skin responds to touch, holds promise for sensory robotics and interactive environments
The Daily Fusion: Wireless Devices That Harvest Energy out of Thin Air Developed
David Szondy: Scientists developing Bluetooth tooth that spies on your oral habits. Twenty-four/seven monitoring of our eating and drinking habits? What could possibly go wrong?
Souri Somphanith: Crisis in the Late Bronze Age Triggered by Environmental Change
Ed Yong: When Our Microbes Chat, Dangerous Germs Are Eavesdropping
Ben Zimmer: Frances Brooke, destroyer of English (not literally)
Angry Asian Man: Stop the Deportation of Gurmukh Singh
Reminder: Ada Lovelace day is October 15 this year.
Erica B.: Review: Vogue 1305 | The 'End of Summer' White Maxi Dress!
Julia Emmanuele: The World According to Julia Child: Her 10 Best Bon Mots
Please feel free to leave your links in comments below.
Today in Anti-Choice Terrorism
[Content Note: Terroristic threats.]
A federal judge has ruled that threatening doctors who perform abortions is free speech:
A federal judge ruled Thursday that an anti-abortion extremist's threatening letter to a Wichita, KS Doctor is protected under the First Amendment and does not constitute as "true threat."Dillard's letter to Dr. Means included [ad begins playing automatically at link] the ominous warning that "thousands of people from across the nation were scrutinizing Means' background and would know 'your habits and routines'."
In 2011, the Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit against Angel Dillard for writing to Mila Means, a doctor who planned to start offering abortion services, telling her that she would have to start checking under her car every day for explosives. The Justice Department accused Dillard of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), a law protecting abortion clinics.
Although Dr. Means testified in court that she felt threated by the letter and had undertaken several security measures in response, U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten ruled that the government failed to prove that actual violence against Dr. Means was likely or imminent.
Dillard has been associated with anti-abortion groups in Kansas. In July 2009, Dillard confirmed she had corresponded with Scott Roeder, then in a Wichita jail awaiting trial for the murder of Wichita abortion provider Dr. George Tiller. Dillard told the Associated Press, "With one move, (Roeder) was able...to accomplish what we had not been able to do...So he followed his convictions and I admire that."
"They know where you shop, who your friends are, what you drive, where you live," the letter said. "You will be checking under your car every day — because maybe today is the day someone places an explosive under it."Free speech.
I have received emails from people (not Angel Dillard) associated with the anti-choice movement with very similar language about scrutinizing my daily behavior. Occasionally accompanied by my home address or pictures of my house. This is the backdrop against which women who advocate for women do our work. And it is considered totally acceptable.
In The News
Here is some stuff in the news today!
[Content Note: Sexual violence; hostility to agency] The National Women's Law Center has issued a report documenting "abortion restrictions that have been introduced and enacted at the state and federal levels in the first six months of 2013 and that fail to protect women [and other people with uteri] who are pregnant due to rape."
California Republican Representative Tom McClintock doesn't believe that white collar crime on Wall Street exists. "For a criminal practice there has to be a gun. It's pretty simple." Ha ha WHUT. Republicans are geniuses.
[CN: Racism; anti-immigration rhetoric] Speaking of geniuses, RNC Chair Reince Priebus says that Mitt Romney's campaign was "racist" and "horrific." Just kidding. He actually said that Republican Iowa Representative Steve King's comments on immigration were "racist" and "horrific," but they were the same things Mitt Romney said! Priebus: "Using the word 'self-deportation'—it's a horrific comment to make. I don't think it has anything to do with our party. When someone makes those comments, obviously, it's racist." Whoooooops! King, who is a garbage nightmare, also said that undocumented immigrants have "calves the size of cantaloupes" so they can haul "75 pounds of marijuana across the desert."
President Obama is putting solar panels back on the White House. Take that, Ronald Reagan!
Do you want to know where Area 51 is? Well, here's a declassified map! Now you know. Was that more or less exciting than you expected? Exactly as exciting as you expected? Tell us in comments! Or don't! Life is short. Do whatever makes you happy.
Gina Carano wants a Wonder Woman movie, and she wants it done right. Yes, ma'am!
Meet the olinguito, the first mammalian carnivore species to be newly identified in the Americas in 35 years!
Here is a story about a shar pei who adopted a kitten rescued from a parking lot. No YOU'RE crying!
Hiring Diversity 101
by Shaker tarian, a female engineer who has worked in places that cared about diversity, and places where she was the only female engineer for miles. She cares about diversity a lot.
[Content Note: Discussion of marginalization in the workplace.]
The contents of this 101 will be entirely familiar to most of Shakesville, but if you are like me, you have probably also had one biebillion arguments that start with a clue-deprived person saying: "We don't need affirmative action anymore / I'm not *ist, I just want to hire the best applicant for the job" and so forth. In which case I thought it'd be kind of nice to stack a bunch of the counterarguments and evidence in one place for handy reference purposes.
Why Would You Care About Workplace Diversity?
It'd be nice if we could halt this right here with "Because it's the right thing thing to do" and then we could all go wander off for tea and scones, but sadly, no.
So, for people who need a more compelling reason than decency...
You want a diverse workplace because we live in a diverse society. If you're making a product, you want to have people working on the product design who accurately represent and/or advocate for the needs of the entirety of your target audience. (And spoiler alert! People from marginalized population are more inclined to be aware of and advocate for their community's needs than people not from that population!) Creative teams comprised entirely of straight white able-bodied cis men tend to overlook, for instance, the needs of people with disabilities.
In the United States, for example: 8.8% of the population identifies themselves as having vision impairment/low vision needs. If you're building a technology for a universal audience, that's 8.8% of your target audience that you are automatically writing off if you fail to make that technology accessible for people with vision impairments.
Seems pretty silly to decide arbitrarily that you just don't want almost 9% of the possible money you could be making. If you're a global company, this obviously gets a lot more critical, as there are many more communities with disparate needs. Of course, not all members of a given marginalized group will have the exact same needs, which means that you do not want to solve this problem with tokenism: "Okay, we have our POC, our Woman, and our Gay; we're all set!"
Also, if your entire board of directors and the visible face of your company is made of straight white cis men, you are telling a whole bunch of potential employees that your company isn't going to be interested in them. This diminishes the quality of the talent pool you're working from, which has a measurable impact on company performance. Cornell's Glass Ceiling Commission report is a little dated, but, if anything, the situation has become more critical—both because demographics are shifting, and also because you're increasingly unlikely to be able to assume your audience is local.
How Do You Create a Diverse Set of Employees?
This tends to be the annoying whine part of the discussion, with a whole lot of hand-wringing over "But there just aren't any good nonwhite / female / disabled applicants! Women aren't as good at math / science / engineering because BIOLOGY!" et cetera ad nausaeum. What to do?
If you have no visible marginalized people in your company, then, no, you are probably not going to have very many marginalized applicants showing up at your door, because why would I want to work somewhere that doesn't want people like me? (Which is rarely recognized as a safety issue by people who don't give a shit about diversity, but is certainly a safety assessment that marginalized people make.) Or where, even if I get in, it looks suspiciously likely that my voice isn't going to be heard? This is where you go RECRUITING. Do you actually have marginalized employees, but they're not getting promoted into visible positions? Might wanna take a look at that. Actively seek out underrepresented voices (resources like Historically Black Colleges and Universities are all over the intertubes) and then go find the people and explain why, despite the current monolith, you plan to do better and ensure they're treated fairly and their input and time has value. (Oh, yeah, and then follow through with that. If you're not planning on offering competitive salary and benefits, GIVE UP AND GO AWAY.)
Speaking of benefits! Family medical leave and parental leave have demonstrable effects on employee retention. (See for example here and here and here.) Funnily enough, this also serves as a response to the aggravating "But if I hire women they'll get pregnant and then have to take time off work or quit" argument. Why, yes, if you successfully hire women and then treat them like shit, you will have problems keeping them!
Suppose that you've managed to fix enough of the above problems that you're now sitting with a stack of resumes that includes a diverse pool of applicants. This is usually where the "I just want to hire the best man for the job" garbage shows up; I find it amusing that it's even usually phrased that way, and then five seconds of blank stare and disgusted look later, sometimes you get a conciliatory "....or woman" tacked on there.
First off, even if your human resources department is entirely made of third-generation social justice activists, unconscious bias happens. Screen the resumes, and before having them evaluated for technical content, remove obvious identifying data. (Name, gender references, addresses.) This isn't perfect, because education history often unhides ethnic background, but it's far better than nothing. Luckily, this process contains its own effectiveness check. You can review the percentage of marginalized candidates that make it to a first interview before and after implementing this change, and then if you actually live in the magic unicorn pony fairyland where *ist biases have been eliminated, you'll just see no change! Neat!
At least we're having a national conversation on racism and sexism in the workforce, even if way too much airspace gets taken up by the There Isn't Any, Neener Neener crowd. The same conversation for people with disabilities is a little thin on the ground, although some resources do exist. This should maybe get its whole own post, because I've seen this handled from Horrifically Awful to Well, You're Kind of Making an Effort to everything in between. Pretending people with disabilities don't exist seems to be a distressingly common non-answer. Some of the things I've seen done well: Making sure that your physical plant isn't itself a barrier to access, having a procedure in place for interviewing people with visual impairments (do you have screen reader software? does your hiring process normally require, say, describing a technical problem on a whiteboard? do you have an alternate if that's not going to work?), making sure that you have sign language interpreters or captioning systems available. What about people with mobility issues? Having a policy on hand for allowing people to interview and/or work from home, at least some of the time, dramatically improves the quality of life for your disabled employees, and opens up a whole other pool of potential recruits.
How Do You Keep Your Employees from Marginalized Populations? (Actually These Are Pretty Good Tips for Keeping All Your Employees)
So, you have a bright shiny newly diversified employee pool. Maintaining this happy state requires some additional work. Hopefully in the year of our lord Jesus Jones 2013, your workplace already has a strong written anti-harassment policy, with a reporting mechanism that does not require the person reporting to go to their direct supervisor and an enforcement strategy that's actually used. (*cough* Bob Filner *cough*). This should be the absolute bare minimum for basic human decency. Better: Hold regular anonymous surveys to document whether your space is as welcoming to all of your employees as it could be, or if you've got a missing stair somewhere. Keep data: Are your marginalized employees receiving raises and promotion reviews at different rates? If so, why?
What's important to your employees? (Hint: People are different, and so you actually have to ask instead of just assuming one size fits all.) Maybe someone would like more family medical leave instead of a raise. Maybe someone else really wants to get company sponsorship for something in zir community. Depending on your state of operation, not all employees are not going to be allowed to marry their partners, so not everyone will be in need of unmarried partner benefits. Oh, and naturally these things are going to change with time, so you'll want to keep asking, and listen to the answers you get.
I've been working in science and engineering for a little over two decades, and like most of us living in the good ol' boys club, I have a laundry list of Doin' It Rong examples. My first job out of grad school involved working with a whole lot of ex-Air Force Academy types. I do not think they were actively trying to make me feel unwelcome; they "just" weren't used to thinking about what their words and actions would look like to me, or to any other woman in the building. I started habitually going through grant proposals and other docs and doing a global search-and-replace for "man-hours" to "person-hours". ("Oh, we didn't mean anything by it, it's just accepted usage, why are you so hostile?" "Perhaps because your assumption that 'person' and 'man' are the same thing tells me that you do not want me working on this project?") Or giving a technical presentation at a conference and having one of the attendees ask me to go fetch coffee. Hi, the coffee pot is like RIGHT THERE. Or the classic: Presenting an idea at a meeting, where it gets ignored, until five minutes later when a white dood reiterates it, and suddenly it is the best idea evar. (I eventually caved on that one and just found a white male colleague willing to play megaphone to whom I could pass post-it notes during meetings so we could save time.)
And then there's one of my favorites, if only because I've been getting funny story mileage out of it for years and years: The facility we were in was located in an extremely warm climate, and the dress code for the engineering staff was fairly casual. During the hottest weeks of summer, "casual" tended to slowly degrade, and eventually my boss sent out a "dress code reminder" email banning open-toed shoes. So I responded to the email with a couple of pictures of my closed-toe shoe options and asked if he'd rather I wear the combat boots or the hiking boots with the sundress? So the policy got revised: apparently he was not trying to ban women's sandals, he was trying to ban "ugly men's feet."
Someone's forgotten the First Rule of Holes, and also, that's a pretty breathtaking display of forgetting that there are women in the building, and also? What was that again about feminists hating men?
There's a pretty obvious question about how, say, a POC would have fared in this particular environment, which I can't answer definitively as there weren't any. HMMMM.
Of course, even getting to the point of being alienated in an engineering workplace requires making it through the education process to get there. Which brings its own set of "challenges"; my building in grad school mysteriously lacked women's restrooms. What's that? That would be discriminatory? In their magnanimity one of the men's restrooms got relabeled "unisex". Yay? Except that it was not one of the ones with a locking door, and they left the urinals in place. AWKWARD.
Unisex restrooms are actually a good idea for being inclusive of genderqueer people, but implementing them as "here's the space for men, and here's the space for men where everybody else can come in, too," or "here's the space for men, and here's the space for not-men" is not the way to do it.
Being an inclusive environment that does not drive away members of marginalized communities starts at "don't harass people, and don't tolerate harassment you see," but there's a long distance between just not supporting active discrimination and making an environment welcoming. It starts with welcoming more people in the door, and then requires actively seeking their opinions, wants, needs, and then listening to them when they tell you. And maybe treating people like people instead of afterthoughts or window dressing. That would be good.
[Note: Please feel welcome to leave links to more pro-diversity educational materials and other resources in the comments, because the links herein are definitely not exhaustive!]
2,776
Barton Gellman for the Washington Post: "NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds." 2,776 times, to be exact.
The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.Whoooooooooooops.
Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.
So much for that whole "None of the revelations show that government has actually abused these powers" thing, eh, Mr. President?
Go see Digby for more.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker bandit_queen: "I love hearing about people's favorite books, but I never have time to read them all, so I'd love to know everyone's favorite line/passage from a book." So: What is your favorite line or passage from a book (or play, or novella, or short story, etc.)?
[Shakespeare's sister] lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.That always, always, makes me cry.
—Virginia Woolf, concluding her essay "A Room of One's Own."
She Was Gonna
[Content Note: Harassment; violence; misogyny.]
She was gonna write this thing about how she is tired, exhausted to her very bones, to the fibers of her marrow, of men who want to hurt women. Not even the men who hurt women because of their ignorance, their privilege, their insensitivity, the luxury of not having to even identify the harm they cause. The men whose intent (that important word! the word that dictates every receipt of her emotions, and whether she is allowed to feel them!) is malicious. The men who actively desire to hurt women. To scare us. To silence us. To make us bleed.
She was gonna write it. She started to write it. And then she stopped.
She stared at the words on the screen, and she thought about how, if she wrote it, if she finished those words and published it and let minutes pass, the men whose intent is malicious would respond. In the way that they do.
She was gonna talk about them, but then she thought about how talking about them is an invocation.
So she didn't.
Chris Christie Continues to Be Great
If I were in the business of writing news that reflexively pandered to a false objectivity and fetishized kyriarchetypical patriarchs as paragons of humanity, I would describe Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as "pugnacious," but because I am in the business of Shakesville, I describe him as "a belligerent, bloviating, aggressively unpleasant asshole."
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie planted himself firmly in the Republican Party's establishment wing Thursday with a pugnacious speech calling on his party to focus on pragmatism rather than ideology and crippling internal debates.What a neat party full of neat people!
"We are not a debating society," Christie told a lunchtime audience at the Republican National Committees summer meeting in Boston. "We are a political operation that needs to win."
..."I am in this business to win. I don't know why you are in it. I am in this to win," Christie said at the RNC luncheon.
"I think we have some folks who believe that our job is to be college professors," he said. "Now college professors are fine I guess. Being a college professor, they basically spout out ideas that nobody does anything about. For our ideas to matter we have to win. Because if we don't win, we don't govern. And if we don't govern all we do is shout to the wind. And so I am going to do anything I need to do to win."
..."We need to stop navel gazing. There's nothing wrong with our principles. We need to focus on winning again. There's too much at stake for this to be an academic exercise. We need to win and govern with authority and courage."
Once upon a time, I thought I might be a college professor someday, but then I was all, "Fuck that! NOT ENOUGH WINNING!"
(Seriously, did Chris Christie just call his party too thoughtful? Ha ha good one.)
Julia Child: The Remix
Yesterday would have been Julia Child's 100th birthday, in honor of which PBS Digital Studios released the following "Keep On Cooking" Remix. Bon appétit!
(h/t AP)
Daily Dose of Cute
Zelly: The Zelliest of All the Bellies.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
Dear Cardinal Dolan: I am Not Disposable
[Content note: anti-agency rhetoric, religious oppression, misogyny]
I see that you have been speaking to the Knights of Columbus on social justice issues. Specifically, you framed this in terms of "the tendency to 'discard' society's marginalized, including immigrants."
So why did you discard me?
In case you don't recall doing this, let me refresh your memory:
During the Knights' 131st convention in San Antonio, Texas, Cardinal Dolan referred to Pope Francis' notion of the “globalization of indifference,” saying this can be seen in how modern society has become a “culture of throwing away.”“We discard things, from the baby in the womb to our elders, to the immigrant, to the refugee, to the sick, to the poor, to the unemployed,” he told CNA on Aug. 6.
See that? By rendering pregnant people completely invisible in your list, in favor of the "baby in the womb," you do the very damn thing you decry.
You discarded me, and every other uterus-having person on earth.
Cardinal Dolan, I am not a womb. And I am not yours to dispose.
I am a collection of many parts, your Grace. I have hands for holding, arms to embrace with, feet to stand on, legs for running. With my ears I hear, with my tongue I taste, with my eyes I see, and with my brain I think. With all my body, I do many different things. I am all of its parts, and all of its parts are mine.
If I become pregnant, it is my body--not yours--which bears the risks of that pregnancy. It is me--not you--who must weigh the physical concerns, the mental toll, the healthcare costs, and all the short- and long-term effects of that entire process. It is me -- not you--who decides if I will attempt to have a child, or whether I will not. And it is me who must continually evaluate and re-evaluate those choices again and again throughout the entire pregnancy, as my body and my conditions are changing. It is me. Me. Not you.
And I (just like every other uterus-bearing person you presume to own) am not disposable.
So perhaps before you start spreading the commendable message of protecting marginalized people from being "discarded," you might take a look in your own trash bin. It's getting pretty crowded in here.
Not yours,
Aphra
When Social Media CEOs Abet Stalking
[Content Note: Stalking]
Warning! A serious, and not remotely joking note upfront: If you reply to this story, either in the comments here or on Twitter, you may be stalked by a known stalker. Please consider your self-care first and foremost.
I am a survivor of online stalking.
I don't talk about that much online because when online stalking is one of your triggers, talking about it online feels like hanging out a sign inviting people to hurt you. It'd be like posting a link to my email address, another link to icanhascheezburger, and mentioning off-handedly that I'm triggered by pictures of cats. I wouldn't deserve what happened next, but that doesn't make the fallout any less predictable. I know that simply existing on the internet as a woman means some people will try to cause me harm, so I try to navigate online spaces in ways which don't divulge certain triggers.
Online stalking is serious. It ruins lives. It ends lives. People die from online stalking. It's not a joke or silly or funny or harmless.
An anonymous account on the internet, a person who goes by the name of "ElevatorGate" -- which is in itself a reference to an incident where a prominent female atheist was propositioned in an elevator in a way which made her feel uncomfortable and possibly even unsafe -- has been abusing the social media tool Storify in order to stalk and harass women, especially trans women, online. And Storify has not only failed to take this abuse seriously, but has also chosen to abet his abuse in harmful and egregious ways.
Let me back up. Yesterday I would have breathlessly told you that Storify was a valuable tool for compiling social media information. Twitter activism is powerful and meaningful, but Twitter makes it very difficult to compile lists of tweets (it's a 5-click process, at best, via Twitter). And Twitter also has a 3,200-search-limit on tweets: your 3,201th tweet, as well as every tweet before it, doesn't display in your Twitter account. That means that the only way I can access, for example, my filibuster tweets is via a laborious tweet-compilation process which Storify makes infinitely easier.
That's when people are using it properly. ElevatorGate has been instead using the Storify tool to obsessively compile the tweets of women he is stalking. Not tweets about activism or public events, or the sorts of things Storify is theoretically to be used for, but tweets about their favorite foods, about their daily lives, about their cat pictures. (I'm not going to link to examples of this and further victimize the women involved; suffice to say that I've looked through some of the 6,700+ Storifys in his profile.) He then uses the Storify "email notification" tool to spam the women he stalks with just that little daily notice that, hey, he's watching them. Every tweet they make. And storing those tweets up forever and ever without their consent.
Including tweets which, taken in the aggregate, could be used by anyone online to identify or locate or dox these women.
Several wonderful activists on Twitter who I follow have been speaking to Storify asking them to ban this user and delete his account. They have noted also that the Storify TOS must be updated to address people who use this valuable tool for stalking purposes. The Storify people have not been unresponsive, but they have (wrongly) seized on the belief that the real problem here is the "email notification" abuse and not the stalking behavior characterizing the compilations of this user. The Storify team alerted one of the activists that they had warned the stalker about his usage of the notification process and limited his ability to send notifications, though not his ability to continue to Storify.
[Note: These tweets shared with the consent of @brassiest, @hubbit, and @colorlessblue.]
