[Content Note: Guns; violence; disablism; xenophobia.]
It isn't enough for the media to speculate about Aaron Alexis' mental health and fondness for violent video games; now the Washington Post jumps in with a totally trenchant article about Buddhism, because: "The relationship, if any, between Alexis's spiritual beliefs and his rampage remains a mystery."
That is a sentence that would never, ever, be written by the mainstream US media about a shooter who was Christian.
[H/T to Aphra_Behn.]
Of Course
Question of the Day
If you were a superhero, what would your super power be and what would you be called?
Texting! With Liss and Deeky!
Near the end of an epic 24-hour texting session about the most recent episode of Breaking Bad. I am in grey and Deeks is in white...
Quote of the Day
"In 1989, the median American household made $51,681 in current dollars (the 2012 number, again, was $51,017). That means that 24 years ago, a middle class American family was making more than the a middle class family was making one year ago. This isn't a lost decade for economic gains for Americans. It is a lost generation."—Neil Irwin, on one of the more depressing findings in the Census Bureau's annual report on incomes and poverty.
Tweet of the Day
The real star in our family!! http://t.co/pI1yECRKU8
— Hugh Jackman (@RealHughJackman) September 17, 2013
His tweet links to this image of him with his French bulldog, Dali:
All the squeeeeees forever the end.
Welp
[Content Note: Guns; violence; disablism.]
Here we go again...
New York Times: Signs of Mental Illness Seen in Navy Gunman for Decade.
AP: Officials: Gunman Treated for Mental Health Issues.
Huffington Post: Aaron Alexis Mental Health: Gunman in Navy Yard Shooting Heard Voices.
The Telegraph: Aaron Alexis: Washington Navy Yard Gunman 'Obsessed with Violent Video Games'.
Etc.
[Related Reading: Their Bootstraps Made Them Do It.]
Right to Die
[Content Note: Assisted death.]
I have some disagreements with Professor Stephen Hawking (like the inherent mysteriousness of women, ahem), but we no longer disagree on assisted death, as Professor Hawking has changed his position:
Professor Stephen Hawking, who once said he thought assisted dying was "a great mistake", has changed his stance to support the right of terminally ill people who are suffering to end their lives.To be clear, Hawking had signaled support of legal assisted death previously, but qualified with his belief it was "a great mistake," because: "However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope."
...[I]n an interview with the BBC, Hawking, a cosmologist and theoretical physicist, offered his unqualified support to those who feel their life is no longer tolerable.
"I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their lives and those that help them should be free from prosecution," he said. "We don't let animals suffer, so why humans?"
He is concerned, however, that there must be safeguards to ensure that nobody's life is terminated against their wish. ..."There must be safeguards that the person concerned genuinely wants to end their life and they are not being pressurised into it or have it done without their knowledge or consent..."
I'm pleased he's now offering his support without such caveats, even as I understand why he made them, and I also share his concern in prioritizing consent in end of life decisions.
Earlier this year, Vermont because the fourth state in the US, in addition to Oregon, Washington, and Montana, to grant people with terminal illness the right to request an assisted death from doctors.
Opponents of such legislation tend to invoke the usual slippery-slope arguments about coercion and abuse, but the reality is that giving conscious, intellectually competent people the right to make decisions about the ends of their own lives provides fewer opportunities for abuse and more clarity around consent than handing over decision-making against a patient's preferences once that patient can no longer make decisions for hirself.
There are also real concerns about people feeling obliged to make end of life decisions to avoid saddling surviving family with massive medical bills, which is a good argument for socialized healthcare and not a good argument to deny people the right to die with dignity on their own time frame, if that is their wish.
I would certainly like to have this choice available to me, when and if I need it. Like Professor Hawking, I wonder why it is that we extend this kindness to our pets, but remain unwilling to extend it to one another.
If you're interested in learning more about assisted death laws in the US, the documentary How to Die in Oregon is an excellent resource.
Recommendations for Video Editing Software?
So, I've been trying to work on this video project, but I'm hitting a tech wall, so I figured I'd ask for some advice.
I've been trying to use Adobe Premiere, but it is super glitchy. Normally I love Adobe products, but I've tried using Premiere on my (now defunct) PC, on my laptop, and on Iain's laptop, and on all three, it crashes constantly and, half the time, the audio doesn't align with the video in video captures, so I spend a bunch of time recording something only to have the capture end up worthless. I've tried using an external webcam as well as the built-in laptop webcams, and have the same problems irrespective of the device. So I've pretty much had it with Premiere and I'm looking for an alternative.
I'm not keen on Sony Vegas, as I tried a demo and didn't love it, plus it's expensive, and I already wasted a bunch of money on Premiere. I'm also not keen on Windows Movie Maker, as it has been revamped, and its editing capabilities are garbage.
So what do you recommend? My operating system is Windows 7, and my primary needs are capture and basic editing.
A Statement of Trans-Inclusive Feminism and Womanism: Update
[Content Note: Transphobia.]
Yesterday, I wrote about being a signatory to A Statement of Trans-Inclusive Feminism and Womanism, a document signed by a collective of trans*, cis, binary-identified, and/or genderqueer activists, writers, and academics committed to practicing trans-inclusive feminism.
Earlier today, I asked one of the organizers of the statement and signatories for an update, and this was her response, which I am sharing with her permission:
This is a link to our follow-up statement, which lists the approximately 60 additional signatories (both individual and organizational) who asked to be added between the time it went live at about 4 pm EST yesterday, until I went to sleep at about 3 am this morning. The overall total as of that time was 161 signatories (153 individuals and 8 organizations) from 13 countries.So awesome. Please note that if you would like to add your name, instructions on how to do that are in the introduction here. Also, per the above email, it would be helpful to include how you would like to be listed—name and title (see the other signatories as examples)—to help save the organizers some time and additional work.
Another 60 or 70 people (or more; I haven't checked in the last hour!) have made requests just since last night, but we have to go through them first before we add any of them – a lot of people just write and say "please add my name" without explaining how they want to be listed, so we have to email them. Our plan right now is to add one new post at the end of every day, listing all the new signatories for that day, as long as they keep coming in at this rate. We also have a link at the end of the original post to the follow-up post, so people can read all the signatures if they want to.
There also appear to have been well over 100 supportive tweets.
The pushback has started; the party line appears to be that the whole thing is a pack of "libfem lies," and several people have demanded proof, with citations, that anti-trans radical feminists have ever engaged in violent rhetoric against trans women. We allowed one example of that in the comments to the original post, and responded in the comments (as did Flavia Dzodan), but aren't approving any further comments of that nature. These people have the entire Internet to say what they like, but we're not going to allow that kind of debate and derail in our space.
So the bottom line is that we are blown away by the degree of support so far. We never expected it!
Keep the support rolling! Let us overwhelm the TERFs with support for trans-inclusive feminism and womanism!
Daily Dose of Cute
Livsy, sound asleep with her paw on her head.
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
Here is some stuff in the news today!
Let's get ready to shutdoooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwn! "A Capitol Hill source tells Jonathan Cohn that backroom talks between House Republicans and the Obama administration over the pending budget deadline and debt ceiling limit have stopped: 'The breakdown is more extensive than you've heard. There is no discussion going on at all at this point.' The person added: 'Nobody knows how this will end. I'm not sure I remember a time when sides were as far apart as this.'" Everything is terrific in DC!
[Content Note: Guns] Speaking of which, still no overwhelming political will to get shit done on gun reforms, so the President is considering executive action. At this point, when I hear hyperbolic gun advocates breathlessly warning that "Obama will take away our guns," all I can think is: "If only."
The Supreme Court will hear a case out of Oklahoma that could outlaw all drug-induced abortions. Swell.
The CDC will start "categorizing drug-resistant superbugs by threat level." Instead of using the color-coded threat levels associated with terrorism, however, the CDC has designated its threat levels "urgent," "serious," and "concerning." All of those sound equally terrible and thus pretty meaningless!
[CN: Racism; violence] So, let me get this straight: Kanye West attacks a paparazzo and gets charged with battery and attempted theft, while Alec Baldwin, who has repeatedly attacked paparazzi, as recently as last month, gets his own show on MSNBC. Yeah, that sounds about right.
Do you want to take a class about The Walking Dead called "Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC's The Walking Dead," which definitely sounds like the best class ever if you are such a fan of patriarchs and zombies? Well, sign up then!
Vice-President Joe Biden stepped foot in Iowa, so obviously he's running for president. Someone get that man an ice cream cone and take some unfortunate pictures of him!
[CN: Misogyny] Have you heard that Bill Nye the Science Guy is on this season of Dancing with the Stars? Here is a clip of him dancing to "Weird Science," which is a gross song from a gross movie about nerds building a female sex robot.
NC Police Shooting Update
[Content Note: Police brutality; guns; violence; racism.]
Yesterday, I wrote about Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) Police Officer Randall Kerrick, a white man who was arrested after fatally shooting 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell, a black man who had been in a car accident and approached police for help, after the resident on whose door he knocked in the middle of the night called police.
Today, there are more details about the shooting:
An unarmed man seeking help after a car crash over the weekend was shot 10 times by the Charlotte police officer who's now charged in his death, investigators said Monday.Even if Ferrell had been doing something wrong—and he wasn't—police aren't tasked with reflexively murdering someone who is a threat to them or others. If it not possible to detain them, and a gun must be used as a last resort, surely some attempt should be made to disable someone before just slaughtering them in a hail of bullets.
A police news release said Officer Randall Kerrick fired 12 times at 24-year-old Jonathan A. Ferrell early Saturday while responding to a breaking and entering call. Ten of the bullets hit the former Florida A&M University football player.
I feel so desperately sad for Ferrell's family.
Also: Police brutality has always been a problem, especially against marginalized populations, as long as there have been police. But our collective unwillingness to address our garbage gun policies is making police objectively less safe (as it is making all of us less safe), and surely there are individual officers whose fear about gun proliferation will inform an urge to use deadly force in situations where none is needed. That is not to absolve Kerrick and other officers like him of their crimes, not even a little bit, but to highlight yet another consequence of our failure to take action on guns.
My point is not to make excuses for Kerrick, but to address what our communal responsibility is in having failed Ferrell.
And then there's this: As we hear ever more cases like this one, where does that leave us? If a man unknown to me comes knocking at my door in the middle of the night seeking help, I don't want to feel like if I call authorities ostensibly equipped with providing the aid he's seeking that I'm risking his life. I don't want to feel like I have to risk my own safety in order to protect a stranger's.
I'm not suggesting that Ferrell would have harmed the woman on whose door he was knocking. Clearly, he would not have. But that's the thing about strangers: You don't know. And if there's anyone about whom to be angry that we cannot safely trust men who are seeking help, it's the men who have feigned help-seeking to prey on their victims, and the victim-blamers who shame women who have extended good faith to help-seekers who victimized them.
Police routinely tell members of their communities to call them when a stranger needs help. When anyone needs help. But how can we safely help someone we believe is in genuine need by calling police, when this is a potential result?
Naval Yard Shooting Update
[Content Note: Guns; violence.]
We're starting to get information this morning about Aaron Alexis, the 34-year-old man who killed twelve people at Washington Naval Yard yesterday and was then himself killed by law enforcement.
The Seattle police have released information about a 2004 case in which Alexis shot out the tires of a vehicle on a construction site near his home:
At about 8 am that morning, two construction workers had parked their 1986 Honda Accord in the driveway of their worksite, next to a home where Alexis was staying in the Beacon Hill neighborhood.Alexis was charged only with "malicious mischief."
The victims reported seeing a man, later identified by police as Alexis, walk out of the home next to their worksite, pull a gun from his waistband and fire three shots into the two rear tires of their Honda before he walked slowly back to his home north of the construction site.
...When detectives interviewed workers and a manager at the construction site, they told police Alexis had "stared" at construction workers at the job site every day over the last month prior to the shooting. The owner of the construction business told police he believed Alexis was angry over the parking situation around the work site.
...Following his arrest, Alexis told detectives he perceived he had been "mocked" by construction workers the morning of the incident and said they had "disrespected him." Alexis also claimed he had an anger-fueled "blackout," and could not remember firing his gun at the victims' vehicle until an hour after the incident.
Alexis also told police he was present during "the tragic events of September 11, 2001" and described "how those events had disturbed him."
Detectives later spoke with Alexis' father, who lived in New York at the time, who told police Alexis had anger management problems associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that Alexis had been an active participant in rescue attempts on September 11th, 2001.
In 2010, Alexis was interviewed by police in Fort Worth after firing a gun through the ceiling of his apartment, which traveled into his upstairs neighbor's apartment:
The woman, whose name is not listed in a Fort Worth Police Department report, said that she was "terrified" of Alexis, who had previously confronted her about making too much noise. The neighbor, who was "visibly shaken up" when questioned by police, said that she believed the shooting was "intentional."No charges were filed in that case.
When police interrogated Alexis...he claimed that he was cleaning the weapon when it discharged. Alexis told cops that he was cooking at the time and his hands were slippery as he "began to take the gun apart when his hands slipped and pulled the trigger discharging a round into the ceiling."
...An officer noted that, while inside Alexis's apartment, a dismantled gun covered in oil could be seen.
Alexis had served in the Navy from May 2007 to January 2011, and recently "had served as a Naval reservist and had been working as a civilian contractor. But investigators were looking into claims that he recently lost that position, which they say may have set him off."
I have questions how it is that a person with two police reports about gun violence passes a background check to be a civilian contractor for the US government. I suppose the answer is the same way that a person with multiple police reports about the misuse of weapons, including one incident in which he claims he "blacked out" while firing a weapon in anger, legally retains his right to own guns and a concealed handgun license.
I don't even know what to say anymore. This is bad policy, and people are dying because of it.
[Commenting Note: As always, racist commentary is a violation of the commenting policy. Comments attributing Alexis' actions to his being a black man will be removed and the commenter banned.]
Question of the Day
What's for dinner? (Or: Whatever the next meal of the day is, in your part of the world.)
Quote of the Day
[Content Note: Racism.]
"I'm back!"—Paula Deen, celebrity chef and purveyor of racial discrimination, at a cooking trade show in Houston over the weekend, where she was greeted with "a reported 10-minute standing ovation."
Let the redemption narratives begin.
Seethe.
Australian Election News
by Shaker Ceredwyn Ealanta
[Content Note: Racism, sexism, rape apologia]
On 7 September 2013, Australia went to the polls to elect our next Prime Minister. Due to the way our electoral system works, minor parties can be accorded enough preferences to win a seat in the senate, so my ballot in particular was so long it could cover the width of my voting booth three times. If I had wanted to, I could have easily folded it into a charming hat or wallpapered an upmarket flat in Saint Kilda.
At the time of writing this, we know that all 150 seats in the Australian House of Representatives have been decided, and 40 (of the 76) seats in the Australian Senate.
Voting in Australia is compulsory (for now), and we generally know who will be Prime Minister the evening of every election, though due to rampant speculation, we usually think we know who will be the country's leader roughly three months before any election as well. While our system defangs some of the utter two party division seen in other countries, our new leader is generally Labor (centre, though there is an argument as to whether they are centre left or centre right) or Liberal-Coalition (historically centre-right, gradually becoming hard-right).
Australia has lost its Labor leadership under the office of Kevin Rudd, and has gained the highly conservative leader Tony Abbott. The Senate has ended up a chaotic mix of various parties, including the Australian Sports Party, the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party, Family First, Country Liberal Party and so forth. Emotions have been high, with the left-wing voters in Australia simultaneously glad that we managed not to give a seat to the Australia First Party (their white-power leader best known for organising a shotgun attack on an ANC representative and yet still being permitted to run), and appalled that we now have several years of leadership from Mr Abbott.
In the House of Representatives, we get to enjoy the spectacle of watching the Liberals court the Palmer United Party - run by a multi-millionaire mining magnate who is irking Rupert Murdoch by claiming that his former wife is a Chinese Spy - and Katter's Australian Party, a group that appears to exist to ensure that everyone is equally confused by their policies and that the requisite proportion of cattle hats and crocodile wrestling remains in Australian politics.
Tony Abbott remains our leader however, and he has a history of denigrating the rights of women and indigenous people, and is the current focus of our shameful position on refugee policy.
We are committed to trans*-inclusive feminism.
I, along with nearly 100 other trans*, cis, binary-identified, and/or genderqueer signatories, have signed A Statement of Trans-Inclusive Feminism and Womanism. The document, which was developed in response to "a noticeable increase in transphobic feminist activity this summer"—including but not limited to "the forthcoming book by Sheila Jeffreys from Routledge; the hostile and threatening anonymous letter sent to Dallas Denny after she and Dr. Jamison Green wrote to Routledge regarding their concerns about that book; and the recent widely circulated statement entitled 'Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Critique of 'Gender',' signed by a number of prominent, and we regret to say, misguided, feminists"—commits to a trans*-inclusive feminism, acknowledges the harm done by transphobia within feminism, and condemns the misrepresentation of criticism of transphobia as silencing.
We are committed to recognizing and respecting the complex construction of sexual/gender identity; to recognizing trans* women as women and including them in all women's spaces; to recognizing trans* men as men and rejecting accounts of manhood that exclude them; to recognizing the existence of genderqueer, non-binary identifying people and accepting their humanity; to rigorous, thoughtful, nuanced research and analysis of gender, sex, and sexuality that accept trans* people as authorities on their own experiences and understands that the legitimacy of their lives is not up for debate; and to fighting the twin ideologies of transphobia and patriarchy in all their guises.Please read the entire statement in its entirety. If you are active in social media or have a website of your own, please signal-boost this important project, if you can safely do so.
Transphobic feminism ignores the identification of many trans* and genderqueer people as feminists or womanists and many cis feminists/womanists with their trans* sisters, brothers, friends, and lovers; it is feminism that has too often rejected them, and not the reverse. It ignores the historical pressures placed by the medical profession on trans* people to conform to rigid gender stereotypes in order to be "gifted" the medical aid to which they as human beings are entitled. By positing "woman" as a coherent, stable identity whose boundaries they are authorized to police, transphobic feminists reject the insights of intersectional analysis, subordinating all other identities to womanhood and all other oppressions to patriarchy. They are refusing to acknowledge their own power and privilege.
We recognize that transphobic feminists have used violence and threats of violence against trans* people and their partners and we condemn such behavior. We recognize that transphobic rhetoric has deeply harmful effects on trans* people's real lives; witness CeCe MacDonald's imprisonment in a facility for men. We further recognize the particular harm transphobia causes to trans* people of color when it combines with racism, and the violence it encourages.
When feminists exclude trans* women from women's shelters, trans* women are left vulnerable to the worst kinds of violent, abusive misogyny, whether in men's shelters, on the streets, or in abusive homes. When feminists demand that trans* women be excluded from women's bathrooms and that genderqueer people choose a binary-marked bathroom, they make participation in the public sphere near-impossible, collaborate with a rigidity of gender identities that feminism has historically fought against, and erect yet another barrier to employment. When feminists teach transphobia, they drive trans* students away from education and the opportunities it provides.
We also reject the notion that trans* activists' critiques of transphobic bigotry "silence" anybody. Criticism is not the same as silencing.
"My feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit."—Flavia Dzodan.
