Here is some stuff in the news today!
Happy 50th birthday, First Lady Michelle Obama!
[Content Note: Death penalty; torture] I can't even find the words to describe my horror at the execution of Dennis McGuire that took place in Ohio yesterday, during which the state tested a new cocktail of drugs that took nearly a half hour to kill the gasping McGuire. States keep looking for new alternatives, but the only alternative is to eradicate executions. The ACLU's Mike Brickner reports: "New Execution Methods Can't Disguise Same Old Death Penalty Problems."
[CN: Destruction; fire] Awful: "A fast-moving California wildfire, apparently started accidentally by three campers, roared out of control in the foothills above Los Angeles on Thursday, destroying five homes and forcing about 3,600 residents to flee, fire and law enforcement officials have said."
In case you needed another reason to support the Davis-Van de Putte ticket in Texas: "As sometimes happens at crowded political events with supporters standing long hours under hot stage lights, a woman had fainted. Van de Putte, a pharmacist who requires all her campaign staff to learn CPR, said it was instinct to step down into the crowd and assist EMTs, who were on site, to revive the woman."
The Polar Vortex is probably coming back. Oh for fuck's sake.
Janelle Monáe on Sesame Street. I repeat: Janelle Monáe on Sesame Street!
Google is working on a contact lens that will test the blood sugar of people with diabetes, as a less painful alternative to pricking fingers. Neat!
The CW abandons its Wonder Woman project. Boo.
RIP Russell Johnson, best known as the Professor from Gilligan's Island, and Dave Madden, best known as Reuben Kincaid from The Partridge Family.
In the News
Indiana Republicans' Latest Ploy to Circumvent Democracy
[Content Note: Homophobia.]
Indiana already has a state law restricting same-sex marriage, but our Republican-controlled state legislature is nonetheless determined to codify discrimination into the state constitution, despite the fact that a majority of Hoosiers do not support the proposed legislation and in fact want the existing ban repealed.
So determined are they to pass this discriminatory and indecent legislation that they will resort to the most breathtaking fuckery: "House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, may take the extraordinary step of replacing members on the House Judiciary Committee to ensure the marriage amendment wins committee approval and gets a vote by the full House. ...At least three of the nine Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are believed to be considering voting with the four committee Democrats against the marriage amendment, which would kill it."
Got that? The Republican House Speaker will replace Republican members on the House Judiciary Committee in order to pass anti-gay legislation that a majority of people in the state don't even want.
Bookmark this story for the next time you see some smug fauxgressive jerk talking about how people in red states are all backwards hillbillies who deserve whatever we get. Because this is the kind of shit we're dealing with.
State Rep. Brian Bosma's contact form for Indiana residents is here. His office telephone number if 317.232.9677. His office's email is h88@in.gov. Please contact him and politely request that he stop pursuing passage of HJR-3 and instead support equality.
Republicans Think People Aren't Entitled to Food
[Content Note: Class warfare; food insecurity.]
Republicans think people aren't entitled to food. Republicans think people aren't entitled to food. REPUBLICANS! THINK! PEOPLE! AREN'T! ENTITLED! TO FOOD! Republican Senator David Vitter thinks people aren't entitled to food:
Under a bill Vitter introduced Wednesday, beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) [also known as food stamps] would be denied their food if they are unable to show a photographic identification card at the register. For millions of low-income Americans who don't have an official photo ID and can't necessarily afford to buy one, Vitter's bill would mean being cut off from their primary food source.And naturally Vitter justifies this nasty bit of class warfare with garbage narratives about how the program is widely exploited by scam artists and lazies and takers and various other conservative caricatures of poor people:
[Vitter] says the legislation "will restore some accountability to the program so it's not ruined for people who use it appropriately," suggesting that "fraud surrounding the taxpayer-funded program" is part of why SNAP costs doubled since 2008.Rage. Seethe. Boil.
SNAP fraud rates hover at around 1%, "the lowest fraud rates of any public program." And the reason why SNAP costs have doubled is not because of increased fraud, but because of increased need. More people are dependent on food assistance programs because more people aren't earning enough money to meet their basic needs without help, as a result of a long recession with high unemployment and a "recovery" that has disproportionately favored the wealthy.
Those are demonstrable facts. But a Republican Senator will shamelessly tell fairy tales about the fraud and greed and low moral character of people in need of some help, so he can justify legislation to cut costs by denying food to vulnerable people. Because he thinks people aren't entitled to food.
Republicans think people aren't entitled to food. That is the most basic strategic move in class warfare. Let them eat bootstraps.
[H/T to @SoDevolved.]
Seen
A church sign in my neighborhood:
Stop Complaining and Gain Some PerspectiveNo, you stop complaining and gain some perspective.
PS: Freedom isn't free.
PPS: I talked to my friend who's a Passive Aggressive Studies major, and she agreed that that church sign totally counts as complaining.
President Obama Will Fix Everything
Reuters: Obama to announce overhaul to controversial NSA program.
President Barack Obama will announce on Friday a major overhaul of a controversial National Security Agency program that collects vast amounts of basic telephone call data on foreigners and Americans, a senior Obama administration official said."Aimed at restoring Americans' confidence in US intelligence practices." As opposed to: Aimed at halting illegal spying on people in the US and abroad.
In an 11 a.m. (1600 GMT) speech at the Justice Department, Obama will say he is ordering a transition that will significantly change the handling of what is known as the telephone "metadata" program from the way the NSA currently handles it.
Obama's move is aimed at restoring Americans' confidence in U.S. intelligence practices and caps months of reviews by the White House in the wake of damaging disclosures about U.S. surveillance tactics from former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden.
In a nod to privacy advocates, Obama will say he has decided that the government should not hold the bulk telephone metadata, a decision that could frustrate some intelligence officials.
In addition, he will order that effectively immediately, "we will take steps to modify the program so that a judicial finding is required before we query the database," said the senior official, who revealed details of the speech on condition of anonymity.
...Obama is balancing public anger at the disclosure of intrusion into Americans' privacy with his commitment to retain policies he considers critical to protecting the United States.
Oh, I'm so cynical. I know. But the reason I don't foresee meaningful change is not just because of a few lines in a single news story that make the Obama administration sound more interested in improving PR than improving their intelligence policies. It's because once these sorts of practices start, they never get rolled back. Not really. Despite lots of lipservice about accountability and oversight and warrants and balance and blah blah fart, once a piece of our privacy is gone at this level in service to "national security," it tends to stay gone.
That is one thing on which both parties are always able to agree.
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UPDATE: Here is the full transcript of the President's address.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker Modiano: "What is your favorite (or most memorable) documentary film or series?"
Mine still is and may forever be Baraka.
Fatsronauts 101
Fatsronauts 101 is a series in which I address assumptions and stereotypes about fat people that treat us as a monolith and are used to dehumanize and marginalize us. If there is a stereotype you'd like me to address, email me.
[Content Note: Fat bias.]
#23: Fat advocates want to force people to find fat people sexually attractive.
Nope.
I am tempted just to leave it at that, because, seriously: Nope. But I'll just briefly add: This is a pretty common accusation levied against anyone who advocates on behalf of fat people, and especially anyone who challenges the notion that fat is axiomatically ugly.
Brian has effectively addressed that crap here, from a fat man's and fat admirer's perspective.
I will just briefly add, from a fat woman's perspective, that the mendacious misrepresentation of my asking people to respect my humanity as, instead, my demanding that people find me sexually attractive is:
1. A useful red herring to turn a valid argument about basic humanity into a garbage debate about how unfair and unreasonable fat advocates are. Suddenly we're not talking about, say, an equal right to access healthcare but instead what "delusional freaks" fat people are who want to force thin people to be attracted to us.
2. Indicative of the pattern of any woman asking for recognition of her full humanity being audited on the basis of her sexual appeal and availability, because misogynists who view women as a sex class value us on the basis of our fuckability. So when they hear any woman saying, "I want to be valued," they hear, "I want you to find me attractive." Because women have no other conceivable value to them.
This, again, is why fat is a feminist issue.
[Related Reading: The Fat Body Visible and Beautiful.]
-------------------------
Previously:
#22: All fat people are lazy and/or weak.
#21: Fat bodies have no feeling.
#20: Fat people aren't that bright.
#19: All fat people hate/want to change their bodies.
#18: You can diagnose fat people's health issues by looking at them.
#17: Fat people's choices are always dictated by their fat.
#16: You are helping fat people by shaming them.
#15: Fat people hate having their pictures taken.
#14: All fat people are unhealthy.
#13: Fat people looooooooooove Twinkies!
#12: Fat people don't like/want to see media representations of themselves.
#11: No one wants to be fat.
#10: Fat people need you to intervene in their lives.
#9: Fat people don't know how they look.
#8: Fat people don't deserve anything nice.
#7: Fat people are permission slips for thin people to eat what they want.
#6: Any fat person eating a salad or exercising is trying to lose weight.
#5: Fat is axiomatically ugly.
#4: Fat people eat enormous amounts of food.
#3: Fat people are jolly/mean, and fat people are shy/loud.
#2: I can tell how someone eats all the time, because of how they eat around me.
#1: Everyone who is fat is fat for the same reason.
Photo of the Day
From the Telegraph's Pictures of the Day for 16 January 2014: A male peacock displays his feathers at Sri Lanka's Yala National Park, in the southern district of Yala. [Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/AFP]Stunning.
All Your Texts Belong to the NSA
NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep: "The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents. ...The NSA program, codenamed Dishfire, collects 'pretty much everything it can,' according to [UK spy agency] GCHQ documents, rather than merely storing the communications of existing surveillance targets."
Neat!
I know this totally isn't How It Works, but I nonetheless love the idea of some poor put-upon NSA analyst sitting at a shitty desk in a garbage cubicle having to read every one of Deeky's and my terrific text conversations about buttholes, chemical peels, and Flowers in the Attic.
The Cardinal Rules
by Cristy Cardinal, otherwise known in these parts as Shaker masculine_lady.
[Content Note: Discussion of various failures around sex, sexuality, consent, and marginalized bodies.]
I am not a resolution maker, at the New Year or any other time. But, it is inevitable that I will review the year as it comes to a close and notice any themes that might inform my plans for the New Year. For example, I might notice that I spent a lot of 2013 ill with pneumonia, so in 2014, I am going to make damn sure to get a flu shot and a pneumonia vaccine (all true).
Two other things I noticed as themes of 2013 were: Dan Savage continues to be a dipshit, and people like to ask me for advice (I also enjoy telling people what to do, so it works out).
Dan Savage, who writes the advice column on sex, love and relationships called Savage Love, lucked into his job when he told the founder of the Seattle paper The Stranger to include an advice column in the fledging publication and was subsequently offered the job. Dan is also the creator of the It Gets Better Project and the alternative meaning of Rick Santorum's last name (please note the irony of creating both an anti-bullying project and bullying a public figure and everyone else who shares his last name, including his children, by making their last name mean something sexually explicit many people will consider vulgar).
He gives terrible advice. He tells rape survivors to "get over it already." He is actively hateful of bisexual folks. He hates on fat people all the time. He is not a big fan of women or trans* folks. He is invested in hegemonic masculinity and white supremacy because they benefit him. He is also a bit of an assimilationist gay man and would prefer that all the queer freaks disappear. It seems that Dan really only likes people who are exactly like him, and his primary advice to give is: Be more like me.
One of Dan's potentially dangerous advice tropes is his conviction that we owe our partners sex, as if it is some sort of bill we pay in order to be partnered whether we want to or not, rather than an expression of intimacy in a whole range of expressions we have available. This is an ongoing theme in his sex advice, so much so that I'll be featuring a whole column (what? keep reading!) on that in the near future.
Dan Savage's terrible advice kept showing up in my life in 2013, with the affiliated groans and complaints that this dude is just.so.terrible. There was at least a week in October or so where he was on my FB daily. And during that week, for the second time, I casually mentioned that I should do my own advice column, as an alternative. I could answer original questions, but also go back and re-answer questions that Dan had really screwed up.
This brings me to the second theme of 2013: People like to ask me for advice (and I like to tell them what to do). Friends of mine have joked over the years that they need t-shirts or bracelets that say, "WWCCD (What Would Cristy Cardinal Do)" so they could channel my insight when they were in a quandary. Last year, people really did ask me for advice a lot, and I discovered that I enjoyed the hell out of it.
So, when I did the 2013 review, I realized that now just might be the time for a person who practices intersectional feminism, well-versed in rape culture and the components of supportive egalitarian relationships, who values rather than discounts the differences in the people around me, who tries really hard to understand that there is more than one way to be a human being or have a relationship, and can see past the end of her nose, to write an advice column.
Oh—and, unlike Dan Savage, I'm actually a professional advocate and educator.
"Cardinal Rules: 21st Century Advice on Life, Love and Sundry Other Bullsh*t" is that advice column. I launched earlier this week, and the first column is up—a re-answer of a Savage Love question from 2010.
We all need advice sometimes, and we shouldn't have to ask a garbage nightmare like that dude for it. Seriously, he claims to be America's only advice columnist. I don't know if that was true last week, but it's not true now!
I know that when I've asked for advice, I felt pretty vulnerable. When it's our turn to seek answers, we should be able to trust that the advice giver will be compassionate and not a judgmental asshole (I considered "Not a Judgmental Asshole" as the tagline, but it didn't take).
You can ask questions, or submit a Savage Love column for review, here.
(Also, many thanks to Liss for suggesting the name "Cardinal Rules" because she rules.)
Daily Dose of Cute
Just a normal napping position.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
And the Guardian Weighs In
[Content Note: Choice policing; terminal illness; disablism.]
Part One: Emma Keller writes a terrible piece for the Guardian ostensibly pondering "the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness," which is really just a bunch of rank policing of Lisa Bonchek Adams' choices surrounding her sharing her lived experiences with cancer on social media.
Part Two: Emma Keller's husband, Bill Keller, writes a terrible piece for the New York Times, which is more of the same reprehensible garbage.
Part Three: The New York Times Public Editor responds with some weak sauce, and Bill Keller doubles-down on being a total nightmare.
And thus we come to Part Four, in which the Guardian's Chris Elliott explains: "Why an article on Lisa Bonchek Adams was removed from the Guardian site."
The subtitle pretty much says it all: "I don't think it is wrong to frame a question about how those with incurable illnesses use social media, but the Guardian was wrong in the way it went about it."
I mean, basically, if you don't think it's wrong to police how people use social media to talk about their own lives, then we're pretty much done here.
Although I do want to highlight this bit of fuckery:
One of the many difficulties in trying to resolve the complaint is that the complainant is undergoing painful treatment. While she has continued to tweet from hospital, she has made clear in the two emails the Guardian has received from her that she does not feel she should have to take time from her treatment to engage with the process of correcting what she believes is wrong in the piece. I entirely understand and respect her position.Really? Are you sure you entirely respect her position? Because I'm pretty sure you just implicitly accused her of either lying or having shitty priorities, by noting she is continuing to tweet from the hospital but isn't sending you detailed information about what Emma Keller got wrong in her contemptible piece.
And in case it wasn't clear enough the first time:
I have written to Adams to suggest we put up a fresh piece dealing with all her issues when she is able to engage with us, and to offer to publish a response entirely from her point of view. However, it is only right that this should be in her own time and that she should be allowed to get on with her treatment without any pressures. Therefore I do not anticipate that I will have fully resolved all issues for some time, and I think that we should not restore Keller's original article to our website until I can do so.How magnanimous. You know, that might have seemed a lot more compassionate if Elliott hadn't noted several paragraphs earlier that Lisa Bonchek Adams "has continued to tweet from hospital."
Essentially, this piece is just a replay of the original objections: The public shaming and auditing of how Lisa Bonchek Adams spends her time and energy.
This time, with an added dose of tasking her with the responsibility for Emma Keller's original piece still being removed from the site.
That is an extraordinary deflection of accountability for publishing and subsequently removing Keller's piece. Disgraceful.
This is a real thing in the world.
[Content Note: Misogyny.]
Let's count just a few of the ways this cover is a piece of shit:
1. As I have previously observed, after first being told to GTFO during the 2008 election, then being admonished for the past year that she HAS TO run, now we're back to wondering if there is any way to stop her. That sound you hear is my mirthless laughter reverberating through the entirety of the known universe.
2. That image. Oh my god that image. Can anyone stop Hillary from smashing all the tiny, helpless men who want a shot at the presidency but are too tiny and helpless to stop her?! Even when a woman reaches something resembling parity with men, at least in terms of access to power, suddenly she is MONSTROUS. A destroyer of all things.
3. That image. Blue slacks. Black shoes. Where have I seen that before? Oh right.
4. That image. Of Hillary Clinton's giant feet and a tiny, helpless man. Where have I seen that before? Oh right.
5. The accompanying story opens with a novel new way to assert that Hillary Clinton is a totes big liar about whether she's made up her mind about running in 2016—by saying it's probably true, but ha ha you know how those tricksy Clintons are!
Hillary Clinton has not decided whether to run for President again. I have this on good authority, despite a recent barrage of reports detailing the many moves that signal a campaign in the making. People close to Clinton and familiar with her thinking insist that she hasn't made a decision.Can anyone else think of any problems with using this sort of "I know what she really wants despite what she's saying" narrative about a female candidate? Because I can think of one!
Perhaps it all comes down, in Clintonian fashion, to definitions. It depends on the meaning of the word decide. And on the meaning of the word run. In Hillary Clinton, the United States of America is now experiencing a rare, if not unprecedented, political phenomenon; she requires a new lexicon.
Although I'm sure I'm just being a hypersensitive, over-reactionary, hysterical feminist who's just looking for things about which to get mad again. You know me.
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today!
[Content Note: Profiling] Here is some good news (contingent upon whether the change is actually implemented): "The Justice Department will significantly expand its definition of racial profiling to prohibit federal agents from considering religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation in their investigations, a government official said Wednesday. The move addresses a decade of criticism from civil rights groups that say federal authorities have in particular singled out Muslims in counterterrorism investigations and Latinos for immigration investigations."
[CN: Rape apologia] Another Republican genius on rape: Virginia congressional hopeful Richard Black "opposed criminalizing spousal rape while he served in the Virginia state legislature. His reason? It would be impossible to prosecute a man for rape 'when they're living together, sleeping in the same bed, she's in a nightie, and so forth,' Black said in 2011. He also argued that men should not have to live with the 'emormous fear' of facing a false spousal rape accusation." He sounds terrific.
[CN: Gun violence] Last night in northern Indiana, a man shot and killed two people in a grocery store before he was killed by police: "Elkhart police received a call about a gunman at Martin's Super Market about 10pm Wednesday, Indiana state police sergeant Trent Smith said Thursday. The 22-year-old gunman used a semi-automatic handgun to shoot and kill a 20-year-old employee and a 44-year-old shopper, Smith said. The victims' bodies were found about 12 aisles apart." The shooting appears to be random, and "a large knife was also found near the gunman's body." Fucking hell.
An amazing cat saved his neighbor's life by warning him he was about to have a heart attack. Cats, man.
[CN: Rape] A woman who survived being raped and then was accused of lying by police who subsequently interrogated her into confessing to false charges has been exonerated and awarded a $150,000 settlement. The man who raped her, Marc O'Leary, "is currently serving a 327 1/2-year sentence in Colorado for raping multiple women."
(Just yesterday, I was talking to Lauren Chief Elk on Twitter about how one of the most detestable thing about Law & Order: SVU and similar police procedurals is that they give the erroneous impression that virtually all cops and prosecutors are keen to pursue rapists. This is, unfortunately, not the case.)
A funeral home in Clinton, Arkansas, is training a two-year-old King Charles Spaniel named Mollie to be a grief therapy dog. I love this idea!
[CN: Gun violence] Newtown shooter Adam Lanza reportedly called into an Oregon radio show, "Anarchy Radio," to discuss mass shootings a year before he went on his shooting spree.
Do you want to see Flula beatbox in slow motion? I can't imagine why you wouldn't!
Nope
[Content Note: Regionalism.]
This is a regularly scheduled reminder that talking shit about "red states" and telling progressives there that we should "just move" is hostile garbage.
It's incredibly demoralizing for progressive activists who live in states with conservative governments (which, as a reminder, often are governing in direct contravention of the will of the people) to be told constantly that we should leave or homes, or that our home states are terrible places.
Not everyone has the privilege of being able to move, which is to say nothing of not everyone having the desire to move—and those of us who could move, who choose to stay and fight on behalf of our values and in solidarity with those who can't pick up and leave, have a rough enough time of it without being written off by ostensible allies.
Knock it off.
[Note: For Shakers having a rough go of it on social media and elsewhere with this kind of nonsense, please feel absolutely welcome to cut and paste as needed.]
The Oscar Nominations Open Thread
[Content Note: Racism; appropriation.]
The 2014 Oscar Nominations have been announced. The complete list can be viewed here.
Not a single woman of color was nominated in the Best Actress category. The only people of color nominated for acting awards were Chiwetel Ejiofor (Best Actor) and Lupita Nyong'o (Best Supporting Actress) for 12 Years a Slave, and Barkhad Abdi (Best Supporting Actor) for Captain Phillips.
While white actors and actresses were nominated for playing roles like stock broker, astronaut, patient advocate, pursuer of justice, random white person living hir random white person life, black actors were nominated exclusively for playing enslaved people and a pirate.
That is not to demean, at all, the fine work done by the nominated black actors. It is merely to observe that the type of roles for black actors, especially those likely to garner award nominations, is vastly different from those available to white actors.
On Twitter, Amadi observed:
Welp.
And in a nation where most of these films were made, the US, which has a population that is 17% Hispanic or Latin@, not a single Hispanic or Latin@ actor can be found among the nominees.
In other news, of course Jared Leto was nominated for his portrayal of a transgender woman, because why wouldn't he be. *thatface*
Discuss.
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UPDATE: On Twitter, Flavia noted that the Razzie Nominations, which purport to nominate the worst films, filmmakers, and actors of the year, seemed to have nominated more people than the Oscars. And, in fact, just in CNN's coverage of the Razzies, there are mentioned four people of color nominated for worst performances: Jaden Smith, Tyler Perry, Halle Berry, and Selena Gomez.
That's one more than the Oscars.
Which is to say nothing of nominations for writing, directing, etc. Worst films include Tyler Perry's latest as well as After Earth, starring & directed by men of color.
UPDATE 2: Michael K has the complete list of Razzie nominations here, and there are even more nominated people of color, including Salma Hayek, Chris Brown, and Will Smith.
