As you know, House Republicans are flipping out and screaming about Obama and the HHS wanting to mandate contraception coverage for those dirty, dirty sluts that use contraception, the ones that constitute over 99% of women. This isn't about "religious freedom", no matter how much that's being used as a distraction. As Mother Jones reports, the USCCB has made it clear that they want a repeal of the entire mandate, because they think women having sex for pleasure is wrong, full stop. Before they were screeching about "religious freedom", the USCCB was clear that they just really want to punish women for fucking. Dana Goldstein reported on this in 2010, and got this delicious quote:
"I don't want to overstate or understate our level of concern," said McQuade, the Catholic bishops' spokesperson. "We consider [birth control] an elective drug. Married women can practice periodic abstinence. Other women can abstain altogether. Not having sex doesn't make you sick."
This is a full-blown war on women's sexuality. Always has been. Republicans are rallying around the idea that women who have sex are sinful and dirty and that therefore their basic health care needs aren't "real" health care. That's what's behind this battle, and was behind the attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, and the pushing of abstinence-only education before that.
“‘I was thinking about how sexy it would be to kiss you,’” world renowned pickup artist Wayne Elise told a group of young Rick Santorum fans. “You can say that [to a girl], it’s a cool.”
Elise, better known by his handle “Juggler” from Neil Strauss’ notorious pickup memoir The Game, was offering advice to attendees at conservative mega-conference CPAC on how to improve their dating game. Remember that old VH1 reality show The Pickup Artist with that lanky host with a Slash hat and goggles teaching people how to insult girls then hit on them when their self esteem is shattered? This is one of his top rivals, charging upwards of $5,000 for a one-day private session.....
But on Thursday, young socially conservative activists got it for free. One tip, he noted, was to introduce sensuality into early conversations with girls — like the above quote — to keep from falling into the platonic zone with your target.
“Most guys fall into the category of not being sexual enough, so that girls will easily see them as friend material and the guys have a hard time getting out of that,” he said. “I think one of my ideas that connects to conservatives is that it’s OK to wait but you definitely want to show the person you’re sexual and sensual.”
Emphasis mine. This goes on for awhile, but the short version of it is that while simultaneously screeching about the evils of feminism and how terrible it is that women want to have their contraception covered like common slatterns, conservative activists are also encouraging young men to be more sexual, more sexually aggressive, and to even seek casual sex with women. Women who then can be condemned by the Catholic bishops, House Republicans, anti-choice activists, and whoever else wants a potshot for offending their delicate sensibilities with their desire not to get pregnant. The double standard always lurks in these discussions about sex, but man, it's just getting blatant. Being a perverted liberal, I've been to lots of conferences where groups like Planned Parenthood and the like handed out condoms, precisely because they know people hook up at these things. But I'm guessing they're not welcome at CPAC. Because while men apparently need to be more sexual, women being sexual at all is a national tragedy that moaning and wailing about it has to dominate the cable news and the halls of Congress.
Update: I also want to point out that "pick-up artistry" is sexist, in that it promotes a "men are hunters/women are prey" approach to sex, as opposed to the enthusiastic consent model of femihism. But it's also just bullshit. If anything, some of their pointers, such as being rude and insulting to women, probably make it less likely you'll get laid. You're better off honing your overall social skills, because women are people, and being people, they act like people.
Mark Oppenheimer has a long but well worth reading profile of Maggie Gallagher, the avid opponent of same-sex marriage, up at Salon. His read on her personality coincides with the observations of a lot of us who've had to deal with her, which is that her self-absorption in her own pain makes her weirdly oblivious to the idea that other people also have feelings and lives that matter. Oppenheimer really spells out something that's well-known in activist circles around gay marriage, both pro and con, which is that Gallagher's hostility to gay marriage is rooted, bizarrely, in her endless bitterness that her pregnancy in her sophomore year resulted not in a proposal of marriage, but in being dumped. This wound is the one her entire life is about tending (not healing, because she really scratches at it and keeps it nice and raw). Really, she's about the closest thing that modern life has to one version of the movie villain, the person whose profound evil is rooted in a single trauma, and who without that might have been a really good person. Darth Vader, all vampires, you know the kind of villains I'm talking about. What that has to do with gay marriage might not seem immediately obvious, but Oppenheimer manages to convey the way I've heard it explained to me by various people in the know about this:
“I’m a revert,” Gallagher says. “I was raised Catholic. When I was 8, my mother left the church, and she ended up doing a lot of spiritual seeking … I was an atheist from the youngest age. When I was 16, I became a Randian. Becoming a Catholic began as an intellectual thing. In college, I reasoned my way into the pro-life stance. I could not come up with any good reason why the person inside a woman was not a person. Also, I had completely separated sex from procreation, and after I got pregnant, I realized that was a mistake. All the smartest people in the world, draped in all their Ph.D.s, were saying that sex and procreation were separate things, and of course that was just completely not true. The Catholic Church was the only institution that was saying that was not true. On the big issues, I began to realize that on all the issues I thought most deeply about, the church was right.”
The great trauma of Gallagher’s youth, her unplanned pregnancy and subsequent alienation from the father of her child, was rooted in failing to understand that sex and procreation are connected. It is understandable that, having grasped the truth, she is intent on emphasizing its importance. So it follows that gay marriage and, above all, gay parenthood, more than gay people themselves, presents a real challenge to her belief system. Same-sex marriage advocates offend her hard-won wisdom in two ways. First, they imply that sex and love can in fact be separate from procreation, and no less valid for it. Second, and perhaps more troubling for Gallagher, the increasingly visible column of attentive, loving gay parents — gay male parents in particular — mocks her own romantic choices. It mocks her own son’s good-for-nothing father. There must be something wrong with these gay dads, something contrary to the natural order, such that even when they appear to be splendid dads themselves, their agenda is the cause of poor parenting in others.
What's fascinating about Gallagher is that she has always maintained that it was liberalism and feminism that failed her. But as she admits here, she was no liberal feminist when she got pregnant. Far from it. She was a prominent campus conservative, a member of Yale's Party of the Right. The guy who got her pregnant was also in the Party of the Right. She wasn't soaking in feminist values when she got pregnant and was, by her measure, abandoned. They were self-professed right wingers that believed in conservative values. Thus, it seems the only logical set of values to blame is the conservative ones.
I'm happy to make that case. Gallagher is a big time anti-choice nut, and soaked completely in anti-choice narratives and myths. One of the most important, prominent myths the anti-choice movement pushes is that babies turn reticient men into loving husbands and fathers. The shotgun marriage is probably the central fantasy of the anti-choice movement, I'd argue. Anti-choice groups like Feminists for Life put most of their energies into pushing the myth that a mercurial lover will, when you tell him you're pregnant, glow with love and immediately fall to his knees and ask for your hand. They have a lecture series where women who got pregnant in college tell glowing stories of boyfriends who joyfully embraced the pregnancy and married them immediately, even though they were still college students. Abortion is often fingered as the reason that women marry later or not at all, again because of this rock solid belief that unintended pregnancies turn carefree bachelors into worshipful grooms.
Hey, I'm not in Gallagher's head, but it seems likely that the reason she's so bitter is she bought the myth that patriarchy is about providing and protecting women, and that as long as you're a good girl who refuses to separate sex from procreation, you'll be rewarded with a handsome husband and a beautiful wedding gown. But what she got instead was a swift lesson in how patriarchy is actually just about men dominating women. (Well, and it is also about creating a pecking order amongst men, often by using women's bodies for status.) You can lead a man to engagement water, but you can't make him drink.
No, the problem wasn't feminism, but not enough feminism. One of the nice things about feminism is that it teaches that women are full human beings and that we have value outside of being wives and mothers. And that you should get married because you want to, not because you "have" to. To be blunt, you're not going to meet many feminists who have whoopsie pregnancies and then flip around expecting the ring to be produced, and then are angry if it's not. Giving women rights means also imbuing women with responsibilities. If indeed one of the trade-off of having reproductive rights is that we forsake the right to pressure a man into marriage with pregnancy, then that's fine with me. Those marriages tend not to be too happy, anyway, and as Gallagher learned, an oopsie is no guarantee that a man is going to cough up the ring. We're better of being empowered to care for ourselves instead of depending on men to do it.
In round one bazillion of the "man, atheists really need to deal with the misogynists" problem, we have Penn Jillette. I know, surprising that he's got a wide misogynist streak, right? I mean, I try not to judge a book by its cover, but if there were cash prizes for correctly guessing which celebrities are still bitter about not getting laid in high school, he would definitely be on my ballot. Now there's a kerfuffle because Jillette is a big fan of everyone's favorite C-word.
As you can imagine, his defenders are trotting out the "just because you call someone a cunt doesn't mean you're sexist!" argument. This is why I get a little frustrated with trying to prove sexism or racism on a single word. It has this tendency to narrow the playing field, make it all about "proving" whether this word or that word is an Official Utterance of -Ists, which distracts from the larger issues and encourages -Ists to use coded language for better ass-coverage in the future. ("Food stamp President" is a good example.) In this case, "cunt" was just the icing on the cake of an explosive bit of inexplicable misogynist diarrhea. You see, this is the piece that caused Jillette such profound anger. As you'll see, it's a harmless bit of goofing on Super Bowl ads, clearly written for an audience looking to pass some time while they're eating a sandwich at their desks, i.e. the bread and butter of freelance humor writing online. I would rate it as funnier than most of these pieces, because it has a clever conceit (marketers are worried about the apocalypse) and because it's breezily written and made me smile. In offensiveness terms, I would rank it somewhere between that video of otters holding hands and Kitten Covers.
In addition, the complaints the Jillette are trotting out are very much of the "those in glass houses" variety. I don't know that someone whose career started because he thought card tricks were first rate entertainment is really in the position to be judging whether or not something is quality sandwich-eating-time-passing material. As for the accusation of strained, repetitive comedy, well, when I think of that, well certainly I'd never think of "Bullshit". I mean, coming up with thin excuses to have naked ladies walking around and being able to say curse words on a TV show is a fresh joke every time, amiritefellas? Most importantly, my eyebrow raised at the accusation that someone is trying to "be superior". This from a man who, you know, has a show called "Bullshit". Within the tweet, he makes a pointless bid at superiority, bragging about how he didn't see any Super Bowl ads. Between the outsized reaction and the incredible double standard for himself and some female writer on the internet, we're already talking about 90+% chance that he's got issues with women. If men allow having sex, being arrogant, or making silly jokes for themselves but flip out on women for doing the same, it's almost surely sexism, and Jillette hit two out of three. (There's far more, of course: being slovenly, drinking, you could go all day with the list of things sexists allow for themselves but not for women.) The fact that he used the word "cunt" just makes it a near-certainty, hovering around the 99.9% region.
With that in mind, I made a list of things people can say, and potential totally non-sexist Penn Jillette reactions. All of them guaranteed to get a "nuh-uh, that's not sexism!" response from his fanboys.
The forecast for today shows clear skies and highs around 55 degrees.
Who does this bitch think she is with her weather predictions? Just because you have a map and a meterology report doesn't make you the queen of the fucking weather, sweetheart.
I'll have a skim latte and a blueberry muffin, please.
*snort* Jesus Christ, what a fucking diva. An ordinary muffin isn't good enough for you? You have to have blueberries? What, is your pretty princess tongue unable to choke down your breakfast unless it's all blue and fruity?
I was happy that the Giants won, but it would have been cool to see the Patriots pull it off at the last minute.
Useless fucking cunt. Hey, lady, instead of offering your pointless opinion on football, why not do something useful with your mouth and stuff a cock in it?
I like to sit around scratching my balls while writing blog posts insisting that unregulated markets, which have been shown to repeatedly fail when tried in the real world, are the one true path to peace and prosperity.
Carry on, good sir. Perhaps you would like to come on my show to pass off your anti-government crankery as if it were scientific fact?
Republican appeals to the white working class have always been fraught, and not just because Republicans are trying to hoodwink this group with talk of abortion and gays in order to get them to vote against their own economic interests. It's also because it's always been illogical. On top of race-baiting and sexism, one of the big rhetorical strategies has been to pit the white working class against well-paid professionals (who are in fact becoming more liberal, though that's a recent shift) they deem the "liberal elite", with the hopes of distracting the white working class from the independently wealthy. It's illogical, since the argument is that rich fat cats who make a lot of money off other people's work are somehow a less appropriate target for class resentments than doctors, college professors and laywers who make a lot of money, but do so clocking in to a productive job every day like their working class brethern. But it's been somewhat effective, in no small part because your average working class white person probably knows someone of the working upper middle class, and they probably don't know any of the obscenely wealthy. Most of us are more likely, in other words, to know someone like the Obamas than the Romneys. So they're an easier target to describe meaningfully while dredging up resentments against them.
But another reason a lot of conservative thought leaders are so good at painting a picture of a snooty professional elite who wouldn't deign to rub shoulders with ordinary working Americans is that they are those people. In fact, far more so than the liberal versions of themselves much of the time. And really, while they're good at setting up people of their own class as hate-objects, they can barely conceal their disdain for working class whites. They just project it on liberals, and hope that their target audience doesn't notice what's going on.
Well, Charles Murray has blown their cover. That's all I can say about his latest book where he simulataneously plays the same cards that conservatives have for a long time, accusing the professional elite of being out of touch with "real" Americans, i.e. the white working class, and then proceeding to tell professional elites that their duty is to appoint themselves the moral guardians of the white working class and scold them to keep it in their pants. As part of the marketing for his book, he's released a quiz where you can rate how "in touch" you are with the working man by counting your visits to Applebee's, which is a typical exercise in claiming that a certain kind of American is the ony real one, a standard issue strategy for conservatives. But most of the book is about how people who would presumably rate high on his Quiz de Vicious White Trash Stereotypes are intellectually and morally inferior to the professional class, and thus need a good talking-to.
Frankly, I think Murray needs to be forced to choose. Are white working class Americans the only Real Americans, and anyone who is less than keen on drinking a Miller Lite in a Chili's is an evil snob? Or are the evil snobs the superior people here, and Real Americans are an unwashed mass of perverts who need to straighten up and fly right?
See, what's nice about being an evil liberal is that I don't have to deal with these problems. I don't think that conservative working class white culture is either the One True Culture, nor do I think that it's the business of upper class or upper middle class folks to appoint themselves the moral guardians of the rest of the country, bleating about how everything is going to hell because someone somewhere is fucking without a marriage license. The beauty of the "We Are the 99%" slogan is that it gets to the heart of this: the real elite in this country has, by treating our markets like a big casino, laid waste to our economy and screwed over everyone else. What's interesting to me is that idiots like Murray can never get past unbelievably superficial anger about sex and getting conservative haircuts (which is presumably what he means by "work ethic", because it's ludicruous to think any actual working Americans have been slacking off when it comes to actual working, which we do too much of) to ever stop and think that perhaps different people make different choices about marriage and haircuts for good reasons. Of course, deeper analysis would reveal that in fact, it's not that Americans collectively got immoral and stupid so much as that the very elite who control this country economically have been gobbling up a larger and larger slice of the pie, leaving the rest of us fighting over scraps. And Murray can't have that.
By the way, I did start to take the quiz and got really bored, but unsurprisingly, considering my family background, I was scoring a lot of points on it. But I have to point out that the fishing question is a little geographical-ist, since people who live in the desert really have to travel far to go fishing much of the time. Also, my long-standing defense of the deliciousness of many American piss beers is, in my experience, has proven to be generally useless in getting the liberal elite to care or conservative America to be less wary of me. But perhaps my dedication to not doing something so bourgeois as get married is good for giving Murray the vapors.
Most mornings, except weekends, at Casa del Marcotte, we get up in the morning. The first thing on our minds is work. I make coffee and get right to it on my computer, since I work at home. My dude gets dressed, walks to the subway, and takes the train to his office. Often we both work late---really often. Like most Americans, our lives are basically consumed by work. Unlike a lot of Americans, we're lucky because we have fulfilling jobs, for sure, but they are still work. Like most Americans, 100% of our income is from work, except maybe like the occasional birthday or Christmas card from relatives with a check instead of a present in it. Americans work more hours than our counterparts in Western Europe and have fewer vacations. (Being a freelancer, I haven't really taken a vacation-vacation where I completely unplug, I think, ever, actually. But being unable to unplug is increasingly a part of even salaried and hourly employees' lives.) Because most non-retired Americans are dependent on work for 100% of their income, losing a job is devastating, often worse that a divorce. Because most of us derive 100% of our income from working, taxes are a legitimate burden, though one most of us---except a few extremist wingnuts---believe is part of the responsibilities of being an American.
Contrast that with what we've learned about Mitt Romney from his tax returns: 1) He pays a low rate in taxes, lower than many of us who derive our income from working 2) His work income is pocket change compared to the money he makes sitting on his ass paying other people to make money for him and 3) He makes more in a day doing nothing than your average American makes in a year of life being consumed by work.
The critical words here are DOING NOTHING. Romney jokes that he's "unemployed", when in fact the proper term is the "idle rich". He was employed at one point, sure, but it's laughable to say that his wealth is the result of "hard work", as every wingnut apologist mindlessly says. Most Americans don't have the option of making more money sitting on their ass than working. Retirement is usually associated with terms like "fixed income", not "exploding amounts of wealth". But the claim from Republicans is that by taxing money you make by not working, you're somehow discouraging productivity, so we need to lower taxes on money made from not working, and shift the burden to those who actually work for their money. I hope it's clear what a giant pile of bullshit that is. If we actually want to adjust taxes to encourage productivity and discourage idleness, we need to jack the rates up on people like Mitt Romney and possibly even lower them on those of us whose lives are occupied by work from the time we get up in the morning to, if we're lucky, sometime after dinner. (And many of us work harder than that.) You know, those of us who contribute something.
Romney has said he was unemployed. He's right. He actually does nothing to earn most of his income. He's just in possession of a giant pile of cash. He pays some people to do stuff with that giant pile of cash so it earns a rate of return. And because we are ruled by horrible people who think the lives of the 1% are more important than everyone else, the tax rate on any money that pile of cash earns is much lower than it is on the money earned by people who actually work.
He snipes that those of us who work and want those---like him---who don't because they can just live like kings off investments to pay more taxes.....well, we're consumed with "envy". Perhaps. Or perhaps it's just that we actually believe, unlike Republicans who just pay lip service, to the concept of work, and we want the people who actually do it to get their fair share of the pie, instead of feeding it all to those who just feed off the money others actually make.
Caitlin Flanagan gets a lot of attention because she's able to write in these elliptical, obtuse ways that seem really profound, which is why it's useful to listen to her on the radio, where she's forced to be more concise, revealing that she's just the same old culture warrior whose veneer of sophistication falls off at a sneeze, revealing the cranky (prematurely) old church lady underneath. That's why I recommend skipping her strange-sounding new book and listening instead to this interview on WBUR, which has the added bonus of Irin Carmon's presence as a sanity check. Listening to it, you realize that for all the puffery about girlhood fascinations and diaries, Flanagan is really only making one argument, one we know really well, that goes like this:
*Boys and men only care about sex, and mainly see girls and women as these tedious obstacles between them and pussy.
*Girls and women only care about romance---the more princessy, the better---and see sex as this filthy ritual they have to perform in order to get it.
*Therefore, women should use sex as a bartering chip to get men to pretend to like us. Actual affection from men is clearly impossible to get, but in Flanagan's view, women can get a semblance of self-respect by refusing to have sex with men until they play-act affection by taking us on some dates and letting us call them our boyfriends. According to Flanagan, not having a man hanging around pretending to like you in order to get his dick wet is a major tragedy, probably the worst thing that could happen to a woman.
And that's about it. A lot of attention is paid to Flanagan's strange descriptions of what she calls "girlhood", which the rest of us tend to think of more as "adolescence", but Flanagan does really collapse the two in significant ways, imagining the typical teenage girl as horrified at her burgeoning sexuality and desperate to return to the comfortable world of childhood. (You can read Irin's review here.) Pretty much all of her descriptions of the life of teenage girls is in support of the above argument. For instance, she's bizarrely insistent that nostalgia for childhood toys is both universal to young women and not something young men care for at all. This has confused quite a few people who live in reality, because, if anything, it's men who are more likely to keep their childhood toys. How many guys not only have a collection of action figures and comic books from their youth, but continue to buy new things that have a connection to childhood playthings? Nor is this a new phenomenon; think of older generations of men with toy train collections or baseball cards. Not that Flanagan is wrong that a number of college girls still have their dollies or teddy bears. That's the point: her continued insistence that men and women are basically opposite in every way is just wrong.
But it's clear to me why she paints a picture of young men forging into adulthood while young women lean back, clutching teddy bears. It's about S-E-X; everything Flanagan says is in service of her belief that women want Disney princess romances, and sex is this filthy price that men extract from us in exchange for the Prince Charming act. (Seriously, few things are more grim than conservatives' view of heterosexuality.) Thus, she has to insist that girls are innocent and boys are not.
Flanagan's call to action is for parents to be excessively "protective" of their daughters' innocence. Listening to this program, you get the creeping feeling that Flanagan feels that you're not a successful parent of a daughter unless your child is a social reject because she acts childish throughout her high school years. She gets positively giddy when some overbearing parent calls and brags that her kids aren't allowed to use Facebook. She proposes sheltering girls (and only girls, apparently) in two very important ways: by disallowing them to have their own internet in their rooms and by insisting that cross-gender socializing only occur in traditional date-like situations, probably involving the boy picking the girl up (which conveniently shuts off any dating before 16, soon 18 in places with graduated driving licenses). The excuse she gives for the internet lockdown is that girls shouldn't see pornography, though I suspect that, due to Flanagan's over-excited response to the Facebook ban, the real reason is that she fears girls having a social life outside of the view of adults. (As the mother of only boys, Flanagan conveniently doesn't have to live by her own rules.) As for the porn thing, well, I don't disagree that it's not awesome for young kids to see so much hardcore porn before they even start to think of being sexual themselves, but I also think the results of Flanagan's actions aren't so great, either. I mean, how would you prefer a girl to first see porn: in her bedroom by herself, or because a boyfriend in college shows it to her?
And that is the fundamental problem with Flanagan's wingnutty attitude towards adolescent girls; she has no interest in helping girls make the transition from girlhood to adulthood. She just wants girlhood to last as long as possible. She's deliberately vague on what happens after the sheltered girl is released into the "wild", as it were. She did slip at one point in the show and say that we shouldn't "let" college women "hook up", which suggests that Flanagan is far more radical than she lets on, and personally fantasizes about young women staying virginal and generally unaware of sex well into adulthood and probably until marriage, by force if necessary. But she won't be up front about it, because she knows showing her cards will end her career as "provocative" writer and expose her as the same old boring wingnut as every other abstinence hysteric. (Seriously, how do we avoid "letting" grown ass adult women---even if they look like young kids to us---not make their own sexual choices?) The problem is that even though Flanagan is right and sheltering a high school girl is possible, there's not much you can do when they move out of the house. So the question is, then what? Is the college freshman better off having learned a little about men and sex in her adolescence before she's dumped into the waters and asked to swim, or does knowledge give you power? Interestingly, Flanagan really wants high school girls to have boyfriends (she's wrong that they don't; what research I've read suggests that high schoolers drift into committed relationships and college kids are more like to hook up), but her proposal of sheltering them is exactly how to keep girls from having that. What normal boy wants to date the religious weirdo whose parents forbid her from having internet access? I'm guessing that a lot high school relationships are conducted online, in fact, so keeping a girl offline probably removes her flirting and getting-to-know-you opportunities.
But realizing that requires thinking, and Flanagan, for all that she's a talented prose stylist, isn't a thinking person. She's just a reactionary, and one with a particular obsession with young women.
All the blather about "fiscal conservatism" that comes off conservatives is, I generally believe, just that: blather. The notion that they want to slash social spending because it's the "responsible" thing to do has always and forever been belied by Republican willingness to spend like madmen when it came to private contractors feeding off the military, corporate giveaways, and of course, tax breaks for the rich. No, the entire conservative view of social spending is rooted in a authoritarian, hierarchical view of the world that believes that it's somehow for the best if the lower classes suffer privation. After all, how will you know how comfortable you are if you don't have people going hungry to compare yourself to?
If you doubt this, spend five minutes listening to any wingnut rant about the economy. Their imagination is captured by the fear that some poor person somewhere might have occasional moments of not suffering. Any suggestion that a poor person might have a moment of joy, a bit of relief, a pillow to lay their head on at night? All this is considered offensive to the wingnut, evidence that the poor are simply not suffering enough. Which is why you continually see "outrages" on the right, such as learning that most poor people have a refrigerator in their homes, a factoid that reasonable people should find unremarkable because refrigerators usually come standard with apartments. (Seriously, I find this outrage completely baffling. Are they suggesting that a smart move for a person living in poverty would be to pawn a refrigerator that is almost surely owned by their landlord? Talk about fiscal irresponsibility!) And needless to say, images of poor people owning phones are sure to set off any wingnut worth his salt. How dare they have a way for potential employers to reach them?! They're poor! They have to bootstrap it by communicating with others through smoke signals. Anything less than that is being coddled by the system.
Once you piece together the various outrages against poor people for having refrigerators and phones, it becomes clear that for all the talk of bootstraps, conservatives really don't want poor people to find a way out of poverty. That's why they really get angry if someone has any tool to help them save money or earn money. The refrigerator is offensive, because it allows a person to buy food at the grocery store and cook, which stretches the food dollar. Apparently, you're supposed to be living on Doritos. The phone connects you to the world, which is the bare minimum for job seekers, and we can't have people looking for work actually, god forbid, find it. And so on.
And so it goes with the latest assault on people living on the edge of the knife. Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania is cutting people off of food stamps if they have more than $2,000 in savings. This will help expediate the process of getting people in unemployed or under-employed situations out of their homes and into the streets. If you have to burn through the money you were counting on to pay rent on food instead, that will subtract months of you sitting around in an apartment, acting like you deserve shelter like some uppity shelter-haver. You can eat or you can have a daily shower, but Corbett and his supporters think you're just asking too much if you want both.
Of course, having savings to lean on while unemployed is critical if you, lower income person, are trying to get a job in order to not be dependent on food stamps anymore. Under the new Corbett system, where you have to choose between shelter or food, you can kiss that job goodbye. Employers aren't generally known for looking fondly on people who show up to interviews in unwashed clothes without having had a good night's rest or a shower. If the goal is to make sure people living in poverty have all avenues of escape cut off, good job, Pennsylvania! If your goal is anything else, well....I reject that it could be. No one could be that stone cold stupid. Occam's Razor: the intention here is to make escaping poverty impossible.
Before we leave the weekend's debates behind, and in keeping with the blog's first rule of economics — Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money. — I would be remiss not to mention the performance on Sunday of Dancin' Dave Gregory, chronic Vineyard vacationer and Beltway King of Pain. He reached an entirely new level of smarm when he asked Jon Huntsman the following question:
Let's talk substance. So Governor Huntsman, name three areas where Americans will feel real pain in order to balance the budget?
See, you stupid proles. The only "substance" worth talking about is exactly how miserable your lives will have to be made in order to keep The Deficit from eating our children in their beds, and how wretched your existence will have to become so that David Gregory and the people with whom he goes to dinner can think themselves people of serious purpose. And then, even after Huntsman had once again pledged fealty to the economic sadism that is the plan offered by zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan, which is why Huntsman's position as The Only Sane One is not entirely accurate, Gregory still wasn't satisfied.
Three programs that will make Americans feel pain, sir?
Not that Atrios and Charles are wrong to blanch at Gregory's slobbering desire to see throngs of people begging in the streets, of course, but I also hesitate to draw too much attention to our disgust, for fear that these kinds of questions are going to get toned down. As I was noting gleefully on Twitter when a couple of anti-choicers started bleating at me, I want them to explain, in lavish detail, how sex is only for procreation and that women who have sex for pleasure deserve to be punished as the dirty whores they are. They know, as I know, that it's probably not best for them to show their hand like this, which is why they're constantly on about "babies", but if you push hard enough, the "sex is evil and should be punished" belief always comes out. That's where we need them: showing their true face. The more honest they are, the better.
Ideally, we'd have a situation where the Republican candidates started competing with each other to see who could come up with the most lavish trials they wish the 99% to endure. If we could get Mitt Romney trying to outdo Newt Gingrich by explaining how he won't be satisfied until good Christian women are selling blow jobs in the church parking lot to make rent, I think that would probably work out pretty well. Sure, the Republicans will eat it up, but it won't do much to help the Republicans pick up votes from those oh--so-important swing voters and independents.
Video chosen, because like Ron Paul, I hope we can all day be Austrians.
Even though he took back his endorsement of Ron Paul, I think it's safe to say that Andrew Sullivan is still deeply in love with George Wallance-cum-Dale Gribble. After all, the general tone of his retraction was, "Wah, I'm right that the man is like Mr. Totally Not A Racist, just like my 'Bell Curve'-loving self, but pouty pout the readers are making me." Seriously, he said things like, "It seems to me that even though I don't believe these old screeds reflect Paul's own beliefs....", despite the heavy of the first person in those screeds. It's clear Sullivan would be denying that Paul wrote them himself if someone dug up a picture of Paul writing them. But he continues to blog about the awesomeness that is the resident black helicopter crank in the race, and so I thought it would be a fun time to grab one of the more fun "NUH-UH RON PAUL IS TOTALLY NOT A RACIST" quotes, by way of this link from LGM.
Chuck Todd notes that Ron Paul voted for the MLK national holiday. Gingrich voted against. I find the notion that Ron Paul is a racist to be preposterous.
Ta-Nehisi Coates pushes back, pointing out that Paul explained his reasons for disliking the King holiday in his newsletter, and guess what! It's not because he's Mr. Peace, Love and Understanding. Here is Paul, in his own words, on the MLK holiday:
Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.
Cue the chorus of people claiming that we can't actually believe that someone using the first person and signing his name to a document could have possibly written it. Next you'll be saying Duncan Black is Atrios. Can we be sure that it's Andrew Sullivan writing the preposterous claim that it's preposterous to believe Ron Paul wrote some stuff that he said he wrote? Why not suggest no one ever be treated like the author of that which they authored, since fundamentally, we can never know for sure.
It's worth pointing out at this point that supporting Ron Paul, even just a little, appears to infect the supporter with Crank's Disease, where they're making conspiratorial claims that we can't assume that someone writing, "I, _____, am totally writing this," actually wrote it. The longer you chew on that belief, the more likely you are to find yourself, a year from now, wearing camo and shooting up beer cans while complaining about a one world currency, which is of course, a totally different thing than your desire that the entire world trade in gold.
I digress, however. (See, it's infecting me!) My point in writing this blog post is to point out that Sullivan, in his desperation, appears to have used Newt Gingrich as his standard-bearer for not-racism. He did this two days ago, in fact, which puts this comment after the blogosphere erupted with this comment made by Newt Gingrich:
And so I’m prepared if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.
Rick Santorum has been having fun implying both that all black people are on food stamps, and that all food stamp recipients are black, as well. In fact, the single largest racial group in the SNAP program is.....wait for it......white people.
According to 2010 census numbers, about 26 percent of food stamp recipients are African-American, while 49 percent are white and 20 percent are Hispanic.
I also want to digress a moment and denounce the very notion that there's something shameful about using SNAP. There's something shameful in the fact that our society has so many people living in poverty that we need to offer so much food assistance, but there's no shame in taking it. In fact, food stamps are the best form of economic stimulus our government is currently engaging in, generating $1.73 worth of stimulus for every dollar spent. The worst problem with food stamps is that the shame and hassle of applying discourages many eligible people---imagine the boost the economy would get if everyone eligible was using food stamps. Just sayin'.
Digression over. The point is that I think it's perfectly sensible and evidence-based to say that Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich both rejected the MLK holiday out of racial prejudice, which both men have routinely displayed and which has helped both men in gathering large numbers of supporters. Any other conclusion is basically throwing red herrings and trying to confuse the situation. The racial resentment boat is a big one, and there's lots of room on board, especially for those catering favor with the Republican base.
It is possible that Sullivan was merely complaining that Gingrich isn't getting the same attention for his no vote on the MLK holiday. To which I say, well, he probably should, but the "he's guilty, too!" thing is no defense, especially if your man is polling much better than the equally guilty.
Well, my plans to blog some of the best of 2011 totally fell apart, and for that I apologize. I thought I would make it up to you by compiling a list of some of my favorite (or most disturbing) moments in sexual misinformation. These are some of the strangest, most dunderheaded, or most appalling falsehoods of the year, at least when it comes to doin' it. You'd think Americans in 2011 wouldn't be so dumb, but sadly, we have a long way to go before we start getting smarter about sex.
Most Jaw-Droppingly Audacious Lie
Yep, when Michele Bachmann tried to claim that a woman told her that her daughter got Gardasil and became mentally retarded. This lie was audacious on a number of levels. Obviously, the HPV vaccine has been demonstrated to be safe, and Bachmann's just trying to maximize the number of health problems and deaths that come to women who have sex, which she disapproves of. But what made this lie special was that she didn't even reference some of the prior, false accusations about the vaccine. It seems what she did here was half-remember claims about the MMR vaccine causing autism, translated "autism" into "retardation" in that special brain of hers, and coughed this one up. It's unlikely that there was a woman, and if there was, she probably didn't say what Bachmann is claiming. Even the most audacious anti-vaxxers know better than to insinuate a shot given at 12 years old causes some of the mental problems they falsely claim early childhood shots cause. Bachmann couldn't even get her bullshit straight.
There were many iterations of this claim, but to summarize: Many supposedly "skeptical" dudes repeatedly and apparently with a straight face claimed that there was no way for a fellow to get his dick wet if he couldn't cold-proposition women he had never met before at 4 in the morning in enclosed spaces with no means for her to escape. You would think that a skeptic, before making this bold claim, would gather some evidence first, by asking people how sex happens for them. Of course, they weren't going to do this, because they'd find that overall, straight people manage to hook it up without scaring the shit out of women most of the time, through processes like meeting someone, chatting, letting it develop into flirtation naturally, and developing a mutual attraction that eventually spills into fucking. Obviously, for sexist men, the problem with this process is it involves being nice to a woman for stretches of time, be it an hour or days or even months. So they falsely claimed it was cold propositions in scary circumstances or nothing, and women who expected men to behave in socially normal ways when they're physically attracted to women are out of their minds.
My favorite version of this lie was by James Onen:
Here is where the problem lies: a man generally cannot know until after attempting the proposition that it was unwanted. Not only that – it is, after all, also possible for a proposition to be unwanted at first but for the recipient of the proposition to change her mind after persuasion.
Setting aside the notion that it's acceptable to badger someone who has already turned you down for sex, let's consider the extraordinary nature of this claim, which is that a man literally cannot know if a woman is amendable to fucking him until he corners her in an enclosed space, and without any prior introduction, discourse, or flirting, asks her to his room for "coffee", a well-known euphemism for sex. For a skeptic, you'd think that such a claim could be tested, again, by asking people who have had successful sexual interactions, and asking what process got them from not knowing each other to touching naked bits. I bet you'd find that 0% of them said, "By getting perfect strangers into enclosed spaces and cold propositioning them." The notion that there's no way to know if someone likes you without asking them for sex without so much as a formal introduction? But James really believes this, and so he suggests that since sex can only happen under these dubious circumstances, we need to build an opt-out system for women who have peculiar ideas like, "A man should flirt with me a little to see if I'd be interested before he asks me to suck his cock".
The solution to such ambiguity is simple – as a way forward, women who attend atheist-skeptic conferences that are absolutely certain they don’t want to be hit on should wear a clearly visible “do not proposition me” sign on their backs. If not, maybe a colour-code can be designated for such women by the event organisers – let’s say, red – and then it could be announced that all women wearing red clothes should not be propositioned or approached by strangers.
Since the vast majority of women aren't amendable to being propositioned by perfect strangers in enclosed spaces, and the vast majority of men know better than to do that (and, I'll add, have no real interest in it, because a lot of men actually like women and enjoy the process of flirting and building up sexual tension so that the eventual sex is about more than crossing the daily ejaculation off the to-do list), this system seems unfair, because it puts the burden of monitoring the behavior of the slim minority of men who feel they're too good for flirting onto women. I offer a counter-solution that puts the burden on those who are too good for ordinary social interactions: men who feel they can't get laid without cold propositioning strangers. If you're one of those men, I suggest walking around with your cock out, to signal that you'd like a lady to do something about it without having to go through that tedious process of introducing yourself and having a conversation with her to gauge her interest. Since there are supposedly a lot of women down with cold propositions from strangers, I'm sure that these guys will find lots of takers!
My personal theory is that when Jon Kyle said that 90% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion, he felt that was accurate, because the word "abortion" is slowly becoming a catch-all phrase on the right to describe any health care that allows women to have happier, healthier sex lives. So, you or I, when we say "abortion", mean "terminating a pregnancy". But Kyle probably includes Pap smears and condoms in his list of things that are "abortion". Anything that allows sexually active women to avoid conceiving against their will, contracting an STD, or dying? The end game for anti-choicers is to get all that defined as "abortion". Kyle was just being a little over eager.
Weirdest Theory About Anal Sex
This may eclipse the B.S. right wing claims that gay men all spend their old age shitting themselves from all the anal (why that doesn't happen to straight women who take it up the butt is never explained), and strangely, this claim comes from an actual gay man:
Paul Angelo MHA, MBA, the Miami Gay Matchmaker who incorporates health, relationship and lifestyle coaching has again "gone wild" with the intention to save the gay community from poor self-esteem, lack of confidence and relationship confusion.
Angelo explains that receptive anal sex decreases self esteem by forcing the person to assume a submissive position during an act of pleasure. This confuses the brain to believe that a feminine-like behavior is appropriate for a man and in turn reduces the man's assertiveness, confidence and will power.
Angelo is an enthusiast of "neurolinguistic programming", which is an obsession usually only found amongst straight men who, coincidentally, find the process of meeting and flirting with women to be a tedious waste of precious man-hours and so spend a bunch of time reading "pick-up artist" materials to find a way to fast track from seeing an attractive lady you don't know and having your penis inside her. Angelo's interest in the incredibly iffy NLP practices may not be geared towards trying to get vagina while minimizing your interactions with the woman surrounding the organ, but he nonetheless seems to be a rabid misogynist. This suggests a link between finding NLP intriguing and rabid misogyny, though further study is needed on this question.
Right Wing "Always Be Breeding" Pressure Reaches A New Low
The discussion then moved on to how she has been able to use this healing power to cure all sorts of maladies, particularly barrenness, including one time when her prayers "completely replaced everything" for a woman who had had a full hysterectomy, resulting in her pregnancy.
In the past, religious wingnuts guilt-tripped women who had abortions, and then those who used contraception. Now they've added women who physically can't have children to the list of those they wish to shame. If you're not reproducing because your uterus has been removed from your body, well, I guess you're just not praying hard enough, you slattern.
I have a theory about the Spiderman musical, and its inexplicable popularity despite being the most hated piece of pop culture in 2011 (people's loathing for "Friday" is mixed with giddy affection, taking it off the list). It's a combination of two things. One, the amount of bad press it got raised its visibility, so when tourists come in and are looking for a show, they latch on to Spiderman because it's a known quantity. Of course, that's not enough to push it over the top. If you go to Times Square and take in the ads, you'll see Broadway is awash in known quantities to appeal to incurious tourists, revising all sorts of classic movies and TV shows to reel them in, plus Mamma Mia. No, I suspect what's helping Spiderman out is backlash. This is just a theory, but I suspect that this scenario plays out over and over again: A Fox News-loving family is planning their trip to the Big Apple, and they want to see a Broadway show. They look over the list of available shows and Spiderman sticks out. They heard a lot about it this year! Of course, it was all bad reviews. But hell, those reviews probably came from those elitist liberal snobs who want their Broadway shows to be nudist interpretative dances about the deaths of animals from oil spills, so fuck 'em. They bet Spiderman is great, because those reviewers hate it so much. And another batch of tickets is sold.
If this theory seems a little far-fetched, I invite you to read Media Matters' end-of-year round-up on the right wing war on health. Health is a thing those elitist liberals like, with their jogging and their fiber. The liberal associations with health grew stronger because of the health care reform battle. Now healthiness itself is suspect. Some of my favorite highlights:
Fox & Friends Attacked HPV Vaccine Law While Promoting Teenage Tanning. During the October 11 edition of Fox & Friends, the co-hosts attacked a California law that will allow adolescents as young as 12 to receive the HPV vaccine, which can protect against cervical cancer, without parental consent. They also juxtaposed this law with a California provision that restricts those younger than 18 from using tanning salons, but failed to note that tanning beds increase the risk of skin cancer by 75 percent.
I liked this one, because it not only touches on the hostility to health, but also encompasses the creepy right wing obsession with the sexy virgin. Jessica Valenti wrote about this in The Purity Myth, but to recap: the right doesn't just want young women to be virgins. They want them to be sex object virgins: slender, beautiful, preferably buxom, apparently super-tan, and compliant. The virgin's value is ratcheted up dramatically by how sexy (by the most conventional standards) she is. It's like objectification on steroids. Thus, the constant churning out of one blonde sex symbol after another who puts on a faux-modest look while bragging about her virginity. And, of course, the inevitable fall.....
Fox's Gutfeld: "Why Are Health Food Freaks Always So Sickly Looking?" On the August 23 broadcast of The Five, Gutfeld said, "Why are health food freaks always so sickly-looking?" Co-host Andrea Tantaros replied, "They're unhappy, because they're not eating any fat."
Projection is the favoritest of all right wing neuroses. This is the war on health equivalent of when a guy hits on you, and when you shoot him down, he calls you ugly and denies that he had any interest, due to the ugliness.
Right-Wing Media Freaked Out Over Red Lobster, Olive Garden Decision To Shrink Portion Sizes. In September, after Darden Restaurants Inc., the parent company of Red Lobster and Olive Garden, announced it would shrink portion sizes and reduce sodium in its meals, right-wing media responded by attacking the decision and claiming the company was "bending to the whims of Michelle Obama." In a blog post, Malkin claimed that Darden was "strong-armed" into "re-designing meals" by Michelle Obama, while the Drudge Report linked to the story with a picture of Michelle Obama and the words, "Adult Supervision for fries."
Fox Promotes Hypothetical Junk Food Tax, Responds With A "Cultur[al]" Defense Of Macaroni And Cheese. On the July 26 edition of Fox & Friends, Carlson discussed a hypothetical junk food tax, beginning the segment by saying, "Do we really need the government ... policing this?" Her guest, Robert Ferguson, then claimed that "[n]o one has ever really talked about" "what makes foods healthy." He also said that a person needs to "tak[e] into account different cultures" in order to calculate nutritional value, then concluded: "In my world, I like mac and cheese. ... I'm going to eat it."
Right wing media has quite literally cast its audience as belligerent, picky children and Michelle Obama as Mom standing over them telling they they can't have any dessert if they don't eat their vegetables. One could argue the facts on this until the end of time---do they seriously believe the First Lady has such all-encompassing powers that Olive Garden would rather cater to her than make money?----but I'm more interested in the psychology of this. Why are so many conservatives eager to imagine themselves not just as children, but as annoying, picky children? You'd think a bunch of authoritarians would at least prefer the image of well-behaved children who politely eat what's served, but their hatred of the Obamas runs so deep that they are willing to cast themselves in the role of the pointlessly petulant child.
Of course, it probably runs deeper than that. The truth may be that they don't realize that they are casting themselves in that role, but are just naturally drawn to it, because they are petulant and childish. That's probably the better explanation, since it also goes a long way towards explaining "Wah! I don't want to play nice with others!", the lavish worship of the bullies who steal other kids' lunch money, and seeing people in distress, such as the unemployed, and wanting to give them wedgies instead of help them out.
The evidence is straightforward: These racist rants were signed by Paul, in a newsletter that claimed to be written by him. Not only that, he referred to himself in the first person during these rants, and made mention of personal details, such as where his home is. By any reasonable measure, he wrote these things. If someone else wrote them, then they were ghost-written, and he is equally culpable. His reaction when people question him on this stuff is to deflect and basically imply that they aren't worthy to speak to the Mighty Ron Paul, the impertinent peasants. So, really, I had to flinch every time Rachel said he's "unwilling" to come up for a plausible explanation for how these writings came into existence, if the most obvious choice---that he's just a racist crank and he wrote them---is off the table, as he demands.
I say that he's not unwilling. He's just unable. Melissa Harris-Perry made basically that same point, though she was good at massaging the bizarre Beltway willingness to want to take Paul at his word when he said he didn't write them:
Melissa is right, of course. Even if he didn't put pen to paper, he took credit for it, and that's all that counts. This "did he or didn't he?" crap is silly.
But I must insist that the charade generally end. Paul's deflections are weird and half-assed. The whole debate over whether he has racism in his heart or just a pen is strange. I think of themyriad possibilities of how those viciously racist rants got into his newsletters, one stands out as far more likely than the rest: Ron Paul is a racist crank who wrote that stuff because he believed it. Being from Texas myself, I have met his type over and over and over again, and this strikes me as not only a plausible explanation, but the most plausible. Look, he's currently running ads where he claims that abortion providers threw dead babies in baskets, whatever that means. That paranoid fantasy correlates nicely with these racist paranoid fantasies. If I were to break it down to percentiles of likelihood, this is what I see:
*Chance that Paul didn't write it, didn't know who wrote it, didn't read it, and was unaware of what was in the newsletter: .1%
*Chance that Paul had someone who knows him really well ghost-write it, but wasn't aware of what was in it: .9%
*Chance that someone ghost-wrote it with Paul's blessing and knowledge: 3%
*Chance that Paul secretly believes all races are equal, but was just wanking off to appeal to the racist voters of his district: 1%
*Chance that Paul is a racist crank who wrote every word in his rants where he refers to himself as "I" and mentions his house and other personal details: 95%
I'm sure someone better with statistics could break it out better, but I don't imagine that their numbers would be far off mine. So can we stop treating all possibilities as equal?
So the fallout from Rick Perry's "Strong" ad has been, if anything, as delightfully strange, hateful and batty as the ad itself. In retaliaion for the bigotry on display in the ad, the gay Republican PAC GOProud decided to out one of Perry's advisors, Tony Fabrizio. This has so upset Andrew Breitbart, who I was surprised to find out is on the advisory council of GOProud, that he made a big public stink about resigning from said advisory council. In doing so, Breitbart demonstrated that he is quite possibly the most shameless liar in all of Conservative Land, which is much like being the stinkiest turd in a litterbox. His mother must be so proud. Seriously, read this shameless bullshit he wrote to explain his decision:
It is with sincere regret that I announce I must step down as a GOProud advisory member. On numerous occasions I have spoken with [GOProud leaders] Jimmy LaSalvia and Chris Barron of the significant impact the practice of “outing” had in my evolution from the political left to the right. I was under the absolute impression that both agreed. I have a zero tolerance attitude toward the intentional infliction of vocational and family harm by divulging the details of an individual’s sexual orientation as a weapon of political destruction.
GOProud is saying that Fabrizio was already out, but that's neither here nor there. What I love is how Breitbart can't breathe in and out without involving shameless lying. Don't let the fact that he got lucky on the Anthony Weiner thing distract you. This statement is pure fabrication. First of all, is it just standard now for conservatives to make preposterous claims about how they used to be liberals? The way they carry on, you'd think there wasn't a conservative in this country prior to 1980. But more importantly, Breitbart puffing up about the evils of inflicting vocational and family harm on people with outing is just, yeah, no. Like Brandon Thorp at Towelroad writes:
Why does Breibart feel so keenly for the family and wallet of Mr. Fabrizio after displaying nothing but contempt for the families and wallets of the working-class ACORN staffers he and his pal James O'Keefe so willfully misrepresented back in 2009? And why didn't he feel any sympathy for Shirley Sherrod, whose career he attempted to destroy with baseless charges of racism? Those individuals actually lost their jobs, which so far Fabrizio has not, and the ACORN workers didn't even have any fancy beltway connections to help them land on their feet.
Perhaps in Breitbart's world, those cases don't count. After all, the accusations he leveled at those people were lies constructed with the magic of film editing. So maybe in Breitbart's mind, it's okay to destroy someone's life as long as you do so by saying a bunch of stuff about them that's not true. So, maybe if GOProud had claimed a straight man was gay, that would be okay by Breitbart? That's much closer to how he usually works.
Oh wait, that can't be true, either. After all, Breitbart gleefuly rained "vocational and family harm" on Anthony Weiner by outing him as a guy who crudely flirts with young women online. In that case, the accusation was true, and Weiner lost his job and is apparently struggling to heal his marriage.
Hmmmm..... So it would seem there's no consistency or logic here. Breitbart is just a self-serving, dishonest sleazeball who mouths the kind of words that people who have morals might say, but he certainly doesn't mean them.
The irony here is that Breitbart's supposed moralistic stand is being taken on something that is far more murky, morally speaking, than lying about someone in order to get them fired, which is his usual M.O. Plenty of people, including myself, support outing people who make a living exploiting homobigotry while having gay sex. It's about equality and justice, and especially about outing hypocrites. Maybe that's what Breitbart didn't like about GOProud's move; it smells too much like the right thing to do and he can't abide by that.
Via Whiskey Fire comes this illuminating piece from Jeff Carter at Townhall explaining why the sole blame for high unemployment is that people are too stupid and lazy to get jobs, coupled with "advice" on how to get one. Carter appears to believe that since a talentless moron like him can get work, so can you, though he's reluctant to offer wingnut welfare as an option, fearing the competition that arises when literally any moron could do your evil job. But what makes this piece special in the growing pile of hateful nonsense wingnuts are churning out to rationalize our terrible economy? Carter's amazing talents at literary interpretation:
If you are an unskilled laborer, it may seem like there are no opportunities. But, there are if you move to where the jobs are. In the 1930's and 1940's, there were several great migrations in the United States. The migration from the Great Plains to California was captured in the John Steinbeck novel about the Joad family. Many families moved from the rural south to the industrialized north for work. Just because you have lived your whole life in one area of the country doesn’t mean you are stuck there.
I'm surprised he didn't take it to the next level, and argue that you should avoid going on food stamps by pressing women with newborns into sharing their breast milk with you in lieu of purchased food. Maybe mow their lawn or something in exchange. My guess is that he didn't think of it, because he probably hasn't read the book, because even someone as dumb as Carter would grasp, upon reading The Grapes of Wrath, that Steinbeck has a fairly low opinion of people like the entire staff of Townhall.
Which made me think about other classic works of literature and how they could be interpreted by conservatives, with or without actually reading the books in question. So I thought I'd make a list:
Oliver Twist: This story clearly demonstrates that putting bastard children into workhouses puts them on the path to peace and prosperity.
To Kill a Mockingbird: Innocent men can be convicted of rape just on a woman's word, so we should dismiss rape cases unless the crime happened in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses, and the victim was a virgin on her way to church. Additionally, growing up in racist communities brings out the best in little girls.
Angels in America: The key is getting religion before you let dudes put it in your butt, and then you wouldn't get AIDS.
Moby Dick: The endangered species list is wrong, because it prevents good men from fulfilling their dreams.
A Christmas Carol: The ending demonstrates that we need no government regulation, because our capitalist leaders are so naturally generous and fair.
The Handmaid's Tale: Women should simply give up on this feminism thing so that men aren't forced to take drastic action.
The Lottery: When your number's up, it's better for everyone if you don't whine about it so much.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles: Women who don't accept that men prefer to marry virgins are pathetic lost causes.
The House of Mirth: Women should spend their youth trying to get married as quickly as possible to the first man that will have them.
Slaughterhouse-Five: WWII truly produced the greatest generation.
I usually prefer to ignore Glenn Beck these days, but his response to the whole Herman Cain situation is actually pretty typical of the various ways that all sorts of people are failing miserably to address the situation with anything approaching decency or competence, so I figured I'd take a moment to comb over it. You see, Beck decided to write a letter of "dating advice" to Herman Cain, and it might pack more fail into a single document than has ever happened in the history of creating documents.
A few double takes were done Tuesday night when Beck emailed his mailing list with this subject line: “Dating 101: Glenn tells Cain how to handle the ladies
The first word of this is utter failure. Cain is alleged to have done a lot of things, but none of them can really be called "dating", in the sense that we Americans use the word. Dating is understood in our culture as an ethically sound behavior that people therefore perform openly. If you're on a date with someone, for instance, you're generally not going to freak out if you randomly run into a friend. Cain is accused of having an affair with one woman, which is generally understood as different than boring old dating. He's also been accused, repeatedly, of sexual harassment. This isn't like dating or having an affair, and I'm deeply sick of people conflating the two. Cain doesn't need advice on how to "handle" the ladies. If he is, as he claims, in a monogamous marriage, then he shouldn't be handling ladies at all. And no one needs to handle non-consenting ladies.
“Another day, another Herman Cain sex scandal,” writes Beck’s email. “The truth is so hard to find amidst all the lies these days, it makes it hard to say with certitude whether or not all of these accusations piling up against former pizza tycoon Herman Cain are in any way legit. Are people just trying to gain their 15 minutes of fame, or is Herman Cain as prolific a scorer as Wilt Chamberlain?”
Trying to set an Olympic record of wrong, Beck? First of all, sexually harassing women is not "scoring" with them, and anyone who convinces themselves of that is quite literally the most pathetic piece of shit ever to slither out of the gutter. You don't accuse someone of "scoring" with you. Please stop conflating grab-ass with the unwilling and sexual contact between consenting adults. Please. I beg you.
But what really bothers me is the proliferation of Cain's preferred explanation for how all these women are coming out of the woodwork all at once, which is that it's a giant conspiracy against him. Or that he somehow has managed to meet more mentally ill women with attention-seeking disorders than roughly any other politician in history. In the first instance, you'd have to accept that the Democrats---or even the Republicans---have the means and desire to organize this elaborate conspiracy, but they chose to do so against someone who never really had a chance in hell of getting the nomination, much less winning the presidency. (Obama wishes he could go up against Cain, believe me.) In the second instance, well, all things are possible, of course, but the likelihood of that happening is incredibly low. It's telling how sexist our society is that we still have to allow for the extremely unlikely possibility that deceitful attention-seeking mental disorders are so common amongst women that they affect like 5% of women that Herman Cain seems to have met.
This whole thing really has been a remarkable demonstration of how rape apologists and other sexists have really set the bar for believing women who complain of sexual harassment and abuse absurdly high. Beck is far from the only person carrying on like there's an equal probability between the possibility that a half dozen separate acquaintances of Cain's are lying, crazy bitches and that they may just be telling the honest truth. That's ridiculous. Especially since mentally ill people spinning stories tend to have a history of doing so and the stories they spin are often unbelievable. Nothing that Cain is said to have done is unbelievable, and in fact, the mundanity of it only adds to the believability.
Later in the email: “Dating 101: Glenn tells Cain how to handle the ladies. Herman Cain’s constant flow of sexual misconduct allegations against him sparked a heated debate on radio today. What are the types of situations at work that are acceptable to engage in and which are unacceptable?”
Simple: sexually harassing women is unacceptable. Stop pretending that you don't know this, assholes of the world. As any woman could tell you if you bothered to ask, when a man harasses you, watching you squirm with fear and discomfort is part of the pleasure he takes in doing it.
“I’d be a fool as a CEO or a head of a company to have dinner with a good friend who is also an employee. I’d be foolish to do that. … There’s just no reason to put yourself in that situation. Why would I put myself in that situation?”
Beck is lying. He works in media, where socializing with colleagues is more common than not. But this is even more offensive than that. The problem is not men and women who work together being alone in the same way two male colleagues would be alone. The problem is the choice to sexually harass someone. Either Beck is implying that men can't behave properly if left alone with a woman for a moment, or he's falling back on the "lying bitches" paranoia that suggests that women will claim sexual harassment at the drop of a hat. Either way, he's wrong.
“Women and men do not think the same way,” said Beck. “I’ve been trying to tell my daughters, who will tell me, ‘Dad, he’s just a friend.’ Is he? He’s 17 years old and he’s just a friend? Really? If he’s gay, I buy it. If he’s not, no, he’s not. No, he’s not. He wants sex. Period. Women and men think differently.”
Great lesson to teach your daughter, that the only value you have to men at all is sexual. Now, it may be true that a 17-year-old girl might consider if her friend is actually a Nice Guy® only pretending to be her friend to get her in the sack. But a blanket assertion that the only thing men want from women ever is sex, and that women have no value to men outside of that? Let me remind you, Beck is making this statement in the context of work life. He's quite literally saying that men cannot look at a colleague and see them as "good at accounting" or "an excellent graphic designer". If a man comes into your office and says, for instance, "Hey, would you be interested in working on this project together?", Beck is saying it's literally impossible---unless he's gay---to be asking you because he thinks you'd be good at the job. No, he just wants your vagina. Because that's all you are to men.
Sad that guys like this are allowed to fucking raise daughters, isn't it?
I have a theory about the Spiderman musical, and its inexplicable popularity despite being the most hated piece of pop culture in 2011 (people's loathing for "Friday" is mixed with giddy affection, taking it off the list). It's a combination of two things. One, the amount of bad press it got raised its visibility, so when tourists come in and are looking for a show, they latch on to Spiderman because it's a known quantity. Of course, that's not enough to push it over the top. If you go to Times Square and take in the ads, you'll see Broadway is awash in known quantities to appeal to incurious tourists, revising all sorts of classic movies and TV shows to reel them in, plus Mamma Mia. No, I suspect what's helping Spiderman out is backlash. This is just a theory, but I suspect that this scenario plays out over and over again: A Fox News-loving family is planning their trip to the Big Apple, and they want to see a Broadway show. They look over the list of available shows and Spiderman sticks out. They heard a lot about it this year! Of course, it was all bad reviews. But hell, those reviews probably came from those elitist liberal snobs who want their Broadway shows to be nudist interpretative dances about the deaths of animals from oil spills, so fuck 'em. They bet Spiderman is great, because those reviewers hate it so much. And another batch of tickets is sold. 
I usually prefer to ignore Glenn Beck these days, but his response to the whole Herman Cain situation is actually pretty typical of the various ways that all sorts of people are failing miserably to address the situation with anything approaching decency or competence, so I figured I'd take a moment to comb over it. You see,