I was going to ignore this Dr. Pepper "bitches ain't shit" campaign on the grounds that it's just catering to the Tea Party-fication of America. It's clear the whole point of it is to convince sexist assholes that using this product will piss off the feminists, since they have empty, meaningless lives that can only be filled up with the hopes that they're somehow pissing off the liberals. Being angry about it just contributes to their disease, because it gives them a temporary fix and discourages them from developing lives with meaning that will keep them from wanting so desperately to piss off the liberals. But Scott highlighted this aspect of the website advertising Bitches Ain't Shit Cola, or whatever it's called:
This week, the company unleashed a new campaign on Facebook, including a “man quiz” and a shooting gallery that aims at girly things like lipstick.
Yeah, because the right way to react when your sense of masculinity is threatened is to whip out a gun.
Obviously, Dr. Pepper rolled out this campaign before there was a mass shooting that left 8 dead, in which the murderer was apparently motivated to get revenge on his ex-wife over not getting his way in a custody battle. But if they'd done a little market research, they would have been able to predict the reaction from the very same misogynists they hope will buy up their soda. David Futrelle gathered some at Man Boobz. The theme of the comments he collected was, "Children are the property of men who create them all by themselves by ejacualating into incubators we call "women", and when you're done with your incubator, she shouldn't be able to get custody over your child-property, no matter what a judge says. And anyone who disagrees only has themselves to blame if they get shot in the face." A sample:
E]nough of this type of offensive action might just start making women and their supporters* think twice, especially if they also become targets. (* Divorce attorneys, child services workers and counselors, family court judges, and other enabling cogs in the feminist legal system)......
Essentially men need to tell feminism to shut the fuck up, give it a vigorous slap across the face thus reminding it who is the biological superior, then order it back into the kitchen/bedroom.......
What options other than overt acts of physical violence are there for a man to deal with a shrew ex and corrupt family court system?....
Most men will just lay down and be resigned to the state-enforced kidnapping and extortion plot, but some are made of tougher stuff and for you to whine about this dead ex-wife or that is inconsequential and no loss to humanity.
I submit that women … are much more likely to pay attention when they’re being threatened.
So yeah, no matter how "cute" or "harmless" you may think misogyny is---or invoking violent misogyny---unfortunately, in the real world, it's not cute or harmless at all.
I'm sure you've seen Erick Erickson's response to We Are the 99%, which is a moving Tumblr created to support Occupy Wall St., where people explain exactly what it's like to not be rich in an America where inequality is expanding rapidly. Erickson responded by starting We are the 53%---the reference is to federal income tax, which wingnuts conveniently pretend is the only tax, even as they attack Medicare and Social Security, which have different revenue streams---a Tumblr dedicated to assholes mocking the pain of others, but in that self-pitying wingnut way. To sum up the tone of the Tumblr: imagine a wingnut walking down the street and seeing someone break their ankle so badly that bone is sticking out. In response to the person with a broken leg crying out for help, wingnut says, "Man, I stubbed my toe a couple hours ago and you don't hear me crying," before moving on and laughing about what a wuss that person is as they bleed all over the pavement. It's somewhat startling to see how much the contributors don't realize what monsters they come across as. I suspect it's because they get excited when they hear a complete asshole being a blowhard (see, Rush Limbaugh), and they forget ordinary people don't actually find it attractive when someone struts about how their puppy-kicking abilities make them a badass. This was Erickson's inaugural entry:
And it is not clear to me what Erick's three jobs are: his internet biographies mention (i) right-wing internet community organizer, (ii) CNN commentator, and (iii) radio host. Are these his "three jobs"? Most of us would say that those are three aspects of one occupation--not three jobs. People who work three jobs are people who teach elementary school in the morning and early afternoon, take a shift at the car wash around dinnertime, and work a pre-dawn shift at a 24-hour 7-11. That does not sound like Erick, Son of Erick to me.
Shit, all this time I described myself as a freelance writer/journalist, not thinking I could take each separate job responsibility and count it as a separate job: author, humorist, blogger, podcaster, columnist, op-ed writer, contributing blogger to XX Factor, freelance journalist, reproductive health care expert, social media maven, and media commentator on all things feminist. That's at least eleven jobs, using the Erick Erickson Patented Job-Counting Method®. And I don't have a wife to handle the housework and social calendar organizing for me, unlike this parasite. I can probably add "chef", "housekeeper", and "cat mom" to the list, using his method.
Oh wait, you totally do. What was I thinking? He's still ranting about how those broken-leg people don't know what it's like to carry around the fading memory of a stubbed toe. Why doesn't anyone care about Erick Erickson's suffering?!
It's a good thing Erickson is a pampered, spoiled white guy. If he wasn't, he would have starved to death for lack of other people catering to him and keeping him in a bubble so thick he actually thinks this routine of his makes him look like anything but the spoiled child he is. With these levels of stupid, I'm genuinely surprised he was able to figure out the steps to writing out a sign and taking a webcam picture. Just kidding! I know someone else operated the webcam for him, because if he did it himself, he'd add "webcam operator" to his list of jobs, bringing the total to four.
Via Roy, I see the folks at National Review are openly longing to live in a society where the streets are clogged with beggars and families are forced to sell their children to traffickers to get enough money to eat. Julie Gunlock, writing for NRO, is ready to give hungry children something to cry about:
Sesame Street would be wiser to educate America’s children about the real poor and hungry — the 98 percent of the world population who live outside the United States.
I want to see that Sesame Street! "Hey kids, I know you mom put you to bed without dinner because she couldn't afford any food, but at least you aren't like this beggar, whose nose fell off from leprosy! Now pray to Ronald Reagan for forgiveness for thinking that you, a 4-year-old child, deserves to eat food. Get a job, you lazy welfare suck."
The truth is, 94.3 percent of American households are able to put enough food on the table every day to feed their families.
Meaning that one in 20 Americans goes entire days without eating. Julie is unsatisfied with this number! If you took a random sampling of kindergarteners and put them in an average sized classroom, only 1 would be too hungry to behave or learn, and that number should be much higher. At least 5-6 children should be crying with hunger. Maybe they can grow up to be fashion models, so they shouldn't be so whiny.
As I wrote on NRO back in January, the idiom “food insecure” — a term created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — means one has either “reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet” or “disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.”
So, far from hungry or starving, Lily suffers from a much less dramatic condition — unpleasant to be sure, but at its core, just a somewhat boring, irregular, and occasionally reduced diet.
I mean, she's not saying that they should go weeks without eating! Just days. Toughens them up, I'm sure. I mean, sure, living on a diet of irregularly accessed Ramen noodles sounds unpleasant for Julie, but we're talking about poor people here. They're not real people in Julie's eyes, and so needs like "nutrition" just don't register. We just need to get enough calories in 'em so they can clean Julie's house and office and harvest and prepare her food. Those things a diverse diet provides---such as vitamins or minerals---who gives a shit? Small children of poor people don't need the brain development of a properly fed child. What are they going to do with all that literacy? Probably vote or something, and we can't have that. And sure, not being fed a decent diet can cause major damage to your bones and internal organs, but how strong do you really need to be to push a mop to clean up after Julie? Strawberries aren't that heavy; you don't need a well-formed body to pick them.
God, I can't even continue. What a monster. The lack of empathy on display is so outrageous that I have to wonder if Julie had a nutritional deficiency as a child that kept the empathy centers in her brain from forming. Of course, the fact that conservatives think this is acceptable and invigorating discourse tells me that this is more a cultural issue---they were born with empathy centers and fed properly, but they lost their sense of empathy from underuse.
I'm just surprised she didn't suggest that if women don't want to see their children suffering from malnutrition, they should have kept their legs shut. But hey, there's still time and apparently, she writes about this topic a lot.
Boy-hoo, I never liked Hank Williams Jr., in no small part because he's pretty much the crown jewel of every tendency of country-western I dislike, notably the postures of rural "authenticity" that are, in and of themselves inauthentic. I actually like country-western music, so this isn't a knock on it altogether, but the more strutting about how you're a possum-eating, backwoods-living country boy when you're in fact a mansion-dweller who spends more time golfing than trapping, the more I roll my eyes. And Hank Williams Jr. was always the worst, the absolute worst. His name is actually Randall Williams, but his pathetic mother basically had him on stage as an impersonator of his dead father from the time he was 8 years old on, and even though his style adapted with the times, he's clung to Daddy's legacy like a motherfucker. Again, I don't dislike children of musicians becoming musicians themselves, but they usually try to be unique individuals---Sean Lennon isn't putting out songs called "You Know My Dad Was A Beatle, Right", but that's basically what Hank Williams Jr. did with "Family Tradition". Look, I get that you might have daddy issues if your famous father credited with inventing modern country-western died while you were small. But please, go to therapy. Stop blanketing the airwaves with your issues. Anyyway, on top of it all, he's a pig. And that was my opinion of him before this shit:
Oh yes, he went there:
When asked what he didn't like about Obama and Boehner playing golf, Williams responded, "It'd be like Hitler playing golf with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu."
The headlines on this are "Williams Jr. compared Obama to Hitler", but he did oh so much more than that. He basically compared Obama's attitude towards conservative white people to Hitler's attitudes towards Jews. Lest we forget, Hitler actually rounded up 6 million Jews and killed them. Obama....occasionally disagrees with conservative white people on some issues. In other words, in Williams Jr.'s world, losing at the polls is for conservative white people as being killed in a genocide is for Jews. That's off-the-charts entitlement. That's so entitled we need a new word to describe how entitled that is.
Also, seriously, fuck you and your faux filthy Wal-Mart-looking clothes. You're like a fucking bazillionaire. Wear a clean shirt, you piece of shit. Your father whose footsteps you wallow in knew to do that much. It's pathetic the way his fan base eats his bullshit up, convincing themselves his faux country boy act somehow makes them more "authentic" for buying into it.
NPR is saying it's not certain if ESPN dropping Williams in light of these comments will be a permanent decision. It really should be. "Rowdy Friends" is a stupid song that's blaringly sexist to boot. They should get someone new that has more mass appeal, like the Foo Fighters. I bet they'd be down.
Emily at Tiger Beatdown has an amusing post up about the way that right wingers are abusing cupcakes for evil instead of good, concluding that cupcakes are therefore evil. She suggests other baked goods---including cookies, cakes, and macaroons---are also tainted with evil. I suggest brownies or my favorite, zucchini bread, as a liberal-friendly alternative. (And for the humorless wingnuts reading this site, I want you to know that the previous trashing of baked goods is a joke. I realize that wingnuts take very seriously the idea that some foods are "conservative" and some are "liberal", and that eating of arugula instead of Burger King will cause their testicles to shrivel up, but seriously, liberals aren't as interested. Sometimes a cupcake is just a cupcake. Really.) But what I thought was really interesting was the anti-choice cupcake fuckwittery:
...once a year, on October 9th, we would bake as many birthday cupcakes as humanly possible and hand them out for free wherever we can. When people asked whose birthday it is, we tell them these cupcakes are for celebrating the birthdays of every person who never gets to have a birthday. People respond in all ways – from refusing the cupcake, to sharing about abortions they’ve had in the past and the regret they carry, to just wanting to know more.
But really, they're selling the whole "never will get a birthday" thing short! After all, there are many, many, many more potential people that never come into existence than just those who may have been but for an abortion. After all, there are children you never had because you use contraception (to be fair, anti-choice activists are also against that). But there are also children you didn't have because you didn't have sex in the first place. Not fucking is clearly murder in these cases. Every time you're ovulating and you elect to go to bed alone, you have deprived someone of a birthday! So women like Lila Rose and Jill Stanek, who claim that contraception is a sin and therefore expect us to believe they simply use abstinence to keep from having babies, are also horrible deprivers-of-birthdays with all that abstaining. Stanek is in her 50s and has only one son, I do believe, meaning she's deprived approximately 400 children of their chance to have a birthday. That's a lot of cupcakes! Lila Rose is only 23, which means she's probably only been preventing precious babies from having the birthdays they deserve for a little over a decade. So let's give her the benefit of the doubt and assumed she's carelessly disregarded her ovulation 130-ish times, preventing a precious, precious baby from having the birthday he deserves. But between them, that's 500 birthdays that will never happen, because, by their own measure, they're selfish shrews who don't care about "life". Honestly, I don't see how they have a right to judge anyone else with their track record of not giving their precious babies a chance.
Unless of course this has nothing to do with potential life and has everything to do with sex, and anti-choice anger that women can having it without paying a steep penalty for it. Because if it's really about not preventing potential babies from being born with "sinful" methods like contraception and abortion, Stanek and Rose---who, I must remind you, have prevented the birthdays of 500 children---have a lot of non-babies to answer for.
Yesterday for RH Reality Check, I wrote a piece about how civility is really impossible in political discourse for those who political opinions are uncivil. I'm sick of how the focus on "incivility" has been around the least toxic aspects of our political discourse, namely joke-telling and an unwillingness to pretend to like the opposition more than you do. I don't really have a problem when people make fun of each other or call each other assholes, Wingnuts are poised to call me a "hypocrite" on this, I'm sure, but trust me, I get called every name under the sun and I don't really waste time worrying about it. I do have a problem with bigoted language---every man out there who calls me a "cunt" isn't just calling me a name, but adding to the overall message that women aren't worth anything---and sexual harassment, but if someone ever bothered to call me an asshole or try (they almost always fail) to make fun of me, I shrug it off. Who gives a shit? It is worth noting that the vast majority of negative response I get is gendered, either in the sense that it's sexual harassment, bigoted language against women, or mansplaining. Which says a lot about the opposition's limited imaginations, but has no bearing whatsoever on the use of snark as a tool of political discourse. Public figures should not whine about having people making fun of them. (Though I will retain the right to ban trolls who have nothing to add our discourse on this blog, though in my experience most of the worst ones have a creepiness stemming directly from deep-set misogyny and racism.)
No, as I note in the piece, what bothers me is that all this focus on civility doesn't dive into the very real problems of incivility in our political discourse, the vast majority of which is, like it or not, coming from the right: lying and abusing private citizens for the "crime" of being human beings with needs/rights where the two I discussed. I was focused on anti-choicers, and my point was that the incivility of their position---civil people do not lay claim to own the bodies of others, even if "only" for the limited purpose of forcing them to bear children against their will---made their lying and clinic abuse inevitable. Of course, an anti-choicer showed up in comments and immediately proved the point about lying, but he was focused on a very specific lie that is really more of a double standard. (I'd call it a lie because people who employ double standards always deny it.) Double standards are a constant incivility of the right; in fact, I would say it's the engine that drives their movement. The Tea Party's motto should be "Rights and privileges for me, but not for thee." Their rationale is always that they clearly deserve all the advantages, but other people, who are clearly inferior (no proof needed; bigotry will do), deserve nothing.
Take, for instance, the tendency of Republicans to make fun of Obama for using a teleprompter by reading those jokes off teleprompters. Rick Scott took this double standard to a whole new level recently by acknowledging that's exactly what he was doing:
That was exactly what Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) did to kick off the Florida straw poll on Saturday. TPM reports that Scott read his remarks from a set of teleprompters at the podium, including this jab (which was underlined in his script to emphasize the joke): “I have to admit, I was a little nervous When I looked out here. I saw all the TV cameras and a teleprompter. I figured President Obama must be here – giving another speech about raising taxes!”
The message of jokes about Obama using a teleprompter is, "Obama is stupid." Being able to speak without one is used as a measure of intelligence, and it's sold to an audience that doesn't engage in public speaking very much, which allows the audience to laugh and feel superior, without ever actually having to prove their own self-assurance that they could make flowing, articulate speeches with nary a note to guide them. But how does that explain all the Republicans who straight up read a teleprompter, even while making fun of Obama for doing so?
Well, having spent plenty of time around wingnuts and reading their self-rationalizations, I would say that their reasoning is, "That's different. They don't need the teleprompter; it's just a tool for them. But he's dependent on it." The evidence for this is crickets, of course, since both Obama and the people making jokes about him use the teleprompter at equal rates. But people making teleprompter jokes assume that it's self-evident that Obama is dependent and his critics aren't. Of course, the reason that they assume it's self-evident is their racist mythology about "affirmative action"---their knee-jerk assumption that a black man holding a job previously reserved for privileged white people is given advantages because he certainly isn't smart enough to have done it on his own. The advantages of privileged whiteness are considered not-privileges, but just natural results of inherent superiority.
I'd say that kind of routine bigotry is far more uncivil than the snark that obsesses people clamoring for more civility. It's not that teleprompter jokes are snarky that's the problem. It's that they only work if you assume a racist double standard.
I think that this double standard is worth considering when you look at the tedious "affirmative action" bake sales being conducted by a bunch of kids who conveniently forget all the privileges that got them a seat at prestigious universities, a seat that many less privileged people with far more native intelligence didn't get because they weren't beneficiaries of the higher levels of education, investment and attention that the nimrods running this bake sale got as a matter of course. It's pathetic seeing a bunch of C students rounded up to B students because the system is invested in seeing them succeed turn around and dog on people who generally have to demonstrate A student talent to be cut a break.
It's worth noting that when I googled "teleprompter" to get an image for this, I found mostly pictures of Obama using one. Wingnuts are positively obsessed with the idea that his teleprompter "proves" he's stupid, which means they are going to elaborate lengths to believe that it's a completely different thing for a white conservative to use one then for a black Democrat to use one.
I hate giving attention to Ron Paul, who is a familiar type in Texas: equal parts racist old crank that obsesses over conspiracy theories that have their historical roots in anti-Semiticism and vicious misogynist who thinks women's sexual liberation is the worst thing that's ever happened in history. Unfortunately, Paul has managed to snag the affections of a collection of white men who imagine themselves to be "liberal", because they hear he supports legalizing marijuana, though they hide behind his opposition to the war because even they know that it's fucking disgusting to believe it's more important for dudes to have legal rights to joints than women to have legal rights to abortion. Paulbots are literally the most annoying people on Earth, because there is literally nothing their hero can do that they won't vociferously defend, sometimes even while claiming not to support his point of view. After all, they aren't prepared yet to follow their hero's prescribed lifestyle of marrying a church lady and giving up on the hope of interesting sex for the rest of their lives, but they know that keeping their already dim hopes of sex with live, consenting women alive means at least pretending like they are also repulsed by statements like, "order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks," and "the federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS". Being Paulbots, they actually claim that these prior statements by Paul are fine, because they claim to believe his transparent lie that someone else wrote them for a newsletter and he just happened to sign his name to them without knowing what was in them. This, even though in many of the offensive statements, he took great pains to make it clear that he was the one writing them. For instance, in the rant about the "federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS", Paul wrote, "my training as a physician helps me see through this one." But Paulbots are so dedicated to seeing this Bible-thumping, racist, misogynist piece of shit as their hero that they'll claim with straight faces that somehow all those first person statements in newsletters Ron Paul signed his name to were not written by him. The man could eat a live kitten on TV, and while it was still squeaking in pain and terror as life seeped out of it and its blood ran down his face, they would say, "CNN is only telling you that's a kitten because they're part of the oligarchy, dude," before taking another puff on the joint.
So I wasn't surprised to have angry Paulbots defend their hero on Twitter when I posted a link to Ron Paul suggesting that the Galveston hurricane of 1900 was the gold standard in how our country should respond to hurricanes, and that we shouldn't have FEMA coordinating rescue efforts that would prevent horrors like that hurricane, which killed three times as many people as the attacks on 9/11. (Galveston is in his district, too, so Paul isn't fucking around when he idealizes the drowning deaths of thousands of people.) Paul helpfully added that drowned bodies are good for our national character, adding, "FEMA creates many of our problems because they sell the insurance because you can't buy it from a private company, which means there's a lot of danger, so we pay people to build on beaches, and then we have to go and rescue them." Angry Paulbots responded to my disapproval of this by sending things like old articles praising Galveston for being able to recover from a hurricane completely destroying their town. Of course, this was nonsensical, because as admirable as the rebuilding efforts may have been, they had nothing to do with the point at hand, which is that it's important to have a federal agency to organize and run efforts to prevent people from drowning in the first place. One Paulbot actually had the nerve to cite Hurricane Katrina as a reason we don't need FEMA. When I pointed out that FEMA was being run in 2005 exactly as Paul wants---which is to say, not at all---the Paulbot had no response.
In a sense, Ron Paul is just a sideshow, and his hateful desire to have people drown as some sort of lesson to people who might live on the coast (as if they do that for the hell of it and not because that's where their jobs are, or as if there's really huge parts of the country where there are never any natural dangers---by the way, Paul is breaking his own moral code by living in D.C.) is just another nasty thing he said to appeal to cranks who just enjoy being assholes, no matter how "progressive" they claim to be. But it's also important to pay attention to these narratives, because a lot of them are tried out by fringe sorts like Paul and then mainstreamed in right wing channels. One of the biggest problems is that when things go right, as they largely did with the response to Irene, the minimal damage perversely gets people to believe that we don't need massive response efforts. "That wasn't so bad," people think, "so I don't know why we need building codes, infrastructure spending, and coordinated government responses to natural disasters." You know, even though these are the reasons that it wasn't so bad. It's a lot like someone who eats right and exercises their whole life, and when they don't develop heart disease, saying, "Man, I guess I wasted all that effort."
Paul's function in the conservative movement is to pull it to the right. He comes out and says something outlandish like claiming that we don't need FEMA or that desegregation actually worsened race relations (the insinuation being that white people can only deal with black people if they have formal legal superiority over them), and that helps make crazy wingnuttery that falls just short that sound more moderate. He runs out and denounces efforts to keep people alive and idealizes a situation where 8,000 people died. That gives other conservatives space to demand a defunding of FEMA and National Weather Services, because hey, at least they aren't opening praising a situation where thousands drown to death. Also, by focusing attention on 1900, Paul can distract from people comparing the excellent government response to Irene with the piss-poor government response to Katrina.
As I noted yesterday, Democrats need to loudly resist this. Not only denounce Paul's statements, but go the next step and hang him on Republicans in general. Irene is a great occasion to show how effective government can be if being run by people who believe in government. It's often hard to show how that works, because as noted before, when things are going well, people tend not to notice them. But one opportunity is to highlight ignorant statements like Paul's and contrast them with our realities.
Even though it will be pointedly ignored by mainstream media types wed to the narrative that the Tea Party is a spontaneous uprising of people who were apolitical before Obama sent them around the bend, I'm guessing many of you read with interest Robert Putnam and David Campbell's distillation of their intense research in political attitudes of Americans that shows that the "Tea Party" is the same ol' right wing base, but just with a new name. And they're the most Bible-thumping-est part of the right wing base (as well as the most racist---these things tend to go together).
More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.
All of which doesn't mean we can just shrug this off as same-shit-different-name. One important thing has changed---giving them a fancy new nickname and a bunch of Astroturf rallies and endless coverage in both right wing and mainstream media has emboldened these dickweeds. It's same-shit-different-name, but with more power and energy because of the fancy new name.
One measure of how emboldened the religious right is at any point in time is looking at book challenges and censorship in local schools. Interfering with the intellectual empowerment of minors is right up there on the priority list with raising the teenage pregnancy rate to produce a constant flow of examples to point to when wailing on about the wages of sin. And censorship attempts have already seen a lot of success this year, according to the American Library Association.
Last month ThinkProgress reported that a Missouri high school had banned Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five because religious residents complained that it taught principles contrary to the Bible. Now the American Library Association reports that this year alone, U.S. schools have banned more than 20 books and faced more than 50 other challenges, with many more expected this fall as school starts.....
While parents have traditionally launched the lion’s share of challenges, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, an attorney with the association, says she has noticed “an uptick in organized efforts” to remove books from public and school libraries.
The uptick in organization is a disturbing trend to watch more closely. With religious right whining censorship efforts aimed at the internet or television, I think it's easier just to see them as "concerned citizens", since a lot of well-meaning but misguided people tend to get bent out of shape at kids' investment in pop culture, which they erroneously believe is significantly different than their own youthful love of pop culture. But attacking books shows that this isn't about the religious right being concerned that kids' minds are being numbed. It shows that they're worried kids' minds aren't being numbed enough! Which, in turn, should make people inclined to agree with them about TV and music stop and think really hard. If people whose main concern is making kids stupid and compliant get upset at kids' exposure to music videos and video games, it's because they see those things, like books, as potentially horizon-broadening. Strangely, the religious right sees things the way I do in this way---they don't see a significant difference between fiction in a book, on a stage, or on a screen. The big difference is they oppose all ways that can broaden horizons, and I see the potential to broaden horizons in all these various mediums, and believe that's a good thing.
There are two basic reactions from Vatican apologists you get when you write a pointed criticism of the dippy shit that the Catholic Church does: incoherent, bed-shitting rage and unbelievably sexist condescension. Both reactions are hilarious but disturbing, because they tend to be effective at the ultimate goal, which is silencing critics of the church. Most people really don't enjoy getting dog-piled and will think harder next time they dare suggest that the god-botherers are assholes. But it's hard to decide which is a more fucked-up reaction. On one hand, there's a fear factor in the incoherent rage response. But the condescension is really over the top in the "silly girls can't be expected to understand stuff, which is why the church expects them to submit and stop asking questions" kind of way.
Take this amusing head pat I got from Jennifer Fulwiler, who, despite being female, is MRA-level sexist. I think she literally touches on every single condescending stereotype about women: that we're emotional children, that we're easily deceived, that we're incredibly stupid, and above all, that we cannot make decisions on our own, but instead are natural followers who are just doing what we're told. And that therefore it's a matter of giving women the correct masters, because women, being basically like dogs, don't really have free will or moral agency.
And no, I'm not exaggerating. Let us examine:
Amanda Marcotte’s article in Slate about World Youth Day is making the rounds this week. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by suggesting that she was very upset when she wrote it. What was it about the event that got her so flustered?
Sure, lady, tell yourself I was flopped out on my bed, weeping like a child who has been told she has to clean her room before she goes outside. Actually, wait, no. Actually, what was going on was I read the article about World Youth Day and thought, "Man, the pope is a real choad, isn't he? I can totally make fun of this." I'm not saying if I was actually laughing at my own jokes while I wrote it, but let's just say it's happened before. I'm also pretty sure that if I was "flustered", I wouldn't have written a piece that hit so close to home. All these things seem really obvious from the piece, which has more of a "eat my poo" tone than a "waaaaaah the pope is a meanie" tone, but I'll bet Fulwiler's audience eats this crap up, because it fits their image of women as emotionally unstable children.
There’s not a clear thesis to the piece, but it seems that the Church’s anti-abortion stance, emphasized when Pope Benedict offered forgiveness to women who have had abortions, is what triggered most of her angst.
Fulwiler can cram as many synonyms as possible in for "bitches be crazy", but it's not actually changing the fact that my tone was not upset, flustered, angsty, or in any way comparable to a teenage girl furiously writing about being rejected by a boy in her diary. The correct adjectives are "amused" and "mocking". And I think we all know what the thesis of the piece was---again, relying more on stereotypes of women as childish and not doing our homework properly!---but I'm happy to spell it out: The pope is a dickbag, and increasing numbers of Catholics are clueing into that. See, that wasn't so hard!
She then goes on to accurately enough describe the pro-choice view that women should have control over our bodies. But, you know, we've already established that she thinks women are just too damn stupid for choices. So now the fun really begins. If you read anti-choice stuff, you can probably guess where she goes next. That's right! To "contraception is an evil conspiracy to hoodwink ladies, who are really really stupid".
And, like a lot of crazy ideas in our culture, we have contraception to thank for it. Now that there’s widespread access to contraception, our young women are told not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. They’re assured that sex can be safely separated from its life-giving potential, as long as they use artificial birth control. From a secular point of view, it might sound like a nice, pro-woman message.
Only if you think women are full human beings who can make their own decisions, which she most certainly does not. She goes on to point out that contraception some times fails, citiing the Guttmacher (who she erroneously claims is owned by Planned Parenthood---they're actually an independent organization with no connection to Planned Parenthood) statistic that half of women who have abortions were using contraception at the time. Actually, she misinterprets the data, saying, "were using contraception when they conceived their child." Actually, the statistic is "Fifty-four percent of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method (usually the condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant." Of this group, only 13% of pill users and 14% of condom users report correct use. She's fudging the numbers to imply that contraception is less effective than it is.
But let's get back to the "women are incredibly stupid" portion of the program!
So, let’s summarize the situation: Women are handed contraception and assured that they need not have a second thought as to whether they’re ready for pregnancy. Then, when their birth control method fails, they’re encouraged to undergo a painful medical procedure performed on the most sensitive part of their bodies.
Because you know what isn't even a remotely painful event in the most sensitive part of your body? Childbirth. Man, she not only thinks women are stupid, but that her audience is stupid. I'm beginning to think she's just projecting a personal problem on everyone in sight.
I love the way she characterizes how contraception and abortions happen. It's not that women seek these things out! No, the contraception man comes to your door and hands you your bag of contraception. Prior to then, it would have never occured you to do something like put a penis in your vagina. But suddenly, without even thinking about it, you're rolling a condom on a penis and boom! Next thing you know, pregnant. And then the abortion posse shows up to your house and takes you to the clinic. You probably didn't even realize that you'd get a baby if you didn't go with them. Because you have no will or mind of your own.
And so, to Amanda Marcotte and others like her, I would say, as I’ve said before: You’re right to be angry. You are correct in sensing that women’s freedom is being taken away. You’re just wrong to blame the Church. Not only does it not “punish female sexuality,” but it’s one of the few voices in our culture that respects it.
Seriously, she has a strange view of respecting women: treat them like overgrown children, portray them as having no real will of their own, condescendingly tell us we have no understanding of our own lives and relationships, and push for laws that "respect" 78,000 women into their graves a year. I think I'll stick with the old-fashioned definition of "respect" that involves treating women like grown adults who should have the right to make important decisions about their own lives.
Also, because I know it's important to Jennifer Fulwiler, here's the thesis of this post: Jennifer Fulwiler is a sex-phobic, misogynist crank who does a poor job concealing her contempt for all women besides herself with condescending head pat tone. And she can eat my poo.
Peter Thiel's ridiculous fantasy that he can escape the oppression of living in a democracy that doesn't (formally, at least) assume white men are naturally superior to everyone else is in the news again, because Details revealed that the Kim Jong Il of the tech world has given a measly $1.25 million to a "seasteading" project:
Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."
Obviously, it's not going to happen, since it's not well-funded enough. I'll bet Thiel's house cost more than $1.25 million in construction supplies. Don't judge! Tiger cages and football stadium-sized LARP-ing arenas built for complete immersion in the fantasy don't come cheap. But the very possibility of running away to a special island where they don't have to deal with all the undesirables and people who know where to find slacks without pleats has an intoxicating effect on many in Wingnuttia. Roy, as usual, is all over this, detailing how much of a pull this redonkulous fantasy has on the dorks of the right, including Allahpundit saying that this could be "the greatest game of Sim City ever".
Roy's response is so great that I'm just going to quote an entire paragraph:
Me, I can't wait for the first Jolly Rogers to encircle Freedonia, and for all the rational self-interest boys therein to start shooting their own dicks off*, and for their galley slaves, who have been paid in sips of water and crusts of bread since they were purchased in Gabon (minimum wage? That's socialism!), to turn against their masters and separate them from whatever penises they have left.
Who wants to start laying bets now that if they do pull this off, and pirates attack them---and if I were a pirate, I'd go a long fucking way to ransack a floating island specifically built for soft-handed dorks with too much money whose time spent at video game consoles has deluded them into thinking they're badass---they turn to the U.S. government for protection?
But I just don't see it getting to that point. Even if they manage to get enough money to build the infrastructure, they still come across the same problem that plagues all libertarian fantasies: the role of women. The problem for libertarians is that their imaginary worlds where there aren't any government services quadruple their reliance on the free labor women already contribute, because that's how it goes---if you won't pay someone to do thankless, hard work of keeping things going, women are often expected to step up and pick up the slack. So, for instance, if you eliminate public education, women will lose 6-7 hours a day just from that much more childcare and educational labor they'll have to provide for free. Without government subsidies and regulation of the food systems, that work will all fall on women, who will spend exponentially more time having to seek out affordable food sources, grow their own, and carefully examine food to make sure it's safe, and go through elaborate kitchen processes to make very sure. The days of just buying a side of beef and some broccoli, throwing it on and having dinner in no time are over. Since a libertarian world requires the consumer to carry exponentially more burden in general---because it's a lot of work trying to protect yourself in a market that has no regulation, no consumer protection, and no recourse---women will basically have no time to sleep. Do you think these libertarian douchebags think they'll be the ones trying to buy everything from clothes to household goods in this time-intensive consumer hellhole? Hell no! The expectation has always been on women to do that, and they'll just be expected to work harder at it. And because the demands of unpaid work will grow so dramatically, women won't have time anymore for paid work. Which will tilt the balance of power even more in favor of men, who in a libertarian utopia will happily pretend they deserve all the power because they make all the money, i.e. are the "producers".
I'm guessing the number of women who are willing to sign up for this to get some loving from an Ayn Rand superfan is roughly zero. Megan McArdle, I must say, seems perfectly content in her non-libertarian paradise of public transportation-heavy Washington D.C.
Now, I'd be surprised if the guys suckling at this fantasy haven't thought about this. I'm sure their solution, though who knows how spoken it is, is to turn to the "free market", since they won't be under U.S. laws anymore and therefore trafficking will be legal. Sure, it really flies in the face of the "liberty" part of the term "libertarian" to pay traffickers to bring prostitutes and domestic workers in with trickery, refuse to pay them, and then disallow them to leave, but I refer you back to the prior link where Thiel makes it clear that the only "liberty" that counts is for white men anyway. I'm sure many will turn to mail order brides, as well. Which will immediately become the entire reputation of the island: a place where men go to rule over women that are all, to one degree or another, living in captivity. And really, even big assholes would hesitate to move to the island and have everyone back home remember him solely as the guy who would do such a thing.
Aggravated today by a New York Times story in which striking Verizon workers were forced to argue that their wages weren’t, in fact, “too high”–seeing them make the very valid point that living in the New York area and raising a family on $40,000-$70,000 a year doesn’t actually make them rich–I tweeted angrily:
“How the hell did we get into a world where workers making $60,000 are overpaid but CEOs making millions are overtaxed?”
I don’t tend to have that many Republican or libertarian Twitter followers, but when Kirsten Powers, a Fox News contributor, retweeted me, I was deluged with replies, some of which I’m reposting here (without user names, since I don’t know if these folks would care to share):
“becuase they are paying all those 60k wages. Without them, the people making 60k are unemployed.”
“Who assumes the most risk?”
“Pay is dependent upon what you accomplish for the company. If you make 60K and are not being productive..”
“If you have to threaten people with violence to earn $60K, you are overpaid.”
“because you can’t punish success. It’s anti-capitalist.”
“The workers making $60K accepted it while CEO’s demanded more, but how does the CEO’s wage negatively affect the $60K guy?”
I personally wasn't aware that the CEO of Verizon did all the work of building towers, working with customers, running accounts, and making sales. But according to these guys, Verizon is simply a charity organization and "jobs" are actually welfare checks that hard-working CEOs write to people who don't work, presumably out of the kindness of their hearts. How that's "capitalism", I don't know, but I will say this: Then why are they so upset at the strike?
I mean, if the CEO is the only "productive" person at Verizon, then all of the "non-productive" people can go on strike and business should carry on without a blip, right? You can't really have it both ways, believing that working people are leeches who contribute nothing, and then throwing yourself on the ground kicking and screaming when the non-productive leeches of the world stop contributing. That literally makes no sense at all. That's like being mad that a complete stranger who has never spoken to you tries to file for divorce against you. You might be a little perturbed, but you're not like, "How dare they want to divorce me?!" They can't divorce you. You weren't married.
Seriously, wingnuts, choose. Either the workers contribute nothing to the company and therefore don't deserve compensation, or strikes are bad. You can't have it both ways.
Since their argument contradicts itself, I think it's time to consider the possibility that all this blather about "production" is just a cover story. We need to start judging them by their actions instead of their illogical rhetoric. And their actions suggest one very solid theme: a belief that this country shouldn't have a middle class. That's what drove so much anger at Sarah, was her assumption that people who work for a living should get middle class wages. The notion that someone, somewhere might work a full-time job for more money than what it keeps to barely keep them alive so they can work more sends these people around the bend.
Which is why I propose dusting off an old term and bringing it back in fashion to describe their ideology. The current ones are insufficient. "Libertarian" makes no sense, because they oppose the rights of workers to collectively demand better wages, a fairly basic liberty. Instead, they expect these people to work hard and slobber gratefully that their masters tolerate paying them at all. Nor are they really "conservative" in any meaningful sense. I don't like conservatives, but conservatives are people who object to social progress. But the existence of an American middle class has been around for a century now, and conservatives in the past were far less likely to object to its existence on the ideological grounds that no one but the rich deserve to have squat.
There's really only one term for people who believe, as a matter of ideology, that a handful of people deserve to own everything and the rest of us should living lives of endless work and squalor, with perhaps a slender class of people who get paid pretty handsomely to protect the interests of those who own everything: feudalists. That's the system that they're clearly advocating for, albeit in modern terms, where the billionaires and company owners are our kings, top executives are the knight class, and everyone else is a peasant who works to death, gets four hours off for church on Sunday, and needs to be grateful that his masters allow him that.
I bet if you groused on Twitter that the Koch brothers are supporting a return to droit du seigneur for CEOs with regards to their male employees' spouses, Kirsten Powers would retweet it so as to bring a calvacade of outrage on your head. It's in our future, people. I can't wait until a sea of Fox News advocates starts tweeting at Sarah, "Right, like some Verizon employee can really give good wedding night to his bride like CEO Lowell McAdam. The workers produce nothing, so why should they be the ones to get the wedding night benefits?"
So, we have a woman running for President who literally believes that her god made women to be the helpmeets of men, and that marriage should be built around women submitting to their husbands. And this belief, being weird---especially for someone who claims she wants to run the entire nation---was asked about during a debate.
And this is "sexist"?
No, it's not. The belief she has is sexist. Asking a candidate about her sexist beliefs is well within bounds. If a politician were running and followed a religion that believed that people under 5'4" were not fully human and should be routinely beat about the head by taller people, it wouldn't be sizeist to make her explain that belief to people she expects to vote for her, either. She's sizeist to believe that.
It's pathetic that this is even being debated. Stop letting conservatives who pretend to have the sense of very small children run us around in circles like this. Please.
I can't decide what is more telling an example of National Review's degeneracy: that they hired the soft-brained virginity worshipper Kathryn Jean Lopez, or that stewing pit of evil John "Women Lose Their Looks At 16" Derbyshire. But Derbyshire is winning the race this week:
Through British veins runs the poisonous fake idealism of “human rights” and “sensitivity,” of happy-clappy multicultural groveling and sick, weak, deracinated moral universalism — the rotten fruit of a debased, sentimentalized Christianity.
When not begging for forgiveness and chastisement from those who rightfully despise him, the modern Brit is lost in contemplation of his shiny new car or tweeting new gadget; or else he has given over all his attention to some vapid TV production or soccer team.
I treasure my faint, fading recollections of Britain when she was still, for a few years longer, a nation.
Today Britain is merely a place, a bazaar. Let it burn!
So many thoughts, I figured I'd just list them:
1) If Derbyshire's measure of how awesome a nation is centers around how white it is, he really has some 'splaining to do. After all, nearly 88% of people living in England are white, In contrast, in the U.S., white non-Hispanic people make up 64% of the population, and I do believe that's falling at a faster rate than England. According to Wikipedia, Derbyshire lives in a Long Island town that is pretty damn white, but I guarantee you, a similar suburban area of England would be much more suitable to his need for a non-deracinated landscape. So why isn't he calling for people to burn America to the ground?
2) There's another reason I know that Derbyshire is being dishonest and is simply playing the role of the grumpy old Englishman saying things his racist audience secretly believes but is afraid to say: His diss on soccer. Derbyshire is playing off a xenophobic, ignorant American audience's belief that soccer is an effeminate game played by girls and effete foreigners. He's also exploiting their ignorance about soccer's history---to suggest that soccer fandom is somehow evidence that England is less English makes no sense, since they invented the sport, and it spread through colonialism. It's like saying being a fan of baseball and apple pie makes you less American. The intertwining of English masculinity and soccer couldn't have actually passed Derbyshire's attention; he was 21 the last time they won the World Cup, which was a big fucking deal. I'd actually bet he probably has a favorite team and just declines to discuss it with his colleagues.
Seriously, what he wrote made roughly as much sense as arguing that American men are a bunch of eunuchs because they like beer-drinking and American football. Except to his audience, which is working off bad information, and that's who he's deceitfully pandering to.
3) Not to go all Godwin on you, but someone has, in the past, really done a bang-up job of trying to burn England to the ground, something that Derbyshire, born in 1945, couldn't have really missed growing up. And they also believed that keeping their nation strong and pure meant keeping it racially pure, and that a "deracinated" country was weak, sniveling and effeminate. That attitude didn't work out well for them, for Europe, and definitely not for England. But Derbyshire knows his audience's historical memories of that are much weaker than English historical memories, and he's aiming this disingenuous and offense rant at an American audience, so he doesn't really give a rat's ass.
There's so much to comment on from this clip, but what really struck me about this report on Boehner's visible loss of control over the Tea Party idiots in his party is that the teabaggers, as an act of aggression against him, started praying. Being from Texas, I'm really familiar with praying as a form of passive aggressive emotional warfare, but even I was mildly surprised to see a bunch of grown men doing it to other grown men who they claim to be on the same team as. As a psychological weapon, it's really grown past the pinched mouth "i'll pray for you" disapprovals I grew up witnessing.
I think this whole situation should put to rest all the hand-wringing about what the "Tea Party" is. Whatever diverse shit people are saying on the ground, people who are taking leadership roles are religious fanatics with very small minds who would rather burn this country down to the ground rather than share power with the kind of folks who would vote for Barack Obama. Or, to put it another way, the teabagger relationship to the country is like a wife-beater to his wife: what they call "love" is actually a desire to exert control and complete ownership. And now the wife-country has run off with a handsome and charming black man.
Of course they're going to pull the trigger.
The religious fanaticism angle is fascinating to me, and I think goes a long way towards explaining why the Tea Party types are going to tank any deal. Basically, once you start saying that god is telling you what to do, what you mean is you're making 100% of your decisions based on knee-jerk emotions. And not just any emotions, but fundamentalist Christian ones---i.e. paranoia, grandiosity, etc. A lot of these folks probably believe Obama is the Antichrist. But even if they don't, they definitely believe that anyone who isn't their version of right wing conservative is in thrall to Satan. What this makes them is impervious to reason. That's why I think they really, seriously do believe that Obama, Boehner, the pundits, etc. are lying when they say the shit hits the fan if we don't raise the debt celing. That is, in the fundie eye, a lie fueled by Satan to keep this country away from the path of the Lord. Everything the demonized mainstream media and the Democrats say is, in their view.
This is what religious fanaticism does to the body politic. I think a lot of people have, for a long time, imagined that the fundie right wasn't that big a deal, because hey, they just want to ban abortion and gay rights, right? As long as people considered these second tier issues, the fundies could grow their power unchecked. The mainstream Republican party thought they could use the Bible thumpers to get a caucus together, throw them some abortion bones, and then use their warm bodies to get votes for the stuff Wall Street really cares about. But what they've found is they've created a monster.
I don't say that lightly; there are many dumbasses in the world. But this clip really puts O'Reilly over the top. He makes, in quick order, three mind-boggling claims:
1) That the Institute of Medicine recommended that the HHS use tax dollars to pay for every woman's birth control.
2) That free birth control won't reduce unwanted pregnancy rates, because the reason women get pregnant is they're "blasted" and don't use birth control.
3) The third claim is implicit, and it's that the birth control that's under discussion---he specifically mentions the pill---requires you to remember to use it while you're having the kind of wild, drunken sex O'Reilly has failed to invite into his life with loofah references. If he can't get any, ladies, neither can you!
Anyway, all of these claims are manifestly stupid. Let's take them one at a time.
1) Actually, the IOM recommended that the HHS classify contraception as preventive medicine. This would not affect taxpayer dollars at all, because what it would do is require insurance companies to cover contraception without a co-pay. I have no idea where this stupid $4 billion figure he's bandying around comes from, but it's irrelevant. The move is universally understood by serious people to be one that will save money in the short and long term, with the hopes that it will lower costs overall to the consumer. The reason is pills, IUDs, etc. are cheap, but childbirth and babies are expensive. Even though it would benefit consumers and insurance companies over the long run to cover prevention completely, the reason it's not done is insurance companies gamble that some other company will have you when you get diabetes/have an unwanted pregnancy/have a stroke. So the government will just regulate it, and that takes that problem away. But the takeaway is this: he's lying about the government paying for it, and that it will cost money. It will actually save money.
2) This is basically a moral claim. O'Reilly is framing unwanted pregnancy as a woman's just punishment for being a dirty, drunken slut. He doesn't, however, explain why he thinks it's such a great idea to have women he considers irresponsible, slutty drunks put in charge of raising the next generation. This is typical anti-choice thinking---putting punishing "dirty girls" above all other concerns, including the well-being of children.
Anyway, there's no reason to believe that his claim has any basis in reality. O'Reilly may only get laid on New Year's Eve after some heavy drinking, but most Americans have sex on average of a little over twice a week. His implication that we're a nation of mostly celibate people who get trashed and then give into temptation doesn't fit the realities.
3) But even if this were true, it wouldn't matter. O'Reilly clearly doesn't understand how the birth control pill works. His statement only makes sense if you assume that the pill works by a woman taking it right before or during sex to prevent conception, which is why being drunk might make you forget it. But in reality, that's not how the pill works at all, as roughly everyone in the world over 10 years old that isn't Bill O'Reilly understands. You just take it during the day and it covers you for having sex roughly whenever, as long as you're up on your pills. If you haven't been taking your pills and you take one right before sex, it doesn't offer any protection.
O'Reilly's lies about the IOM recommendations and about how only drunk sluts get pregnant are toxic. But beyond all that, I want to emphasize this: Bill O'Reilly is 61 years old. He has been on this planet for 61 years, and he knows so little about female biology and sexuality he literally thinks you have to use the birth control pill during sex for it to work. O'Reilly has both a wife and a daughter, and yet he's so ignorant about female biology, I bet you could tell him that women get their periods out of their urethras and he'd probably believe you. But despite knowing less about female biology than your average 6th grader, O'Reilly feels entitled to rail on and on about abortion, birth control, reproductive rights, women's sexuality, and health care. This is in part due to our toxic culture that treats white men like authorities, even when they're so stupid you have a strong feeling they need their wives to tie their shoes for them in the morning.
Yesterday for RH Reality Check, 
I hate giving attention to Ron Paul, who is a familiar type in Texas: equal parts racist old crank that obsesses over conspiracy theories that have their historical roots in anti-Semiticism and vicious misogynist who thinks women's sexual liberation is the worst thing that's ever happened in history. Unfortunately, Paul has managed to snag the affections of a collection of white men who imagine themselves to be "liberal", because they hear he supports legalizing marijuana, though they hide behind his opposition to the war because even they know that it's fucking disgusting to believe it's more important for dudes to have legal rights to joints than women to have legal rights to abortion. Paulbots are literally the most annoying people on Earth, because there is literally nothing their hero can do that they won't vociferously defend, sometimes even while claiming not to support his point of view. After all, they aren't prepared yet to follow their hero's prescribed lifestyle of marrying a church lady and giving up on the hope of interesting sex for the rest of their lives, but they know that keeping their already dim hopes of sex with live, consenting women alive means at least pretending like they are also repulsed 
Even though it will be pointedly ignored by mainstream media types wed to the narrative that the Tea Party is a spontaneous uprising of people who were apolitical before Obama sent them around the bend, I'm guessing many of you read with interest 
There are two basic reactions from Vatican apologists you get when you write 
Peter Thiel's ridiculous fantasy that he can escape the oppression of living in a democracy that doesn't (formally, at least) assume white men are naturally superior to everyone else is in the news again, because 
I can't decide what is more telling an example of National Review's degeneracy: that they hired the soft-brained virginity worshipper Kathryn Jean Lopez, or that stewing pit of evil John "Women Lose Their Looks At 16" Derbyshire. 