Heather at C&L posted this 13-second video of Reihan Salam saying that the TSA dust-up is just one of many examples of conservatives getting back to caring about civil liberties. This is naked bullshit, of course, and that he bothered to utter it just proves what I said at the Guardian about this:
The influx of money, tied to a perceived political imperative not to be seen as being “soft on terrorism”, means the battle lines over this are being drawn in such a way that real change over security protocols is unlikely. Conservatives who are up in arms about this will likely shut up if their team wins by getting security privatised, even though it will remain as invasive. Meanwhile, many Democratic-leaning journalists and pundits seem content to attack dishonest and shady rightwing TSA critics – without examining in detail why such security procedures are invasive and need to stop.
It’s been really unpleasant, dealing with conservatives on this. Plenty of liberals think the TSA searches are out of line, but making alliances with conservatives on this is a scary proposition. From my article:
[A]ligning yourself with the American right means bringing on quite a bit of baggage: bad faith arguments, outright lying, racism – and hidden agendas, usually serving predatory corporate interests.
The notion that there’s some great pro-civil liberties sentiment on the right makes as much sense as saying Sarah Palin is a feminist. Which is to say, only if you’re too stupid to figure out how to work a zipper. Those of us who support civil liberties mostly find ourselves fighting the right on this one. We are talking about the conservative movement, to whom the term “ACLU” is a dirty word. Indeed, most of the energy on the right on this TSA thing is about restricting civil liberties—-the problem for most isn’t that there are invasive searches. It’s that white people have to endure them.
As far as I can tell, the right only cares about civil liberties if they can make it about provoking the emasculation fears of a bunch of bitter assholes, thus the gun nuttery aspect of the right. But should said emasculation fears support restrictions on liberty, then they’ll all for it. You can’t take their guns, and no woman should have the right to reject a man’s seed, which is practically like taking his balls from him! Freedom of speech is sorely misunderstood on the right—-their interpretation appears to be, “No one should criticize me when I speak my mind, liberals should shut the fuck up, and how come white people can’t say the n-word, like black people can?” (Which goes up to the first point—-they seem to treat having people snarl at you as an infringement on liberty akin to actual infringements, like going to jail.) Religious liberty only means that Christians should have a right to impose their bullshit on everyone else with taxpayer money, but it certainly doesn’t mean you should have the right to build a community center on private land. There appears to be exactly zero right wing anger, outside of a couple of eccentrics working at libertarian think tanks, over police abuses of the citizenry.
Actual supporters of civil liberties are out there as they always have been, mostly working for the left. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t liberals who buy into fear-mongering and support actual infringements on our liberties—-I’m not naming names, but I’ve seen some pants-wetting about terrorism used to justify the TSA searches on the left. But most of the work done in this area is and will continue to be done by liberals. And we tend to be more whole cloth about it. As I note in a podcast I do every week that’s devoted to a certain aspect of civil liberties, people shouldn’t have to have their junk touched to get on an airplane, but nor should the price they pay for delivering a baby in a hospital while being in an interracial relationship be that their baby is taken from them on spurious grounds.
Awesome sauce: Jezebel posted a straight up hit trolling post from Edward Pasteck, who has some serious mansplaining to do. At length, as mansplaining usually goes. And about his douchebag opinions that Americans need to act….wait for it….like the French when it comes to our standards on male treatment of women. I suppose he’s hoping that the mansplained-to audience has no understanding of or relationship to France, or they would see directly through this bullshit, though I suppose as a mansplainer, he believes any female skepticism of what he has to say is due to their wee female brains that perceive very little, which is why they need to be mansplained at so much.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love Paris. Great city. I had a blast there, rolling around town with my friend Kiki, a great friend. Also, and this is important, a male friend. Totally platonic, but not something that you’d probably assume if you just saw us walking through the Louvre together. Paris has great food, great culture, great wine, and super great cheese. I was not exposed to what many female friends have told me about Paris, though, which is the high levels of harassment you get from men if you deign to be out without your male chaperon. Doucheteck seems to think this harassment is the best thing ever:
In Paris, it seems as if the straight male attitude toward consent is that it doesn’t exist. At clubs, bars, bistros, in the street or on the Metro, Parisian men lobby very aggressively for sex. At the clubs in the 8ème, off the Champs-Élysées, and all along Rue de Rivoli, it is fairly common to watch men literally grab and touch the girls who weave through the crowd. Men often draw a finger down an unknown girl’s cheek or under her chin like a doting Uncle; they can be seen pinching girls’ noses, throwing arms around shoulders and even stealing kisses. It’s not for nothing that the French slang word for “kiss” or “make out” is choper, which literally means “to catch.”
Parisian women deny or accept these advances with a decisiveness many American women lack. Naturally, some girls in Paris walk away and reject these strong come-ons. But one can observe many of them reacting with knowing laughter; these women understand the game.
Taking women’s survival strategies and suggesting that means they enjoy having to survive is a classic douche move. “That she’s running means she likes it! Her feet say ‘getting away’, but the swing of her hips from scrambling says, ‘I love it when you grab my ass, strange dude!’”
He’s really amazingly good at being full of shit.
Whatever the result, women maneuver around male aggression to gain the upper hand. They are the ones deciding what to do with the onslaught of male desire.
That guy probably thinks the strip club is a matriarchy. He almost surely reads “Lolita” with a sympathetic eye towards the pedophile—-why don’t people recognize his purity of spirit?
Parisian women seem to derive a feminist power from this chauvinism that makes them come across as strong, self-determining, and completely aware of themselves as permanent objects of desire.
I was only in Paris for a week, and I swear to god, I saw actual elderly French women, fat French women, French women who dressed pretty damn butch—-the sort of women I imagine Pasbag wouldn’t describe as “permanent objects of desire” to men like himself. He lived there. Why on earth did he miss these women? It’s almost as if, gosh I don’t know, he’s a pig who thinks women exist solely to squeeze his dick and therefore women he doesn’t want don’t exist at all.
Anyway, he blathers on at length, basically blaming the fact that he can’t get laid on the fact that Americans don’t tolerate harassing women like the French do. Though, he does put a pseudo-intellectual gloss on it. I suspect if he took on harassment as a full time job, it still wouldn’t improve his chances, but I don’t have the mansplaining skills to say otherwise. But I will say that I highly doubt that men constantly harassing women in Paris is a game that everyone enjoys that is practically intended to empower women.
Why? Because I didn’t get harassed in Paris. Now, perhaps I’m in the Unwoman category that Pasteck has unwittingly created, but I doubt it. But I have heard—-just recently, as Skepchick, in fact—-many stories from women about the rather constant crap you are exposed to there, that Pasteck would have you believe women enjoy, including being actually followed by men. The difference between my experience and theirs was that I was always with a dude when I was out in public.
Now riddle me this: if it’s all in good fun, why not do it to women when they have a male companion around? I’m serious. If everyone agrees there’s no harm, and you’re just expressing a compliment, and she’s completely in control of the situation, why not? Surely, male companions would be expected to laugh along with the women at the compliment! If it’s all in good fun, that is. If they expect to be rejected anyway, then that surely can’t be it. But if it’s not in good fun, then the refusal to harass women that are hanging out with men is another story altogether. It implies that you find the man worthy of respecting and treating like a full human being, and also that you see women as male property—-and that you’re disrespecting a man when you make comments about “his” woman. It doesn’t imply that women are in charge at all, but that women are vulnerable, and they have to borrow men’s power and men’s respect if they want to get through life unmolested.
That doesn’t actually sound as fun as this douchebag is making it sound. In fact, it sound stifling and embittering.
But hey, I’m not bagging on France. Every place has its drawbacks. They have street harassment on levels beyond ours, but we also gave the world Edward Pasteck. We’re far from innocent on the asshole-creation front.
Call the Waaaambulance for the NOM-ster. Actually, Maggie, I haven’t been thinking about you much at all, since that summer NOM bus tour was such a raging failure that I dropped you and perpetual flop-sweating Brian Brown down onto my third-tier list of homophobes along with The Peter and Ken Hutcherson. But if you want me to point some fingers at bigots who have helped create a climate of discrimination that reinforces young LGBTs that they are not equal in the eyes of the law, I’ll be happy to do so. (NYP):
Do I have blood on my hands?
Major gay-rights groups are saying so. Each of us who opposes gay marriage, they say, is responsible for the terrible and tragic suicides of gay teens that recently hit the news.
San Francisco just filed a brief in the Prop 8 case, saying 7 million Californians who voted to protect marriage as the union of one man and one woman are responsible for high rates of suicide among gay people.
Evan Wolfson, one of the leading architects of the gay marriage movement, calls me out personally: “National Organization for Marriage Chairman Maggie Gallagher is among those who, with reckless disregard, attacks LGBT youth.”
Former Clinton adviser Richard Socarides told the AP these suicides demonstrate why gays should be allowed to marry: “When you speak out for full equality now, as opposed to partial equality, or incremental equality, you send a message to everybody, including the bullies, that everyone is equal.”
Apparently, either we all agree that gay marriage is good or gay children will die.
It’s a horrific charge to levy in response to some pretty horrifying stories. Will gay marriage really reduce or prevent gay teen suicide? I felt a moral obligation to find out.
She then goes off on a tangent to discuss statistics about gay youth suicide, sexual intercourse, drug abuse and yes, bullying. Then she says this:
Forced sex, childhood sexual abuse, dating violence, early unwed pregnancy, substance abuse—could these be a more important factor in the increased suicide risk of LGBT high schoolers than anything people like me ever said?
Gallagher’s blind spot is mind-boggling. It clearly does not occur to her that adults—parents who hold views like hers send a clear message to their children about inequality—for LGBT kids, they hear intolerance, or experience abuse from homophobic parents. For other children, their parents’ homophobia gives them license to bully gay (or perceived to be gay/non-gender-conforming) kids. The bigotry trickles down. What people like Maggie Gallagher say to their children can translate into kids who seek to escape through drug abuse, casual or high-risk sex. And some of those kids see no way out—certainly no support system at home if NOM’s message is what’s delivered to them.
Via Digby, we learn that the Republican nominee for Congress in New York’s 18th district Jim Russell has a history of straight up white supremacy, falling somewhere on the spectrum of evil between David Duke and Dinesh D’Souza. Notably, he published an essay titled “The Western Contribution to World History” in a publication called “Occidental Quarterly”. The title alone is the sort of thing I was alluding to earlier when I was talking about the way that white supremacists have this obsession with lining up a bunch of white people who did important shit, as if they get a piece of Shakespeare’s brains because they share his skin color. (The other part of that is denying the cultural accomplishments of people they consider different in some way, of course.) But for all the pretensions to the heights of Western civilization embodied in a title like that, it appears that the actual work itself is an incoherent rant. But hey, he doesn’t need to be smart, since there have been some smart white people in the past and he can just round up because of it.
But what was really awesome about this essay was the Jim Russell has a native understanding of how, when you’re a Tea Cracker, you don’t have to choose between misogyny and racism. You can have it all at once, if you want. Who’s going to stop you? Rush Limbaugh? Russell’s argument against racial integration, particularly of schools, is beautiful in its linkage of the aims of patriarchy with the aims of white supremacy.
It has been demonstrated that finches raised by foster parents of a different species of finch will later exhibit a lifelong sexual attraction toward the alien species. One wonders how a child’s sexual imprinting mechanism is affected by forcible racial integration and near continual exposure to media stimuli promoting interracial contact. The most serious implication of human sexual imprinting for our genetic future is that it would establish the destructiveness of school integration, especially in the middle and high-school years. One can only wonder to what degree the advocates of school integration, such as former NAACP attorney Jack Greenberg, were conscious of this scientific concept. It also compounds the culpability of media moguls who deliberately popularize miscegenation in films directed toward adolescents and pre-adolescents. In the midst of this onslaught against our youth, parents need to be reminded that they have a natural obligation, as essential as providing food and shelter, to instill in their children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage.
The sociobiological warfare that our youth is subjected to is likely to be even more diabolical since it appears to deliberately exploit a biological theory of sexual imprinting at the critical period of sexual maturity. Movies like this past year’s spate of miscegenationist titles, Save the Last Dance, Crazy / Beautiful and O, a parody of Othello, appear deliberately designed to exploit the critical period of sexual imprinting in their target audiences of white pre-adolescent girls and adolescent young women.
If Jim Russell wants to honor his elders—-and what are teabaggers without an obsession with looking back to “happier” times when patriarchy and white supremacy weren’t questioned as much—-this strikes me as an opportunity for him to do so. Remember that famous Jesse Helms ad in 1990 that blamed job loss on racial integration and affirmative action?
Scene: Pair of middle aged white hands holding a picture of a high school cheerleader, taken some time in the late 60s/early 70s, when Jim Russell was in high school.
Voiceover: “You needed that pussy. It was your birthright. But she had to give it to a minority. Because of school integration. Is that really fair? Nita Lowey [his opponent] says it is.”
Scene: Crumpling up of picture.
I think it’s a message the Tea Crackers would eat up. After all, they can tell each other that this will really piss off the liberals, and at the end of the day, isn’t that what matters the most?
Instead, the GOP decided to assert itself a little, dropping Russell and joining the ranks of the “liberal elite”. Russell is well-versed in conservative victimology, calling the GOP “hypersensitive”. Which is quickly becoming the slur term for anyone who is uneasy with any kind of racism, no matter how over the top. Only a bunch of pansy asses and girls get upset when they discover that a candidate for Congress is opposed to school integration.
...“Conservative” icon Glenn Beck, in a conversation with Bill O’Reilly, said basically he doesn’t care about the attack on traditional marriage. Asked if the California ruling will harm the country in any way, he responded: “No I don’t. Will the gays come and get us? I believe that Thomas Jefferson said: ‘If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket what difference is it to me?’”
Rush Limbaugh, the iconic leader of American conservatism, hired the noted homosexual singer Elton John to perform at his wedding. He has not aired one of his bitingly satirical “gay community updates” in years.
“Conservatives,” it seems, are on the verge of not only accepting homosexuality’s domination of the culture, but embracing it.
Count Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck as the latest deserters in the culture war and in the battle for sexual normalcy. They have flinched at “precisely that little point which the world and the devil are … attacking,” and so have forfeited the right to consider themselves any longer culture warriors.
Let’s be clear: Endorsing homosexual behavior is not a conservative position, period. Supporting special rights based on aberrant sexual behavior is not conservative, period. Supporting either civil unions or marriages based entirely on using the alimentary canal for sexual purposes is not conservative, period.
You [Ann Coulter] will be received with a standing ovation [at HOMOCON] for pandering to a group that wants to put open homosexuals in the same showers and barracks with sexually normal soldiers (priority No. 4) and is fiercely opposed to any attempt to elevate protection for natural marriage to the Constitution (priority No. 7 – see GOProud website).
...Glenn Beck has completely and shamelessly surrendered on the issue of gay marriage, and did so on Bill O’Reilly’s program, only the most-watched cable news program in all TV land…Even O’Reilly, who is a notorious squish on the subject of the acceptability of homosexual behavior, was taken aback by Beck’s capitulation and rightly accused him of “ignoring the profound change in the American family.”
Folks, we are starting to see real damage to core of the professional homo-hate machine. The fiscal conservative/libertarian lite wing of the GOP, as well as those like Beck and Coulter, who depended on that demo for their meal ticket in the past, sees the legal handwriting on the wall for the social conservatives (aka loonies) and are publicly making a break for the door to more credibility), with the alignment now toward the burgeoning Tea Party wing.
It’s pretty clear that a corner has been turned, with the green light foor Beck and Coulter likely being the 138-page Prop 8 legal ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker that decimated the pathetic case presented by the defenders of marriage discrimination. The sorry-ass, religious, culture, and bias-based excuses to prevent opening civil marriage to lesbians and gays couldn’t stand up to the reality-based legal standard, as Olsen and Boies smacked down the so-called “experts” who bothered to show up to testify. Just a peek at Walker’s Findings of Fact alone put those ridiculous arguments completely to bed.
Beck and Coulter, who are thinking about their professional bottom lines, are placing their bets on the legal wind blowing away from the bible-beating theocrat wing of conservatism.
Again, while I can’t always agree with their political positions on issues, credit also has to go to GOProud, which has managed to become a deeply lodged splinter into the social conservative movement in a very short time (the LCR was never this effective). It was first an irritation, and now it’s making the bible-beaters hurt badly if they are taking this infighting public over HOMOCON. Makes we wish I could get up there to cover the event, which is on September 25 in NYC.
“I strongly encourage Mr LaBarbera to head out to his local bookstore, buy an Ann Coulter book and actually read it. For a guy who claims to be a “fan,” he seems completely clueless about what Ann has actually written and said about gay people and gay conservatives.
If Mr. LaBarbera spent less time obsessing about gay sex and hanging out at gay Pride events, maybe he would have a little more time to read one of Ann’s books.”
Is there such a thing as a negative IQ? The View’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck goes for the gold standard. Via The Advocate:
The View’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck says she knows why lesbians come out later in life: there are simply no available men.
Her theory is that older men tend to date younger women, “leaving older women with no one,” she said.
My question - someone willing to say something so asinine on the air cannot possibly have any close gay or lesbian friends. She needs to invest in rent-a-lez or some such before opening her piehole.
“Huffington Post has created a computer that generates stories based on click-happy tags.” That was my first thought upon reading this alarmist article about how teenage kids are getting high off the internet. No, I’m not kidding. The headline actually reads: “DIGITAL DRUGS: How Teens Are Using The Internet To Get High”. Clearly, this is a computer-generated headline, I thought. They don’t even care anymore; whatever it takes to get clicks.
But I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and actually dig in and read a little more of the story. Unfortunately, I have to report that what I learned wasn’t enough to relieve my concerns. Indeed, the article seemed to be reporting on something that’s actually happening, but their take on it is some of the saddest shit I’ve seen from adults since I saw that evangelical program on an access channel back in college about how Satan reaches kids through not just heavy metal, but backmasking records and even through Whitney Houston.
The trend, called i-Dosing, is a supposedly “legal” and “safe” way to alter one’s consciousness.
According to Kansas News 9, these “digital drugs” use “binaural, or two-toned, technology to alter your brain waves and mental state,” producing a “state of ecstasy” for the user. i-Dosers listen to these atonal tracks while sitting motionless with headphones on.
It may sound benign, but parents, educators and law officials are worried that i-Dosing could be addictive, harmful, and a gateway “drug” to other illegal substances. The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has taken an interest in the phenomenon. “Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about,” the Bureau’s spokesperson Mark Woodward told Kansas News 9, “and it can lead them to other places.”
As someone who spent her teen years in a boring ass small town, I had a strong suspicion that whatever the specifics, that this was almost surely a parlor trick that, because it’s in the hands of teenagers, is being blown up as something it’s not for maximum effect. There wasn’t a parlor trick that we didn’t indulge as kids, and many of them, such as “light as a feather, stiff as a board”, had a pseudo-occult feel to them that gave us all a good scare before we forgot about it a couple hours later. Hey, you got to get your thrills where you can. Eventually most of us discovered sex and left the world of adolescent parlor tricks behind. That this is framed by kids who pass it along as being like drugs should be a relief to parents, because it means said kids have no experience with actual drugs.
Today’s news in wingnut failure is double the fun. A lot of us in netroots land were annoyed yet again at wingnut leechiness when it was revealed that the teabaggers were going to have a big convention….in Las Vegas….in July….ending right before Netroots Nation began. Well, more amused than annoyed that they’re so bereft of ideas beyond just liberal-hating that they can’t even muster the dignity required not to ride on our coattails for even this. Perhaps we should coin a word to describe the peculiar mix of amusement and pity that wingnuts often inspire in liberals.
But the whole situation just went to a whole new level of stupid when the teabagger convention in Las Vegas had to be canceled due to lack of interest. As you’ll see in the video above, there were many excuses on offer—-the convention conflicted with family vacations, and Las Vegas is, get this, too hot. Who knew that it was hot in the desert in the summer? The organizers claim they’re simply postponing the convention. We’ll see. I feel that anyone who can’t get a bunch of retirees to spend time in Vegas is basically out of options.
As for Netroots Nation, I have to point out that it’s going to be a super fun convention this year. Not only is it at the Rio in Vegas, and not only are some super great people going to be there, but Jesse and I have organized a panel for Saturday that’s going to be a blast: Bringing the Snark after Winning Elections. I’ve assembled a group of folks who make me laugh and asked them to come talk about their experiences making fun of all sorts of wingnuts: Roy Edroso, Brad and Damon from Sadly, No!, Sady Doyle, and of course Jesse Taylor. We’re going to talk about trying to bring the funny in light of this shift of power away from conservatives and towards liberals. So, come out to Vegas! Play craps and come to our panel stocked with very funny people.
Freedom is irrelevant. Assimilation is inevitable. Resistance is futile.
Yes, it’s pretty funny that the Family Research Council continues to believe that The Homosexual Agenda is all-powerful and all-consuming—a steamroller of epic proportions, crushing all Christianity out of our culture by our stealthiness
Read the crazy-*ss paranoia of FRC blogger Cynthia Hill, who believes that the success of Victory Fund candidates on June 8th signals armageddon for America.
Americans should take a cold, hard look at the consequences of significant wins by openly lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) candidates in last night’s races. This is the fruition of that community’s methodical efforts to further homosexualize America. Their efforts, combined with this administration’s appointments of key federal positions of at least 101 LGBT aficionados, have largely been under the radar, but could predict critical damage to our rule of law. Think of it – we are electing people who ultimately see the Christian world view as the single, final barrier to their ultimate goal of acceptance and implementation of the homosexual agenda. If and when they dominate the legislatures, those who espouse Biblical principles then become the enemy and will surely be on the wrong end of law-making.
Um, does somebody have some domination fantasies maybe? Anyway, it’s always drama with these people–the “final barrier” to their “ultimate goal” of dominating the legislatures!
Reality check: There are about 7,000 state lawmakers in the U.S., and about 80 of them are openly gay or lesbian or bisexual–about 1% of the total. So chill out, Cynthia Hill. You’ll be fine. For now.
Nice to know that the man who bludgeoned, electrocuted and tortured pit bulls he trained to kill one another is welcome in our capital city. Gee, you think he might be doing any fundraising for local shelters, the ASPCA or pit bull rescues? I doubt it.
Philly Eagles QB Michael Vick’s moved on long ago from his experience of 18 months in a federal prison for his role in a dogfighting ring.
“I’ve overcome a lot, more than probably one single individual can handle or bear,” Vick said. “You ask certain people to walk through my shoes, they probably couldn’t do. Probably 95 percent of the people in this world because nobody had to endure what I’ve been through, situations I’ve been put in, situations I put myself in and decisions I have made, whether they have been good or bad.
Yep. Moved on, feted by his team, a man who clearly has a narcissistic view about why he went to the pokey. It’s more like “I’m sorry I got caught with the carcasses in my yard and you found out I beat, shot, hanged, electrocuted and drowned my dogs that didn’t fight”? What he had to endure was taking responsibility for his own actions.
Well, as a pit bull advocate who still sees the cruelty meted out by breeding these dogs for all the wrong reasons ending up in shelters, I can’t forgive and forget Vick’s behavior. He’s done his reputation rehabilitation tours around the country. In fact one of the reasons this birthday bash in Raleigh irks me is that it’s the second time he’s parachuted into the Triangle and embarks on another missed opportunity to pay back those who deal with the fallout from popularizing dog fighting—the shelters and the pit bulls who need forever homes.
I wrote about his in one of my last Durham News columns in March of this year when Vick came to a Bull City school to speak to kids about his experiences. That’s below the fold.
Susan Jacoby has a fun response to the idiot parade claiming that there’s such thing as a “feminism” that opposes basically all the things that feminists stand for. (Though I am considering, if this doesn’t die down soon, starting an evangelical church dedicated to believing that there is no god and Jesus was a fraud, and angrily and constantly insisting that the only reason I’m being kept out of the club is prejudice.) The only real drawback to Jacoby’s piece is she suggests that Rand Paul is an exception to the Tea Party rule—-she argues that they’re mostly culture warriors but he’s a genuine libertarian. Except, of course, he’s not. “Libertarian” is an increasingly meaningless distinction, especially when you’re talking about Paul, who does think that the government should force women to keep fetuses in their uteruses even as he argues that the government should be able to force black people out of segregated lunch counters. Paul’s strict constitutionalist stance consistently stops short when it’s securing the rights of anyone who’s not a white guy, in fact. But I digress.
What is so awesome about Jacoby’s column is that she really teases out how much the surge of anti-feminist politicians is a) sexist and b) about stoking resentments in the base. Sexist, because conservative female politicians are running on what happens in and around their vaginas.
Sarah Palin, the Tea Party’s Red Queen, is the personification of the two strands in right-wing thought and politics. And Palin is the mistress of the art of claiming moral standing as a result of what she does with her reproductive system. Remember all the times she exhibited her Down syndrome son on the campaign trail in 2008? Fiorina’s repellent attempt to bolster her anti-abortion credentials by lamenting her own infertility is directly inspired by Palin’s message, “Look at me, I’m a wonderful woman because that I had a child with a mental disability. And you women who had abortions in the same circumstance are bad, bad, bad. “
And the resentment thing is what’s so fascinating.
Explaining her anti-abortion stance to the San Francisco Chronicle, Fiorina said, “I myself was not able to have children of my own, and so I know what a precious gift life is. My husband’s mother was told to abort him. She spent a year in the hospital after his birth. My husband is the joy of her life, and he is the rock of my life. So these experiences have shaped my view.” So all of those pro-choice feminist moms don’t know what a precious gift life is? Or perhaps Fiorina wouldn’t be so opposed to abortion if her husband had turned out to be a disappointment to her or his mother? There is nothing more pathetic than the spectacle of someone who probably would have been a “moderate” Republican 20 years ago trying to cozy up to the Christian right and the Tea Party by discovering strong anti-abortion convictions.
It’s telling that the Republican base eats up an argument that is fundamentally, “I can’t have children, so I want to force other women to do so whether they like it or not.” It’s kind of like those parents who force their children to take up hobbies and careers that they themselves failed at, except in this case she’s doing it to perfect strangers, with only the payoff of making them suffer instead of experiencing any positive emotions like pride.
Of course, this really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone paying attention. The anti-choice movement is the cutting edge of right wing assholery, and their main weapon of choice has always been stoking resentments—-resentment of people who are happier than you, people who have sex, people who have enough going on in their lives that it even occurs to them to take control over their fertility instead of passively acquiescing to everything that happens to them. Which is why Jacoby is right in suggesting that these asinine attempts to make distinctions between this right wing ideologue or that right wing ideologue are missing the point. They’re all playing the same song of resentment, and even if the person playing the solo right now is using the racism instrument, the anti-feminism instrument, or the theocrat instrument, the others are still playing in the background. And they’ll get their solos whenever they’re needed.
It’s 2010 and black women are still being told their hair is “bad,” ugly, lacks class, etc. If you saw Chris Rock’s “Good Hair”—that’s all you need to know about the pain, the humor and the self-loathing pathology black women (and men) have about natural hair (see my post on it).
And now the style tide has turned in one strange circle, where the women with chemically straightened hair are now being called “trashy.” Sisters, you can’t win. In an article over at Gawker, “American Apparel: Internal Documents Reveal Uglies Not Welcome,” you have to wonder how many people would pass muster for owner generally, but for black women applying for work there, “nice hair” has a different requirement Dov Charney.
Another former [American Apparel] AA manager says that she received the following instructions as to what kind of black girls she should try to hire during the company’s open calls:
“none of the trashy kind that come in, we don’t want that. we’re not trying to sell our clothes to them. try to find some of these classy black girls, with nice hair, you know?”
i will remember that forever, especially the “nice hair” part. he was instructing another manager and i on who to look for during an upcoming open call, and i sat there dumbfounded, listening to him speak while the other manager made “uh huh, got it” sounds on her end of the phone. the other manager on the call with me later became a district manager, and at one point instructed me to tell two of my employees (both of whom happened to be black females) to stop straightening their hair. i refused to do this, but wondered if the mentality behind her request was related to what dov had said.
As everyone knows, I’m an advocate for women dumping relaxers, aka the creamy crack, because that stuff is f*cking toxic. The beauty aesthetic is secondary; natural hair can be beautiful, classy, etc., but as we know, the culture at large doesn’t celebrate the crazy curls and kinks.
Via Roy Edroso, we find that James Lileks is back, and he’s still eager to win the world championship for Grumpy Old Farthood (At Heart, Not Chronological Age Division). And don’t anyone tell him I said “fart”, because the last thing the world needs is a 2,000 word lecture on why intestinal gas is Not Funny.
My nine-year-old daughter looked at the front page of the paper, and her eyes grew wide:
The president said “ass”?
She swallowed the A-word, because it is, after all, the A-word. I nodded; he said that. She was silent for a while, digesting the information. Presidents, after all, are part of the great Pantheon of Authority, standing over the school principal, teachers, the pastor, police, and perhaps the mailman. To consider them using bad words reordered everything. Unless …
“He didn’t mean donkey,” she said, this being the only possible explanation.
What we learn from this is that Lileks is, by his own standards, a bad father. After all, his 9-year-old obviously knows what the word “ass” means. Clearly he’s a complete failure, and should just give up. Nothing short of a perfect job at enforcing arbitrary sheltering from certain combinations of sounds will do. Who wants to bet money that this ruined little girl first learned the word “ass” from her daddy’s precious lips? Of course, that doesn’t count. The first chapter in the “IOKIYAR” handbook is titled “Cursing”, something I’m reminded every time I get an email from a wingnut along the lines of, “You’re a pottymouth, you stupid little cunt.”
He carries on at length, including using the word “tuckus”, as if that’s amusing. It’s mostly incomprehensible, because he’s repressing the profanity-laden verbal beatdown he wants to give to the President for criticizing British Petroleum. So he’s stuck with vulgarity trolling.
Barack Obama is probably the last guy you’d think would introduce “ass” into the mainstream political discourse…...
But at the heart of Maher’s image of authentic blackness is part of the leftist creed: the trivial niceties of civilization are a barrier to the most important goal of human endeavor, self-expression. Lenny died for your sins.
Really, he could have just written, “Blah blah blah blah” and had way more time left over to oil the stick that’s up his ass. I’m sorry, tuckus. What I fail to understand about conservatives who moan and groan about pottymouths is this—-it’s fucking impossible that they can’t hear themselves. Maybe I’m wrong. When I sit down and write, I can hear my internal voice speaking what I’m saying as it’s coming out, and so generally, I have an idea of how it sounds. Like if I write, “Screw you guys, I’m going home!”, I physically cannot prevent myself from picturing Eric Cartman and hearing his voice saying it. So I have to believe that conservatives who write these pointless screeds about second rate curse words like “ass” must hear the voices in their head, and realize that they sound like one of Dana Carvey’s characters from “Saturday Night Live”.
But maybe I’m over-projecting. For all I know, different people hear different things in their heads when they write. If so, I’m putting ten down that Lileks’s head is full of that static hiss you had on old TVs when you switched to a channels that had no broadcast signal.
Which, come to think about it, I can’t wait for his next missive about annoying sounds he misses. TV static will definitely be on the list, but I hope he also covers the dial tone.
As you probably know by now, the GOP put together an extremely silly site called America Speaking Out so their base can flood them with the ideas that they’re lacking right now. Of course, their base doesn’t have any ideas, either, besides a general disdain for people they don’t consider Real Americans, so there wasn’t a whole lot of what they wanted going on. But what there is a lot of are internet pranksters, and they’ve basically taken the site over. I thought I’d submit some ideas of my own, and I’ve collected them here. Sadly, most didn’t make it on to the regular website, mainly because it’s getting so flooded with pranksters. I put the results of each submission in parentheses. Try it at home, and please share the results in comments.
American Prosperity
CAN WE JUST BAN FRIGGIN PENNIES ALREADY? THEY’RE ALL OVER MY HOUSE AND THEY SLIDE IN BETWEEN THE COUCH CUSHIONS. GOD ONLY KNOWS HOW MANY GERMS ARE ALL OVER THEM BUT KIDS PUT THEM IN THEIR MOUTHS ANYWAY. (Site went down.)
It’s hard to pass calculus. Congress needs to make it against the law for pi to have more that 2 digits after the decimal point. Infinite numbers seem kind of ungodly anyway. tagged: education (Site went down)
You know how hot women always date jerks and the Nice Guys stay in the friend zone? You should set up an affirmative action system requiring that Nice Guys get their fair share of the sex out there. tagged: American competitiveness (Inappropriate.)
Fiscal Accountability
How is it that the FCC can fine the network for showing a pop star’s baby feeder during halftime, but were helpless to do anything about depressing the nation with that halftime Who “concert”? Can you rewrite FCC regulations to address that? tag: government regulation (Site froze.)
Please pass a law requiring the producers of “Lost” to go on TV and answer this long list of mysteries that we on the internet have ginned up. tagged: accountability (Site crashed.)
Lesbians are taking perfectly workable uteruses and housework skills away from red-blooded American men. Pass a law requiring lesbians to go to church until they give in and marry a dude. (Site broke.)
Obviously, the Constitution isn’t limited enough, because of the big government problem. Maybe we should just rip out that last few pages to make it shorter? How long is it, anyway? tag: constitutional limits (Accepted.)
National Security
Can you tell your mom to stop calling my house and coming over and asking the neighbors when I’m coming home? (This one posted, but was taken down.)
Does my rear end look big in these jeans? tagged: security (Site crashed.)
Most of the world seems to call soccer “football”, which is un-American and hurts the NFL’s brand overseas. The UN is worthless if they can’t do anything about that. Are our ambassadors even trying to fix this situation? tag: diplomacy (Accepted.)
We’re already getting the world-weary sighing about how we need to move on from the Rand Paul thing—-and don’t worry, it’s the weekend and we will—-but I do feel the obsession over it that sprouted up needs a defender. Rachel Maddow did an excellent job on this front.
But I’d also like to take the time to talk about Rand Paul, teabaggers, and why libertarianism matters despite being unbelievably childish as a philosophy. I think a lot of media people tend to think of libertarians mostly as a tiny minority of overprivileged twits who are relatively harmless with the power fantasies of what unbelievable sci-fi badasses they would be if the government just got rid of OSHA. But the folks who write for Reason and work for the Cato Institute aren’t really representative of libertarianism as it actually exists in most of the U.S. Because self-identified libertarians are a tiny minority doesn’t mean that libertarian thought doesn’t enjoy widespread popularity amongst conservative Republicans. Indeed, libertarianism is the primary intellectual justification in this country for resistance to most social justice movements. (I use the term “intellectual” loosely here, but you know what I mean.) It is also the primary intellectual justification for unchecked corporate power that leads to disasters like our collapsed economy and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And I would argue that the existence of the Republican party today depends largely on people who are invested in the latter exploiting people invested in the former for support and votes. And that’s why libertarianism is extremely fucked up and concern about it isn’t a distraction. Most people who spout libertarian arguments are self-identified Republicans, and most of them have extremely conservative views on race and gender.
I thought I’d break down my examination into some major points.
Values
One of the unfortunately unquestioned aspects of the argument that folks Paul aren’t racists so much as strict ideologues is it buys into the assumption that the ideologies we support and values we hold just exist, as if they were assigned to us randomly at birth. This doesn’t actually comport well with reality. Most people’s values derive from their ideas of what the world should be like. A common exercise with activists in trying to get them to clarify what their values are and how to fight for them is to have them picture the world they want. What they picture can be used to figure out what they value. (For instance, I picture a world where people are unrestrained by prejudice to live full and meaningful lives.) Therefore, if their values just so happen to create a world marked by racial segregation and most wealth being held in the hands of the few, and most of the people who benefit from these values are people who look like those who hold them, then it’s a safe assumption that they chose their values to achieve these ends.
Which isn’t to say that people can’t make mistakes, or incorrectly think that value X will lead to result Y. However, when presented with historical evidence that their assumptions—-in this case that free enterprise would automatically desegregate—-are incorrect, if they persist in arguing otherwise, they are being willfully ignorant.
The commerce clause
Awesome sauce: Jezebel posted a straight up hit 
Do I have blood on my hands?
...“Conservative” icon Glenn Beck, in a conversation with Bill O’Reilly, said basically he doesn’t care about the attack on traditional marriage. Asked if the California ruling will harm the country in any way, he responded: “No I don’t. Will the gays come and get us? I believe that Thomas Jefferson said: ‘If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket what difference is it to me?’”
“Huffington Post has created a computer that generates stories based on click-happy tags.” That was my first thought upon reading 
Well, as a pit bull advocate who still sees the cruelty meted out by breeding these dogs for all the wrong reasons ending up in shelters, I can’t forgive and forget Vick’s behavior. He’s done his reputation rehabilitation tours around the country. In fact one of the reasons this birthday bash in Raleigh irks me is that it’s the second time he’s parachuted into the Triangle and embarks on another missed opportunity to pay back those who deal with the fallout from popularizing dog fighting—the shelters and the pit bulls who need forever homes.
As you probably know by now, the GOP put together an extremely silly site called