Gay marriage opponents often take pains to claim that it's not that they're against gay people---how dare you say that!---but that they just want to protect "traditional marriage". This story is implausible on its surface, of course. They've accepted many changes to marriage law, such as legal divorce. Plus, if "that's the way we've always done it" was a real argument, they should also resist everything from the computer to the automobile, which have changed society in ways that affect them directly far more than gay marriage could.
But even beyond that, you have direct evidence that opposition to gay marriage is part of a larger belief that gay people should face formal discrimination for housing, health care, and employment, to punish them for being different. "Traditional marriage" is being used as a cover to advocate for discrimination against people just because they're gay. See Bob Marshall, a GOP legislator in Virginia who is really, really obsessed with people who aren't having sex with him, and he fears are having too much fun. He's backed legislation to punish those sex-having ladies, and now on the grounds of their sexy, sexy gay relationships.
Virginia state Del. Bob Marshall (R) has launched an effort to block an openly gay judge from being considered for a post on a general district court.
Marshall said he believes that Tracy Thorne-Begland, a Richmond-based prosecutor who lives with his partner and two adopted children, should be removed from the list of potential appointees. Thorne-Begland's sexual orientation would conflict with his ability to hold up the state's constitution, Marshall said.
"Marriage is between one man and one woman, and the the applicant has represented himself in public in a relationship that we don't recognize in Virginia," Marshall said in an interview with WRIC, the ABC affiliate in Richmond.
So there you have it: Banning gay marriage is really about putting gay people into a formal second class that can be barred from certain jobs, and I'm sure if Marshall had his way, pretty much all jobs.
The underlying assumption of this argument is that a minimum requirement for judges is that they can't be in a public relationship that isn't recognized by the state. Marshall would like you to believe this is a criteria that's always been around and is just now being abandoned, but as far as I can tell, the "judges must be in legally recognized public relationships" is a brand-spanking new requirement. It would also mean that any straight judge who is dating someone would also be barred from the bench, since they're in a public relationship that isn't marriage. One also wonders if Marshall would make this a retroactive requirement, meaning that even if a judge is married now, if they dated their spouse prior to the marriage, they should be barred from the bench. He is an anti-sex fanatic---he backed the "personhood" bill that would basically classify all sexually active straight women of reproductive age as "pregnant", barring them from wide swaths of medical care and certain kinds of employment just because they touch penises---so I wouldn't be surprised. Take this train of thought to its logical conclusion, and if you've ever been alone with another person not a relative, we have to assume you've had sex outside of a legallly recognized relationship and shouldn't ever be considered for the bench. This niftily eliminates 100% of candidates, allowing wingnutty legislatures to pass any kind of hateful law they want with no check on it, but I'm sure that benefit is just a bonus for Bob Marshall.
So far, it seems like a slow news day, but because of this, I had an opportunity to read this revealing story in the NY Times about a bunch of paranoids buying slightly less hideous pants. The pants are a pair of chinos that have hidden compartments for a concealed weapon, but unlike most pants that have these kinds of compartments, they aren't quite as baggy. Here are the pants:
So you can just imagine how miserable the previous options were. Not that it mattered that much, in my experience. The kind of douchenozzles who loved carrying everywhere also enjoyed the big, baggy pants that screamed "I conceal carry and I'm too much of a man for stupid girly stuff like looking like I try to look remotely attractive". I suppose there was a point where that was unsustainable, and the need to at least be occasional presentable, if still broadcasting that you're too manly to actually look good, had to come into play. Maybe for going to dinner on your wedding anniversary or something.
As you can tell, I'm not fond of this overbearing anxious masculinity that drives gun culture. It's the platonic ideal of trying too hard.
This passage is rather important, I think:
Gun experts suggest that there are many reasons for the growth in the number of people with concealed-carry permits. They say it is partly due to a changing political and economic climate — gun owners are professing to want a feeling of control — and state laws certainly have made a difference.
I'm curious who these "gun experts" are, but not because I disagree with them. "Wanting a feeling of control" is a very nice way of describing "in a state of abject paranoia that manifests itself in fantasies that people are coming around every corner to kill you". So why is this feeling on the rise? It certainly has nothing to do with actual fear of crime, since crime rates are down, not up. Like way down. No, the predominantly conservative white men that are deep into gun culture are feeling out of control for another reason. They see women and people of color slowly making gains in society, and they fear that they are losing their unearned dominance and control over society. So they buy a gun and carry it around to regain that sense of control and dominance. Sure, your wife has more of a right to leave you if she wants and you may have to compete with a black person for a job, but you can comfort yourself by feeling like you could just up and kill someone if the opportunity arises. Which it won't, but you can fantasize about it all the time. Unfortunately for the rest of us, as the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin situaton demonstrates, for the occasional gun nut, merely fantasizing isn't enough. The desperation to make the fantasy come true can occasionally lead to extreme measures.
Caitlin Flanagan gets a lot of attention because she's able to write in these elliptical, obtuse ways that seem really profound, which is why it's useful to listen to her on the radio, where she's forced to be more concise, revealing that she's just the same old culture warrior whose veneer of sophistication falls off at a sneeze, revealing the cranky (prematurely) old church lady underneath. That's why I recommend skipping her strange-sounding new book and listening instead to this interview on WBUR, which has the added bonus of Irin Carmon's presence as a sanity check. Listening to it, you realize that for all the puffery about girlhood fascinations and diaries, Flanagan is really only making one argument, one we know really well, that goes like this:
*Boys and men only care about sex, and mainly see girls and women as these tedious obstacles between them and pussy.
*Girls and women only care about romance---the more princessy, the better---and see sex as this filthy ritual they have to perform in order to get it.
*Therefore, women should use sex as a bartering chip to get men to pretend to like us. Actual affection from men is clearly impossible to get, but in Flanagan's view, women can get a semblance of self-respect by refusing to have sex with men until they play-act affection by taking us on some dates and letting us call them our boyfriends. According to Flanagan, not having a man hanging around pretending to like you in order to get his dick wet is a major tragedy, probably the worst thing that could happen to a woman.
And that's about it. A lot of attention is paid to Flanagan's strange descriptions of what she calls "girlhood", which the rest of us tend to think of more as "adolescence", but Flanagan does really collapse the two in significant ways, imagining the typical teenage girl as horrified at her burgeoning sexuality and desperate to return to the comfortable world of childhood. (You can read Irin's review here.) Pretty much all of her descriptions of the life of teenage girls is in support of the above argument. For instance, she's bizarrely insistent that nostalgia for childhood toys is both universal to young women and not something young men care for at all. This has confused quite a few people who live in reality, because, if anything, it's men who are more likely to keep their childhood toys. How many guys not only have a collection of action figures and comic books from their youth, but continue to buy new things that have a connection to childhood playthings? Nor is this a new phenomenon; think of older generations of men with toy train collections or baseball cards. Not that Flanagan is wrong that a number of college girls still have their dollies or teddy bears. That's the point: her continued insistence that men and women are basically opposite in every way is just wrong.
But it's clear to me why she paints a picture of young men forging into adulthood while young women lean back, clutching teddy bears. It's about S-E-X; everything Flanagan says is in service of her belief that women want Disney princess romances, and sex is this filthy price that men extract from us in exchange for the Prince Charming act. (Seriously, few things are more grim than conservatives' view of heterosexuality.) Thus, she has to insist that girls are innocent and boys are not.
Flanagan's call to action is for parents to be excessively "protective" of their daughters' innocence. Listening to this program, you get the creeping feeling that Flanagan feels that you're not a successful parent of a daughter unless your child is a social reject because she acts childish throughout her high school years. She gets positively giddy when some overbearing parent calls and brags that her kids aren't allowed to use Facebook. She proposes sheltering girls (and only girls, apparently) in two very important ways: by disallowing them to have their own internet in their rooms and by insisting that cross-gender socializing only occur in traditional date-like situations, probably involving the boy picking the girl up (which conveniently shuts off any dating before 16, soon 18 in places with graduated driving licenses). The excuse she gives for the internet lockdown is that girls shouldn't see pornography, though I suspect that, due to Flanagan's over-excited response to the Facebook ban, the real reason is that she fears girls having a social life outside of the view of adults. (As the mother of only boys, Flanagan conveniently doesn't have to live by her own rules.) As for the porn thing, well, I don't disagree that it's not awesome for young kids to see so much hardcore porn before they even start to think of being sexual themselves, but I also think the results of Flanagan's actions aren't so great, either. I mean, how would you prefer a girl to first see porn: in her bedroom by herself, or because a boyfriend in college shows it to her?
And that is the fundamental problem with Flanagan's wingnutty attitude towards adolescent girls; she has no interest in helping girls make the transition from girlhood to adulthood. She just wants girlhood to last as long as possible. She's deliberately vague on what happens after the sheltered girl is released into the "wild", as it were. She did slip at one point in the show and say that we shouldn't "let" college women "hook up", which suggests that Flanagan is far more radical than she lets on, and personally fantasizes about young women staying virginal and generally unaware of sex well into adulthood and probably until marriage, by force if necessary. But she won't be up front about it, because she knows showing her cards will end her career as "provocative" writer and expose her as the same old boring wingnut as every other abstinence hysteric. (Seriously, how do we avoid "letting" grown ass adult women---even if they look like young kids to us---not make their own sexual choices?) The problem is that even though Flanagan is right and sheltering a high school girl is possible, there's not much you can do when they move out of the house. So the question is, then what? Is the college freshman better off having learned a little about men and sex in her adolescence before she's dumped into the waters and asked to swim, or does knowledge give you power? Interestingly, Flanagan really wants high school girls to have boyfriends (she's wrong that they don't; what research I've read suggests that high schoolers drift into committed relationships and college kids are more like to hook up), but her proposal of sheltering them is exactly how to keep girls from having that. What normal boy wants to date the religious weirdo whose parents forbid her from having internet access? I'm guessing that a lot high school relationships are conducted online, in fact, so keeping a girl offline probably removes her flirting and getting-to-know-you opportunities.
But realizing that requires thinking, and Flanagan, for all that she's a talented prose stylist, isn't a thinking person. She's just a reactionary, and one with a particular obsession with young women.
Via Whiskey Fire comes this illuminating piece from Jeff Carter at Townhall explaining why the sole blame for high unemployment is that people are too stupid and lazy to get jobs, coupled with "advice" on how to get one. Carter appears to believe that since a talentless moron like him can get work, so can you, though he's reluctant to offer wingnut welfare as an option, fearing the competition that arises when literally any moron could do your evil job. But what makes this piece special in the growing pile of hateful nonsense wingnuts are churning out to rationalize our terrible economy? Carter's amazing talents at literary interpretation:
If you are an unskilled laborer, it may seem like there are no opportunities. But, there are if you move to where the jobs are. In the 1930's and 1940's, there were several great migrations in the United States. The migration from the Great Plains to California was captured in the John Steinbeck novel about the Joad family. Many families moved from the rural south to the industrialized north for work. Just because you have lived your whole life in one area of the country doesn’t mean you are stuck there.
I'm surprised he didn't take it to the next level, and argue that you should avoid going on food stamps by pressing women with newborns into sharing their breast milk with you in lieu of purchased food. Maybe mow their lawn or something in exchange. My guess is that he didn't think of it, because he probably hasn't read the book, because even someone as dumb as Carter would grasp, upon reading The Grapes of Wrath, that Steinbeck has a fairly low opinion of people like the entire staff of Townhall.
Which made me think about other classic works of literature and how they could be interpreted by conservatives, with or without actually reading the books in question. So I thought I'd make a list:
Oliver Twist: This story clearly demonstrates that putting bastard children into workhouses puts them on the path to peace and prosperity.
To Kill a Mockingbird: Innocent men can be convicted of rape just on a woman's word, so we should dismiss rape cases unless the crime happened in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses, and the victim was a virgin on her way to church. Additionally, growing up in racist communities brings out the best in little girls.
Angels in America: The key is getting religion before you let dudes put it in your butt, and then you wouldn't get AIDS.
Moby Dick: The endangered species list is wrong, because it prevents good men from fulfilling their dreams.
A Christmas Carol: The ending demonstrates that we need no government regulation, because our capitalist leaders are so naturally generous and fair.
The Handmaid's Tale: Women should simply give up on this feminism thing so that men aren't forced to take drastic action.
The Lottery: When your number's up, it's better for everyone if you don't whine about it so much.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles: Women who don't accept that men prefer to marry virgins are pathetic lost causes.
The House of Mirth: Women should spend their youth trying to get married as quickly as possible to the first man that will have them.
Slaughterhouse-Five: WWII truly produced the greatest generation.
In case you didn't just get to watch Herman Cain destroy any chance he ever had at becoming President or being in a room alone with a white woman again, a brief summary:
"The Democrat Machine of America is throwing these terrible allegations at me, although I cannot say who did it, precisely. As you heard from the lawyer who introduced me, because that's always a good sign, real victims of sexual harassment and assault do everything differently, even the stuff they did that's the opposite of the other stuff they did. Now, stop talking about Herman Cain sexually harassing people, because of the grandkids."
All I have to say is that if Herman Cain is getting high-tech lynched, I'm pretty sure everyone in history who's been low-tech lynched would gladly trade places with his black ass.
Every year around Halloween, it's important to have a post explaining the ridiculous and seemingly growing fundamentalist hostility to the holiday, which they consider too fun demonic. And then after waging actual war on Halloween, these fucktards then go on Fox News and cry that we're trying to kill Christmas with innocuous phrases like "Happy Holidays". That America allows this sort of thing to continue happening demonstrates why we don't deserve nice things. Oh sure, some of us bloggers out here make fun of it, but on the whole, the whole "fundies are trying to destroy Halloween" crap doesn't get the attention it deserves. I mean, just for sheer comedy value, their belief that trick-or-treating invites Satan into your home should be enough for coast-to-coast cackling until they retreat in shame. But mostly, anti-Halloween sentiment gets no coverage, even though it's a) real (unlike anti-Christmas sentiment) and b) surprisingly widespread.
Yale University researchers have looked into whether there are increases or decreases in cesarean section births on holidays. They found a 12 percent increase in "c-section" births on Valentine's Day and a nearly 17 percent drop on Halloween.
Emphasis mine. The first one can be explained by a combination of sentimentality and the stress of having to give birth during the coldest month of the year, I'm sure. Plus, you may have an eyeball towards making sure they get badass birthday gifts as a grown adult with a romantic life.* But the Halloween thing? What kind of horrible monster would deny their child the chance at being born on Halloween? I mean, think of the lifelong advantages of having your birthday fall on the best holiday of the year! You get to eat cake and candy. Your birthday party is always a costume party. No one ever forgets your birthday, plus they give you cool macabre stuff as presents. It's a popular holiday, but it's not a religious one or a present-oriented one, so it doesn't overwhelm your birthday. It's like hte opposite of having a Christmas birthday, which is the worst birthday to have, unless you have a family that doesn't celebrate Christmas at all.
So what kind of monster are you to deprive your child? Well, you're probably a fundamentalist Christian who believes in demons, that's what kind of monster. Depending on your measurement, conservative evangelicals are 14% to 35% of the population, a solid enough chunk to completely explain this 17% drop in C-sections on Halloween.
Of course, some fundies are going beyond just being scared assholes about Halloween, and openly trying to combat it. How? Well, apparently by locking people up in houses and showing them blatantly false representations of how abortions are performed. I know; that hardly seems like a good way to stomp out the practice of wearing costumes, being a little drunker and sexier (for adults) for a night/trick-or-treating (for kids), but with fundies, all roads lead back to the grave evil that is women being able to say what happens to their own bodies, no matter how not-sorry they are that they touched a penis. So it goes:
Ybarra tells KTRK that while the tickets came with a vague warning about graphic images, like you'd see at any event featuring wounds applied with spirit gum and buckets of fake blood, there was no indication that it was hosted by Potters House Christian Fellowship Church — or that it contained disturbing depictions of what the church considers evil acts. Ybarra says that inside Hell House,
"There was a young lady lying on a gurney, and two nurses. And one of the nurses was reaching into the lady and pulling out a bunch of gunk, and throwing it on the floor."
She felt the scenes were too "realistic" (though safe and legal abortions obviously don't involve guts being thrown about the room) and quickly asked to leave, but she was told she had to stay and go through the whole house due to safety concerns. Good thing she wasn't having a heart attack.
Hey, when you're dealing with people who want to control what women do with their uteruses, don't be surprised if they think it's acceptable to hold you against your will and be subjected to their hysterical attempts at proselytization.
Anyone ever notice how evangelicals and time share salesmen have the same M.O.? Lure you into an enclosed space under a false pretense, use social pressure and a whiff of physical intimidation to keep you from leaving, hit you up with the hard sell? It's pretty despicable. Though I suppose if they'd done this to Ybarra in service of hitting her up for sex instead of hitting her up with some Bible-thumping, we could expect a hearty defense of this tactic from many in the dudelier sections of the atheist community.
*This is not an endorsement of Valentine's Day, which I consider a foul holiday that I've come around to boycotting. You might as well call it Single Shaming Day or Our Love Can Never Measure Up Day. It functions in the same way photoshopping impossible proportions on fashion models does: to fill you with shame for not being good enough (which is impossible by the standards set) so you buy more shit.
Herman Cain's temporary surge in popularity baffles much of the press, but it honestly doesn't surprise me that much. There's always been a strain of conservatives---the ones who say, "I'm really more libertarian"---who missed out on the 60s and so want to reimagine themselves and dangerous rebels who are out to get The Man, except in this case The Man is ordinary working people who are oppressing the beleagured wealthy class. You don't know downtrodden until The Man, in his greedy grasping for health care and a humble pension, makes you downgrade to a smaller yacht and reduce your summer house options to a mere two or three. Luckily, the downtrodden rich have "libertarians" out there who imagine they're being radical and subversive by calling for regressive tax structures. These folks are Cain's base. Who else do you think is buying all those stupid Harleys?
It's gritty! There's smoking and insistent tones! And vaguely menacing pseudo-rock music! Cain is clearly a motherfucking badass. He wants to ban abortion, but he figures it's your choice if you break that law. I don't know how liberals don't see it! He's Mick Jagger mixed with Ronald Reagan. James Dean spouting strange tax theories. You may think it's a misfire for a man who has the same name as the Bible's first murderer and a tax plan that immediately invokes the number of the Beast to run for the nomination of a party that houses the majority of evangelical Christians, but it's all part of the plan. Herman Cain wants you to think he's dangerous, y'all.
Personally, the whole thing reminds me of another dangerous rebel.
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 definitely think that Rick Santorum's quote was (probably accidentally) revealing of conservative attitudes about sex. In an attempt to explain why he supports banning gays in the military but doesn't want this to be characterized as bigotry, Santorum said this:
I — I would say, any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military. And the fact that they’re making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to — to — and removing “don’t ask/don’t tell” I think tries to inject social policy into the military.
What made this comment so eye-rolling is that he's functionally trying to claim that people who have any kind of sexual activity with the opposite sex are already banned, and therefore letting gay people in is a "special" right. That's literally the only way this makes sense. But in a fucked-up way, I think he probably does believe a variation of that. There's just a deep-set sense with the religious right that sex is just inherently perveted. This is a statement of a man who probably begs for forgivenness every time he ejaculates. That's why they insist that contraception even within marriage is an iffy proposition---if you're going to be so dirty, you should at least pay for it somehow.
Which isn't to say they see straight and gay sex the same. It's more like straight sex is the marijuana/alcohol of sex, and gay sex is the cocaine. It's more taboo in their minds, so it's somehow more sexual. So he's approaching it like you would if you were a big enough dip to say, "Drinking and drugging has no place in the military," with the full understanding that you'll look the other way when it comes to the drinking, but you'll boot someone immediately for cocaine. So pointing out that Santorum has 4 kids with his wife sounds, to him, like someone doing a line claiming it's the same as someone who has a glass of wine with dinner.
It also caused me to want to ball up on the floor and cry. Not because it's bad; it's great. But because it had to be written in the first place. That's how stupid our political discourse has gotten, that people are actually defending the existence of the government. It's like having a debate about whether or not water is good for you. In a sense, I feel like defending the existence of government is wasting your breath. If people who are just generally "against" government can't see how their day to day life is affected by---usually for the better---the existence of government, I don't know that rational arguments pointing it out are going to make much difference. They clearly live in a fantasy world. Rationality has no influence on them.
Seriously, just grab a notebook and put in a hashmark for every time you do something that you couldn't do if it weren't for government regulation, funding, and organizing. You'll find you fill a page up before lunch with hashmarks. I've been up for an hour now, and I've made coffee(1,2,3), eaten breakfast (4,5), had a glass of water (6), used the toilet (7,8), checked stuff on my iPhone (9, 10, 11, 12, 13), gotten online through my computer (14, 15, 16, 17, 18) , and read some stuff (19). I played with my cats (20, 21, 22). Oh yeah, this whole time I was wearing pajamas (23) and using electricity (24). I haven't even left the house or finished my coffee so I can brush my teeth. Leaving the house will multiply those hashmarks exponentially.
In other words, "we need government in order to have our standard of living" isn't an argument. It's just a fact. It's pathetic that this "debate" is even going on.
1) Clean water.
2) International trade agreements getting the coffee to the U.S.
3) Roads to ship it to the store.
4) Clean water.
5) Roads!
6) Water!
7) Seriously, water.
8) Regulations governing size and other aspects of the toilet.
9) International trade.
10) Anti-trust legislation.
11) Funding research into space programs that make satellite techonology possible.
12) Rooooooooaaaaaaads.
13) Funding the development of the internet.
14-18) See iPhone, but substitute "regulation of cable lines" for the satellite technology stuff.
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.
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.
As I've noted before, the first neighborhood I lived in when we moved to Brooklyn was the famous/nefarious Park Slope, land of the mind-bogglingly huge strollers and some pretty damn solid resale shops. I liked a lot about Park Slope, but you know, it's hard not to want to start a Tumblr titled "Reasons I'm Glad I Don't Live in Park Slope (Anymore)". Reasons such as this one, obtained from this tweet:
I brought this up at a small gathering last night, and as one of my fellow gatherees astutely noted that there's absurdity here beyond the sum of money you can get for a used stuffed monkey: the extremely low opinion of your fellow humans that you have to have in order to offer such a reward. After all, we can all imagine what has happened here. A small child has lost a beloved toy, and in the throes of grieving his/her first love, has made the parents quite miserable. Who amongst us cannot relate to the pain, both the child's and the parent's? Who amongst us wouldn't, if we found this sad little stuffed monkey and saw this sign, simply pull out our cell phone and reunite child and toy, for free? Would most people really need to be bribed to grease the wheels of true love reinstated? No, I think not. And yet, here this parent feels that no sum less than $500 will cause their fellow human beings to relieve the pain of this loss by returning the monkey, slightly bruised and dirtied, to the grieving child.
Last week, the [Park Slope] co-op held its first open discussion about whether or not to endorse B.D.S., an international movement that calls for the boycott, divestment and sanctioning of Israeli products and companies. Supporters see B.D.S. as a nonviolent way to attack Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, while critics claim the movement stinks of anti-Semitism. The issue has been batted around the co-op for years, from the bulk aisles to the letters section of the biweekly Linewaiters’ Gazette, house organ of the organic house.
It began in earnest during the Jan. 27, 2009, general meeting, when Hima B., a self-described queer-centric, intradependent filmmaker who eschews a last name, made a comment during the open forum that ran in the next issue of the newsletter: “I don’t know whether or not we carry Israeli products, but I propose that we no longer carry them.” Apparently there were some Sharon persimmons and organic red peppers in stock, but that was as far as the discussion went. It was followed by news of broken debt card machines on Christmas Eve.
For the entire 14 months we lived in Park Slope, we were asked roughly twice a week if we were members of the co-op, which we initially thought might be mandatory if you live in the Slope. We never did join. We took the tour of it and considered it after having people rave to us about how it's a great lefty institution, and very socialist in nature. Much (most?) of the labor is provided by members---you have to work a 3 hour shift once a month---which I thought wasn't actually that leftist or socialist at all, but more like anarachist. Being the labor-oriented lefty that I am, I would rather pay a higher fee and actually give people jobs, instead of work three hours so that I, an already-employed person, could get slightly cheaper food at the grocery store. So we didn't join.
I can say that this particular situation makes me all the gladder for it. I enjoy being free of having to engage any delusions that a single neighbor hippie co-op is really go to create a Palestinian state by turning its nose up to the importation of hummus and olives.
But wait, it gets worse:
The debate likely would have remained within the confines of 782 Union Street had someone at The Jewish Daily Forward not noticed those three innocuous paragraphs. The ensuring article got picked up by Ha’aretz and a million little blogs, setting off a media frenzy that consumed the co-op for months. The debate—angry letters, dirty looks—did not die down until the following fall. When the Gaza flotilla fiasco occurred last summer, it inflamed the issue yet again, which led a group of about 20 co-op members to push for a referendum on B.D.S., the subject of last week’s meeting. This being a democratic institution, everyone gets their say, but saying it takes time. It will be at least six months before the referendum can be taken up....
It is not clear how many Israeli products the co-op carries. Ms. Mazor said there are only bath salts and the occasional peppers or lychee. Emily Damron, a pro-B.D.S. member, said there were many more products, which would be impossible to know without a full accounting of suppliers and manufacturers. Ultimately, the movement’s aims go beyond the Israeli economy. “I welcome sending a strong message to Washington this way,” Ms. Damron said.
I'm certain that Washington will drop what they're doing and say, "A Brooklyn co-op is so serious about this that they're depriving their customers, excuse me, members of Israeli bath salts? Time to push harder on that human rights front!"
But this is my favorite detail:
While last week’s meeting seemed surprisingly orderly to many of those in attendance, opponents like Ms. Mazor feel B.D.S. could alienate many co-op members. Already there are dueling blogs, psfcbds.wordpress.com and stopbdsparkslope.blopgspot.com—part of an emerging genre—and should a vote be held, it could divide granola-munching families and friends. There is fear of an exodus of Jews.
There are entireblogs about this. The usual accusations that crop up whenever the debate over Israel heats up are being flung around, but this time it's over what kind of organic goods at low prices will be available to people living in a relatively small area of Brooklyn. I look forward to the new fronts that open up in the political battles over Israel. Perhaps if dedicated citizens work on this hard enough, we can find a way to make fights over parking spaces and noise ordinances into the determining factor that will somehow bring peace to Israel.
I opened up Michael Lind's article at Salon titled "The Tea Party and white Southern extremism" with a sigh. I'm sure it will be astute, I told myself, but at the end of the day it doesn't seem to matter. No matter how many writers and historians point out that the Tea Party is just the same old race-baited Bible-thumping white Southern fools that have been a pain in the ass of this country since its inception, the mainstream media won't listen, instead characterizing them as some bold new political force.
Makes you wonder if they all think Old Spice smells better now that it has better advertising.
But I tell you now, drop what you're doing and read this piece. In fact, bookmark it. Because while our mainstream media may have short memories that make them impervious to history*, they have a somewhat harder time trying to wiggle out of cold, hard statistical facts. And Lind has really marshalled the evidence to show that this "Tea Party" is basically the same old angry Southern right wing nuts who were so pissed about desegregation that they switched to the Republican Party (after begruding Republicans their votes for 100 years to punish them for the Emancipation Proclamation), and who have spent most of the post-Civil War period nurturing a culture where fundamentalist Christianity is wed to a general hostility towards the nation as a whole, which they disguise as "patriotism", though the cracks often show with their tendency to fly the U.S. flag next to the Confederate flag. In other words, the Tea Party Caucus in Congress, far from being some sparkly new nationwide phenomenon, is the same group of Dixiecrats that would rather burn this country to the ground rather than see it move into a more modern, progressive era.
But even these numbers understate how much the Tea Party is just a new name for the same old bullshit. After all, there has been a Southern diaspora, which is why you see Confederate flags and Bible-thumping Baptists popping up frequently in rural areas of the Midwest and the Northwest. As Lind recounts, many of the people classified as non-Southern hail, unsurprisingly, from districts that are heavy on the descendents of this diaspora.
Many of the other states with Tea Party representatives are border states with significant Southern populations and Southern ties. One is Maryland, a state with Confederate sympathies during the Civil War, which, because the Census Bureau defines it as "Northeastern," is responsible for the only Northeastern member of the Tea Party caucus, Roscoe Bartlett. The four Californian representatives come from the Orange County area or inland California, both regions whose political culture was shaped by Southern political culture, in the form of the "Okie" diaspora that settled there during the Depression.
I can hear the pissing and moaning and tantrum-throwing of conservatives thus exposed by these statistics, which will center heavily around "Nuh-uh!", as in, "How dare you suggest that just because Southern whites have disproportionately tried to fuck up everything great about this country, all because of their racial resentments and backasswards views on gender, that this could still be going on?"
To which I say, as always, dudes, I'm from Texas. Trying to pass off Southern white culture as more tolerant and less superstitious than it is might work on people who haven't spent a lot of time around the very people we're talking about---thus the baffling refusal to get it in the mainstream media---but it doesn't fly with me. I have a lot of years under my belt of trying to get through conversaations with your average Southern Joes without some offensive shit coming out of their mouths, and I can attest to what a Herculean task that really is. And while part of my reason for living in Austin was to minimize that kind of thing, it's not like we had a law banning assholes from living inside the city limits, as demonstrated by this picture I took during the 2008 elections of a house in my neighborhood.
Needless to say, I'm not fooled by lip-smacking denials about what it's actually like.
I think perhaps the problem was there wasn't a catchy name for this voting bloc before, and so now we're stuck with "Tea Party", even though, as Lind pointed out, the Tea Party caucus presence from the states that conducted the American Revolution is basically nil.
*Seriously, I saw the usually astute Eugene Robinson on MSNBC scoffing at the idea that Republicans might be looking for an angle to impeach Obama. His argument seemed to be, "Nah, why would we think Republicans would be extremist enough to concoct a bullshit reason to impeach a Democratic President simply because they can't stand the idea of him in office?" I suppose it has been a whole 13 years, and so it may as well have not happened. There's some kind of "Logan's Run" system going on with the memories of the Beltway media, except the lifespan of a memory we're allowed to acknowledge isn't 30 years, but somewhere closer to 3.
One of the great mysteries of Tea Party politics has been the place of female leaders in their pantheon, from the whole coinage of "Mama Grizzly" to the baffling enthusiasm for Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin. It's not that Tea Partiers have suddenly decided their lifelong hostility towards feminism was misguided; Palin and Bachmann's prominence has been accompanied by a dramatic turning up of the volume of anti-feminist hysteria. Of course, that anti-feminist hysteria has been focused mainly on controlling and punishing female sexuality, which I think gives us a path to understanding what seems contradictory on its surface.
But when I started to read Roy's column about rightbloggers trying to pretend the latest propaganda film about Palin is some nationwide hit, something clicked. I realized that Palin's main role is to be a saint and a martyr in the civic religion of Tea Partyism. Think about it: while the Tea Party is incoherent enough that a lot of people with diverse approaches to being resentful wingnuts feel welcome, the language of Biblical literalism has been amply applied to their illiterate readings of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers. (It's why I blanch at the word "literalism", which implies having actually read and attempted to understand the text, when what it means is coming to a text with authoritarian leanings and claiming, regardless of the evidence, that an immoveable object or deceased authority supports your contentions. There's nothing literal about it.) Because fundamentalist Christianity is being wound up into it, the distinction between religious figures and political figures has collapsed. And that explains how women can somehow rise to prominence in a world that quite literally depends on a hyper-chauvinist take on patriarchy as the source of virtue, where a comic book masculinity takes the place of the garments of priesthood. Even in societies where women have almost no real life outside of the home, female figures can be prominent in faith. In fact, often prominent female figures exist to shore up misogyny---the figures are idealized women who are used to punish other women for being merely human.
Fundamentalist Christianity has mostly missed the train on this, until somewhat recently. Catholics have it down cold. I mean, their most prominent female figure is a woman who managed to be both a virgin and a mother---the two ideals of woman a misogynist society holds up above others. But of course, the two roles contradict each other, so if you're one, you're failing at the other, because the first rule of patriarchy is Women Are Always Failing. The Virgin's role is to drive home how every other woman who has ever lived is an utter failure. But Catholicism also has a role for prominent female martyrs, and yeah, virginity is practically a requirement---some died so they could stay virgins.
Obviously, what's required of female ideals and martyrs changes from culture to culture depending on their needs. But I'd say that Palin and Bachmann are, for the Tea Party faithful, playing the role of both idealized women and martyrs. Their popularity depends on using them as a weapon. They're packaged as hyper-fertile but chaste, sexy without having sexual demands. So as the Virgin can be used to bash women who can't be both a virgin and a mother, Palin/Bachmann are there to bash women who can't be sexy but chaste, submissive without losing that appealing spark, and able to raise huge herds of children without losing their waistlines or two hours in the morning to get beautiful for their husbands and the world. Right wingers try to bash feminists with them, but suddenly it occurs to me that they're being venerated for the effect on the ordinary women of the Tea Party faith as much as anyone else. When right wingers solemnly intone that feminists are jealous, we can laugh because hey, most of us don't see any virtue in the sexy-but-chaste thing, much less the huge herd of kids thing. (The fertility goddess thing is particularly important during a stampede to force women to link childbirth and being sexual, no matter how unwilling or unable they are to have more children.) But for women who are involved in that values system and having to traverse the impossible contradictions every day, well.... And hearing the line that "feminists are jealous" would be remarkably effective at tamping down your resentments if you were a female conservative. You can't point out that Palin/Bachmann are promoting an impossible myth, because next thing you know, you're going to be called a feminist. And you can't have that.
And of course, they're also martyr in the Tea Party eye---sacrificed for their devotion to chaste motherhood, just as the virgins of old were forced to commit suicide instead of allow rapists to take your virginity. Which also means you can't complain, if you're an ordinary woman. After all, you aren't as brave as the saints and martyrs, right?
Of course, the question remains, "Why do they give them leadership roles, if they're more idealized women in this civic faith?" And the answer is, because they have to. I mean, how else do they show support? Palin is trying to make it as a more media/commercial figure, but that requires some coverage from the political media, and they aren't going to give it to her if she's not considered, you know, an actual politician. Bachmann's position is even more precarious. They need media to feed the faithful, but the media needs politics to consider them relevant. But also, their ability to be politicians while still playing the submissive wives is just one more contradiction that makes emulating them impossible for ordinary women, and after all, isn't that the point?
Every year around Halloween, it's important to have a post explaining the ridiculous and seemingly growing fundamentalist hostility to the holiday, which they consider 
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 
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 
One of the great mysteries of Tea Party politics has been the place of female leaders in their pantheon, from the whole coinage of "Mama Grizzly" to the baffling enthusiasm for Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin. It's not that Tea Partiers have suddenly decided their lifelong hostility towards feminism was misguided; Palin and Bachmann's prominence has been accompanied by a dramatic turning up of the volume of anti-feminist hysteria. Of course, that anti-feminist hysteria has been focused mainly on controlling and punishing female sexuality, which I think gives us a path to understanding what seems contradictory on its surface.