By the way, the song I posted on Sunday I got from the Best of Bootie mashups, a series of albums consisting of tracks combining songs or audio recordings from the past couple of decades. They’re all free to download, and there are some definite gems in there. For example, did you know that Avril Levigne goes well with Toni Basil, that the Jackson 5 gets along famously with Guns n’ Roses, or that LL Cool J and Dexy’s Midnight Runners are a match made in heaven? I thought not. But don’t take my word for it…
Posts from March 2011
“A secular atheist country…dominated by radical Islamists”
 |
| Doesn’t care about the difference between a secular nation and a Muslim theocracy, and you shouldn’t either. |
That’s what Newt Gingrich is afraid his country will become by the time his grandchildren are adults, if people like him do not themselves dominate. The full quote:
“I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9,” Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
Ten years of right-wingers attempting to portray radical Muslims as the bosom buddies of liberals/secularists/atheists (take your pick; they sure treat them as identical), and it hasn’t gotten any more convincing for some reason. Sorry Newt, but I just can’t seem to swallow the idea that a people who are highly religious and morally opposed to homosexuality, abortion, feminism, and freedom of expression (which includes the freedom to blaspheme) are more like me than you.
But of course speeches like this aren’t intended for people like me. They’re intended for people whose gorges don’t rise at the mere thought of electing someone like Newt president. Those are the only people who could listen to someone describe a secular atheist country dominated by radical Muslims with a straight face, unaware of or unconcerned about (not sure which is worse) the utterly nonsensical nature of that statement. The kind of people who would actually turn up by the thousands to hear Newt speak in a church in my fair state. I do not understand these people.
Tuesday links
- The Psychologist‘s April issue is dedicated to psychology, religion, and spirituality, and you don’t need a subscription to read articles such as “The Cognitive Science of Religion” by Justin Barrett and Emily Reed Burdett.
- Update from the New York Times on the gang rape in Cleveland, Texas– it’s worse than we thought. Much worse.
- The Village Voice skewers a study on sex trafficking.
- Transgendered people face more troubles at the DMV, this time in Utah.
- Private prisons seem like a bad idea for everyone but private prison owners.
- Austrian court fines man roughly $1,600 for yodeling while his Muslim neighbors are praying. Regardless of whether he was actually doing so to “disparage religious symbols” or not, I’m
hopefulthankful that such a thing could not happen in the U.S. - Pixar’s 2012 film Brave will be their first film with a female protagonist. As a Pixar junkie, I’m very curious…but could we leave the notion of “Disney princess” behind, please?
- The perils of the straight male gamer
Monday links
- Dan Savage reports that pro-gay marriage advocates are protesting outside the home of a florist who refused to provide flowers for a same-sex wedding: “Not cool.”
- Radley Balko points to a story of New Jersey police arresting five teenagers after a noise complaint…and then leaving them in the police van out in the freezing cold for fourteen hours without food, water, or access to a bathroom. I’m curious what will happen to the officers in question.
- Hehmant Mehta at Friendly Atheist wants to know how many Christian pastors actually believe in Hell, and whether they mention it at the funerals of people they believe are going there.
- Dr. X’s Free Associations posts a Youtube video from an 8th grader about her experiences being bullied that probably matches, word for word, what a lot of us experienced at that age. The difference is that Youtube wasn’t around when we were 13, so we couldn’t post such videos and have it get attention from school officials. Here’s hoping that in her case, they use the information wisely.
Video game death
Boingboing produced this video montage of deaths in the old school age of video games (Atari and NES/Sega mostly, for you young’uns). Along with the memories, the music is actually what makes it– it has a serene yet wistful feeling, bringing to mind the monologue at the end of American Beauty as though it had been spoken by a video game character:
Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life… plus the three additional ones I earned in those dungeons on levels 5 and 7.
Why should we care where Sarah Palin got her bunny (and how many shots it took)?
Why should we care where Sarah Palin got her bunny (and how many shots it took)? published on Read more posts by the author of Why should we care where Sarah Palin got her bunny (and how many shots it took)?, GretchenNo Comments on Why should we care where Sarah Palin got her bunny (and how many shots it took)?
The designated Badass Quote of the Day for today over on Dispatches is from Jason Easley at Politics USA:
Sarah Palin has become the political equivalent of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. America regrets the one night stand they had with Palin, but now she has broken into our house and is ready to boil our bunny. Sarah Palin is America’s ultimate political stalker. It all makes you wonder where Michael Douglas is when we need him most.
Which is indeed a great quote, although I’d distance myself by saying that she’s more like the stalker with whom my housemate had a one night stand– I had nothing to do with it, thanks very much, and would have evicted that housemate long ago for entirely different reasons if such a thing were possible.
But the following exchange in the comments caught my interest:
Sarah Palin does not boil bunnys.She shoots them with high powered rifles with sniper scopes.you forgot “from helicopters”. And that it takes her an average of 7 shots to hit them.
We’re probably all familiar with the “hunting from helicopters” bit. But where does the “7 shots” thing come from? Well, this— an opinion piece in USA Today describing Sarah Palin’s Alaska on TLC:
The caribou hunt episode provides a centerpiece of the series’ excesses, as well as Palin’s ineptitude. According to script, it’s Palin’s turn to replenish the family’s dwindling freezer with wild meat — from an Alaska point of view, all good. But the logistics of the trip defy common sense. Instead of hunting within reasonable distance of home, her party flies 600-plus miles to a remote camp in multiple chartered aircraft. This isn’t subsistence but the sort of experiential safari popular among high-end, non-resident sport hunters. For all that, Palin ends up with a skinny juvenile cow caribou. Boned out, we’re talking maybe 100 pounds of meat, at a staggering cost per pound. Faced with that hapless animal, this darling of Second Amendment supporters nervously asks her dad whether the small-caliber rifle kicks. Then, even more astoundingly, her father repeatedly works the bolt and loads for her as she misses shot after shot before scoring a kill on the seventh round — enough bullets for a decent hunter to take down at least five animals. (Given Palin’s infamous tweet “Don’t retreat, reload,” we can infer she plans to keep her dad close by.) Later, Palin blames the scope, but any marksman would recognize the flinching, the unsteady aim and poor shot selection — and the glaring ethical fault of both shooter and gun owner if the rifle wasn’t properly sighted. Instead of some frontier passion play, we’re rendered a dark comedy of errors.
Why should we give a damn about whether Sarah Palin can hunt, and whether she does so efficiently? Is making fun of that just a cheap shot (pardon the pun)? After all, how many of us could go out and easily kill something to feed our family for dinner?
Probably not many, but that’s really beside the point. The point is populism, or what should be a failure thereof. It’s perfectly okay with me if Sarah Palin is a lousy hunter. What’s not okay is that hunting (presumably well, presumably for a purpose aside from show) is part of the persona she has adopted in order to appeal to a certain demographic, and it seems pretty clear that the persona is contrived. This led to a rather fascinating discussion amongst Ed’s readers, some of whom live in Michigan or other northern states in which hunting is a way of life, about what exactly being a good hunter means. Apparently it means being responsible and trying to minimize suffering. It means not taking a shot unless you are pretty sure it’s the only shot you’re going to need to take. It means you know your weapon intimately and can operate it safely and effectively by yourself. Pretty much common sense, right? Even a non-hunter should be able to guess those rules, and expect that anyone who claims to be an active hunter would abide by them.
To be fair, it’s possible that Nugent just didn’t know that Palin’s hunting abilities are a façade. He probably just heard all of the rhetoric on the subject and thought “Hey, one of my kind!” I know that Nugent himself is perceived by many as a whackjob and that reputation is not undeserved, but:
- A lot of people do like and listen to him, and
- When he talks about hunting and sustainability, I can’t help but half-nod in agreement.
He’s wrong, of course, that hunting is sustainable. America simply could not feed itself on the same diet we’re accustomed to now if the meat we ate came from hunting alone. We could not eat meat to the same degree that actual hunters do now if we all had to get our meat only from hunting– there just aren’t enough wild animals out there. If we all turned into Ted Nugent tomorrow, we would almost certainly hunt the prominent game animals into extinction. There are just too many of us. That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with being a hunter, but for that reason alone it’s misguided to suggest that we all should become hunters even if we were so inclined (which is a tremendous “if”).
What’s unfortunate is not just that Nugent doesn’t appear to realize that, but that he thinks that just because Palin is gung-ho about hunting (whether she can actually do it or not), she’s on board with his sustainability thing. That she gives a damn about preserving God’s earth, the balance between man and nature, and the general glamorized picture of hunting that Nugent appears to genuinely believe in. Which means that Nugent, in addition to being a nutter, is a sucker. I feel kind of sorry for the guy– Sarah Palin really isn’t good enough for him, as much as he wants to believe she is.
Standards, gun-toting God-praising right-wingers….you need ’em.
You make the music go back; you hear Satan speakin’
According to Wikipedia,
Pareidolia ( /pærɪˈdoʊliə/ parr-i-DOH-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek para– – “beside”, “with”, or “alongside”—meaning, in this context, something faulty or wrong (as in paraphasia, disordered speech) and eidōlon – “image”; the diminutive of eidos – “image”, “form”, “shape”. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia.
Two methods of shaming women out of getting abortions
Let’s say you’re pregnant, and really don’t want to be. Maybe you were raped and conceived as a result, or maybe your birth control just failed. After thinking the matter over, you’ve decided that an abortion is what you want. It isn’t something you take lightly, but you feel that it’s the right decision. Once you make it, which would be worse to experience?
1. According to state law, before you can get an abortion you must go to a “pregnancy help center.” There you will be given a lecture by a volunteer counselor who may be overtly religious or may not. This person will not need to have any particular certification or license. Their sole job will be to convince you to keep the pregnancy. By law, they will have to inform you that your abortion would “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being.”
2. According to state law, if you want an abortion you must submit to a sonogram 24 hours before the procedure. It’s not terribly unusual to be given a sonogram at some point before an abortion, but in this case it will be mandated by the state for every woman who wants an abortion, because the governor and Congress want you to re-think your decision. This will be required even if your pregnancy is the result or rape or incest, or if you want the abortion because your fetus has fatal abnormalities. If you are not given the sonogram, your doctor will lose his/her medical license. The procedure is intended to confront you with the fact that your embryo has a heartbeat– whether it actually does at the time or not– and resembles a human, although if you wish you can completely disregard both of those by not looking and wearing headphones.
The former is now the case in South Dakota. The latter is legislation that was recently passed by the Texas State House. The Senate passed a slightly milder version, one which allows exceptions for victims of sexual assault, a 2-hour distance from the abortion rather than 24, and would not punish doctors who will not perform the sonogram.Currently they’re duking it out about which version will prevail, though Governor Rick Perry has denoted the legislation in general an “emergency” and is eager to sign off on it.
A friend described such requirements as a “modern poll tax,” and I can definitely see it. These restrictions do not discriminate amongst women who want abortions– unless (as is entirely possible) they will need be paid for by her, in which case getting an abortion will become even more costly and poorer women will have an even more difficult time affording one. However, they are created for the express purpose of creating additional obstacles in the way of exercising a freedom that is Constitutionally protected. They perpetuate the myth that women who want abortions are themselves like children, and don’t know what they’re doing. If they could only be confronted with the truth, they might change their minds– it would be silly to presume that they have given extensive thought to the decision beforehand, or that they have been advised sufficiently by their own doctors. Not only does the state need to intervene in the physician-client relationship, but it needs to do so using sheer emotional appeal. Because in addition to being ignorant, women are emotional, not rational human beings.
Leslee Unruh, owner of one of South Dakota’s pregnancy help centers, taunts asks “What are they so afraid of? That women might change their minds?” No, Leslee. We trust in a woman’s ability to make this most private decision regarding her body herself, in consultation with her doctor. That’s why we’re not trying to get legislation passed which allows us to browbeat women into getting abortions. Believe it or not, abortion providers and those of us who support them aren’t out to get every fetus aborted. It isn’t about ignorance versus informed decision-making; it’s about paternalism versus autonomy. The difference, whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life, should be clear as day.
“Freedom for me, but not for thee” of the day
From the American Family Association’s spokesman, Bryan Fischer:
Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam. Islam is entitled only to the religious liberty we extend to it out of courtesy. While there certainly ought to be a presumption of religious liberty for non-Christian religious traditions in America, the Founders were not writing a suicide pact when they wrote the First Amendment.
Isn’t it interesting how people claim that the Constitution is not a “suicide pact” when they want to refuse to acknowledge something clearly guaranteed in it, but dollars to donuts are the same ones who will be thrusting said document into the air and yelling at the top of their lungs should someone come along who says the same thing about something they actually value?
The First Amendment, last I checked, singles out no particular religion when it acknowledges both our freedom to religious expression and restrains the government from foisting its own expressions upon us. Nor is it accurate to say that the founders had no intention of protecting freedom of religious expression for Muslims:
In his seminal Letter on Toleration (1689), John Locke insisted that Muslims and all others who believed in God be tolerated in England. Campaigning for religious freedom in Virginia, Jefferson followed Locke, his idol, in demanding recognition of the religious rights of the “Mahamdan,” the Jew and the “pagan.” Supporting Jefferson was his old ally, Richard Henry Lee, who had made a motion in Congress on June 7, 1776, that the American colonies declare independence. “True freedom,” Lee asserted, “embraces the Mahomitan and the Gentoo (Hindu) as well as the Christian religion.” In his autobiography, Jefferson recounted with satisfaction that in the struggle to pass his landmark Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786), the Virginia legislature “rejected by a great majority” an effort to limit the bill’s scope “in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan.”
And the atheist? Well, that’s another story. But it’s absurd on its face to claim that the right to religious expression exists for Christians alone. If it did, then the word “freedom” would hardly describe it.
We’ve all got our own stuff
Again on Colorlines (I’m really happy to have discovered that site), Thoi Lu discusses black male feminism:
In light of the recent 11-year-old Latina who was reportedly gang raped by 18 black men in Cleveland and news of Chris Brown’s continuing meltdowns, Texas, a few black male writers have stepped up to the plate to explicitly discuss their journey toward becoming feminists. Byron Hurt of The Root wrote last last week on “Why I am a Male Feminist,” which prompted G.D. of PostBourgie to also write candidly about the topic two days later. Hurt admitted that observing the way his father would invoke fear in his mother during arguments by virtue of his greater size influenced his own relationships with women. He fell into feminism accidentally; Hurt interviewed for a position with the Mentors in Violence Prevention Project, not knowing that it was designed to use the status of athletes to make gender violence socially unacceptable. After hearing how women protected themselves from sexual assault and rape, his conception of feminism radically changed:
Like most guys, I had bought into the stereotype that all feminists were white, lesbian, unattractive male bashers who hated all men… Not only does feminism give woman a voice, but it also clears the way for men to free themselves from the stranglehold of traditional masculinity. When we hurt the women in our lives, we hurt ourselves, and we hurt our community, too.
While Hurt’s father’s presence was inescapable, G.D. wrote, “mine was imperceptible.” He had an absent father figure and was raised by “black women who were fantastically smarter and more competent than I was.” G.D. internalized how his mother always cautioned his twin sister to be responsible while in public, in a way he didn’t have to. Also, during a college summer, one of his female friends woke up in an empty dorm room in a bare bed and had to file a police report and get a rape kit, which was another situation he couldn’t fathom living through. At the least, however, he admits to his own ignorance:
I am routinely very, very dumb about this shit as a heterosexual dude — with all the tunnel vision and privilege that attends that location. The relationship those realities have to my blackness is a muddled one; sometimes they’re independent, sometimes they act in concert. But if growing up black and poor and male provided an unlikely bridge to anti-sexist thinking, so has feminism complicated the way I think about blackness and class.
Feminism as an ideology has a reputation for being a privilege of white women. They have been the ones who have generally been wealthier and more educated, the ones with the time and money to go off to university and take Women’s Studies courses and sit around discussing the patriarchy and learning to appreciate the value of a vagina. Black women were too busy working. They didn’t have time to do the kind of navel-gazing white women did in the 60’s (and still today) about the feminine mystique and the legitimacy of working outside the home, because they were already doing it. The issues they faced weren’t quite the same. So black women felt that their struggles were not being properly represented by a movement that purported to speak on behalf of Womankind. If in actuality it’s all about the interests of upper class white women, then we might as well just say so, but hopefully none of us actually want that to be the case. If we mean that, then being a feminist should be about representing the concerns of all women. If there is a single woman of any sort anywhere in the world who is being mistreated and her choices in life denied, we should all be feminists for her…shouldn’t we?
There are multiple dimensions to distribution of power in life, and it’s not surprising that one minority group should view one or more other minorities groups with oppressive eyes very similar to the ones with which they themselves are viewed. Hence, you get rich minorities looking down on the poor, white minorities looking down on minorities of different races, male minorities looking down on females, straight minorities looking down on non-straights, cisgender minorities looking down on transgenders, and various religious minorities looking down on each other and on non-believers. I’m sure there are more examples, but that’s a good representative sampling. I can see how if you’re anything but a white straight rich cisgender male, it would be easy to pick one or more minority groups to look down on order to get some sense of superiority. It’s not shocking at all that there are white feminist racists and homophobes, and blacks who are passionately concerned with racial equality but are themselves homophobic and/or misogynistic. Having your own struggle doesn’t automatically flip on some kind of empathy switch for other people’s struggles, as nice as that would be.
I don’t think I need to imply that men should speak for women in order to say that it’s an absolute pleasure to see/hear of them speaking up on our behalf. Often we’re not there to speak up for ourselves, and it has never made sense to me to think that it’s okay to make sexist/racist/homophobic/etc. comments just because someone who represents the group you’re talking about isn’t present. This post from from A Division By Zer0 makes the point that there are some men out there who think that rape is okay, provided you don’t call it “rape.” It’s sort of like murder, in that “murder” is the name for killing that is definitely wrong, and “rape” is the a name for a kind of sexual contact that is definitely wrong. But just as there are people who murder while considering it acceptable killing (for whatever reason), there are people who rape or would be willing to rape while considering it plain ol’ sex. The argument goes that by trivializing rape around such people, you are confirming in their minds that it is in fact trivial–giving them the impression that it’s normal to think the way they do, that there’s nothing wrong with it. The same is true of casual sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia. If the victims of these prejudices are the only ones to ever speak up in reaction to them, they will never be eliminated. That’s why we need feminist men, along with straight LGBT rights advocates, white racial equality advocates, and wealthy people who not only give to charity but don’t think of the poor as stupid, helpless, or otherwise inherently lesser.
I realize how very kumbaya this sounds, but we all have to stand up for all of us. There’s just no other way.