Oh, for fuck's sake

Sigh.

Apparently, the US is a criminal sex offender. So be on the look-out should this country move into your neighborhood.

I suppose this shouldn't come as a surprise... I've found myself rather in agreement with critiques of recent years observing that we've come to accept prison rape as an informal additional punishment, a nonchalance which can't help but be reflected in the actual approach of the prison-industrial complex to investigating and stopping it. There's a good point to be made that we shouldn't accept rape as an informal punishment any more than we would accept it as a formal one -- I can't imagine (or I can, but'd rather not) it would pass Constitutional muster as a NON-"cruel and unusual" punishment, but our being so blase about invites it to stay part of our system.

Speaking, unfortunately, of rape, there is the continuing and seemingly worsening wave of sexual violence in the Congo, where apparently we're (the US and UN) helping to mentor other countries' armed forces in sexual violence:

AMY GOODMAN: Now, what about this issue of the US-, the UN-backed Congolese army in the area now increasing the rate of rapes? And we’re actually not just talking about women and girls, but also of men and boys, as well. Is that right, Christine?

CHRISTINE SCHULER DESCHRYVER: That’s totally right. I have to say, since they started like with the new operation called “Kimia II” with the Congolese army and supported by the UN forces, the situation here on the ground is terrible, terrible, because now we have the militias just—not just going and rape the women, they are burning villages, they are killing the people, they’re raping men. They are like—they already use the same methods like Janjaweeds in Darfur. So now the level of violence in both North and South Kivu is just incredible. There’s no more words to describe what’s going on. And we still, like—we all, like—like the international NGOs, the local, the national NGOs, all of them made reports to alert the world that there’s a tragedy going on with this operation. But they’re still continuing, and we don’t understand that.

I... have nothing else to say, really. This has sort of sapped the pithiness right outta me.

SCOTUS likely to say, apparently, that a school fucking STRIP SEARCHING a 13 year old girl based on hearsay is A-OK

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH. ps. AHH.

Read this article on Slate by Dahlia Lithwick, in what I can only hope is her most far wrong call of all time. (Well, ok, this is less horrible than, say, Supreme Court (SCOTUS) allowing torture and indefinite detention and the suspension of habeas rights, but it is also less understandable from even a utilitarian perspective.)

Choice excerpts from Dahlia's well-written piece:

When constitutional historians sit down someday to compile the definitive Supreme Court Concordance of Not Getting It, the entry directly next to Lilly Ledbetter ("Court fails utterly to understand realities of gender pay discrimination") will be Savana Redding ("Court compares strip searches of 13-year-old girls to American Pie-style locker-room hijinks"). After today's argument, it's plain the court will overturn a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals opinion finding a school's decision to strip-search a 13-year-old girl unconstitutional. That the school in question was looking for a prescription pill with the mind-altering force of a pair of Advil—and couldn't be bothered to call the child's mother first—hardly matters.
Editorialists and pundits have found much to hate in what happened to Savana Redding... you might see the humiliation in pulling a middle-school honor student with no history of disciplinary problems out of class, based on an uncorroborated tip that she was handing out prescription ibuprofen. You might think it traumatic that she was forced to strip down to her underclothes and pull her bra and underwear out and shake them in front of two female school employees. No drugs were found. [SCOTUS Justices] had access to an amicus brief in this case documenting the fact that student strip searches "can result in serious emotional damage" and that student victims of strip searches "often cannot concentrate in school, and, in many cases, transfer or even drop out." Savana Redding, herself a data point, described the search as "the most humiliating experience" of her life. Then she dropped out of school. And five years later, at age 19, she gets to listen in on oral argument in Porky's 3: The Supreme Court Says "Panties."

Apart from the hyperbole at the end, Lithwick's analysis seems pretty solid, and the rest of her article backs up first impressions. I haven't read more on the case myself, so I reserve my own final judgment, but it certainly appears to be another "WTF?" moment, along with such highlights as Lilly Ledbetter, The Torture Years, and the "An American Woman's Uterus is Effectively US Soil" ruling (where most of the men of the court, "respecting the differences between men and women" -- and ignoring the women on the court at the time -- upheld as Constitutional a law making it easier for the child of an American mother and foreign father than an American father and foreign mother to be granted US citizenship, which I have fondly called the "Uterus as a US Embassy Theory of Citizenship").

Fuckety FUCK FUCKING FUCK, court!!!! I, I... all I can do right now is splutter. And get back to work -- got packing for a trip that I've been incredibly procrastinating on to do yet.

Republican Revolt: WTF?

I haven't been closely following the mainstream news recently, but while I know Olbermann & Maddow have been covering the Republican/conservative grassroots-ish Fox News supported TeaBagging rallies, I haven't found much in the way of satisfying analysis on-line. On the other hand, I haven't looked very hard -- but Slate hasn't covered it closely, let's say. The Daily Show, on the other hand:

Jon Stewart Slams Hannity, Bachmann, And Beck: Defeat Is 'Supposed to Taste Like a Sh*t Taco'

Stewart: Yes, tyranny. A.K.A. our democratically elected President. You know what guys....I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing. And I feel for you because ah...I've been there. A few times. In fact one of them was a bit of a nail biter. But see, when the guy that you disagree with gets elected, he's probably going to do things you disagree with. He could cut taxes on the wealthy. Remove government's oversight capability. Invade a country that you thought should not be invaded but that's not tyranny. That's democracy. See now you're in the minority. It's supposed to taste like a s#%t taco. And by the way, if I remember correctly when a disagreement was expressed about that President's actions when ya'll were in power I believe the response was "Why do you hate America?". "Watch what you say." "Love it or leave it." "Suck on my truck nuts." ..... For god's sake guys. You've been out of power for ten f*%#ng weeks. You've got a mid-term election in twenty months. Pace your rage! (h/t C&L)

Yesterday night, and previously, in the paragraph linked above, The Daily Show has been pointing out the wild WILD crazy hypocrisy of this Republican Uprising. Perhaps John Oliver only interviewed the craziest of the crazies on yesterday's show, but they argued that the Obama Administration was worse than England's rule over The Colonies (with Oliver hilariously defending England's imperial fiendishness, with its torture, tyranny and wiping out of the Native Americans), and called the prospective couple % increase in tax rates -- to still far LOWER than it was under, say, Reagan, much less Kennedy -- taxation without representation. Even though, as John Oliver pointed out, they do have representation. And Stewart, at some point, I don't remember what day, pointed out -- in democracy, yes indeed you have the right to voice and support positions and politicians representing these. But these CrazeFuck Wackaloons seem to have confused the right to representation for the right to always win. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

Stewart highlighted Fox News peeps' hypocrisy over all this, what with their ridiculing of lefty protesters in years gone by and warning leftiest that their language and anger and criticism was unpatriotic or even "dangerous" or incitations of violence, yet now Bill O'Reilly talked in front of a graphic saying "The protests are perfectly valid: arguing about government size is perfectly valid." Sure, yeah, great -- where was all this assurance of "validity" for lefty protesters? Where is the Hannity that criticized an activist for advocating "anarchy on the streets of Washington" as being a threat of violence, yet two days ago agreed with a righty activist that what we need is "a revolution" right now against this government?

What TYRANNY are they talking about? In the name of all that's right and good -- is it really the prospect of a tax increase? Is it really the money given to the self-same market capitalists that have had the Right's backing (and the Left in government as well, actually) for decades that is pissing them off? While I agree that this money to the banks et al. is shady at best and downright intellectually and morally bankrupt on the O administration's part at worst (see commentary at Talking Point Memo on how the assumptions behind giving insolvent banks money to get a recovery are a bit facile at best), this is not a new tyranny. And in what world is this worse than the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where, by any count, thousands of innocent civilians have died and we've spent billions of dollars and lost or had wounded thousands of our citizens? In what world is this worse than support for Israel despite its contravention of the nuclear weapons treaty (Israel is not an openly nuclear state, though it's widely agreed that they nonetheless have nuclear weapons and are therefore in violation of the relevant treaties) yet pressuring Iran to obey the same rules we don't require of our allies? (Of course, that makes perfect realpolitik sense, but realpolitik also often includes telling the truth about one's utilitarian motivations)? In what world... well, I could go on. But in sum: this is RE-FUCKING-GOD-DAMNED-DUNCULOUS. Argh.

Sorry. I just lose it every time I see the women interviewed on the Daily Show that, well, refused to be interviewed because Jon Stewart has a communist agenda. It's not so much that she hates Jon Stewart (or at least his agenda), it's WHAT THE FUCK DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH COMMUNISM? DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS? AHHHHHHHHHH!

Cheeses fuck, but our country is home to some messed up political dynamics.

I'm just saying

h/t to the ornery Captain Plaid on the first video.

The ornery Southern Scot also had this gem:



He asks some questions similar to my recent post on why so many lower-income/rural folks support Republicans; I'd like to see him delve into this deeper in the future.

(Ooooo, this just in! He apparently has some thoughts on it somewhat similar to mine...)

Slate Idiotically Conflates Lack of Style with Substance

Christopher Beam's brief dispatch for the debate exemplifies much of my problem with Slate these days. Depth of analysis, they don't got.

Beam makes the rather inarguable point that the debate was boring, along with the pretty uncontroversial point that boring can be good in comparison to hair-trigger idiotic mud-slinging. He comments that boring is good because, nominally, the evening was heavy on substance.

WHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTT?

While substance may be boring (especially to the news media), it is NOT the fact that boredom means you're getting some substance vegetables in your presidential election dinner that you have to finish before you get to the dessert of irresponsible speculation and obsession with personal details. BORING does NOT equal SUBSTANCE!!!!

Is that really all that hard to realize? The fact that they talked a LOT about the issues in excruciating detail doesn't actually mean that they talked about the issues substantively -- the details were puffery, distortions, and contextless factoids. Indeed, I think it was boring largely because they did all they could to not dwell into substance -- despite Lehrer's occasional helpful suggestion of substantive topics, which they talked around such that he returned to his initial question around 5 times subsequently. If you have to say a lot without saying anything, a sure way is to be boring. They didn't tell us their economic strategies (other than "Yes tax cuts" "No on loopholes" "His plan is more expensive" "No, HIS plan is more expensive" "Freeze spending" "Invest in our future and alternative energy" -- nothing I couldn't have guessed or told you about BEFORE the debate). Bland generalities is not wonky, it's politically expedient.

I'm sorry. It just drives me crazy -- the immediate assumption that substance is hard and boring and that's why it's avoided so much by the mainstream news, all the more reason to avoid it in favor of "Gotcha!" news reporting, except for the fact that, at least Christopher Beam, doesn't even seem to understand what substance is. I'll give you an example -- saying that you might meet with Iranian President Ahmedinijad, but might not, as the situation calls for it, is not wonky, substantial, or interesting. Saying, for example, that there is much pro-American feeling in Iran, but far far more anti-intervention feeling, and as such you will be pushing for cultural missions and person-to-person exchanges in return for trade concessions (something I just made up whole cloth and not necessarily suggesting) would be substantial -- it's a plan, with details, that you can then debate. Whether or not Obama's theoretical plan that is only referred to obliquely despite the fact that I doubt the general public is familiar with it is better than John McCain's theoretical plan that is only referred to obliquely despite the fact that I doubt the general public is familiar with it is not vegetables. It's just really, really, REALLY bad tasting fast food. The fact that one would even briefly confuse the two is the most distressing thing I've heard all day.

M & O Slip Me a Mickey

Good god, this debate is soporific.

It's hard for me to judge what's going to come of this, but my prediction as an armchair gadfly is that this will swing in McCain's favor. He landed some hits -- the $932 million in supposed pork barrel, that went unanswered and not even indirectly refuted -- he got call himself a maverick and a reformer a couple times, and though it sounded scripted, and isn't, I believe, true, it sounded effective.

Obama actually raised his hand (or actually did that sort of "Waiter -- oh, waiter? Excuse me?" thing) at the beginning of the debate to try and get moderator Jim Lehrer to, well, moderate. He needed to come off as commanding and forceful (without, I suppose, coming off as a threatening black man, ), but he came off still as incredibly schoolmarmish. And actually, his answers were so bland and diffuse that I can't remember any specific thing he said (though the jist of it abides -- things like the fact that McCain was speaking of not "showing your hand" when speaking of attacking a country ("You don't say that aloud."), Obama pointed out that McCain had sang the infamous "Bomb bomb bomb Iran" song -- hit!).

Overall, though, they both bore me, neither said anything bold, both told some lies, and only McCain really had anything soundbite-like. Now, I don't believe in soundbites, but the actually legitimate need they may have arose from was from clarity. Both of them talked around and around and around issues so as to not to commit to anything. Lehrer couldn't even get them to say anything remotely resembling an answer about what they would do or change because of this crisis. ARRGH.

Oh, nice -- Obama just pointed out the McCain is chiding Obama for something his (McCain's) advisor, the war criminal Dr. Henry Kissinger, recently endorsed. But you know -- despite the cheesiness of canned quips and put-downs, this debate REALLY needed (well, needs) some pithy insults.

Oh, for god's sake -- this whole "talking to them legitimates them" thing. Ok, that's it. I'm out. I'm playing some video games.

Paging Dr. Madison...

"At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

A Cogent Analysis of MSNBC's Olbermann/Matthews Bullshit

Read here.

And of course, the worst of it is that the most rightward folks, from the Falwells and Dobsons and Norquists through the David Brookses of the world gets time on TV, far more often than the Amy Goodman, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, or Ralph Naders of the world. As I've long maintained, there is no far that is too far Right to be on TV (except, I suppose, people who openly advocate killing, say, blacks, Jews, and gays -- though especially the latter is only sometimes considered unacceptable), but woah-ho-HOOO! Chris "Mission Accomplished Gave Me a Woody" Matthews and Keith Olbermann -- left and an intelligent and sharp critic, but no Goodman, Ali, Chomsky, Nader or Moore -- they got to GO! Way too left!

What the fuck.

Hah! For all my Melittologists, what what! Plus: Apis Samanthas

Hat tip to Daktari:

Bee Dance.

(Though should really all be chicks. Chick bees, that is. You know what I mean.)

And speaking of Anthophila, our favorite Apis via Feministing, Samantha Bee on... um... decisions... um... what was it? Alternatives?... for Bristol... at the RNC...

Sarah Palin just made me barf. Plus: French ticklers!

She was fine and unoffensive -- in the sort of literal way of being bland and predictable in her attacks and jokes -- until she belittled community organizing as compared to being Mayor (of a town of "less than 7,000" no less), saying that in small towns they're not exactly sure what community organizers do (I think) and definitely saying that being Mayor involved real responsibilities, unlike community organizing. (??)

WTF? When was being a community organizer a crazy socialist idea? Isn't the Republican ideal a "welfare" system based entirely on the goodwill (or lack thereof) of your neighbors to get together and build the less fortunate a house? I mean, that's what they SAY, that communities should take care of such affairs, not the state, but apparently DOING it is just SILLY. It's one of those things you just say and don't mean, like "I'll call you back," or "I'll get lavish federal funding to help you out here by building a very expensive bridge to an airport on a road that doesn't exist yet."

Oh, wait:

One year later, Ketchikan's Republican leaders said they were blindsided by Palin's decision to pull the plug... Palin's 2007 press release announcing her change of course came just a month after McCain himself slammed the Ketchikan bridge for taking money that could have been used to shore up dangerous bridges like one that collapsed in Minnesota... Mayor Weinstein said many residents remain irked by Palin's failure to come to Ketchikan since that time to defend her decision -- despite promises that she would.

And this is the same woman who just criticized Barack Obama for saying one thing to small town Americans and then doing another.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Republicans aren't just not bothered by hypocrisy. They pull hypocrisy on like a French Tickler and go at Truth from behind while sticking a finger in her ass. (Don't ask how long it took me to come up with that. But I think it was worth it.)

I'm (still) afraid of Republicans...

Watching Rudy Giuliani's speech to the Republican Convention, it is awesomely scary -- awesome in its original sense -- to see even Giuliani taken aback by the Republican Delegate audience. Giuliani launches into attacks on Barack Obama, with the same types of caveats the Dems made about Republican John McCain being an honorable man or whatever before they attacked him; ok, fine. But he stumbles several times -- because, for one, as he tries to say how admirable Barack Obama's work as a community organizer was, it wasn't executive experience. But he was cut off as soon as he said "He was a community organizer," and people started chuckling, and chuckling, and chuckling. Giuliani laughed confusedly, just like I threw up in my own mouth confusedly, and then he sort of did the David Letterman thing, looking to the side of the stage and mouthing "What the hell?" (I may be exaggerating a bit.) But he did seem confused as he tried to get through what he thought was a laudatory part of Obama's life, as the crowd laughed -- I can only guess that they laughed because helping people is silly...? Organizing community is a worthless endeavor...? Sure, they may think his experience is laughable as qualification for the President, but it seemed to me more mean-spirited than that. Perhaps I'm just being uncharitable.

But I don't think so... especially when Giuliani praises how Obama was able to make himself a successful man, something "that could only happen in America" -- and everyone laughed. They laughed -- because...? I got the vague impression it's because they view his success as not due to his skill but, what, his luck at being black? Or perhaps his luck at being black in America? Cuz, yeah, that's great shakes. (There're worst places to be, but it's not for nothing that noted black intellectuals and performers moved to Europe when they could naught but a couple decades ago, when either you or your parents were undoubtedly already around.) In any case, RG seemed as confused as I was, and sort of shrugged and moved on.

This redmeat red-state crowd scares the fUCK out of me.

RG complains that the Dems have rarely mentioned 9/11 in this campaign... YIKES. I know 9/11 was the centerpiece of his campaign, but way to turn your demagoguery into a flaw on the other side. Yikesy McYikeserson.

Well, it's back to work. I can't handle looking at the blinding Whiteness on screen jeering at things I believe in and chanting something like "Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill!"... for energy independence. (Essay question: better or worse than their "Zero" chant for Obama, assumedly representing his supposed zero experience and qualification? How about the "USA USA" chant? Do they think we don't realize it? Are they under the illusion that we're the only democracy and need to celebrate our fortune at not being French. (Probably.))

So true...

Is Susan Stamberg on Crack?

This is perhaps a most trifling note, but listening to reports of the Republican Convention this morning, and being reminded of how effective sounding tough can seem to be to Americans -- Fred Dalton Thompson rallying against Obama as the most liberal, least experienced candidate for president ever [sigh] -- it was crazy-making to have that followed up by NPR's Susan Stamberg wondering at the exotic wonderland that is Wyoming.

Now, there's nothing wrong with being enchanted by Wyoming; every state has its charms. And Stamberg had apparently visited all other 49 states, but had never been to Wyoming in her years of travel, for journalism or otherwise. Ok -- great -- sure. But she got there, and thrilled on-air to hear those three words she'd been waiting for decades to hear -- "Well, howdy, ma'am."

WTF?

Apparently, Wyoming = Old West to Stamberg, and she was charmed to have her feelings confirmed. She went to some small town that had a stagecoach and Westy-type stuff "for tourists," and was told that the town wasn't really Wyoming, but it was the closest she'd get. Huh? Presumably, the closest to some imagined Old West Wyoming, since it was in the state of Wyoming after all -- so I'm pretty sure that counts. But certainly, if you want to go get a tourists'-eye view of your preconceptions of a state, your options are limited to certain tourist spots disdained by all the states' "real" residents. (Heaven forfend you, as a journalist, stretch yourself and report on anything about the rest of the state, rather than a navel-gazing travelogue purely about your own reaction to the state, not about the state itself.)

She was thrilled to -- what the hell? -- go to a "roh-DAY-oh," she said, only realizing afterwards that it was pronounced "roh-DEE-oh." She explained to those Wyomingites that heard her mispronounce "rodeo" that she "was from the East," which she said she ended up having to explain a lot, she said. Umm... I've been to the Wild East Coast of this here nation, and I didn't notice that ro-day-oh was the accepted pronunciation. Or that Stamberg had apparently never watched any show about ANY western/southwestern state for more than 5 minutes, with the sound down. Ro-day-oh? Who is she, Paris Hilton? I mean, sure, there's California's "Ro-day-oh" Drive, but, um, Stamberg's not from California... plus she supposedly had visited 49 other states, of which I'm thinking at least several of them pronounced it with the "dee" sound. (It is "roh DAY oh" in Spanish, but as far as I know, we don't all pronounce our appropriated words in the original tongue here in the Civilized East, or, er, Midwest either.)

She followed this with wondering at the buffalo walking across the road, just hanging out, eagerly pointing and asking her hostess to slow down so she could clearly see them. She may have never seen them, but it's still clearly weird to me that that was a big part of her "Wyoming" experience -- considering Bison have more famous herd/enclaves/protected populations in various other states.

Why am I going on about this? Just because the juxtaposition of Fred Dalton Thompson's Southern drawl and Stamberg going "Oooo! He called me 'ma'am'! Can I take a picture of him in front of that buffalo?" was a bit too much -- it was the ultimate in the portrayal of the East and West...ern United States as foreign Others. And her excusing her practical ignorance with "Sorry, I'm from the East," seems support attempts to show that the East and The Liberal Media are elitist, out-of-touch, and out-of-step with "real" people. It's the ultimate "East Coast Liberals are wide-eyed and totally out of touch with reality, too busy sipping their lattes." Now, it's not Stamberg's fault that there's that perception, or that she had glee at Wyoming's, um, perceived stereotypical quaintness I guess, but seriously... was she THAT out of touch that buffaloes, sheriffs, rodeos, and "Howdy ma'am," was the Wyoming experience she wanted, that she'd REALLY never found anywhere else in the US? It's not just a little disheartening, it seemed like bad journalism to go somewhere just to have your cookie-cutter images of someplace confirmed, and play out the segment with "Happy Trails." There's so much else that could be learned about or commented on from Wyoming, but apparently, it really IS just Big Sky Country... oh, wait, that's Montana. So Stamberg experienced the REAL Wyoming the... um... Equality state. Er, um, the Park state. Oh, oh! Ok, it's ALSO the "Cowboy State." Apparently, of the three state nicknames, Stamberg had to choose one and just go with it. So thank goodness we got to confirm our biases, and not learn anything new in that 5 minute segment. Thanks NPR, I had nothing better to do than learn that Stamberg has remained incredibly naive for someone who visited 49 states already, and then to, er, grouse about it for 15 minutes.

Seriously, if this is the Red State/Blue State divide, I am living in an entirely different set of states from everyone else, cuz I can pronounce rodeo AND drink lattes...

If She Can See Farther Than Others... Daktari on Palin

If Daktari can see farther than others, it's because she's sharp like woah.

Go read Daktari's blog. There've been a series of sharp and probing posts recently that I really haven't had the time to fully process and react to. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't go read her excellent summary post of VP Nominee and Republican Wackaloon Sarah Palin. Daktari's rounded up a good number of links and primary/secondary sources about Palin's abject horribleness by any progressive feminist standard.

Apparently Daktari will not be part of Samantha Bee's Love Pitas for Palin, the gynecologically-inclined issue* voters, those women voting not with The Big Head, but The Little Hood.
----

*Apparently that issue is: "Does someone on the ticket have a vagina?", not "Does the Party/Ticket/Nominee represent anything I believe in?" Substantive issues, it seems, are NOT for pussies.

Hah! I slay me.

But seriously: even J-Fave Slate's Today's Papers jumps on the pre-determined narrative bandwagon, saying that

"Choosing Palin undercuts the argument that Barack Obama is too inexperienced, raising questions about John McCain's age and judgment. But it could pay off: Palin—an NRA member and staunch pro-lifer—is energizing evangelicals and tempting Hillary Clinton voters to defect."

If one bothers to read the linked WaPo article, a paragraph worthy of note (more than halfway through the article, natch) reads

"Interviews with women who supported Clinton suggested that the fact that McCain picked someone as conservative as Palin will be reluctant to vote for McCain, even for those who have been flirting for months with the idea of defecting to the GOP ticket"

only then followed by a quote from one Clinton supporter who has decided to defect. It could be a real phenomenon, but they don't know -- Slate, and to a lesser extent, the WaPo here are making up the narrative before the facts. Not new for The News, but nonetheless, egregious. Objective media my left ass cheek.

I tend to agree with those that charge McCain with thinking Women Candidates Are Interchangeable, though of course as with any modern "identity politics" argument, somehow those who see sexism in the events of the day are themselves charged with misunderstanding feminism.

The Clinton Family Fun-Time Minstrel Show

This is my fawning response to a great Slate article here by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton. The title is "The Clinton Fallacy: Black Americans' love for Bill Clinton is built on a fallacy -- Did blacks really make big economic gains during the '90s?" (The answer is not really.)

A money quote:

In many ways, the scandal-marred, deeply partisan years of the Clinton administration proved disappointing in the face of such early optimism. Welfare reform, the growth of black imprisonment, and the public abandonment of progressive African-Americans like Lani Guinier are some of the most memorable racial disappointments of those years... But there is evidence that Clinton's unmatched popularity among blacks confused many about the true economic impact of his presidency. In a 2005 article I co-authored in the Journal of Black Studies, I analyzed five national surveys from 1984 through 2000. The data show that nearly a third of black Americans held false understandings of black economic conditions during the Clinton years. By the time Clinton left office, many African-Americans incorrectly believed that blacks were doing better economically than whites. In the '80s, barely 5 percent of blacks believed blacks were economically better off than whites. By 2000, nearly 30 percent of African-American respondents believed that blacks were doing better economically than whites. This belief is simply wrong. There is no evidence to suggest that African-Americans were in a better economic position than whites at any time in American history, including during Clinton's presidency.

Damn straight. I was young during the Clinton presidency -- but even when I liked him, I never got why he was "the first black president" -- other than that he possibly did the best job of pretending/showing that he cared about black people than any other president. JFK's "Boston Brahminism" was never the personal touch that Clinton brought, plus his sax-playing and modest beginnings showed a president a little less... Upper-class white (despite that being what he is now) than we'd seen in a while.

Said another way: Clinton was probably the President least like Richard Pryor's impersonations of white people, which can't but have helped his popularity.

This is my slightly less informal response to the article on Slate's Fray:

It was over-time to start discussing Clinton's honorary "blackness" and what he did to deserve it. Identity politics are misunderstood, misused, and unjustly maligned in today's United States, where there are real and profound racial disparities stemming from past and present circumstances. Beyond the inherited disadvantages of lesser wealth and savings from the African-American slave and then underclass, blacks in the US suffer from a system that's convinced itself it's fair when Jim Crow is still in living memory. Many people are alive today who lived under segregation, yet we pretend that it's a past and best-forgotten phase in the US at that.

All this is to say that there are real disparities between races, and adoration of Clinton, who did nothing real to change this, and abandoned black progressives like Gunier and Elders, is as misplaced as the belief that blacks are equal to or better off than whites -- a perception too common among whites, as well, breeding some of the dissatisfaction with affirmative action and related programs. (After all, if black people are equal or better off, why should they get the breaks?) Eric Alterman rightly pointed this out as, in part, a failing of the media to accurately portray reality in the US, dividing blacks on TV news into criminals and stars. Clinton's stardom is part of this syndrome, and he of course has done nothing to correct it.

One can argue about Clinton v. Obama v. abstention or a third party, but one must do it from the knowledge that neither Clinton can lay claim to honorary blackness outside a bubble of hype and misperception -- they stood for business as usual. Indeed, sadly, these misperceptions are what led people like JFK to be revered, when Nixon and Ford did more substantively for civil rights. They were forced to do it politically, but did it all the same -- while people like the Clintons and JFK and perhaps even Obama get a free pass.

Clinton wasn't the first black president. He was the first BLACKFACE president.

Big Brother is Watching, Listening, and Reading... for Bootlegged Britney

In a potentially light-weight return to blogging, I would like to call your attention to this Slate article about AT&T's apparent desire to start monitoring all their electronic traffic from their customers for illegal content.

In what may end up being nothing or may end up being, as author Prof. Wu calls it, the beginning of a privately-run police state (though likely without a young Red Forman heading Detroit crime syndicates under the table for OCP). He rightly points out:

No one knows exactly what AT&T is proposing to build. But if the company means what it says, we're looking at the beginnings of a private police state. That may sound like hyperbole, but what else do you call a system designed to monitor millions of people's Internet consumption? That's not just Orwellian; that's Orwell.

This may be nothing, as I think Wu's right that it would be corporate disaster for AT&T: "AT&T's new strategy reverses that position and exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders." But as the sole poster as of 10 minutes ago points out, AT&T was known as The Death Star among telecom peeps in-the-know in the old days. "Mandycat" goes on to point out: "They persistently and diligently bought up well-run and profitable companies like NCR and proceeded to destroy them. They even took the extra precaution of changing NCR's century-old name to something idiotic like "GIS" just in case there was any residual goodwill left intact. It was like a sickness."

Hmm... a plausible explanation has popped up here, claiming that perhaps this is just a pretext for remaking the internet hierarchically so that they can indeed get around network neutrality and discriminate service quality between high-payers and average joes and joanns (guess who gets higher quality). Seaturnip says: "I don't think AT&T at all wants to analyze HTTP connections for pictures, as you suggest. That would indeed be horrendously inefficient. They are probably mainly interested in stopping bandwidth-guzzling movie piracy via peer-to-peer protocols such as BitTorrent."

What say you, oh people of the internet? Is the idea that AT&T will go through with what it announced last week, that "it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws" indeed, as Wu says, "[A] prospect ...too totalitarian for my tastes"? One would think, but of course, I would've said not too long ago that a different prospect would be too totalitarian for most Americans' taste: "AT&T [is] already accused of spying on our telephone calls."

J. Edgar Hoover, eat your heart out.

(ps: what the hell is "eat your heart out" supposed to actually MEAN, anyway?)

"Even women can have tiny dicks."

What the hell? you ask.

This the hell. In an unusually light-hearted J-post, I point to this article by Slate Ad Report Carder Seth Stevenson. Apparently, Hummer is trying to sell to the tofu set. Seth reports that new TV spots from Hummer for its H3 are aiming specifically to say, "Feel wimpy because you're the dude at the supermarket buying tofu and tempeh instead of the Fred Flintstone Brontosaurus Prime Rib? Buy a big fucking car! Now, less fucking big than before!" (It's now-shrinkaged size is I guess a selling point to tofuers: destroy the world somewhat slower than otherwise! Buy a Hummer, you Dirty Hippy! It's GOOD for the environment cuz it's SMALLER!) Seth reasonably points out that calling attention to the "I have a small penis" aspect of Hummer pop psychology may not be the best of ideas. The "women with tiny dicks" (now there's a rock band name if there ever was one) line comes from one of Seth's readers who suggests that this is the (unifying?) message of the she-version of the commercial, where a mom doesn't stand up for herself and her kid when they're pushed out of line by another kid and obnoxious mom on the playground. What does she do? Goes to buy an H3! As Seth implies, this confusing vein of you-go-girlness has apparently failed to run afoul of feminist takes as of yet. This in comparison to the rather quick backlash, apparently, to the male version that originally ended with the tagline "Restore your manhood." (Now it's "Restore the balance" -- apparently tofu shrinks your penis, but the Hummer will pump it up again like SPAM-email Cialis. Balance restored. Without the direct implication that you're a short dicked man -- or woman.)

I don't have any idea what to think about this other than "Um... ok," but I think the reader's line "Even women can have tiny dicks, and the Hummer is the cure" deserves to be repeated.

Virginity Fraud???

File under Useless Things You Probably Wish I Hadn't Told You. William Saletan of Slate.com in his Human Nature column today highlights the growing Re-hymenation industry:

Business is booming in "revirgination," i.e., hymen reattachment. Cost: $2,000 to $5,000. Unmarried immigrant women are getting it to avoid family disgrace by hiding the fact that they've lost their virginity. Married women are getting it (along with vagina-tightening surgery) to thrill husbands on their anniversaries. Objection from the left: It's female genital mutilation. Objection from the right: It's virginity fraud.

I think this calls for a Patented J-AHHHHHH.

AHHHHHHH.

As far as I can tell, there's no free way to get to the Wall Street Journal article on-line without subscribing (i.e. in this case, paying). Using the magical power of being a grad student I got to the article.

Take it from me and J-Friend Lindsay, under no account should you get to the article.

Here's a preview that the sane among you should take as warning enough:

It's the ultimate gift for the man who has everything," says Ms. Yarborough, 40 years old, a medical assistant from San Antonio.

Gynecologists are marketing hymenoplasty in magazines, local newspapers and online. They report business is booming.

Religious groups that value abstinence until marriage say hymen repair is a deception. (Their frickin' problem with hymenoplasty is HONESTY? Not, i.e., the fact that "Some feminists liken hymenoplasty to female genital mutilation." Gee, who knew religious groups weren't tapped into deconstructionist post-modern feminism? --ed.)

"Revirgination" costs as little as $1,800 at Ridgewood Health and Beauty Center, a spa and cosmetic-surgery center in the New York City borough of Queens. To promote the procedure, the center's owner, Cuban-born Esmeralda Vanegas, has given away hymenoplasties on a Spanish-language radio station.

"Losing your virginity is like losing a member of your family," Ms. Vanegas says. "We can make it seem like nothing ever happened."

"I thought it would add that extra sparkle to our marriage," says the woman.

Ok, so maybe those don't appear so bad. But I warn you: we didn't get to the part about how "midwives used to disguise a broken hymen with a needle and thread, sometimes using membrane material from goats and other animals."

Need I say more? GOAT HYMEN.

This sounds almost like a cautionary tale against pre-marital sex by itself. "'Don't give yourself to your man until you are married, or else the GOAT HYMEN will get you,' my old Aunt Baruska warned me before we came to the New World, fire in her eyes, as animals whickered and whinnied and stirred in the night."

So, my readers, go forth and sin no more, else this Old World Terror come claim you late in the night.






P.S. Is anyone else reminded of the Sneetches?

“My friends”, he announced in a voice clear and clean, “My name is Sylvester McMonkey McBean. And I’ve heard of Your troubles. I’ve heard you’re unhappy. But I can fix that I’m the Fix-It-Up Chappie. I’ve come here to help you. I have what you need. And my prices are low. And I work with great speed. And my work is one hundred per cent guaranteed!”

Perhaps that's Dr. Sylvester McMonkey McBean?

On reflection, probably not a name that would inspire hymenoplastic-trust.



Ok.

I'm done now.



P.P.S. Someday real blogging will resume. Really. Honestly.

Some day.