Sophianotloren

After artist Donald Judd moved to Marfa, Texas in 1971, he quickly transformed the cow-town into the art world’s desert outpost, much to the chagrin of some locals. Now, the gentrifying city’s rising property values and mushrooming taxes are threatening to push out long-time residents altogether, according to an eye-opening article by John MacCormack published last month in the San Antonio Express-News. 

Unhappy residents are protesting after a reappraisal of Presidio County properties found their values have doubled in the past year to $1.14 billion, from $563 million in 2013. “A couple of the rich types moved in and paid an arm and a leg for a lot, and then resold it for more, so now the people who live out here find themselves saddled with these escalating valuations,” retired county employee Marge Hughes told the newspaper.

Move to Marfa today and you can purchase a five-bedroom home that Judd once owned for $735,000; though cheaper than a New York brownstone, it’s astronomical by West Texas standards. Several homes in Marfa are priced above $350,000, and many more are in the $200,000 range, according to the newspaper. That’s significantly higher than the $22,000 that Hughes paid for her house 14 years ago; it’s now worth $120,290.

“It’s hard to find anything livable in Marfa for under $100,000, and what you get for that is a small one-bedroom. We still have a lot of out-of-state people looking. Locals not so much,” 71-year-old resident Valda Livingston said. “The young people who grew up in Marfa for the most part can’t stay. It’s the job market. All three of my children are in San Antonio. They couldn’t make a living in Marfa.”

From the Soho and Williamsburg neighborhoods in New York to Santa Fe in New Mexico, artists have frequently upset existing social fabrics in their quest for cheap rent. Though Marfa’s art renaissance has drawn much outside investment, transforming it from “just a dying, little West Texas cow town” — as a retired U.S. Border Patrol agent told the newspaper — to one of the state’s hottest destinations, it has sidelined many with deeper Marfa roots. After watching their town reinvent itself, they may now also have to reinvent their own lives. That hurts artists, too. Instead of living in a diverse, challenging community that might inspire them in new ways, they settle into an echo chamber.

“We’re lucky the world discovered Marfa, but the week your property values get sextupled is not the best time to get people to admit it,” cartoonist Gary Oliver said. “This is a rich town because a small percentage of the people have a lot of assets. But if your taxes go up enough so you can’t pay them, what are you going to do?”

“We’re all sick and tired of these little fluff pieces about Marfa,” 72-year-old painter Emily Hocker said. “This is a wonderful place, but just like other wonderful places suffering from gentrification, the poor people always get shoved aside. A lot of people who grew up here are suddenly on the fringe.”

Molly Moore wrote a post about photographing and being photographed nude. On twitter, she joked that she was proud to say she’d taken my cherry. Because it was the first time I’d ever photographed a willing, nude model. I’ve shot performance art that contained nudity, but that’s different; they are already offering up what they are doing as ‘spectacle’ to a determinate audience. It isn’t intimate. It’s a public act that I have documented. This was very different.

I wanted to write this post to mark the experience and to explain what I learned from it. I had assumptions, and plans, and when I was met with the reality of it – like most intense experiences – it was entirely different from what I anticipated it would be.

I always assumed shooting someone who I knew, nude, would be an erotic experience. And it was, but not at all in the way I thought it would be. It wasn’t sexual, but it was intensely sensual.

The first thing that became stunningly clear is that clothes break up the body. They interrupt the lines of the body, bleed it into the background. A naked body becomes a very solid, very present form. Sounds silly, but believe me, it’s a shock. Your subject is suddenly very, very present. An single-shaded organic shape. And so colour, shape, light, shadow, texture and line really become the first things your eye starts to work with in the composition.

So at first, I was concentrating on just that contrast – white skin against a dark tree bough. Then the flesh, smooth against the rough, patterned surface of the tree bark. Then lines and shapes: the organic lines of legs, arms, torso, profile juxtaposed against the geometrically cut gravestones, the railings, the bare earth beneath her. Where those shapes were echoed, and where they crossed, and fought against each other for balance. The dapple of light on her body, how it was coming down in shafts between the leaves, where it was illuminating her. The weight of her light body against the dark background, in balance, unbalanced. Her leg hanging, arm dangling, breast canted. Gravity there in the photograph, acting on a body. Motion delayed.

I could have played with just those things for hours. It is very compelling to deconstruct the body in this way. It feels transgressive to do it – to reduce someone you know and like to part of a composition. Molly as part of the landscape; Molly in opposition to the stone; Molly smooth against the roughness of the bark. It’s entertaining, and impressionistic. And yet, I felt strangely guilty about it. I’m sure it wouldn’t bothered have Molly. But it bothered me that I could so easily reduce her to the elements and principles of art. Something I have taught, year in and year out, for what seems like ages.

So, I decided to focus more on the context. The graveyard. A real woman’s body – that’s been lived in, and borne children. I thought about Gothic Victorian novels and how liminal the female body was for them, how fragile and fleeting, how forever-imperiled by disease, and poverty, and childbirth and violence.

This graveyard was full of dead women and their epitaphs. Tender and formal, steadfastly denying the nature of decay, and the truth of bones, the moist dead meat left behind when the soul has fled. The sublimation of the natural world for some quaint, narrative ideal.

Finally, I remembered a lecture by Judith Butler, strangely enough, about the photographs of Abu Ghraib. The act of the lens as aggressor, as an enabler, the shutter as trigger that sets the wheels of atrocity in motion, the ease and casualness digital image-making as normalizer of obscenity. And I thought about the camera as death. Not the angel of death, not the murderer in the woods, but death waiting, watching, observing a body in the slow process of dying. Not now, not tomorrow, but inevitably and the awful patience of that eye.

That was my experience of photographing Molly Moore. I really can’t say when I have learned more in two hours.

Or, let’s talk about different styles of bottoming and submitting. This post will probably make more sense if you read the last one about styles of topping and dominating. These two posts were inspired by Xiao Yingtai’s brilliant post “Am I Just Selfish? Service Versus Control,” which you should go and read.

The gist of her post is that in addition to the service submissives who everyone seems to know about, there are also control-oriented submissives who (shockingly enough) just want to feel controlled during a scene.

Xiao Yingtai’s post blew my mind because she explained something I’ve literally spent years trying to understand: what the hell people are on about when they say they want to be “trained.” I always thought people who wanted that had spent too much time with one-handed BDSM reading and not nearly enough time talking to real people about how they actually live their lives. But it turns out that some s-types are control-oriented and love things that would make service-oriented submissives miserable. Or to quote from the post:

Constant micromanagement and correction? No endpoint? Sign me up for this!

I never realized that feeling controlled was the point when someone asked to be “trained.” I always kind of thought they were just bad at service or had the idea that there was some magical “right way” to do things and if they learned it they would be the perfect submissive and never feel sad or lonely or inadequate ever again.

The idea of “training” also irritated the shit out of me because if you assume it actually is about making yourself useful, then being trained by someone else before you look for a partner is a complete waste of everyone’s time. Even something as simple as how to make tea isn’t that likely to carry over, and assuming that all dominant women take their tea the same way (or even that we all drink tea) is a good way to convince your prospective dom that you see her as female dominant seven of nine, not an individual human being.

Where things get complicated is when people try to sell themselves as service submissives when making themselves useful is really, really not the point of the kind of scene that they’re after.

To quote Mistress Matisse’s article “Slave Labour“:

Some folks try to turn what’s sexy for them into something of practical use to others, in an attempt to attract partners. This rarely works. My friend Jae has coined a not-very-complimentary generic term for the breed of man who does this: “the Panty-Washer type.” The name springs from dirty-underwear fetishists who try to persuade you that hand-laundering your lingerie should earn them sexual favors.

Another example of that type are the boys who’ll offer to, say, scrub your floor. Oh–did they mention they’d be doing it naked? And you will be standing over them, supervising and disciplining them the entire time? In full fetish gear? With a riding crop?

Guys, there is someone out there who wants to have that scene (possibly for $250 an hour, but that’s a separate post), but you are absolutely not going to find her by trying to convince people that this is a good way to get their floors clean. For fuck’s sake be honest about what you want. I mean, I’m not even particularly control oriented but the way Xiao Yingtai puts it is just hot:

But some of us irrational types like being constantly pushed further. We actually live for that state of desperation, we get a kick out of providing entertainment through our suffering. Or, at the very least, the boot on our necks.

Entertaining me by suffering for me? Yes please! Desperation? I’m all over that. Tell me about that if you want to play, not about how clean my house is (not, let’s be honest) going to be.

It turns out “training” actually does mean something after all. It’s still not my thing, but it makes me so happy to finally have any idea what people who like it are talking about.

Readers, are any of you into “training”? Has anybody else struggled to understand what that hell “training” even means?

rememberyourbones:

This is me:

I’m the girl who got headbutted. You might recall this incident from a few years back with either a feeling of support and the urge to high-five me, or an intense dislike because I’m mad feminist, hell-bent on making up stories to demonise men. If you are not familiar with the story, I will give you the short version; I saw a man attacking his girlfriend and I stepped in to stop him, resulting in him headbutting me after a lengthly confrontation where he threatened to have me killed. The man was prosecuted. I made a post about it on my personal blog which had about two hundred followers. The post gained a monumental amount of attention, but a couple of months later, someone decided to ‘prove’ that I had made all of it up. I was the centre of an online witch hunt for months. I was threatened, bullied, laughed at and shot down whenever I tried to offer a rebuttal. I wasn’t too bothered, because the man had been sent to prison and I stayed in contact with the young girl who was very grateful that I had stepped in. It didn’t matter to me that a few thousand people thought I had made it up; I knew the truth, the police knew the truth and my friends and family knew the truth. I stopped using my blog and ignored all the mad comments.

But it continued. It snowballed dramatically. Before I go on, I can assure you that this happened. I promise. You can Google my name, Laurie Malyon, and you are one click away from finding numerous articles very clearly stating my attacker’s sentencing.

I’ve put up with comments and threats for almost two years now, and whilst everyone around me tells me to ignore it I can no longer sit back and watch people slander me on the Internet. I realise that I am utterly powerless in changing the opinions of 500, 000 people who are too lazy to spend five seconds doing some research on Google, but I’m going to give it one last go before I stop talking about this godforsaken controversy forever.

I did a good thing. I am proud to say that. I stepped in when many others would not have. It’s very easy to see something like that and pray that someone else stops it so you can remain a bystander, but there was no one else around to stop it when I saw it and I’ll be fucked if I’m ever going to sit by and watch somebody be harmed intentionally at the hands of someone else. I am still in contact with the girl. I see her perhaps once every two months, and she still thanks me every time she sees me. I helped her out of a situation that everyone was too scared to help me out of when I was her age. I stepped the fuck up.

The comments I have received about the situation make me very, very upset. I am a human with real feelings and I can read everything that people write. I’m put to shame on feminism blogs that read the ‘debunking’ post and didn’t think to research it. They say that I’m giving feminism a bad name by lying. They say that I’m an attention whore. They say that I’m an idiot for claiming to have stepped into a domestic situation because that can often make it worse. They ask if I’ve ever even heard of a domestic situation. They tell me I deserve to be in a domestic situation for lying. They say that I’m ugly. They say the amount of makeup I wear in my photos is silly and I look like a slag. Now forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that absolutely negating the entire point of feminism? As a well educated and practising feminist, it is not the comments from men saying that they’ll ‘give me a real black eye’ that upset me, it’s the comments that are hateful and shaming from my fellow sisters.

A lot of people speculate (because I’m a loony feminist) whether or not I’d have stepped in if it were a woman beating a man. Of course I would have. Violence is violence and I completely agree that anyone attacking anyone should be stopped. Twisting it into this and challenging me on it creates even more diversion from the real issue. Why the hell are people trying to pick so many holes in my story? Was it really that difficult to believe that I was a normal girl, on her way to work, who simply stepped in when I saw someone in need? Why have I been questioned and scrutinised for two years? Surely the anger shouldn’t have been directed at me for posting about it, but towards the man who succeeded in assaulting two young women, entirely unprovoked?

I am not taking it any more. I am not remaining silent whilst people call me names and post about how I deserve to die. I am sick to the back teeth of being branded a ‘whore’ by feminists who aren’t really feminists if they’re using a word associated with slut shaming when nothing about my story even mentions anything sexual. I am fed up with being told by men that they’d rape me then give me a black eye with their dicks and how no one would believe me if I tried to get them arrested because I’m that mad man-hating feminist who lied about being headbutted.

I’m trying to undo all the unfair comments with this post. I’m speaking out to the 3.6 million of you who have read about the situation, whether I was portrayed as a do-gooder or a liar. I am asking you to share this so that I can attempt to clear my name. I understand that the post has spread like wildfire throughout the Internet in it’s entirety and that it’s unlikely I will get any kind of redemption from this, but even if this makes 100 people believe me I’ll feel a little happier about the whole situation.

I’d like to thank the masses of you who believed me and who have offered me your kindness and support from the start, and I’d also like to mention that the chap who ‘debunked’ my original post is on my side. He deleted his blog and apologised to me over a year ago. We went out for a burger to talk it over. We cool.

Remember her?  I wrote 2 separate posts about the internet detective who “debunked” her story and convinced everybody (who didn’t bother checking up HIS claims) that she was a lying liar who lies.  It really really frustrated me that people were so easily deceived by somebody using pretty simplistic rhetorical tricks to disguise his lack of proof, and who used emotional manipulation to make people buy it without question.  Also, that so many people were saying how he’s a “real Sherlock Holmes” just because he framed his debunk as being about attention to detail and deduction, and people wanted to believe that you can apply fictional tropes like “omg nobody would EVER wear their clothes like that, HE must be GUILTY” to real life.

It doesn’t surprise me also that a lot of the people condemning her were feminists because the internet detective hoaxer was very sneaky in the way he played the guilt card.  He framed his ending statement to make it sound like he’s a feminist and on “our” side, and he understands that we really want to believe it’s true (just like he did, of course) but that endorsing fake stories only hurts feminism and we shouldn’t be extremists who believe everything.  Playing on people’s guilt and fear that they’re going too far, and giving them an option (not believing her) as a way to prove that they’re NOT “bad feminists”.  It’s a really effective tactic, and why I keep telling people that if you want to be an activist, or advocate for social justice, you have to make sure you’re not doing things out of guilt, because when you do things out of guilt, you don’t think about what you promote, you just do it to assuage your guilt, and that’s not a good way to operate.

Anyway, the point is, THINK before you reblog things.  Check things yourself.  If you don’t have the time, you DON’T have to reblog it.  You’re not obligated to comment on everything.  This would have prevented what happened with the OP in two ways: 1) people might not have reblogged the original without thinking, and therefore not freaked out that they might be wrong and reblogged the 2nd one out of guilt 2) they might have checked out the claims of the second post and realized they were false.

I think one day I’ll do a breakdown of the “internet detective” post because there are SO many little tricks in it to get people to buy something that isn’t true, and not to question claims of medical knowledge and other such things. 

But yeah, I’m really really glad to see this show up so much on my dash because I was getting really annoyed how much the fake debunk was spreading, even years later, and any attempt to undo the damage, I’m a big fan of.

<@pyna> i read a survey of all the ways they spell khadafi
<@pyna> theres dozens
< pgp> the only thing gadaffi is good for is testing regular expressions
< pgp> M[ou]'?am+[ae]r .*([AEae]l[- ])? [GKQ]h?[aeu]+([dtz][dhz]?)+af[iy]

The Minotaur is going to take photos of the rising “super moon” tonight.  I hope he gets some good shots to share.  Because it has been one of those damned days when I wish I’d never gotten out of bed.

Yes, stupidity is strong in several “this ones” of my immediate acquaintance lately.  My annoyance level is maxed out.  Pity the poor idiot who shows up on my doorstep to sell me ANYthing at all….brushes, vacuums, or religion.  Because, yeah, human sacrifice is SUCH an appealing idea to me at times.

Tagged: burning stupid

Because it will be useful to do this, to refer people to later: Various complaints/comments/questions about the Amazon/Hachette negotiations and my commentary on it, that I’ve seen online, or have been sent to me via e-mail/social media are below, paraphrased, with my responses. Ready? Here we go.

Why do you hate Amazon?

I don’t hate Amazon. I’m in business with Amazon. They publish many of my audiobooks via their Audible subsidiary, and they sell a lot of my electronic and printed books. I’ve also been an Amazon Prime user since the program started and buy tons of stuff from them.

Then you’re a hypocrite for saying terrible things about Amazon!

If by “a hypocrite” you mean “someone publicly noting the company’s increasingly odd public tactics in its negotiations with Hachette,” then yes. Otherwise, no. I’ve been very clear what my position on Amazon is, to wit: It’s a self-interested corporation, doing what self-interested corporations do. This is in itself neither good nor evil. Its particular public actions are open for comment and criticism.

Why do you love Hachette? 

I don’t love Hachette. I’m in business with Hachette through its UK imprint Gollancz; it’s published two of my books in the UK. Gollancz has done well enough for me. I don’t feel anything that could be construed as “loyalty” to Hachette therein, any more than I feel “loyalty” to Amazon for publishing my audiobooks.

But you’re not criticizing Hachette like you’re criticizing Amazon.

Hachette appears (wisely) not to be offering up as many public opportunities for criticism, as regards this particular negotiation with Amazon. If that changes I might comment on their actions, too.

I still think you’re a hypocrite.

That’s fine.

I also think you’re just a tool of big publishing!

As someone who self-published his first two novels online in an era where if people wanted to send you money they had to physically mail it to you, and then later was the president of a writers organization that frequently went toe-to-toe with publishers to defend the rights of writers and to make sure they were fairly compensated for their work, and who has worked with several small and indie publishers over the years, I find your assertion amusing.

Prove me wrong! Say something negative about big publishing!

I’ll say two things: One, its general continued reliance on digital rights management is stupid and insulting to people who buy electronic books; I’m happy Tor and Subterranean Press, who publish the bulk of my North American fiction, don’t use it, and note its lack has done nothing negative regarding my sales. Two, the standard 25% net eBook royalties are too low, everyone knows it, and I suspect in the very near future if large publishers don’t move off of that as a hard line, they’re going to start losing authors — as they should.

I still think you’re a tool of big publishing.

That’s fine.

Why can’t you see that big publishing is doomed?

Probably because I work directly with big publishing on a daily basis and the part of it I work with is full of smart people who are actively figuring out how to make all this stuff work for them. The fact that one my books — The Human Division, which we initially serialized electronically — was formally a research project, from which data was obtained, crunched and studied intensively, suggests to me that the outside-looking-in image of these publishers as cartoon dinosaurs, flailing chaotically, is, in my corner of this world at least, somewhat uninformed.

But [insert Author name here] worked with a big publisher and says they are doomed!

Okay, and? His or her experience may have been different than mine. Bear in mind that authors are not usually perfect reporters — they carry over grudges, loyalties, slights, personal experiences both positive and negative, etc — and that in general, in my experience, and intentionally or otherwise, they tend to universalize their own individual situation.

Are you calling [insert Author name here] a liar?

Only as much as I’m calling myself a liar, since it works that way with me, too. The point to take away here is that maybe you might want to consider the idea that not any one author should be considered the last word on these sorts of things. This is especially true if the author is nursing a grudge, or has an explicit economic interest in a particular publishing model.

But [insert Author name here] sells lots of books!

So do I. Is there a point you have here? (Also, somewhat related, does anyone else see the irony of criticizing certain traditionally published authors — me among them, I will note — as being part of “the 1%” and thus being somewhat clueless to the real world of working authors, while lauding certain self-published authors whose earnings would also put them into the 1%, in terms of author earnings? Seems sketchy logic to me.)

You feel threatened by this new wave of self publishing and that’s why you hate it!

One, it’s not new — please see my notation of having self-published my own novels, the first one 15 years ago now — and two, I don’t particularly feel threatened by it or hate it, no. Why should I?

Because it will doom the way you get published!

You know, at this point I gotta say I’m not exactly concerned that I won’t be able to sell work, regardless of the publishing environment.

New writers are nipping at your heels!

Excellent — I always need new things to read.

Look, here’s the thing: You can construct in your mind a world where there are the tough and scrappy self-published authors on one side of a battle and the posh and pampered traditionally published authors on the other, and pretend to set them against one another, like flabby, middle-aged Pokemon. But I think that’s kind of stupid and I’m not obliged to live in that particular fantasy world. Nor do I believe that the successes of other writers take away from my own. It’s not actually a zero-sum game where only one publishing model (and the authors who use it) will survive and the rest are eaten by weasels, or whatever. The world is large enough to have authors publishing one way, or another, or by some combination of various methods.

And none of that, mind you, has anything to do with Amazon and Hachette negotiating with each other. Trying to conflate the two suggests you’re not actually paying attention.

You’re smug and obnoxious and condescending.

I’m fine with you thinking that.

I will never buy your work!

Oh, well.

This whole conversation is just you using strawmen to make your own points for yourself!

Hush.

I WILL NOT BE SILENCED.

Fine.

Seriously, though, what do you want out of this?

Me? I want Amazon and Hachette to figure out something that allows both of them to be happy with the outcome — or at least happy enough that they can continue to do business with each other — and for Hachette’s authors to have the same access to Amazon as other authors currently have. I would like for both Amazon and Hachette to have economic models that work nicely for authors, so that everyone makes money and everyone is happy. And as I’ve repeatedly said, I would like authors and everyone else to stop thinking this negotiation is about an epic clash of cultures, and see it for what it is: Two companies trying to maneuver for their own economic advantage.

But it is an epic clash of cultures!

Maybe you need to get out more.

I have a complaint not addressed in this entry!

That’s what the comment thread is for.

Thank you to the lovely and bark-scratched Molly Moore (@MollysDailyKiss)

In March this year I was being served at my local Sainsbury’s and was reluctantly drawn into conversation by the woman behind the counter; she revealed she lived on the same street I used to live on and mentioned a friend of mine who also lived there, a friend I’d lost touch with since moving. A few exchanged words about this friend – name of Alison – followed, and then the woman serving me casually said, ‘Oh, she died, didn’t she’ – in a house-fire, apparently, ‘a couple of years ago’. I thought I hadn’t seen her around for a while because she’d moved. I didn’t expect this.

In a way, I’ve been lucky to reach my mid-40s and only experienced the loss of beloved pets, aged grandparents or relatives I hadn’t seen in years. For anyone whose disconnection from their family has resulted in familial affection and loyalty being transferred to friends, however, the first death of a friend can be devastating. What made hearing of Alison’s death worse was the fact that it hadn’t just happened; a cursory search through the online archives of the local newspaper actually told me it had happened in April 2010 – four whole years ago. I could’ve sworn I’d last seen her a couple of years previously – three at the most; but a root through my diary of 2010 told me my last encounter with Alison had taken place just three days before she died. Like me, Alison lived alone, which meant she died alone, at home and in a fire, on the eve of her 50^th birthday. 

Alison was one of those people who make a lasting impression because they’re unlike anyone else we’ve ever met, a person without a reference point, someone genuinely incomparable. She was the most eccentric individual it’s ever been my pleasure to know and also one of the funniest, often unintentionally so. Nothing about her was remotely conventional, so it makes sense that our first meeting remains one of my life’s more unusual ones. I was walking my dog on a street behind where I lived one evening in November 2002 and saw what I assumed to be an abandoned Guy across the street, a slouched figure in an indolent parody of the lotus position. I looked again and gradually realised it wasn’t a ragdoll effigy destined for the top of a bonfire, but a human being, a woman. I approached her to ask her if she was okay and she answered in a mumbling fashion without lifting her head. Having been recently associated with a community of hard drug-users, I thought I recognised all-too familiar signs, but she insisted she wasn’t on drugs. With the help of a passer-by, I managed to get her to her feet and inquire where she lived; my face received a smack of spirits from her breath and I finally knew the cause of her condition before proceeding to effectively carry her home as though she were a wounded soldier on the battlefield; thankfully, it turned out she lived in the neighbouring apartment block to mine and we were no more than 200 yards from home. 

After this bizarre opening, I used to see her around on the streets but we never spoke; only several months later, when she finally deigned to open a neighbourly conversation with me did she admit she’d been embarrassed to speak to me on account of the state she’d been in the day we met. But I soon realised Alison liked a drink. No binge-drinking pub-crawler, though – more the proper old-school alcoholic indulging alone at home with bottles for company. She had the classic spirit-addict physique, without an ounce of fat on her, almost as if she’d once been a model or ballerina whose dedication to the profession had rendered her incapable of weight-gain; and it was impossible to guess how old she was. She dressed in a manner that wasn’t age-specific and had the aura of loner about her, with no suggestion of husband, partner or family. Her accent was southern ‘posh’, and I quickly learnt she had a fascinating (if occasionally frustrating) habit of going off on a tangent during a conversation, switching subject mid-sentence, as well as opening conversations with the quirkiest of ice-breakers, such as ‘Have you ever tried Coco Pops?’ We initially used to bump into each other on the street and stand and chat either for a minute or half-an-hour, depending which unpredictable mood Alison happened to be in, something I could never second-guess beforehand. It also depended on how much she’d had to drink. Then she started calling round at my flat, usually to borrow tobacco or loose change; she was in the same breadline strata as me, which hardly qualified me as the best person to come to for a loan that wouldn’t be paid back. But even when I wasn’t feeling sociable and had nothing to give her, she always made me laugh. Alison could come out with an almost Peter Cook-esque surreal, spontaneous observation in the same way most people will make small-talk about the weather.

She revealed snippets of her past in dribs and drabs: She’d been amongst a contingent of servicemen’s families evacuated from Cyprus in the early 60s (her father had been in the RAF at the time); she was a cousin of Wilko Johnson; she attended St Martin’s School of Art when Jarvis Cocker was there in the early 90s; she had been in an ‘abusive marriage’ she’d entered into because she was pregnant. The latter surprised me the most; she had a child? There’d been no hint whatsoever of that. But for all Alison’s undoubted entertainment value, there was an undeniable air of indefinable sadness surrounding her that always made me think of Eleanor Rigby; she seemed as lonely as I was. There were moments when we could have been more than friends. I twice asked her out early on and she turned me down; when we became closer, she asked me out more than twice and I fudged the issue; the timing was never right with either of us for that kind of relationship. 

The more we saw of each other, the needier she seemed to become; but I wasn’t in a position to help her, as I was going through a bad patch myself. I’m ashamed to say sometimes I crossed the street to avoid her and when she once came round to ask if she could move-in with me, I refused. When I eventually relocated a mile or so up the road, I didn’t tell her in advance and when I used to bump into her thereafter, I was determined not to give her my new address. And then I suddenly never saw her again. Only when I found out she’d died four years previously did I belatedly realise how fond of her I really was. This overdue realisation motivated me to turn detective, attempting to chart the progress of a life that began in the affluence of West Sussex and ended in a poky rented flat in Leeds as it burned down around her, estranged from family, friends and (as I discovered) two sons. What had led her to this end? I eventually acquired copies of both her birth and death certificates and have applied for copies of the coroner’s report from the inquest into her death as well as the pathologist’s post-mortem. Incidentally, only two people attended this inquest: the pathologist and the fire-officer who put out the flames in her flat. No family; no friends. 

I found out where she was buried and visited her grave – a pitiful little plot, overgrown with weeds and marked by a pathetic little ‘corporation’ cross with a plaque that didn’t even state her date of birth. It was an appalling monument to a special person that had slid into neglect because no one cared. A friend who accompanied me on the journey was disgusted and suggested we do something about it, so we did. We purchased the necessary tools and began to transform Alison’s grave into a more fitting resting place for her, cutting the grass, planting flowers and adding a plaque with a personal tribute. I documented this transformation with photos and experienced the rarely-discussed positive side of social networking as a consequence, inundated with an overwhelming wave of kind comments on the project, something that climaxed with a friend of a friend I barely knew building a spectacular new cross for the grave. There was a determination in me to prove that somebody gave a shit about Alison and that someone who had made a difference deserved better; and it was nice to learn that this appears to have struck a chord with so many people. Perhaps Alison’s unnecessary, tragic death served as a sober reminder to all of us who live alone that there but for the grace of God…and so on. 

But the strangest gesture of appreciation came one day when I opened a cupboard I had already opened before that same day and saw fifty pounds had suddenly appeared out of thin air, three crisp notes that hadn’t been there a couple of hours earlier. Although every logical avenue was explored, none offered an explanation. Besides, I knew where the money had really come from the moment I saw it. I told you she was a special person.

©Petunia Winegum.

‘Save Our NHS’ screech the placards! Who exactly is that ‘Our’ referring to?

‘Our’ as in ‘Our’ union ridden, hidebound, monolithic organisation that can keep endless middle managers in work writing reports, attending conferences, following the politically correct line?

Or ‘Our’ as in the recipients of health care?

They surely cannot mean the latter - for no one is suggesting that people be left dying in the streets as a result of reform.

The reform that is suggested is a part-privatised service. As we have here in France.

The Unions recoil in horror – ‘patients will be little more than consumers‘ they say. ‘Live consumers’ say I.

I had a phone call late last night. It was my friend Jane. Let me tell you about Jane.

We met because we had both written – from France – to the national health service’s ‘Sarcoma help line’. We asked to join their forum, which promised plentiful advice and support. We did so because we are both english, we both have leiomyosarcoma, and we were both becoming overwhelmed by the task of deciphering from the quick fire French which treatment from the array of treatments on offer to us, we should choose.

We were both turned down. We might be British nationals, we might both have subscribed for many years to the national health service, but ‘it would be too confusing’, I quote, for us to be allowed to view the conversations on that forum concerning treatment methods.

They offered to introduce us to each other, we could be our ‘own support group’. So we have been.

Incredibly, it turns out that we are the only two people in the whole of France that have this particularly aggressive form of cancer in the specific circumstances that we ‘enjoy’.  We have, so the latest statistics tell us, a 14% chance of surviving to the five year period that is graced by the term ‘cured’. 14% sounds pretty good when you compare it to the alternative of ‘not surviving’.

Personally, I like it even better than 13%, and a whole lot better than 12%.

However, our personal circumstances are very different. I am on a collision course with the proverbial ‘three score years and ten’; I have had a damn good life, done all the things I ever wanted to do, and have the endless support of Mr G for when the prospect of a foreshortened future gets me down – and it does from time to time. If you have never had the ‘palliative care’ conversation with a Doctor, you cannot begin to understand how it strikes fear into your heart; how it is endlessly repeated in your brain during the most mundane conversations – ‘I couldn’t start work on it for three months’ says the builder, and your brain goes into free fall – ‘have I got three months’ it says?

I had the ‘palliative care’ conversation last October; it came as part of a range of options, which included mind bogglingly expensive surgery and further treatment with a prognosis roughly equal to that 14% that sounded so good a couple of paragraphs before.

A ‘range of options though’. I had already had extensive surgery; already had the chemotherapy, did I want to continue the fight, or give in gracefully? My choice, my body, my life. Not my cost though; I have paid my tax dues to France – in return they delivered every treatment I needed without question.

‘Jane’ went about things very differently, for very different reasons. She is the 40 year old single Mum of a ten year old boy. She speaks perfect French, she was married to a Frenchman, and so understood these conversations very differently. It wasn’t ‘A’ or ‘B’ for her, it was ‘ignore ‘A’ and let’s get on with the best possible options for ‘B’. For her son’s sake, she had to be in that 14%, there was no ‘choice’.

She flew off to Germany, to have the surgery done by the Doctor with the best reputation in the world for ‘success’; she paid for it privately, her friends and family raised the money. So far so good. The surgery was a huge success, leaving her with some tiny ‘mets’; small embryo tumours that were beyond the reach of the German laser gun. Chemotherapy was the answer. She flew to England, as she is entitled to do, having been a contributor to the national health service for most of her working life. The Royal Marsden Hospital. Envy of the world and all that.

The main reason for having done so was that she was now weakened by surgery, and facing Chemotherapy, she needed the help of her family to care for her son. One of the worst features of leiomyosarcoma is that when it decides it is ready to cart you off, it happens in days not weeks. You can be fine on Monday, overwhelmed on Thursday. We have both seen it happen to too many people. You don’t hang around doing the things you want to do; you don’t plan long term projects. So, England, and a home counties cottage and off to the Royal Marsden she went.

You have to wait for an appointment with a consultant in England of course; but the waiting list wasn’t too bad. Letters went from a GP to a consultant, and back to Jane. Royal Mail dragged their heels. Finally she saw the consultant. They agreed to give her chemotherapy. Not the full whack that had been given to me in France; just a ‘palliative dose’ – ‘you know we can’t cure you’ said the nurse as she set up the equipment. Jeez, thanks for the encouragement!

Incredibly, even the palliative dose has had a dramatic effect. She is left with just two tiny – 1cm each – ‘mets’. Nothing like the 50cm monster the Bergonie managed to rid me of, nor its offshoots – but is the Royal Marsden elated and looking to the next stage – radiotherapy?

No. It’s ‘not policy’ apparently because she has evidence of leiomyosarcoma in two places, and thus ‘only’ palliative care is on offer. Not as part of a range of options. She’s had to wait three weeks for that decision. It takes that long to get to see the consultant again.

This is a 40 year old single parent with a young child.

Last night she rang me; she wanted to know the details of how many different places I had ‘mets’ last October, and how big they were – and what the consultant had done about it.  And I’m not a young single mother.

Suffice it to say, she was on the phone to my consultant this morning. What? Wait for a GP to write a letter – don’t be silly – she phoned him directly, that’s what you do here. We’re little more than consumers, right? She explained that she was currently in England and what had occurred.

‘How soon can you get here’, he said. ‘I can get a flight on Tuesday’, she said. Naturally she now has an appointment for Wednesday morning;  I’m meeting her there. I don’t know what the outcome will be – but I do know for certain that palliative care won’t be the only option on offer. Fortunately she is the Mother of a French citizen, and she has paid her dues here too. She is entitled to the best France can offer.

They don’t give up on you here. They certainly don’t give up on young mothers. They don’t have ‘a policy’ on when it is worth ‘trying’ and when it isn’t.

They don’t have a committee that vets whether new treatments are cost effective or not. NICE, the anything but nice committee that does that in England has just refused to license the eighth consecutive cancer treatment they have turned down on the basis of cost.

Yet the Royal Marsden can find the money to fund a 48 page exhaustive inquiry into a third hand allegation where neither the name of the victim was known, nor the current name of the ‘second hand’ informant was known, regarding alleged abuse by Jimmy Savile. Turned out he’d never set foot in the place.

That’s political correctness for you. The British are repeatedly told that ‘The problem is that there is only so much money to go around and that therefore you have to allocate the scarce resources to the benefit of the most people possible’. 

This statement then continues ‘Inevitably this will mean some treatments are declined’. 

That shouldn’t mean life saving treatment – that should mean that first you limit the number of politically correct projects you undertake, like tying up a senior manager writing 48 page reports when ‘Operation Yewtree police searches have been unable to trace the potential witness referred to within the original allegation’; then you limit the number of ‘highly paid’ managers you employ; then you limit the number of non-life saving operations – like pinning back someone’s ‘traumatising’ ears from sticking out – unless they part fund it by holding an insurance policy.

No wonder they didn’t want Jane or I to have access to that forum – it would, I agree, have been too confusing to the British patients to have learnt that in the rest of Europe they don’t have a policy that a 14% chance isn’t worth taking.

“P” is for poly, meaning many.  That should be simple, shouldn’t it?  I mean you can have polyamory (many loves), polyandry (many husbands), polygyny (many wives), or be a polyglot, speaking many languages or a polymath, a student of many knowledges…and oh, BINGO, polytheism — many gods. (But if you like the Biblical book Leviticus, you may not mix polyester with cotton, nor wool with silk, so there.  Mono-weaving, damn it.)

In general, the monotheistic faiths tend to be a bit leery of anything that occurs in multiples — bees might be evil just by dint of there being so MANY of them, for instance.  (I always wondered if this was the origin of some theosophical ‘divide and conquer’ mentality.)  But then again, ‘hive-mind’ can be freaking scary!

But pagans, oh, I recall belatedly discovering the neo-pagan communities of the world via the internet.  Oh, my, there was relish for poly EVERYTHING, really, the more the merrier seemed the dominant signpost.  Freedom for all by there being THINGS, GODS for all.

But then, nothing stays the same, does it?  Perhaps Wiccans started it when they said things that rattled polytheists like “All the gods are One God, all the goddesses are One Goddess.”  And a schism in the happy-happy, joy-joy began.  There were soft-polytheists who thought some of the myriad deities might just be switching masks at cultural borders; and there were hard-polytheists who declared that every deity ever named was absolutely individual and not like any of those other gods.  (That should, over time, have made enough deities for every person now alive to have one of their very OWN!)  Isis was NOT Aset.  Athena was NOT Minerva.  Mercury was NOT Hermes.  Hestia was NOT Vesta…and on and on and on.  And then it got REALLY ugly when humanist-inclined sorts like me began to say “How do we know the deities we speak of objectively exist at all; how do we know they are not archetypes in our collective unconscious?”  Because, really, and I say this as a mystic who occasionally thinks she has had a drive-by — how can we KNOW for certain?

Well, then?  Some of the hard polys really got angry about how belief was falling out.  Paganism was “sullied”and the very word was unfit for usage by anyone serious about devotion to the many deities.  I mean, “pagans” just weren’t devoted enough for some polytheists — and questioning the reality of each and every god was absolutely verboten.  Gee, what does that remind me of — oh, I know, I know!  Good old, bad old inquisitorial days, eh?

Meh.  You know what I think?  You know I am going to tell you, right?  Because I am a sort of idealistic bitch who won’t be herded well — I think all those arguments are IRRELEVANT to spirituality.  Furthermore, even if one posits the existence of objective Beings generally referred to as Gods?  I think it is the ultimate in hubristic attitude to presume to know the precise nature of any Deity.

In other words, I feel that none of us, as humans, on this phenomenal plane of muck, mess, blood, sweat, and tears CAN know with certainty about the noumenal world where those Beings would presumably have their habitation.  Just as an aside, I am not so much a polytheist as a polyDEIST — in that if I (on one of my more theistic days)posit the existence multiple gods,  I theorize that they exist at a remove from the messy little details of OUR lives here on this rock.  And that is a good thing, I’d say — because from what stories about them tell me?  If “they”, the presumptive gods actually bothered to read what their fanatic fandoms actually get up to here?  They’d blast us to bits — lightening bolts up ass via Zeus/Thor/Taranis/whomEVER you prefer.

I prefer the take that human concerns ARE human concerns.  The gods can take care of themselves.  Argument and recriminations and discriminations based on which and how many deities we bipedal apes kiss up to do NOTHING for mankind.  Which makes me want to create another word with the letter “P”: polymoronic — for too many morons screaming about too much stuff they cannot know instead of working on things they CAN fix.

That snarky bit said about one of my biggest peeves about modern pagan life?  I am less afraid of dogmatic polytheists than I am of monotheists.  Monotheists, after all, are the ones responsible for destroying centuries old art, and for drowning, stoning, and burning (mostly) women for alleged transgressions.  Monotheists are the majority and generally the ruling paradigm of modern life.  Monotheists seem to get their knickers knotted enough to turn on military allies after YEARS of presumed good company and commit murder.  Monotheists are the ones trying to redesign life for women as one long reproductive nightmare.

And on this post?  Trolls bitching about my opinion may just take their crackers and cheese to have with their whine.  I’m having none of it.  I’m not a government and I don’t have to grant polymorons any freedom of speech.  You may believe as you like — you may not dictate to anyone else whether how they believe is the ‘right’ way or not!  Snarling illogicality is as bad or worse than snarling logicality (thank you William James) any day of the week.

Tagged: intolerance, pagan blog project, polly-wants-a-cracker, polymath, polytheism, snark

The deadly outbreak of Ebola virus in west Africa has the world’s attention.  The American Center for Disease Control recently declared that the current crisis is “unprecedented,” and, yesterday the World Health Organization (WHO), held an emergency meeting and declared that the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is “an international public health emergency.”

Not too many people on the planet are celebrating the Ebola outbreak . . . but then Reverend Rick Wiles is not like everyone else . . .

From his roost at “Trunews” radio, Wiles foretold:

This Ebola epidemic could become a global pandemic and that’s another name for plague. It may be the great attitude adjustment that I believe is coming.  Ebola could solve America’s problems with atheism, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, pornography, and abortion.

An interesting take, to say the least, on how politically selective viruses can be but then Rev. Wiles tells us just how to protect ourselves and our loved ones:

If Ebola becomes a global plague, you better make sure the blood of Jesus is upon you, you better make sure you have been marked by the angels so that you are protected by God.  If not, you may be a candidate to meet the Grim Reaper.

Admittedly, some less extreme variations on that pitch can be found in churches throughout the land, but, Rev. Wiles is a multi-faceted prophet and, like others of his generation of doomsayers, has discovered the utility of enhancing his prophecy with a liberal dollop of partisan politics. 

For example, the previous day, he shared these divinely-inspired insights on how President Obama could exploit the Ebola epidemic to grow the government and force Americans to be inoculated with a vaccine:

Obama would claim executive powers to mandate that every human being in the United States be vaccinated.  They could use the panic to stampede hundreds of millions of people in this country to be vaccinated, in fact billions worldwide, they could stampede the world to receive to (sic) a vaccine against a deadly virus and nobody knows what is in the vaccine.

Which strikes me as peculiarly similar to the way in which Rev. Wiles “uses the panic” to “mandate that every human being in the United States” “make sure the blood of Jesus is upon you.”

Wiles would be easy to dismiss as just another self-educated End Times prophet with his own media operation.  But a look at his guest book is pretty chilling.  Evidently, quite a few Republican members, and former members, of Congress find it expedient to visit with Rev. Wiles, from time to time, for a convo on his latest conspiracy theory.

On the same day that Wiles shared his enthusiasm for Ebola as a way to “clean up” America, he hosted Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) who shared his thoughts on immigration:

If you were a terrorist, why would you come through Dulles airport or Kennedy airport and go through TSA, why wouldn’t you just go to Mexico City and come across the border?

Last year, Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) visited Wiles to discuss Duncan’s own fear that IRS agents are receiving training with assault weapons.

Pete Hoekstra, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has visited with Wiles.

Allen West is a regular guest on TruNews.  Recently, Wiles asked West if he believes that Obama is a closet jihadist bent on converting America to Islam—here’s West:

I don’t think it is secretly happening, I think that you can look at his actions and he is enabling Islamist forces to be successful in the Middle East.  He is aiding the rise of radical Islamism, not just in the Middle East but really across the world.

We don’t really know who this President Obama is and I’m not talking about his birth certificate. We don’t know who he is, we don’t know about his college transcripts, we don’t know what he was doing in Pakistan when he was back in college and who funded him to go over to Pakistan.

Trust me, there are more . . .

Here are just a few of the other fever dreams going on in Rick Wiles’ head:

- the Sandy Hook and Columbine shootings were carried out by CIA mind-control assassins

- Miley Cyrus sold her soul to Satan and had sex with a demon

- President Obama is a Jim-Jones-like, Nazi antichrist working to bring about a civil war

- Adolf Hitler’s “race of super gay male soldiers” is currently taking over America.

- Obama’s reelection amounted to the “communist takeover of the United States of America.  Obama and his “internal revolutionary party of communists” will “eradicate Christianity,” outlaw its practice and eventually “bulldoze Christian churches in Dallas, Texas.

My point in laying all of this out is to ask these questions:

Why would a top-tier elected official have anything to do with this man?  Why would a politician consider it a career-enhancing move to associate with a conspiracy theorist, no matter how many radio listeners find him entertaining?  Why would a sane person, occupying a seat of power in our government, endorse such a person and such ideas by participating in his circus? 

I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that there are only two answers to all of those questions:

a) Americans really are electing some mentally unstable or intellectually challenged individuals to run their government; or

b) Republican politicians are such craven and cynical operators that they will pander to anyone for votes.

Or maybe a little of both?

Most pagans, and certainly those who publicly call themselves witches, at one time or another, have had some very mis-informed Christian spit “Devil worshiper!” at them.  Even in the 21st century, at least for me, even if the epithet is not followed by the casual “You’re going to burn in hell!” bit, it makes the hair rise on my neck.  People who scream things like that are capable of worse if the situation favors them.

And in Iraq nowadays?  It favors some of them.  The ISIS (talk about profaning a holy name!) militants were bearing down on people most often called “devil worshipers” by Islamic fundamentalists — the Yazidi people.  Of course, when Mohammed brought the word back from Allah, the story goes that he destroyed the idols of 360 “devils” that had previously been worshiped as gods and goddesses.  So, a bit more strongly even than Christianity does, all the divine competition is suddenly labeled diabolic.

A gentle thought for the Yezidi — who apparently found Mohammed unconvincing, and they have suffered discrimination and hatred ever since.  And now have likely narrowly escaped a gruesome death.  Of course, ISIS isn’t even cutting “people of the Book” any slack — Christians are fleeing as well.

Tagged: Iraq, religious discrimination, religious fanaticism, Yazidis

eschergirls:

Okay, so hopefully this will be the final update. :)

Since yesterday evening, I have had private email communication with Mr. Queen.  I am satisfied by what he said.  He’s personally apologized to me, and is withdrawing the DMCA takedown complaints against this blog.  I’ve accepted his apology.

As of this post’s writing, Tumblr has not yet restored the content, but I am hoping that they will soon.  I am also checking with them that the now-retracted DMCA complaints will not be counted against Escher Girls or the Tumblr users who submitted content to Escher Girls that was removed.

I consider this situation resolved with the restoration of the removed content, and I wish Mr. Queen well.

If you spread around the initial controversy, please spread this around too.

If you are a media outlet that has been covering this situation, please update the story with these new details.

I know sometimes that the controversy gets a lot of play but people miss the retraction/resolution, and I don’t want that to happen here.

As a sidenote, I discovered today that Tumblr did send me an email explaining what happened about the apparent removal of my post about the initial DMCA takedown requests.  The email was eaten by my spam filter.

According to the email, Tumblr processed the DMCA takedown against that post and removed it by accident.  They restored the post shortly after, but I assume in the process, all the reblogs were lost.

I hope that clears up something that people had been wondering about. :)

Thank you everybody so much for your support and help during this stressful time, it’s been overwhelming and I feel really touched <3

And again, I want to specifically thank Ken White at Popehat and my amazing lawyer, Kate Andrews for all of their help.  Without both of them, I would have been so lost.

Hopefully this is the last time I will be addressing this situation, and we can all put it in the past and move on.  :)

~Ami Angelwings, owner of Escher Girls

Originally posted 2014-08-07 20:58:40. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

skin diamond source: droolingfemme.

I was a little dismayed to read of Montana's John Walsh dropping out of his Senate race, because it was discovered that he had plagiarized sections of a research paper he had submitted while at the Army War College. As "Crooks and Liars'" Karoli noted, though, Rand Paul was found to have plagiarized sections of his speeches and a book and faced absolutely no consequences. Of course, allegations of plagiarism have dogged Joe Biden for decades- part of me wants to believe him when he states that it was a momentary failure to credit Neal Kinnock, but the bigger part of me believes that he should have come up with his own damn words.

Plagiarism is a funny thing in this age of the internet, where cut-and-paste jobs are easy to do, but a cut-and-search effort will reveal instances of stolen passages. Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today brings up the aphorism “To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.” and promptly excoriates it. I always endeavor to post links to sources when I write more substantial posts, especially my Secret Science Club recaps, but it's often hard to rephrase a concept without sounding obtuse or precious. Still, if any phrase sounds "too good", I plug it into a search engine to see if someone else has come up with it (this is especially important when I come up with what I think is a neologism).

I am reminded of an anecdote told about Paul McCartney's writing of Yesterday, in which the song came to the "cute Beatle" in a dream, and he agonized over whether it was an original song or not, playing it for several colleagues in an attempt to identify it. Yesterday sure sounds like it could have been a traditional ballad, which is one of the more humorous plot points of Tim Powers' wonderful novel, The Anubis Gates. Paul bent over backwards to make sure he wasn't stealing, and is a good role model for writers of good intention.

For me, plagiarism is a sin against the Muse, and a theft against oneself, as well as the writer(s) one is stealing from. I love the language, I love wordplay- stealing the works and words of others deprives one of the fun of writing. In an academic setting, it deprives one of the joys of true discovery- the seeking and utilization of multiple sources of information to gain a well-rounded understanding of one's topic. Plagiarism, is the sin of crass, lazy utilitarians- the sort of people who are content to gain a diploma without gaining an education. As someone who has gleefully scattered his various written pieces of various lengths across the internet, I don't just have scorn for plagiarists, but I have pity as well. You don't need to steal words- if you have the diligence and the patience, they come to you, oftimes unbidden.

This essay first appeared in Cliterati on June 22^nd; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.

There’s a persistent belief that some areas in the United States are more liberal and urbane than others, and while I suppose that’s true to some extent the differences are generally cosmetic.  It would be more accurate to say that some areas enjoy pretending to be more sophisticated than others, or at least that they delude themselves into believing they’re more sophisticated.  But pull back the curtains or lift the rug just a bit, and you’ll find the vilest and most disgraceful ignorance collected there, just out of view.

Take the state of Washington, for example; it has a reputation for being very liberal, modern and forward-thinking, as exemplified by its being one of only two states to decriminalize recreational cannabis, and by being home to grunge rock, Microsoft and Starbucks.  But while Washingtonians may be very accepting of tech, drugs and rock and roll, they behave like pearl-clutching Victorians when the subjects is ess-ee-ecks and positively foam at the mouth if such impurity exists anywhere in close proximity to money.  For example, Washington is one of several states that forbid alcohol in strip clubs, and cities there regularly enact bizarre and schoolmarmish restrictions on lighting levels, the distance dancers must keep away from patrons, etc.  And when it comes to prostitution, they’re completely barking mad:

…some of the silliest, most absurdly exaggerated and just plain  stupidest “trafficking” tripe in the entire country erupts forth from the Pacific Northwest at least once a week these days…in the name of “fighting sex trafficking” the Washington legislature actually passed a law which would have totally destroyed the internet as we know it, and despite a federal slapdown they’re at it again; this is also the state which devotes hundreds of man-hours to trying to trick coffee-stand waitresses into flashing their tits so they can be charged with “prostitution”.  And who could forget the hilarity which ensued when Shared Hope International held a program warning high school girls, “Don’t run off to the other side of the country with strange adult men after turning over your life savings to them, because pimps are cool and abortion is sex trafficking”.  Or something like that…

The crusade against caffeine-dispensing harlots mentioned above is largely concentrated in Snohomish County, in other words suburban Seattle.  The police of the county’s largest city, Everett, are especially obsessed with the wanking fantasy that there are whores hiding in every coffee stand, and have aggressively persecuted a number of shops for years.  But they’ve apparently tired of this game, and decided to go after a bigger target:  rather than trying to “end demand” for coffee, they now want to regulate the sun on the grounds that it causes “sex trafficking”:

When the weather gets nicer in Everett, the number of suspected prostitute sightings increases…(the SUN) appears to be a strong factor in the increase in traffic.  Although, website traffic for prostitution maintains a steady pace throughout the year [sic].  We believe there is evidence that people are brought to Everett from neighboring states/counties by pimps…

I can’t help but be fascinated by this reporter’s idiosyncratic capitalization, fondness for sentence fragments and creative use of scare quotes:

…there are many factors that may lead someone into the “sex trade” and…some women are independent “workers”…

But the cops’ un-self-conscious hypocrisy is even more fascinating:

…There are many reasons and/or intricate layers involved for someone to enter the sex trade (either voluntarily or by force).  Drug addiction, mental health, lure of money, survival and forced/coercion just name a few [sic].  The bottom line:  Women are human beings; someone’s daughter, sister, mother or friend.  Treating them with respect and dignity is our priority…

Because deceiving, hunting, beating and caging a woman, subjecting her motivations for consensual behavior to state scrutiny, denying her right to choose her own work, thinking of her not as an individual but only in relation to some man, and referring to her normal economic needs with the dysphemistic phrase “lure of money”, constitute dignified and respectful treatment in the minds of Everett cops.  The rest of the article refers to other “end demand” practices embraced by the Everett police, including “Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution” orders, which are essentially similar to Britain’s ASBOs; in the United States, however, such practices are flagrantly unconstitutional and can only continue until challenged in court – which, needless to say, means they’ll probably be around until at least the end of the “sex trafficking” panic.

As I said at the beginning, there’s a persistent belief that some areas in the United States are more liberal and urbane than others; the actual truth is that they’re all pretty authoritarian and unsophisticated where sex is concerned.  It’s just that some places seem less aware of how ridiculous, childish, bluenosed and tight-arsed their anti-sex policies make them look to the adults of the world, and within those areas are cities which, due to being surrounded by normalized prudery, feel free to carry their priggishness to truly clownish levels.

This is a guest post by Rory McKinnon. Content warning for domestic violence. It is published with permission of the survivor.

My name’s Rory MacKinnon, and I’ve been a reporter for the Morning Star for three years now. It’s given me a lot of pride to see how readers and supporters believe so strongly in the paper, from donating what cash they can to hawking it in the streets on miserable Saturdayafternoons. I was proud to represent a “broad paper of the left”, as my editor Richard Bagley always put it: a paper that saw feminism, LGBTQ issues, racial politics and the like as integral to its coverage of class struggle.

It’s for this reason that I thought I would have my editor’s support in following up domestic violence allegations against the Rail, Maritime and Transport union’s assistant general secretary Steve Hedley. Instead the Morning Star’s management threatened me with the sack, hauled me through a disciplinary hearing and placed me on a final written warning.

If you want to see my reasons for writing this, skip to the bottom. But I’m a reporter, and in my mind the most important thing is that you all know exactly what’s happened behind closed doors. So let’s get on with it.

—–

Last March a former RMT assistant branch secretary, Caroline Leneghan, went public about what she described as a “violent assault” at the hands of Hedley while they had been in a relationship.

“On this occasion he kicked a pot of paint at me, threw me around by my hair and pinned me to the floor repeatedly punching me in the face.”

Leneghan said she had approached both police and the union after their break-up to seek an investigation: her RMT rep confirmed that police had suggested “a high chance of conviction” but that the six-month window for a charge of common assault had since expired.

Despite this, the union’s then-leadership had decided not to refer the allegations to its national executive for a formal investigation. It was at this point that Leneghan decided to go public (you can find Leneghan’s full statement and photographs here).

Now, I don’t pretend to have any inside knowledge, and at the time I had only just been assigned to a post in Scotland and was busy trying to get my feet in under the table up there. But I am a journalist, and when the union agreed to consider an appeal from Leneghan only to see it eventually withdrawn at her request – amid a pretty vile reaction from some elements of the left – I mentally filed it away as something to keep an eye on.

In March of this year I went as a Morning Star reporter – with the RMT’s approval – to cover its women’s conference in Glasgow. Women I knew of in the RMT were still talking about Leneghan’s case, and it made sense to me as a reporter to follow it up in the public interest, so I took advantage of a Q&A session with the union’s national organising co-ordinator Alan Pottage – a session on recruiting women organisers and combating sexism in the workplace – to ask whether he thought the lack of formal investigation into the allegations against Hedley had affected women members’ perceptions of the union. Pottage declined to comment and the session continued, but when delegates reconvened for the afternoon session the union’s equalities officer Jessica Webb and executive member Denis Connor approached my seat and forcibly ejected me from the conference. (You can find my full statement on the incident here).

The very next day the Morning Star’s editor Richard Bagley informed me that I had been suspended following allegations of gross misconduct and that any public comment I might make “could risk bringing the paper into disrepute and could have a bearing on [my] case”. (You can see the letter here and subsequent charges here.)

Six weeks later, I found myself back in London for a disciplinary hearing, with the company’s secretary Tony Briscoe bringing the charges and Bagley sitting in judgement. But as the Morning Star management’s minutes (for some reason presented as a verbatim transcript), andmy own notes here show, it quickly became clear that the real nature of the accusations had nothing to do with the charge sheet and everything to do with appeasement.

From the minutes:

“RB: You have three years’ experience as a Morning Star journalist. Given the type of stories you’ve covered previously do you think the paper would have published a story on the issue you raised?”

—–

“RB: So let’s clarify the role of the Morning Star here: internal union matters are different from inter-union matters.”

—–

“TB: It’s debatable whether the NUJ (National Union of Journalists – Rory) code of conduct applies in a situation such as this and the fact you asked it raises a question about your approach. The question feels more like something a Daily Mail reporter would ask than someone from the Morning Star. You should have known better. This indicates a lack of journalistic etiquette and has damaged our relationship with the trade union movement.”

And from my own notes:

TB: “I would have thought the role of the Morning Star reporter was to progress the aims & goals of the paper.”

—–

TB: “I would expect that sort of question to be asked in the Daily Mail or the Sun.”

—–

TB: “I would say the public has no right to know about the ins-&-outs of the relationship between Leneghan & Hedley.”

Shortly afterwards I received Bagley’s written judgement. Again, you can read it for yourself here, but the thrust of the Morning Star’s editorial policy is below:

“After three years at the paper you should reasonably be expected to be familiar with the paper’s news priorities, which do not include reporting internal union rows or personal controversy. Your actions suggest a fundamental failure to grasp the Morning Star’s news focus, and by extension the role of any journalist employed by it.”

I was placed on a final written warning with twelve months’ probation, then went on to appeal (dismissed, ruling here), but that’s procedural stuff that isn’t strictly relevant.

What’s relevant, to my mind, is that readers cannot trust the Morning Star’s current leadership to report on abuse allegations and failures to formally investigate when they concern favoured figures in the trade union movement, even when those figures are elected officials. As the edition for 24 July shows, however – coincidentally the same day I had decided to give my notice – those Nasty Tories cannot expect such discretion. Feminist principles are a weapon with which to attack the right, but not an end in itself for the left.

I’ve written this because I was told that “the public has no right to know.” I think the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union’s members do have a right to know about their leaders’ decision not to hold a formal investigation into reports of violence against a female member, and I think the Morning Star’s readers and supporters also have a right to know that the paper’s senior staff have an explicit policy of suppressing such allegations.

It is quite possible that the Morning Star’s management committee – a panel which includes the National Assembly of Women’s Anita Wright – have not been told anything about this. If so, I hope that they will investigate and reassert the paper’s editorial independence. I am not trying to wreck the Morning Star here. I am insisting that it commits to its feminist principles and treats readers with the respect they deserve.

Rory MacKinnon
Morning Star reporter (2011-2014)
mackinnon.rorySPLATgmail.com
@RoryMacKinnon

 

UPDATE – This post was drafted on Saturday 26 July, the day after informing the Morning Star’s management of my intent to quit. On Monday 28, the paper announced company secretary Tony Briscoe’s retirement and editor Richard Bagley’s departure “for family reasons”. Bagley would continue to work for the paper, the report added.

__

ETA: The survivor has clarified some of the sequence of events. Caroline says:

“There’s a mistake here,the executive refused me to appeal, after that the only route was the agm, which is the quashed one, as i realised all my documents, statements etc had been distributed to hundreds of people without my knowledge”

ETA 2 (19.14 08/08/14): The MS have issued a statement denying everything. To borrow their phrasing, it is interesting to note they haven’t started issuing libel threats…

“A yearlong investigation [in Florida] by 10 Investigates reveals many of the men whose mugshots have been paraded out by local sheriffs in made-for-TV press conferences were not seeking to meet children online. Instead, they were minding their own business, looking for other adults, when detectives started to groom and convince them to break the law.”

Link to article

No wait, bad analogy, in Two-Face’s character, one of the choices is actually good.

Ross Douchehat, The Motherfucking Scumsucking Bottomfeeding New York Times:
Obama’s Impeachment Game

Man, fuck the borked site, some things need to be waded after as if they were piranha-proof bikini bottoms. And in this particular carcass of our once proud vessel, it is the simple fact that the Republicans have completely lost the goddamn plot.

I know, hardly news, but the Republicans have managed to outdo themselves in their fervor to repeat Brazil’s performance against Germany in incompetence by flipping out over the fact that it’s been 5 and a half years and the blackity black man is still in high office and no one seems to be scared of them even though they’ve done their damnedest to legalize murder of the untermenschen in their little fiefdoms. As such, they’ve soiled their little nappies over calls for impeachment, figuring it worked well enough delegitimizing the last Democratic president, but apparently forgetting that one is supposed to have like, a cause, before banging the table about how being black and in power is against the law.

As such, the Republican House has managed to bring shame to that benighted and plagued palace of ineptitude and intentional ignorance by raising the call and saying that they will get that darn wasscally pwesident if it’s the last thing they do, you know, as soon as they find some lame excuse to semi-justify it. The current course led by John Semi-Erect Penis is to mumble something about how Obama isn’t doing enough to enforce the Health Care Law that Republicans have been blocking the enforcement on, because apparently conservatives never graduated from the school of playground arguments and think “stop hitting yourself” is legally binding.

Granted, it’s not like they’ve bothered to even pretend they care about the rule of law these days what with the Supreme Court giving a big middle finger to the Establishment Clause and well… pretty much every Republican action since Nixon first started his band of thieving scoundrels, but it’s one of those things that is so blatant that even Joe Nosepicker is forced to cock their head in genuine query.

Which has led to a fascinating round of kabuki as our Bought-and-Sold Media once again flash the dollar-signs printed on their solid diamond go-go shorts to try and deflect the damage of this hilarious own-goal and argue that Democrats are the real embarrassment for daring to notice and comment on this tragedy of errors. Because Democrats being alive is apparently too much to keep pretending that it’s at all an even choice between the Shit Party and the Cabal of Cannibals who Plan to Eat us in Our Sleep.

And for those “Intelligent” conservatives and “moderates” employed by likes of the motherfucking New York Times, the cover up is more hilarious than the fail itself. Roll our first clip.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• What this broken window I’m standing next to with a baseball bat? Um, I didn’t do it. It was the black guy who lives here. Yeah, he caused this broken window, which doesn’t even exist. And we should be very ashamed that he’s taking valuable time from fixing this not at all broken window to ask questions like “who broke this window” and “what the fuck are you racist fucks doing?” Very, very ashamed. Bad Obama. We should impeac- I mean, ha ha what broken window?

Yes, indeedy, it should come as no surprise to those of us versed in conservative’s mastery of IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION, but the “reasonable conservatives” have all been given the talking points that it’s very bad form of Obama to recognize the hilariously bullshit Impeachment rumblings as the Renew America racist fantasies they are and use them to highlight the way that the House has blocked pretty much everything in Year Nineteen Hundred of Republican’s stonewalling plan for breaking their toys if they are being forced to share.

And it equally comes as no surprise that our favorite vagina-fearing Catholic water carrier is going all out in front with his shiny Chunky Reese Witherspoon cheeks hoping to turn the bacteria infested waters of his drinking hole into premier exotic supreme bottled water.

SOMETHING rather dangerous is happening in American politics right now, all the more so for being taken for granted by many of the people watching it unfold.

That the system is broken and any attempt to fix the shorting wires and rotted cables that keep our diseased and tired country lurching somewhat forwardish in the direction of not turning into a perfect shooting location for the next Mad Max movie? That a small core of political nihilists are trying everything in their power to smash the gears and loot the corpses because their cheerleading for the rich and moral-less has made them so unpopular that they are worried they’ll lose their ability to cheat and steal their way into absolute power anymore?

The way that wholesale murder of black people in the defense of meaningless stuff has been wholly legalized up to and including to the point of hunting them in the streets for sport? The way that a crazed religious order has done everything in their power to try and force women back into their “natural” role as broodmare and owned object? The way that we’ve wallowed in a Second Great Depression where children have to go further and further into debt and get more and more levels of schooling they can’t afford just to achieve the lofty place of actually being able to afford rent?

The way we’re all just waiting patiently for the truly mad cabal of psychotic bitter and frustrated white men, spitting mad at their loss of unequivocal power, to die off so we can begin fixing the first layer of everything that is wrong and we’re all hoping that that far-off moment won’t be too late to stop the single greatest environmental disaster to ever befall the human species?

I do not mean the confusion of House Republicans, or the general gridlock in Congress, which are impeding legislative action on the child migrant crisis (among other matters).

Oh yeah, didn’t even get into the way that the lizardmen of the Republican Party have tried to literally demonize and dehumanize literal* children because playing hide and seek with human lives in the hope of being a few more years of viability out of the Southern Strategy is apparently supposed to be perfectly reasonable and unobjectionable. Add that to the list.

Incompetence and gridlock are significant problems, indeed severe ones, but they’re happening within the context of a constitutional system that allows for — and can survive — congressional inaction.

Indeed. All of these grave and dire situations pale in the comparison to… DUH DUH DUHHHHHHH!

What is different — more cynical and more destructive — is the course President Obama is pursuing in response.

Yes, pales in comparison to that blackity black black bastard who keeps thinking he’s the leader of the Free World in all defense of “natural lawwwww” politely clearing his throat and asking what the fuck at the latest kabuki theatre of made-up indignities and conspiracies he is apparently responsible for.

Damnitt, liberals, when will you learn that it’s unfair when you think you get to participate in how this country runs? Just lie back and accept the autocracy’s flaccid one-inch dick. Please. We’ve worked so hard to create it and with our current outreach efforts to anyone who isn’t fucking insane and literally praying for the Rapture being what they are, we’ve really stopped believing we’ll ever have the run we had in the 00′s.

But I kid, surely Douchehat’s reasons are far more rea-

Over the last month, the Obama political apparatus — a close aide to the president, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the “independent” voices at MSNBC — has been talking nonstop about an alleged Republican plan to impeach the president.

Ha ha, as if.

Also, got to love the dogwhistle here. Sure, every “news” rag on the payrolls of our Reptilian Overlords masquerading as the rich has been trumpeting this non-story trying to make the Republicans falling in lockstep behind the likes of Alan Keyes and Sarah Palin seem like a real and reasoned response to Obama’s skin color… I mean crimes, but now that this shit is completely embarrassing and just makes Democrats look good, it was all invented by the dastardly likes of Rachel Maddow who controls all the other Jews… I mean liberals of the media to dance around Obama’s pied piper routine.

John Boehner’s symbolic lawsuit against the White House has been dubbed “impeachment lite,” Sarah Palin’s pleas for attention have been creatively reinterpreted as G.O.P. marching orders, and an entire apocalyptic fund-raising campaign has been built around the specter of a House impeachment vote.

See. It’s all Obama’s fault. He’s profiting off our dumbassery, so ipso facto, he’s responsible for it. He tricked us into digging a bear pit and then stumbling drunkenly into it! So there!

Oi, I never cease to be amused by this logic that liberals are somehow responsible for “tricking” conservatives into acting like complete shitemonglers in order to “profit” from the martyrdom of having been treated shittily.

I mean, beyond the whole “blaming the victim” absurdity at work in the basic premise, there is the simple fact that the supposed “victims” of this “deception” have a really fucking easy way to stop this indignity of “being profited off of” from happening.

Just stop being assholes.

Take a break, change the subject, and stop being monstrous in public and then those dastardly others won’t be able to use your ignorant and hateful bullshit to “trick the public” into sympathizing with the abused instead of the abusers. It’s just that fucking simple. I mean, you could make this go away in an instant by just giving up this childish fantasy that you can make the black man go away and actually work to be a real political party.

But no, instead we get this nonsense in the hopes that if you just pull this stunt enough times, people will collectively get a concussion and forget it’s fucking stupid.

Anyone paying attention knows that no such impeachment plan is currently afoot. So taken on its own, the impeachment chatter would simply be an unseemly, un-presidential attempt to raise money and get out the 2014 vote.

Our ill-thought out plan is wholly unfeasible, therefore, it was totally the invention of the liberals. Because that’s how you um logic good.

But it isn’t happening in a vacuum, because even as his team plays the impeachment card with gusto

Race card, Impeachment card, War on Women card. Maybe the biggest problem in American politics seems to be that one party thinks that politics is supposed to be a fucking gambling sport rigged in their favor instead of the main apparatus by which Americans run and support their country.

Hey, dipshits, our lives and survival are not a fucking game of cards, you casino-addicted fuckweasels!

the president is contemplating — indeed, all but promising — an extraordinary abuse of office: the granting of temporary legal status, by executive fiat, to up to half the country’s population of illegal immigrants.

DUH DUH DUHHHHHH! See, liberals, we’re totally not pushing for made-up bullshit we can spin into justifying impeachment, except, oh my lord, using historical precedent to handle an immigration crisis our country created and refuses to address is totes the worst abuse of power EVAH and justifies impeachment!

… Okay, just going to gloss over the first thousand obvious points that come up and just note that I don’t even think our amnesic public is going to be ga-ga over supporting Obama being impeached for nonsense and bullshit after we let the last gang of war criminals and real life supervillains go into the night scot free. I think people might be a bit perturbed and that might have something to do with people being a bit sour on the whole game of “Invent a Scandal” that the conservatives have been playing for the last couple of years.

Such an action would come equipped with legal justifications, of course. Past presidents have suspended immigration enforcement for select groups, and Obama himself did the same for certain younger immigrants in 2012.

So… you’re saying you have no case outside of “bu-bu-but we’ve totally tanked outreach to latin@s and they won’t allow us to steal the next batch of elections”. Fantastic. Glad to see you offering your valuable opinion on the wide-reaching stage of the Ol’ Grey Lady. Shows… things. Definitely things.

A creative White House lawyer — a John Yoo of the left —

Ha ha ha ha! Fuck you.

could rely on those precedents to build a case for the legality of a more sweeping move.

But the precedents would not actually justify the policy, because the scope would be radically different. Beyond a certain point, as the president himself has conceded in the past, selective enforcement of our laws amounts to a de facto repeal of their provisions. And in this case the de facto repeal would aim to effectively settle — not shift, but settle — a major domestic policy controversy on the terms favored by the White House.

Oh man, if Obama did something really big, that sure would be something to rattle our sabres about. Let’s all pre-emptively impeach him before he… doesn’t actually do that but argues for something much smaller even though he’d be fully in his rights to do our nightmare hallucination seeing as how we’ve completely bowed out of any and all dialogue on this issue as the crisis grows worse and more desperate.

Also, what the fuck on the selective enforcement shit equals repeal equals illegal bullshit. Hey, dipshit, every country does selective enforcement of its laws, because you only have so many police officers and government inspectors to ensure law is upheld. And in our country, that selection has only been to the protection of rich white assholes. Powder cocaine gets a free pass, stealing millions from the poor gets a yawn, grand theft continent gets an eye-roll, and poisoning whole towns for short-term profit gets a sad soft fart at best. But hey, suddenly wonder about using that same blindness to handle dumb laws that criminalize people for no better reason than bad laws on the books haven’t been fixed yet (minor drug offenses, immigration, etc…)? And oh noes, Obama is suspending the rule of law with his shocktroopers. Even if he isn’t even pushing in that direction.

And the sheer self-serving dishonesty of that just sticks in my fucking craw, just like whenever some bribe-taking, lobbyist-employed weasel tries to run on a “law and order” campaign while begging indulgence for stealing from the Leave a Penny tray.

This simply does not happen in our politics. Presidents are granted broad powers over foreign policy, and they tend to push the envelope substantially in wartime. But domestic power grabs are usually modest in scope, and executive orders usually work around the margins of hotly contested issues.

Yeah Fictional Version of Obama! Don’t you know that ignoring the rule of law is only okay when you are sending people to kill and become horrifically traumatized in some random desert somewhere because a bunch of brown people live there? It’s not for actually fixing problems that the nihilist party refuses to address because they are hoping a broken system will somehow benefit the wanna-be fascists they’re counting on for political relevance. Duh!

In defense of going much, much further,

Fuck the fucking Republicans and the War For White Supremacy disguised as our current laws on immigrations and let’s start treating the people who are already here as people and streamline the ability of those wracked by violence we fueled and created to migrate safely here?

the White House would doubtless cite the need to address the current migrant surge, the House Republicans’ resistance to comprehensive immigration reform and public opinion’s inclination in its favor.

… Those were all true things, which means you’re about to start spinning some babbling double-talk off the logic cliff straight into Dumbfuck Gorge.

But all three points are spurious. A further amnesty would, if anything, probably incentivize further migration, just as Obama’s previous grant of legal status may well have done. The public’s views on immigration are vaguely pro-legalization — but they’re also malleable, complicated and, amid the border crisis, trending rightward. And in any case we are a republic of laws, in which a House majority that defies public opinion is supposed to be turned out of office, not simply overruled by the executive.

Well, that strawman is well and truly ablaze. Well done. Fictional Obama will now know twice than to do the thing he won’t do.

Also, sure, believe that the American people will support Team Kill Everyone Not White because eek, latin@s. Whatever helps you sleep at night on your tear and piss soaked pillow full of money.

What’s more, given that the Democrats controlled Congress just four years ago and conspicuously failed to pass immigration reform, it’s especially hard to see how Republican intransigence now somehow justifies domestic Caesarism.

We’re not deliberately stonewalling. I mean, look at conservative Democrats. They also deliberately stonewalled. So there!

But in political terms, there is a sordid sort of genius to the Obama strategy.

Fictional Obama’s non-strategy?

Yeah, it would be fucking brilliant. It would be brilliant if our politicians and media stopped pretending that the band of nihilists and their made-up distractions were worthy of thought and more ink was spilled on the issue of actually looking at how we treat immigrants and aiding them in legally integrating into our society than on trying to justify impeaching Obama on trumped-up nothing. If we actually could fix the myriad of problems we are besieged by rather than entertain the feels of people whose convictions stretch no further than: “grr, more non-white people in country decreases relative percentage of white people. Downvote. Unsubscribe.”

That would be fucking swell. But sadly we’re here on Earth and so the closest we’ll get is Obama using the bullshit non-drama of the latest conservafail to try and draw attention to actual fucking issues!

The threat of a unilateral amnesty contributes to internal G.O.P. chaos on immigration strategy, chaos which can then be invoked (as the president did in a Friday news conference) to justify unilateral action. The impeachment predictions, meanwhile, help box Republicans in: If they howl — justifiably! — at executive overreach, the White House gets to say “look at the crazies — we told you they were out for blood.”

Wahhhh! It’s liberals fault that our actions make us look bad! Wahhh!

It’s only genius, however, if the nonconservative media — honorable liberals and evenhanded moderates alike — continue to accept the claim that immigration reform by fiat would just be politics as usual, and to analyze the idea strictly in terms of its political effects (on Latino turnout, Democratic fund-raising, G.O.P. internal strife).

Yeah, liberals, pfft, it’d be totally *snicker* “genius”, heh, if you were to totally give up actually arguing on moral, ethical, humanitarian, or practical grounds and just let us unilaterally frame the issue as Democrats inventing evil mole people to gain an unfair political advantage. That’s smaaaaart. Pfft. C’mon, would I lie to you?

This is the tone of the media coverage right now: The president may get the occasional rebuke for impeachment-baiting, but what the White House wants to do on immigration is assumed to be reasonable, legitimate, within normal political bounds.

It is not: It would be lawless, reckless, a leap into the antidemocratic dark.

So… Obama arguing for a law passed by Congress is antidemocratic, but the idiots trying to bring down the country because they don’t get to steal it with impunity anymore are… the true expression of the will of the Founding Fathers?

Fuck, is there a drug we can start prescribing that would get conservatives to stop making out with their strawmen and actually fucking deal with the world that is for a change?

And an American political class that lets this Rubicon be crossed without demurral will deserve to live with the consequences for the republic, in what remains of this presidency and in presidencies yet to come.

Yes, a non-existant event that won’t happen and wouldn’t actually be outside of precedent if it did is the Rubicon we can not come back from. Not… you know arguing that war crimes are a-okay if you have the nuclear arsenal to back them up. Or normalizing indefinite detention and torture. Or punishing whistle blowing far more than war crimes.

Mm hmm, sure. Fuck, man, if you’re going to produce such weak shit, at least have the decency to flush afterwards…

But hey, silly and pathetic as Douchehat’s article is. It’s not the most embarrassing cumstain to leave its mark on the NY Times drapes.

Nope, while Douchehat was trying to pull his trademark, oh no, no one is actually calling for impeachment, that’s all an invention of Obama to sneak dirty filthy bean-eaters into your wife’s bedchambers, gambit, an even dumber, more pathetic creature was taking a triumphant piss all over Douchehat’s attempted deception. Ah yes, let us dive into…

MoDo(r), Why Do People Still Take This Shitrag Seriously?:
A Modest Proposal

Oh, lordy lordy Lorde, it’s been too long since I’ve waded in this particular over-flowing septic pit. Mainly because reading the works of Maureen Dowd is like volunteering to go to the most hate-spitting Church in the country wearing my best dress and a sign that says “Please Commit a Hate Crime Against Me”. Maureen Dowd has only ever remained employed so that the sexist bastards who own the New York He-Man Woman-Hater’s Newsletter can point to her and go “gosh, aren’t women and feminists dumb and selfish and evil she-beasts who try and steal your alimony, you hear that Cheryl, I’ll get my kids back, you’ll see!”

And despite how mind-numbingly awful she is when trying to handle anything related to gender politics, Dowd always manages to find exciting new lows whenever she turns her syphilis-riddled mind to politics. Endless parades of poorly sublimated daddy issues, deep grudges based on imaginary slights, and just pure concentrated stupid on the level to make one weep for one’s gender.

So when she tries to hide her panting erotic excitement of someone getting rid of the black daddy and giving her a proper white silver fox to masturbate to behind an excuse of supposed satire, you know you’re in for a “treat”.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Hey, maybe we should impeach Obama. Just kidding, that would be terrible for Republicans… Well, I mean, shouldn’t we do it anyways. It would make all my political fanfic canon and… c’mon, I need this. Hee hee, totally just joking, I swear. Biden, please call me!

Jonathan Swift, she is not.

Enough with all the phony impeachment talk.

Onward to a real impeachment!

In the absurdist capital we live in, it would be good for all sides — in ways you may not have considered.

Indeed, it would fit the Wonderland-esque surrealism of our modern political landscape and further codify its departure from the people it supposedly is responsible to.

Let’s see you somehow forget this is supposed to be a bad thing.

President Obama’s threat to bypass obstinate Republican lawmakers and pass legislation with executive actions — “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” — may have seemed a bit of a wimpy cop-out in January. But now he has a chance to turn it into a historic battle cry.

He gives a passionate address to the nation, channeling 2004 Obama, and asks, as the son of a foreigner who came to America to go to school, how our mosaic of immigrants soured into such a cruel place toward displaced children.

He defies the Republicans and shoots the moon on an executive order, giving backdoor amnesty to millions of undocumented Hispanic immigrants as well as all those suffering kids on the border who are afraid to live in their own violent countries.

Okay, it really doesn’t fit the notion of “satire” if you’re still trafficking in the same wild eyed conspiracy theories and trying the same sad distraction game as all the other talking heads and trying to argue that Obama getting reasonably short with a House of Representatives that is less and less connected to basic reality and less and less interested with even putting up the pretense that they are not just a giant monkey wrench in the works.

It just becomes the sort of “satire” MRA-types try and hide behind when they want plausible deniability for their panting argument for why the age of consent should be lowered to 12.

The Republicans go absolutely nuts and realize that their lawsuit, the mini-me of impeachment, will not suffice. They hesitate to go as far as a Swiftian solution, selling the children to rich people as food.

Ha ha HA! Fuck you.

Fuck, what’s the rule about film? Never reference a better movie during your shitty one? There should be a similar rule in place for the written word… (glance up at most of my titles) er… um… I mean, that’s a totally stupid idea, heh heh.

So they race back into session and try the president for the high crime and misdemeanor of abusing his power.

Yeah, see, here’s the thing, it doesn’t count as satire if you think this random conspiracy of a non-event would actually be a fucking high crime and misdemeanor that would justify proportional response. I mean, for fuck’s sake, you so completely shoot the pretense of satire that you actually preface this self-serving bullshit with a line about rejecting a Swiftian response. It’s… grahhhh, Literature Nerd Rage!!!!!!!

It gives the party, which is ripping itself apart trying to figure out what it stands for, a clear identity: You can count on Republicans to always impeach Democratic presidents in their second terms. G.O.P. will become short for Gratuitously Ousting Presidents.

They won’t be able to win the White House ever again after alienating every Hispanic in the country, but they can bask in presidentus interruptus.

Republicans could finally take on Obama to a degree that would make their crazed base happy — or as happy as this begrudging, seething crowd and their mindless, malcontent queen, Sarah Palin, are capable of being.

Yeahhhh… I don’t think they need to go to all the effort of actually impeaching Obama to have that reputation. I think the last 5 and a half years have spoken well enough for themselves.

Presidential candidates who support impeachment would thrive in the primaries because the rabid anti-Obama base would reward them. A recent CNN poll reported that 57 percent of Republicans support impeaching Obama — and that is before any bold executive action on immigration or preventing corporations from fleeing America to dodge taxes.

Yeah, which is sort of the biggest reason that Republicans are fucked in any match that isn’t rigged in their favor through gerrymandering. The inmates of the asylum who can at least pour themselves into a suit and feign dignity are being replaced by the type who use their own feces for toothpaste and it’s leading to an ever-growing cascade of doubling-down and showing off who is more disconnected from reality than who for the dwindling members who have tribal loyalty.

Fuck, it’s why we’re seeing this Renew America fantasy that has only been lurking here and there in the wingnutosphere suddenly getting mainstream attention as the Serious Journamalists try and invent fantasy stories of how this lunacy could possibly be justified and not be the racist claptrap it is.

And it’s why Republicans have straight up given up ever trying to appeal to latin@s and women and people who make less than 4 million a year.

Democratic candidates, struggling in this election season, wouldn’t have to think of silly excuses not to appear on the trail with the president while Republican candidates jockey to get a blessing from Mitt Romney.

Yesssss, Obama is totally a net negative for candidates, uh huh. Sure. Keep telling yourself that, sweetie. And oh, by the way, you might want to get to a mirror, your pointy hood has gone all crooked.

And if Democrats are having so much success raising millions by hyping a fake impeachment threat, think of what they could do with a real one.

Seriously, it is amazing how the right-wing noise machine has tried and tried to make the notion of Democrats actually going through the steps of elections into some sort of unfair, abominable, cheating action. Oh no, how dare Democrats fundraise? It’s scandalous. And calling attention to just how fucking unchained from reality Republicans have become? What dirty pool. But trying to impeach the President because you don’t like how the health care law that has already been passed gives people reasons to be grateful to liberal politicians is par for the course. And making it legal for rich people to outright buy campaigns and our Supreme Court?

It’d all be so laughable if it wasn’t a sign that the entrenched authoritarians in our society are growing increasingly frustrated and unsupportive of democracy now that they’ve completely jumped the shark.

The biggest beneficiary, of course, would be President Obama.

Oh, I guess, we’re back to the “Modest Proposal”, where Modest Proposal apparently means the usual dishonest conservative claptrap where they try and sell some self-serving horseshit as “secretly good for liberals” in the hope that there is a Lieberman type out there legitimately dumb enough to fall for it.

If Congress makes him the first-ever president removed by impeachment, his popularity will soar from its current nadir, maybe even approaching Bill Clinton heights. It would validate the president’s whinging that he could never work with the Republicans and cement their reputation as world-class thwarters.

It would endear him to Democrats for years to come because he lost the highest office in the land going to bat for them. They would finally forgive Obama for running for president — twice — when he scorned politics.

Fed-up Americans would decide to actually go vote this year for Democrats and save them from the losses they seem headed for.

Oh, don’t concern yourself with that strange sound in the air. It’s only the answer to a zen koan. What is the sound of one hand fapping?

I mean, MoDo is fucking going to town on herself here with a delusional fantasy level where it is Obama who is the least liked person in politics right now and Democrats are the ones who look bad and out of touch and are destined for future losses.

Best of all, President Obama could take an extra-early slide out of the job he doesn’t seem to enjoy.

He and an ecstatic Michelle could move back to Chicago or up to New York, leaving the despised Washington in the dust. He could indulge in the speechifying, edifying and modulating that he loves so much.

As a master of narrative, the president knows that he lost control of his own. An impeachment would allow him to recast his story in a vivid new light.

Right now, his story is the boring — and bored — president who can’t get Congress to do anything and is just coasting into irrelevance. After taking big risks early in his presidency, with health care and the bin Laden raid, he seemed to sink into disgust at the gnarled system, slacking off and playing golf.

But if he got thrown out of office for taking an audacious risk, showing he was willing to fight for something and stand up to the nihilists, racists and Tea Party loonies, his narrative would leap into “High Noon” drama.

And this sexual fantasy of such horrifying nature as to make me one of those sex-repulsed asexuals nonetheless serves as a great demonstration of what this is all about.

All the fantasy of what random assortment of events would somehow justify this nonevent of removing him, of Obama being a weak-minded and weak-willed fool who can’t wait to abandon ship, and most of all, the central motif of Obama being over early.

It all comes down to the same pathetic white conservative tantrum that has occurred since Obama was first elected. From the Birth Certificate bullshit through the spun tales of how 2012 would sweep the “uncleanliness” out of our Whitest of Houses. The inability to handle what it means that we are in a country where the most powerful man in the country is a black man.

And not only a black man, but a black man with a funny name, birthed of a single mother and immigrant blood, succeeding on his own merits, climbing through the rigged game and being liked by the majority of Americans.

That one of “them”, the “help”, the permanent underclass to be regarded as subhuman criminals and na’er-do-wells, the escaped slaves who will be returned to their rightful place when the “heritage” of the South Rises Again is, in all possible interpretations of the term, better than them.

For petty authoritarians and especially the likes of Maureen Dowd who needs to worship a President as a dominating Christian Grey type figure, the notion that the “Top Dog” is a black man and will be a black man for the next 2 and a half years breaks them. And the notion that this could only be the beginning and we may have other black or brown men in high office, or even black or brown women, maybe even queer black and brown men and women fills them with existential terror, because to them it marks the end of an era of White Supremacy. Where the Southern Strategy is a viable means of waltzing into political power and a cry of “Nigger, Nigger, Nigger” will elicit wild ecstatic cries of support.

Where the sad unworthy beneficiaries of an unfair system weighted in their favor will no longer be looked at as wise sages, but rather in the same way one regards Uncle Clem when he starts ranting about impure pollution of the species when your brother starts talking about his wife. That people will cease to be held in locked fear of this mad dog and the locked gears against progress and actually start examining the racist, sexist bullshit that holds us down.

Why was Trayvon Martin shot? Why are the prisons filled with black men on non-violent drug charges? Why is it somehow a “morality” issue to deny a woman birth control, but not to deny a man a boner pill? Why are we all so scared of a small smattering of gibbering lunatics who think extending some small iota of humanity would be the greatest political treason in an era where drone assassinations and permanent torture camps are to be regarded as nothing?

Why, in short order, should we give a shit about the likes of Maureen Dowd instead of the words of someone like Laverne Cox?

These are the things that birth this panic and self-destructive bullshit like this wave of dimbulb support for impeaching a sitting president for literally nothing but fantasy and bullshit.

I’ve wasted enough words on this waste of space, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t take time for one last kick in the stomach on my way out.

Oh, and there’s a final person it would be really good for — and he’s owed one.

Joe Biden would get to be president — the shot that Obama and his strategists have been reluctant to give the loyal vice president, preferring to boost former rival Hillary Clinton.

Unlike Obama, Biden enjoys schmoozing, jawboning, logrolling, arm-twisting and deal-making with lawmakers ’til the cows come home.

And, as we learned in the new Ronald Kessler book on the Secret Service, Biden likes to swim in the nude. So he’d certainly be a president who believes in transparency.

Someone needs to be older male prostitutes for the entire diseased MSM to finally end their panting unconsummated lust for silver haired white men with slightly above average physiques.

Maybe it will spare us all from this endless parade of morons thinking their unpublished politics fanfic deserves ink space on what is laughably called a “news”paper.

Print media really has no one to blame but themselves for their hole. Same as Republicans. And to all, I say, good riddance to bad rubbish.

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‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. Back in black! I hear the sound! We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

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*Though given the new definition of literal in the dictionary, I’m wondering if I should start using figurative when I mean literally literal.

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout.  There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.  For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy; and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn.  And the pity of it is, that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.  –  Rod Serling

In the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”, the residents of an ordinary suburban neighborhood – people who have lived alongside one another for years – quickly turn paranoid and hostile when weird phenomena convince them that they are witnessing the beginning of an invasion from outer space.  Every nonconformity, every idiosyncrasy, every unexplained incident, every behavior or characteristic even slightly outside the local norm, serves as the basis for accusations that certain individuals are either alien collaborators or even aliens in disguise; naturally, witch-hunting and violence soon ensue.  And though the pace of the hysteria’s development is obviously exaggerated so the drama can fit into a 26-minute television episode, the basic psychology is correct:  in a moral panic, humans will inevitably try to cast some of their own as members of the “enemy” (witches, communists, Satanists or whatever) and to lynch those so selected, with or without the formality of a kangaroo court to declare the victims members of the (largely or wholly) imaginary bogeyman hordes.

We are unfortunate enough to be living in a real-life version of “The Monsters Are Due”, but instead of aliens, the panicmongers claim we’re being invaded by “sex traffickers”; instead of the action unfolding over one night in a small neighborhood, it has unfolded over ten years on a rather provincial little planet.  And while there really are aliens about in the Twilight Zone, the villains on our real-life Maple Street are the self-proclaimed leaders and invasion “experts”.  One thing is the same in both stories, however:  once the panic reaches a high enough pitch, the hysterics start pointing fingers at each other for the flimsiest of reasons.  Submitted for your approval one Troy Martinez, who inhabits a twilight zone called Las Vegas:

A Las Vegas pastor’s idea to report to police suspicious businesses who decline to display a human trafficking hotline poster is being met with skepticism by business and civil liberties leaders.  The new human trafficking awareness effort is being suggested by Pastor Troy Martinez, of the East Vegas Christian Center as part of his involvement with…Mayor Carolyn Goodman’s Faith Initiative…on…human trafficking.  Martinez presented a hypothetical scenario of his plan, which is in its infancy, at a meeting Thursday.  Picture this:  A few…volunteers go to a…bar and ask the owner to put up a poster with the national human trafficking hotline.  The owner agrees and a volunteer notes it on a form before moving to another business, a nail salon, perhaps.  The salon owner doesn’t want to hang the poster, and someone makes note of it on a form.  Maybe volunteers observe a lot of single men hanging around the establishment and decide that is suspicious, so someone writes that down, too.  Then, those notes might get passed on to law enforcement.

The scenario drew suggestions from those attending…[a] working group meeting that the bar seemed forthright, but the nail salon was a different story.  “Well they’ve got something to hide.  They don’t want the poster.  They don’t want to cooperate,” one member said.  The idea of citizens informing on local businesses who rejected displaying a poster bewildered Tod Story, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada…[who] said it sounded like the [US government's] “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign on steroids…Martinez’s idea is modeled after a Los Angeles law that requires establishments — including adult or sexually oriented businesses, massage or bodywork services, emergency rooms and bars — to post the national human trafficking hotline…volunteers filled out a questionnaire noting if the owner was in compliance, aware of the law and if the owner agreed to hang the poster.  According to Martinez, the community began to identify which businesses were legitimate and which businesses were being used as fronts for human trafficking or sex trafficking…Martinez [claimed] that…“a lot of people…were rescued because of the reporting system”…Martinez’s conclusions, however, don’t match what actually has happened in Los Angeles, according to a leader of the grassroots campaign…who…said while the potential is there for volunteers to stumble on a human trafficking front and report it, that has yet to happen.  Also, no one has been rescued as a result of the poster outreach survey…

Case in point one moral panic, a phenomenon in which people voluntarily relinquish their reason, their knowledge, and their consciences in pursuit of ghosts and shadows, and in doing so plunge themselves, their neighbors and those they believe they have cause to fear into a nightmarish, yet very real Twilight Zone.

At the beginning of July I posted on my tumblr about a situation that arose due to a photo of me that was photoshopped and published in a local magazine.

This article was published in a local magazine this month and it took me a minute to realize that the photo had been photoshopped to hide the fact that I’m wearing a crop top. While I was at the shoot the photographer kept asking me to pull the shirt down because they thought the 1 inch of skin showing would distract people from my face.

 

Fat crop tops are not necessary but I think it’s important to note how the prevalence of fat phobia made the writer of the article, who I think was fantastic, not even notice or think about checking to make sure the photo wasn’t photoshopped. 

 

Bottom photo was taken the same day. Clearly my stomach is going to ruin the world.

I called it #croptopgate and tweeted along with the tag #mybeautifulbody, which was created by a follower on twitter who wanted to respond to what happened to me in their own way. There was some push back against the use of the second tag but I’m also very aware of how people are at different stages in their own deconstructing of fat stigma and self hatred. Being able to call yourself beautiful when you have spent your whole life thinking you aren’t can be revolutionary. 

Below is the letter to the editor I finally sent today. I’ve been taking a break from writing and that meant not getting this out when I wanted to.

————-

In the July 2014 issue of WestEnd Magazine I was featured in the “Faces” section to highlight the work I do to deconstruct fat discrimination and body ideals. While I know for many the issues fat people are forced to navigate in their daily lives is a new concept, I incorrectly believed that the magazine would be more thoughtful in how my photographs were used. My experience being interviewed was incredibly positive but I cannot say the same about the photo shoot or the final image that was used in the magazine.

From the beginning of the shoot the photographer made it very clear they were uncomfortable with the outfit I was wearing. I highly doubt that their discomfort would have been the same if I wasn’t a fat woman whose outfit drastically challenged the “rules” assigned as appropriate clothing for fat people. Most fat women are taught from a very early age that we are suppose to hide out bodies and be ashamed of them, thus wearing clothing that covers or diverts attention in an attempt to pretend our bodies simply don’t exist. I thoroughly reject the idea that I need to hide my body and wear clothing that I love regardless of how other people feel. Due to this, I wore an outfit that I made myself – a matching skirt and crop top with a lace upper – for the shoot.

On the day of the shoot one of the first things they asked was if I could pull my top down, saying they believed the top would “distract from my face.” Their comment may seem to be harmless but it is one that I have heard most of my life in other forms. Often fat women are told we have “such a pretty face” making a distinction between what is considered to be beautiful and not. Our bodies are considered to be distractions and my outfit didn’t hide that distraction but instead forced the photographer to look at it. It forced them to be distracted and actually see my fat body.

The photo shoot continued without any more comments but when the article was published I wasn’t surprised that the photo they chose not only was taken from an angle to make me look thinner but the outfit I was wearing was photoshopped to look like a dress. This experience has reminded me that while I can control the way I dress and present my body to the world I cannot control the way it is consumed and presented by others. This experience that ended the final photo is a complete disregard of my work and myself as a person.

I hope this experience makes the magazine think more thoroughly about the photographers they use and how they communicate with them about the subjects they are profiling. The bodies of marginalized people shouldn’t be presented in a way that makes other people feel comfortable nor should the magazine be completely unaware that a photo was digitally altered as was done in my case. We should have the autonomy to decide how our bodies exist in and out of print.

Sincerely,

 

During the week, I might have as many as 50 ‘tabs’ open on the computer; articles that have generated a germ of an idea, research for an article I might be writing. They just pile up on me. Sometimes when I can think of nothing to write, I flip through them in turn; refresh my memory. Sometimes they are just there because I intend to link to them in the Saturday Evening Post.

Equally I flip through Twitter from time to time. I’m not a huge fan of Twitter – and have a positive aversion to Facebook. To all those who send me requests to link on Linkedin – I haven’t been able to get into my account for about three years now; it’s ‘linkedin’ to an obsolete email address – you are wasting your breath!

That was by way of explanation for what follows.

One of the people I follow is @MarkGSparrow. He’s an interesting writer with a contrarian view on a number of issues. Often witty; sometimes obtuse. During this past week he was positively Delphic. Going on about visiting his corner-shop.

More cornershop nonsense. http://t.co/73m5K6K23c

— Mark Sparrow (@MarkGSparrow) August 3, 2014

No, I didn’t follow the link – I should have done though!

One of the articles I had an open tab on was from a young artist who has created something extraordinary. Superb photographs detailing what was obviously an ocean of hard work – and real inspiration. I didn’t think it lent itself particularly to an article, I was thinking of linking to it on Saturday.

Instead, feast your eyes now – the young artist is Lucy Sparrow. Yes, Mark, the penny has finally dropped! Your daughter; and how lovely to have a Father so proud of what you have created – and how lovely Mark, to have a daughter you can so justifiably be proud of.

Whilst some have spent the past few months on Twitter, doing nothing more with their time than trying to upset someone else – Lucy has created a magical body of work. It’s a ‘corner shop’ made entirely of felt. Each piece – and there are hundreds – lovingly hand stitched and for sale when the exhibition is over. I’m going to buy myself a packet of Benson and Hedges to remember them by when they appear in plain white packets – I trust the Guardian will buy the long lasting felt version of their newspaper for when they finally go out of business. They should.

I wrote about video game corridors for the huge expensive hardcover 1000+ page Rem Koolhaas book-set "Elements of Architecture" -- it's part of an entire book about corridors, alongside books about doors, walls, etc.

The bit that I've read has a pretty contemporary approach to things, talking about film geography and nationalism in the same breath as my lonely page that touches on the technical / level design aspects of corridors.

Look mom, I'm a published architecture critic now!!!

In response to this bit of BothSidesDoItism, Krugman is directly on point:

OK, this is grotesque. Rick Perlstein has a new book, continuing his awesomely informative history of the rise of movement conservatism — and he’s facing completely spurious charges of plagiarism.

How do we know that they’re spurious? The people making the charges — almost all of whom have, surprise, movement conservative connections — aren’t pointing to any actual passages that, you know, were lifted from some other book. Instead, they’re claiming that Perlstein paraphrased what other people said. Um, what? Unless there’s a very close match, telling more or less the same story someone else has told before is perfectly ordinary — in fact, it would be distressing if history books didn’t correspond on some things.

Paraphrase with attribution is not plagiarism, and facts cannot be copyrighted. These are not complicated questions.

There are reasonable questions to be asked about the online-only endnotes of The Invisible Bridge, something that I’m guessing is going to be more common. My take is that the online source notes with links are, in themselves, an invaluable resource. Recognizing that resources are scarce, publishing serious works of history is generally a low-margin enterprise at best, etc., I would prefer all things being equal that they be supplements to traditional endnotes rather that replacements. As I’ve been working my way through the book there have been multiple times where I’ve wanted to look up a reference but haven’t been around a laptop. This is a question, however, that has nothing to do with scholarly integrity; online references are still references. And the specific campaign against Perlstein is plainly a political hit job.

…Weigel is must-reading on this.

Traditionally known as the “first citizen of Athens,” Pericles was a lover of art and literature, and a driving force behind the Parthenon’s construction. Now, archeologists in the modern Greek capital claim to have discovered the statesman’s wine cup, according to the Greek newspaper Ta Nea.

Twelve fragments of the two-handled, black-glazed, 5th-century skyphos were uncovered six-and-a-half feet beneath the soil by construction workers digging the foundation of a building located — ironically — on Sparta Avenue. If real, Ta Nea notes that it would be “the first tangible evidence of the daily life of one of the most famous personalities of history.” (Aside from a few statues of the bearded Athenian, the main reason we know about Pericles’s life is because the historian Thucydides detailed his conquests during the Peloponnesian War.)

So what makes archeologists think the cup is real? One of its fragments is engraved with six names, including Arrifron — the moniker of Pericles’s grandfather and brother. “The name Arrifron is very rare,” said A. P. Matthaiou, secretary of the Greek Epigraphic Society. “The mention of [Arrifron] over that of Pericles on the surface of the vase makes us 99% confident that they are the two brothers.” That would make the vase the first object on which Pericles’s name has been discovered in full, as previous references have only appeared in part.

The inscription of the name Aristides also points favorably to Pericles having used the cup. Aristides was a politician who acted in Athens between 488 and 478 BCE, while Pericles led the city-state from 460 BCE to his death from the plague in 429 BCE. The cup dates between 480 and 465 BCE, when the two might have interacted in a social setting such as a symposium or tavern. As men commonly drank from the same skyphos, it’s possible they would have carved their names onto the cup as a token of their meeting.  “[He] certainly was dizzy from the wine as it is clear that whoever wrote the name of Pericles made a mistake initially … and then corrected it,” Matthaiou said.

It’s always a little magical when archeologists turn up objects that place such mythic figures in real time and space, breathing the same air and walking the same ground we do today. In some ways, though, the Pericles cup sounds too good to be true. It seems miraculous that 2,500 years after the orator’s death, one out of 12 fragments of an ancient cup just happens to contain six complete names evidencing a life that has evaded archeologists for centuries. You can make up your own hypothesis as to whether the cup is a historical artifact by seeing it in person, when it goes on display at Athen’s Epigraphical Museum this fall.

The first nick came with what Blanche thought was a sincere apology. She was amenable to accepting it because she was enjoying the view: him kneeling between her spread legs, with nothing on but a pair of underwear. It mitigated her discomfort at being so exposed and the ache where the rim of the bathtub bit into her buttocks. Her ass was, apparently, not as fat as she feared.

The careful attention he was paying to the task of shaving her pussy was also a salve to her bruised pride.

“Don’t you like my pubic hair?” she had asked, after his suggestion that she shave it off.

She was ready to be wounded in that very female way a woman can be. Over a careless remark about some minor aspect of the area between her thighs. As if that nether valley were a permanent wound forever waiting to split open and bleed at even the mildest criticism. All it took was one tiny gesture of disregard, one misinflected word.

“Some days I like it,” he said. “But not today. Haven’t you ever wondered what it feels like bare?”

Blanche pondered that, reaching back into the pre-pubescent past. She had childhood memories, of course, but none of them involved her sexual organs.

Perhaps one. An abstract tangle of images and feelings, of sliding herself instinctually but shamefully over an old piece of carved furniture, feeling the ridges and even the grain of the wood against her bare, plump cunt. As much as her rational mind told her that all children are sensual creatures, she recoiled in unforgiving disgust at the memory.

“Ow! Careful!” she snapped. She flinched at the second nick, unsure of whether the flare of her temper came from the cut or at the queasy shame of her remembered self.

“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered, thumbing the welling bead of blood away, along with a smear of pinkening shaving foam and a clump of dark curls like a small, broken spider dragging its fractured legs behind it.

The tendons of her inner thighs ached for being so widely spread, and now, for the tension of fear that tightened them further. The muscles twitched and trembled.

He looked up from his labours, straight razor in one hand, towel thrown over his shoulder.  “Don’t you trust me?”

Blanche tried to relax. “Yes?” she said, with a rising tone that meant no.

Trust? Trust, with his face so close to her viscera? Not in bed, like a lover with a clever tongue and lascivious intentions, but like a judge of aesthetics, efficient and clinical and far too close. Didn’t one need a degree or a license to be there, like that?

Most women were accustomed to seeing blood in the region but this was something else. He shaved himself with a straight razor each morning; it wasn’t that he lacked experience with its use. But a vulva, she thought, was a different matter: squidgier, with fewer flat planes, more complex even than the little ridged dip between his nose and his upper lip, or the bony part of his chin. She wondered how many cunts he’d shaved and decided she didn’t want to know the answer.

Holding the flesh of her left labia taut between his thumb and index finger, he shaved away another clump of shrubbery, leaving the skin pink and velvety in its wake. Then he nicked her, again, in almost exactly the same spot, except on the opposite side. There, where the skin transforms from dry, pored epidermis into shiny, moist flesh, the absent cusp – the indistinct delineation between outside and insideness.

“Hey! Fuck! Watch it!” She launched each syllable onto a higher shelf.

“Jesus, sorry.”

“You’re not sorry!”

“Don’t be silly,” he said, pinching the cut to stop the bleeding. The gesture distorted her labia, pulled it sideways until it looked detachable – an alien appendage.

In fact, her whole denuded crotch looked unfamiliar. The pinch hurt more than the cut. She looked up from her groin to his face.

“Ow,” she breathed.

He met her gaze and smiled. “Ow,” he whispered back.

* * *

“So, what do you think?”

He released the plump lip, leaving a curiously white mark in the flesh where the pressure had constricted the blood vessels.

Blanche looked down again, doubtfully. “It stings.”

“Touch it. Feel it.”

“Of all the ways of getting me to wank in front of you, this is the lamest.”

“Have I ever had to trick you into doing that?” He nodded at her crotch. “Come on, feel it.”

She reached down, tentatively, the way one hesitates to touch an unfamiliar thing.

“Oh.”

He smiled and cocked an eyebrow. “Smooth, huh?”

Blanche didn’t answer. She was too busy marveling at how any part of her own body could feel so foreign to her, and so unaccountably perverse.

He rose on his knees, wrapped an arm around her waist, and kissed her.

* * *

It was in the midst of that kiss – once it had turned from casual affection to something more intentional and driven, once she had put aside any unwillingness to indulge in the strange delight of stroking her own denuded cunt – that she felt the first tiny pricks of pain. At first it was just a clutch of itches, but as she grew wet and her wetness spread out over the area, the itch became a maddening sting. She squirmed in his embrace, then struggled, and then pulled her hand from between their bodies in alarm.

“It stings! It fucking burns!”

He smiled against her mouth.

“I need to rinse it.  Move,” she said, trying to push him away.

But instead of acquiescing, he cupped her bare ass cheeks in his hands and pulled her against him, burying his face into the curve of her neck. She could feel the cotton of his underwear against her mound, not soft at all, but coarse and mean, and his cock, thickening by degrees beneath it.

In that one quotidian moment, he had pushed her past being a sentient human who took care of her own requirements with any semblance of dignity. The scratch of the cotton felt good; his erection was in just the right place so that, if she moved her hips strategically, she could relieve herself of the infuriating sting and grind herself to orgasm at the same time.

* * *

Just before she reached it, he stopped her and picked her up off the edge of the tub, her legs still wrapped around his hips.

“What? What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Don’t you want to fuck?”

“I do. We could have done it right there.”

“True, but this is better,” he said, and dropped her onto the unmade bed.

She looked up at him, with the veiled sullenness of someone who’s just been cheated of something. It wouldn’t be the first time. He had a nasty habit of teasing her to the point where she got aggressive and then would, either figuratively or literally, walk off whistling. But she sensed he was not in that kind of a mood today. There was a dark wet spot and faint red streaks on his underwear where she’d rubbed herself against him. He was still hard. She elbowed her way up the bed to make room for him as he peeled them off.

“Does it still sting?” He pushed her legs apart, knelt between them and cupped her cunt. The salt from his palm made nonsense of the question. Then he gave her a savage squeeze.

Her hips arched upward, of their own volition. “Motherfucker!”

“Bitch.” His hand was hot and cruel; he almost made a fist, gripping the pink flesh of her.

Caught between arousal and horror, she felt the recently clotted cuts break open, watched a tiny rivulet of blood seeped between his fingers. “I don’t want to. I’ve…I’ve changed my mind.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, taking his hand away, gabbing her by the back of the thighs and pulling her to up to him. “Don’t go all coy on me.”

“I’m bleeding. Can’t you see I’m bleeding?”

“Yeah, you are.” He brushed the back of his fingers over her cunt, smearing the blood that wept from the cuts, then pressed his thumb between the lips and trailed the flat of it over her clit. “And you still want to fuck.”

Blanche turned her head away, wondering why her eyes were filling with tears, why the blood scared her, and why, despite it or because of it, she wanted to fuck.

As he pushed into her, it wasn’t the thrust that hurt. It was the way filling her pulled the cuts apart. It wasn’t a sting any more; now it was worse. As if all the little nicks had decided to merge and become one generalized ache.

“Look,” he said. And, when she wouldn’t turn back, he bent forward, cradling her head in his hand and made her look.

Between their bodies, across the expanse of bare skin, between her raised knees, he penetrated her. Even and unhurried, he fed himself into the mess of her new cunt, marred, swollen, seeping, streaking his cock with blood each time he pulled out of her.

It didn’t stop. The more aroused she became, the more she bled and the less she cared – or part of her, anyway – because she was crying. She knew she was crying. She heard her own breath, hitching on the sobs that couldn’t quite decide if they were moans or something else.

She wanted to see his face, to get some sense of what was going through his mind, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the frightening spectacle of copulation turned into artful butchery, and her own body and his made into meat, into their constituent parts. Just blood and skin and sweat and meat.

Then she knew why it frightened her, as he repeatedly pushed the trickles of red back into her body: all the risk it carried; all the untouchability of it; all the mad commitment of covering himself in her blood; all the agonizing desire that anathema could offer.

“Oh, Christ,” she whispered.

The shock of the orgasm took her like a thief, as if it didn’t belong to her, as if she’d had her body snatched and put to a purpose she hadn’t agreed to.  Before she’d stopped twitching, he covered her with his body, dispensing with all his earlier restraint, and fucked her with all the driven ruthlessness of a man who has been somewhere wicked and wants to forget it. He stopped after one last, harsh thrust, rested his forehead on her collarbone, and came, shuddering.

It was hard to know how long they lay like that – long enough that, when he moved off her, the gore had clotted. She hissed as he pulled away from her skin. He gave an uncertain little laugh as if, perhaps, this time he’d gone too far.

It wasn’t a desire to assuage his doubts that made her roll onto her side, nestle up against him and fall asleep. It was the need of an animal for shelter after a storm, and the deep, dreamless sleep of a creature that has come to know what it’s made of.