Sophianotloren

Content note: this post discusses violence against women and misogyny

Dear men,

I’m addressing every single one of you. If you think this isn’t for you, it probably is. If you’re itching to complain that I’m making generalisations, this is definitely for you. Sit down, shut up, and maybe try not to prove me right.

It’s been in the news that Elliot Rodger murdered six people because women weren’t giving him the time of day. I’ve seen you struggling to make sense of this, putting what he did down to mental illness, or neurodiversity, or being mixed race, or even being a repressed gay man. You’ve been twisting the truth to make it seem like he’s not like you, that he’s a deviant.

You’re wrong. Elliot Rodger murdered six people because of a feeling that all men are taught to feel. Elliot Rodger murdered six people because he felt entitled to sex and emotional labour from women. Elliot Rodger murdered six people because, like all men, he was taught he had every right to feel angry at not getting his own way.

We were all born and raised under patriarchy. These beliefs about men and women are prevalent. You can trace a direct line between that sense of entitlement and Elliot Rodger murdering six people. You can also trace this direct line between that sense of entitlement and much of the other violence men inflict upon women: the rapes, the beatings, the random acts of street harassment.

By now, your fingers are probably twitching with the urge to scream NOT ALL MEN ARE LIKE THIS. I can almost feel your agitation, and your desire to say this. Guess what? That desire to burst in and announce NOT ALL MEN is tied in to that self-same sense of entitlement. You say it because you feel entitled to my time and attention. You say it because it horrifies you that I might feel negatively to you and you want to show off what a nice guy you really are.

Last night, I talked about this on Twitter, and was deluged with men screaming NOT ALL MEN. Take a look at your brothers. Take a look at the level of misogyny seeping from all men who screech NOT ALL MEN.

It’s easier to say that not all men think like Elliot Rodger, because that stops you having to worry about structural misogyny. You can pretend to yourself that you’re a special snowflake who is above all of that. The truth is frightening: sure, you probably haven’t murdered anyone, but that doesn’t mean that you have a hell of a lot in common with that mass murderer. Instead of trying to distance yourself from Elliot Rodger, you need to take a long and hard inventory of the things that make you alike. Only then can you kill the Elliot Rodger inside your head.

I’m sick of you men whinging that you’re not all like this. Every time you do, it makes you seem all the more similar to me, a writhing mass of entitled misogyny. You need to accept this problem that you have and solve it rather than continuing along this path. End your complicity now.

NOTE ON COMMENTS: I’ve not been moderating comments like I usually do, because they all kind of prove me right. Content note for misogyny, racism and disablism because men are pigs.

Ok, my somewhat pathetic iPhone photos of the family cats are now absolutely inadequate.  But at the same time, this is where I can slap my hands together in a dust-it-off manner and shout “My job here is done!” — albeit, by someone ELSE!

But really, what could be cooler than ALL the cats?  Gracie thinks all the cats are cool, too…long as she gets to keep the desk.

Tagged: cats, nature

As promised, more snarky posters.  Snarky, btw, does not mean ‘untrue’…more like truth with a dose of pointy teeth.  Only right from a dripping fang liberal, eh?  And since I steal most of my posters from Yellowdog Grannie, a Texan – Texas being where the phrase ‘dripping fang liberal’ originated…it is only fair.

And hey, MacDonalds?  I am so NOT loving it here in the USA.

Filed under: Politics, Snark Tagged: economy, gop lies, labor rights

I am always both saddened and slightly enraged when reading of PTSD afflicted veterans being shot by the police.  I will admit, some of those cases were likely not resolvable in that moment by any other means — veterans who aim guns at police, or hole up in a house and shoot at police and others, for instance.

But sometimes, I wonder.  Take Parminder Shergill, for instance.  His frightened relatives called the police asking them to come take the Sikh veteran to the VA Hospital. But Mr. Shergill seemed to not notice the police calling to him as he crossed a park.  The police reported that he “had a knife in his hands and was refusing commands”.  They shot and killed him.

The first thing that came to my mind was what KIND of knife he had in his hands.  Was it his ritual kirpan?  Did he even hear the police?  They HAD been told he was in an altered mental state, did they really think him capable of obeying their commands?

I find these sorts of cases very distressing — first of all because in a nation where the police have been militarized to an unheard of state, they seem to have absolutely no training in dealing with ACTUAL ex-military persons, nor any idea how to deal with mentally disturbed people.  One would think some of that bloody Homeland Security money being spent on body armor and bigger guns COULD be spent on something to occupy space between their ears!

And then, I think America could stop striving for all the clear cut black and white ‘either/or’ answers.  The younger Sikhs in his community say he died for being a Sikh, which suggests to me he may have been holding his own kirpan; the older Sikhs want to say it is a veteran issue.  I think it was both.  We throw away veterans; America prefers cheaper dead heroes, so far as I can tell.  And the land of freedom of religion DOES seem to have penalties for choosing one that doesn’t involve white steeples and crosses.

Tagged: police, ptsd, religion, religious discrimination, veterans

My latest goal: I’m going to try to force myself to write shorter posts, and to be happy with them. One of my big problems with writing, and writing consistently, is that I feel like everything has to be at least 1,000 words long in order for me to have done my job. And not only does that writing take a long time; it’s intimidating, which means that I don’t actually get started, because all I can imagine is struggling to get the word count done, and all the things that I should be doing, instead of writing. So, instead of aiming for a high word count, I’m going to be trying to do more posts under 300 words. Yes, the SEO plugin won’t like it (very much) but, fuckit. Who’s the boss here, anyway? Maybe we’ll get some more content in here.

More later.

-30-

 

 

The post New Goal: Write Shorter Stuff appeared first on Literate Perversions.

…if they traded five Gitmo prisoners to get him back!  This news made me burst into tears. I will STILL be “squeee-ing” about his for the entire week.  He looks so terribly thin, but oh-so-alive!   I can only imagine his family is falling apart in relief.

I can’t believe his family is being told they can’t see him till he is finally stateside.  Medical clearance my ass.   The US now wants to debrief the poor bastard.  Hey, you heartless fucks in the DOD and State Dept?  You should be kicked in the balls.  Let that young man’s mother be with him NOW!

Tagged: afghanistan, hostage, mia, pow, war

That's our Sen. Rand Paul, showing leadership for Kentuckians with authentic frontier gibberish. A reporter asked Paul if he thought Kynect should be dismantled. Paul responded that he was "not sure.""You know I'm not sure — there's going to be … how we unravel or how we change things. I would rather —I always tell people there's a fork in the road. I was in healthcare for 20 years so we had

So you want to attend AA but not sure if you’re really an alcoholic? That’s ok.  You don’t have to know for sure.  All you have to do is lie. That’s what everyone else does.  Confess your powerlessness. Say that you want to stop drinking but can’t.  No matter how hard you tried. Who knows what that even means?  Maybe it’s really true.  Embrace your alcoholism.  Wear it like a badge.  Re-evaluate your entire life in this new context.

And if you’re still not sure, just lie.  Lie like a rug.  Lie like a Louisiana hooker.  Think of a stupid thing you did and then blame it on alcohol.  It’s easy:  I <insert sin here> because I drank <insert alcoholic beverage here>.  For example, “I lost my job because of rum.”  “I yelled at my wife because of fuzzy navel.”  Don’t worry the stupider it sounds the more everyone will believe it.  And the best part is, you can always resume ‘denial’ as soon as you step out the door.  Remember, AA is a drinking club.  Go to the bar and have a drink.  In a weird way, it actually proves your lie – just be sure to call it a ‘relapse’ and remember it’s a normal part of ‘recovery’.  Congratulations on your shiny new disease!

If you do this, if you perpetrate this simple lie, I promise you, the scales will fall from your eyes.  A new world will open up in front of you.  You will witness and discover amazing things.

So go ahead, lie like the wind!  And have fun!  Just remember, don’t mix alcohol and drugs!

Then come back and report your findings in the comments below.

Read more:

• How to Drink Like a Normal Man
• Powerlessness as Religion - Only the good die young
• You Are So Brainwashed It’s Funny - Who will pay for their sins?
• The Problem of the Jews: a Lesson in Brainwashing Propaganda - How AA bamboozled a country
• The Drinking Club - Watch what they do, not what they say
• I Call Blackout - I did what??
• Rat Addicts and the Science Of Addiction - The best of 60′s Science Fiction
• A Conversation with Dr. Drew Pinsky - 13% and proud
• School for Scoundrels - What you actually learn in the rooms

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I just read Nisi Shawl’s essay on “Appropriate Cultural Appropriation”, which gives a few tips and advice to Western authors on how to behave, and what questions to ask themselves. Because I was reading it on a plane with no internet access, I even read the comments.

Of course there was the sort of comment that is so typical, it’s why I really truly don’t read the comments most of the time: the aggressive, probably male, white and Western, voice, saying something like:

“…call me insensitive, but I’ll borrow whatever cultures I please…” (said in almost those exact words, but expanded upon in several paragraphs of course.)

Due to some stage in my own thinking about cultural appropriation and power dynamics, I suddenly saw this comment in a new light.

It does not occur to the writer that this assertion of “I’ll do whatever I want” might come at any cost other than a few people calling him out by name for it. (He didn’t hide his name.) It doesn’t occur to him that publishers might reject his work, that editors would tell him to cut appropriative material or send him off to do more research, or even (most likely) that anyone he gets to help his research should be entitled to compensation. He is asserting a power of independent expression that writers of color, non-Western voices in the USA, are routinely and incessantly denied.

How many times have I heard about writers being told not to include “so many queer characters”, “so many women”, being told “you have to explain this cultural reference even if it takes power away from a dramatic literary moment”, or even “you can’t include foreign languages without translation”? That’s, of course, when the story has actually made it as far as editor’s cuts or a non-generic rejection letter.

There was a saying repeated on multiple panels at WisCon, which I recently attended: Junot Diaz, “…fuckers will read a book that’s 1/3 elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and White people think we’re taking over.” It’s an incredible testament to the power of white readership, and white-normative publishing.

So, when a commenter like this says, “I’ll do whatever I want”, does he realize the kind of power he is exerting? Yes and no, I think: he knows his own power, and if he’s much of an SFF reader at all, he knows what gets published. In fact he knows that clever, even malicious exotifications could make his story more publishable in a lot of places, not less. But, does he understand even the first thing about the people he is exerting this power upon?

I think Shawl’s essay covers a lot of ground for a conscientious reader. But for white and Western-centric readers, I think we could stand to re-emphasize a crucial point about cultural appropriation: to distort someone’s culture so that their own versions are not commonly recognized, requires power. Cultural appropriation is an abuse of power. And I know it’s not just me who took a long time to grok that.

Related: accountability, and what it means. If you’re on the privileged side of something, then accountability often means that if you fuck up badly, you may lose friends, or your friends will call you out; or strangers will. You can, if you really want to, abandon them altogether and the only price you will pay, most of the time, comes in feelings of shame and/or pain. If on the other hand, you’re threatening a dominant culture that oppresses you, then you may quite reasonably fear for your life, or your source of income and health. I have noticed even really long-term, really well-meaning white activists, in particular, more or less deliberately ignore this when our own feelings are hurt. I am sick at heart, knowing how much that happens.

So, yay, the VA investigated the Phoenix VA facility and found that Yes, lies have been told and people wait over three months for care, while the VA was saying they waited less than a month.   Shinseki ordered the 1700 veterans waiting be immediately triaged.  No word on the vets who DIED waiting.

Nifty.  But when do the lying asshats in charge of the Phoenix VA get put on trial for fraud and murder?

Tagged: death, health care, lies, support-the-troops-my-ass, VA neglect, veterans

Yesterday, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 margin, decided that if a prisoner's IQ is within a margin of error of "mentally retarded," the prisoner should not be executed. That's pretty much it. Just a touch more humanity, if you can use that word, when it comes to capital punishment. It's significant in that the majority, led by Anthony Kennedy, said that individual states should not get to decide, arbitrarily and rigidly, what "retarded" is for people convicted of crimes punishable by the death penalty. It makes sense, if you think about it. If you're "retarded" in Massachusetts, you should be "retarded" in Florida (make your own Florida joke there).

All in all, the decision reaffirmed the 2002 judgment in Atkins v. Virginia, which was 6-3 against the state killing people with the IQ of a particularly well-trained schnauzer. Yesterday's Hall v. Florida ruling also affirmed that more than IQ should be taken into consideration when determining the relative "retardation" of the "retarded." (Note: "Retard" and its variations are used dozens of times in the opinion and the dissent, always in quotation marks.)

Of course, there's the four who disagreed, and, in a dissent written by Justice Samuel "You better not talk shit about SCOTUS" Alito, the conservative members of the court said, more or less, "C'mon. Let us kill us some motherfuckin' retards."

The biggest point of contention for the dissenters is that the majority wants to rely on "experts" and "science" to determine who is mentally challenged and who is not. Alito says that the unwashed mob should get to say who is or isn't: "Under our modern Eighth Amendment [no cruel and unusual punishment] cases, what counts are our society's standards-which is to say, the standards of the American people-not the standards of professional associations, which at best represent the views of a small professional elite." That's a line that could have been written by a Tea Party politician in his sleep. Oh, we certainly don't want the elite (or, you know, "the best") making decisions that are better settled by people scratching their nuts while watching Fox "news." We don't want scientist losers telling us all what the science says.

Alito lists the reasons this is bad. That includes: "because the views of professional associations often change, tying Eighth Amendment law to these views will lead to instability and continue to fuel protracted litigation." Yes, and the whims of society are fixed and immutable. It's not like we ever executed people for idiotic reasons in the past, like being an escaped slave or a witch or gay. Alito wants state legislators to make a determination based on the going rate of "retardation." In that case, sure, maybe Massachusetts stupid isn't quite as stupid as Florida stupid. "Practical problems like these call for legislative judgments, not judicial resolution," Alito writes.

Even more disturbing, Alito says, "[T]he Court binds Eighth Amendment law to definitions of intellectual disability that are promulgated for use in making a variety of decisions that are quite different from the decision whether the imposition of a death sentence in a particular case would serve a valid penological end." So now, for Alito, there's "smart enough to kill" versus "smart enough to get a job." The former would be a much lower threshold than the latter. That's some fine jurisprudence there.

What's bizarre is just how badly Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas want to ensure that the most people possible are executed by state governments. The majority is saying, "Hey, what the fuck? Just take a fuckin' breath and let's make sure we're doing our barbaric punishment in the best way possible." That's not enough for the conservative justices. They want blood, goddamnit. They want to bathe in blood, get drunk on blood, pass blood around for all to enjoy.

Remember, too, that Scalia and Thomas were part of the losing side in 2002. They don't fuckin' care who is murdered by the state. In his dissent on that case, Scalia, pretending to be an originalist, really wrote, "The Court makes no pretense that execution of the mildly mentally retarded would have been considered 'cruel and unusual' in 1791. Only the severely or profoundly mentally retarded, commonly known as 'idiots,' enjoyed any special status under the law at that time." (Note: In that decision, "retard" and its variations were used without quotation marks. Times change.) Ten years ago, Scalia said that we should execute the same people that the founders would have executed.

Of course, Scalia would probably want them hanged on public gallows, old-school style, "retarded" or not. Hell, he'd probably pull the lever and then hump the corpse.

Wanna know the horrible direction in which this country may be headed? This video is an example...

Last week, the House of Representatives passed the bill called The USA Freedom Act, 303 votes to 121. Following a series of amendments, the bill as it passed in the end contained much weaker reforms than even the very modest ones it originally proposed. The Chair of the Judiciary Committee’s manager’s amendment removed two-thirds of […]

This is a female military veteran.  She must have worked at a job similar to what my husband and I did — the security clearance and working in a “vault” only happens in so many jobs.  She is now severely disabled, largely as a result of being raped, tortured in an asylum to make her retract her claim of being raped, medically compromised, surgically butchered by an incompetent son of a bitch, and then disregarded “because you have PTSD,it’s all in your head” while she went into sepsis.  Watch it all, I DARE you.  Then get on the phone or in email with your Senator and ask them why this happened and what has happened to those who caused it?

 

You may contribute to help her find a home, here.  It is amazing how little money various attempts have raised, when I’ve seen video game developers get a million in less than a week.  This woman is asking for a few thousand to fund a place to live with no stairs….and nobody gives a shit.

Tell ya what?  Next yellow ribbon on a vehicle?  Specially a Hummer?  Pull that sucker off and shove it up said “troop supporter’s” ass, ok?

 

Hat-tip to Heretic!

Tagged: medical malpractice, military rape, ptsd, war on women

One of my favorite movies of the aughts was the 2000 supernatural thriller, “What Lies Beneath,” starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Peiffer. I just found everything about it compelling– from the sets to the MacGuffin to the performances. I even watched the director’s commentary, which endeared the movie to me still more. (Thank you, Robert Zemeckis, for making one of my all-time favorite thrillers.) I don’t recall the movie getting a lot of attention/kudos, so I’ve always thought of it as an underrated, hidden gem.

So, that got me to wondering: What are your favorite underrated films/hidden gems?

arte-mysia:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

huffingtonpost:

Watch all of John Oliver’s look at the new gay marriage friendly Nintendo Universe here.

That Princess Peach and Zelda gif…

IT IS EVERYTHING I WANT :D

Yes

Yes Zelda, smooch your lovely Mushroom Kingdom princess and give her your lady loving

John Oliver is incredibly funny on his own.  I’m so glad he’s got his own series.  I do miss him at The Daily Show, though.

Oh so that’s where that Zelda/Peach kissing scene cap came from. o:

Omg that gif tho.

>_>

:D

genderfuckedover:

thewomanfromitaly:

i-am-river:

So, i read this awful article using bathroom “scare tactics,” which was claiming that trans women are potential rapists. “Men” who dress as women to gain access to women only spaces and force them self on women. This really upset me and i had a bit of a Twitter rant. They were read by others and i was urged to post them in other media also, so i am posting them here. (Edited together in easy reading format from top to bottom.)

This is the link in the first tweet about how there are no cases of a trans woman attacking a cis woman in public restrooms: Link 1.

This is the link in the second tweet about the cases where trans people are assaulted in the bathroom by cis people: Link 2.

if you’re cis and you follow me i’m gonna need you to reblog this

don’t care if you’re cis or trans, this is important.

How we construct fears in our head often aren’t about what’s likely to happen, but about what we’re most afraid of happening.  Cis people aren’t particularly caring or thinking about what happens to trans people when we use washrooms, but they are super scared of being assaulted when they use it, so to them the latter seems the most likely.  They can explain to you how OBVIOUSLY this will happen because once you allow trans people into your washroom, then all sorts of predators will sneak in, it’s so OBVIOUSLY easy, so therefore it’ll happen all the time.  This is much like how rape apologists think that false rape accusations happen all the time because “it’s SO EASY, all you have to do is point a finger and lie!”.  Except this isn’t actually happening.  It’s like how people are generally more scared of flying rather than driving even though flying is actually really safe, and driving is the most dangerous activity most of us do every day.  But, we feel in control about driving, while flying feels like putting our lives into other people’s hands, and a plane crash seems like insta death rather than a car crash, and we think we know more about cars than we do about how planes work, so all of these combine to make us feel flying is way more dangerous.  But really it’s not, it’s just a combination of ignorance, self-interest, and fear of the doomsday scenario that makes it seem more scary and thus more likely in our minds.  This is exactly the same sort of fear construction thought process that happens with cis people and trans inclusion in washrooms.

Script of cartoon:

Panel 1: An Uncle Sam sort of figure, wearing a top hat with stars and stripes and a floral Hawaiian shirt, is talking to a cigar-chomping businessman.

Uncle Sam has his hand on a sign sticking out of the dirt. The sign says “NEVER AGAIN!”

UNCLE SAM: 146 workers died in the Triangle Factory fire! We can NEVER let that happen again!
BUSINESSMAN: If you institute safety regulations for my factories, I’ll be forced to raise prices! You play a few cents extra per shirt!

Panel 2
Close-up of Uncle Sam, who is looking very anxious about this dilemma.
UNCLE SAM: A few cents? That’s HORRIBLE! But hundreds of factory workers dying is ALSO horrible! What a DILEMMA!

Panel 3
BUSINESSMAN: I know! I’ll build totally unregulated factories in other countries! So shirts will stay cheap, but we won’t have any more big factory tragedies in the USA!

Panel 4
UNCLE SAM: Hooray! EVERYBODY wins!
BUSINESSMAN: That’s capitalism for ya.

We can see that the “NEVER AGAIN!” sign now has a piece of paper taped under it; the paper says “Where we have to see it.”

After a massive legal battle costing millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours, the government has dropped all charges against AddictionMyth for his wickedly funny parodies of government science and scientists: Cease and Desist and A Conversation with Aaron White, PhD.

BerkleyLettertoLevy-5-19-2014

As stated by the government: “We’re sorry for the government overreach and sheepishly accept our memberships in the Red Face Club.  However we still feel that the interview with Dr. White was insufficiently satirical to be protected.  I mean, read it yourself and see if you even crack a smile.  I’ve read it a hundred times and still don’t understand the point.  Medicalizing demon possession?  That’s just crazy.  I suspect high functioning Asperger’s. They can get entranced by their own lame attempts at humor, coupled with a penchant for shameless gloating.”

Adds NIH Junior Attorney at Law Dale Berkley, “That AddictionMyth better watch his back.  Unless he wants to experience the full faith n’ credit of the US Government on his sorry ass.  He thinks he’s funny.  Well he’s the only one laughing.  He thinks he’s so cool but he’s really just a fool.  Plus he’s a coward and a bully.  Which I would tell him to his face if not for the restraining order.  Which I would have contested if I didn’t oversleep ONLY because I was up all night waiting for him to call me like he PROMISED.  He’s such a liar and has treatment-resistant scabies and NEVER returns my calls even when I’m in crisis, and I know he’s not working all the time.  I know him.  He just watches Benghazi News Channel and eats Pringles.  Day and night.  He’s a lazy ass cunt.  Pardon my French.  Sorry I still struggle with the cravings.  Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome.  Can last several months, I’m told.”

Thomas McLellan, former Obama Drug Official and acclaimed AA Higher Power added: “I have never seen such deplorable behavior from someone who refused to blame it on drugs or alcohol.  I’m a trained psychiatrist so I don’t believe in evil.  But wow that AddictionMyth really stretches the bounds of my forbearance.  I hope for his sake he’s just in major denial.  Not holding my breath.”

Nora Volkow, looking seriously bad-ass in a new leather jacket, added: “If that jerk directs one more satirical post to me or anyone in my office, I’m going to put him on the CDC Biologic Threats list!  Next time through airport security he’ll discover cavities he never knew existed!!  Then again, he’d probably enjoy that.  What a pervert.  I really just want to punch him in the face.  Which by the way is a perfectly legal response to satire in my cone tree.”  In your what?  “My cone tree.”  Um.  Your cone tree?  You mean like a pine tree?  “No, my CONE TREE!  My CONE TREE!  MEXICO!”

Dr Aaron White, hapless victim of the merciless satire, sobbed tearlessly: “Boo hoo!  Stupid Jew lawyers!  Boo hoo!!”  The Koobster tried to wipe away his tears but noticed there weren’t any.  “It was the weirdest thing.  Then I remembered we had removed the tear ducts last year for an experiment.  So I just reminded him that we’ll have the last laugh, and we practiced our acceptance speeches.  That always cheers him up.”  The boys then knocked off early for ‘a few drinks’.

AddictionMyth issued a statement through his attorney: “I am very relieved to be fully vindicated and now I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with my cats.  Who at least had the courtesy to act like they missed me, even if only until I fed them.”

AddictionMyth’s lawyer added: “We’re now working on lifting the out-of-state travel restriction so he can take Methistopheles to the Henderson Feline Galorama¹.  Plus I’m not licensed in that jurisdiction, so it might be a good opportunity to suggest a referral and then change my phone number.  Honestly, I didn’t expect them to knuckle under this quickly.  I mean, they did make some fair points.”

¹ My client assures me this is not a veiled reference to interstate drug trafficking.  Though I’m quite sure he doesn’t own any actual cats.  I would certainly hope not.

AddictionMyth would like to thank Paul Allen Levy of Public Citizen for his fearless if tepid stand in support of free speech.

“I believe each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.”

I was very sad to read of Maya Angelou’s passing. I’m not a poet or African American or any kind of woman in the way I think she was, and yet she spoke to me. There are so few people in the world who will tell you the honest truth, and she was one of them. She wrote the truth as she saw it, with all the integrity she had, and yet she was an optimist. It’s there in her maybes, and her pledges to rise, and her defiance of her body’s haste. There are few people in the world I have admired unreservedly, but she is one of them. There are few role models like her – so raw, so compassionate, so dignified.

Not too long ago, I wrote a post on the ERWA blog about writing, and I used her poem ‘Men’ to encourage prose writers to aspire to the kind of precision that poets find in language. Not crafty, or complicated, or esoteric. Just right. Just deep and true. Her similes and metaphors were forged so naturally. In the elegance of great simplicity.

One day they hold you in the
Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you
Were the last raw egg in the world.
(Men)

I loved the vastness of her eye. Prehistoric, cosmic, reaching inward and outward. Even in the details she chose to settle on, there’s a panorama of rich meaning that stretches over the horizon. I remember the poem she read at Clinton’s inauguration.

Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.

Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.

Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,

Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.
(from On The Pulse of the Morning)

And Ms. Angelou knew about love. Wrote about love in ways I never will. Yet I can’t even find it in my heart to feel envy – only admiration.

Beloved,
In what other lives or lands
Have I known your lips
Your Hands
Your Laughter brave
Irreverent.
Those sweet excesses that
I do adore.
What surety is there
That we will meet again,
On other worlds some
Future time undated.
I defy my body’s haste.
Without the promise
Of one more sweet encounter
I will not deign to die.
(Refusal)

Of all her poems, my favourite is one of her darker ones. For me, this poem speaks to the sin of disengagement, the waste of cynicism. To me, it’s a commandment to own internally what you experience in the world, but to refuse to allow it to diminish you. It is possible to carry the truth of the world inside you, and yet reject solipsism. It’s important to me, because it’s the hardest challenge she ever laid down and I will spend my life trying to live up to it.

We die,
Welcoming Bluebeards to our darkening closets,
Stranglers to our outstretched necks,
Stranglers, who neither care nor
care to know that
DEATH IS INTERNAL.

We pray,
Savoring sweet the teethed lies,
Bellying the grounds before alien gods,
Gods, who neither know nor
wish to know that
HELL IS INTERNAL.

We love,
Rubbing the nakednesses with gloved hands,
Inverting our mouths in tongued kisses,
Kisses that neither touch nor
care to touch if
LOVE IS INTERNAL.
(The Detached)

If you’ve never read any of her poetry, I hope you will take the opportunity to read some. It’s all over the web. Read it aloud, linger in its rhythm and the roundness of the words. She made language both a sword and a caress.

A great lady, a great poet, a great human being has passed. I’m not religious but I know she was, and she trailed wisps of glory with every line she wrote.

Good literary citizens shop at local independent bookstores, and Amazon’s ongoing trade war with Hachette underscores the fragility of a marketplace dominated by a single online retailer. But are local bookstores just another form of privilege? Kelly Jensen writing at BookRiot explains what its like to live in a book desert:

Not all readers have access to brick and mortar stores. Not all readers have the capability to walk to their local indie or their local Barnes & Noble or their local Books A Million or their local Chapters and buy books in person. Not all readers have the ability to get in a car, fill up their gas tanks, and spend an hour driving each way to a store. Not everyone lives in a great city, not everyone lives near a great city, and not every great city is a great city for bookstores.

Related Posts:

• Amazon Guilt
• So Long, Marcus Books
• Can Beer Save Bookstores?
• The Tale of Two Community Bookstores
• Oases in the Bookstore Desert

Filed under: Life

When I wrote yesterday's lighthearted post, I was ignorant of the details about yesterday's horrific mass shooting near UCSB. On Saturdays, I work until 4AM, wake up at 11AM, listen to NPR for a couple of hours, and return to work at 5PM. At work, I am in a bubble for the first couple of hours- I have to interact with the public for an hour-and a half, and then have to run around closing the site up after operating hours. Whoa, did I have a horror story awaiting for me when I checked out the web in my first quiet moment.

Now that I'm catching up with the coverage of the shooting, two things strike me- the first is that the killer had a history of making misogynist and racist comments on "Men's Rights" sites, and the second is that he wrote a lengthy manifesto describing himself as a "good and pure" individual suffering at the hands of "brutal and twisted humanity". Two toxic cultural narratives, the MRA narrative of evil women "withholding" sex and love from "worthy" males, and the NRA narrative of the "good guy with the gun" defeating the "evildoers" combined in a poisonous synergy that ended up with seven corpses.

Reading snippets of the killer's "manifesto", one sees a picture of a bitter guy, obsessed with the facts that the "hot" women go out with "brutes" (in a number of instances, a racist obsession with blonde women going out with "dark-skinned Mexicans" and “ugly black filth” comes to the fore). Hypocritically, the guy excoriating women for not seeing his worthy qualities was solely concerned with women's superficial attributes. He was a shallow person, railing at the shallowness of others. In one jaw-dropping statement, he railed that women “should not have the right to choose who to mate with”. Aping the MRA obsession with "alpha males", he decided that his ticket to "alpha" status would be the ability to kill- after the purchase of a Glock 34, he asked, “Who’s the alpha male now bitches?” Whatever personality deficits he had, his dive into the fever swamp of online misogyny caused him to make the transition from an awkward youth to a wannabe supervillain straight out of a Jack Vance novel.

The other evil thread running through this sordid narrative is the idea that violence is the answer to all of life's problems- the "good guy with a gun" being the preferred hero of the tales Americans tell themselves. In the case of this killer, he was the newly-minted "alpha male", armed and ready to kill the "bad" people: “How sweet it would be to slaughter all of those evil, slutty bitches who rejected me.” Distilled to its essence, his warped view of the world could be summed up by his assertion that “the ultimate evil behind sexuality is the human female.” Fit into the narrative pushed by the gun-lobby, he was the "good guy" and the women that he hated were the "bad guys".

While the prevailing media narrative is going to be that the killer was "mentally ill", this is unfair to the already marginalized mentally ill community. No matter what was going in his head, the killer's embrace of misogynistic websites aggravated his problems- a toxic blend of MRA and NRA talking points combined in a synergistic fashion, resulting in a horrific tragedy.

I’ll be at San Diego Comic-Con this July and I’ve seen some people wondering whether SDCC’s Code of Conduct qualifies as a harassment policy under my personal set of rules, and if not, why I would bend the rules for SDCC.

These are totally fair questions. If I’m going to publicly have a position on harassment policies, then I should be ready to have people ask me if I’m living up to that position. So let me address that.

1. I think the SDCC Code of Conduct policy fulfills two of the three of my requirements unambiguously: It says harassment/offensive behavior will be not tolerated, and tells attendees how to report being harassed. So that’s good. The third thing, being clear on what is unacceptable behavior, I think it falls down on — it says harassing and being offensive are unacceptable, but doesn’t give guidance on what are examples of such behavior. Having that guidance would be helpful.

And giving that guidance is not hard to do — see, as an example, the harassment policy at ComicPalooza, which I am attending at the moment. ComicPalooza notes that its guidance is not an exhaustive list, i.e., someone harassing someone else couldn’t get out of it just by noting they weren’t doing a specific thing noted. But by offering information the convention makes things less ambiguous both for people being harassed and for the people those being harassed go to for help.

Do I think SDCC’s staff would discount someone complaining they are being harassed? I would like to think not, or at the very least that it’s rather less likely than it used to be. This is a topic that’s been on people’s mind, and the SDCC folks have to know as that as “the” comic con, they will be under scrutiny more than most. But liking to think something isn’t the same as knowing something. Having some guidance of what constitutes harassment/unacceptable behavior is useful for everyone.

2. As for whether I am letting SDCC slide on something I wouldn’t let other conventions slide on: not intentionally, at least. SDCC didn’t ask me to attend this year (I was a special guest a couple of years ago, before my policy) and I didn’t approach SDCC to be a guest. I’ll be going because my publisher asked me if I would attend, a conversation which went like this:

Tor folk: Hey, were you planning to go to SDCC?

Me: No, because at this point it’s waaaay too much work. If you want me to go, you have to do everything.

Tor folk: Okay, we’ll get back to you.

And then I didn’t think about it again until my Tor folks told me I was going; I didn’t think they would make it work, because it’s SDCC, so why expend brain cycles on it. So I came into SDCC sideways, which meant I wasn’t paying attention like I should.

This is not me blaming Tor for anything, incidentally; Tor folks know I have my policy with respect to conventions (they know because I told them), but they also quite reasonably assume I pay attention to these things and would have given them heads up if there was a conflict. If there’s a conflict, it’s on me.

3. And is there a conflict? Well, I want to be able to say no — the SDCC’s Code of Conduct is clear harassment won’t be tolerated. But without the code of conduct offering guidance on what harassment is, I’m not going to lie, I’m feeling a bit squidgy about it. That’s something I’d want to see from any convention I am a guest at. It’s something SDCC, and all the conventions under the Comic-Con International umbrella, should have. It’s something I would ask for, if I had been directly asked by SDCC to be a guest. It’s something I should have paid more attention to.

4. With that said, here’s how I’m going to deal with this personally. I made a commitment to my publisher, and one should honor one’s commitments. SDCC says it won’t tolerate harassment, and I expect it will honor that commitment, too — I expect it wants to be seen letting harassment happen on its watch even less than I do. So I’ll be at SDCC this year, and am looking forward to seeing folks there.

With that said, again: providing clear guidance on what is harassing behavior is something SDCC should do — it’s not difficult to do, other comic cons do it, and it would help everyone who has to deal with this crap. So I think SDCC and Comic-Con International should add that into their Codes of Conduct (or even better, break it out under its own heading), and the sooner the better. I think it’s reasonable, and it’s something I look forward to seeing — and it’s something if I don’t see in the future, will matter to me, in terms of attendance.

Given that Wal-Mart’s business model is borrowed heavily from the supply chain management system pioneered by the same textile industry that brought you the Triangle Fire and Rana Plaza collapse, it’s hardly surprising that the company would then import the intimidation of pregnant women so common in Mexican maquiladoras and south Asian apparel factories. Wal-Mart could treat women with respect. But then it only does that with a group of workers it if makes for good PR:

After all, pregnant women are at the final analysis socially valuable and morally distinct as a category of person. They ensure the ongoing life of society, and do so at personal cost: sometimes great, sometimes minor. If Wal-Mart is willing to recognize the moral significance of veterans in those terms, why not pregnant women? The answer in that case would be to simply recognize pregnancy as a discrete category worthy of its own set of special labor protections not because pregnant workers offer any extra utility, but simply because pregnancy is a morally significant vocation.

And it won’t happen. Not because it couldn’t, but because Wal-Mart won’t sacrifice potential profit for the social value or moral import of a person unless it can be turned into a P.R. stunt. There is a reason that when Pope Francis speaks of a culture of death he also often speaks of economies of exclusion; the preference for profit over people and material objects over human life is a symptom of the melding of the two impulses, which are joined by a similar extreme undervaluing of life. Firms and the economy as a whole are here to serve humanity, not to be served by it; to reverse that order is to invite incredible harm, and Wal-Mart is in many senses the very manifestation of that injurious reversal.

And let’s face it, women workers will never offer the PR that a company like Wal-Mart wants because they are not valued highly enough in the broader society. Instead, Wal-Mart continues the exploitation of women workers that has marked low-wage industrial and now post-industrial work for two centuries.

The Rude Pundit doesn't write on weekends, generally, but he didn't want to let this week go by before commenting on a couple of things before we are immersed in a fresh vat of shit on Tuesday, after we consume our burgers and fancy-ass grilled corn on the cob on Monday. Besides, he felt leaving you with a beefcake photo was a lame way to end the week.

1. Regarding Ta-Nehisi Coates' article, "The Case for Reparations," just read it. Stop listening to everyone talking about it and just fuckin' read it. The Rude Pundit isn't a drooling Coates fan, but it's rare these days when a writer so succinctly, so admirably lays waste to virtually all conventional thinking. It provides white liberals all the ammunition they could ever want when their backwards ass racist fuck relatives show up at the barbecue and talk about African Americans. For non-conservative African Americans, goddamn, it's gotta be almost cathartic to have someone say what they've known from their life experience. Any time someone wants to pretend to argue that white privilege doesn't exist, they should be forced to eat every page of the printed copy of "The Case for Reparations." It's that good and that important.

2. The Rude Pundit hasn't read Glenn Greenwald's book, No Place to Hide, the story of how National Security Agency classified documents were given to Greenwald by Edward Snowden, so he can't comment on whether or not it's any good. But he thinks that if he wrote about it, he'd be able to separate the book from the importance of the events, as it seems Michael Kinsley was unable to do in his New York Times "review." Greenwald has already ripped Kinsley a new asshole (which would give him about twenty).

But let's just get this straight (again): Whether or not Greenwald is the biggest egotistical prickhole in the world has nothing to do with the story. The story is the story. Kinsley can go crazy on how much he hates Greenwald; that's fair game in a review of book that's ostensibly part-memoir, even if "self-righteous sourpuss" is one of the lamest, most priggish insults the Rude Pundit's come across in a while. It's when Kinsley expands to criticize the very act of leaking classified documents that he becomes a craven coward.

When Kinsley writes, "There are laws against government eavesdropping on American citizens, and there are laws against leaking official government documents. You can’t just choose the laws you like and ignore the ones you don’t like," he is essentially taking a shit on the American tradition of civil disobedience. Of course you can choose to ignore the laws you don't like. Sometimes the effect of that is to change the laws, like, oh, fuck, the Civil Rights Movement? And one of the things that happens when you ignore laws you don't like is that you are subject to punishment, which used to be arrest and a trial. What would happen if Edward Snowden came back to face charges? Would he even be allowed to present the evidence against him in court? Would he get the Manning treatment? Not for nothing, but exile is a pretty harsh punishment.

Kinsley and others who decry the revelation of the NSA's all-encompassing spying seem to subscribe to the incredibly fascistic idea that citizens shouldn't be kept informed about what the government they elected happens to be doing to them. That's more frightening than however self-righteous Glenn Greenwald might or might not be.

3. This blog didn't get around to commenting on this, but, holy fuck, did David Brooks really write in the Times this week that the United States should consider becoming more autocratic and less democratic? Well, at least that's being a great deal more honest than most conservatives.

People do know what a hyperlink is, I KNOW this.  I think I am wasting my time putting those links into posts, however — they are NOT clicked, the stories they tell that explain my position, my frustration.  Nobody wants to read that much, apparently.

It makes me wonder why the hell I bother; I link rather than plagiarize another blogger or news source.  But never mind.  Sound bites are obviously what is wanted.

Tagged: blogging, sound-bite-nibbled-to-death