Sophianotloren

Here have the 90s X-Men theme (otherwise known as THE X-Men theme) because I feel crappy and listening to it makes me feel better and therefore I must share. >_>

Just 7 percent of journalists are Republicans. That’s far fewer than even a decade ago.

BY CHRIS CILLIZZA

May 6 at 12:52 pm

A majority of American journalists identify themselves as political independents although among those who choose a side Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one, according to a new study of the media conducted by two Indiana University professors. Write Lars Wilnat and David Weaver, professors of journalism at Indiana, of their findings:

Compared with 2002, the percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who claim to be Democrats has dropped 8 percentage points in 2013 to about 28 percent, moving this figure closer to the overall population percentage of 30 percent, according to a December 12-15, 2013, ABC News/Washington Post national poll of 1,005 adults. This is the lowest percentage of journalists saying they are Democrats since 1971. An even larger drop was observed among journalists who said they were Republicans in 2013 (7.1 percent) than in 2002 (18 percent), but the 2013 figure is still notably lower than the percentage of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican Party (24 percent according to the poll mentioned above).

...

...

ELLISON: Quite frankly you are the worst excuse for a journalist I have ever seen.

HANNITY:  I can’t hear you.

ELLISON: You heard me.

HANNITY: No, say it again.

ELLISON: I heard you — what you just displayed was not journalism, it was yellow journalism, it wasn’t anything close to try to tell the American people what’s really going on and I mean, it’s just shocking.

HANNITY: Yellow journalism, to play Obama in his own words is yellow journalism.

ELLISON: With the background music and the lead up before you let the president talk. Let me tell you, I was here. Everything the president said is absolutely true.

HANNITY: Yeah.

ELLISON: And for you to try to make the American people make you think it isn’t is deceptive on your part and is a breach of everything, every journalistic ethic I heard of was just violated by you. And the president was truthful. The president was honest. What the president said was dead on accurate and for you to say the president is to blame here is ridiculous. I was there August, 2011 when the Republicans, your party, which you shamelessly …

HANNITY: I am not a Republican

ELLISON: You are nothing but a Republican.

... Levin said when it's time to govern, Republican establishment politicians "jettison" their positions and promises made on the campaign trail.

He also blasted those in the chattering class who were once liberals, hated and did not support Ronald Reagan, and who mock constitutional conservatives, just like the liberal hippies and poets they are, choosing to work with Republican establishment operatives to trash conservatives.

Levin reminded his audience that in 2006, "George W. Bush and his right-hand political hack Karl Rove lost the House of Representatives and the United States Senate."

He said nothing good was happening within the Republican party until 2010 when the people "rose up through the grassroots" after they had enough of George W. Bush's policies and the direction Obama was taking the nation after the election.

Levin, whose book Liberty and Tyranny sold a million copies without being reviewed by mainstream outlets and who was a precursor of the Tea Party movement, said the Tea Party tidal wave in 2010 was not fueled by lobbyists or establishment consultants. Instead, he called it a "spontaneous movement of patriotic Americans with conservative beliefs"--individuals who were fed up with the overreach of Democrats who controlled Congress.

"Did the Republican Party stop them? No. You stopped them," Levin thunderously declared...

...

I guess they had some people with meters that were being used to register their reaction to what they were hearing, and I noted that the independent and Republican lines tracked identically. When there was a positive reaction to whatever was being said, the independents and Republicans were perfectly aligned. There was not a gap between them. When there was anger or disagreement with whatever was being said, the Republican and independent lines tracked identically, with very little space between them.

I think there's been a fundamental shift in who the independents are. I think the independents of today are, in many cases (and maybe a majority now), former Republicans who are fed up. They're actually conservatives, former Republicans who feel disconnected from the Republican Party as it's defined by the establishment. They have simply given up the party ID. They simply registered as independents.

...

If you're just joining us, I actually apologized to independents today for getting it wrong 'cause I think now what's happened, the vast majority of the independents are Republicans who have left the party in one way or another.

... And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

The movement toward independent status among reporters is in keeping with a similar move in the broader electorate as they find the two parties increasingly rigid and, therefore, less welcoming.

Rob Ford, America thanks you.

Ford is behind the wheel and hammered. One constituent he calls that night recalls Ford slurring his words.
The Star has heard audio of Ford and Bellissimo talking and both are slurring. (The Star has interviewed people who say it is nothing for Ford to down a 40-ouncer of vodka. The man who recorded the audio of Ford at Sully Gorman’s bar two weeks ago told the Star Ford’s ability to drink shots of tequila is “incredible.”)

Ford has two ways of communicating as he drives — his cellular phone and his Onstar device, a General Motors product that acts as a cellphone. During one call as he drives that night, Ford is recorded as saying the following about Jews, blacks and Italians:

“Nobody sticks up for people like I do, every f—ing k–e, n—-r, f—ing w-p, d-go, whatever the race. Nobody does. I’m the most racist guy around. I’m the mayor of Toronto.”

O:  My inbox is filled with such nice anons today. :) 

I am super flattered! ^^;;;

*accepts hugs*

Yeah. :\  And it’s hard when you start to worry if you are capable of something “better” and if the other thing is “better” or would make you more credentialed or something, and you worry people are tsking you for not taking it and achieving your “potential” :(  I always feel very insecure about the lack of letters, and that I can’t really say off the bat anything about me that makes people take me seriously?  So this is playing into that I guess.

…that the WordPress phone application ALWAYS seems to suck?  I find I have to delete the damned thing about every six weeks and re-load it to have any success with it at all.

The latest glitchy bit?  People I’ve never ever heard of seem to appear on my ‘reader’ function as if I had “followed” them, when in fact I did nothing of the sort.

This is especially annoying when it is someone bleating about how SICK they are of hearing how “toxic” the monotheistic religions are, when actually “They are NOT toxic at all, it is the ABUSE that makes it look that way.”  Well, you know, I just don’t know — when Lot wanted to toss his young daughters out to be chew/sex toys for a mob, that seemed pretty much “by the Book” AND toxic as hell.

That argument reminds me mightily of the crowd screaming that guns don’t kill people.  Perhaps both monotheistic religions AND guns just attract a lot of abusive sons of bitches, eh? If only I could find a “delete” button for THAT!

Tagged: blogging, smart phones, technology, wordpress

The New Yorker pulled this from Pushkin’s “The Wagon of Life;” it contains swearing:

At dawn we jump inside the wagon.
Happy to break our necks like glass,
We scorn life’s hedonistic languor,
And yell “Man, fuck it! Just haul ass!”

It’s not by accident they chose this particular passage. Swearing is close to the heart of Russian culture, and as inextricably embedded in Russian art as labor—close enough, in fact, to have its own name: Mat. Mat comes from the verb materit, to scold one’s mother. It refers to the four base linguistic ingredients of the hardest Russian swearing, of which there are “thousands of variations and elaborations.” As of July 1st, 2014, these words were outlawed from Russian theatre, music, and movies.

Related Posts:

• “The Czar and the Poet”
• Swearing Firsts in the New Yorker
• Pitt on Parker
• Politics Sunday
• Traveling with Zweig

Imagine that your travel agent calls you and says, “Hey, it’s all set — pick up your tickets and off you go!”  Being a bit surprised, you ask, “Where am I going?” Your agent laughs and says “It’s a surprise!”

Do you go?  Do you just throw caution to the winds and pack you bags?  Clue: you already did.  The difference in a pagan life?  You don’t have a map as allegedly precise as the dominant paradigm religions advertise for your use.

Every life is a journey, several types of journey, actually.  My spiritual journey began when I was a child.  The first parts were certainly not my idea…less to do with spirituality and more to do with formal religion.   I was mysteriously sent, as a child, to “Vacation Bible School” by my atheist mother.  There, a scary red-lipped woman with giant tits that looked like twin prows of a catamaran battleship loomed over us holding a coconut lamb cake “because Jesus was the ‘lamb of God’, children” and told us if sin blackened our hearts, God wouldn’t want our filthy hearts or any other part of us.  Yum, right?  I still don’t eat coconut cake.  Nor anything shaped like a lamb except actual lamb.

Then when I was 13, my father decided I was going to be his proxy Mormon so he could clean up on Mormon aid to our financially ailing family.  That was a mixed bag, I wondered how so many sweet people could be stupid enough to believe the alternative history of the Book of Mormon when there was absolutely no history to support it — great horse battles in the New World, for instance, where no horses existed in the pre-Columbian era.  But it was a sound business decision on my dad’s part and kept us alive and fed through some hard times.  Ah, the uses of organized religion.

But later, far from the Mormon-villes of Idaho; I read a white-clad Bible that was the gift of  my deceased Grandmother from years before.  Crazy book, I thought — it contradicts itself all over the place.  It has tons of “do as I say, not as I do”, too.   And women get treated like shit.  I’d sit in my bedroom and look across the back yard to a small wooden church where the bells no longer rang –across the street from that wee Catholic Church was the home of the town banker.  He was a notorious drunk and didn’t like the bells on the two Sunday mornings a month when a visiting priest did Mass.

I’d been to church with Christian friends of several Protestant stripes; the services all struck me as some sort of group hysteria.  The Catholic Mass sounded so peaceful by comparison, curiosity consumed me.  I surreptitiously studied the history of the “Roman” Church.  And Buddhism.  And Judaism.  I seriously considered conversion to Judaism — mistakenly (I WAS a teen!) thinking it the oldest extant religion. But after leaving home at 17, finding no synagogues in Kansas, I compromised; took Catholic instruction and joined the eldest Christian church available to me.  Apparently, I was something of a natural Platonist — wanting to stay as close to the perceived source as I could, ignoring “copies”!  Learning from within something always seemed the best way to me; later, to my delight, I found a historical hero who had done the same: Sir Richard Burton.  He explored several religions from within and may have been a practicing Sufi for a significant time of his life.

Seventeen must be a significant number for me in some fashion — I kept, at least publicly, the  Catholic”faith” for the next seventeen years in spite of feeling no connection whatsoever to “Gentle Jesus.”  There were always things that had given me pause from the start.  I must have had a core of “pagan” from the start, because I simply ignored those things, analyzing them as mere political attributes of a religious system and thereby not applicable.

The mass struck me, even in post-Vatican II English, as something sweet and magical.  And when I was a Eucharistic minister and lifted a chalice to the lips of communicants?  It seemed an unidentifiable electricity ran through that cup to my very heart.  There was a power there that I could neither define, nor deny.  But my journey moved on, other “winds” filled my spiritual sails even as I was enjoying the very public professions of Catholic life in Catholic Bavaria, Germany.

Dreams that felt more real than life came night after night in the wake of an emotional  family trauma, coincidentally after the birth of my final child.  These dreams, both waking and sleeping, filled me with a kind of bliss and seemed to hold an entirely new-to-me paradigm that did not depend on falling prostrate before a deity, begging as “wretches”.  They filled me instead with inspiration and a sense of personal power and responsibility.

It still took me almost ten years to stop feeling I was insane, or going that way at warp speed, and come out to my family when I could no longer participate at our Jesuit parish on even a socio-political level once Pope John Paul II said his ex-cathedra rulings trumped human conscience.  Once I realized there was a thriving neo-pagan community, I explored — and (sigh) ultimately stayed on my own solitary path.  It has been twenty years since I publicly declared my paganism.  It is my journey, I learn the ways by walking it — and even those things I leave in my wake teach me something about myself, where I am going and what will or will not get me to wherever “there” is located.  Not all who wander are lost…I am a pilgrim of life.  I may not know the final destination, but there are delicious hints now and again — and the trip itself is really more the point. And as a bonus?  On this trip — lost baggage is a GOOD thing!

Tagged: forced conversions, pagan blog project, pagan life, religion

So, a Florida man who became a Satanist to antagonize his fellow Floridians is demanding to be allowed to open a city council meeting by hailing Satan.

That’s now allowed, because the Supreme Court said that hailing Satan — or any religious invocation, for that matter — doesn’t necessarily represent a state endorsement of a particular religion.*

The Montana Attorney General just agreed with the spirit of that decision when he claimed that Flathead National Park’s “Big Mountain Jesus” statue isn’t necessarily a religious symbol, which opens the door to establishing a “shrine” to “Big Mountain Satan.”

Would that I were a sculptor — or graphic designer — as obviously talented as the person responsible for “Big Mountain Jesus,” I would be all over creating “Big Mountain Satan.” But, alas, I am not!

*Which is the equivalent of people on Twitter claiming that links aren’t endorsement, which means the Court’s as sophisticated as people on Twitter, about which the-less-thought-about-the-better.

I am often flummoxed by the rationale of the Religious Right.  They often call themselves “Conservative” — but conserve nothing whatsoever.  Back in about 1985, my eldest son was in Cub Scouts on an Army base in Bad Tolz, Germany.  I really disliked the leaders of the troop — a married couple of rather extreme Fundamentalist stripe.  In their quarters, when the occasional meeting was held there, I observed absolute FILTH.  Her children jumped on the Army owned (and lent to them) furniture and generally acted as if they were raised by rabid hyenas.  I finally asked her if she wasn’t at least worried about paying for damages to quarters or furniture.

“Why, no,” she told me, “All this stuff is just material and not important since we will all go to heaven.”  Riiight.  Why didn’t I think of that?  Oh, yes, I know — because even if that was a myth you wanted to invest your death unto, you don’t know WHEN and the military will take the damages right out of your paycheck.  Affecting stuff like, oh, I don’t know, money for groceries so death by hunger does not ensue?

I stopped letting my son attend any meeting held at that home and we got much more active in order to present a different paradigm to the boys of the troop. And before anyone asks why I let my son go to such a youthful fascist organization?  Cub Scouts was ‘it’ — all my children experimented with clubs, sports, etc that their friends were in and made their own decisions.  Both of my sons had plenty in barely over one year of uniforms and badges.

But sadly, I note this theme played larger and larger as the world somewhat literally prepares to “burn”.  And having read their Bible, it makes no damned sense to me at all; so why does it make sense to them?  Do they really think Jesus is going to sweep down like Superman to rescue them from the horrors that will ensue with global climate change?  Isn’t that just a wee bit hubristic to assume that he will hold them all blameless and adjust the calendar of his apocalypse to coordinate with the folly of mankind? Because that just is NOT what I read in their book.

Apparently?   I am not the only one who read it that way; finally, one of their own, so to speak has said maybe they should take another look at that peculiar brand of evangelical logic. I’d like to say this comforts me somewhat, but it does not.  There are too many idiots believing bedtime stories, believing they will somehow magically (and I am the one who supposedly believes in magic?!) be immune.  And it may be far too late to mitigate the main effects.  It’s going to be a long hard slog.  But the wise words of the woman saying “Hey, that is NOT what the Good Book said.” might be useful to use ON the idiots.

Tagged: ecology, religion

I have read all but four books on this list.  And while I know this was an AARP list?  I do think the list is rather narrow.  Nor do I agree that all the books are great.   Popular, yes…but great?  Meh… I HATED “Anna Karenina” — but fair disclosure, I pretty much hate Tolstoy anyhow.  (For the record, describing adultery as ‘fun’ never occurred to me, either.)

I’ve not read # 12, 13, 14, or 18.  I’m not much of a Stephen King fan — to me, he begins well and ends lazily.  And I don’t like books about the Civil War –”Andersonville” was excellently enough to end my time in that genre of history, thank you.

I find this a very short list, frankly.  I find the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” more than a bit trite.  If I were to submit a sci-fi?  It would be Herbert’s “Dune” or Lessing’s “Canopus in Argos: Archives”.  And no Dostoyevsky?  Seriously, that is some light-minded omission!

Tagged: books

Awww.  Thank you, mysterious stranger. :)  I hope I can make it work for me.  I vacillate between believing I can do it and having no faith in myself because of how many things have gone sideways in my life lately. :(  I appreciate the kind words though. :*)

You anons today. >_> 

It’s hard though, because it seems really scary… like… I keep worrying every decision I make is wrong, and maybe I should just do things that people think are better for me?  But then a large part of my life got screwed up by doing what other people wanted me to do and be rather than doing what I wanted, and that included the first time I went to school.  Taking this allows me to take the path I passed up last time (and didn’t even seriously consider b/c it was just so de facto that I was going to do the other thing b/c that’s just what I was expected to do) and also be able to mix it with the career path I’ve already started in my current work, so it should be the best of both worlds.  It’s just that it’s a thing that people aren’t as familiar with, so when I tell people they go “that doesn’t sound useful/important/smart/etc” and then I get worried. :\

Thank you so much for the nice ask though. :)

You know, people who run sites you like sometimes get busy.  They’re human beings who are doing this on their own free time?  They could be working, or on vacation, or stressed, or tired, or having an anxiety attack, or a billion other things.  If they don’t respond to you right away, just wait?  Or ask politely if they’ve seen your email, don’t yell at them or get really passive aggressive about how much they suck and how obviously they don’t care about their fans?

This is a round up of current projects that need funding or support.

1. Abundant Bodies Track at the Allied Media Conference

The Abundant Bodies track at the AMC this summer needs your help to support the work of fat activists with their workshops and activist organizing.

I’m part of two different sessions but there are so many amazing workshops and other activists who are coming to Detroit to talk about fat politics over the weekend. They all need financial support to not only get to the conference but also for lodging and other expenses over the weekend.

via the funding campaign,

Some of the most well-known fat activists (including Dr. Charlotte Cooper, Amanda Levitt, Virgie Tovar) will be sharing their brilliance alongside up and coming young qtpoc fatties. Some of the topics and issues folks are exploring include race & fat activism, the “dangers” of excessive selfie consumptions, exploring fat & kink, building an inclusive fat community, body autonomy vs. body positivity, reimagining desirability, fat activism for unruly people, and so much more!

From the program guide:

ln this track we will gather, share and celebrate the wisdom and abundance of our bodies. Abundant/thick/fat bodies are the target of so much hate, policing and negativity, even in our organizing communities. How do we unlearn mainstream ideas of what a body should look like and (re)-learn to celebrate the diversity, resilience, wisdom and beauty of all bodies? This track will explore these questions and create spaces to challenge the ongoing ways mainstream media shames and harms abundant bodies, to name fatphobia in our organizing and activism, and to create media and practical strategies for resistance, healing and community building. We will broaden the conversation around fat activism by centering this track on the voices of Indigenous, Black, people of color, dis/abled, super-sized, trans and queer fat folks. Through workshops, panels and skillshares we will transform mainstream ideas around abundant bodies and create resilient communities, media and art centered around abundant bodies!

Please support and share this campaign! There are a ton of awesome perks for donating too!

2. Suport a Fat Art Exhibition!

Second Helping Exhibition and Performance Fatinee is raising funds for their event!

Second Helpings is a group visual art exhibition, a “fatinee” of multidisciplinary performance, and a queer intervention into American popular culture’s understanding of the fat body as a deviant body. Exhibiting artists fight the stigmatization of fat bodies, radically re-envision the notion of body diversity, and destabilize deeply embedded hierarchies of desire.

Second Helpings features works in many media by 20+ visual artists, and 8 solo and ensemble performances. Selected works deconstruct and reassess body politics to foster a collective understanding of fatness that empowers and heals fat-bodied people emotionally, sexually and politically.

A new theatrical work humorously addresses the correlation between body shame and cultural imperialism. A 5-piece band named after pastries snacks ritualistically onstage. A debut video work explores racialized and gendered experiences of fat-phobia. A chubby drag queen pushes back on the ways her body is treated as a dystopian object of desire. Come ravenous. Help yourself.

3. Help the Fat Nutritionist become a registered dietitian.

Michelle aka the Fat Nutritionist is raising money for an unpaid dietetic internship so she can become a registered dietitian. 

Becoming a Registered Dietitian will allow me to offer clinical nutrition counseling — as well as the Health at Every Size approach — and will also make me a powerful voice in the fight to end weight stigma. 

To become a dietitian, I must complete an unpaid dietetic internship. 

Internships are difficult to get into, require a more-than-full-time commitment, and offer no financial aid to interns. In March, I was lucky (THRILLED, ELATED, OVER THE MOON) to be accepted to a 9-month internship that starts in September 2014. 

Now I need to raise money to help me actually do it!

$7,000 is less than I need, but I’m trying to set an achievable goal. My stretch goal is about $10,300, which would cover the costs of the campaign itself, as well as my internship. The money is for tuition, transportation, professional membership/insurance fees, and 9 months of living expenses.

Any money raised over this amount (plus the cost of new perks and taxes) will be donated to an as-yet-undecided good cause.

She has already raised her original goal amount of the extra funds will help her time during the internship easier.

4. Support a fat positive movie about fat representation in the media

The move Fattitude has been running a kickstarter campaign since the beginning of April and have already reached their funding goal. They could still use more funding to make the movie even better.

Support as many fat community projects that you can! If can’t donate with money, donate with your voice and share this post around your own social networks!

As always, connect with me on tumblr and twitter.

I’m back to being torn between taking something so my mom will be happy and taking something I like but my mom sees as a waste of everything and shaking her head at what a failure I am.

Yay I am 18 again.

The government using kid gloves with Cliven Bundy has just encouraged others in the West to step up their aggression against government land managers. First, Utah:

After two armed men threatened a Bureau of Land Management wrangler on Tuesday in western Utah, workers are removing BLM logos from their vehicles to help avoid additional incidents, the Salt Lake Tribune reported on Thursday.

The wrangler was driving on a highway near Mills, Utah when two people in a pick-up truck pulled up along side the vehicle. The occupants “told him he was No. 1 with that certain gesture,” Eric Reid, the wrangler’s supervisor at the BLM Fillmore Field Office, told the Tribune.

The men then reappeared in the pick-up truck a few minutes later wearing hoods and holding up a sign that read, “You need to die.” One of the men pointed a Glock handgun at the wrangler.

And then, New Mexico:

The water is drying up, making every stream worth a fight.

Ranchers in Otero County are wrangling with the Forest Service over a patch of land where a creek called Agua Chiquita runs.

The Forest Service says it built a new, sturdy fence to keep cattle away from a recovering river habitat, but cattlemen say the new fence and locked gates infringe on long-standing water rights.

The battle goes beyond a single stream and the single ranching family directly affected, say ranchers and county officials, and rests on the principle that even on federal land, ranchers holding water rights dating to before 1907 – as often happens in Otero County – should have access to the water, including the portion downstream of the fenced-in area.

The Forest Service says it has a right to manage the land, including where water flows.

After the Forest Service refused to open the gates, the Otero County commissioners this week demanded the sheriff cut the locks, potentially igniting a confrontation on the order of Nevada’s Cliven Bundy, the rancher who has rallied armed supporters in a fight against federal land managers. So far cooler heads have prevailed in New Mexico.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office has agreed to mediate the conflict next week, according to Otero County attorney Blair Dunn and a spokeswoman for Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M. The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment.

“I really, truly believe the U.S. Attorney is going to be able to facilitate this in a fashion that prevents it from escalating to what happened in Nevada,” Dunn said. “That is where things feel like they are headed.”

Well, we will see about that.

The increased aggression of these angry white men in the rural West is quite worrisome. I know no one wants another Ruby Ridge or Waco but at the same time, government land managers are going to start getting injured or killed if it becomes clear to rural westerners that they can intimidate without consequence. Some sort of these people are just jokers and bullies, but a continued escalation of aggression will probably not end well.

There’s a special secret sin to desiring an ugly man. I don’t mean someone mediocre with a few too many pounds around the middle. I mean someone truly ugly. Bones that refuse the grace of symmetry. Skin ravaged by early acne or one of those fevers one hardly ever hears of any more. Or scars that pull unintentional expressions, cut through eyebrows, pucker muscles into novel crevices. Burns that leave their shiny, lacy traces. Ugliness beyond the reparation of make-up or surgery.

There was a curious thrill in the fact that this man would never be cast in a television show or a film. Not even in a reality TV show about ugly people. His ugliness was beyond the garnering of sympathy.  He’d never grace the page of a magazine or a website as an example of ‘everyman’ or even as marginally ‘unfortunate’ man. Although Dario Argento might have, at one time, hired him for the minor role of the nameless undertaker who’d fucked one too many corpses.

He was medievally ugly. As if that ancient belief that the sins of the soul really did reveal themselves on the body and this man had spent his entire life committing indescribable atrocities.

I wanted him instantly and beyond reason. I wanted to kiss that face so wrong that no sane person would kiss it. I wanted those wrecked hands on me. Each knuckle misshapen from too much work and too much breakage. The skin on their backs riddled with tendons and veins. I imagined them on my skin, on my hips, on my breasts. Gripping and tugging and clutching. Those crippled, bent fingers sunk into me.

I looked at him and immediately I was wet. And then, in a blink of an eye, he was gone.

“Never mind,” I thought. “I’ll find you again.”  There are so few of you left in this world.

I’ve long thought GMOs were the most overrated scary issue current liberals care about. But I never quite had the right words. Mark Bittman does:

Then there are G.M.O.’s: OMG (the palindrome is irresistible). Someone recently said to me, “The important issues are food policy, sustainability and G.M.O.’s.” That’s like saying, “The important issues are poverty, war and dynamite.” G.M.O.’s are cogs in industrial agriculture, the way dynamite is in war; take either away, and you have solved virtually nothing.

By themselves and in their current primitive form, G.M.O.s are probably harmless; the technology itself is not even a little bit nervous making. (Neither we nor plants would be possible without “foreign DNA” in our cells.) But to date G.M.O.’s have been used by companies like Monsanto to maximize profits and further removing the accumulated expertise of generations of farmers from agriculture; in those goals, they’ve succeeded brilliantly. They have not been successful in moving sustainable agriculture forward (which is relevant because that was their claim), nor has their deployment been harmless: It’s helped accelerate industrial agriculture and its problems and strengthened the positions of unprincipled companies.

But the technology itself has not been found to be harmful, and we should recognize the possibility that the underlying science could well be useful (as dynamite can be useful for good), particularly with greater public investment and oversight.

Let’s be clear: Biotech in agriculture has been overrated both in its benefits and in its dangers. And by overrating its dangers, the otherwise generally rational “food movement” allows itself to be framed as “anti-science.”

Right–technology is neither a miracle nor evil. GMOs are part of the larger problem with modern agribusiness but it’s not like monstrous Frankenfood is going to destroy your body or put chips in your brain so that Obama can follow your thoughts. The actual evidence that GMOs are harmful is pretty much nil and while I do think there are problems around patents and non-reproducing plants that are serious, this is one left of center issue I just can’t relate to.

The universe continues to be heavy-handed in its satire:

The most Republican-leaning company in the country, based on political donations, isn’t Koch Industries. It’s the company that makes Wonder Bread.

The political action committee of Flowers Foods, a Georgia company that produces the pillowy sandwich bread, Tastykakes and Nature’s Own baked goods, has given more than 99 percent of its political contributions since 1979 to Republicans. Only three Democratic congressional candidates have gotten money from its PAC since 1984, and not one in the past 20 years.

 

bhryn:

summonerseina:

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even one or two notes make me happy

Stupidly, this is also how I feel about a lot of posts I write. >_>  I take likes very seriously. :(

I’ve decided to choose a program that seems like I would enjoy it and get a lot out of it, rather than just one that sounds more “official” and better on a resume.

*deep breaths*

“Twilight has problems with misogyny and with abusive relationships. I don’t want to sugar-coat that. But if you, dear reader, are going around saying that Twilight is proof that girls are all stupid-heads who want a brooding vampire to stalk and abuse them, then you are being misogynistic.

In all my years of life, I have never heard anyone seriously speculate that the popularity of femme fatales in fiction means that all men secretly yearn for an abusive relationship; yet in the time since Twilight was released, I have heard the meme that all girls wish to be abused more times than I can count. This is a failure of understanding the difference between fantasy and reality, and it is a “failure” that conveniently props up existing misogynistic narratives about how women who stay with abusers stay because they secretly want to be abused rather than because they are groomed (by both their abuser and the larger society) to stay with their abuser, and because society does not empower them to leave. This is a comforting lie we tell ourselves because it’s easier to blame abuse victims than acknowledge that we are failing them.”

-

Ana Mardoll’s Ramblings: Twilight: Abuse and Attention (via michaelblume)

Yup.  All of this.  And people prefer to not analyze stuff like this in the broader context of how society normalizes power-imbalanced relationships between men and women as how things should be, and the conflation of male obsession/stalking/bullying as being proof of his love and interest (you see this even for kids “oh he just likes you” when boys hurt girls), and instead it’s just “oh girls just want it that’s all”.  And it doesn’t just serve in blaming women and girls for being abused, but also in constructing things so that boys and men are treated as almost confused victims when they abuse.  It’s what’s behind all the “girls just want a bad boy”, “girls want to be mistreated”, “I’m just trying to do what they want”, “I don’t know what girls want, they say one thing, but they want another”, and etc… where abusers and abuse apologists act as if men abusing women is just a confusion on the man’s part, and it’s just mixed signals, or she secretly wanted it, or how should he know better, or she didn’t date me because I was too nice, or etc etc etc… One of the big lies society constructs about dating is that it’s a women’s domain.  Women control sex, women control dating, women control everything and men are just floundering around trying to keep up with women.*  And this reframing of abuse as something women want is part of that.  Women are the ones who really want abuse and men are just struggling to keep up and how can you blame them for being so confused and lost and trying to keep women happy!  When the truth is it’s really about what THEY want (power, control, etc), and this is another flimsy justification.

(*this is also why MRAs and other misogynists try to reduce the entire world to being about dating and men wanting to impress/fuck women because society believes this is the one domain where women have all consuming power and control, and if they can make people believe everything boils down to that, therefore women are truly the ones in control of the world)

I found this in my twitter feed.

 

I can’t decide if it’s a great thing or the greatest thing currently on the Internet. One thing I do know is that Jonah Hill is a.) very rude and b.) dates women who seem to have a disorder that makes them unable to discern seasons.

No, but seriously, this is just awful in so many ways I hardly know where to begin snarking. (I do wonder if anyone at Reason knows that girls/women also play video games. Probably not.)

So instead of doing that, I guess I’ll talk about something a little more substantive: organized atheism taking up social causes. The skeptic/atheist blogosphere has been slightly abuzz with the topic lately.

To sum things up, some prominent members of the community think that taking up social causes will benefit it in two ways: 1.) it will draw more people of color/women/people who feel similarly disenfranchised by the community to atheism 2.) it will drive out the riffraff. (By riffraff, I, of course , mean young misogynists libertarians.)

I think the argument that atheism, technically, has little to do with social causes–outside of making sure people remain free of religious burden–is sound. It’s just that I can’t think of a downside of taking them up anyway. It seems like a win-win proposition to me.

HRH The Prince of Wales:  I’ve spent enough on you to build a battleship!
Lillie Langtry:  And you’ve spent enough in me to float one.

Once the “prostitute” was defined into existence as the lowest of the low in the late 19^th century, it became necessary for those who were emotionally invested in the concept to police the dividing line between whores and all other women.  If it was possible for a “fallen woman” to not only raise herself by her own efforts, but to do so without repenting her whoredom, she obviously was not someone any woman could look down upon; since the whole purpose of the definition was to provide such an exemplar, famous harlots became an embarrassment to the prohibitionists.  Such women’s harlotry therefore had to be ignored, rationalized or even denied so as to maintain the fiction that we are all monsters, criminals, victims or whatever other role the individual fanatic’s belief-system requires.  In the past few decades especially, whores who achieve fame and/or accomplishment that transcends their whoredom are routinely co-opted by prohibitionists, and most popular biographies either leave out the fact that they made a living on their backs or else sanitize it with words like “mistress” or “lover” in order to pretend that the arrangement was established for romantic reasons rather than economic ones.  And if a professional achieves greater and more lasting fame in some other career after her hooking days, the general practice nowadays is to omit her earlier means of support entirely.

Emilie Charlotte Le Breton was born on October 13, 1853, the only daughter of Rev. William Corbet Le Breton (Dean of Jersey) and his wife Emilie; though she had six brothers, only two survived childhood.  Emilie was a high-spirited girl who inherited her mother’s looks and her father’s temperament; he had numerous affairs and eventually resigned his post in disgrace several years after his daughter had left the island.  Being the only girl also contributed to her personality: she learned to handle males from a very early age, and was educated by her brothers’ tutor because she was far too rambunctious for a governess.  At the wedding of her brother William in autumn of 1873 she met the Irish landowner Edward Langtry, the 30-year-old widower of the bride’s older sister; Emilie was taken with his charm and apparent affluence and he dazzled her with (chaperoned) cruises on his yacht.  They were married on March 6^th, 1874, and he bought her a stately home in Jersey and a flat in London; unfortunately, Langtry was not as wealthy as he appeared to be, and her family’s dislike for him was so intense that when her beloved younger brother Reggie died in the spring of 1877, she hadn’t seen him in years.

After the funeral Emilie fell into a deep depression, and in an effort to cheer her Lord Ranelagh got her an invitation to a salon held by Lady Sebright and attended by a number of famous artists and literary figures.  Because she was still in mourning, she wore a simple black dress without jewelry and isolated herself in a quiet corner of the suite; but because she was both beautiful and charming this had the opposite effect of the one she was looking for.  She attracted the attention of a number of artists at the salon, among them Frank Miles (who had previously seen her at the theater and was very taken with her); Miles made several sketches that evening and raved about her beauty to everyone he knew.  By the end of the week the Langtrys were overwhelmed by invitations, Miles’ sketches had been sold and every photographer and painter in London wanted Emilie to model for him; the most famous of these portraits was A Jersey Lily by Millais, which not only spread her fame but gave her the nickname by which she would be known ever after:  Lillie.

Within weeks, she had come to the attention of the Prince of Wales, who asked to be seated next to her at a dinner party on May 24, 1877 and was soon spending legendary amounts of money on her; since this allowed a far more lavish lifestyle than he would otherwise have had, Langtry was content to go away on fishing trips while his wife entertained her royal patron.  Though His Highness was a noted womanizer, he became totally infatuated with Lillie and even built a house (now Langtry Manor Hotel) for them to tryst in; she became the closest thing to an official mistress as was possible in that time and place, and was even accepted by the Prince’s wife, Princess Alexandra (Queen Victoria, on the other hand, was said to have treated her rather coldly).  The relationship continued for two years, during which Lillie made many important friends; chief among them was Oscar Wilde, who later helped her launch the career for which she is known today.  And though it ended when Sarah Bernhardt captured the Prince’s eye in June of 1879, they parted on good terms and he later helped her on a number of occasions.

Lillie immediately became involved with the Earl of Shrewsbury, but that arrangement broke up the following January once rumors of divorce began to circulate and creditors started to hound her husband.  By April she had attracted another royal patron, Prince Louis of Battenberg, and when she found herself pregnant in June she told him that he was the father; however, she was also carrying on a romantic affair with Arthur Clarence Jones at the same time, so it’s possible that the child was his.  By this point the Langtrys were truly estranged; Edward went off on an extended fishing trip, leaving Lillie to deal with the bill collectors (which she did in October of 1880 by selling off many of the expensive gifts Prince Albert had given her).  She at first tried to hide the pregnancy by renting a cottage in Jersey, but soon realized a small community was the worst place to be; she then appealed to “Bertie” for help and he gave her some money and had her taken to Paris, where she and Jones lived until she gave birth to her daughter Jeanne Marie on March 8, 1881.

By autumn she had deposited the child in her own mother’s care and returned to London, where Wilde suggested she should take up acting.  He connected her to Henrietta Labouchere, a retired actress turned acting coach, and after one amateur production in November she was hired for a part in She Stoops to Conquer; though the critics were divided in their opinions, she had lost none of her charisma and the ever-supportive Prince of Wales made a point of attending several of her performances in order to draw attention to them.  Her popularity attracted enough investment to form her own company only a few months later, and she toured the UK for the rest of the year before landing a deal for an American tour in October – less than a year after she had started acting.  She was an even bigger hit in the US than she had been at home, and her box office receipts broke all previous records.  Nor had she entirely given up her previous career:  she found a new patron in the person of Freddie Gebhard, a multi-millionaire who bought her a townhouse in New York and a private railway carriage built to her specifications.  She eventually became a US citizen and divorced Edward Langtry in 1887, but though she and Gebhard remained together until 1891 they never married. He bought her a whole stable of thoroughbred horses, and she enjoyed modest success racing them; she also bought a vineyard and winery in California in 1888, and though she sold it in 1906 it still bears the name Langtry Farms.  She also sold endorsements for soap and cosmetics, becoming one of the first celebrities to do so.

In 1899, she married Hugo Gerald de Bathe, who became Lord de Bathe in 1907.  Though he was 19 years her junior, the relationship does not appear to have been the typical love match between an aging courtesan and a young lover, but rather a marriage of convenience contracted to get money for him and a title for her; when they retired to Monaco in 1917 he lived half an hour away in Nice, and they only saw each other on social occasions.  She continued acting right up until her retirement, at which time she also sold all of her horses and racing interests.  During her last decade her closest companion was Mathilde Peate, the widow of her butler; she had been estranged from her daughter since 1899, after Jeanne Marie’s fiancé had explained the truth about her parentage (which had been kept from her for eighteen years).  In the winter of 1929 Lillie contracted bronchitis and later influenza, dying on February 12^th at the age of 75; she left her entire fortune to her daughter, grandchildren and Mrs. Peate, and nothing at all to her husband.  She was buried in the churchyard of St. Savior’s Parish on Jersey, near the rectory in which she had grown up; though she had left early and wandered far in her eventful life, the Jersey Lily eventually returned to the soil of her beloved home, which her heart had never really left.

I had an alcoholic father.  And a co-dependent mother who physically abused me, the child “just like your father” because she couldn’t “get” at him.  He was a veteran, he self-medicated with booze for his unnamed-back-then ptsd — and for more, perhaps bi-polar disorder.  He often told us he would kill us all when he had “enough” of this world.  And my mother used that threat to keep me in line, I wouldn’t want to be the one who set him off, now would I?

So, to read of a veteran dead by gunshot, at the hands of his own desperate son, protecting his mother and his siblings?  Is to be haunted and heartbroken.   How many more are out there, slowly winding their way to a madness that drives everyone in the family down the same road of brokenness?

My father died in 1997, of gunshot by his own hand.  He was too many days drive away to reach me or my family, or even his presumably closer ex-wife and my estranged siblings.  But his death left a mark anyway.

Tagged: alcoholism, child abuse, marriage, ptsd, war

To follow up to Erik’s post, Amanda Hess has a comprehensive roundup of the labor grievances of NFL cheerleaders. In addition to the low pay and huge amounts of unpaid labor required, there’s the humiliating amount of body micromanagement. It’s an outrageous set of practices.

As it happens, I’ve been reading Nicholas Dawidoff’s Collision Low Crossers, which shows similar things about coaching assistants, who are asked to work hours like BigLaw associates for almost nothing. This extremely profitable, generously taxpayer-subsidized league could actually pay all of these people well, but they exploit because they can.

Of course, I’m sure that all these labor cost savings that accrue to the NFL’s benevolent overlords are passed on to the fans, as so many credulous sportswriters have assured me…

Several years ago, there was a case of a pedophile mutilating a young boy.  Oh, my the press furor was something to see.  It got more coverage than I had ever seen about pedophiles doing horrible things to little girls.

But then, that is a real thing, it seems.  The lives of women and girls seem to rate so much less attention than the lives of men and boys.  Monotheism has male gods, and all maleness thereby is sacralized.  All things female are therefore not holy, not sacred — all the weaker vessel shit ensues on every level of society.

Women are scapegoated for being sexual temptations.  Breastfeeding is denigrated if done in public because we might inflame passions of some dude with a penchant for baby bottles being reserved for grown men? Meanwhile, male breasts can be publicly exposed — what if it turns of women?  Well, obviously, who gives a good damn if WE are sexually aroused, eh?  It doesn’t really SHOW, after all — no throbbing pants-fronts on us, right?

It has boggled my mind for years how men occasionally (or is it often?) can kill a wife and get very little time in jail — less than the average black kid gets for selling marijuana in most states!  And yet, women who kill abusive husbands?  Oh, my — that dangerous bitch is obviously out of her goddamned mind, keep her locked up forEVER so she can never threaten a violent, rape-minded son-of-a-bitch again!  Because, hey, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.  And the little woman should take it like a good girl?

So, why should a man who killed an old woman who was “abusive” be out of jail so soon?  Well, she just hit ALL the witch-hunts-of-old criteria, his victim.  She was a widow, she was rich, she annoyed her neighbors; sure and the old bitch had it coming, no?  And he was “well liked” in his community.  He committed murder upon a woman over thirty years his senior.  And this case was deemed fit to make a comedy film?  So, yes, killing a grouchy old woman is now comedy.  Terrific.  His community thinks the murder victim was “not so nice”…but her killer was “polite and generous”?

America’s alleged “justice” system can get back to me when the women who killed husbands who had beat the shit out of them for years are all set free as soon….

THIS is what comes of worshiping a deity of one gender.  Sure, the theologians all say the Divine has no ‘real’ gender — but all the pictures are sure male and bearded, eh?  There is no SHEsus on the cross of their faith, is there?  Woman’s place is on her knees, on her back…because if there is nothing divine AND feminine, then women deserve nothing more?

I’ll just stick to seeing whatever divinity I can perceive or imagine as being both, thank you. After all, if I only thought of goddesses, I might think it was ok to batter, rape, rob, and murder men like the mad dogs some of them are….

And then?  In Texas, where damn near everyone owns a gun, a police officer shoots a very aged black lady when showing up to a 9-1-1 call at her home, because hey, women, one supposes, cannot be armed.  Where is the equality when a female house-holder cannot be armed?

Tagged: abuse, blame-the-victim, feminism, justice, male-exceptionalism, murder, rape, rape culture, sexism

shunnedunicorns:

Each white actress has more confirmed projects than every single black actress put together. Are these three at the bottom that much better at movies? If you’re thinking “Maybe these black women aren’t as good at acting as Kristen Stewart, Julianne Moore, and Jessica Chastain.” Okay, but if that’s true, then why do Halle Berry, Jennifer Hudson and Lupita Nyong’o each have acting Oscars then?

What do you think is going on with Hollywood behind the camera that even after these women have made it, they still may be struggling to shine in the way that they should be?

"Ami, I’ve never heard anybody talk about policy and make it so accessible."

- somebody to me about a trans inclusive consultation I just did for their shelter

:D