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ANGRY LETTERS: brilliant, especially the ones to the NME and RSPB.
Archive for January, 2009
links for 2009-01-31
January 31, 2009
links for 2009-01-30
January 30, 2009-
Up a flight of stairs, around a corner. No more paperwork. Now it gets personal: two tons of human hair behind glass. Mounds on mounds, amorphous and hard to take in at first, until you focus and see the pigtails and braids. Jarek remarks that they were going to send some of this to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, but in the end it was declined as “too much.” The hair was shorn after the gassings, then efficiently dried in the crematoria so it could be industrially spun into carpeting.
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From their shared loathing of Rahm Emanuel to the insurgency led by the minority leader (“he took us by the throat”), the inside story of why not a single House Republican supported the president’s stimulus package.
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Compare and contrast: Bush signing Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act; Obama signing Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
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Research reveals that one in four local authorities in Britain offer no specialised services for women who have faced violence or abuse, and shows that a quarter of those rape crisis centres that are still operating believe they will either have to close or radically cut services in 2009.
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ARMADILLO
links for 2009-01-29
January 29, 2009-
The original Star Trek only managed to make 80 episodes before running out of Dilithium. Not enough! So we mixed up the show's most frequent plot twists, to create a foolproof Trek story generator.
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The idea is to think three times before you post on a massively sensitive topic, and to include the thought of, "Does what I'm going to say here have horrible connotations in this context?" If it does… say something else!
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Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give "credit" to God, Attenborough added: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."
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And Lenny is sat there, trying not to show how shocked and upset he is. How much that word hurts him. Because it does. It hurts him badly. (Immediately after that scene he talks about how it made him feel, and I'm afraid I can't remember any more precisely than he was really, really upset).
None of those men in that Pub intent to hurt Lenny. None of them decided to use that word because they wanted to show "what they really thought of him". But it did. It did hurt him, it did upset him. And I hope that if any of those men watched the programme after it aired, they had the balls to write to him and say I'm sorry and I know better now.
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As someone who bought her little sister a chemistry set last month: fuck you, Dangerous Book for Boys!
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photos from throughout GWB's terms.
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We have a problem. That problem is racism. That problem is that the vast majority of books in our field are written by, edited by, and published by white people. The vast majority of TV shows in our genre are written by, directed by, and produced by white people. Most of these books, movies, and TV shows star white people and feature people of color only in secondary and stereotypical positions, if at all. Cons are attended largely by white people. Sf/f discussions online take place largely in white spaces. Attempts to discuss race, cultural appropriation, racism, or racially inflected power disparities, whether American or global, invariably end up discussions of the hurt feelings of white people.
links for 2009-01-28
January 28, 2009-
The results confirm, yet again, that there is essentially no difference between “real” acupuncture and sham acupuncture. All that talk about meridians and Qi really is so much mumbo jumbo.
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Newsflash, dudes: when every single other reporter on every other network is saying the same thing, you’re not the special snowflake you think you are.
And stop fucking re-writing history out of your imagination. We’ve been saying for many many months that the dude isn’t the epitome of progressivism, isn’t a feminist in shining armour, isn’t going to deliver us from evil.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer reports,” Soon after Tyson, a retired computer technician, was elected mayor in this rural community of 2,700, he said he received a dozen phone calls and several e-mails warning he was being watched and labeling him a dead man, using a racist epithet.
No arrests were made, and investigators said the caller or callers in 2007 used untraceable disposable phones. His tires were also slashed and his lawn sign was defaced with "KKK."
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The highest of high speculative fiction? That'll be Doris Lessing, I reckon. A take on old Icelandic myths? Betsy Tobin with Ice Land. Want some undiscovered treasures from the heyday of feminist science fiction? Try Josephine Saxton, Jody Scott, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy. There are too many to mention.
links for 2009-01-27
January 27, 2009-
There were a few bloggers and commenters who, when responding to David’s reference to gentile privilege (a concept that immediately made sense to me), stated, explicitly or implicitly, that they didn’t believe it exists. In doing so, they broke one of the fundamental rules of anti-oppression work: you never, ever dictate to a group what its own experience looks like. If you haven’t lived as a member of that group, you simply do not have the right to tell them how they are or aren’t oppressed.
links for 2009-01-26
January 26, 2009-
If you go from being a non-hijabi to a hijabi, everyone loves you for your newfound piety. But I’ve never seen this happen the other way round. Once you wear the hijab, and everyone knows you for it, showing up without it somehow makes you feel even more naked than someone who never wore it in the first place.
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Trying to figure out why clueless white people cling so hard to their white privilege denialism is hard, but here is what I would guess: racism is huge and horrible in a way that's really hard to grasp. The idea that a certain percentage of people in our society are going to be born behind the proverbial eight ball due to something that is absolutely and completely out of their control in every way is fucking awful, you know? And if you as a white person are trying to grasp that, it would make sense that you would try to shrink it down to a manageable size, and to personalize it. And from there it's a slippery slope toward deciding that another form of othering that you have experienced must be just as bad if not worse than racism, and so that means racism can't be as impossibly, inconceivably big as you thought it was, and the world makes a little more sense.
links for 2009-01-24
January 24, 2009-
Which points up the biggest flaw in the thinking of racist whites, who call upon their personal experiences with people of color so as to justify their bigotry: namely, how many bad experiences with other whites are such folks forgetting, which didn't lead them to generalize about white folks as a group?
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Warning: cynicism may run high in this post.
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hundreds of inauguration front pages
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And this is why I'm a racist dipshit: in all of my preparation and research and study of Charlie's birth culture, I never once thought to google racist terms for Asian people. I've been focused on every aspect of culture except how Chinese people experience race and racism. Because I'm white, so when I think about culture, I don't think about racism.
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Victim-blaming is based on the damnably fucked-up notion that people (and women in particular) allow themselves to be victimized by virtue of carelessness or stupidity, and they need to be warned and educated and lectured and hectored and cajoled and shamed into never being victims (again).
No.
Our culture creates rapists—and they create victims. No one has ever been a victim of rape, until they had the bad fucking luck of being in the presence of a rapist.
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Suicide is the third biggest cause of life years lost. Anything real you could do to study the causes, and possible preventive measures, or effective interventions, would be cracking. Making stupid stuff up about the most depressing day of the year, on the other hand, doesn’t help anyone, because bullshit presented as fact is simply disempowering.
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I will always be a person of color. Being color-blind means people will never see me: they'll only see the places where their culture overlaps with mine. I want people to see my color and how it informs my day-to-day life, and I want them to recognize the ways in which I won't do the same things they do as completely understandable differences–not as obnoxious, not as difficult, not as inconvenient.
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I’m aware it sounds dreadful whenever I explain how much of my dislike of all three – my primary dislike, before I even get onto their policies – is character-based, is based on their Bullingdon membership – to anybody outside Oxford. Bullingdon is a club for arseholes, arseholes; I don’t know how many tutors have told me stories of Bullingdon escapades that ended in slack-jawed idiots writing blank cheques with fountain pens, while the real world faced down the criminal damage. Contemporaries and near-contemporaries of Cameron’s (indeed, anybody who was around Oxford in the relevant decade) can confirm that he didn’t attend Bullingdon during some sort of humanitarian blip where the club was about more than vomit and booze.
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When somebody says to you, "Wow, white person, that thing you did in that story you wrote was incredibly racist," do not panic! Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, no one is accusing you of being a racist or a bad person or the source of all evil in fandom. They may not even be accusing you of being a bad writer.
What they are saying is, "A) You made a mistake, B) Your mistake offended me and C) your mistake will offend many other people."
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Yes, writing outside of the live you’ve lived is always a risk, but when you are portraying an aspect of life someone else IS living, you HAVE to be willing to do the work to do it right. This doesn’t mean just white writers, or just cultural imformation. I’ve written from the POV of Oneida, East Indian, Black, Navajo, Irish, Korean, Blind, Albino, etc… women (and men). Every time I’ve had to do my research to do the character, and those who I hope will relate to these characters justice. I’ve spend hours with people of that culture, who’ve lived that life, even with cultural departments of various tribal nations (who are so patient and helpful).
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I get at least to try to explain some version of everything I have just written in this essay–then the stakes of talking about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict become, for me, potentially, a matter of life and death, because my history tells me that antisemitism is always potentially a matter of life and death. If you are unwilling to hear that, then it doesn’t matter to me how accurate and fair your critique of Israel’s policies is, you damned well better believe I am going to call you an antisemite.
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"I'm growing tradition," River said. "It can't last for thousands of years if no one encourages it to grow."
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Roundup of what now appears to be referred to as RaceFail '09.
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"You bastard!" he shrieked. "You tricked me into celebrating Hanukkah!"
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Two years ago, in an attempt to make myself feel smart, I tried to read Fear and Trembling, one of the most seminal philosophical texts in Western culture. In it Kierkegaard takes up the story of Abraham and Isaac, the story of Abraham binding and attempting to sacrifice his son. He wrestles with it over a hundred pages, and concludes (in part) that it is impossible to understand the kind of man who would sacrifice his son, or God's motivations in commanding him to do so. He never once references any of the thousands of Jewish thinkers who have talked about the text. He acts as though he has invented this struggle, as though he were the first to wonder about it, as though every year at Rosh Hashana I did not have to wonder again, would I–?, as though generations of whichever Jewish kids were paying attention during Rosh Hashana and not dreaming of apples and honey did not have to think, would my father–?
links for 2009-01-23
January 23, 2009-
I promised myself that I wouldn't participate in this debate any more, because I'm fairly sure I'll end up giving myself an ulcer, but I had to get this out. Someone – several someones, in fact – called me a racist because I see things in terms of race, thereby acknowledging its existence, thereby agreeing with the hierarchical ranking of racial groups (a very Victorian definition of racism), or simply because I'm not colourblind. Not seeing things in terms of race is an aspect of privilege, as I've said before. I can't not see things in terms of race, because people will always see me in terms of mine.
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In other words, only some women are seen as worthy of having sexual rights. And it’s the women who have already had their sexual rights violated. In order to gain sexual rights, women first have to have them abused.
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"We are not, as I said during the inauguration, going to continue with the false choice between our safety and our ideals," Obama said at the signing ceremony. "We intend to win this fight. We are going to win it on our own terms."
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The white working class are discriminated against because of their accent, style, food, clothes, postcodes and even their names, but not because they are white, according to a Runnymede Trust study published today.
The report, Who Cares about the White Working Class?, disputes the claim that white working class communities have been directly losing out to migrants and minority ethnic groups.
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oooo gorgeous. (the coats and the photo)
links for 2009-01-22
January 22, 2009-
We’ve discussed a few topics that dance around this question — such as how mental health disorders reduce employment. But what actually happens when you make people healthier? Do they become more economically productive? More importantly, does the economy grow?
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Once their three years is up, if their university career survives to its natural end, Bullingdon members go on to some of the most powerful and infl uential positions in the country. Harry Mount, George Osborne, Alan Clark, Lord Bath, David Dimbleby, Boris Johnson and – it has recently emerged – the Tories’ ‘man of the people’ David Cameron, were trained to the pressures of fame by the champagne quaffing, bellicose Bullingdon.
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"The White House itself is an institution that transitions regardless of who the president is," he said. "The White House is not starting from scratch. Processes are already in place."
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Are the characters’ names impossible to pronounce? Alternatively, when you pronounce them, do you realize that they are actually homonyms for scary-sounding English words? If the book is not written by Tolkien and is not a parody, it might be a Bad Book.
links for 2009-01-21
January 21, 2009-
I thought people were JOKING when they predicted mad right-wingers would claim he wasn't really the president! What can you expect of people who still seem to think he faked his birth certificate.
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Because the brilliant evolutionary psychologists grasp the little-known fact that all women are straight, there is no word on whether wads of cash influence the number of orgasms “gay” girls experience.
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Meanwhile Hamas has pledged to commandeer any humanitarian supplies that make it through, fill them with semtex and fire them at settlements in southern Israel.
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Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: "You will notice page five of the Daily Mail carries an angry story about 'why oh why does the government have to treat us like Christmas morons?'.
"But if you then turn over to page six you will see a story about a man from Dorset who called the fire brigade after shoving at least 18 inches of Norwegian Spruce firmly up his back passage.
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"This is the sort of top drawer, high quality violence that could keep us all going for years and years. Vintage stuff.
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The spokesman added: "And, of course, when you're unemployed the last thing you need is to be confronted with the soul-destroying horror of an unpeeled carrot."
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Vandeveld’s declaration exposed, in excruciating detail, how the Commissions’ prosecution office was “chaotic,” and how only a combination of luck and diligence led to his discovery that Jawad was almost certainly not responsible for the grenade attack on two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan translator, for which he was charged, and was, instead, a dirt-poor refugee who was tricked into joining an insurgent group and was drugged at the time of the attack.
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To use the term is to do the terrorists' work for them – just as in Gaza, Israel has done precisely what Hamas wanted. To say we are "at war" glorifies a bunch of sociopaths and misfits, giving them the status of soldiers that they crave.
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Like many of the “feminist” ads, these ads seem to be genuinely celebrating Obama’s election. Do they? Or do they trivialize everything he claim to stand for and the difficult road ahead for both him and the country? Something in between? Something else entirely?
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What exactly did Israel achieve through its foolish military action than the death of hundreds of innocent civilians and even more polarisation?
Did it actually think Palestinians would turn towards moderation while it was raining white phosphorous on them? I thought Bush was stupid, but the Israeli government takes the biscuit in idiotic realpolitik.
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"While I tried to be commander in chief first and a homosexual man second, I knew that everything I did would be judged through the lens of 'America's first gay president,'" Bush said during an interview with ABC's Charles Gibson broadcast Dec. 1. "Looking back, my personal need to prove my man-hood definitely influenced my actions. The arrogant swagger, invading Iraq, my ruthless support of the death penalty—heck, even setting back gay rights 25 years—all of it seems so silly now."
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Grown men cried as he picked up a pen for the first time as president and started doodling during a national security briefing. Some said the doodle was an intense, graphic interpretation of the concept of hope, while others said it was simply a weird looking cat in a space helmet.
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I guess that’s the (ex)presidential privilege but it does strike me that declaring January 18th the Sanctity of Human Life Day smacks of desparation.
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Do Tim and Gary Oldman really write messages to each other on their body parts?
