links for 2009-04-28
April 28, 2009-
A trans woman writes about transitioning while being a parent of young children, and their reactions. BLUB.
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Best Meta Correction
The Guardian:We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26, page 30.
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He mentioned feeling that the Doctor’s character was uneven–sometimes he’s incredibly cruel and judgmental and other times he’s compassionate and reluctant to do harm. My response was that I didn’t see this as unevenness, I saw it as purposeful part of his character. I truly feel, particularly after the events of Season 4, that the writers want us to think that the Doctor is a complicated and deeply flawed person. He is, to be blunt, a jerk.
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Dexter earned my trust based on the strength of the episodes and writing. Joss Whedon has not yet earned my trust. Therefore, I don’t read all the good intentions into Dollhouse as other fans do. Even without trusting him at the outset, Joss still could have earned my trust by the way the premise was handled. He didn’t, he hasn’t, and I refuse to give it to him just because he created Buffy and Angel and Firefly. I don’t owe him anything.
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I'm noticing a lot of people insisting that the portrayal of Martha as strong and capable automatically negates any accusation of sexism in the latest season of Who. And people demanding step by step proof of the racism, because apparently it's all just the way things are written and we're making too much of it.
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In a recent New York Times fashion week photo spread entitled “African Influence on the Runway,” the first mistake made is the usual assumption that Africa is one big country. Morocco has a completely different fashion history from South Africa which has a different fashion history from the Congo, just, you know, as a tiny example. So in the title alone, end up equating the diverse fashion traditions to one big imagined Africa. To make matters worse, the corresponding article is entitled “Out of Africa.” In reading the captions, I kept waiting for a punchline. The Times was just being ironic and funny, right? Nope. They were for real.
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Every few years, we are surrounded by dire warnings of an impending pandemic — such as the SARS, avian flu, and 1976 swine flu scares — pandemics that never materialized. As JFS covered during the avian flu scare (when we were being told that 81 million of us could die), these scary pandemic projections are based on computer models that assume the worse case scenarios: a world without medical care or medications, without veterinary medicine, and such social demise and unsanitary living conditions that people will die at the same rates they did a century ago during the Spanish flu pandemic. Most of all, they ignore the science.
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Speculative fiction (SF) has been, historically, one of the most racist genres in American literature. Oh, it hasn’t had as many Stepinfetchits or Uncle Toms as the mainstream, but there are few more powerful ways to wrong a people than to wipe it out of existence, and this is precisely what countless SF novels have done. If the crew of the Space Navy Vessel Whozimawhatsit is all white; if a vast medieval epic spanning several continents contains no one browner than a tan; if the scientific accomplishments of ancient nonwhite empires are dismissed as alien leftovers; if China is the only country toasted by an invading space warship; all of these is a kind of literary genocide. (Yes, genocide.) And it’s something that SF has not only done for years, but continues to do; shit like this gets published all. the. time.
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John McCain, the oldest first-term president in history, is proving as rambunctious and pugnacious as the youngest one, Teddy Roosevelt. Of course, Teddy probably would have sent the Marines to Venezuela, while McCain had to make do with mugging for the cameras with an exaggerated grimace when he was forced by protocol to shake Hugo Chavez's hand at the recent hemispheric summit.
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That is, the risks that kill people and the risks that upset people are completely different. If you know that a risk kills people, you have no idea whether it upsets them or not. If you know it upsets them, you have no idea whether it kills them or not.
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*There is always some flu around and flu is always killing some people. Even when a raw mutant flu manages to kill off more people than a shooting-war, flu has never ravaged whole cities as cholera or the Black Death can do. As awful pandemics go, flu is like the snotty-nosed little sister of awful pandemics.
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Causes don't come much more righteous than the campaign for retired Gurkhas to be allowed to settle in this country. Following Friday's derisory if not downright insulting decision from the Home Office that would at most allow only 100 to emigrate here, the Sun and doubtless other papers are preparing campaigns, or in the Sun's case, a rather inaptly named "crusade" for their right to live here. Even the British National Party, which only last week talked of how other immigrants could never be considered British because they are of "foreign stock", supports their cause.
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Trigger Warning
Since I’ve been blogging, I’ve come across a whole slew of excuses for rape and other sexual assault, made both by perpetrators themselves and their supporters. The stream is almost never-ending, and they’re usually pretty easy to recognize. There’s the “what did she expect dressed/acting like that?” defense, the “well, she didn’t say no” defense, the “oh, it was a joke!” defense — you get the picture.
But while not entirely unheard of, the “I was just providing medical treatment” defense is relatively new.
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Avenues is a California primary clinic, fully licensed and accredited by the state. So exactly what kind of medical facility lures women with the promise of free pregnancy tests and leaves them fearing eternal damnation?
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Developing countries are using mobile phones to leapfrog to personalised medicine
