links for 2009-06-02
June 2, 2009-
In 2008, vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin drew criticism for her absurd beliefs – from Creationism to climate denialism – but few seem to realise how far that same anti-science sentiment has crept into our own politics. We submitted nine questions to the main parties on various aspects of science, including attitudes toward climate change, stem cell research, and energy dependency. Their answers were far more revealing than we expected.
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With the battle between science (as defined by large numbers of scientists) and True Science (the kind Phillips believes) thus resolved, we can go back a week and see how Phillips views more complex issues like human sexuality and the strive for equality and human rights, and how we achieve harmony through delicately balancing the competing needs and opinions of our various communities.
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Of Thin Blue Lines, Race, and Stereotypes at Racialicious – the intersection of race and pop cultureThe shooting officer is white. The deceased officer is black. All kinds of racial inferences can be drawn from this description of the scenario. But is that the whole story?
What I found a bit more compelling was a second article published by the Times, “On Diverse Force, Blacks Still Face Special Peril.” In this piece, Michael Powell parses out the racial make up and struggles of the NYPD:
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I have nothing against princesses. I have nothing against movies with princesses. But don't the Disney princesses pretty much have us covered? If we had to wait for your thirteenth movie for you to make one with a girl at the center, couldn't you have chosen something — something — for her to be that could compete with plucky robots and adventurous space toys?
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Paradoxically, the film might have worked better if it had been shot entirely in English. Its audiences would have accepted that they were dealing with a dubbed or translated world and would have, as sophisticated audiences do, suspended disbelief. But Slumdog doesn’t let the Indian viewer suspend disbelief because there’s enough Hindi spoken in the film to make the English sequences sound absurd. Ironically, Hindi, which is used here as an art director might use a prop, as authenticating décor, undermines the credibility of the story.
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my favourite is 'expendability'
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Playboy likes to claim that it prints pictures of naked women as a means to empower them. Uh-huh. It seems that Playboy and Hugh Hefner only like to empower women to the extent that they’ll take off their clothes, but when they open their mouths and have an opinion … well, then it’s time to roll out the demonization. They have a new feature on the website that features — and I’m not making this up — conservative women they’d like to “hate-f**k” (link NSFW):
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"If one merely imbibes the media coverage of the issue, one tends to get the impression that America is awash in abortions. The truth is that in most places in the United States abortions are technically legal, but they are often nearly impossible to obtain. A mere 13 percent of counties in the nation now offer the service. The state of Mississippi, for instance, home to nearly 3 million people, has a single abortion clinic. Meanwhile, the state’s counseling provisions also require that patients be told that abortion may increase the risk of breast cancer, despite the fact that the National Cancer Institute, the British medical journal the Lancet, and faculty members of Harvard Medical School have found no such link. Mississippi is also one of only two states that require a minor to get the consent of both parents to have an abortion (though if the minor has been impregnated by her father, she needs only the consent of her mother)." <— Awwww, how considerate of them!
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If any good can come of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, one of the very few providers of late-term abortions in the U.S., perhaps it's the opportunity to have a conversation about the reality of termination in the second and third trimesters. Anti-choice activists often cast late-term abortions as the murder of a viable baby at the whim of a woman who doesn't wish to be inconvenienced, carried out by a doctor who looks at her and sees only cartoon dollar signs.
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The reality is that abortion in the late second and third trimesters is extremely rare. The reality is that finding a doctor to do this procedure in the late second or third trimester is almost impossible. For me, the reality was that at the most painful time of my life I had to travel out of state, stay in a hotel room and face hostile protesters in order to carry out this most personal of choices.
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This is, finally, what the battle about abortion concerns. To the extent people choose to limit a woman's right to her own body, they accept and reinforce this endlessly destructive cultural tradition — and they believe in Original Sin, even if they are atheists. Religion holds no exclusive claim to irrationality of this kind. They seek to control abortion because they seek salvation, whether they recognize that fact or not. To bring salvation nearer, women must be eternally subordinate, and they cannot be allowed to do anything other than what men allow.
Don't let them do it — not even in a single state. Personal liberty, and the liberty of women, must not be subject to "community standards," or "the spectrum of public opinion," or to ignorance and hatred.
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Largely they blame the local Polish and Muslim communities, though ethnic minorities in fact make up just 7% of Stoke-on-Trent's population. "There's not a lot of meat behind their policies," Barnes says. "They're putting populist ideas forward, but they don't actually do their homework. They wanted to get rid of the council translation service, for instance, but they didn't realise that would prevent translation into braille."
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Sarah Coe was one of the 250 to 300 women with late-stage pregnancies who seek help every year at Tiller's fortress-clinic. Coe, who talked to the Guardian using a pseudonym, had an abortion in Wichita two years ago this week. The confluence of the anniversary of her baby's and Tiller's death was, she said, very hard to bear.
At 22 weeks of gestation it was discovered through ultrasound and other tests that the foetus of her first child had hydrocephalus – an excess of fluid on the brain. Its head was enlarged, and Coe and her husband were told that it would be born without brain function and would have no conscious life.
"We made a difficult decision that that wasn't the life we wanted for our child," she said. No doctor on the entire east coast of the US would accept her as the baby was beyond the 20 weeks needed for a foetus generally to become viable outside the womb. They were referred to Wichita and to Tiller.
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So basically, Buchanan yells when Hispanics are allegedly unwilling to learn English. However, when they make an attempt to do so, he mocks them as being dumb.
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We are soaking in a rape culture where a dude sticking his balls in someone else's face without his consent as a "joke" seems normal.
