As she says, this ought to be utterly noncontroversial. Yet it is, because a toxic meme has been released into the public discourse.
She’s more polite—more “politic”—than I might be, so I’ll just leave this to stand on its own for now.…
DISTAL MUSE – OBSERVATIONS, OPINIONS, EPHEMERA, & VIEWS
As she says, this ought to be utterly noncontroversial. Yet it is, because a toxic meme has been released into the public discourse.
She’s more polite—more “politic”—than I might be, so I’ll just leave this to stand on its own for now.…
Let’s imagine the conflict known as the Civil War. It had been brewing since before the Constitution was ratified. The issues were marrow deep in American society, so much so that any attempt to address the issue of slavery was, in effect, a deal breaker for the new nation. The South made it abundantly clear that any action on the part of the North to write into the new guiding document the idea that black slaves were somehow deserving of the liberty being claimed for their white owners—and thereby signaling the end of slavery among the Thirteen Colonies—would be met with absolute refusal to play. …
I sometimes wonder who Rush Limbaugh is speaking to anymore, but the evidence suggests someone tunes in. I wonder how many think it’s a comedy show, sort of a political version of an old Andrew Dice-Clay routine. (Remember him? No? Well, there’s hope after all.)
In the wake of Rush’s remarks about Sandra Fluke he has been losing sponsors, a few Republican politicians have been condemning him, and everyone seems to want to keep as far from him as possible. No one but a few academics are talking about this in historical terms, though, and I think that’s a mistake. Because this is so typically male-dominant behavior, the kind that feminists— the ones Rush has had it in for lo these past decades— point to when describing cultural oppression that someone should be raising a banner and saying “See? …
There’s an aspect of this flap over Obama’s insistence that health care policies offered by institutions with religious affiliation cover birth control that I don’t see many people discussing. All the posturing over how this is anti-religious and a blatant slap at religious freedom, blah blah, is both predictable and irrelevant. For one, it’s not. For one thing, it doesn’t even approach the kind of infringement of a basic freedom that Bush’s infamous “gag rule” on abortion information represented, which Obama overturned.
But there is a common link between both that Bush-era ruling and the current stance taken by the Catholic bishops. …
I’m taking time out (already) from all the rewriting I have to do to complain and restate a principle.
Here’s a lovely little bit of misogyny.
Read the article? A newspaper took the photograph of the ready room where Obama and his cabinet received the news of Bin Ladin’s death and photoshopped out the women present. For reasons of “modesty” they claimed. They then apologized but asserted they have a First Amendment right to have done this.
Inadvertently—and I am sure they didn’t think about this when they did it—they gave Bin Ladin a small cultural victory out of his own death. …
I’m a tad upset. The House just voted (all the Republicans and ten Democrats) to de-fund Planned Parenthood.
Why?
Planned Parenthood has been the target for the Right since it was founded in the 1920s—during a time, it should be stressed, when you could go to jail for distributing information about contraception. Jail. Because such information was seen as destructive of public morals.
Again, why? This should be a no-brainer for Conservatives. Privacy. The ability to control your own person. The responsible management of your own life. But time and again we keep running up against this perverse negative reaction to anything that smacks of responsible sexuality. …
This is a completely personal anecdote, so take it for what it’s worth. This is about a defining moment for me in my education as an egalitarian.
Equality is something we talk about, we assume to be the case for everyone, and never really question. Here, it’s the air we breathe. It’s not true. We are not all equal. And in spite of our all our lip service to the idea of equality under the law or the equality of opportunity, we all know, if we’re honest, that we’re still trying to get to that level. Probably it’s a function of how well we think our lives are at any given moment. …
A friend of mine, the estimable Erich Veith, came by my home a bit over a year ago and we recorded a long interview. Erich has finally gotten around to editing it and has begun posting segments on YouTube. Here’s the first one. (I still haven’t figured out how to embed videos here, so bear with me.)
Erich runs the website Dangerous Intersection, where I post opinionated blatherings from time to time and Erich graciously allows me to hold forth in my own idiosyncratic manner. Why he thought people would also enjoy watching and hearing me as well, I can’t say, but I enjoyed the process and from the looks of the first three (which are up at Dangerous Intersection) I don’t think I came off too badly.…
So Mel Gibson has been exposed (once again) as an intolerant, sexist, abusive person. A recording of a phone conversation with his former girlfriend is now Out There on the internet and one can listen to Mel spill molten verbiage into her earpiece while she calmly refutes his charges.
All I can wonder is, So what?
What business is this of ours? This is private stuff. People lose control. Between each other, with strangers, but more often with those closest, people have moments when the mouth ill-advisedly opens and vileness falls out. The question is, does this define us? Are we, in fact, only to be defined by our worst moments?…
I just discovered that there is a day for this brilliant woman.
Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, a scholar, and wrote what is arguably the very first computer program in an essay about Charles Babbage. Of course, since she was a woman at a time when women were considered not to have either brains or rights, she would have been seen as an anomaly at best, a monster at worst. Since she had some position, however, she has not been forgotten or dismissed.
Warning: personal opinion follows.
Women who denigrate the idea of Feminism and fail to understand how tenuous their position is vis-a-vis history cause me heartburn. …